Ysayle for the meme!
How I feel about this character:
Love of my life light of my heart my queen my angel my everything!!!
...this got very long.
I mean I was pretty much doomed to stan Ysayle considering Shiva has always been bar none my favorite classic FF summon (alongside Phoenix), and the XIV design is my absolute favorite after X's Shiva. But Ysayle is one of my very favorite characters in the game and always will be, because of so many reasons I could go on and on and on about (and have), but mainly because of how unapologetic she was in her convictions even as she was incredibly vulnerable as a person. This is a woman who lost absolutely everything there was to lose as a young child and was dealt the most rotten hand imaginable, but when presented with proof of a profound injustice, threw herself into fighting it with everything she was. On the surface, in another other game (*cough*WoW*cough*), she could very easily have been a 2 dimensional one note sort of villain, but she has amazing amounts of depth to her, and her redemption arc is the gold standard to me as these things go, much less in XIV. They haven't gotten it right since her tbqh. Way too often in these kinds of stories, the heroes can't actually end up finding any lasting common ground with the antagonists and there's these arbitrary roadblocks put up largely to underscore ~the tragedy of it all~ and it just ends up being frustrating as hell, but Heavensward threw that right the fuck out and had us go on a roadtrip with Ishgard's Public Enemy #1 and she was reasonable. She wasn't some cackling stereotypical witch/femme fatale type leading us to our doom or we talked out of what she believed. Fuck, she was even right! It's just how she was going about things was awful, and she expressed genuine regret about it, even as she accepted the blood on her hands and the loss of her personal virtue as the price for peace. She was even willing to team up with the Azure Dragoon, someone she considered a genocidal butcher, if it meant peace. How could I not fall in love with her??? And she loves moogles. fhdsfksd
In short, Ysayle is literally everything I could have ever wanted in an Enemies to Friends story, except in how it ended obviously. Wonderfully complex character. Pretty.
All the people I ship romantically with this character:
Gisele is obviously #1, for all the reasons I've gushed about before and will continue to gush about, but first and foremost because they are absolutely perfect foils for each other in nearly every respect, and they compliment each other stunningly well. Only Emet has these two beat for Enemies to Friends to Lovers goodness and that's only because he's got the reincarnation romance angle to add to it. But Gisele x Ysayle have this air of capital-F Fate about them that is so fucking intriguing to me, there's the battle couple thing because they fight Primals together, but also in that of all Gisele's lovers, only Ysayle understands what it means to be chosen by Hydaelyn. I keep thinking of Tia Dalma's "touch of destiny" line every time I think of Gisele and Ysayle.
After Gisele, there's the lads ofc and Estinien foremost among them, with the heavy caveat that I'm very particular about that pairing to the point it honestly squicked me out for the longest time and I only started to ship it very recently. But in a not-grossly-heteronormative context, it's such a fantastic ship because much like with Gisele, Ysayle and Estinien are great foils for each other, have a ridiculous amount of things in common, and the adversarial distrust they had turning to grudging respect turning to low key affection turning to love is such a wonderful progression. And that's before the whole love triangle-to-metamour angle.
Aymeric and Haurche both have the metamour-to-lovers dynamic with her as well, but Aymeric is especially tasty given how very fraught it is--there's a forbidden fruit vibe with those two and I am a weak and simple femme. Her and Haurche are just...sunshine, really. They make me feel warm and cozy, and they will forever be bound by their love for Gisele making them nearly lose their lives to save her.
Y'shtola because Magic Baes but mostly because they're very alike, in that they tend to keep their cards close to their chest, are incredibly stubborn, and will go their own way and damn what anyone thinks. Them fucking off from the Crystarium and building a life together among the Night's Blessed is probably one of my fave ShB headcanons.
And Urianger, which I talked about when I did the chart.
My non-romantic OTP for this character:
Before I actually started shipping them, I would have put Estinien here, and everything I said up there also counts. But I would also add Emet, among the Scions she's not romantically involved with, bc that metamour relationship they have is incredible and I need to write more about it. And the twins obvs, most especially Alphinaud, who is very much a little brother to her.
