*spoiler* What was the point of making Yda... *spoiler*

[daltonjl]

Sorry if this question has been asked already, but what was the point of making Yda into Lyse AND (to my knowledge) revealing that the real Yda had died even before 1.0? I haven't played Stormblood or Heavensward in a few years, but in hindsight, it just doesn't seem to contribute to the story in any meaningful way.

I felt like it would have been far, far more meaningful for Yda to have simply been Yda, to have escaped from Ala Mhigo as a child and later join the Scions, and then to have dedicated herself to her work with the Scions in the following years and become complacent with her new life. The complacency could have led to an extreme feeling of guilt after Papalymo dies as a result of Ilberd's actions - actions which, if I recall correctly, were driven by resentment at Eorzea's inaction and especially by resentment at the inaction of Ala Mhigan refugees like Raubahn and, in this hypothetical case, Yda. She could have felt guilty because she could have done more for her country and possibly saved Papalymo in the process, which also could have given her the resolve to fight for her long lost homeland to prevent deaths like this from happening again - two very powerful reasons for her to join you in Stormblood and eventually leave the Scions at the end. This whole scenario just seems like it would have made more sense and been more consistent with the themes and other characters of the expansion. Raubahn would have understood and been able to guide her because his situation would have been similar.

With Lyse, she just doesn't seem to have a good reason to fight for Ala Mhigo. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like she wants to fight for them because her sister and father did. She didn't really remember her childhood or have any substantial ties to Ala Mhigo. She just enters the country and wants to fight because...her sister wanted to? Even the short stories on the Lodestone about Lyse were incredibly weak. M'naago resolves to follow Lyse because she finds that Lyse had beaten up a bunch of Garleans with bestial ferocity despite being mostly an outsider, but...wouldn't anyone fight with bestial ferocity if their lives were on the line? The whole story and everything surrounding Lyse just seems so inconsistent and contrived, and I don't understand WHY when it seems like it would have been so much better and consistent and emotional to just have her be Yda.

So yeah! What was the point of making Lyse? Would it have been better to just have Yda be Yda without the (in my opinion) superfluous sister subplot?

[Vyrerus]

Why Lyse

It's kind of funny, because a lot of the points in your post still apply to Lyse, as Lyse. My take on it is that they did it to further separate her from Papalymo, and also try to give Papalymo's sacrifice more weight. Basically, he was watching over Lyse, and giving her the appearance of a Sharlayan Archon. By removing those marks from Lyse... if she'd actually been Yda, it was established that Yda actually did earn Archonship. Then Square would have had to explain why she didn't have them in the Stormblood trailer, but let's forget that for a moment. This would mean that for Yda to be believable as a Member of The Circle of Knowing, she wouldn't need aetherology explanations, and should technically have been nearly as learned as Y'shtola or at the very least, Thancred. The real Yda is supposed to be older than Lyse as well, old enough to spirit her away to Sharlayan.

If it were still Yda, she'd be older, likely mid 30s. Lyse is 25. She was 5 when she fled her homeland, meaning her feeling like an outsider makes perfect sense. If you were born somewhere, and only lived there until you were 5, then you wouldn't exactly have many memories there, nor an incredibly strong attachment to the place. Any attachment you did feel would be based off of older family or family friends who informed your views as you were raised, to give you a bias.

As for your point about, "could have saved Papalymo." No, you should replay the story. That was a sacrifice he was willing to make, and Thancred takes her by force to the airship. If the WoL tries to stand by and stop/save him, he blows them into the airship with magic. What Papalymo did was suicide by sealing spell.

Ultimately, the decision for this is admittedly arbitrary, but it was done to distance her from Papalymo and the Scions to try to make it more believable when she gives up being a Scion. To more clearly evince that she is an Ala Mhigan. That she's lost her whole family to the Garleans. That's why she fights with them in mind. Obviously it fell flat, because nobody liked it. I think the main reason being, she'd been Yda since 1.0, so for a lot of people, the reveal came off as, "Explain away the trailer." But I think it's one of the few times they had the plan for the character all along, because it fits fairly nicely with all the previous scenes with the character, where she is notably less learned than the other scions, unwilling to show her face, and only really excels at fighting.

