Oh my fucking god. Yanessa Halovar, you heinous, insidious bitch. Oh my god.
Right. Okay. Episode 27. Hal and Yanessa and Thaisha and the play. I’ve only caught up, and I’m having a meltdown right now. Oh, you bitch. You manipulative insidious bitch.
This scene:
Yanessa: We feel that when, ah. The play ends and Azgra is still dominant. Azgra wins, the revolution fails, the rebellion fails. And it feels like it’s going to be an extremely tragic or sombre or … unfortunate ending. We would love if, at the end, yes, Phokeon dies, but if he were to die and merge with a universal force, something that would show that his life, his rebellion, was not spent in vain. But rather that, in struggling and failing, his soul was actually redeemed and rewarded.
Hal: I am with you. I am with you. I think, I would like to suggest, that that is implied.
Yanessa: Let’s make it explicit! And further, I think there are some moments of comedy that just don’t hit in the first act. I think that there’s an element that we would like to bring as well of … Phokeon communicates a lot towards his people. He keeps bringing it back to the Rungjani. But of course there will be many in your audience who are not themselves Rungjani. Perhaps if there was something that he referred to that there was a spirit moving upon him. Something that he almost didn’t understand why he was doing what he was doing. That there was something communicating to him.
Hal, keeping it together, trying to bend it back away from where this is going: Yearning for freedom.
Yanessa: Yearning for redemption. Yearning for salvation.
Thaisha, livid: Redemption against what? Redemption from what?
Yanessa: We are all sinners.
Thaisha: Sure, but … is that the focus … Mm. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. (towards Hal) This is your play. And, ah. My people’s history. So you guys can keep … That’s fine.
I have never felt such a towering rage at what comes out of this woman’s mouth. Not even during the false resurrection. Because Thaisha has it bang on. Thaisha knows exactly what this is.
Yanessa, these edits, are flat-out trying to co-opt the Shaper’s War.
Okay. There are … In the short term she’s trying to stall opening night. That’s quite obvious. She’s so insistent. There’s a short term goal, and she probably doesn’t actually expect the edits to go through, even with a judicious helping of veiled threat. Hal came here with a Lloy. So Yanessa probably doesn’t actually expect these to go through. The main short-term goal is to delay the play. But. Even just her saying them.
And Kother’ai isn’t talking about the Shaper’s War directly. It’s a previous, failed rebellion against Azgra. Which. Dangerous in itself, given the Falconer’s rebellion and it’s sudden fresh relevance recently. It’s probably half the reason why she suddenly can’t let the play go ahead, in the wake of everything that’s happened this past week. Thjazi was killed on Tachonis orders, Halovar likely wasn’t planning for it. She may have originally intended to let the play happen, gain some good grace, but with the mood in the city shifting rapidly, she cannot let a play go ahead about a failed rebellion flinging hope for a successful one forward into the future. It’s got far too much resonance right now, she needs the inhabitants of Dol Makjar to not get a head of revolutionary fervour up in the current climate. Hence the sudden kibosh on the play and the insistence that it be delayed.
Delayed, or changed. Or, ideally, both.
But whether or not she expects these changes to be carried out, the sheer fact of her asking for them is …
It’s vile. It’s so vile. And so insidious.
… The orcs did not rebel for their own sakes. They didn’t decide to rebel at all. They were moved to it by a mysterious force. By a universal truth, perhaps, that predates the Shapers, to which the Shapers themselves were returned, to whom all souls belong. The Shapers were evil, obviously, and the Shaper’s War was obviously correct, but it wasn’t the orcs, the Rungjani, who were responsible for that rightness, it was something else. Some force. Some force that, conveniently, Yanessa herself has a direct line to, that resurrected her from the dead only last night.
No wonder Thaisha was internally clawing at the walls. Yanessa is straight up trying to co-opt the Shaper’s War, the history of Thaisha’s people, their greatest and most terrible sacrifice, into propping up Yanessa’s own fucking fake-ass religion.
Oh, I wanted to rip her face off. Congratulations to both Hal and Thaisha for holding that together, because I have never felt such fury towards this woman as I did this conversation. To even suggest that. To a Lloy. To two Rungjani.
Hal’s play is a celebration of the orcish people, their sacrifice, their suffering. To the rebellious spirit that was always there in them, the longing for freedom, the determination to not only escape slavery but destroy their slaver, to stand and fight even against gods themselves in that cause, no matter how often they failed, how often they suffered, how often they were slaughtered. Phokeon’s rebellion failed. But the one that came later? Did not. And now this play, in honour of that failed rebellion, that first and failed attempt at freedom, takes place on the god’s own ground. They honour that long ago sacrifice while standing on Azgra’s own blood.
And Yanessa fucking Halovar … wants to suggest that maybe that wasn’t the orcs themselves at all. They weren’t people, they didn’t stand up for themselves, they were tools. They were moved. By a mysterious force. As tools to end an obvious evil.
An evil that no one else in the world objected to until the orcs took the choice of inaction out of everyone’s hands.
This goddamn colonial missionary white saviour goddamn fucking bullshit. All wisdom, all truth, comes from white (or in this case human) religion. Native people could not act for their own good, much less the good of all, unless they were guided to it by a much more … truthful, powerful, mysterious force, that incidentally happens to speak only through white human mouths.
Oh, I want to rip her face off. And she so good at what she does. Look at the city right now. The Lloy wing, the history of the Lloys and the Rungjani and the Shapers War, vanished and in limbo at the Archenade. The Revolutionary Council itself under direct attack, from Yanessa’s own mouth. And now this. This direct attack on the histories and stories of the orcish people. This displacement of their stories inside their own damned city. ‘There will be many in your audience who will not be Rungjani themselves’. Oh, you bitch.
The Tachonis are fighting a war of magic and force. The Halovar are fighting a war of culture.
And while it’s far, far too early to say they’re winning, they sure as fuck came out swinging.
