Fire Emblem Tellius/YMMV

• Alas, Poor Villain: Bryce, Zelgius, Shiharam, Dheginsea, Levail, Sephiran and to a lesser extent, Jarod and Hetzel are all people you might feel bad about killing. Possibly Petrine too, given her death quote.
• Awesome Music: Rally the Spirit from Path of Radiance.
  • Also Eternal Bond from Radiant Dawn. Not only is it awesome enough to be part of the opening and the closing music numbers, but Super Smash Bros renamed it Ike's Theme, despite there being Ike's Resolution.
  • The Devoted. Few times such a short song is this intense.
• Base Breaker: Makalov. The fans either love him for his jerkassery, his pink hair and orange armor. Or hate him for his jerkassery, his pink hair and orange armor.
  • Stat-wise: Edward. He's either one of the best characters in the game, or one of the worst. His usefulness gererally depends on what difficulty you're playing. (Part 1 on Hard Mode really isn't kind to Magikarp Power characters)
  • Micaiah. She's either a Canon Sue who makes stupid decisions due to bad writing or being stupid depending on who you ask, or a complex heroine struggling with My Country Right or Wrong who was unfairly shafted by a narrative that favored Ike.
  • Ike himself is either a beloved badass Game Breaker that even male fans admit to being attracted to or a Boring Hero who steals the spotlight from Micaiah.
  • Astrid's characterization in Radiant Dawn. To some, she's Chickified to hell and back and only exists to fawn over Makalov, which gets her a lot of hatred and pity. Others still find her charming and sweet, since her generic supports reflect her Path of Radiance characterization more. (And still others blame Makalov alone. While he is a jerk and she could do better, Astrid's still capable of making her own choices.)
• Breather Boss: Hetzel, who only uses staves on the first part of 4F.
• Canon Sue: Micaiah comes dangerously close to this, but has enough flaws and makes enough mistakes not to be one. While a good number of people like her and come around to her in the end, she has to earn it by learning to work alongside a man she's been blaming and resenting for a good portion of the game.
• Cliché Storm: Path of Radiance is this for Fire Emblem, backstory and setting aside. Heck, Elincia even looks like Guenivere and Nyna. Until she suddenly dons armour and jumps on her grandmother's pegasus.
  • Deconstructor Fleet: Radiant Dawn pretty much goes on a pretty big deconstruction in Parts one and two. Part one pretty much shows that while Ashnard was certainly bad, Begnion wasn't much better. Likewise, part two shifts focus to a rebellion in Crimea. As a Let's Play put it, Path of Radiance pretty much went like a fairytale for Crimea. Radiant Dawn shows that when they were no longer united against Daein, they decided to go back to petty power squabbles and
• Complete Monster: Ashnard, Lekain, and Izuka are obvious examples. Schaeffer would be one too, but...see below.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The boss of the Radiance chapter "Solo" is holding the unarmed population of a monastery hostage to gain leverage and some human shields. He is the most hilariously, unapologetically vile man your army has personally met thus far, and he seals it with his death quote:

Schaeffer:"...Gwaar... Haaaarr... Haaaaaa... Shoulda brought... more priests... Or some... babies... Dang..."

