Despite being the least promising lord when I sat down and opened my copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Dimitri has become an extremely important character for me. He's the first character I ever ran into, back in 2019, that was mentally ill and mentally ill in an ugly way that has ramifications for everybody around him... yet is still seen as worthy of love and compassion.

In 2019, I was diagnosed with Bipolar II after a progressive downward spiral for the two years prior. Given a unipolar (but atypical) depression diagnosis in 2017 after years of wanting treatment for anxiety, I finally felt functional. For the first year or so, my mental health was great. Yet, as time went on, it began to slip. The medication had worked, hadn't it? And it had worked well? So obviously, it couldn't be that, and it wasn't like I had spontaneously manifested any new disorders.

Why did it become harder and harder to get out of bed, then? Why did it feel as if I was shot with adrenaline and then encased in lead? As my mental health became worse and worse, things started to make less and less sense. I tore relationships to shreds and retreated in on myself. I began to fantasize about the unthinkable. My grades tanked, I felt my ability to think slip, and yet, the world moved around me. I had friends who were depressed; surely, they could sympathize.

But they didn't.

Not for lack of trying nor for any cruelty on their part, but they simply didn't get it. The one who could have had taken the brunt of my own worsening behaviour, and he was the last person I'd want to bring this up to. Everybody else seemed to have very "simple" experiences: some days, it was just difficult to even do the bare minimum; some days, the desire to no longer be alive was worse than others; some days, they slept all day.

I didn't. I felt like I was going insane. I rambled and paced and drove in circles, woke up 400 miles from home wondering what the fuck was wrong with me. I drove home to Houston and back to Austin, hyperventilating and in tears. I clawed at myself, I smoked packs of cigarettes and put them out between my fingers, I sat very still even as it felt like my insides were vibrating. I remember staring at the string of white Christmas lights, one very cold, wet day in winter in a house that lacked central heating. It was 40F inside, and I could not remember how long it had been, how many days I had stared at those lights, feeling the way I did.

Nobody else felt like this? Nobody locked themselves in their car and screamed and cried over nothing for hours because it became too painful to live in my own head? Nobody wandered in aimless circles, laughing to themselves over how ridiculous and theatric it all was even as they couldn't stop, weeping? Nobody stared at their professors, wondering how they were supposed to process the words when all they could think about was ending it?

I felt like a circus animal, sitting at the bottom of some deep pit and gnawing to get my chained limbs off me while a crowd of curious onlookers threw peanuts at me. I needed to leave, to go home, to leave, but how does one leave their own head? I scrabbled at the walls inside my skull, broke things, howled and wailed. Nothing worked anymore. I fantasized about increasingly gratuitous displays of violence against myself in front of those who wronged me and those who didn't; if nobody could understand my agony when I spoke of it, perhaps they would understand when it manifested in the physical, the tangible. Nothing about me worked anymore. Where had the brilliant student, the charismatic extrovert gone? Was this it? Was this what was left? I began to worry that I could no longer recognize happiness, and if it returned, it would pass me by as a stranger. Truly, I had gone absolutely, irreversibly, batshit insane.

If this was my new reality, perhaps it was better to get used to it. Maybe, in the end, I even deserved it. For not having tried harder, for letting myself wallow in my own misery, for watching as everything crumbled around me and doing nothing at all about it. Even if I, with my own two hands, hadn't dug the hole deeper myself, I had let myself sink further in further as the ground caved in, ignored every opportunity to start climbing out; even if there was something to step on and peek over the edge, if I couldn't drag myself out, who else could I blame but myself?

It was around the breaking point that Fire Emblem: Three Houses dropped.

I didn't have a Switch so I borrowed my friend's at their recommendation. Three routes. I went in completely blind, having been too dead inside to bother keeping up with games. I didn't want to get too attached to whoever I picked first. The generic pretty boy blonde guy it was, then.

Of course, he had some hidden "dark side". I loved Fire Emblem, but Awakening hadn't set the bar too terribly high in terms of character complexity. The handsome blonde prince had some kind of tragic backstory. Sure.

