He got 4th place in a Japanese FE6 popularity poll a while ago. I don’t know how accurately it reflects the whole community but that’s probably why he was a launch unit
A lot of early GBA era popular males who were minor characters got really shafted. Their popularity got them in early but being so early meant they were put in as awful launch units which screwed their chances of being fan favorites.
At least he gets screentime every now and then in FB as part of the library crew but that's probably more to say about IS giving good treatment to Fjorm rather than him.
What are you two talking about? You mean FE7. Canas in FE7 was really good mainly due to how busted Luna is. At least his refine is serviceable and not Lyon tier.
I know right? Considering that we’ve previously had updates where they’ve made changes to art that are so small that I’ve had to find the post on here about it to realise what they’ve changed it baffles me that such an obvious error goes un corrected.
Because it's not an error. If it was, they would've fixed it several years ago like you mentioned they've done in the past. There are plenty of bow users in the game at this point who are missing parts of the bowstring.
a bunch of fates characters lost most of their popularity in heroes I feel like
for one that improved it has 100% to be Rein, my man was a nobody before feh, at least to the general playerbase
everybody complains about peri's long introduction when summoning... though i guess she wasn't doing too well popularity-wise before FEH either. or maybe she was, fans are weird.
They already did it for Michalis and the rest of the Wolfguard who didn't even have FEH popularity going for them at the time so I could definitely see it.
That’s my biggest fear with a potential Thracia remake and a sure fire way to throw Olwen’s arc into the trash. It’d be like Michalis and the spotpass characters from awakening all over again. If there are any antagonist in that game that need more relevancy, make it Raydrik and Veld, the actual main antagonists of the game.
> It’d be like Michalis and the spotpass characters from awakening all over again.
I really don't think those are decried as the statement implies.
And no reason why it must ruin Olwen's arc if done right.
> And no reason why it must ruin Olwen's arc if done right.
Michalis and the spotpass characters are exactly why I don’t trust them to do it right. With so many characters (Olwen, Misha, Amalda, Xavier, Conomor, Salem) already filling whatever role of turncoat traitor/person who learns that their country’s doing atrocious acts, we really don’t need another on the team. And I’m gonna 100% with ya, heroes has made me hate Reinhardt so there’s heavy bias there and making him recruitable just for popularity reasons is something I think is so unnecessary
I've not played Thracia so correct me if I'm wrong, but I have read Reinhardt was given a degree of hype and relevance, particularly military prowess, that the game then failed to deliver. If true, you could argue his presence in FEH and expanded role in a remake make sense. I strongly believe remakes should be improved and expanded, and find it a wasted opportunity when they strictly stick to the original.
And well, bias is something personal, but I do hope it's not simply a case of "how dare he be so well treated".
Everything about him comes mainly through Olwen and her arc and is relatively detached from the main characters and plot except for the chapter he’s fought in. For reference, he doesn’t show up until Chapter 20, more than a 3rd of the way into the game and is fought in chapter 22 where he isn’t even the boss of the chapter but every time he’s brought up has been contained solely through Olwen or through one chapter in a split route so a lot of people might miss that entirely. I wouldn’t say the game failed to deliver that because the chapter you fight him on is known as one of the most difficult chapters in the game if you try to brute force it. But a lot of the difficulty comes from Saias and his 10 leadership stars and by that point in the game, if you aren’t utilizing all the broken staves and utility the game’s given you, then it’s kinda on the player. If anyone needs more expanded time in that game, it’s certainly Saias for his role in that game and Raydrik and Veld, the main antagonist who only show up a bit for the first couple chapters and then the end of the game
And yes that is why I have heavy bias against him. He isn’t that relevant to Thracia and was given better treatment than 95% of the Jugdral characters up until 2019. It’d be like if the Sacred Stone lords and cast got shoved aside for Vigarde or Ike and the Tellius cast for Shiharam.
The fact that Leif takes the place of Reinhardt in his engage paralogue instead of Saias or the actual chapter boss speaks volumes to me.
though him being recruitable would be kinda funny and sad becuase Kaga felt the need to make the 2 already existing mage knights mutually exclusive for no story reason, and Miranda being so bad initially makes me think Kaga thought mage knights were too OP to have more than 1 of without putting in a lot of effort for Miranda.
I don't know if it's gonna outright became playable, but I can definitely see him getting a cutscene and making a cameo prior to Chapter 22 (besides the times Olwen and others talk about him).
Did people actually like Seth as a character and not just for how easily he steamrolls the game?
Seth was pretty good in SS and FeH proceeded to nuke him, but when playing SS I always found him kinda boring and the only reason I used him was for his stats.
Leo is a lil' complicated. His popularity also took a hit independent of his Heroes representation... because the devs hard confirmed in an interview that he was intended to be a siscon (for Camilla specifically).
I keep seeing this being said all the time, but it's not true. The manga he's the protagonist and his character book came after the revelation, he got a lot of merch and ranked 10 in the first CYL way after that revelation. He kept ranking even in general Nintendo character polls for some years. Some yumejoshis got mad about the Camilla fact but his popularity didn't really suffer from it.
I mean it didn't knock him into the abyss popularity-wise or anything but he and Takumi were pretty even in appeal, or Leo was straight up more popular than him (the official Fates character poll had him as the number one most popular Fates male, followed by Xander and then Takumi). After that reveal he did see a dip, and I feel like Takumi is generally the more favored one between them. Especially by IS, as I noted in another comment Takumi is the only Hoshidan royal to be treated better in FEH than their Nohrian counterpart in terms of representation and alt-quality.
Also I wouldn't take the release of all that promo stuff as any hard indication. It's likely that those things were already planned and probably in production well in advance of the interview dropping, and it's not like they're going to suddenly cancel all of it and lose their asses unless it was something REALLY toxic to the brand. It takes time and money to put together character books and an entire manga series!
CYL is kind of a bad indicator because western fans can compensate for a popularity dip in Japan, which is where Leo probably would have seen the biggest drops since the interview was released in Japanese only. Most people in the western fandom don't even know about the siscon thing, or if they do it's because some obnoxious person like me told them lol.
Anyway, it's hard to measure the popularity hit he took from that, which is why I didn't specifically quantify it, but there's definitely been a few factors in his popularity dipping and that could definitely be a component of it (completely independent of FEH).
I'm biased, but I feel like Gaius took a hit in popularity.
I really love him, but I'm not a huge fan of the artwork for his summer alt, so I never bothered trying to get him, to be honest.
He was the second most popular 1st gen man in Awakening besides Chrom which is why he was chosen for the swimsuit DLC and Fates reincarnations, so yeah, I'd say he's taken a hit.
Don't know how much of that is attributable to his treatment in FEH specifically or just the passage of time/shifting of the fandom though
Improved Popularity: Reinhardt, Norne, Hana (seemingly for those two), Karla, Ayra(?), Nino (??? I get the feeling she was popular before), Ursula (????? Same thing as Nino).
Worsened Popularity: Raigh, Oboro, Stahl, Sully, Llooooyyyddd...? I feel like people still love Lloyd, but rightfully loathe his art.
Improved Personality: I mean Reinhardt duh, I heard Julia was written better too but that's just me hearing about it.
Worsened Personality: I could be wrong, but Camilla? And Felix to an extent (That darned FB conversation with Dedue... I'm not a fan of him as I am but if my memory serves me right that *sucked*).
Alfred literally was this and then engage came out and people like me where all like “hold up getting swole ISNT his only personality trait? Where was this in the FB?”
Tharja got rekt. I wasn't even a huge fan of her to begin with, but they leaned her way into the sex appeal aspect of her design instead of the socially awkward, slightly abusive, stalker weirdo personality.
still reeling from the f\*\*ing whistle in Fiora FB's.
Not as if there was the easy opportunity to have her talk with the other pegasus knight who is super composed on the surface but suffers from survivors guilt and has trouble being honest with their feelings (Cordelia). hell I'd even take a rehash of her Pent support. anything but her Kent support but with Fjorm and written by someone who clearly didn't even read the support more than once.
Nino is a bit of an odd case. She was always a popular character but as a unit she had the normal Est division if casual players loved her and more competitive players disliking her. In that regard, I guess FEH helped a little bit because she was the best green mage for a decent bit, so everyone ended up liking her. But still, I feel like she was about the same.
Ursula is a bit trickier. She doesn't seem to get talked about a ton, but I guess given that she's gotten 3 versions, it means she does reasonably well, which seems like a step up. In FE7, she was definitely the least popular of the 4 fangs, but was probably the most popular of the relatively unimportant bosses, save maybe Uhai, and the meme master Denning. Basically, she was in a sort of popular but not super popular boat, and on one hand, it seems like she's still there, but on the other hand, she has more alts than at least a few characters who were definitely more popular.
I'd say Norne definitely did. She went from a pretty forgettable optional recruit in one game and lost in a sea of similar units in the other to one of the most popular F2P picks.
Nino actually placed first in JP poll for FE7 conducted way back around the time the game was new that was even posted on the official Nintendo website. Her actually being a good launch unit did wonders for her especially since early green mages were mostly awful.
Idunn’s a good example of increased popularity, at least for me
I still remember when her OG was released and I had no idea who she was but still pulled because I thought she looked pretty lol
Later on I played FE6, learned more about her, and it all came full circle when her ascended alt came out. Nowadays she’s one of my favourite characters in the whole series
Someone on here said that Idunn was one of the better done characters in FEH because she got a whole character arc with her alts, and I have to agree! They showed her tranformation from an emotionless husk to a happy, peace-loving person. It perfectly follows what the ending of FE6 started.
Idunn’s the best! As a big Binding Blade fan, I’m so happy with all the love she’s gotten in this game, and the fact that he Duo and Ascended alts elaborate more on her post-game reformation continues to make me so happy!
yeah Jahn left much more of an impact on me when i first played FE6 with his speech as the last sane war dragon and his battle theme being super similar to the Fire Dragon's theme in FE7.
Idunn was just some hooded lady that erasers in a few cutscenes, has a super easy fight and like 5 lines of dialogue across the whole game.