[SpiralMask]

I assume it was to give her some sort of motivation for so fervently trying to work with the ala mhigan resistance--"i was too young to be in the resistance when all that bad shit went down, but my older sister totally was and people need a figurehead like her, so I'll carry on her dream" and all that. Pretending to be her big sis so people will have a name to cling to. It also gave her a cover when she was spying on the gryphon/griffin's forces leading up to stormblood.

Though she could have just done the same for her father (also a resistance bigshot iirc), so idk. I think the point was that Lyse has only heard of the atrocities of ala mhigo under garlean occupation since she was too young to remember much, while Yda was and lived through that, and it's easier to support someone who knows what you've been through/are going through? Then again it would be a PR nightmare if she revealed truth after doing so.

[daltonjl]

My take on it is that they did it to further separate her from Papalymo, and also try to give Papalymo's sacrifice more weight. Basically, he was watching over Lyse, and giving her the appearance of a Sharlayan Archon. By removing those marks from Lyse... if she'd actually been Yda, it was established that Yda actually did earn Archonship. Then Square would have had to explain why she didn't have them in the Stormblood trailer, but let's forget that for a moment. This would mean that for Yda to be believable as a Member of The Circle of Knowing, she wouldn't need aetherology explanations, and should technically have been nearly as learned as Y'shtola or at the very least, Thancred.

Oh! That's a very good point about her total lack of knowledge on aetherology.

As for your point about, "could have saved Papalymo." No, you should replay the story. That was a sacrifice he was willing to make, and Thancred takes her by force to the airship. If the WoL tries to stand by and stop/save him, he blows them into the airship with magic. What Papalymo did was suicide by sealing spell.

Sorry, I should have clarified - my point was not about saving Papalymo directly in that moment or even saving Papalymo at all. It was just a part about what a hypothetical Yda's thought process would be following his death. Maybe if it were Yda all along - an Yda who became complacent in the Scions like Raubahn became complacent with the Flames - then she would feel that she could have done more for Ala Mhigo and stopped someone like Ilberd from creating the very circumstances that led to Papalymo's death. Then, she would have felt more resolved to do more from that point on than she had in the past. It was all just a hypothetical scenario that I feel would have been more consistent with the themes in Stormblood. Papalymo dies regardless.

But I think it's one of the few times they had the plan for the character all along, because it fits fairly nicely with all the previous scenes with the character, where she is notably less learned than the other scions, unwilling to show her face, and only really excels at fighting.

This actually does make me feel a little less negative about the character. I still feel like the real Yda would have had more potential as a character, though with what you said in mind, it really wouldn't fit as well with previous scenes and been inconsistent with her status as a member of the Circle of Knowing.

[Draginhikari]

I think much of it had to do with the story they wanted to try to tell (One can debate the success of the story but I think it's clear of what they were trying to do). They seemed to want to tell the story of a person growing to understand some of nuances of the war and to grow as their own person from a result of those actions.

Yda herself presents some of the same problems some of the original Scions had with their character growth. Thancred, Y'shtola, Papalymo, and Urianger basically initially existed to be able to explain things that the Warrior of Light needs to know through exposition. The only time they could really grow is when they were put in a particular context where they're knowledge and hordes of resource really won't resolve a problem which is why Thancred, Y'shtola and Urianger worked so well in Shadowbringers when they were removed from the status quo and forced to adapt to a new situation.

I think the problem with Yda as the main figure of Stormblood is that this would not of put her far enough out of her status quo to make the conflicts Lyse has really work or they would have to be written drastically differently. Yda IS experienced, she IS aware of the complications of the war, and she knows particularly everyone involved in the conflict. There would be little reason for Yda to go with the WoL to Kugane given she likely would have been less rash in response to the situation nor would there be any questioning in Yda’s mind on her position in the Ala Mhigian Resistance where Lyse does express some hesitation from time to time.

