Fashion in Fódlan part iii: yet another very long and entirely unsolicited FE3H costume design analysis
This time, we're focusing specifically on the placement of quivers, because that's a very normal thing to get caught up in and I'm very normal.
[Part 1, focused on money and social aspects in all three countries; Part 2, focused on political aspects between church/empire; bonus part 2.5, regarding a crown]
This post came about because of this video from @blumineck (who posts lots of cool stuff btw, go check out his blog), which talks about quiver types and their purposes, pros and cons, etc.
Shall we?
So, while watching that video, I remembered for whatever reason that Cyril has a back quiver, but Ashe has a hip quiver.
The reason my brain went there was that I immediately thought "Oh, Cyril actually does more hunting and physical labor than Ashe, and as demonstrated in the video, a back quiver is more practical for him. That makes sense - great attention to detail, FE3H character designers!"
I figured that would likely carry over to other characters, specifically our other canonically talented hunters. Therefore, Leonie and Petra should also have back quivers, yes?
Wrong! Leonie has a hip quiver, and Petra has no quiver.
That's odd, so let's look into this a little deeper. Here are the other canon archers:
Shamir
Claude
Ignatz
Bernadetta
You will note that Ignatz and Claude don't have quivers in their outfits, but Claude does wear a hip quiver in an animated 2d cutscene. Ignatz we've already determined is a bit if an anarchist, so nothing interesting there - he will be benched from the discussion.
The really notable thing here, which I'm sure you've picked up on, is that everyone except Cyril uses hip quivers.
BUT WAIT!
Let's consider Claude again. Check out his final class, Barbarossa:
What's that I spy? A back quiver???
Surely you can make the connection easily: Our two token Almyrans are the *only* people with back quivers.
So, why is that?
Let's return to the others, briefly. What do Ashe, Leonie, and Bernadetta all have in common? Their skills set them up for becoming bow knights. Shamir just wants to remain a sniper, but can go that direction as well.
Mounted archery almost always uses hip quivers, according to my research (*cough cough duck duck go image search "mounted archery"*), so it makes sense that all of our innate archers have those hip quivers.
What makes Claude and Cyril different? Well, thanks to Almyran typecasting, they are both placed on wyverns, not horses! That means significantly more mobility than the bow knights (bow knights aren't doing loop-de-loops), so they need their quivers to be more secure! Boom, mystery solved!
...or is it?
Of course not. It always goes deeper.
Tell me, history buffs: Throughout world history, who are among the most famous horse archers? What group of people most immediately comes to mind? Among whom, exactly, were armies of mounted archers a defining feature?
If you said Mongolians, you were right.
And how, pray tell, do Mongolian horseback archers wear their quivers?
ON THEIR BACKS. CHECKMATE.
(I tried to find name of this archer to credit her but couldn't track it down. She was the winner of a competition that took place during a festival in Inner Mongolia, China at some point in the last like 15 years, so incredibly skilled. Wish I could point y'all in her direction for more cool stuff!)
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