#I'm making the best of the text here get off my goat a Van's gotta eat

[honestlyvan]

Talk to me about Isurd and bureaucracy

Oh boy, so, I think Lambda's issues with structural inefficiencies and bureaucratic overhead produces a direct parallel between the way Taion and Isurd responded to Nimue's death. After all, we know that commanders get pretty free reign in how they run their colonies, and there are far less subtle examples of "the thing that is Wrong with this colony is also what is Wrong with its commander" in the game, so this isn't even too aggresive of a read, IMO.

For Taion, his bad coping is pretty front and center -- he's got a strong need for control, but also little faith in his own judgement; he's suspicious of other people's conclusions, but also defers to them when it comes to decision-making. He can't even fully stand by his own conclusions most of the time, because the more critical it is to get something right, the worse the runaway anxiety gets, and the more he slips into analysis paralysis. Taion doesn't trust himself, and doesn't trust anyone else -- so no decision he makes can truly be grounded, everything is up for second-guessing, and he can never have peace knowing he made the right call.

Isurd, on the surface, is kind of the opposite. He's very decisive, to the point where he tends to pull ahead of the pack because he's already two steps to a solution while everyone else is still catching up to a problem. Undoubtedly some of the problems with Lambda's system are that peacetime operations are more complicated and they're simply not equipped to handle them at this scale, but a larger problem is that even while authority diffuses down the chain, if there is a fuck-up, ultimately the responsibility will be his. Absolutely nobody is allowed to make judgement calls unless he's personally appointed them, and even then he retains a veto. Isurd also doesn't trust himself, and also doesn't trust anyone else -- so no decision can be made without a second opinion, and he has to run himself ragged not to slow the system he's set up down.

It reads as a kind of hypervigilance -- neither of them has fully dealt with their trauma, and so are mentally braced to react to a similar situation. Now, I do think to an extent both of them probably just are like that, naturally -- Isurd is the strategist of the generation, after all, and Taion is very curious and intellectually engaged in general, they're absolutely the kind of people where "comparing notes" is a kind of love language -- but it just kind of goes to show that sometimes bad coping looks like good coping, but too much. They're overprepared to respond to their own judgement failing, and it's wearing both of them down.

I think this reading of the situation also nicely harmonises with how little presence Isurd has in Lambda's quest line. By his own admission, he's been going through the war essentially on autopilot since Nimue's death, letting the problem grown unfettered just because he naturally tends towards hogging responsibilities. Delegating and leaving actual decision-making to other people is a step forward -- or at least a step sideways -- for him, and leaving Lambda and having to just trust that they'll be okay without his supervision would further help with that. He's at least trying to disengage, even if he's very bad at it, being a dumb moron workaholic who has to make everything into a production.

#van's answers #Xenoblade Chronicles 3 #Taion #Isurd #quetzalpapalotl #NATURALLY I write Isurd with MUCH WORSE coping than this #because characters I like exist exclusively to suffer for my entertainment lmao #after I'm finished with the fic I'm gonna post the big brainstorming document I've been keeping b/c I genuinely think it's some good stuff #like the one big weakness with this read is that Isurd is generally pretty chill and not really that uptight #At least not compared to how I'd expect someone with this level of control issues to be #I'm making the best of the text here get off my goat a Van's gotta eat #so I just chalk it up to a combination of 'genuinely just being genius level smart but not wanting to condescend to people about it' #which is the true source of his ridonkulous work ethic exarcerbated by the batshit high amount of energy #I am once again forced to conclude that I have A Type