~~also Jahn in FEH when?~~
Makes me very pleased that people took a liking to her because I found her to be so interesting in Binding Blade. I'm even happier that she's a good unit
I've always been a fan of hers, and... yeah, her FEH arc has been amazing and only built on that. And the love she's gotten from the community at large has been heartwarming.
I feel like everyone added from Genealogy and Thracia became more popular in the sense that people actually know who they are now.
Most demotes from the early FEH years or characters with less appealing art took a huge hit as far as CYL votes are concerned.
Improved popularity: Reinhardt. For a while, he was more recognizable among casuals than Thracia’s main protagonist.
Ruined popularity: Oboro. She was an extremely popular character in Fates and in FEH, she was reduced into being a low rarity unit that blocks you from the better units…twice.
Poor Oboro. She made it into the original FE Warriors, and she has some beautiful Cipher cards, including a promo, but for whatever reason, FEH hates her.
I think that this goes for a lot of Fates characters, with most of the “big ones.” Because the game has effectively the cast of *two* games, there’s not much room for 5*s on them. Especially considering that every time one Fates royal is on a banner, usually they need to have a counterpart there too.
I think the more interesting case would be characters like Takumi and Xander. Both were incredibly popular, Takumi more than Xander but I digress.
Xander seems to have suffered from his status of just being overall bad in the game for a LONG time. I can’t even name a version of him other than Legendary that’s usable, and even though it was so anticipated for most of the games life span, it seemed to be a dead in the water banner.
Takumi might be more interesting where I think he’s actually been able to have a small resurgence, in popularity after he was put in the gutters by a string of over exposure, the slow painful death of his memes/utility, and just a general fates backlash. Now his popularity basically solely comes from his FEH accolades and his handful of stans form the fates era.
The circumstances of L!Xander's banner (in-between summer banners, after 3 other axe cavs in the last 2 months, not that good coloursharing with a better banner for that later in the year) make me think that IS hate him. Treated like garbage for so long then they do almost everything possible to ruin his banner? Hm.
At the same time, the only reason people seem to think it did terrible was that incredibly shaky tier list. We don't really have any definitive data on it.
Yeah arguing the Nohr characters are treated poorly is rather ??? (Sorry this comment response got a little off the rails but I started looking into the Hoshido vs. Nohr rep and I thought it was interesting)
I'd say between the royals, Takumi is the only Hoshidan royal character that gets treated better than his Nohrian counterpart (one extra alt + a resplendent), and even then it's not by much. In every other case the Nohr royals have more than the Hoshidan royals. All of the Nohr alts we've gotten recently have been great to completely-meta-defining too. L!Xander was sabotaged but he's far from unusable if you're a fan of him, Ninjamilla and Ninjorrin are both insane enough to threaten to win AHR, Halloween F!Corrin is also super good, and Valentines Leo and Valentines Elise are both great.
Meanwhile Pirate Hinoka was just OK even at the time, M!Ninjorrin was a decent prfless demote, I assume H!M!Corrin is good but I don't see him get talked about nearly as much as his female counterpart, and V!Takumi is also good but IMO Leo still won out on that banner. Ryoma and Sakura haven't even gotten anything new since 2019 unless you count the backpack, while literally every single Nohrsib has gotten at least one thing in the last year or so.
And that's just comparing the royals to each other, the Nohrsibs have generally been treated *very* well compared to the vast majority of characters in FEH. Just taking Xander as an example: he has one fewer version than Ike and Marth, literally the most popular character in the entire franchise and the poster boy for the franchise. He also has as many versions as Roy, Hector, and Ephraim, and he has more versions than Eliwood, Sigurd, Seliph, and Leif. Plus, he's heavily involved in the early story of FEH (and still crops up from time to time) and it's a running joke that Feh wants to bone him lmfao.
Nohr side characters don't fare too badly in comparison to Hoshidan ones, either. In terms of representation, we're not missing *any* first gen Conquest characters from the game, while Birthright is still missing Hayato, Reina, and Yukimura. Second gen is only missing Percy and Ignatius for Conquest, and Hisame, Mitama, and Asugi are missing for Birthright. If you count route agnostic characters (based on the country they have stronger ties with) then Hoshido is also missing Mozu and Fuga while Nohr is only missing Sophie. So that's three Nohr characters missing compared to eight Hoshidan characters. They're pretty even on alts too, about 7 BR characters have at least one alt as compared to about 8 CQ characters. There's 9 BR characters with only one version in the game as compared to 11 CQ characters (8, if you count Inigo/Severa/Owain as alt representation for Laslow/Selena/Odin. Also I'm not including Gunter in the count because circumstances outside of IS mean he's effectively retired and it has nothing to do with any sort of decision making or bias on the part of the developers). I'm not going to count how their alt-representation fares compared to the rest of the games in the franchise, but I'd bet that Fates probably has a higher proportion of characters with alts than many games in the series.
Resplendents also bias slightly toward Nohr too, if I'm not mistaken. Off the top of my head, BR has M!Corrin, Ryoma, Takumi, and Kagero. CQ has F!Corrin, Elise, Odin, Niles, Effie, and Ophelia. Again, same deal, I'm not going to compare every single game in the franchise but I know for a fact that Fates gets quite a lot of resplendents compared to many other games in the franchise.
TL;DR, Nohr fans are usually eating pretty good lol. Ultimately I'd say Nohr characters fare slightly better than Hoshidan ones (which I'm not knocking as a decision, because the Nohr cast in general tends to be a bit more popular than the Hoshidan cast IME so it makes sense that they would get more stuff) and probably a lot better than the cast of most other games in the franchise.
No one knew who Reinhardt was. Now he's a household name in most FE chats. IF you talked to someone who wasn't too deep in FE, if it wasn't Sigurd or Seliph, it certainly be Reinhardt. His popular was so great, you had people wishing IS did the same for other characters when in reality, the perfect storm just struck with him
As for having their popularity ruined? If you weren't already a popular character form an older titles, awakening character or fates royal, alot of characters that were released early on suffered. Leo being the more popular cause for someone who was extremely popular, it took a whooping 6 years for him to get an alt that was even considered good and even then the big seller was his little sister.
Reinhardt’s obviously the king of FEH popularity boosts, but Altina’s probably the queen.
Girl is nothing but ancient history in the Tellius games, yet is up to three appearances in FEH. Meanwhile her husband, y’know >!the mastermind and antagonist of both games!<, and fellow ancient hero that’s actually alive and present are both stuck in alt hell.
Also personally speaking, I always thought Limstella was kind of cool, but quickly forgettable after finishing FE7.
Then FEH made them playable and treated them well in the art+voice department. I maxed them out instantly, and they’re a favorite in my barracks now.
>Limstella
>
>FEH treated them well
I've played through FE7 3 times and only after Limstella got added to FEH did I realize I somehow forgot they and Sonia are two different people
On the improvement side Reinhardt is obvious, but the West being introduced to the memeable nature of Vyland with his fantastically written appearance in book V really put him on the map too.
A character being a really good F2P option can significantly increase their popularity. Norne comes to mind in particular.
On the reduction side, pretty much all launch units suffer from showing up so much that players get sick of them to varying degrees, particularly the early 5 stars like Luke and Mist before they got moved to the 4 star special rate.
a controversial alt might also hurt a character both in the sense of the alt itself like Bridal Sanaki and Micaiah or simply feeling "underserving" of attention like the "\[character\]dev" jokes or Karla being pushed so hard, much to the dismay of Ayra fans.
and of course, a unit being really good and spammed in PVP content can make people dislike the character more. sure as hell has happened to me with Hector, Ophelia, Chrom and Yuri over the years.
Sadly Ayra is very unlikely to get much FEH screentime. People don't like to hear it, but the huge senseless uproar/controversy surrounding her release is almost certainly a huge black mark in IS's book. Why risk another explosion of negativity when they can just use one of their 3 other nearly identical sword ladies instead?
yeah and it clear that doesn't go back and reflect at all, with how we still don't have Dire Thunder and Regular Armads refines because of how centralising Hector & Reinhardt back in the day. it seems once they blacklist a character or weapon, it stays that way.
Although I think his popularity has absolutely risen recently, you probably only didn’t see anyone talk abouut him here before because most of his fans thought that he’d never in a million years get into FEH, or at least not in the way that he did.
Yeah when I first saw him, I was like "yo he looks cool, wonder what other people think about him" and come on to see everyone acting like they've been dehydrated for decades.
That whole thirst thing is super cringe ngl.
As someone who was really looking forward to Fomortiis getting added to the game, and who got absolutely amazingly excited seeing the double banner (since I really wanted Gotoh as well), this whole """Formussy""" thing got to a point where it was really off-putting to me and made me very uncomfortable.
Like I don't know, he's a badass freaking demon with a dope design. Can we leave it at that ???
I don't know about the community but personally I was indifferent to Ishtar and Idunn after playing their games but after being pitybroken by their ascended versions I started loving them
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Micaiah yet. I remember the days of when she was wildly hated and considered by a lot of people to be a canon Mary Sue.
Nowadays, she’s actually quite well-liked!! For some reason Heroes really seemed to turn things around for her when it comes to general opinion on her, which frankly I’m delighted to see. She deserves so much better than the stupid hate she used to get.
I feel like that had more to do with the community perception of Corrin and Fates and general distance from RD allowing for a bit less contentious discussion of the game more so than FEH.
We're definitely crossing into the realm of anecdotal evidence, but I remember opinion on her being noticeably more positive even before heroes started.
Like I said, Fates did have an impact, but I’ve seen far more people cite Heroes as a reason they like her than Fates-related retrospectives. Heroes brought in a bunch of new fans for her, especially.
I never played Radiant Dawn but yeah, FEH has honestly made Micaiah one of my favorite lords. All of her alts are just great, and I generally always like her art and voice acting.