Could of it been done? Yes, probably. Though it would probably need to be a very different story then what we got. Given Stormblood mostly seemed to exist to get the Ala Mhigo and Doma subplots resolved as quickly as possible, it probably made more sense at the time.

[TinkerTech]

I was one of those post-release players, so I never had the "but they had to justify the trailer!" mentality. From my perspective Lyse's reveal made sense, even if it felt a bit cheesed. What fell flat immediately afterwards was how incompetent she was at integrating herself into the Ala Mhigan resistance. Again, understandable, but it also breaks the suspension of disbelief when she becomes the leader of the resistance at the end. It would have made more sense for Yda to take that role. They didn't give Lyse anything to build on once her disguise was torn away, and it shows. (Seriously she spends most of HW running around with the resistance in Eorzea, she should be at least a LITTLE more competent.)

A secondary note (And the one that caught my attention) is that I personally think that while Lyse feels guilty over Papalymo's death, I don't think she would have felt like she could have prevented it. Because A) Papalymo can be just as stubborn as she can and B) Ilberd didn't seem like the kind of person who would be stopped. He wanted Ala Mhigo back, and he wanted it back 15 years ago. He couldn't understand why people like Raubahn seemingly 'abandoned' their people, when they were first dealing with their own issues before biding their time and building their forces. (It's kinda hard to lead a rebellion from the bloodsands.) He was not going to listen to reason, he just wanted the same bull-headed force that freed them from the Mad King and immediately let the Garleans in. People like Yda and Raubahn were willing to retreat, strategize and wait until they had a surer footing. And thankfully, Lyse learned from them.

I think the character change would have landed better had the writers shown Lyse with other skills that could appeal her to the resistance, aside from her fighting skills. Maybe having her stay and personally help rebuild rather than travel all the way to Othard just because the WoL does would have helped.

[MikkoAkure]

One thing that's interesting is that if you played 1.0 and started in Gridania, then you met the original Yda. 1.0 had players time travel into the past a lot with the echo beyond just cutscenes. The echo flashbacks were 10-15 years into the past, so Lyse would have still been a child.

Another reason for the switcheroo is that by having Lyse not be a Archon, that gives her more reason to be able to stay behind in Ala Mhigo and for the narrative to focus on a smaller set of characters for Shadowbringers.

[RenewalXVII]

This sorta came up in a different thread recently, so I'll just quote myself from there:

Thematically, I think part of what the writers were aiming for in SB were the stories of young people who had grown up entirely in the shadow of conquered states: Lyse, Fordola, and Yotsuyu all spent most of their formative years with a homeland controlled by the Empire. It's clear that a thematic parallel was set up among them. Yda as we knew her by HW was a bit too old for that, and the writers wanted their two-fer with an Ala Mhigan Scion invested in freeing their nation, while also being young enough to parallel Fordola and Yotusyu.

Like, the obvious counterfactual for SB's story is for Lyse to be introduced as an entirely separate character from Yda in late HW/early SB, and I don't think people would have been any more invested in such a Lyse than the one we did get. The writers were attempting to bind old affection for Yda--which I certainly have since I started the game in Gridania--with a new character concept in Lyse, and their two-fer attempt didn't land cleanly enough for a lot of people.

[Mimilu]

My theory is that they realized there was too many main-Scions and decided to cut some out at the end of 2.x. >w>

[daltonjl]

This sorta came up in a different thread recently, so I'll just quote myself from there:

Wow! That is a really good point and it makes a buttload of sense. I believe it would apply to Hien, as well, since I believe he grew up during the Doman occupation and received a Garlean education, if I'm not mistaken. If that's the case, then I guess they must have stumbled a bit with the writing for any number of reason, like the ones stated previously. Good stuff!