• 8.8: The GameSpot review pans Radiant Dawn for not including Mii support and being too much like the rest of the series. And being hard on Easy Mode. And not including motion controls, which resulted in a very bad review anyway. And guess which console was being criticized by the same site for using motion control in too many games?
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Mia due to her personality and being a myrmidon (the fandom's favorite characters all seem to come from this class).
  • Heather in Radiant Dawn, due to be one of the few new characters with personality and Girl-On-Girl Is Hot.
  • Nephenee also has a significant following, due to her being a Shrinking Violet farm girl - and at the same time, she's also one of the most powerful characters in the game, outside of laguz nobles.
    • She's also the first playable Soldier.
  • Devdan of course. Danved as well who is certainly not Devdan and who fights like ten men.
  • Oliver too. He's the most beautiful character in the game.
  • Volke, Marcia, Haar, and Stefan are quite popular as well.
  • Bastian is also moderately popular due to his exuberant personality and heroic Magnificent Bastardry.
  • In a non-character example, the Tellius incarnation of the Soldier class as a competent playable class, and its promoted forms Halberdier and Sentinel, seem largely beloved. Improving Soldiers and creating and inserting Halberdiers (of varying levels of graphical quality) has become a very common practice in the Game Mod community for the GBA trilogy and the lack of this form of Soldier in Fire Emblem Awakening was much bemoaned.
• Evil Is Sexy: Petrine, complete with Boobs of Steel.
• Fan Dumb / Hate Dumb: Soren gets loads of this, earning a Base Breaker status. Some fans were definitely not pleased with the fact that he and Ike seem to be the Official Couple for the game given the insane amount of hoops you have to jump through to get their bonus scene.
  • Heather's lesbianism is mocked and derided by some fans. They either accuse her of being "too stereotypical" for flirting with girls and being annoyed by men, or gripe about how an attractive Lipstick Lesbian is "just fanserivce for males" and even accuse the writers of heteronormativity.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: There's a small minority of FE fans who DON'T ship Nephenee/Heather.
  • Pelleas/Micaiah is more popular than Sothe/Micaiah in some circles due to the former having plenty of deep, introspective moments together, Pelleas's admiration of Micaiah, and her refusing to ever give up on him.
  • Rolf/Mist was this for a while, causing minor shipping drama when Boyd/Mist was given the paired ending instead.
  • Lethe/Jill and Mist/Jill are much more popular than Haar/Jill these days due to the growing Age Discourse in fandom. Even before then, many fans saw Haar and Jill as being more sibling-like, some believing Haar's true love was Jill's father, General Shiharam.
• Fan Nickname: Mickey Sue for Micaiah.
• Foe Yay: A bit; most prominently between Greil and Petrine, and between Valtome and Zelgius.
• Fountain of Memes:
  • Devdan
  • Septimus
• Game Breaker:
  • Laguz Royals in Radiant Dawn, Ike in both games, and most tier 3 characters in the sequel. To specify, there are now 60 levels to grow up, and each 20 levels you go up a "tier" (which the game calls a "class change"), and get pre-set stat bonuses (contrasting normal level-ups, where it's random). In the other games, there were only two tiers. Now there are 3, and even though most of your units come in tier 2 anyway, their stats become so ridiculous that many people consider the Endgame the easiest part of the game.
  • Averted with the tier 3 characters in the Japanese version: Units don't "Class Change" upon leveling up, but need to use the Master Crowns to reach third tier, so the number of third tier characters is somewhat limited.
  • Haar. Lightning Bruiser, excellent mobility, plenty of availability, weak to only an uncommon type of Magic, masters the best weapon type in the game, is essentially a flying tank... it's safe to say that Haar is one of, if not THE, best units in the game. Such is his influence as a Game Breaker that among FE fansites, when drafting tier lists for any game in the franchise (and even other games), it's not uncommon to refer to the absolute top tier as the "Haar Tier".
• Goddamned Boss: Sephiran's oddly low HP (50) for a late-game boss is to lull you into a false sense of security. Thanks to Mantle, he's healing 40 of that every turn, so essentially the only way to subdue him is to gang up everyone and take him out in one turn. You also need Nihil on those who will attack him if you don't want him to Corona-bomb someone to death. However, he's got another dirty trick that is almost literally cheating: those magic spirit mooks always standing adjacent to him? They have an unadvertised Guard skill that will start directing attacks away from Sephiran when his HP is low. You have to remove all four of them before you can finish the job. Do this too slow, and he'll use Rewarp to move somewhere else. Rude and rather lame, but it makes sense in context; see Death Seeker above.
