Oh oomf my lord please talk about Faye Ferin
OKAY HI IM HERE
faye is so fucking interesting as a character but i gotta say some ground rules real quick bc i run a STRICT program here. number one: if your only response to ANY of this is "shes hot" get out now. this is not for you. number two: im going to call her a fascist because that's what she is. do not beat around the bush.
that said, she's so interesting to me because i love hypocritical characters. i love how she is a control freak, every single issue she's fighting in some part was caused by an action she did. she has all her soldiers wiretapped. on paper, her motivations are understandable; she wants to unite the world and stop the calamity. but what she Does Not Say, is that she is going to unite the world by killing those who do not agree with her, or fall in like with "her justice." what she Does Not Say is that she is actively preventing the unification of multiple factions by (in the case of the undersea) killing the leviathans and stripping the undersea of its magic, and for pirates, declaring a war on all pirates because "pirates killed a RAFT officer," something that we know is not true and that She Herself is responsible for said RAFT officer's death.
but on a less sociopolitical level and a more interpersonal one, she's dare i say more abhorrent. her response to jayson (her own son) grieving over the brutal death of his Daughter was to basically lobotomize him to not care about it that much. she had ava killed and then dehumanized her to the point of making her nothing more than a headline and a reason to enact war on pirates. Ava's mother and sister didn't know ava was dead until a while after it happened. ava didn't even get a fucking funeral or memorial, but her death is used as an excuse for faye to gain more power, not just through war on pirates, but by voiding neutrality clauses islands (like Featherbrook) have and forcing them to align with RAFT, and colonizing islands that dont align with them (like Canella and arguably Edison Kingdom).
a very small thing she does that i just enjoy as a storytelling mechanic is her use of relational terms. in 118, when talking to jay, she refers to jay as "my granddaughter" she refers to jayson as "my son." she refers to ava as "your sister." she refers to malenia as "your mother" she removes any kind of relationship from herself to people she does not align herself with. and when jay denounces her, she insults her son's ability to raise children and does not refer to jay relationally again, literally she calls jay and ava "tainted women." there's a wonderful subtext there about oppression and fascism as tools of a cisheteropatriarchy, but i fear that may be a topic for another day.
