Cherche

Cherche is a character from the Fire Emblem Awakening game.

A wyvern rider in the service of House Virion. She was raised with simple values and likes to cook and sew, but loves her "sweet, adorable" wyvern Minerva even more.

Appearance
Cherche has a long crimson-red hair and has red eyes. She wears a white hairband on top of her head alongside dragon wing-like head protector below her face. She wears a silver-colored armor covering her front body over a black turtleneck dress with a revealing backside and black-cropped tightsuit underneath, shoulder armors, arm and hand gauntlets, black thigh-high socks underneath silver-colored armored boots.

Personality
Cherche is a domestic woman raised on simple values who is good at cooking and sewing, in contrast to her vicious wyvern. This is because, despite being just a knight at first, Virion's particular fondness of her led to her duties being combined with those of a servant, with the pressure and suspicion of others forcing her to balance both her attitude and skills in the process.

Though disdainful of his behavior, she's loyal to Virion, deciding to stay with him despite his fall from grace. Having an understanding of his torments, being the only person Virion shows his real self, she isn't afraid to mock his demeanor when felt needed, something that he admits to actually affect his mood.

She has a bizarre sense of aesthetics, referring to monsters and bugs as cute. She also manages to not lose sight of Kellam because his armor is 'cute' and later offers to decorate its shoulder plate with spikes so it would be 'cuter'.

Cherche shares an extremely close bond with her wyvern and has developed an ability to tell what Minerva is feeling or saying by her shrieks. Many conversations and dialogue in general revolve around this bond, with Cherche refusing to treat her mount like a common animal and even only accepting to marry if the wyvern also consents with said person.

She is the scariest person in the army to anger as she tends to threaten people by implying that she will make Minerva eat them all with a smile on her face.

Abilities
Cherche is among the first of flying Axe units in Heroes and is one of the easiest to acquire due to being a 3-4 Star unit since the very beginning. This allows Cherche to be an easily acquired unit and makes her a valuable unit overall, especially when considering her potential in her specific unit role. Against the other summoning 3-4 star options Camilla and Beruka, Cherche is a hyper offensive unit, toting a monstrous Atk and good physical bulk. She does trade this off for incredibly low Spd and equally low magical bulk. With her Spd foregone, she was commonly utilized with an inherited Brave Axe as she could easily unleash significant damage against blue units and most greens through a double axe attack. Nowadays, she has since remained in that role, but now without needing to inherit the weapon effect she is best suited to use.

Cherche's initial weapon was a Hammer, allowing her to deal bonus damage to Armor units, utterly decimating units like Effie and sometimes Hector. She later gained her own personal axe, Cherche's Axe which is essentially a boosted Brave Axe, bringing her neutral Atk to 49 and to deal immense damage, but still taking a -5 Spd penalty. It can be refined to add a Panic Ploy effect, turning enemy buffs into penalties if their HP is lower than hers. She has a decent HP stat to apply the effect on a wide range of foes, but not so much that she affects some key tanky threats in the meta.

Her remaining base kit is rather underwhelming, serving short term boosts that ultimately needs replacing. Pivotallows her to position herself on the opposite adjacent tile of an ally she utilizes the skill on, which does grant mobility, but as a flier, she has among the best mobility in the game. Attack +3 is a flat Atk stat boost that serves little purpose in the long run. Fortify Defense is a serviceable stat boost for ally Def if they start the turn next to her, which makes it the only skill that can be worked into her end build, if not replaced with other options depending on team composition.

Trivia

 * Cherche's dragon mount was named after Minerva, as revealed if Cherche fights Minerva in Lost Bloodlines 2.
 * The sounds that Cherche's wyvern mount, Minerva, makes in some of her supports, were also reused as Kana's dragon sounds in the western release of Fire Emblem Fates.
 * Cherche shares her English voice actress, Amanda C. Miller, with Sully.
 * Cherche also shares her Japanese voice actress, Akutsu Kana, with Tharja and Rhajat.
 * Cherche's official artwork from both Awakening and Heroes, as well as her Cipher TCG appearances, depict her wielding the Helswath.
 * Cherche's birthday is the same day that Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance was first released in North America.
 * Due to the fact that she was originally trained to be a cleric, both of her reclass options are healers. Ironically, among the first generation, she has the highest strength and defense modifiers of any female and one of the highest overall.
 * According to Awakening's project manager Masahiro Higuchi, Cherche was the first character that Yusuke Kozaki designed for the game.
 * Cherche's portrait has the least amount of facial expressions in the game, with only four.