Part 84: Luke's Character

A Note on Luke's Characterization

Warning, get ready for a wall of

To describe Luke I'm going to steal an old quote Fedule used for Shinon in FE10. He's an asshole, but to be fair "he is, at least, a nuanced asshole."

Long Hair Luke is a prick, but he's not a prick for no reason. It's mostly out of ignorance, somewhat out of being a spoiled aristocrat, and if you look deeper it's something of a defense mechanism. A lot of it is just an act in order to appear like he has a handle on the situation. When you realize that in truth he's a scared seven year old who's been violently taken from his home for the first time in his life, he's more or less stranded in the country that's "responsible" for his amnesia, and he's been dragged into a life or death situation way above his head, you can start to understand why such a defense mechanism would be needed.

The fact is, even pre-Akzeriuth Luke is not as big an asshole as he puts off. If he were he wouldn't have let the Cheagles off the hook, or gone out of his way to save Ion several times, or tried to comfort Tear over his mother's illness, or felt such regret at taking life.

If you look at Luke in this lens, the whole Deo Pass meltdown actually starts to make a lot of sense. Luke may be a bit tempered by his travels, but he's still seven years old, and has been been suddenly thrust into the position of the ambassador to end the war. That's a lot of pressure. Put on top of that the fact that his one safety blanket (Van) is gone, he's just found out that Asch looks disturbingly like him (and nobody seems to care), he's been traveling for days through sewers, deserts and perilous mountain trails, and to put the cherry on top Van's told him that Kimlasca is going to use him to start a war, then lock him up for the rest of his life. Now put all of that on to such a young child and tell me you aren't going to get the biggest melt down in history. In fact to touch on the whole Mieu thing, he's not beating on Mieu out of psychopathy. PFlats pointed out that Mieu is something he has power over, but really if you think about it Mieu is the only thing he has power over. Everything about the situation is above him, but this one annoying furball is in his control. So he's going to use and abuse it for all it's worth, because he's a kid looking to get a grasp on something, anything in order to comfort himself.

If anything, Luke's story is really tragic. It's the story of an innocent child being forced into situations far above his understanding and that he cannot easily adapt to. This causes him to make a lot of mistakes, to the point that he destroys an entire city in his ignorance. His innocence is shattered, and he has to rapidly grow and mature in order to atone for mistakes that he was too young to understand or avoid. Even now, Luke is simply desperate to save people anywhere he can, because he's still wrecked with guilt over the greatest failure of his life.

Of course, you can't catch all this on your second playthrough, because a lot of it comes from either very deep insight or hindsight. Having played through this game far too many times, Luke's behavior makes sense and is even understandable.