Let's talk about WoL!Fordola AU Lyse!
I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about the not-White elephant in the room: why does Lyse have brown skin in my WoL!Fordola AU?
While most of the changes in that AU flow from the divergence point that "Krile was the reincarnation of Azem rather than Meteor," Lyse's appearance doesn't have anything to do with that, obviously!
So yeah, cards on the table: The primary reason she looks like that is because canon Lyse being so pale-skinned has always sat wrong with me. I tend to judge characters more by their written personality than their visuals (see also: the silly missing pants on Fordola's Skulls uniform, which I'll probably also change haha). And the game's writing repeatedly underlines that Lyse is meant to look like an average Ala Mhigan Highlander, shhh please ignore her actual model.
And yeah, there's a conversation that could be had about how people remember Ala Mhigo as having a mainly darker-skinned population, even though several other characters like Minfilia, Erik (MNK quests), and Raulf (CUL quests) are actually fair-skinned. It's a nation-state that got started as a hodgepodge of many different Hyur clans that were all fleeing the Fifth Calamity, after all.
There's just one problem with that justification, for Lyse specifically…
It's that her father looks like this!
And at the end of the day, Lyse's function in the narrative is to be the face, the poster girl, the representation of Ala Mhigo to the players. So it's particularly ironic when her character design looks more at home in Sharlayan or Gridania (which both initially rejected her) than with her fellow countrymen.
Truly delving into the nuances of canon Lyse's appearance is a conversation that's out of my lane, given that I am White myself. But even with my own limited understanding, I've noticed that it often results in her Stormblood arc being seen as a "White savior/outsider" narrative, rather than the story of a refugee who fled her homeland as a child who struggles and ultimately succeeds at reconnecting with her heritage as an adult. And while there are certainly valuable stories that can be told about characters who have "passing privilege" and don't immediately clock as the discriminated/oppressed minority they are part of… or of adopted characters who do not resemble their parents… that's not the story being told in Stormblood. We never get lines about Lyse's appearance being unusual or her trying to navigate that distinction - again, instead we get plenty of lines to the contrary, that affirm that she's meant to visually remind people of her father.
When playing through Stormblood for the first time, it felt to me that perhaps the writers intended to present a typical Ala Mhigan-appearing character, but either because of existing character design inertia (Yda's model being a White-looking Midlander since 1.0) or because racist/colorist marketers didn't want the poster girl of the expansion to not be pale (or probably both, sigh), she ended up in this oddball Schrödinger's character of color state.
By changing that in my AU, I wanted to further emphasize that Lyse is not seen as an outsider by other Ala Mhigans - especially in comparison to Fordola's uneasy status. That's the major reason.
As for a few more scattered minor reasons…
-This is incredibly silly, but self-insert ships are kind of a squick for me, and IRL I look quite similar to canon Lyse! Adding an extra level of distance by changing her appearance makes it feel less weird/more fun for me to write about her, heh.
-There's this awful trend in fandom spaces to ignore mixed race canon ships in favor of shipping two white characters together, or of downplaying/lightening the character of color's skin. As a Fordolyse shipper (as opposed to the more "canon" Arenvald/Fordola), I want to avoid contributing to this trend where I can.
-Gosh dang it we need more variety in the Scions! Enough with the pale hair and skin combo already it's so boring!! :P
Why this specific look?
Honestly? It's because when I first got my hands on NPC-altering mods, "hey what if I give Lyse her dad's skin tone" was one of the first things I tried just to test the mod out… and it kind of stuck, haha. That's just how Lyse looks by default for my game now, and I occasionally forget to turn it off!
Of course, with that working… why stop there? And indeed, literally the next thing I tried was seeing if I could turn Lyse into a Highlander that had some actual muscle on her arms. Unfortunately, that didn't go so well - it's beyond my (still very beginner level) modding ability to put Lyse's custom Midlander face on a Highlander body. And even if I did, Highlanders having different emote animations means some cutscenes would break or have her out of frame. Boo.
In theory, there's still more I could do, though. I remember once stumbling upon a picture of a gorgeous Lyse that had darker hair/eyes and her facial features slightly altered to be more SWANA-typical. And I could at least do the hair/eyes part of that… but at that point, would she still read as Lyse to people running across my gposes out of context? Or does she now look like an OC?
Indeed, there's yet another whole discussion that could be had about the "average Ala Mhigan" combination of straight blonde hair + blue eyes + brown skin also potentially being an unfortunate fantasy trope. But fixing that wouldn't just require changing Lyse, it would involve redesigning a lot more NPCs. And that's a hefty undertaking I'm not particularly interested in doing!
Still, if readers really want to see Lyse with dark brown hair and eyes… I might still switch to that! Heck, it's not like any of this is set in stone - this is all just a fun AU that I'm plenty open to changing, and I welcome any criticism or advice!