And then we began to see Dimitri as he really was.

Charming, sweet, approachable. Hellbent on being as accomodating and kind as possible. Deeply alienated and alone. Frightened by himself. Diligent and sincere, everything undertaken with the kind of seriousness that got him laughed at yet drew people to him. Losing it. Sleepless. Self-loathing. Driven by something he could not resist nor stop. Desperately trying to control something that was slipping out of his grasp no matter how tightly he squeezed.

And when he made the mistake of easing his grip, there were the flashes of a Dimitri completely unlike the one we met initially. Worthy of the kind of embarrassment and self-loathing he felt. Violent. Steeped in self-obsessed misery. Angry. Out of control.

Watching the descent, gradual and then sudden, of Dimitri from a well-liked, earnest youth into a bitter, angry, inconsiderate creature we did not recognize, revelling in the brutality he was capable of and lost in his own head, was intoxicating. I remember playing the game for three days with more or less breaks only to sleep (however little I did that anymore) and scrounge something to eat when the hunger pangs reminded me that yes, that was something I needed to take care of.

In isolation, on a dark bed, unwashed and exhausted, I watched Gronder, and when Dimitri sobbed (bless Chris Hackney's talent), I sobbed with him. It wasn't until we see him on his way out of camp, ready to go to Enbarr alone, fully aware of what'll happen to him, and Byleth stops him, that I really broke.

Here was a man who had spent five years in a prolonged spiral, who destroyed the image people had of him, who lashed out constantly, who brutalized countless people, who pushed people away, who viewed himself as beyond hope and beyond forgiveness... being told that, for all his sins and transgressions, he was worthy of love. That even as ugly as he was, he was not beyond the dignity of humanity.

And it's enough. Being told that he was still human and, deeply flawed, needing to atone, he was allowed to find joy and others still cared... was enough. People will criticize Azure Moon for giving him a heel-face turn with regards to Dimitri's mental health, but I think that that's not necessarily true in terms of the arc's writing (rather reflecting on the fact that this fucking game is insanely long between its three and a half and a xenologue routes), and at the same time, a quick turn isn't totally unrealistic either. Sometimes, it really is just one hand offered at just the right moment that can pull you back on solid ground, and once you're on solid ground, even limping, rock bottom is quite a ways away.

And he does get better. Life begins to look a little more bearable. People who could not and should not have had to pull him back over the ledge still waited for him near it. He learns to forgive himself, his head clears over time, he's willing to listen over the sound of whatever it is that's brewing in his own brain.

I am not Dimitri. Nobody is Dimitri. Dimitri does not exist.

I am not psychotic like Dimitri is (and I will let psychotics talk about their own gripes and resonance with the way his psychosis is treated). I am not a survivor of anything. I'm surely not an 11th century king that would qualify as a war criminal by modern definitions. Our trajectories, even disregarding the distinction between fictional and real, are very different.

All the same, Dimitri is a representation of something very real for a lot of people. I am somebody with a severe mental illness. I am somebody who's cracking under guilt and shame in many ways, even now. I am somebody who has kneejerk reactions, disproportionate emotional responses, big feelings as somebody put it. For all that some may lambast Intelligent Systems for creating another "caricature" of mental illness, I truly think that this is the first time I've seen a character with a disorder just as dramatic and bombastic as mine that is also treated with quite some seriousness. There's a certain flavour to it all that rings less like pure "fun" insanity (for lack of a better word) for its own sake, and more like the unpleasant fanfare that truly does come with certain disorders and a certain kind of pain.

Perhaps, then, some of us are also caricatures of our disorders. Perhaps, then, I, myself, am a caricature of my own mental illness, all its theatrics and drama and the humiliating fallout. All the particulars aside, seeing those things mirrored in a set of pixels and treated with a kindness often reserved for those with more pleasant mental illnesses (at best, if at all) is a comfort I didn't know I craved so desperately.

Your Honour: he's just my little guy. <3 Long live the saviour king.