• Ho Yay/Les Yay:
  • Among the males most prominently Ike with his all-male support endings, especially Soren with whom he has loads of subtext in both games.
  • Among the females, there is Heather who pretty much flirts with every woman she meets (Nephenee, Lucia, Ilyana... even giving hyperbolic compliments to Elincia without meeting her.)
  • Other places people notice Ho Yay include but are not limited to Oscar/Kieran, Tibarn/Reyson, and Zelgius/Sephiran.
  • Other places people notice Les Yay include but are not limited to Jill/Mist, Jill/Lethe, and Tanith/Sigrun.
• I Knew It!: The Black Knight's true identity of Zelgius, as well as Bertram being a Brainwashed and Crazy Renning. Thanks to the magic of hacking Radiance and examining unused files and dummy data, many saw these coming a mile away, although Ranulf spoils the former in Dawn for those who didn't.
• It Was His Sled:
  • The Greil Mercenaries saving Lucia at the end of part II. Yes, it was originally a spoiler, since it was never hinted at the beginning. Also, Zelgius is the Black Knight.
  • Greil's death from the first game.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks: "Stop Having Fun!" Guys complained that you could save mid mission in Radiant Dawn, providing an opportunity for Save Scumming (a first for a Fire Emblem game.) Others countered that you can't do it in Hard Mode (the mid-battle saves are deleted when you load them.)
• It's Hard, So It Sucks: The GameSpot reviewer said that the game was insanely hard, even on Easy Mode, which contributed to the badly received low score. Up until then, every Fire Emblem was made easier for international release. This one wasn't, except for including some new weapons, and making promotion and forging weapons less of a hassle.
  • It really didn't help that the Japanese Normal, Hard and Maniac modes were renamed Easy, Normal and Hard in the localization. It's quite likely that many reviewers avoided playing Easy out of pride, not realising they were jumping straight into the Japanese Hard.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Ashnard, though you don't find out about it until his back story and motives are explained in the second game, well after his death. In the first game, he just comes off as being Ax Crazy.
  • Non-villainous examples include Nasir, Bastian, Naesala, and Soren (although the last becomes more of a Guile Hero by the end of Path of Radiance).
  • Sephiran, who is The Man Behind the Man to everyone. Lekain thinks he's one, but is more of a high-functioning Smug Snake.
• Memetic Badass: "The 3-13 Archer," a particular friendly archer in Chapter 3-13 of Radiant Dawn, is especially distinguished for Memetic Badass status in spite of want for a name. By an incredible quirk of Artificial Brilliance, the 3-13 Archer has cemented himself in the hearts and minds of Fire Emblem players everywhere.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Danved is certainly not Devdan. He also fights like ten men.
  • "Give them a sound thrashing!"
• Moe: Mist, Ilyana, Astrid, Amy, Micaiah, and Sanaki. A lot of people think this of Rhys as well. Soren could be, but that might just be something else.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Jarod crossed it when he murdered three innocent civilians in pursuit of the Dawn Brigade, and possibly earlier when he killed one of his own men for failing to capture the Dawn Brigade.
  • Izuka definitely crossed it when he was testing his Feral One drugs on Muarim, although the Feral One drug’s existence to begin with could mean he crossed it sooner.
  • Lekain crosses it every other line of dialogue.
    • Being responsible for the Serenes Massacre definitely stands out, though, particularly since it's one of his few acts that weren't the idea of Sephiran.
    • In fact, because the Serenes Massacre is what caused Sephiran to cross the Despair Event Horizon, Lekain is pretty much indirectly responsible for everything.
  • Ashnard crossed it when he abandoned his lover, took his son hostage in order to lure in the boy's uncle whom he turned into a mount, and then abandoned his son after that.
  • Valtome does it twice, starting by ordering his men into the Kauku Caves (almost certain death) purely to "retrieve corpses" in 3-8. In 3-10, in case there was any doubt, ordering his soldiers (a hell of a lot of men) to attack the unarmed Queen Elincia, who has just managed to avert a major battle between Begnion and the Laguz Alliance. This troper cheered when he got to kill the douchebag in 4-2.
• Narm:
  • Some of the voiceovers in the scenes in Radiant Dawn's English version. Especially Deghinsea's. A was intended to be a very serious scene showcasing Lehran's plight, but Deghinsea's voice actor decided to play Large Ham and whatever was intended to be serious in the scene vanished in thin air.

