Fire Emblem is a dense and originally impenetrable series that has waxed,  waned, and waxed again within its lifetime. What started as a series of Japan-only turn-based strategy games with proto-roguelike character deaths turned into a cornerstone of the Smash Bros. roster that grew and grew. From time to time, a new swordsperson  would be added to the joy of a vocal subset of people, but mostly silence from someone like me, a weirdo who wanted best girl and magical genie Shantae to be playable.  While Fire Emblem’s mascot character Marth has been a go-to name for fictional characters and online usernames for me in the past, that was more  my admiration for videogame and anime boys/men with headbands (worth its own piece) than for love of an 11^th century medieval game about soft-resetting because the new mage got KO’d in her first fight and how the power of comrades can beat any evil dragon. Fire Emblem became the place of keychains and fan art of specific characters and wanting them to smooch each other or the protagonist self-insert. A fanaticism that eluded me because my only experience was with the older games. Until I met the Ashen Wolves, a crew of paid DLC characters for the series equivalent to Mad Max: Fury Road, Three Houses. 

Groundwork, or better yet, underground work is needed to discuss the Ashen Wolves and their fictional lives. Cindered Shadows is a stand-alone campaign that follows protagonist Byleth, the heads of the three different dorm houses, and a few respective house stragglers who collectively investigate a series of hidden tunnels beneath their school/church, the Garreg Mach Monastery. The group is attacked by the Ashen Wolves, a secret fourth class of students who were expelled from the school for various extra-legal reasons, who later become allies. Boastful muscleman Balthus von Albrecht, cackling witch Constance von Nuvelle, and dower human experiment Hapi are led by cut-throat twink Yuri Leclerc to support the other outcasts and vagrants of the Abyss, a town cut off from the above-ground society. In a game series that became synonymous with character appreciation (or simply character gushing), I finally received my own crew of cool kids.

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