Chapter Text
Content Warning: racism, mentions of genocide, and white supremacy.
Fire Emblem. The turn-based game series by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems that originated in 1990 and got me hooked into it in 2013 with Awakening. For those who don’t know every Fire Emblem game is a mixture between a role-playing board game and visual novel, with the player controlling a cast of characters as they fight through battles and advance a plot that can differ from installment to installment. The skills that a unit has in-game usually relates to a part of their character in story.
This brings us to Dedue Molinaro and Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Dedue Molinaro is a character that can become a starting member of your party if you pick one of the three houses of the Officer’s Academy. He is a dark skinned, Black-coded, 18 year old who is the vassal- the right hand man- to Dimitri, the prince of the Kingdom of Faerghus.
I would like to take a walk through the canon and fanon material of Three Houses, using the writing and treatment of Dedue as a sort of measuring stick to see the similarities between the two before attempting to describe the changes needed for racially transformative fanworks (and transformative fanworks in general).
Canon Dedue
In canon Three Houses, Dedue is written to be ride-and-die loyal to Dimitri. Whenever you’re walking around the monastery in between battles, the two can usually be found next to each other, and if you bring Dedue to tea, some of the dialogue that can pop up directly revolves around his “life debt” to the prince. I am somewhat hesitant to claim that these mannerisms fully fall into the trope of the “Black butler/caretaker”, but there are in-game interactions where Dimitri is about to over exert himself and Dedue asks the player to step in, and I wouldn’t know what else to call it. (To be completely fair, Dimitri also asks Dedue to take a break too.)
While we’re talking about the relationship between Dedue and Dimitri, we also need to talk about this “life debt” and the inherent white savior that Dimitri is set up to be. Dedue is not a native citizen of Faerghus, instead coming from the smaller nation of Duscur. Before the game, people from Duscur are implicated and blamed for an ambush that kills most of the royal family.
In retaliation, Faerghus burns down most of Duscur, kills most of its citizens, and even takes land away to give to one of the Faerghus nobility. Dedue, who is around 14 years old at the time, is nearly attacked by a knight before Dimitri throws himself between the two and tells the knight to stand down. The entire base of their relationship relies on the fact that Dimitri does not believe that all of Duscur was responsible for the ambush and murder of his dad. In fact, most times when Duscur is brought up in plot relevant scenes, it is in regards to the ambush of the Faerghus king rather than the country, and it seeks to further Dimitri’s character, the prince who is seeing his kingdom destroy a country, instead of Dedue’s, the blacksmith’s child who is seeing his country be destroyed. Dedue isn't given the space to talk about how he feels about that event.
White saviorism isn’t just delegated to Faerghus in-game, but this is the most insidious version of it, where in the actions of being a white savior, Dimitri ignores the power he has to directly help Duscur rebuild and only focuses on punishing those who framed the country (and following that train of thought, is only focusing on those who killed his father instead of the actions taken afterwards to kill many fathers, mothers, parents, children, etc).
In-game, Dedue faces prejudice from many different places. In his own house, he has to deal with the racism from Ingrid, who has a hatred of people from Duscur listed in her character profile throughout the entire game, and Felix, who constantly verbally insults and attacks Dedue, even going so far as to call him a dog. During different chapters of the game, there are times where you can see nameless NPC’s making bold and disgusting claims about Dedue’s involvement in different events around the academy, mostly when it comes to the kidnapping of a young girl and accusations of future theft. Dedue hand-waves all of this, and the only time that someone else seems to talk about them is once in a scene between Dimitri and Dedue where Dimitri uses his social power as a prince to get two knights to stop gossiping about Dedue. A few of the interactions that Dedue has with other characters have moments that revolve around how he behaves, mostly when it comes to the impassive expression he generally wears.
In the end, the biggest issue with how Dedue is treated in-game revolves around his paralogue, an optional mission that focuses on a character. His paralogue is War for the Weak, and involves a Duscur-led rebellion to take back some of the land that was stolen from them, which is a great premise, until you realize that you are fighting the rebellion, using Dedue to help squash it under the guise of sparing the rebels from the more hostile (yet allied) Kingdom forces.
There’s a lot to unpack in this paralogue. There’s the entire premise of forcibly squashing a rebellion for the return of stolen land, the difference between the Black 3d models and the white portrait art of Duscur soldiers, the laughable difference between the levels and skills of Duscur soldiers and Faerghus soldiers, and the fact that Dedue dies off-screen if you don’t complete this paralogue before the end of the first act.
Dedue is the only playable character whose paralogue has a direct impact on his survival, and it is handled poorly in-game. The fact that there is a possibility that Dedue is not alive for the entire second act forces him to be written out of the narrative and be replaced by two side characters that have fleeting moments of plot importance. Dedue is the only character who can be fridged (killed off to advance another character’s plot) for Dimitri’s character arc in-game, and literally nothing else I can say can explain the issue of representation and treatment that Intelligent Systems gave with his character arc. He only grows in relation to Dimitri, and very little is done towards his own character. He exists more as a plot point and a prop for Dimitri to prove that the Kingdom isn’t “all racist”, even as they work to never help Duscur out of the poor situation that the nation was forced into.