My unpopular opinion about this character:
One of my few criticisms about Heavensward is that there's parts where it felt like they didn't know what to do with certain characters after a while and Ysayle's ultimate fate is probably the worst example. After having such a central role to the story for the heart of the xpac (the Great Dravanian Road Trip), she just kinda inexplicably fades out after quelling the riot, only to just come back for a Heroic Sacrifice. And she absolutely deserved better than to be treated like a loose end they forgot about and needed to tie up real quick.
She also deserves much more than to be treated as more than a footnote in Estinien's journey toward healing and being a Real Dragoon. I mentioned it above but I used to think Estinien x Ysayle squicked me so bad because I saw Ysayle as a lesbian, but then I realized I actually didn't, and I was just grossed out by how heteronormative the stuff I saw with them was. How often she was reduced to being a footnote in his character development, and that similarly to the way Haurche often gets treated in Haurche/WoL ships that follow canon, too often her whole role in teh content I saw was to be a love martyr and die so Estinien grows as a person and she's the Lost Lenore or w/e. Like fridging on steroids. And I find it repulsive (which is him naming his armor after her gave me hives). For a long time I mistook that for being squicked by Estinien x Ysayle period.
Then I realized what my pain point actually was with that ship (because I realized she had a ton of chemistry with Haurche in a thing I was doing), and that none of that gross shit actually applies in my verse, not just because she survives but more importantly she has a whole ass story of her own that he has absolutely nothing to do with Estinien. Ysayle's post Dragonsong arc involves her journey as a Scion, reckoning with what she did, and trying her best to atone. She continues to work for peace between Dravania and Ishgard as a Scion but she has a similarly parallel journey to Estinien's in that she has to figure out who she is now, if not Lady Iceheart the reincarnation of Saint Shiva. She's her own person with agency and a life and struggles and healing to do, not just some sad ethereal angel watching over him as he lives on. I still think that is a tragically unpopular opinion in some quarters.
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon:
First and foremost that she had survived to join the Scions, like in Gisele's verse. But if we couldn't have that, that her memory actually be honored the way Haurchefant's continually is. I love Haurchefant to death of course and I'm not upset about that (insofar as much as I am angry and sad that canon took him away too) but there is a glaring discrepancy in how the legacies of these two characters are treated in the game, and it absolutely reeks of misogyny. We are constantly able to make call backs to Haurche and what he meant to us, we talked to random people in Gridania of all places about him, during the Firmament quests.
Meanwhile, there was the E8 debacle which I've ranted enough about previously (and at length) but it will suffice to say that given our emotional connection to her, it was a slap in the face to Ysayle that she apparently warranted all of 1 fucking offhanded line and wasn't even an afterthought, when she should have been the emotional touchstone of the whole damn tier.
But it happened again, in a more subtle example, in 5.5. The entire patch Estinien is walking around in armor that he named after Ysayle and yet when we return with him to the place of her death--Azys Lla--on a mission to free a member of the First Brood no less, there's not a fucking peep about Ysayle. The talk you have with him about Fandaniel, where he expresses concern about what your plans are for him? There's a dialogue option like "I want to understand him" or something, I forget verbatim, but the point is it would have been a prime opportunity for him to respond with something like "not all your foes are like Ysayle" given that she was a foe we tried to understand, and eventually did, and became allies with. Shit, Ysayle is alive and well in my 'verse and went with them to free Tiamat, and Estinien and Gisele still had that conversation in my headcanon (with the added benefit of Emet being a good point too). And if that wasn't enough, later on in that (frankly infuriating) scene w Fordola after Paglt'han, Estinien says something like "some dreams are worth fighting for" and like...Ysayle's thing was referring to her dream of peace between man and dragon, she literally mentions it right before she turns into Shiva for the last time to make her big sacrifice. And we get nothing. Another opportunity to reference her and the impact she had on WoL AND Estinien, totally wasted. When I talk about it feeling a lot like they treated her as a loose end that needed tying up, so they killed her and then forgot all about her? This is the type of shit that I mean. And it just keeps happening, and it's so infuriating.
They just did Ysayle absolutely dirty and they continue to do her dirty and it's why I'm so adamant about writing her the way I do and giving her all the happiness ever.
