This post is part of my ongoing translations of the Fire Emblem Echoes Shadows of Valentia Memorial Book: Valentia Accordion project.
Please note these posts may contain spoilers for those who have not completed the game.
Today’s post features Dolth and Nuibaba. Of note is Nuibaba’s backstory that does not exist in game.
You can find every scan/translation I’ve done on this book so far on the compilation post.
Enjoy!
(Right click and do “View Image” for full resolution!)
Text format:
Dolth
Class: Cantor
A Cantor of the Duma Faithful. After Jedah expunged the sage Halcyon, he took refuge in Sage Hamlet, which lay within the Lost Treescape. Dolth was tasked with manning a fort that stood guard at the entrance to these woods. With their corruptive powers contaminating the very earth they stood upon, both Dolth and Garcia saw the Lost Treescape slowly turn to a poisonous swamp simply due to their presence.
Nuibaba
CV: Junko Kitanishi
Class: Witch
A witch of the Duma Faithful. She is contractually bound to Medusa. She resides in a hall upon Fear Mountain and torments the locals in her vicinity alongside Jerome of Rigel. She became a witch not out of swearing oath to Duma, but by her own means simply to be beautiful and able to use dark spells. She seeks to preserve her youth by sacrificing beautiful young maidens from all across Rigel.
There was once a time where she was a pretty young girl who lived happily with the man she loved. However, one night she was attacked by bandits who left a hideous wound on her face. The man started to avoid Nuibaba in favor for her prettier younger sister. Growing tired of Nuibaba’s presence, the man and the younger sister schemed and lured Nuibaba deep into the woods. There, they pushed her off a cliff. As Nuibaba lay on the brink of death, a ghastly apparition appeared before her –attracted to the scent of death. She formed a contract with it and found herself restored with the promise of a longer life. After taking revenge upon the man and sister who had backstabbed her, she secluded herself to the woods where she became obsessed with power and beauty, eventually becoming a witch. That lust for power drew her attention to Alm’s brand which would grant her both eternal youth and life.
Despite her plan to stir up Berkut’s fiery spirit against Alm, he was defeated. After that, she tried to lure Alm to her abode by using a phantom of Celica, but he managed to break through that plan too.
Translator Notes:
- To clarify, it’s Halcyon who took refuge in Sage’s Hamlet, not Dolth or Jedah. The wording can be confusing there.
- Nuibaba’s profile very literally says “not necessarily swears oath to Doma” rather than a flat out no. But the apparition (Medusa) we see appears likely makes it an absolute no.
As you can imagine, the process of doing all this (scanning, editing, translating, etc) takes a lot of time, and I am unemployed…so if you like what I did, then…
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kantopia 
I wonder if there really is that much of a pattern of making the female enemies less well-rounded, attractive, sympathetic, or otherwise likeable, or if it just looks that way because there are less female characters in general, so it just stands when when we get a bad guy woman no matter what.
I mean… Lyon, Rudolf, the Black Knight, Lehran, Walhart, Gangrel, Bruno, Anankos, Garon, Berkut, Fernand, Hardin, and whichever brothers you side against in Fates (if Birthright or Conquest) are all major male antagonists portrayed as having at least one of the aforementioned traits, but no one gets mad that “Fire Emblem’s writers won’t let their men be real villains!” The closest I ever heard from that was from certain Edelgard fans who accuse Dimitri fans of only forgiving his flaws because of the character’s gender, but if you ask me that criticism applies more to Edelgard than Dimitri. (No offense to Three Houses fans but I think there’s a bit more to gray morality than making a cute chick with tragic backstory think and act strikingly like Adolf Hitler to the point where I have to wonder if she wasn’t deliberately based off of him, and making said character’s opposition consist of a smooth-talking shady Turkish guy who never actually did anything wrong and the leader of a religious group that is demonized, scapegoated for problems it didn’t actually cause, and accused of having more power than it actually has–I really wasn’t kidding about this Hitler thing. Dimitri actually does seem to be rather gray for his part, but that makes him seem out of place compared to the other characters, especially since his route is so different writing-wise compared to the others…)
…But I digress.The point is that there are plenty of male villains who are given a chance to be liked by the player–I only named the ones off the top of my head–and I would rather they give nuance to all major villains, regardless of gender. I really liked how even the minor bosses in Path of Radiance and Awakening had such distinct personalities, and I think bigger bad guys should be more well-rounded. They need not necessarily be GOOD–Ashnard being Ashnard is surprising in how he manages to believable but still very villainous, because he has a goal and a belief system, and yet he still has a certain insanity… I think he works very well. I love Izuka too; it was very out there for Fire Emblem to do a mad scientist character given the setting, but they managed to make it work, and I think this type of villain appeals to a very… risky-for-the-writers-to-go-there fear. What I am trying to say is that he reminds me of Josef Mengele. The question I wondered about him is, “does he operate on a different system of morality? Does he genuinely believe no price is too high to pay for scientific discovery?” and then you see his battle conversation with Bastian and you get the answer to that question: no. He is just disregarding the feelings of his subjects to experiment on them. And that, I think, is a really important thing to point out when it comes to, say, drug and cosmetic animal testing… people say it’s okay because “it’s not a human!” but in my mind that makes it worse–an animal is always innocent, but a human not necessarily so. It’s one thing to kill an animal, but it’s a completely different question to torture one. Supposedly there are laws in place to prevent animal testing from going too far, but… they can still use elctroshock to inflict pain on them which I’m sure you’re not allowed to do to a human, just yesterday I read an article where it was said that they could not reproduce an experiment that involved inducing food aversion in human subjects because it would be inhumane even though they had already done it in animals, and there was another article from a while back that involved the psychological effects of putting a cricket in an enclosed area with a predator spider that chased and bit (with wax-covered fangs so that venom could not be injected) it repeatedly, in a practice described as “spider torment” by some. If someone is testing on animals because they have a question about animals, or animal tests increase the efficiency of the experiment, that’s one thing, but if the experiment is being performed on animals because the scientist can’t legally get away with doing it to humans because it’s too cruel… maybe that scientist should get the hell to hell.
