Is Lyse ugly?

[Vyrerus]

The problem

I think the character of Lyse suffers from several jarring disconnects that actually started when she was still Yda. As Yda she was shown to be working with the Ala Mhigan Resistance, but usually off screen or in meanwhile scenes... then they did the dramatic shift to finding out that she is Lyse before we went to Ala Mhigo. So we already suffer a mental disconnect here, where all of the work that she did for the Resistance was done under the guise of Yda, only for her to cast off that persona before returning to them. I honestly don't remember if the Resistance knew all along, but I feel like on a psychological level this causes the player to dissociate the actions she went through before with the actions she's going through now. And it really doesn't help at all that the actions done before were off screen. It's like how the story tells us that Minfilia did a ton of organization and behind the scenes sort of work for the Scions all along, never really showing it... it may as well have never happened.

Insofar as Lyse's "holding pattern" goes in the Far East segment... it's more that she's shown to be considering what it means to lead people, but she's musing on it by herself most of the time. This is another type of disconnect, because we're not shown anything concrete other than her musing occasionally, generally followed up by her beating something up.

I do think the sudden transferal of Resistance Leadership to her is supposed to feel jarring. Despite Conrad being just another generic old man, I think they were trying to illustrate the unpredictability of war... it falls flat though cause he's ultimately a character that the player has spent minimal amounts of time with, so we feel almost nothing about it. Lyse gets sad about it, but we don't really empathize, because their entire relationship was built up off screen, and still has that scent of the whole she was pretending to be Yda so did you really know her anyway stink on it.

Honestly, she doesn't get much build up once we return at level 67, either. The focus goes to the operations we're now going to undertake. Krile being kidnapped. Lakshmi being a thing. It's not until 2/3rds of the way through southern peaks that Lyse really starts getting propped up in front of you as a set piece all of the time. We get one Echo scene of her old man, who inspired Raubahn and Ilberd alike, but since we never met him before, and only get that one vision... it's kind of hard to draw actual parallels between him and Lyse other than the fantasy logic that heroism/leadership are traits that are passed on through blood.

I guess the TL; DR, the point I'm trying to make is that Lyse as a character was executed very very poorly on the whole, because what they tried to do with Stormblood was setup a ton of future events, and I really think they sacrificed her character on that altar.

[Rinhi]

snip

what also doesn't help her one bit were her failures after she was appointed leader and how she was the focus of the weaker stb part while hien by comparison, despite being as much of a "failure" as lyse, is seen in a way better light by many people due to the yanxia part of stb being considerably better than the ala mhigan part