Deghinsea: "Hold, hold I say!"

• • Ilyana's death. "I'm dying...on an empty stomach."
  • The flashback with Ike as a child. Because whoever was doing his voice was not told that IKE WAS A FRICKEN CHILD. Hilarious to watch.
• Stoic Woobie:
  • Soren is the most obvious example, although admittedly he loses some of his stoicism in the scenes that make him the most Woobie-like. Except for his Path of Radiance B Support with Ike.
  • After making his promise that there shall be no great war, Dheginsea is not only forced to hide Lehran from the world and persecute the branded, but also sit idle as the Laguz are forced into slavery, since the Dragon's interfering would cause said war. Then Ashnard has an affair with his daughter, uses their child to draw out and kill his eldest, and then warps a brigade of red dragons into Feral Ones. Dheg still remains neutral. Then a great war happens anyway, and his only remaining child Kurthnaga joins the war. He still remains neutral. By the end of Radiant Dawn Dheg has lost a child, had the other two turn against him, the majority of his people killed, and his hundreds of years of neutrality torn down before his eyes, and all he could do to validate his actions was to continue to uphold his promise, even in the face of Armageddon and the objections of everyone around him.

• Tier-Induced Scrappy: Poor, poor Fiona. The girl comes in halfway through part 1 with poor bases during one of the more dangerous chapters, her only saving grace being the Savior skill that lets her carry an NPC without penalties. While she has good growths and is technically of a valuable class line, mounted units get a movement penalty during indoor maps...and guess which maps are the only ones she can be deployed on! On top of that she has poor availability. All this adds up to a useless unpromoted cavalier you're better off benching in the later parts unless you pull some serious strings to beef her up before part 1 ends.
  • Meg isn't much better. Though you get her earlier and she doesn't suffer the same indoor penalties, and you have more time to train her, her growth spread doesn't favor the typical armor knight's. This can give players a rude awakening when they try to block a choke point with her and she dies almost instantly. Like with Fiona, you'll need to do some serious work to make her a viable unit for later chapters. She does, however, come with a skill that protects her from critical hits.
  • Astrid is considered the weakest and most useless of the Crimean Royal Knights in Radiant Dawn, due to coming in at a lower level than the others with rather poor bases. While she can be a viable unit given a good support and with the Paragon skill to help her level up faster, she's still a far cry from what she was in the previous game. Players who were used to her amazing growths there were bitterly upset by this downgrade.
  • Lyre, Lyre, Lyre. Laguz in Radiant Dawn other than the royals and arguably Ranulf get a serious downgrade in stats from the previous game, and Lyre has possibly the worst attack in the game. She's fast, sure, and she can hit, but it doesn't mean much when she can't even do scratch damage.
  • Leonardo. Despite coming in during the prologue of part one and having good availability, his bases are poor and his growths just as bad, especially his speed and HP. Plus, he's an archer, meaning he can't fight back at close range without a crossbow. Which you can't even get in part 1. Many players just take his Dracoshield and bench him.
  • Micaiah redefines Squishy Wizard and Glass Cannon. While her magic output is amazing, she has low HP and pathetic defense, plus horrible speed growth. The fact that you're required to keep her alive and use her all throughout the game makes her unfortunate circumstances even more frustrating. Thankfully, some of this is mitigated by her personal tome Thani, which she can use to one-shot armors and horseback units and makes her a good boss killer.
  • Path of Radiance's incarnation of Sothe is, simply put, terrible. He joins during one of the harder chapters of the game, has weak bases and growths, is stuck using the weakest weapon in the game, and he can't promote. Story-wise, this makes sense, but gameplay-wise it makes most players bench him and carry around extra chest keys. His Radiant Dawn incarnation fares better, but is something of a Crutch Character who may fall behind later in the game if you're not careful.
  • Tormod, Muarim, and Vika have the worst availability in Radiant Dawn. You get them for half of part one, but they're overpowered and you naturally don't want to waste EXP on them when so many others need it. The problem is, they don't come back until more than halfway through part four, when they've fallen hopelessly behind! Vika in particular can die to anything in two hits if you're not careful, and Tormod can barely damage anything. Only players who really, really like these three tend to bother training them or giving them any bonus EXP in part 1.