…But I digress. The point is, Izuka is such a horrible person that when I saw a translation of a Japanese script that said Bastian and Volke actually tortured him in their interrogation of him I actually had to wonder if I still had a problem with torture. He works, though, because he is realistic. A good character need not be a good person, but they need to make sense (that doesn’t necessarily mean the character is intelligent though), and statistically speaking, “evil” people (if we’re using the definition of those who score high in Dark Tetrad traits) are rare, and even then one of those traits (narcissism) is born of a troubled past, so for a more believable story, most villains should be pretty messed up. So I like for most major villains to be “tragic pretty boy/girl” types, as I call them, and the remaining few to be the psychopaths, sadists, and machievllianists. I would also like for more minor villains to have believable reasons to be fighting. Awakening did a good job, I think, of humanizing those aforementioned paralogue villains, and it gave other characters humanizing details in Henry and Ricken’s supports and in the unnamed Valmese continent characters being heavily implied to have been coerced into fighting, whereas Pheros (one of my favorite bosses for her character) fights because she believes in the cause she is fighting for. Meanwhile Tellius has people like… I think his name was Homasa? A Daein swordsman. He was very young and he had a light affinity, which struck me as odd because it’s very rare, especially among named enemy characters… and of the playable characters who have it, they tend towards being idealistic, and often believe in people to the point of naivety or gullibility. He mentioned that he learned swordmanship from his father two, I think, and he had a special conversation with Stefan, because swords, you know… I think the point of his character was to say “hey, this could have been Ike if he was born at a different place/time”, but since no one really comments on him, it’s hard to know for certain. Then there’s a druid guy from Radiant Dawn (don’t remember his name, but he has this really done-looking face), who stands out because dark-magic using bosses are rare, and I remember he really hates working for the Begnion senators because they are such awful people and are cruel even to their own subordinates, but… it’s his job. He doesn’t have a choice.
OOF wall of text 😔
Late, but Nuibaba’s backstory reminds of this interview with Kaga. Here it is posted for reference.
Tsukamoto: Another thing that caught me by surprise this time round was the presence of women in the enemy ranks. I think this was the most refreshing part of the game to me, actually. Till now, any female enemies you saw were usually recruitable units, but women that stay as antagonists throughout is a first.
Kaga’s comment: I didn’t do that on purpose, I just didn’t like the idea of completely irredeemable women…but I guess no one does (laughs). I didn’t want to make a female character that was completely evil, but then I also wouldn’t be surprised to find that women like Hilda exist in this world. But it feels so overly unpleasant that I don’t really like doing it. Among the enemies in this game, many of whom have their own circumstances and some of whom even have their likeable points, Hilda is the very definition of villainous. She’s like an evil witch; you’d want to kill her if she were your enemy. I like real world history, which is why I base my works on it, but the killing of women is something that doesn’t happen so much even in real life. That’s why I don’t really like to include it.
Your thoughts?
Ooh that’s pretty interesting. I’m not sure if that backstory existed in the original Gaiden or the Echoes variation, but that’s pretty interesting stuff.
I think with the most recent release with Three Houses, IS was not as worried about Kaga’s kind of reluctance there considering there were even generic female enemies and the like. So it’s quite the progression!
No such backstory existed for Nuibaba in the original, they were just an ugly boss of unmentioned gender whose name was derived from the Japanese word for “Hag” AKA “old woman who is both ugly and evil.”
Have you ever noticed how female bosses very rarely come close to being as hideous and evil as the male bosses? Nuibaba’s treatment in Echoes is an example of the cliche of female bosses being far more attractive and far more sympathetic then the male bosses, when the character was meant to be neither.
Three Houses, Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776 are the only games to regularly include female generics. Genealogy of the Holy War is the only game to include female bosses, though to be fair, Three Houses doesn’t really have minor bosses outside of Kostas.
Kaga was saying there that he had to motivate himself to create female bosses that were ugly and repulsive, hence the creation of Hilda and the minor female bosses.
I’d say its less the series has progressed, as plenty of post Kaga games have far more blatant examples and more the series re-examining Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776(the last Kaga FEs), then deciding “you know what, the series should have continued in that direction.”
Your thoughts? Also if its alright to ask have you played FE4?
Oh sorry, I was conflating it with your thread I found on SF (when trying to find the entire interview/source for context xD)
I started FE4 awhile ago but never finished it. I tend to observe and comment on the post-Kaga games, so I may not be the best one to have a discussion about that kind of thing on!
No problem, actually I’m overjoyed you read my thread!
Basically FE4 had minor female bosses in addition to unsympathetic female bosses, they were drawn less attractive then FE usually does females: evil looking eyes, sinister camera angles and wrinkles for the older ones, . Most of the non palette swap female bosses were linked in the thread.
Would you have preferred it if Echoes Nuibaba was simply an evil old woman with no tragic past? Personally I think it’d be more unique to the series and truer to the mythology FE always takes from?
I think being an evil old woman would be fun, though I would want some kind of past (even if not tragic) to at least build the character up : )
Nuibaba’s entry was quite interesting, and does this imply that Medusa is a separate spirit that you can sell your soul to in Valentia? Also, she can age after losing her soul, right?
Indeed, it seems to imply that! It also seems she can still age, and hence has to continue to find those sacrifices.
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Thanks for the translation! Interesting backstory for Nuibaba.
Indeed, I look forward to what other backstories will be uncovered. : )
Same. I’ll look forward to it~
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