Prelude to Azure Moon

So.

After 75 long hours divvied up over a few months, I have finally completed my first complete run of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It's an absolutely delightful game with excellent aesthetics, wonderful strategy warfare gameplay on a mobile platform, delightful characters brought to life by verbose performances from a number of voice actors and an engaging story full of political intrigue.

And I've only completed the Blue Lions route. #BlueLions4Lyfe

But with that said, I do have one major problem with the game…

Its support system is dreadful.

As someone who is entirely too invested in the shipping and relationship-building side of video games, it was incredibly disheartening to find Intelligent Systems go for something that takes away a player's agency in the final moments.

The ludonarrative dissonance of seeing characters that spent all their time together wind up with completely random pairings across endgame flavor text because of choices made by the CPU is palpable. Outside of my pairing with Byleth, no other character wound up in a pairing I was aiming for.

Having support problems kind of reminds me of my turmoil with Scarlet in Fire Emblem: Fates, come to think of it. But that's a story for another day.

Obviously, this ordeal left a bad taste in my mouth. They should have either gone the route of traditional Fire Emblem games with canonical pairings, or a relaxed system reminiscent of the 3DS-era games where players could choose who they wanted to pair. Not some Frankenstein amalgamation of the two.

But I digress.

I've been planning to do a Three Houses fanfiction (or two… or three…) for some time now. Other life commitments kept me away from it. But now that those are in the past and I have a raging fire stoked in my soul, it seems like the perfect time to begin.

My first idea is a long-running story that recreates and somewhat reimagines the entirety of the Blue Lions story utilizing my own headcanons for different events and character pairings. Particularly focused on the budding relationship between Dimitri and Marianne, because it's one of my absolute favorites in the game and I got robbed.

There may be other one-off fanfics published on the side, but this piece will be dedicated to a Blue Lions route retold.

I already have the vast majority of the story planned out, down to the structure of each chapter. I'm essentially going to go month-by-month, only sometimes slowing down or jumping ahead. Each chapter will begin with a sort of recap in the style of Jeralt's painting narrations that will either catch readers up on how the story has progressed since the last month, or provide some insight into the game's lore that is in some way relevant to the preceding events.

The actual story will typically play out from the perspectives of Dimitri, Marianne, Byleth or some combination of the three. Other characters will appear and play prominent roles of course, but the Boar Prince's love life will be center stage.

The other important detail worth noting is that you may see certain character mannerisms or general plot points taken from other stories in the Fire Emblem tag.

I've had a wonderful time staving off my desire for more and more Three Houses content while on my brief hiatus from playing the game through stories on this site. Stories from fellow Blue Lions such as SousChefSean's "Lion's Pride" (ID: 12570713), gallaghergirl09's "Cerulean Skies" (ID: 4432237), Lady StarFlower's "my love, tonight we live" (ID: 6390972), queenofowls' "A Single Regret" (ID: 12682818) and most recently Gigglecake's "Their Routine" (ID: 4292559); general character studies such as WaggleDaggers' "Blisters" (ID: 4922021) or ShadowBlade4444's "Our Professor" (ID: 5244981); and a veritable tome of a Felix and Annette story by KayMoon24 (ID: 1917642) called "Baby, Pull Me (Closer)" which is gone from here but still exists on Archive of Our Own.

If I wind up finding any more stories I particularly enjoy that play a role in how I write this story, I'll be sure to credit them.

But that's enough rambling for one prelude.

I'd like to post a chapter of this every Friday so it can coexist alongside my ongoing Pokémon fanfic, though it won't last nearly as long.

Astute observers will see that means the true opening chapter will be up tomorrow! Unless you're reading this in the future, in which case just hit 'next chapter.'

I simply wanted to get out this behind-the-scenes exposition dump in one fell swoop so you would all know the mindset I'm coming from.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to tell me about them! I'm hoping to make whatever I write the best it can be, and there's no telling how much good an active community around the story could do if it gains traction.

Thanks for sticking with me this far! Hope you enjoy the tale.

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