I’d be lying through my teeth if I told you that my decision to re-write Nintendo’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H) as a novel-length, golden route, romantasy action story was fully intentional.

Back in 2024, I hit a challenging roadblock in my work on The Xenthian Cycle and needed a break. Enter Into the Fishpond, my seven-month obsession.

Registered members can read Into the Fishpond on AO3. I’ve also tagged all my reflections on what writing a novel-length project on AO3 taught me.

If you don’t know the game, FE3H pits the heirs of three nations against each other, first as academic rivals and then as opposing generals.

You play as Byleth, a nonbinary mercenary turned reluctant professor with their own secrets to unravel. Whichever leader Byleth champions will conquer the other houses and impose their vision on the continent.

The character writing is excellent, and all the endings are heartbreaking in some way. The game design forces you to make hard choices across the board, which makes it compulsively replayable (e.g., I’ve finished three out of four routes.)

As I began work on Fishpond, I knew a few things:

• My adaptation would be a romance. Since our setting is a secondary fantasy world, it’s technically romantasy.
• The principal character is from Earth and enters the game world aware of the story’s cannon events. In fanfiction circles, this structure makes Fishpond an Isekai story.
• Seteth, the school’s administrator, is the male protagonist.
• Zara, my thirty-something lead, would body swap into Byleth’s unoccupied female body (the player chooses which version of Byleth to play when the game starts).

Beyond that, everything else was up for grabs. Or so I thought.

In Chapter 1, the Goddess Sothis wandered into my adaptation and handed down the terms for a classic golden route.

With a year of hindsight, it was a wonderful decision. Rewriting FE3H as a golden route added richness to my adaptation.

Okay, what is a golden route?

In video games, a golden route maximizes positive resolutions across the board. For example, the main characters all live, peace is restored to the land, terrible choices are avoided, secrets are safely shared, and everyone gets what they want (at least in part).

Unlike Triangle Strategy, another popular video game, FE3H has no golden route. No matter what you do, at least one of the house leaders ends up dead, often alongside key supporters who won’t join any of the opposing armies.

Adding a golden route to the romance plot raised the stakes for all the characters and dramatically changed storylines for the house leaders who play supporting roles in my version of the story (e.g., Claude, Edelgard and Dimitri).

Writing a Golden Route also meant I could:

• Adapt the story’s overall ending.
• Avoid the five-year time skip written into the game’s original story, keeping us in the more idyllic, academic setting that all the routes share in the first half of play (“White Clouds”).
• Write new battles with the story’s best antagonists in ways the game doesn’t allow.
• Change all the endings for the major house lords, supporting players, and non-combatants.

Didn’t that torpedo the story’s conflict?

In short: no.

FE3H has layers of misunderstanding and betrayal baked into the narrative. Despite the wide-ranging success conditions, my adaptation had plenty of tension.

For example:

• Lady Rhea, the archbishop of Fódlan, is a character with deep secrets, a flawed psyche, and a decidedly amoral approach to statecraft. She remained a morally gray character in my work.
• The Agarthans, the true villains of FE3H, rarely get to fight the primary heroes (the game’s Verdant Wind route where you side with Claude is the exception). My adaptation sets them directly in opposition to the united school in ways that were new to readers. I used the game’s existing Agarthan spies and turncoats to foster suspicion and fear.
• Macuil, one of Seteth’s mysterious brothers, plays a minimal, off-screen role in the canonical story. Bringing him into the main plot and putting him at odds with Seteth allowed me to wrap lore drops in provocation. Macuil also let me build a unique supporting character since he’s absent for so much of the canonical experience.

Given the fraught, interconnected character histories, Zara’s and Byleth’s efforts to unite the house leaders still required care and discretion. They’re always on the edge of being found out, often in explosive ways.

What I learned

Fishpond follows the canonical story to a point. Reshuffling the possibilities around an outcome that readers had never seen in the game added extra intrigue.

After spending so much time on this thought experiment, I understand why FE3H doesn’t include a golden route:

• The extra scenes, maps and battles would mean a lot of complexity and development for a game that was already four months late when it was published in 2019.
• Fans complain that some routes aren’t as well developed as others (consensus seems to be that Azure Moon is strongest and Silver Snow weakest, though the debate continues).
• Adding the extra scenes required to support a new route would also mean more character dialogue. FE3H already has four routes + 1 partial DLC route, along with a full and excellent cast, so that’s a big additional cost.

Thanks to the comments, I know that some readers gave Fishpond a shot because it was tilting at this particular windmill, not the romance premise (Seteth is not as popular as the students for obvious reasons).

Conversely, writing an original female character, even one who spends much of the story wearing a body that is part of the game, meant some fans wouldn’t read my story. Some readers only want original pairings; others dislike the Isekai structure.

Either way, writing a golden route gave me another hook to Fishpond’s pitch. It’s an impulse that I’m glad that I embraced.

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Other posts in this series:

• My AO3 stats model
• Overturning my Internet Bullshit: That time I wrote romantasy action on AO3