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I’ve always meant to write proper essays about both infamous scenes in Rose of Versailles: the Incident Scene and the Poisoning Scene.

Everyone has their own opinion regarding both scenes, and because they contain difficult subject matter, they can be hard to talk about on any kind of public platform. People tend to get weird about them. I’ve seen a lot of anger and a lot of defensiveness over the years. I honestly don’t even know where to begin, but I’ll do my best to talk here about the Incident Scene.

To start with, I think people assign a lot of power to this scene without really understanding what the power they’re assigning to it even is—or how it might be misguided. I’m going to talk about the manga, because I don’t like what the anime did to the series in general—and I especially don’t like what they turned the Incident Scene into.

The scenes leading up to the Incident Scene are as follows:

New FE7 thoughts? In my 2024? It’s more likely than you think!

So, I flung myself back into FE7 fandom under the impression that I would have no wholly new thoughts about the game. Usually when revisiting an older fandom, it’s a given that the time away will have distanced me from both fanon and the source material, so reengaging should give a few fresh ideas and an updated perspective.

But FE7 was never a pitstop fandom for me the way that, say, Tales of Symphonia was. I was ENTRENCHED in the fandom for about a decade—and I participated back in the Livejournal and AIM/MSN days; we talked about this game daily for literal years.

It wasn’t arrogance that made me feel certain I would find nothing new to talk about; it was experience. Even back in the day, it felt like every talking point about the game had been done to death, and I remember my fellow fans complaining about it on LJ. I remember agreeing with them! I remember when the old fans stopped engaging with new fans because they were tired of rehashing the same things.

It’s an old game but I’m even older; I’ve seen it all: the theories, ice cold takes, bad faith arguments, more fanon than you can shake a stick at, So Much Shipping Discourse, and, of course, an ungodly number of attempts to Make It All Make Sense.

So my highest expectation in replaying FE7 was rooted in nuance. I fully expected that I might find something new to like about, say, a support chain that had failed to catch my eye 20 years ago—but not a major plot point.

And certainly not any character stuff relating to Lyn, who has always been my favorite and was very often discussed back in the old days.

But here we are at the end of 2024, and something occurred to me the other day that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone talk about even once since this game came out, so I feel like it’s my civic responsibility to share it.

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