Speaking as someone who likes both Ingrid and Hilda, I find the discussions around their prejudices to be cancerous.

I’ll be blunt: I really dislike how the game handles both the Tragedy of Duscur and the relations between Goneril/Almyra, and a large part of it is because they feel so…mechanical, for the lack of a better word.

The part about Goneril having indentured Almyran servants seems to exist purely to explain how Cyril got to Fodlan while trying to add more “gray morality” and make Almyra more sympathetic; outside of the paralogue, which explains Cyril’s backstory, it’s never mentioned, which seems like a pretty glaring thing to miss in a route where Fodlan/Almyra relations is supposed to be important. The attempt at making Almyra sympathetic backfires because 1) it’s confirmed that they attack the border just for the lulz, and 2) there’s no reason why they conscript kids. Generally when a country employs child soldiers, it’s a last resort and not the default behavior. In fiction, it’s used to either depict a country as extremely evil or extremely desperate, and neither of those cases apply to Almyra.

Another issue with this particular plot point is that the game doesn’t give any details on Cyril’s time with House Goneril, which ties into third major problem which is that it creates character inconsistencies. Both the Goneril siblings want to make peace with Almyra, and they’re both supposed to be rather compassionate individuals; Hilda’s support with Cyril also says that everything she knows about Almyra is what people have told her, and it’s not clear whether or not she’s even met one before. So if House Goneril does have indentured servants, are they kept by relatives? Are there many of them? Are Holst and Hilda even aware of how they’re being treated, and if they’re not, is it a case of willful blindness or complete ignorance? These are important questions, but none of them are even acknowledged.

Claude looks worse too, since he just seems to ignore all of this. He doesn’t acknowledge Almyra using child soldiers, his best friend’s family using the captured soldiers as servants, or the fact that there are pointless raids happening in the first place, so his talk about opening borders and eliminating race issues just makes him look like a clueless knobend. Which again, would not be an issue if that was by design and if it was a part of the story, but it’s not.

The worst part is that this wasn’t even necessary to explain how Cyril got to Fodlan; he could be a survivor of a village on the border that got destroyed in the crossfire that Rhea just happened to find. If the writers didn’t want to address the elephant in the room, that’s probably what they should have gone with.

The Tragedy of Duscur has the advantage of being used in the plot, but just like with the servants in Goneril, the game only cares about it as a way to give something for the Lions to angst about and to serve as another mystery box. But the circumstances and details are barely touched upon and it’s resolved by just having some random guy who doesn’t even have a name say that he did it because Ideals before being just dropped altogether. To be honest, I find that even worse than the game forgetting about Goneril and Almyra, because this is something you’re blueballed with for the whole game and the payoff is completely unsatisfactory, so it feels like game is wasting your time for getting invested in it.

So what does this have to do with Hilda and Ingrid? Basically when the topic of Ingrid and her racism comes up, there’s often someone who brings up Hilda, often accompanied by “Hilda is the REAL CEO of Racism.” Then there’s a debate about who is more racist and therefore who deserves to be torn down, and these plot points will inevitably come up. I hate these arguments for several reasons:

It’s pedantic as hell and it mainly boils down to which form of bad writing do you find more tolerable.

The arguments can get almost stan-like at times in the sense that one of the characters gets their lines read in the most uncharitable fashion, which is how you end up with takes where people claim that Ingrid and Hilda refer to Almyrans and Duscurans as animals - something that’s not even implied by the text. It also involves people ignoring key parts of their dialogue, such as Ingrid apologizing to Dedue and Hilda’s B and A rank supports with Cyril.

CEO of Racism jokes are unfunny cancer, regardless of which character is stuck with that label.

It’s because of this that you end up with people talking about some weird, bastardized, one-dimensional versions of the characters, such as Ingrid being a homophobe because she doesn’t let Dorothea sexually harrass her, or the Claude/Hilda ending leading to Hilda being some sort of oppressive queen, which is a take I’ve actually seen. It also has the consequence of stifling the discussion of certain character traits that don’t get brought up often, but give them a lot of color.

tl;dr version: Ingrid and Hilda are good people with a pretty glaring character flaw that is not addressed properly because the writers are hacks; all the memes are reductionist garbage and I wish people would stop trying to tear them down.