So, when I was in elementary school, my sister had this book series called Spirit Animals by various authors, and I picked up the first book and read it and was obsessed for a year or two, then put them down and never thought about them again.
But it’s always nice to revisit your old books, so if you’re in the, like, 5-person spirit animals fandom, welcome! If you’re not, you should be. It’s fun. We get a new piece of fanart every few years. You’ll also be hopelessly confused by this post without having read the books.
Now, in blood ties we meet what I think is one of the most underrated and underutilized characters of the series: Lishay.
What do we really know about Lishay?
It’s basically canon at this point that she and Tarik were in love. Her brother’s dead soon before she meets our main characters. Her spirit animal dies at the end of the book, widely considered the worst thing that could ever happen to you. She’s a native of Southern Zhong (in the book of Shane). Oh, and she and her brother were twins. She’s around Tarik’s age, so middle-aged, probably in her forties or at most, late thirties. Tarik describes her as “one of [the Greencloaks’] finest.”
And you can do so much with just that information!
I would actually go so far as to have her and Tarik be married. This is how you can tell I typed this at midnight and that I have too much time on my hands, but seriously, it makes them more than two greencloaks who maybe have a thing for each other trying to keep four kids alive in the middle of a war; they have lives that they left behind! It makes Tarik’s eventual death and Lishay’s entire existence in the series even more tragic. And think of the old married couple jokes there could’ve been!
She and her brother were twins, and I feel like he maybe deserved more than a single sentence in passing. Maybe her brother and Tarik were also friends, and now they have to both cope with their grief. Maybe Lishay’s used to always having her brother guard her back, so Tarik notices that she fights less effectively without him--two halves of a whole, as the whole ying-and-yang thing goes. And with her spirit animal dying, we open up room for Meilin to have flashbacks in Fire and Ice about Lishay helping her through the grief of losing her own father right in front of her. Part of what makes Lishay’s character so interesting to me is that she’s probably the character we see go through the most and worst losses in the least amount of time. Her homeland is being attacked, she’s under constant physical and emotional stress, and she loses her twin brother and spirit animal in what, two weeks, AT MOST? And then she still has to fight a war?
Lishay is a native of southern zhong and seems familiar with the jungles of that region, so why not have her explicitly be a native OF THE JUNGLES? Make up a tribe for her to belong to. That makes the fight in the jungles more personal, because this is her home. Show her skills at hunting, climbing trees, swimming in the rivers, and archery, etc., skills that you could only pick up in the jungle. Give us a perspective of Zhong that goes beyond Meilin’s rich girl, general’s daughter life; give us women of the jungle who are trained to hunt and fight alongside their brothers, people who live in treehouses or wooden huts. And Lishay is supposed to be one of the greencloak’s finest warriors! Give us a taste of her swordfighting or archery skills that makes her so remarkable. Give her a more crucial role in the final battle; show her being close to other powerful greencloaks, like Olvan and Lenori.
And in the book of shane, make it undeniably obvious that the only reason he got away was because of the talismans, not because she couldn’t shoot him out of a tree.
In short, give her the fucking credit.
