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FE7’s Taliver Bandits — The Massacre of the Lorca & Lord Lundgren's Treachery
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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So, I want to make it clear how this thought came to me in the first place. There I was, reading old ‘fics of mine. I happened upon one (“Watch Them Bleed”) that focused on Lyn’s revenge against the Taliver, specifically on her anger and how it felt to be told by Wallace that he took revenge for her.
The point of the story was to explore Lyn’s struggle with still having all that anger, but losing a target at which to direct it and a goal that she thought would bring her catharsis. Where is her closure now?
Because let’s be honest: what happened to her people was deeply traumatic and disturbing on multiple levels.
The story was from 2008, so it was very clumsily written, but it was An Attempt™ at putting words to themes I believed were pretty important to Lyn’s character but are only explored through her supports with Wallace*. In Lyn’s Story Mode, Kent, Sain, and Mark all offer to help Lyn get her revenge so that she doesn’t have to go alone, and frankly I always thought that went so hard because these characters don’t get anything out of helping her; it’s wholly personal. I wanted to see her get that closure with the help of her friends who had promised to be there for her when she needed it! (And from a gameplay perspective, we were totally robbed of a post-game epilogue chapter where our three units + Mark face overwhelming odds against the Taliver… Like, can you imagine? Letting Florina fly in with Wil later? Wallace shows up halfway through to aid you? I MEAN…it’d be so cool.)
*Frankly, Wallace’s supports with both Kent and Lyn are incredible; until you read them, Wallace feels like A Goofy Guy, but he has great insight and a big heart.
But then Wallace casually swings by the Taliver’s hideout and wipes them off the map while Lyn is in Caelin. It’s kind of neat how this made me feel like I was also robbed of the right to help Lyn get revenge, you know?
In rereading that old story, I was struck again by two things: 1.) how much I love the tension that Wallace adds to Lyn’s backstory…and 2.) how much the backstory itself has always bothered me.
When I was younger, I tried multiple times, and rather desperately, to make it make storytelling sense. I started multiple novelizations of the game that covered the attack or the aftermath of the attack in detail, wrote a few one-shots, and discussed it to death on my LJ account.
Because the one thing the game never covered was why the Taliver attacked the Lorca in the first place.
And before you can come after me in the comments about how it’s not that deep or they obviously attacked because they’re violent bandits and that’s what violent bandits do, hold your thoughts. Please.
Let’s reverse engineer it.
The plot of Lyn’s Story Mode is an inheritance dispute. We need Lyn’s mother dead or Madelyn becomes the focal point of the dispute, rather than Lyn. The attack against the Lorca specifically serves this purpose: it kills Lyn’s parents. It also serves a secondary purpose of killing almost her entire tribe: without her community, getting Lyn to Bulgar to meet Kent and Sain is easy. You could argue that the tertiary purpose is the Hector and Lyn pirate ship conversation, since she outlines the events a bit more clearly there and this becomes a bonding moment.
However, it’s worth noting that:
- Only Madelyn has to die for the main plot. She could have been the only casualty of a violent bandit attack, or one of several to die, and this would been equally as good at giving Lyn a revenge arc and a hatred of bandits.
- Nothing about the original plotline requires Lyn to go to Bulgar, or even be in Bulgar at all. Kent and Sain could have found her on the plains (they are preparing to do this when she runs into them anyway).
- Hector and Lyn could have had just as deep a conversation about parental death without it being an over-the-top tragedy (and I still don’t think she’d be unreasonable to hate the idea of traveling with pirates if she saw her mother brutally killed right in front of her).
- Lyn’s “I must become stronger” character bit could still hold true easily even if only Madelyn had died, and could be arguably more interesting this way (her needing to become stronger not just to get revenge, but also to protect herself from such a thing happening to her).
So from a storytelling standpoint, it’s interesting that so many die in the attack. This seems like a very deliberate choice, you know? And not just to give Lyn character stuff. So what could it be pointing toward?
Well, let’s look at the details of the attack.
We find out in Hector Story Mode that this wasn’t just a typical attack: the Taliver poisoned the Lorca’s drinking water. After unknowingly ingesting it, they were all in so much pain they could hardly even stand. Lyn’s last memory of her father is of him fighting the pain to get her out of there and he only barely manages to get her on the back of his horse (“with his last breath”). Lyn gets away and is found unconscious by another tribe. After this, she’s still stuck in a coma for TEN DAYS.
It's very likely if she’d been found even 12 hours later, that she would be dead.
So here we have the whole story as Lyn knows it: the Lorca were minding their own business* when suddenly they all grew very ill—only to fall under attack by bandits. Because everyone was too sick to fight back, it was a massacre. Very few escaped (less than ten, including Lyn). In fact, so many people died in this attack that it’s not well-known that there were survivors (per Rath). It’s not clear when Lyn learned the “illness” was in fact a poisoned water supply, but at some point she either realizes or is told this.
*This point is actually super important to Lyn’s characterization and tells us why the attack was such a deep and traumatic experience for her (beyond the obvious, of course). She literally has no reasoning or understanding of why it happened in the first place beyond “they’re just assholes.” This is undoubtedly why she focuses so hard on revenge; it’s literally all she has when the game starts.
Weird, that a group of bandits would wipe everyone out after the game tells us REPEATEDLY that it’s super profitable to sell women (and probably children). Weird, that we’re never given a reason for this attack, even a guess from Lyn (“they must have been after our supplies for the winter” for example). Weird, that the attack comes shortly after* Madelyn sends word to Caelin to reconcile with her father; weirder that it’s framed as a coincidence. WEIIIRDDDD that poison was used twice on two completely unrelated attempts at murder that conveniently benefit the same person. EXTRA WEIRD that Zugu attacks Lyn, knows her real name is Lyndis, and knows she’s supposed to be alone out on the plains; we’re told he’s working for Lundgren but how would he have known Lyndis was alone.