• That One Boss:
  • If nothing else, Dheginsea is statistically fearsome: 100 HP, outrageous stats (six of them maxed out), a skill (Mantle) that stops your skills, renders him immune to non-blessed weapons, and heals him for 30 HP every turn; and to top it off, a mastery skill (Ire) that just plain kills you, period. The good news is, by this point you've had a chance to get three copies of Nihil, which you can simply slap on your three strongest units to even the odds. The bad news is, you're still having to fend off his countrymen in the meantime, and they are no slouches. Another strike against Dheginsea is that (like all the rest of the enemies) he will never retaliate against Kurthnaga or Ena. Not that this helps you anyway, since those two are lucky to damage him at all. (This troper used the two of them as roadblocks to stall the reinforcements.)
  • In Path of Radiance, defeating the Black Knight is more or less a matter of luck, unless you've gotten Mist leveled up reaaaaaal well. And even then you have to do it in just four turns, which is harder than it sounds.

• That One Level:
  • In Path of Radiance, a lot of players groan at chapter 17 being split into four parts, with each one being about as long and involved as a regular chapter. The third part is an Escort Mission where Ike must go through the second half of the chapter carrying Leanne on his back (halving his speed, dodge rate, and hit rate), you can't go back and grab extra items from Inventory for the characters you've already deployed, the ones you pick as reinforcements take two turns to show up, and in the final part you're accompanied by Tibarn and his crew. While they're very helpful, they also run the risk of killing the boss, who drops a rare and useful light magic spell.
  • Radiant Dawn has a lot of these, but one of the most notable is Chapter 3-6, where you fight as the Dawn Brigade for the first time in a long time. Unless you've painstakingly level-grinded these units, you're going to have a bad time: the enemies are a lot stronger, and they're all beast laguz who can hit hard and fast. You have to kill a certain number of them, but it's a big number, and you're playing in Fog of War where the enemy can jump you out of nowhere. Squishier units like Micaiah, Laura, and Leonardo will be eaten alive if you're not careful.
  • Chapter 1-8 isn't a barrel of laughs, either. You're fighting in a swamp, trying to rescue a bunch of NPCs stuck in the water, and you can't bring your only flying unit. That's right, you can't use Jill, and that makes the chapter a hell of a lot harder, especially if you're aiming to rescue all of the NPCs. You do get Nailah, but she's overpowered and can easily steal valuable EXP. Plus, she can attack in both forms and you can't remove her weapon the way you can overpowered beorc units.

• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The generic support conversations in Radiant Dawn were not very well-liked after four straight games of interesting, detailed ones. A fan project was started to create support conversations in the vein of those seen in previous games. Link here.
• Toy Ship: Mist and Rolf. Also counts as a Fan-Preferred Couple.
• The Woobie: Among others, Tormod, Muarim, and Ena definitely count.
• Unfortunate Implications: Astarte's status in the game could be viewed as this but if anyone cared it'd probably be for Sadly Mythtaken reasons. The translators renamed her Ashera though, so unfortunate implications abound when she's used for the church stand in.
• Woolseyism: The Black Knight's survival is changed from very silly Phlebotinum Breakdown to I Let You Win using existing reasons.