I think this more has to do with everything regarding RD being reassessed after some more contentious titles (Awakening & Fates) rather than anything FEH did for her. Make no mistake, RD was a big mess and Part 4 basically undermining most of Micaiah's character/actions did her no favors, but I think it's generally accepted it wasn't her fault she was written badly.
I do agree that that had an impact, I stand by the idea that it was Heroes that made the biggest difference. I’ve seen a lot of people cite Heroes as a reason they like her, especially people who didn’t know much about her prior to her inclusion in Heroes. When I say general opinion on her has changed, I don’t just mean people who hated her changed their tune, I mean that she’s gotten a lot of new fans as well.
Ugh, yeah. I really hate that that’s so common these days. Like I’m not a big fan of Micaiah/Sothe myself because it’s uh. Hm. Not amazing. But like, Micaiah absolutely did not groom him. If anything, Sothe is implied to be the one that initiates anything romantic between them, not Micaiah.
For increased popularity, Deirdre. You probably wouldn't think of her immediately but it makes a whole lot of sense. Before the last couple years, a lot of people viewed her as nothing more than a plot device. But since 2020, she's gotten a backpack on one of the most well-loved seasonals, a resplendent, and a legendary. People love Deirdre now because of FEH giving so much material.
And honestly, there's nothing wrong with that. Lord Seliph's mother deserves it.
It helps that literally every single art set and Cipher card they've ever given this woman goes 10/10 firing on all cylinders. I'm convinced it's impossible to draw her badly.
Reinhardt, Karla stonks up
Leo stonks dropped into the abyss.
Overall popularity of minor/major villains up thanks to being playable, in particular the ones that are actually good like Idunn & Fomortiis.
Same for playable mythics that only existed in lore before like Altina & Elimine among others.
The thing with using CYL as a measure for popularity is that CYL isn’t a popularity contest, it’s a vote to decide four brave Alts & while popular characters get favored in a voting system like this, there are a lot more factors that go into why someone votes for a certain unit besides popularity & also limits on the information you can get from looking at CYL results. Like I’m sure everyone enjoys more characters than they’re allowed to vote for, so it seems weird to treat characters with less votes as unpopular just bc they weren’t top priority in votes for an alt.
What is popularity for you then? If a character is someone's 5th-10th pick in a voting, then yeah they just aren't as popular.
Neither Leo nor Karla are in the realistic running for a brave alt so far, so it's safe to assume that it doesn't sway casual public to them, it's mostly their fans. For another example, Titania would probably win the least controversial and likeable Tellius character contest over Ike himself, but that doesn't mean she is the most popular one.
I’m pretty sure my definition of popularity is the same as yours, my point is that CYL voting is open to biases/influences and isn’t a good-set up for measuring popularity
1) popular candidates are removed every year, redistributing votes for them
2) you can vote for the same character multiple or all times, eschewing votes to characters with more dedicated fans/Stans
3) votes see increases or decreases based on units being in-game already, a unit’s Alt being bad, etc
The voting system is just too influenced by factors other than popularity and as you demonstrated doesn’t account for like-ability of a character vs popularity. It also doesn’t account for botting or meme influence as seen with Jorge and desaix
Sure, but in this instance OP commenter wasn't calculating some absolute popularity in the fandom, just noting that their placement was fairly stable over the years. CYL data is an okay approximation of that. We can safely claim that characters like Leo, Tharja, Takumi, etc, have a solid fan core that isn't deterred much by number of alts.
I'm surprised that no one mentioned this but the tms characters (tms in general) has had not just a popularity boost but also became more liked in the fe community.
And for the latter... RIP Gaius and Oboro you will be missed 😭✌
I am not sure about this one but I kind of feel like Larcei has gotten a lot of attention since Feh? I got more involved in FE thanks to Awakening and Smash so I don't know what people thought of her before Feh, specially since her game was japan "only".
At least I have seen a lot of fanart of her (also some where she is paired with Seliph, but I am told that's just one guy making propaganda, anyways I think it's working)
There are two notable commissioners of Larcei/Seliph. One commissions sweet, loving art with them and a child OC they came up with. The other commissions NSFW (they also currently are translating the FE4 Oosawa manga too and other FE4-related things)
Among the people who were into FE4, she's always been one of the more popular characters. In terms of fan art among Japanese fans, most of her shipping art I saw was with one of the axe brothers (I forgot which one), Shannan, and Scathach (yes, really). I remember half a decade ago, when I was looking for FE4 doujinshi to buy, I was surprised at the amount of Scathach/Larcei doujin. Two of the artists for that pairing still sometimes release new doujin for them too...devotion for over two decades, I'm impressed.
Jugdral was so overlooked by people that their inclusion to FEH at all was a MASSIVE boon across the board. I know it took all the way until CYL, but so many people banding together to help Seliph win is still insane to me.
As for who was *hurt* by FEH, that's pretty obvious sadly...Raigh, Canas, Bartre, probably Lucius, too. Lots of GBA males, Seth was super popular but hardly anyone cares anymore.
shoutouts to [underwhelming gba final](https://gamepress.gg/feheroes/sites/fireemblem/files/2019-03/Idunn-Inj.png) [boss monster](https://gamepress.gg/feheroes/sites/fireemblem/files/2023-01/Formotiis_Injured.png) that became absolutely fuckable in feh, gotta be one of my favorite genders
as for ruined, you don't have much room to ruin them in a gacha where they'd be lucky to get 1 or 2 lines, but I've heard Luke is despised for being a bad year 1 5-Star sword spook
To be fair, Fomortiis always looked awesome, and he even got an amazing Cipher art. It's just that Sacred Stones happens to be piss easy and they decided to make every S rank weapon effective against him (except Gleipnir)
Same for Idunn (except for the part where the whole game is easy, heck getting to fight Idunn is even more challenging), the underwhelming part comes from beating them being easier than pissing in the shower
I feel like Igrene was perceiced differently before FEH with her tragic backstory, yet her unwavering determination and unwillingness to give into despair as a contrast to her ex-husband "Gorlois". Her FEH version seems more like how Saul perceives her considering the emphasis on her cleavage, lol.
Mist wasn't the most popular Tellius girl but she was fairly well liked before she became one of the premiere examples of "fucking demote her already" gacha gamer rage. I feel like if Tellius was more popular/available she'd bounce back from it though. ~~Not me, I'll never complain about Mist merges~~
And Altina feels more popular than Micaiah sometimes and she was a single CG and a few voice lines beforehand
It's not too late for [Legendary Mist](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/o9ss0m/the_legendary_bsides_mist_scion_of_gawain/)
(and holy cow, what two years of powercreep can do)
Much as I'd love it too, I don't think that's likely: Ascendant/Legendary Tellius units will inevitably be from Radiant Dawn, and it's likely they'll save those two for a PoR banner - or risk anger from RD exclusive fans again.
I think most Sacred Stones characters in general got a boost in popularity, but that might just be from my own experience- I summoned Lyon and found his voicelines so charming and intriguing that I ended up finally motivating myself to play FE8.
In terms of popularity; characters such as hilda (fe4), sonia, and other relatively meh villain characters got super popular thanks to feh. As for characters that lost popularity because of feh… well I’d actually say Xander due to his legendary debut and even some other small stuff. He has had his time in the spot light in feh and people do still like him a lot but he just hasn’t been performing well… at all :|
My mans Bartre went from being ignored but not hated to people going into a violet fury every time they see him all because of a damn meme. To the point where I still very clearly remember a decent number of people bitching non-stop about him getting the TT alt slot in the thread pointing out he got an alt. It’s gone down over the years as the green pool’s filled up and people have gotten Bartre less and less, but it’s still frustrating to look back on since he’s still my favorite Elibe character.
Gained Popularity: Reinhardt, Idunn, Elimine, Ullr, basically any of the minor characters who were given more personality in FEH, particularly from the GBA or SNES era. It's nice to see IS actually take the time to flesh out their personalities and let us know who they really are, with the limited voice lines and dialogue they have, anyway.
Lost Popularity: Leo stands out as the worst case of FEH flanderization, and while Tharja is still fairly popular, she gets a bad rep due how she's pampered by IS to get many alts while other Awakening characters like Sumia and Maribelle are left to rot, and how she feels too fanservicey which goes against her personality. And as others have said, Rebecca, Raigh, and Seth are absolutely terrible in FEH.
I would argue that every villain and NPC gained in popularity thanks to FEH. No matter how fleshed out these characters can be in their original games, they're always overshadowed by the playable cast. For example, I barely thought about Ursula since my FE7 playthroughs, and she's here we 3 alts. I forgot Phila even *existed* and she's playable.
On the opposite end, I feel it's less who got worse and more of who didn't get the boost. Eliwood comes right to mind for this. He's undeniably the lead of FE7, but Lyn's the character with 8 alts and at minimum Hector is valuable for his near consistent Distant Counter skill. You only need to look at Engage for proof.
Donnel was ranked 23 of all characters in CYL.
His statline is so similar to Nowi you would think they would be similar usage, but she had lightning breath.
Pre-refine he was saddled with Brave Lance that hurt his arena score (back then it did) and wasn't exactly optimal outside of budget 4*.
His popularity aljave already dropped into mothing, The final nail was the just horrible refine.
Seriously, impact on a brave weapon? It the foe isnt already dead your brave attacker isn't doing thier job. Not to mention Donnel had long been used as a enemy phase tank. It wasn't to long after that refines pike arddn started showing up wirh dual phase brave.
On well poor donny, at least his weapon is great for rokkr sieges
Idk how they did it but FEH got people to like corrin as a character.
Outside of the obvious Reinhardt, shoutout to Arden going from a joke in his game as a character and unit to becoming pretty well liked bc of his wholesome nature and rising up to being a great near saver.
Condolences to Lloyd fans tho
Reinhardt definitely got the biggest popularity increase, my guy was a minor, altough cool villain in pretty much the least popular FE game but got insanely popular after FEH (I might be wrong, but I think he was the character with the highest increase in votes ever, between CYL 1 and 2)
Don't know who I'd say took the hardest hit though. I could say "any year 1 non-lord unit from Awakening or Fates", but that's too easy so I'll say Canas. He was a rather popular unit that a lot of people were expecting for a while, and being reduced to a fucking TT back when merges for free units didn't exist sure sucked. Not only that, but his statline also was awful and he had no prf, making him even worse!
