#to and i think ysayle's story is inherently a tragedy i think her death was written on

[elfyourmother]

but I think what wigged me out so badly about est/ysayle was how gross and heteronormative it always seemed to be whenever I would run across it in the tags. it was always “lol they fight bc they secretly wanna fuck” which always gets my back up w m/f shops, and inordinately focused on the ~star-crossed tragedy~ w a lot of going on and on about her dying in a way that felt very much like textbook Woman in Refrigerator Syndrome

I’m sure there were folks who weren’t weird and vaguely misogynistic about it but since I never actively sought it out, I had this sort of thing shoved in my face just desperately trying to find any content w her which made me resent it that much more. I just wanted stuff where she was happy or doing shit besides being a tragically beautiful corpse to make Estinien sad and fueling his character development or wevs. and looking back on it, I think my original hc for her as a hard Kinsey 6 was almost entirely rooted in contrarian bitterness over all this. It was my way to shake my fist and push back against it. I don’t think it was so much that I legitimately saw her as a lesbian (and there are faves I do—Lyse 100%, Alisaie, and before then Tali in ME among others) as declaring her one was the easiest way to sidestep all that bullshit I didn’t like, while firmly centering her in her own story w/o everything being about a man, even one I love to death,

(and some of it too I think was internalized biphobia and a little bit of lingering fandom respectability politics from the BW bad old days. feeling like I was Bad for constantly writing all of my faves as bi, especially the ladies, and feeling like I was morally obligated in some way to put more lesbian rep in my fic bc otherwise I’m a bad wlw. it absolutely does not help that there are followers who do not at engage w anything I write or create except the f/f content, and I’m always afraid I’m not doing enough for them. also a contributing factor: the rash of “why tf is everything about shipping and romance” posts that were flying across my dash near daily for a while, that made me feel like even beyond everything else, emphasizing Estinien and Ysayle’s platonic metamour relationship re: the V with Gisele as the shared point was Proper, because then I wasn’t contributing to the problem and being a dumb slut for romance like I always am. note how what I actually want or need from my fic or what I think is fun or fulfilling to write was nowhere near this list of priorities and concerns! how fucked is that?)

what caused such a hard 180 on it? it was always tenuous tbh, I just never talked about it. Ysayle always had gobs of chemistry with Haurche any time I wrote her with him, unintentionally so, and I always felt really guilty about it. That should have been the first sign that I wasn’t being authentic w my work but...I just tried to ignore it

but one thing in particular set it off real bad, and I realized this really wasn’t fun. So sitting down and really thinking about all this, and talking through it with Dandy, made me realize that no actually there’s nothing wrong with interpreting Ysayle differently if it worked better. From there, once stripped of all the bullshit, I realized there was actually nothing inherently squicky to me about Est/Ysayle. and constantly pounding the “she’s like a sister to me!” drumbeat was starting to feel like protesting too much. when I gave myself permission to just set all the nonsense aside and consider it in the context of Gisele’s story, it was like my heart burst with rainbows. It’s not that Gisele and the lads were somehow incomplete without Ysayle, but they all feel so right together, that much more than the 4 + 1.

it works well for me in my verse because Ysayle lives as a start, which avoids the fridging, but even more than that, she has agency and her own reasons for joining the Scions, and she has her own distinct character arc that has very little to do with Estinien—she’s not even the one who convinces him to join up, in the end. she grows and changes over the course of the story and he has nothing to do with it. she forms bonds and connections that have nothing to do with him. in short, she’s a 3 dimensional character with a story that does not revolve around him. her role in mine is a lot bigger than just being his foil p, or a lost lenore figure. (he’s not even her only partner!)

so I can be really happy knowing how loved she is, how much she belongs with Gisele and the lads, because there’s more to her than that.

#negativity cw #a little bit I guess #more so talking about how I went from notp to ot3 w e/y #w heavy navel gazing as a warning #ice wife #azure the grouch