#ysayleposting

[tovaicas]

ysayle should’ve lived bc the scions need an extra full-time tank

[tovaicas]

I’m just saying. ysayle with sharp teeth. think about it.

[tovaicas]

kind of always disliked that the mouthpiece audience stand-in used to indicate the pure breadth of the world-shattering betrayal the halonic faith has inflicted on ishgard, the pain and grief of having your entire paradigm of how you see with and interact with the world and how you view the war that you've been forced to fight in, lost friends and family to and suffered abuses at the hands of the church that were 'justified' in the name of halone and the grind of the DSW, that everything you fought for and suffered through was not only a lie but a war crime bc in actuality you were fighting and killing children and the extreme sense of world-rending disgust with yourself and pure raw rage at the vault which has willingly, without your consent or knowledge, made you into a murderer of the worst kind, all riding on the back of a literally world-altering disaster that forced you out of your home and made you run for your very life and the pure cultural grief considering that the holy see lost literally all of fucking coerthas in the calamity only five years ago is not the guy in this conversation who is actually ishgardian and has lived through all of the above but rather a sharlayan national with no connection to this conflict who's been living in ishgard for like two weeks

[tovaicas]

obsessed with the hints that ishgardians’ sense of self-worth is tied to their sense of societal ‘usefulness’ btw

[tovaicas]

I think one of the reasons the way Ysayle was handled bothers me so much is bc a) so much of it relies on nobody in her life (new and old) ever telling her anything when they would know otherwise and b) the way the narrative wants to treat her as if she’s an awful person it’s ok to laugh at while also not wanting to admit that everything she said was right and that the thing she was wrong abt is pretty minor in comparison

[tovaicas]

utterly kills me that eden’s rendition of shiva is the one closest to the actual primal bc it implies ysayle, her loss, and what she fought for is still super fresh and raw in he wol’s mind

[tovaicas]

like what if the narrative actually trusted ysayle and her familiarity and ability to reason with dravanians and you were just on the cusp of being able to pass through sohm al unmolested but estinien’s impatience and anger fucks everything up, because rage is a destructive emotion. that properly centres the conflict around estinien’s unchecked anger, spurred on by his possession of the eye, and mirrors the later scene where nidhogg attacks his own family members and physically wounds vidofnir because he perceives of anyone wanting to end the fighting as a traitor

[tovaicas]

ysayle’s backstory of having to literally run for her life from the calamity and that she was very nearly just a number that Didn’t Make It to ishgard or was turned around at the gates of judgement to die bc space is limited and she is unimportant is only used as an aside rather than the very real horror that that’s a huge, major reason as to why ishgard is Like This right now, why the brume is overflowing and there’s not enough food or supplies to go around even for nobles, and why aymeric can’t keep control over his own people

[tovaicas]

my hatred for the aery is all-consuming but don't worry I have no love for sohm al either

[tovaicas]

I’m still angry they let Ysayle be really depressed and then she just dies like she could’ve done so much

[tovaicas]

yes I’m still mad. it’s fucking wild heavensward is abt forgiveness and the abuses of both the ishgardian regime and nidhogg upon his children and that yes, we actually did have the stones to make a revolutionary character who utterly rejects the narrative she’s been taught in favour of peace in a society where even the hint of progressive views re: the dsw is violently suppressed, even if her methods sometimes result in the deaths of others and she needs to reconcile with that fact, but because she’s a woman instead of letting her have her win because she is ostensibly right about everything we were setting up we side against her in every issue even when it directly contradicts our own fucking storyline because we’re get so fucking hard when we ‘prove’ women wrong

[tovaicas]

and btw I’m not saying ysayle is completely innocent, she is why vishap nearly destroys ishgard and gets a lot of innocent people killed, she is a war criminal, but what ysayle has done quite honestly pales in comparison to the crimes of the ishgardian church, which is the thing her actual beef is with

[tovaicas]

ysayle is wrong abt one small thing so this gives us full reign to call her an idiot. please conveniently forget that through shiva she united people abandoned and harmed by the system into a legitimate group capable of actually harming the ishgardian regime and made genuine massive progress in relations with dravanians, especially hraesvelgr’s brood

[tovaicas]

remember when heavensward conveniently forgot that the way primals and the echo work is specific information to people In the Know:tm: and largely only cared abt by the alliance leaders (but barely), the scions, and the ascians, because to average joe the difference between ‘this manifestation of garuda isn’t the real garuda and is a reflection of her summoner’s wants’ and ‘this manifestation of garuda is body and soul thought to be the real garuda by the people that matter’ is largely a semantic one bc while primals aren’t ‘real’ persay they’re still capable of wreaking incredible amounts of havoc which is the real sticking point, not the semantics of whether or not we consider your gods real enough. just so we could yell at ysayle for not being smart enough to piece together she’s not really shiva despite the fact she’s doing exactly what anyone else would do using what information from the situation she has

[tovaicas]

still obsessed with ysayle’s choice of lipstick

[tovaicas]

also it’s pretty gross that by constantly validating estinien’s assertions through people like alphinaud, even when we know he’s ostensibly incorrect (by sohm al we’ve already been through anyx trine and we’ve already had our assertions that all dragons are violent and unreasonable challenged) it makes ysayle trying even to the very end to reason with the horde look like the ravings of a delusional woman instead of the desperate attempt to save lives it is, especially when everyone around her ignores her efforts and continues to slay dragons in their own homes with little thought