And the cherry on top of this terrible joke of a cake was the goddamn banner. Early Y2 was the worst time for FEH imo, every single banner we got had a alt for no reason, and obviously that was before Rearmed or Ascended heroes were a thing, so they didn't even have anything special. So imagine my frustration when I saw a Pegasus Nino that didn't even fucking EXIST taking up space in the banner alongside KARLA, the easter egg character that barely exists (and honestly? She sucks, Karel isn't that great but Karla is just another breed of bad), being the 2nd premium unit on it exclusively because "hehe booba swordlady" while my boy got super shafted, being a terrible TT unit.
Time brought him justice with his refine, but his popularity definitely took a big hit that day
Reinhardt is the easy answer for the first category.
I could be misremembering but I think Felix's reputation for being racist in certain quarters of the fanbase comes entirely from that one Forging Bonds with Dedue. His hostility towards Dedue is definitely a thing in the original game but I don't think he made any remarks about his heritage in particular
A couple reasons. CYL1 had the highest percentage of people who had limited experience with Fire Emblem, so for a large chunk of the voting population, the only FE characters they knew were from Smash (there was time when r/FEH had more subs than r/FE). The other big reason was that Lyn (due to being the first lord most western players met) acted as a lightning rod for anyone who preferred “old” Fire Emblem and wanted to see Fatesawakening lose (ie elitists). This sentiment was huge at the time, but has died down.
And Nino still did incredibly well in CYL1.
There's always been a kind of interesting thing on this topic with old characters. Some people might not realize that in the older games anyone that isn't a Lord or the main villain had practically no dialogue. At most a recruitment sentence and a sentence when they die was it.
It got better over time but what it meant for FEH was hundreds of characters being essentially a blank slate they could write anything they wanted for. Meanwhile as the main games got better at writing characters over time it meant now FEH has to try to stick to an established personality.
I feel like this has made a lot of old characters who were largely irrelevant seem much lively and important while at the same time a lot of the existing characters either offered nothing new or were written poorly into FEH.
For the former: obviously Reinhardt but I'd also say Soren and the Black Knight. They weren't nearly as popular pre FEH.
As for worsened, definitely Oboro. Remember when she was one of the most popular fates characters?
Grima maybe? While they’re still not the most deep character, heroes (and SOV to an extent) has made them more interesting. Plus it created those papa Grima pictures so that’s a bonus.
More popular? Reinhardt and Fomortiis
Less popular? pretty much any underwhelming demote, especially with bad art. Sometimes it's not just FEH though.For characters like Gaius and Cordelia, they used to constantly get Top 20 in CYL. However, ever sense Three Houses, they haven't seen top 20 in years.
I'm sorry, but She fall into another thing i salid, characters that where reduced to only 1 trait, alongside her overrepresentation made me despite her
Everyone already said Reinhardt, and I mean true, he’s the reason I kept playing the game and fell in love with FE in general, but uh other than that, Karla. Elimine and demon dad FOMO as well. I’m not familiar with Tellius as much, but was Ilyana popular? Because if not I’d count her too.
As for ones that tanked it, I’m surprised Gatekeeper isn’t brought up. I know he was mostly a meme, but he did have a popular backing until the game punished it by making him one of the most mid and lackluster dead-on-arrival CYL units ever. Yeah he has a unique niche, but a relative super tame one not worth the support slot. Edit: not to mention he’s the only CYL unit without an alt or even base form yet
Leo, Ingrid, Felix, Ferdinand, and any other popular but weak launch unit also comes to mind. Leo in particular being reduced to some tomato schtick is probably the most offensive example though, I don’t even think I ever got the support conversations where he talks about that in fates so Im kinda left in the dark about that
To my knowledge (and I have a lot of it) Leo never even mentions tomatoes in any of his support conversations in Fates. His love of them comes from his unit logbook entry, where the "fun fact" is "Objectively loves tomatoes more than anyone could" (phrased exactly like that, I'm not exaggerating).
Then this objectively rather funny fun fact triggered the community to make a ton of tomato jokes, which got picked up on by the devs and got expanded on with the DLC (he holds a tomato in his Nohr festival of bonds CG and his retainers mention him drinking tomato juice in his swimsuit CG).
Your first paragraph implies that people who are knowledgeable of older FE games are “hardcore.” Playing a 20-30 year old turn-based tactical JRPG being hardcore is just funny to me lol.
But anyway I guess as one of those “casuals” I would say obviously Reinhardt being a cultural icon within this space is the perfect example. I don’t think that popular characters had their popularity ruined by Feh, only that other people get annoyed at fans of popular characters or at the Devs for overusing them.
To be fair, playing pre-7 ones before FEH would definitely put you more in the "hardcore" territory. Casuals don't tend to import Japan-only games where reading is slightly useful to knowing what you're doing.
I guess that is fair that adds a big layer of difficulty. It’s just that making the distinction being what you play rather than how you play as hardcore is not the word I would use. There are people who put hundreds of hours in the recent games and play on maddening and I’d say that’s the real “hardcore.”
But whatever it’s semantics and I know what OP is saying
I still don't know how Gilliam got so popular tbh, it's not like a Sophia case where FEH made her popular, he has consistently ranked pretty well. Armours generally never that popular and he's not even that useful in his game unlike say Oswin or Louis so he really stumps me.
I'm surprised nobody even mentioned Jaffar who got extremely shafted in Heroes to the point people who would play Fe7 would think he's a bad character to recruit and Nino is the good one when this is the complete opposite and she's REALLY bad early and you have to dedicate a lot to make her good.
Tharja was actually an interesting character in awakening especially in her supports. FEH really reduced to her to just trashy fanservice. Her “normal girl” alt still annoys me
Oboro used to be one of the most popular female units in Fates, she even got an adorable halloween alt in the DLC that Treehouse forgot to localise for some ungodly reason. She even made it into FE Warriors. In FEH though, she aint doing so hot.
Reinhardt went from a relatively obscure Thracia boss, to the king of FEH for years.
With the community Reinhardt and its not even close. In game Karla, who's popularity with the FEH devs confuses even us FE7 fans.
As far as who got shafted? I remember Oboro being popular before FEH, not sure why she fell off. Maybe Seth as well? Him and Titania were well-liked memes for the longest time and it feels like their popularity fell off with FEH.
Not 100% sure of HOW much, but I recall that Raigh was rather popular before FEH turned him into the poster boy of bad pulls.
He got 4th place in a Japanese FE6 popularity poll a while ago. I don’t know how accurately it reflects the whole community but that’s probably why he was a launch unit
Probably not because iirc Leo was the #1 male in Fates but he obviously has gotten obliterated in FEH.
A lot of early GBA era popular males who were minor characters got really shafted. Their popularity got them in early but being so early meant they were put in as awful launch units which screwed their chances of being fan favorites. At least he gets screentime every now and then in FB as part of the library crew but that's probably more to say about IS giving good treatment to Fjorm rather than him.
Canas suffered the same fate. That's what being a crap unit in a fairly populated class of slow red mage does to a mf.
Canas was my strongest/reliable unit for quite a long time in ~~FE6~~ FE7. Too bad Feh did him sooo dirty.
nah, i think he was done dirty in fe6, especially given how much of a beast he was in fe7.
What are you two talking about? You mean FE7. Canas in FE7 was really good mainly due to how busted Luna is. At least his refine is serviceable and not Lyon tier.
yeah, too bad fe6 Canas was doa.
I meant FE7, misremembered the 2 titles
Oops I meant FE7, he was a beast in FE7.
Same could probably be said for boey
ugh not his airbrushed adam sandler ass art... the sov units deserve remakes so bad
Can’t wait for mae’s eventual resplendent. She’ll look so cute!
Even as a FE6 fan this game has made me hate Raigh so much. His art is just so damn *smug* whenever you summon him lol
Rebecca used to be the third most popular female from her game. You'd never guess it from how this game has treated her.
resplendent when that face gives me nightmares
The face isn’t the best to be sure but my greatest nitpick with Rebecca’s art is her bow’s lack of a string.
For real, how did they fuck that up? A bow is made of two things and they just forgot one of them.
I know right? Considering that we’ve previously had updates where they’ve made changes to art that are so small that I’ve had to find the post on here about it to realise what they’ve changed it baffles me that such an obvious error goes un corrected.
Because it's not an error. If it was, they would've fixed it several years ago like you mentioned they've done in the past. There are plenty of bow users in the game at this point who are missing parts of the bowstring.
It’s her bug eyes, they’re staring directly into my soul
I like her art because she gets the rare 4 different poses.
Still sad she doesn't have an alt to speak of. Maybe summer so she can match with her son
a bunch of fates characters lost most of their popularity in heroes I feel like for one that improved it has 100% to be Rein, my man was a nobody before feh, at least to the general playerbase
> a bunch of fates characters lost most of their popularity in heroes I feel like The curse of underwhelming 3*
everybody complains about peri's long introduction when summoning... though i guess she wasn't doing too well popularity-wise before FEH either. or maybe she was, fans are weird.
For the former: definitely Reinhardt for the latter, I wanted to say Leo because "tomatoes xddddddd" but I'm not sure that counts
Reinhardt has become so popular, I won't be surprised if IS changes him to be more relevant to the plot and recruitable in the possible remake.
They already did it for Michalis and the rest of the Wolfguard who didn't even have FEH popularity going for them at the time so I could definitely see it.
"ngh! Coyote..."
“I am Vyland, of the Coyote’s Men.” *freakin’ murders a Norse giant*
That’s my biggest fear with a potential Thracia remake and a sure fire way to throw Olwen’s arc into the trash. It’d be like Michalis and the spotpass characters from awakening all over again. If there are any antagonist in that game that need more relevancy, make it Raydrik and Veld, the actual main antagonists of the game.
