Raven World

🖤⚜️🖤Raven World🖤⚜️🖤

y'shtola

quiz: tragic play character — yiuno.

Misunderstood Villain.

Prepare for an onslaught of both the most dehumanizing and hateful takes, and flood of thirst comments. You’re chronically misunderstood; whether or not you’re actually evil is debatable. You may be acting out for revenge, to defend someone you love, or even just to protect yourself—you’re a pretty jaded person. You don’t trust or even really like most people—perhaps you did, at one point, but that part of you is gone, and you don’t go a single day without grieving it. You think a lot about what your life could have been. You’re stuck in the past—you’re angry and maybe you don’t even want to be, but this is the only way you can see to survive. You’re open, but less in a trusting way and more like a wound. You don’t like to let people see you, but the hurt spills out of you before you can stop it. You’re impulsive, even as you try hard to plan and prepare. Maybe someday your side of the story will finally be heard. Until then, you can convince yourself that being hated is safer anyway.

link to quiz.

Oh, wow. What an eerily accurate result.

Yiuno embodies many aspects of an anti-hero: be it common tropes (ex. Dark and Troubled Past), or tip the scales further into extremity (ex. Psycho for Hire and Femme Fatale), it’s really fun working on his characterization… as much as I struggle to comprehend his complex, multilayered nature.

I dunno if people see him as a misunderstood villain—guaranteed, this guy literally kills for a living, and he was a war criminal at one point (as a major participant during the Magi War in the Fifth Astral Era). His unique physical condition has twisted his perception of time, like he’s stuck in a psychological limbo akin to a living hell, for eternity. While the idea of eternal life has been explored many times in the game (both the MSQ and mostly the ARR side-quests), to an immortal like Yiuno, only death can bring him true peace.

Oh wait, sounds like Emet-Selch much? Not really—for one, Yiuno does not crave for the past (in fact, he wished he could erase it and start over again), and he doesn’t believe in utopia. While Emet tried to justify his genocidal acts as a “necessary ritual” to reclaim his lost paradise, Yiuno doesn’t even bother to sugar coat the war crimes he’d committed. Though Emet (in Shadowbringers, not Endwalker) did humor the idea of giving the current world a chance as he observed how WoL and the Scions tried to save the First, he never stopped to show outright contempt for the Sundered, calling them lesser beings unworthy of existing. Yiuno, however, never harbors any form of racism or social prejudice towards anyone—on one hand, he sees people as, well, just people; on the other hand, he may appear to be rather apathetic and detached (and hence why he could kill people as willingly as Emet, but for different reasons).

It also didn’t help that his childhood was equally fucked up. Born into a clan with an unconventional (and controversial) family system and societal rules, Yiuno grew up pretending to be a girl for many years just so that he could stay together with his twin sister for as long as possible. This twisted upbringing gave him a rather unique outlook to gender and sexuality—while he identify himself as biologically male and is very much aroace, mentally he feels disconnected and sees them as mere labels. It’s hard for me to explain in a way that people can understand, without radical folks jumping the gun and dissing me about “misrepresentation” and stuff, so I won’t go into details here. (If you want to know more, feel free to ask me in DMs!)

I guess the last line rings true—perhaps it’s easier to hate him for no reason at all. I mean, unless it’s his soulmate Y’shtola or the energetic curious child Sora, very few people have the patience and time to learn more about a walking history like Yiuno.

If history must be unwritten, let it be unwritten. Become what you must.

🔥⚜️Fire in my Soul⚜️🔥

She wanted to be courted with mysterious language.

― Anaïs Nin

“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.”

― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing