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#because she created nobility and the crust system
randomnameless · 1 year
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Uhh...
In the explore section, before attacking Enbarr, GK goes :
Enbarr's history goes back 1,400 years. That even predates the founding of the Empire.
Which is confirmed in by the History books (Rhea landing around there in -41) and Nopes.
A Monk even says :
Did you know? A magnificent canal flows through downtown Enbarr.  It's said to have been constructed under the guidance of Saint Seiros before the Empire was even formed. Ever since, that canal has been a major lifeline for the capital's development.
But then Judith says :
It's not just big. This city was designed to protect the castle where the emperor lives.  It's as though the city itself is a massive stronghold.
So?
Enbarr existed before Adrestia, but it was re-designed to protect Willy’s castle? Rhea in a typical “Treehouse 5D chess” moment created that canal, to serve as a fortification somehow, because 40 years later Willy would become Emperor and it will serve to protect his new castle?
Or...
Enbarr existed before Adrestia, Nopes indicates there used to be a noble there (jury’s out about Willy being one of the many lords of Enbarr or The Lord of Enbarr!) who would have had a palace/castle before Seiros the Warrior popped up. Seiros made her canal and developped the city. And maybe later on, as Adrestia prepared for war and built forts around (Myrddin iirc) Enbarr was fortified too, to protect the palace/castle ?
Edit : I’ve checked around the script and all, and it’s the “designed” to part that was a bit weird - in the jp/cn scripts it’s more something like the city had the task to protect the palace, but it doesn’t mean it was specifically designed, since the beginning, to do so.
Double Edit : I was mistaken on “designed” because it has two meanings, and I brainfarted (no thanks to the french loc this time), it’s coherent with the jp meaning if you take “designed” as “this city was chosen” meaning, but not as the “designed” like “it was built/conceived this way for this purpose”
(pour une fois c’est toutes les trad EU qui se sont merdées)
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toflyandfall · 4 years
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I just saw a photo of "What persona. Dick Grayson isn't a mask. Not like Bruce Wayne is" from Detective Comics #725 and I find it interesting that Dick and the rest of the bats, with the exception of Bruce, don't wear "masks" per se. They are who they are with or without the domino mask/helmet. The only time I can really think of Dick faking things is when he pretended to be an incompetent BPD cop. How was he able to avoid creating and living, half the time, through a "persona" like "Brucie"?
Oooh, this is a lovely, meaty question.  There’s a lot more analysis of Bruce than I planned because let’s be real, it’s kinda weirder for a guy to run around with half a dozen personas than for someone else to run around as himself.  I hope you still find it interesting, but if you want to skip straight to the more Dick-centric stuff, head under the readmore.
A simple but significant factor is that Dick thrives on the company of people in a way that Bruce does not.  I suspect if you talk honestly to many introverts, you will find they too have an extroverted ‘mask’ they put on to the larger world, though probably not quite so extreme.
Another factor is that the civilian social circles Dick and Bruce travel in are vastly different.  Though they each have a reason for being in those circles, that difference itself enables Dick to escape much of the scrutiny that Bruce’s public identity undergoes, because he doesn’t frequently associate with the much more media-hounded elite.
An interesting thing here is that the large difference in social circles between their civilian lives is actually caused by their own personal similarities: they are 100% committed work-a-holics.  It’s just that they have differing civilian approaches to their goals.
I want to start with Bruce because as you point out, his use of persona is distinct among the bats and his reasons for using them in part explain why Dick and the other bats do not.
Bruce is a child of privilege, he has always lived a lifestyle of privilege, regardless of the tragedies that have occurred during it, and his default view of the world, through no fault of his own, is natively that of the extreme upper class.  This drastically influences his perspective and approach to change, and changing the world is his perpetual goal, the reason he put on the suit in the first place.
Bruce works a top-down society approach toward systemic change, and he works it all the time.  This is actually my favorite but woefully under-emphasized part of him: he is not just someone who punches people on the street ‘for justice’, he uses his company, his money, and his social position toward substantial systemic change. This post does a wonderful job covering the ways he does this through his corporations and personal wealth, as does this one.  I cannot recommend either enough because I constantly want to push even the most casual Batman fans to understand: Bruce Wayne is not just a violent punchy puncher man.  He is a traumatized person genuinely trying to use all his resources including himself to make the world safer.
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Detective Comics #725
Bruce has many personas he maintains, and he uses all of them according to what suits his need--Batman for places the law can’t go, Bruce Wayne the CEO pushing for systemic changes, Matches Malone for street information, and Brucie the society high roller for society information and social influencing.  He is rarely ever not in a persona and simply ‘Bruce’.
His top-down perspective of enacting change are what dictated the usage and necessity of these personas. He has the means and capacity to basically disappear from society if he so chose--he in fact does so to train during his younger years so successfully they don’t even know how long he was actually gone. 
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The Batman Files
So he doesn’t need the personas.  Not Bruce Wayne, CEO, or Brucie, or any of them really, to protect his identity.  That tells us that Brucie is a deliberate choice he made at some point.  He could have been a recluse billionaire Batman indefinitely.  Even though he fully has the status and means to not maintain a job or a persona or, let’s be frank, a life outside the mask at all, it’s his own work-a-holicness that led to the creation of his public personas.  He’s an obsessive strategist, so if Brucie is a choice, that leads us to why?
Bruce does many philanthropic things with his money, but he isn’t the only rich person around, especially not in a city as old and corrupt as Gotham.   But he’s one of the very few ones doing good with it.
The comic you mentioned has a very beautiful moment where Bruce touches on that, and in full context you can feel how consumed he is by this goal of creating the Gotham his parents would have wanted.  Batman mentions he never sees himself in that place, and the morbid interpretation is that the city kills him before he reaches it, but the hopeful interpretation is that in that shining city, Bruce Wayne and Batman and Brucie and all his masks will no longer be needed.
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Detective Comics #725
Back in the old days they’d call it noblesse oblige: the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged. Thomas and Martha Wayne ingrained this feeling of responsibility into Bruce by example, and as all things related to them, he obsesses over it.  It urges him to fulfill expectations within segments of society he finds onorous for the betterment of society as a whole in order to carry out their unfinished works.
Enter Brucie.
Brucie serves a two-fold purpose.  Since Bruce has chosen to maintain personas among society, it becomes a false face to justify any oddities Batman might bring into the life of Bruce Wayne by setting himself up as a eccentric, popular social scion.  But that persona itself also allows him to manipulate the upper crust of society.
I have some insider perspective on the kind of society events Brucie attends.  They’re all about the who’s who of making connections, name-dropping and networking, and unspoken class-based elitism.  Charity events among the upper class have these things at the forefront and the cause is the background.  You don’t get your hands dirty, you don’t go out and make change yourself, you pay money to be socially seen and sometimes it happens to go towards a philanthropic cause.  If you want to raise money from the rich and keep people with deep pockets coming in the door, you have to have social currency yourself. This is where, and why, Brucie comes in.  I believe Brucie ws crafted to maintain Batman’s cover but still attempt to carry on his parents’ legacy to grease the wheels of the rich in the directions he chooses: one of generosity towards those less privileged. 
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Superman/Batman #51
The inevitable flaw of Bruce’s approach to his personas and their philanthropy is that in a city rife with corruption, money distributed from the top has many opportunities to disappear well before it reaches the bottom.  As in many of ways they are complements to each other, Dick’s approach balances that out, because his approach to helping his fellow man starts out at the street level...literally.
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Nightwing #153 (Nightwing: The Great Leap)
Dick, we know, does not come from privilege.  His mother was from a middle class family before she joined the circus, and despite being world famous athletes, most circus workers are lower to middle class.  The people he grew up with, was comfortable with, were all working folk who expected everyone to pull their weight right alongside each other.  He enacts this everyone-together approach in almost all aspects and phases of his life. 
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Batman #615
Even once he had settled into being Robin and adapted to living at the manor, he didn’t feel belonging to a culture of privilege, materialism, or high society. He preferred shotgun in the limo to chat with the driver to riding fancy in the back.  Once he was able to start making his own decisions about where and how he lived, despite having both Bruce’s money and then later inheriting a substantial amount of his own, he chose mostly lower-class communal places.
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Batman Black and White #6
Dick also doesn’t see the value of throwing money at a problem when there is an option to fix it with his own hands.  We see this frequently, from building his own car instead of buying a finished one or outsourcing the work, to deciding the best way to clean out the BPD was to start at the bottom and work his way up (literally), to quitting college because his classes never got prioritized over crimesolving.  Most of his day jobs ended for similar reasons. 
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Nightwing #153 (Nightwing: The Great Leap)
Despite the showmanship training, he gravitates away from spotlight on the rich and wealthy, who are notoriously the kind of people who do not get their hands dirty or go out and take care of things themselves, and prefers to find or build communities around the kind of people who do.
Finally, Dick is an extrovert.  He doesn’t need to act extroverted as Brucie does because he is extroverted.  He likes people and likes being around people.  Whether by conscious choice or not, he tends to put himself in situations where he is surrounded by people in nearly all aspects of his life.  He chooses apartment buildings whose occupants frequently pass each other on the stairs; jobs that involve interacting with many co-workers, patrons, or students; and collects superhero teammates like Boy Scout badges.  And all of these behaviors come very naturally to him.  
He doesn’t need a mask or a role or a persona for those kind of interactions; his mask is pre-supplied as “neighbor” or “co-worker” or “teacher” by the situations he puts himself in.  It helps make him an exemplary leader, because just by acting authentically to himself, he automatically builds up little communities around him any time he arrives somewhere.
Bruce, on the other hand, is an introvert.  For him, interacting with people isn’t easy, automatic, or comfortable unless it has a purpose, but as a strategist, he knows the necessity of human interaction as a catalyst to achieving dynamic change. So he adapts personas to suit people’s expectations.  Extroverts have more social currency; the life of the party can generate more resources than a brooding wallflower.  
So, it boils down to just a few elements: Dick believes in living and interacting at the street level to accomplish the things that he wants to, and he is extroverted enough that the level of social interaction that entails is not a burden to him.  He surrounds himself with the types of people he is more familiar or perhaps more comfortable with, which happens to keep him further out from the media’s eye than associating with the upper crust does. The lower profile is more incidental than intentional, but it lessens his need to have a cover story for every single bruise and lets him get away with even less of a ‘persona’.
Bruce, on the other hand, is introverted and follows a more classist view that systemic change needs to be effected from the top down.   His personas are more of a self-assumed duty than a necessity, as a way of trying to carry out his parents’ legacy.  Any of his children could have chosen to follow his path in business or the high society limelight, but the sense of obligation toward it is something personal to him that most of them don’t share.
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randomnameless · 4 months
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I am gonna be honest I really don't get how people don't understand Crest have nothing to do with being nobles, it's literaly the whole reason behind Mercedes's and Emile's tragic story, that their father who didn't had a crest wanted to marry Mercedes because she had one like her Mother so his children can inherit the Crest of Lamine.
On a side note, I do think that even if Rhea didn't created the Crest system it would have happened with or without her, Crest are superpowers that are rare and humans either worship like a god or treat as a witch people who have special power, I wouldn't believe for a second that left out as is in nature people who have Crest wouldn't try to rule over the other anyway or wouldn't be treated like aberrations.
Hm...
Mercie's mom had a crest and was a nobody, which could be married off to a bastard : aka, despite her crest, Mercie's mom wasn't a noble who was able to say big F to potential "suitors" who were supposed to be beneath her in status since they had no crest themselves.
Constance (and what's left of her fam?) were demoted to nothing and sent to the sewers in Garreg Mach, even if Constance comes from a prestigious family that got a crest from a Saint.
As you said, regardless of nobility wanting to pretend to have "better blood" than the pleb, Crests are superpowers, which would always be sought afer.
The games does it best to avoid talking about the tangible and objective benefits of having a crest - when we see Dimitri crush a man as easily as a snowball in a cutscene - but imo, it's part of Fodlan's DNA, try to spin a very objective and no-solution conflicts (you have a world with two races, and one has superpowers compared to the other, how does it work?) to artificial lip-service and copious amounts of smokescreens.
For something that was only alluded to but completely ignored because otherwise both Nopes and Houses fall apart - Seteth tells Yuri in their Nopes support how it is rumoured that an Elite was cured from an "incurable" disease after getting a crest...
Admitting this is remotely true to what happened in Zanado, does it justifiy the subsequent massacre and genocide? Dominic might die in 2 days if he doesn't kill a Nabatean, was he "right" or justified in killing the Nabatean who became Crusher and drinking their blood?
If humans are envious for good or bad reasons of the Nabateans' powers, what is going to happen when a Nabatean would refuse to share said power ? Are the humans justified in trying to steal it? Are Nabateans asses when they refuse to "lend it" to humans?
This game tries its hardest to avoid blaming the usual trifecta of human greed/assholishness/lust (for power!) as the reason why the world doesn't go round, and blame everything on... blue eyes, that can somehow shoot lasers too.
Of course someone with in-built lasers would be better seen/more valued than someone who hasn't the same lasers, but bar the milquetoast "we should try to accept everyone!", what is the specific answer to the Gautier border issue - crest means the border is defended, no crest and no plot hax means it isn't - should the defender of the border be the crested kid or the non crested-kid?
Nopes!Sylvains finds a loophole and replies with "we won't need to defend the border if we're not at war with Sreng anymore", and it's a nice solution, honestly. I like it. It makes for a bright perspective, of a future where, if everyone play their part, Crests won't be "needed" anymore.
But when it comes to using the power of a crest to heal, will you go to Manu, who cannot heal someone who has a cancer, or to Flayn, who can, if you suddenly learn you have one?
"Just develop chemiotherapy!"
Yes but I'm dying - who should I go to?
Imo, Crust System is used both in fandom and in-game to avoid mentionning the existence of super humans (or non humans if we want to stay close to Supreme Leader's words) and the inevitable jealousy/envy their existence creates/causes in humans, who cannot help but seek after the power they have.
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