*The English translation says she dies “a few days after” but the Japanese script is a bit less clear in this regard and seems more “shortly after” rather than “immediately after.”
So anyway, I don’t think it was a coincidence at all.
I think Lundgren paid the Taliver to eliminate his competition to the throne.
The sequence of events would be something like this:
- Madelyn and Hassar elope, and she never returns, so after enough time passes, Lundgren is named Caelin’s official heir.
- Hausen receives Madelyn’s letter that she is alive and well and has a daughter that she and her husband named after her mom.
- Hausen’s anger dissipates, and he’s excited about this news and talks about seeing them again. This stirs up drama immediately with Lundgren, who was already preparing to take the throne for himself.
- Lundgren pays the Taliver to eliminate this threat to his power ASAP. (He has the wealth to do this quickly and clearly the network for it.)
- The Taliver ensure this is carried out by attempting to eliminate the entire tribe; they can’t make any mistakes that way. This may have even been part of the agreement in the first place, since we know Lundgren’s racist af and takes extreme measures, going so far as to blackmail Eagler to ensure he cooperates and to pay off multiple bandit groups to kill Lyndis later.
- Hausen decides he would like to see his daughter and her family again, so he sends Kent and Sain* to find them and bring them back.
*We’re never told why he picks Kent and Sain, but their promotion to the top of the military upon completing this story mode, the fact that Lundgren tries to win Sain over to his side, and that Lundgren already knows Kent will not join him leads me to believe they were already extremely accomplished and personally trusted by Hausen for some reason we’re not privy to. That General Eagler and Wallace both know them is quite telling, too; Kent and Sain are not low-ranked nobodies when they appear. I’m so serious when I say I don’t think this point can be understated; that they were chosen out of everyone in Caelin’s military is telling. Also interesting is that they’re both aware of Lundgren’s greed from the beginning of the game before they’re branded traitors. They know IMMEDIATELY that he’s paying people to kill Lyn when Lyn says one of the bandits called her “Lyndis”—a name only her parents and a few people from Caelin would know. It’s never a “well mayyyybe” moment; Sain is 100% certain right away when he mentions it. Which means when they left Caelin they knew Lundgren was starting some shit.
- Shortly after Kent and Sain leave, Lundgren starts poisoning Hausen. He’s sure that Kent and Sain will find nothing out in Sacae because he’s had it taken care of. By the time they return empty-handed, Hausen will have tragically passed and they will have a new lord to serve and no proof of foul play.
- Oops! Word gets to Lundgren that the Lorca were mostly wiped out, but somehow one of the targets lived. It’s fine because she’s been basically abandoned and it’s said she just lives on her own.
- Kent and Sain arrive in Bulgar only to learn that Madelyn died not long after she sent her letter, but they also learn that her daughter survived the attack and lives alone out on the plains.
- Zugu (bandit leader) has also learned this information and has either caught up to Kent and Sain, followed Kent and Sain, or coincidentally runs into Lyn. That he knows her full name gives away Lundgren’s connection to the attack on Lyn’s life (otherwise it would just look like another coincidence).
Thus, we arrive at chapter 1.
It makes so much sense on multiple levels.
Lyn still wouldn’t know why the attack happened, and in fact, it’s possible that unless she tells Kent and/or Sain about the poisoned water and how deliberate and premeditated the attack was, nobody will ever put those pieces together. But with all of that information I think either man would figure it out.
So this allows Lyn’s characterization to remain entirely the same while still giving her the option later of figuring out why her people were attacked. And it’s still a tragedy in a big way, because neither Lyn nor her mother wanted to rule Caelin at all; if Lundgren had stayed in his lane he’d have everything he wanted and Lyn would still have her community and her parents.
I think this theory also does something good for Lundgren’s character. He always came off as so one-note evil. “You’re not like that stubborn fool, Kent. Join the dark side, Sain.” Calling her a “Sacaen mongrel” and “an annoying little girl” and “a savage.” Literally shoving poison down his brother’s throat. Blackmailing Eagler.
If he paid the Taliver to wipe out the Lorca I feel like he’d get bold like that, though. He’s very similar to Darin when you think about it. Both men start off a bit iffy but at some point they pass the point of no return. Sunk cost fallacy and all that. If Lundgren already has these ties to unsavory groups and he’s being publicly challenged by this young lady and her entourage of weirdos (and he’s losing lol) then who even cares anymore; what does he have to lose?
Like if he’s already planned his brother’s death and ordered his niece and her husband killed, what does he care about killing Lyn?
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Anyway, I felt a bit insane for a few days after I came up with this theory and even mentioned it to a few friends to see if I was missing something super obvious that contradicted it, because in hindsight this seems SO VERY OBVIOUS and I'm mad with confusion regarding how it slipped by an entire fandom for so long. I think we were all just taking the game at face value back then or something; it was never explained and we were like, "Well it was meant to just be a tragedy then I guess?" and I spent 10 years trying to come up with a reason for it happening in my 23 novelization draft attempts.
Maybe we never considered it because it never would have mattered within the context of the game—but her figuring it out would make for a really juicy 'fic, so...you'd think I would have thought of it myself and rushed to write something, haha.
So yeah. New theory? Headcanon? Idea? Thought? It's not perfect of course, but neither is the FE7 script in general. I don't know if we're meant to imagine this is canon, but it's super fun to think about.
Please feel free to share your thoughts if you have any.
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