(07-04-2017, 06:41 PM)Edda Wrote:(07-04-2017, 02:47 AM)Virella Wrote: You know, I would have been fine with that if it was just at start of MSQ, but she continues to do this lol. That is what fucking bothers me.
Yeah I really don't get the people who are claiming that Lyse grew a lot through MSQ and accomplished so much on her own. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to like her a lot too, but I'm not going to fool myself into thinking the writing around her was good, or that anything about her character 'development' was handled well. She's static from start to finish. Sure, she feels different from Yda, but she's still goofy and selfish and childish... if anything I noticed these traits more in Stormblood than I did before (though that could be because we've simply spent more time with her/my memory is shit). She got two wardrobe changes and made the leader of the Resistance, despite not having any skills a leader might need. The writing around her was as bad if not worse than Minfilia's.
Part of me wants to argue 'it's not the character that's bad, just the writing,' like I do with Minfilia... but constantly getting mad at oppressed non-combatants that are just trying to get by for not seeing things YOUR way is a pretty shitty character trait, lol. Ugh god, why.
Like Ave alluded to, Lyse has a bad case of what I would call Bella Swan syndrome. We're told countless times throughout the story how competent she is, how good she is, how right she is for the position; how we're supposed to care about her and her struggles, and how she truly earned everything she was given. Yet the writing does not fall in line with these sentiments. The writers failed the most basic of writing tropes with Lyse in that we're TOLD about how worthy she is, but never actually SHOWN it. A fact which trips up many a person it seems and allows them to falsely believe the spiel without hard evidence to back it, which happened similarly with discussions about Bella's inflated status as a feminism symbol when she was anything but.*
Don't get me wrong, I'm praying Lyse develops properly in the coming patches as I've always had a soft spot for characters who start as unlikable and end up being something so much more than even they could have dreamed of. Yet unlike the Youko Nakajima's of the world, Lyse has been placed so high upon a pedestal already and basically told that her naivete isn't an issue that I can't see how they're going to fix this convoluted mess they've created. Not without pulling the same stunt they did with Alphinaud and the Crystal Braves.
Which to be blunt, is what Lyse's writing reminds me of. She's a bastardization of Minfillia, yes. Yet more than that she's following right in ARR Alphinaud's footsteps down to the inflated sense of importance the plot is trying to contrive upon her. Why they're making near the same mistake, down to the plot beats, is boggling my mind given the fact that we needed an entire expansion after the fact to redeem Alphinaud of his mistakes.
*This is not to say you can't like Lyse or her arc, but the similarities between her and Twilight's titular character in terms of raw WRITING MISTAKES cannot go unstated.