Fanon Dedue
Now, fanfiction is the democratization of art, right? It gives power to the people and fans to create their own narratives using beloved characters and universes. One would think that when it comes to all fanworks: art, writing, etc, people would be thinking about how they portray characters of color.
I feel like I should now talk about the racism that Dedue faces in the Three Houses fandom.
If we simply look at the tag for Dedue in AO3 (which honestly, I would not recommend if you don’t know the horrors that can exist on AO3), we can see many of the same issues that plagues the man in canon: reduction to a background character, white saviorism, and servitude. The only difference is that there is now a ship involved: Dimidue.
For those of you who don’t know, a ship is when fans take two characters and put them into a relationship. That relationship does not have to be written out in the canon work, and you could come up with practically any ship that you want with little regards to how much it makes sense. Dimidue is the ship name of Dimitri and Dedue, and it is one of Dedue’s most popular ships. Most fics that include the ship have elements of the codependency that is inherent in canon, with Dedue keeping an eye on Dimitri’s every need and Dimitri always looking out to see if Dedue is okay and well.
However, very few fics seem to talk about the unbalanced power dynamic that Dimitri and Dedue have and work on fixing it to make them equals. Imagine: you are watching your house and city get burned down, you’re about to be murdered in cold blood, and the prince of the kingdom that is doing this to you and your people chooses to save you specifically. There is a visible difference in how this relationship is formed from the jump: Dimitri’s authority as a prince both saves Dedue, but also forces him to repay the prince’s actions back by being in his service for his whole life.
There are very obvious real life parallels to what this could be considered, but none of them scream “romance” to me.
Continuing on, there are also a lot of rather stereotypical and harmful elements that are added under the gaze of (white) fanon material. When there is fanart of the Blue Lions house, Dedue seems to be excluded at an alarming rate. People will draw 4 out of the 5 male characters in the house, title it “Blue Lion Boys!”, and I, being a Black guy, will notice the lack of melanin and a lack of Dedue in the picture. Sometimes, Dedue is in the art, but his skin is lightened to a significant degree, a practice known as whitewashing. I have even seen art where Dedue is made out to be brutal, monstrous, or otherwise an “other” compared to his fellow classmates. I have seen fanart that fetishizes Dedue through stereotypes applied strongly to Black men. There is even a "Dedue Bear Week", which while I cannot claim is overtly and made with racist ideals in mind, I can say that seems to ignore the constant othering of Black people and treating Black people as animals, such as in real life "Black zoos". I can say that in game an NPC describes that Dedue can be confused for a bear during Crimson Flower Part 2.
In the end, very few fics work to actually explore Dedue, but only work to affirm what is ultimately what the game sidelines Dedue to: a character who can only connect to Dimitri, a yes man, someone who will do anything for a prince of the kingdom that killed his people.
This is still bad.
Transformative Dedue
So, what would be transformative? To be transformative, one must cause a marked change in someone or something, so I would argue that a transformative fan work causes a marked change in theme of the original work. To give a good explanation that most people would understand, the first fan work I would consider to be transformative would be North American Tournament, which is a Harry Potter fanfic currently written by an anonymous author on AO3. This fic works to pull apart the culture of Magical Britain that J.K Rowling establishes in her books, specifically in The Goblet Of Fire. North American Tournament takes a revolving cast and allows different characters to vent and show different perspectives while staying in universe and mostly in character according to canon.
When it comes to Dedue and Three Houses, I would like to plug my own (in progress) fanfic: auditum parvum, which puts more of a focus on the intricacies of racism and prejudice in-game. The transformative aspect of the fic comes from how Dedue’s perspective is written to be more active than canon, where he starts making decisions for himself and his people. There’s also a lot of heavy worldbuilding when it comes to Duscur and its culture that has to be done because of the lack of attention given to it by the game. In auditum parvum, Duscur is no longer a stagnant plot point only used for a bad paralogue and to further a white savior, but as a country with a history and ideals, a symbol of home and safety. Dedue has healthy interactions with characters that the game won’t let him have and works through complex situations regarding his own place in Faerghus and near Dimitri. Prejudiced characters actually receive consequences for their actions, and there is an exploration as to why those prejudices are so rampant in society. Characters from Duscur are fleshed out respectfully, allowing a more natural representation of Black culture and how it intersects with many other identities, such as gender, sexuality, disability, and non-Black heritage than what the game provides (which is about 4 lines and weak NPC troops) better than what non-transformative fandom has presented.
To have a transformative fanwork, a creator must be willing to put in the time and research to make it respectful. If they must ask a person for their opinions on a portrayal of their culture, race, creed, ability, etc, they must find a way to compensate that person respectfully and to an agreeable degree.
To interact with a transformative fanwork, a person must allow the work the same level of suspension of disbelief that they gave the original work. The feeling that a character may be written “out of canon” is not a viable excuse to write off a transformative fanwork, just proof that the audience hasn’t attempted to see if the character has been written consistently.
To have a transformative fanwork, one must ask questions that will probably make people uncomfortable about how they interact with the original media. And that’s fine.
There’s always another fanwork somewhere.