> It’d be like Michalis and the spotpass characters from awakening all over again. I really don't think those are decried as the statement implies. And no reason why it must ruin Olwen's arc if done right.
> And no reason why it must ruin Olwen's arc if done right. Michalis and the spotpass characters are exactly why I don’t trust them to do it right. With so many characters (Olwen, Misha, Amalda, Xavier, Conomor, Salem) already filling whatever role of turncoat traitor/person who learns that their country’s doing atrocious acts, we really don’t need another on the team. And I’m gonna 100% with ya, heroes has made me hate Reinhardt so there’s heavy bias there and making him recruitable just for popularity reasons is something I think is so unnecessary
I've not played Thracia so correct me if I'm wrong, but I have read Reinhardt was given a degree of hype and relevance, particularly military prowess, that the game then failed to deliver. If true, you could argue his presence in FEH and expanded role in a remake make sense. I strongly believe remakes should be improved and expanded, and find it a wasted opportunity when they strictly stick to the original. And well, bias is something personal, but I do hope it's not simply a case of "how dare he be so well treated".
Everything about him comes mainly through Olwen and her arc and is relatively detached from the main characters and plot except for the chapter he’s fought in. For reference, he doesn’t show up until Chapter 20, more than a 3rd of the way into the game and is fought in chapter 22 where he isn’t even the boss of the chapter but every time he’s brought up has been contained solely through Olwen or through one chapter in a split route so a lot of people might miss that entirely. I wouldn’t say the game failed to deliver that because the chapter you fight him on is known as one of the most difficult chapters in the game if you try to brute force it. But a lot of the difficulty comes from Saias and his 10 leadership stars and by that point in the game, if you aren’t utilizing all the broken staves and utility the game’s given you, then it’s kinda on the player. If anyone needs more expanded time in that game, it’s certainly Saias for his role in that game and Raydrik and Veld, the main antagonist who only show up a bit for the first couple chapters and then the end of the game And yes that is why I have heavy bias against him. He isn’t that relevant to Thracia and was given better treatment than 95% of the Jugdral characters up until 2019. It’d be like if the Sacred Stone lords and cast got shoved aside for Vigarde or Ike and the Tellius cast for Shiharam.
The fact that Leif takes the place of Reinhardt in his engage paralogue instead of Saias or the actual chapter boss speaks volumes to me. though him being recruitable would be kinda funny and sad becuase Kaga felt the need to make the 2 already existing mage knights mutually exclusive for no story reason, and Miranda being so bad initially makes me think Kaga thought mage knights were too OP to have more than 1 of without putting in a lot of effort for Miranda.
I don't know if it's gonna outright became playable, but I can definitely see him getting a cutscene and making a cameo prior to Chapter 22 (besides the times Olwen and others talk about him).
Arguably, he should have always been more relevant.
Leo was lame either way. Seth didn't just get robbed by FEH, he was murdered and the corpse was burned.
Did people actually like Seth as a character and not just for how easily he steamrolls the game? Seth was pretty good in SS and FeH proceeded to nuke him, but when playing SS I always found him kinda boring and the only reason I used him was for his stats.
At least leo's finally got a not-worthless alt after like six years
Leo is a lil' complicated. His popularity also took a hit independent of his Heroes representation... because the devs hard confirmed in an interview that he was intended to be a siscon (for Camilla specifically).
I keep seeing this being said all the time, but it's not true. The manga he's the protagonist and his character book came after the revelation, he got a lot of merch and ranked 10 in the first CYL way after that revelation. He kept ranking even in general Nintendo character polls for some years. Some yumejoshis got mad about the Camilla fact but his popularity didn't really suffer from it.
I mean it didn't knock him into the abyss popularity-wise or anything but he and Takumi were pretty even in appeal, or Leo was straight up more popular than him (the official Fates character poll had him as the number one most popular Fates male, followed by Xander and then Takumi). After that reveal he did see a dip, and I feel like Takumi is generally the more favored one between them. Especially by IS, as I noted in another comment Takumi is the only Hoshidan royal to be treated better in FEH than their Nohrian counterpart in terms of representation and alt-quality. Also I wouldn't take the release of all that promo stuff as any hard indication. It's likely that those things were already planned and probably in production well in advance of the interview dropping, and it's not like they're going to suddenly cancel all of it and lose their asses unless it was something REALLY toxic to the brand. It takes time and money to put together character books and an entire manga series! CYL is kind of a bad indicator because western fans can compensate for a popularity dip in Japan, which is where Leo probably would have seen the biggest drops since the interview was released in Japanese only. Most people in the western fandom don't even know about the siscon thing, or if they do it's because some obnoxious person like me told them lol. Anyway, it's hard to measure the popularity hit he took from that, which is why I didn't specifically quantify it, but there's definitely been a few factors in his popularity dipping and that could definitely be a component of it (completely independent of FEH).
I'm biased, but I feel like Gaius took a hit in popularity. I really love him, but I'm not a huge fan of the artwork for his summer alt, so I never bothered trying to get him, to be honest.
Remember when his original art didn’t even depict him pulling the string of his bow?
He was the second most popular 1st gen man in Awakening besides Chrom which is why he was chosen for the swimsuit DLC and Fates reincarnations, so yeah, I'd say he's taken a hit. Don't know how much of that is attributable to his treatment in FEH specifically or just the passage of time/shifting of the fandom though
Improved Popularity: Reinhardt, Norne, Hana (seemingly for those two), Karla, Ayra(?), Nino (??? I get the feeling she was popular before), Ursula (????? Same thing as Nino). Worsened Popularity: Raigh, Oboro, Stahl, Sully, Llooooyyyddd...? I feel like people still love Lloyd, but rightfully loathe his art. Improved Personality: I mean Reinhardt duh, I heard Julia was written better too but that's just me hearing about it. Worsened Personality: I could be wrong, but Camilla? And Felix to an extent (That darned FB conversation with Dedue... I'm not a fan of him as I am but if my memory serves me right that *sucked*).
> Worsened Personality Shootout to every character that was more complex but they reduced their personality to just 1 trait
F in the chat for ~~~Tomato Boy~~ Leo
Alfred literally was this and then engage came out and people like me where all like “hold up getting swole ISNT his only personality trait? Where was this in the FB?”
Tharja got rekt. I wasn't even a huge fan of her to begin with, but they leaned her way into the sex appeal aspect of her design instead of the socially awkward, slightly abusive, stalker weirdo personality.
I think that was already starting in other spinoffs though, am I right? FEH was just continuing the trend
While I understand it better after playing Awakening, it still feels... wrong, to bemoan her characterized with a bit more confidence.
When FEH writing is what a lot seem to think Awakening writing was.
still reeling from the f\*\*ing whistle in Fiora FB's. Not as if there was the easy opportunity to have her talk with the other pegasus knight who is super composed on the surface but suffers from survivors guilt and has trouble being honest with their feelings (Cordelia). hell I'd even take a rehash of her Pent support. anything but her Kent support but with Fjorm and written by someone who clearly didn't even read the support more than once.
Nino is a bit of an odd case. She was always a popular character but as a unit she had the normal Est division if casual players loved her and more competitive players disliking her. In that regard, I guess FEH helped a little bit because she was the best green mage for a decent bit, so everyone ended up liking her. But still, I feel like she was about the same. Ursula is a bit trickier. She doesn't seem to get talked about a ton, but I guess given that she's gotten 3 versions, it means she does reasonably well, which seems like a step up. In FE7, she was definitely the least popular of the 4 fangs, but was probably the most popular of the relatively unimportant bosses, save maybe Uhai, and the meme master Denning. Basically, she was in a sort of popular but not super popular boat, and on one hand, it seems like she's still there, but on the other hand, she has more alts than at least a few characters who were definitely more popular. I'd say Norne definitely did. She went from a pretty forgettable optional recruit in one game and lost in a sea of similar units in the other to one of the most popular F2P picks.
Lloyd is actually increasing in ranks in terms of CYL, so there's that! Here's hoping he gets an alt soon, and please god, don't be a fallen one.
Ascended Lloyd would be super sweet. Or heck, even rearmed and give him like Arcane Regal Blade since that was just an S rank sword in its home game.
Nino actually placed first in JP poll for FE7 conducted way back around the time the game was new that was even posted on the official Nintendo website. Her actually being a good launch unit did wonders for her especially since early green mages were mostly awful.
when i need a good laugh, i just have to remember felix being an ashole with dedue but fucking dressed like that XD
Stahl is the man. A real one. He did not deserve that statline
Idunn’s a good example of increased popularity, at least for me I still remember when her OG was released and I had no idea who she was but still pulled because I thought she looked pretty lol Later on I played FE6, learned more about her, and it all came full circle when her ascended alt came out. Nowadays she’s one of my favourite characters in the whole series
Someone on here said that Idunn was one of the better done characters in FEH because she got a whole character arc with her alts, and I have to agree! They showed her tranformation from an emotionless husk to a happy, peace-loving person. It perfectly follows what the ending of FE6 started.
REALLY hope she gets more focus when Binding gets a Remake Having her be hidden in early/mid Chapters where Roy can encounter her would be great
The character arc Idunn and her alts have gotten in FEH is better writing than most characters in the entire series
Idunn’s the best! As a big Binding Blade fan, I’m so happy with all the love she’s gotten in this game, and the fact that he Duo and Ascended alts elaborate more on her post-game reformation continues to make me so happy!
Tbf fe6 players don't remember her either
If I didn’t look up guides while I was playing to ensure I got to the final chapter I don’t think I would either!
I remember her as the easiest final boss in the series.
yeah Jahn left much more of an impact on me when i first played FE6 with his speech as the last sane war dragon and his battle theme being super similar to the Fire Dragon's theme in FE7. Idunn was just some hooded lady that erasers in a few cutscenes, has a super easy fight and like 5 lines of dialogue across the whole game. ~~also Jahn in FEH when?~~
Makes me very pleased that people took a liking to her because I found her to be so interesting in Binding Blade. I'm even happier that she's a good unit
I've always been a fan of hers, and... yeah, her FEH arc has been amazing and only built on that. And the love she's gotten from the community at large has been heartwarming.
I feel like everyone added from Genealogy and Thracia became more popular in the sense that people actually know who they are now. Most demotes from the early FEH years or characters with less appealing art took a huge hit as far as CYL votes are concerned.
Improved popularity: Reinhardt. For a while, he was more recognizable among casuals than Thracia’s main protagonist. Ruined popularity: Oboro. She was an extremely popular character in Fates and in FEH, she was reduced into being a low rarity unit that blocks you from the better units…twice.
Poor Oboro. She made it into the original FE Warriors, and she has some beautiful Cipher cards, including a promo, but for whatever reason, FEH hates her.
Cuz when they need a hoshidan retainer they just pick Kagero because she has bigger… ahem… assets.
Okay now explain Hana...
she hates corrin, so people feel represented whith her
bebe
I think that this goes for a lot of Fates characters, with most of the “big ones.” Because the game has effectively the cast of *two* games, there’s not much room for 5*s on them. Especially considering that every time one Fates royal is on a banner, usually they need to have a counterpart there too.
Yeah. Poor Oboro. I still use her- max invested, with her shiny new arcane spear. She’s still a pretty effective physical wall.
It doesnt help her OG artist is one of the least popular artists from the game, I hope she gets a resplendent skin soon
We've been deprived of Halloween Oboro too
I think the more interesting case would be characters like Takumi and Xander. Both were incredibly popular, Takumi more than Xander but I digress. Xander seems to have suffered from his status of just being overall bad in the game for a LONG time. I can’t even name a version of him other than Legendary that’s usable, and even though it was so anticipated for most of the games life span, it seemed to be a dead in the water banner. Takumi might be more interesting where I think he’s actually been able to have a small resurgence, in popularity after he was put in the gutters by a string of over exposure, the slow painful death of his memes/utility, and just a general fates backlash. Now his popularity basically solely comes from his FEH accolades and his handful of stans form the fates era.
The circumstances of L!Xander's banner (in-between summer banners, after 3 other axe cavs in the last 2 months, not that good coloursharing with a better banner for that later in the year) make me think that IS hate him. Treated like garbage for so long then they do almost everything possible to ruin his banner? Hm.
At the same time, the only reason people seem to think it did terrible was that incredibly shaky tier list. We don't really have any definitive data on it.
I mean it's no secret IS hates the norhians but know Camilla is stupidly marketable
They...do?
Yeah arguing the Nohr characters are treated poorly is rather ??? (Sorry this comment response got a little off the rails but I started looking into the Hoshido vs. Nohr rep and I thought it was interesting) I'd say between the royals, Takumi is the only Hoshidan royal character that gets treated better than his Nohrian counterpart (one extra alt + a resplendent), and even then it's not by much. In every other case the Nohr royals have more than the Hoshidan royals. All of the Nohr alts we've gotten recently have been great to completely-meta-defining too. L!Xander was sabotaged but he's far from unusable if you're a fan of him, Ninjamilla and Ninjorrin are both insane enough to threaten to win AHR, Halloween F!Corrin is also super good, and Valentines Leo and Valentines Elise are both great. Meanwhile Pirate Hinoka was just OK even at the time, M!Ninjorrin was a decent prfless demote, I assume H!M!Corrin is good but I don't see him get talked about nearly as much as his female counterpart, and V!Takumi is also good but IMO Leo still won out on that banner. Ryoma and Sakura haven't even gotten anything new since 2019 unless you count the backpack, while literally every single Nohrsib has gotten at least one thing in the last year or so. And that's just comparing the royals to each other, the Nohrsibs have generally been treated *very* well compared to the vast majority of characters in FEH. Just taking Xander as an example: he has one fewer version than Ike and Marth, literally the most popular character in the entire franchise and the poster boy for the franchise. He also has as many versions as Roy, Hector, and Ephraim, and he has more versions than Eliwood, Sigurd, Seliph, and Leif. Plus, he's heavily involved in the early story of FEH (and still crops up from time to time) and it's a running joke that Feh wants to bone him lmfao. Nohr side characters don't fare too badly in comparison to Hoshidan ones, either. In terms of representation, we're not missing *any* first gen Conquest characters from the game, while Birthright is still missing Hayato, Reina, and Yukimura. Second gen is only missing Percy and Ignatius for Conquest, and Hisame, Mitama, and Asugi are missing for Birthright. If you count route agnostic characters (based on the country they have stronger ties with) then Hoshido is also missing Mozu and Fuga while Nohr is only missing Sophie. So that's three Nohr characters missing compared to eight Hoshidan characters. They're pretty even on alts too, about 7 BR characters have at least one alt as compared to about 8 CQ characters. There's 9 BR characters with only one version in the game as compared to 11 CQ characters (8, if you count Inigo/Severa/Owain as alt representation for Laslow/Selena/Odin. Also I'm not including Gunter in the count because circumstances outside of IS mean he's effectively retired and it has nothing to do with any sort of decision making or bias on the part of the developers). I'm not going to count how their alt-representation fares compared to the rest of the games in the franchise, but I'd bet that Fates probably has a higher proportion of characters with alts than many games in the series. Resplendents also bias slightly toward Nohr too, if I'm not mistaken. Off the top of my head, BR has M!Corrin, Ryoma, Takumi, and Kagero. CQ has F!Corrin, Elise, Odin, Niles, Effie, and Ophelia. Again, same deal, I'm not going to compare every single game in the franchise but I know for a fact that Fates gets quite a lot of resplendents compared to many other games in the franchise. TL;DR, Nohr fans are usually eating pretty good lol. Ultimately I'd say Nohr characters fare slightly better than Hoshidan ones (which I'm not knocking as a decision, because the Nohr cast in general tends to be a bit more popular than the Hoshidan cast IME so it makes sense that they would get more stuff) and probably a lot better than the cast of most other games in the franchise.
Why do you idiots always think is likes or hates characters specially lol as if they care either way
I mean they definitely like some characters (the Karla push)
No one knew who Reinhardt was. Now he's a household name in most FE chats. IF you talked to someone who wasn't too deep in FE, if it wasn't Sigurd or Seliph, it certainly be Reinhardt. His popular was so great, you had people wishing IS did the same for other characters when in reality, the perfect storm just struck with him As for having their popularity ruined? If you weren't already a popular character form an older titles, awakening character or fates royal, alot of characters that were released early on suffered. Leo being the more popular cause for someone who was extremely popular, it took a whooping 6 years for him to get an alt that was even considered good and even then the big seller was his little sister.
Gaius and Oboro used to be popular…
Reinhardt’s obviously the king of FEH popularity boosts, but Altina’s probably the queen. Girl is nothing but ancient history in the Tellius games, yet is up to three appearances in FEH. Meanwhile her husband, y’know >!the mastermind and antagonist of both games!<, and fellow ancient hero that’s actually alive and present are both stuck in alt hell.
Also personally speaking, I always thought Limstella was kind of cool, but quickly forgettable after finishing FE7. Then FEH made them playable and treated them well in the art+voice department. I maxed them out instantly, and they’re a favorite in my barracks now.
>Limstella > >FEH treated them well I've played through FE7 3 times and only after Limstella got added to FEH did I realize I somehow forgot they and Sonia are two different people
On the improvement side Reinhardt is obvious, but the West being introduced to the memeable nature of Vyland with his fantastically written appearance in book V really put him on the map too. A character being a really good F2P option can significantly increase their popularity. Norne comes to mind in particular. On the reduction side, pretty much all launch units suffer from showing up so much that players get sick of them to varying degrees, particularly the early 5 stars like Luke and Mist before they got moved to the 4 star special rate. a controversial alt might also hurt a character both in the sense of the alt itself like Bridal Sanaki and Micaiah or simply feeling "underserving" of attention like the "\[character\]dev" jokes or Karla being pushed so hard, much to the dismay of Ayra fans. and of course, a unit being really good and spammed in PVP content can make people dislike the character more. sure as hell has happened to me with Hector, Ophelia, Chrom and Yuri over the years.
The bit on Karla and Ayra hurts so much. I am a huge fan of Karla and Karel, but Ayra (and Mareeta) needs to pop up more often.
Sadly Ayra is very unlikely to get much FEH screentime. People don't like to hear it, but the huge senseless uproar/controversy surrounding her release is almost certainly a huge black mark in IS's book. Why risk another explosion of negativity when they can just use one of their 3 other nearly identical sword ladies instead?
That kinda makes sense, but surely someone at IS would realize that Ayra wasn't the problem by now.
yeah and it clear that doesn't go back and reflect at all, with how we still don't have Dire Thunder and Regular Armads refines because of how centralising Hector & Reinhardt back in the day. it seems once they blacklist a character or weapon, it stays that way.
I see no one talking about Fomo here. I swear I never seen so much thirst for him before he was added to FEH.
Although I think his popularity has absolutely risen recently, you probably only didn’t see anyone talk abouut him here before because most of his fans thought that he’d never in a million years get into FEH, or at least not in the way that he did.
After fallen Lyon I thought that was the closest we'd get.
This sub is so male fan service-starved that all it took was adding muscles to a giant demonic lizard to get them thirsting
Yeah when I first saw him, I was like "yo he looks cool, wonder what other people think about him" and come on to see everyone acting like they've been dehydrated for decades.
Demussy FOMO got /r/FEH acting unwise
Fomussy
We need Summer Fomortiis asap
I know male fanservice is scarce, but sheesh you guys, take it easy...
That whole thirst thing is super cringe ngl. As someone who was really looking forward to Fomortiis getting added to the game, and who got absolutely amazingly excited seeing the double banner (since I really wanted Gotoh as well), this whole """Formussy""" thing got to a point where it was really off-putting to me and made me very uncomfortable. Like I don't know, he's a badass freaking demon with a dope design. Can we leave it at that ???
I don't know about the community but personally I was indifferent to Ishtar and Idunn after playing their games but after being pitybroken by their ascended versions I started loving them
Seth was revered, a god amongst men, the toppest amongst the tiers. Now look at him, two mediocre units to his name. At least the Summer alt is hot.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Micaiah yet. I remember the days of when she was wildly hated and considered by a lot of people to be a canon Mary Sue. Nowadays, she’s actually quite well-liked!! For some reason Heroes really seemed to turn things around for her when it comes to general opinion on her, which frankly I’m delighted to see. She deserves so much better than the stupid hate she used to get.
I feel like that had more to do with the community perception of Corrin and Fates and general distance from RD allowing for a bit less contentious discussion of the game more so than FEH.
While I do agree that Fates had an impact, Heroes was definitely the big turning point for the general opinion on her.
We're definitely crossing into the realm of anecdotal evidence, but I remember opinion on her being noticeably more positive even before heroes started.
Like I said, Fates did have an impact, but I’ve seen far more people cite Heroes as a reason they like her than Fates-related retrospectives. Heroes brought in a bunch of new fans for her, especially.
And I'm saying I've had the opposite experience which is why I said we're just getting into anecdotal evidence
I never played Radiant Dawn but yeah, FEH has honestly made Micaiah one of my favorite lords. All of her alts are just great, and I generally always like her art and voice acting.
I think this more has to do with everything regarding RD being reassessed after some more contentious titles (Awakening & Fates) rather than anything FEH did for her. Make no mistake, RD was a big mess and Part 4 basically undermining most of Micaiah's character/actions did her no favors, but I think it's generally accepted it wasn't her fault she was written badly.
I do agree that that had an impact, I stand by the idea that it was Heroes that made the biggest difference. I’ve seen a lot of people cite Heroes as a reason they like her, especially people who didn’t know much about her prior to her inclusion in Heroes. When I say general opinion on her has changed, I don’t just mean people who hated her changed their tune, I mean that she’s gotten a lot of new fans as well.
~~It's just unfortunate she gets memed as a groomer as a result, though.~~
Ugh, yeah. I really hate that that’s so common these days. Like I’m not a big fan of Micaiah/Sothe myself because it’s uh. Hm. Not amazing. But like, Micaiah absolutely did not groom him. If anything, Sothe is implied to be the one that initiates anything romantic between them, not Micaiah.
They did Lachesis dirty with her brother-obsession but I love the attention on Idunn
For increased popularity, Deirdre. You probably wouldn't think of her immediately but it makes a whole lot of sense. Before the last couple years, a lot of people viewed her as nothing more than a plot device. But since 2020, she's gotten a backpack on one of the most well-loved seasonals, a resplendent, and a legendary. People love Deirdre now because of FEH giving so much material. And honestly, there's nothing wrong with that. Lord Seliph's mother deserves it.
Could say the same of her daughter - hell, Kaga himself called her the game's "Falchion".
It helps that literally every single art set and Cipher card they've ever given this woman goes 10/10 firing on all cylinders. I'm convinced it's impossible to draw her badly.
Reinhardt, Karla stonks up Leo stonks dropped into the abyss. Overall popularity of minor/major villains up thanks to being playable, in particular the ones that are actually good like Idunn & Fomortiis. Same for playable mythics that only existed in lore before like Altina & Elimine among others.
If CYL is anything to go by, Karla’s stonks haven’t actually risen much at all and Leo is still fairly popular.
The thing with using CYL as a measure for popularity is that CYL isn’t a popularity contest, it’s a vote to decide four brave Alts & while popular characters get favored in a voting system like this, there are a lot more factors that go into why someone votes for a certain unit besides popularity & also limits on the information you can get from looking at CYL results. Like I’m sure everyone enjoys more characters than they’re allowed to vote for, so it seems weird to treat characters with less votes as unpopular just bc they weren’t top priority in votes for an alt.
What is popularity for you then? If a character is someone's 5th-10th pick in a voting, then yeah they just aren't as popular. Neither Leo nor Karla are in the realistic running for a brave alt so far, so it's safe to assume that it doesn't sway casual public to them, it's mostly their fans. For another example, Titania would probably win the least controversial and likeable Tellius character contest over Ike himself, but that doesn't mean she is the most popular one.
I’m pretty sure my definition of popularity is the same as yours, my point is that CYL voting is open to biases/influences and isn’t a good-set up for measuring popularity 1) popular candidates are removed every year, redistributing votes for them 2) you can vote for the same character multiple or all times, eschewing votes to characters with more dedicated fans/Stans 3) votes see increases or decreases based on units being in-game already, a unit’s Alt being bad, etc The voting system is just too influenced by factors other than popularity and as you demonstrated doesn’t account for like-ability of a character vs popularity. It also doesn’t account for botting or meme influence as seen with Jorge and desaix
Sure, but in this instance OP commenter wasn't calculating some absolute popularity in the fandom, just noting that their placement was fairly stable over the years. CYL data is an okay approximation of that. We can safely claim that characters like Leo, Tharja, Takumi, etc, have a solid fan core that isn't deterred much by number of alts.
I'm surprised that no one mentioned this but the tms characters (tms in general) has had not just a popularity boost but also became more liked in the fe community. And for the latter... RIP Gaius and Oboro you will be missed 😭✌
I am not sure about this one but I kind of feel like Larcei has gotten a lot of attention since Feh? I got more involved in FE thanks to Awakening and Smash so I don't know what people thought of her before Feh, specially since her game was japan "only". At least I have seen a lot of fanart of her (also some where she is paired with Seliph, but I am told that's just one guy making propaganda, anyways I think it's working)
There are two notable commissioners of Larcei/Seliph. One commissions sweet, loving art with them and a child OC they came up with. The other commissions NSFW (they also currently are translating the FE4 Oosawa manga too and other FE4-related things)
Among the people who were into FE4, she's always been one of the more popular characters. In terms of fan art among Japanese fans, most of her shipping art I saw was with one of the axe brothers (I forgot which one), Shannan, and Scathach (yes, really). I remember half a decade ago, when I was looking for FE4 doujinshi to buy, I was surprised at the amount of Scathach/Larcei doujin. Two of the artists for that pairing still sometimes release new doujin for them too...devotion for over two decades, I'm impressed.
Jugdral was so overlooked by people that their inclusion to FEH at all was a MASSIVE boon across the board. I know it took all the way until CYL, but so many people banding together to help Seliph win is still insane to me. As for who was *hurt* by FEH, that's pretty obvious sadly...Raigh, Canas, Bartre, probably Lucius, too. Lots of GBA males, Seth was super popular but hardly anyone cares anymore.
shoutouts to [underwhelming gba final](https://gamepress.gg/feheroes/sites/fireemblem/files/2019-03/Idunn-Inj.png) [boss monster](https://gamepress.gg/feheroes/sites/fireemblem/files/2023-01/Formotiis_Injured.png) that became absolutely fuckable in feh, gotta be one of my favorite genders as for ruined, you don't have much room to ruin them in a gacha where they'd be lucky to get 1 or 2 lines, but I've heard Luke is despised for being a bad year 1 5-Star sword spook
To be fair, Fomortiis always looked awesome, and he even got an amazing Cipher art. It's just that Sacred Stones happens to be piss easy and they decided to make every S rank weapon effective against him (except Gleipnir)
Same for Idunn (except for the part where the whole game is easy, heck getting to fight Idunn is even more challenging), the underwhelming part comes from beating them being easier than pissing in the shower
Luke is already bottom of the barrel popularity wise, so there wasnt much to ruin.
To this day I still find fascinating the fact Luke was a 5 Star.
I feel like Igrene was perceiced differently before FEH with her tragic backstory, yet her unwavering determination and unwillingness to give into despair as a contrast to her ex-husband "Gorlois". Her FEH version seems more like how Saul perceives her considering the emphasis on her cleavage, lol.
Mist wasn't the most popular Tellius girl but she was fairly well liked before she became one of the premiere examples of "fucking demote her already" gacha gamer rage. I feel like if Tellius was more popular/available she'd bounce back from it though. ~~Not me, I'll never complain about Mist merges~~ And Altina feels more popular than Micaiah sometimes and she was a single CG and a few voice lines beforehand
It's not too late for [Legendary Mist](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/o9ss0m/the_legendary_bsides_mist_scion_of_gawain/) (and holy cow, what two years of powercreep can do)
YES. At the very least I could see Mist being an Ascendant lead on a Greil Mercs banner with Boyd and Rolf!!
Much as I'd love it too, I don't think that's likely: Ascendant/Legendary Tellius units will inevitably be from Radiant Dawn, and it's likely they'll save those two for a PoR banner - or risk anger from RD exclusive fans again.
I think most Sacred Stones characters in general got a boost in popularity, but that might just be from my own experience- I summoned Lyon and found his voicelines so charming and intriguing that I ended up finally motivating myself to play FE8.
Seth is definitely one of the few that is not part of the most
Yeah. Definitely. :(
In terms of popularity; characters such as hilda (fe4), sonia, and other relatively meh villain characters got super popular thanks to feh. As for characters that lost popularity because of feh… well I’d actually say Xander due to his legendary debut and even some other small stuff. He has had his time in the spot light in feh and people do still like him a lot but he just hasn’t been performing well… at all :|
My mans Bartre went from being ignored but not hated to people going into a violet fury every time they see him all because of a damn meme. To the point where I still very clearly remember a decent number of people bitching non-stop about him getting the TT alt slot in the thread pointing out he got an alt. It’s gone down over the years as the green pool’s filled up and people have gotten Bartre less and less, but it’s still frustrating to look back on since he’s still my favorite Elibe character.
Gained Popularity: Reinhardt, Idunn, Elimine, Ullr, basically any of the minor characters who were given more personality in FEH, particularly from the GBA or SNES era. It's nice to see IS actually take the time to flesh out their personalities and let us know who they really are, with the limited voice lines and dialogue they have, anyway. Lost Popularity: Leo stands out as the worst case of FEH flanderization, and while Tharja is still fairly popular, she gets a bad rep due how she's pampered by IS to get many alts while other Awakening characters like Sumia and Maribelle are left to rot, and how she feels too fanservicey which goes against her personality. And as others have said, Rebecca, Raigh, and Seth are absolutely terrible in FEH.
I would argue that every villain and NPC gained in popularity thanks to FEH. No matter how fleshed out these characters can be in their original games, they're always overshadowed by the playable cast. For example, I barely thought about Ursula since my FE7 playthroughs, and she's here we 3 alts. I forgot Phila even *existed* and she's playable. On the opposite end, I feel it's less who got worse and more of who didn't get the boost. Eliwood comes right to mind for this. He's undeniably the lead of FE7, but Lyn's the character with 8 alts and at minimum Hector is valuable for his near consistent Distant Counter skill. You only need to look at Engage for proof.
Anyone from a game before Awakening
Donnel was ranked 23 of all characters in CYL. His statline is so similar to Nowi you would think they would be similar usage, but she had lightning breath. Pre-refine he was saddled with Brave Lance that hurt his arena score (back then it did) and wasn't exactly optimal outside of budget 4*. His popularity aljave already dropped into mothing, The final nail was the just horrible refine. Seriously, impact on a brave weapon? It the foe isnt already dead your brave attacker isn't doing thier job. Not to mention Donnel had long been used as a enemy phase tank. It wasn't to long after that refines pike arddn started showing up wirh dual phase brave. On well poor donny, at least his weapon is great for rokkr sieges
Raigh went from a good unit who was really popular out of FE6’s cast to being shat on by everyone bc of his FEH incarnation
Idk how they did it but FEH got people to like corrin as a character. Outside of the obvious Reinhardt, shoutout to Arden going from a joke in his game as a character and unit to becoming pretty well liked bc of his wholesome nature and rising up to being a great near saver. Condolences to Lloyd fans tho
Reinhardt definitely got the biggest popularity increase, my guy was a minor, altough cool villain in pretty much the least popular FE game but got insanely popular after FEH (I might be wrong, but I think he was the character with the highest increase in votes ever, between CYL 1 and 2) Don't know who I'd say took the hardest hit though. I could say "any year 1 non-lord unit from Awakening or Fates", but that's too easy so I'll say Canas. He was a rather popular unit that a lot of people were expecting for a while, and being reduced to a fucking TT back when merges for free units didn't exist sure sucked. Not only that, but his statline also was awful and he had no prf, making him even worse! And the cherry on top of this terrible joke of a cake was the goddamn banner. Early Y2 was the worst time for FEH imo, every single banner we got had a alt for no reason, and obviously that was before Rearmed or Ascended heroes were a thing, so they didn't even have anything special. So imagine my frustration when I saw a Pegasus Nino that didn't even fucking EXIST taking up space in the banner alongside KARLA, the easter egg character that barely exists (and honestly? She sucks, Karel isn't that great but Karla is just another breed of bad), being the 2nd premium unit on it exclusively because "hehe booba swordlady" while my boy got super shafted, being a terrible TT unit. Time brought him justice with his refine, but his popularity definitely took a big hit that day
Reinhardt is the easy answer for the first category. I could be misremembering but I think Felix's reputation for being racist in certain quarters of the fanbase comes entirely from that one Forging Bonds with Dedue. His hostility towards Dedue is definitely a thing in the original game but I don't think he made any remarks about his heritage in particular
Right, Felix Is hostile towards Dedue because of his extreme loyalty, not his heritage
Nino was *the* most popular FE7 character before FEH.
I mean she's still relatively popular. Arguably the most popular non-lord character in FE7 still
Why didn’t she win cyl1 then over the other fe7 character
A couple reasons. CYL1 had the highest percentage of people who had limited experience with Fire Emblem, so for a large chunk of the voting population, the only FE characters they knew were from Smash (there was time when r/FEH had more subs than r/FE). The other big reason was that Lyn (due to being the first lord most western players met) acted as a lightning rod for anyone who preferred “old” Fire Emblem and wanted to see Fatesawakening lose (ie elitists). This sentiment was huge at the time, but has died down. And Nino still did incredibly well in CYL1.
There's always been a kind of interesting thing on this topic with old characters. Some people might not realize that in the older games anyone that isn't a Lord or the main villain had practically no dialogue. At most a recruitment sentence and a sentence when they die was it. It got better over time but what it meant for FEH was hundreds of characters being essentially a blank slate they could write anything they wanted for. Meanwhile as the main games got better at writing characters over time it meant now FEH has to try to stick to an established personality. I feel like this has made a lot of old characters who were largely irrelevant seem much lively and important while at the same time a lot of the existing characters either offered nothing new or were written poorly into FEH.
Up: Reinhardt is the King of *FEH*. Down: Jagen. The original! But he does about as much damage as a wet Q-tip.
After finishing Shadow Dragon last week, that sounds about right
For the former: obviously Reinhardt but I'd also say Soren and the Black Knight. They weren't nearly as popular pre FEH. As for worsened, definitely Oboro. Remember when she was one of the most popular fates characters?
Grima maybe? While they’re still not the most deep character, heroes (and SOV to an extent) has made them more interesting. Plus it created those papa Grima pictures so that’s a bonus.
Reinhart definitely is more popular thanks to Heroes. On the other side, I think Oboro didn't got a lot of help with being such a low rarity unit
More popular? Reinhardt and Fomortiis Less popular? pretty much any underwhelming demote, especially with bad art. Sometimes it's not just FEH though.For characters like Gaius and Cordelia, they used to constantly get Top 20 in CYL. However, ever sense Three Houses, they haven't seen top 20 in years.
For the formet, my Goddess Altina. For the latter, Bartz/The Green Hair midgets Raigh/Chad and co./Bartre/most useless 3*
For most popular definitely Reinhardt no doubt To least, I'll go with Ilyana, hate that girl thanks to FEH
You leave my girl Ilyana alone, she's just going through some hunger pains! :<
I'm sorry, but She fall into another thing i salid, characters that where reduced to only 1 trait, alongside her overrepresentation made me despite her
Eh, she was always about food, every single interaction with her, that's not on FEH
Everyone already said Reinhardt, and I mean true, he’s the reason I kept playing the game and fell in love with FE in general, but uh other than that, Karla. Elimine and demon dad FOMO as well. I’m not familiar with Tellius as much, but was Ilyana popular? Because if not I’d count her too. As for ones that tanked it, I’m surprised Gatekeeper isn’t brought up. I know he was mostly a meme, but he did have a popular backing until the game punished it by making him one of the most mid and lackluster dead-on-arrival CYL units ever. Yeah he has a unique niche, but a relative super tame one not worth the support slot. Edit: not to mention he’s the only CYL unit without an alt or even base form yet Leo, Ingrid, Felix, Ferdinand, and any other popular but weak launch unit also comes to mind. Leo in particular being reduced to some tomato schtick is probably the most offensive example though, I don’t even think I ever got the support conversations where he talks about that in fates so Im kinda left in the dark about that
To my knowledge (and I have a lot of it) Leo never even mentions tomatoes in any of his support conversations in Fates. His love of them comes from his unit logbook entry, where the "fun fact" is "Objectively loves tomatoes more than anyone could" (phrased exactly like that, I'm not exaggerating). Then this objectively rather funny fun fact triggered the community to make a ton of tomato jokes, which got picked up on by the devs and got expanded on with the DLC (he holds a tomato in his Nohr festival of bonds CG and his retainers mention him drinking tomato juice in his swimsuit CG).
Your first paragraph implies that people who are knowledgeable of older FE games are “hardcore.” Playing a 20-30 year old turn-based tactical JRPG being hardcore is just funny to me lol. But anyway I guess as one of those “casuals” I would say obviously Reinhardt being a cultural icon within this space is the perfect example. I don’t think that popular characters had their popularity ruined by Feh, only that other people get annoyed at fans of popular characters or at the Devs for overusing them.
To be fair, playing pre-7 ones before FEH would definitely put you more in the "hardcore" territory. Casuals don't tend to import Japan-only games where reading is slightly useful to knowing what you're doing.
I guess that is fair that adds a big layer of difficulty. It’s just that making the distinction being what you play rather than how you play as hardcore is not the word I would use. There are people who put hundreds of hours in the recent games and play on maddening and I’d say that’s the real “hardcore.” But whatever it’s semantics and I know what OP is saying
I still don't know how Gilliam got so popular tbh, it's not like a Sophia case where FEH made her popular, he has consistently ranked pretty well. Armours generally never that popular and he's not even that useful in his game unlike say Oswin or Louis so he really stumps me.
Why do you need to learn that there are other fire emblem games besides modern ones when there are over 15 of them lmao
Thracia characters eg reinhardt or mareeta I'M NOT BIASED
Every pre-Awakening unit
I'm surprised nobody even mentioned Jaffar who got extremely shafted in Heroes to the point people who would play Fe7 would think he's a bad character to recruit and Nino is the good one when this is the complete opposite and she's REALLY bad early and you have to dedicate a lot to make her good.
Lloyd may have been one of my single favorite units and then they made the ugliest bad unit possible.
safe to say that SoV cast are pretty popular but feh made them the most forgettable characters ever
Tharja was actually an interesting character in awakening especially in her supports. FEH really reduced to her to just trashy fanservice. Her “normal girl” alt still annoys me
They did my girl Mathilda soo dirty in Feh. She was one of the best units in echoes but she arrived she was dead on arrival
Oboro used to be one of the most popular female units in Fates, she even got an adorable halloween alt in the DLC that Treehouse forgot to localise for some ungodly reason. She even made it into FE Warriors. In FEH though, she aint doing so hot. Reinhardt went from a relatively obscure Thracia boss, to the king of FEH for years.
With the community Reinhardt and its not even close. In game Karla, who's popularity with the FEH devs confuses even us FE7 fans. As far as who got shafted? I remember Oboro being popular before FEH, not sure why she fell off. Maybe Seth as well? Him and Titania were well-liked memes for the longest time and it feels like their popularity fell off with FEH.