#for the record i dont think its intended as a 1:1 reading of american-middle eastern politics

[ahamkara-apologist]

Something that people don't really seem to see (or perhaps it's just my perspective, as the son of an Iranian immigrant) is that the hatred for Eramis among fancircles goes beyond pure media illiteracy and seems to be directly tied to anti-immigrant racism. People on youtube seem to be fixated on the idea that she's a 'terrorist' for firing the Warsats- it doesn't matter how many times people tell them that she didn't have a choice in the matter with the Witness being right behind her, or that her target was the Traveler rather than the Last City, or that it means nothing when they never actually discharged in the first place. It doesn't matter that she has a very good reason to hate humanity-the Vanguard in particular- after they systematically destroyed her House and any attempt that the Eliksni made to rebuild a functional society. To them, she's a terrorist, and terrorists are executed for what they've done no matter what. There's no consideration for the circumstances that led them to this point, because these people grew up in a landscape where that does not matter- all that matters is the elimination of a perceived barbaric threat against their nation. And this ideal is extended into the video game

Idk, it just gives me a really bad taste in my mouth that people are so vitrolic towards the Eliksni who do not trust the Vanguard. It doesn't matter who started the Eliksni-Human war (the answer is that both sides started wars across the Houses), the end result is that post Final Attempt, the Eliksni had lost, and we continued to systematically hunt down and eliminate any attempt at reformation with the end goal of exterminating them from the system. If it wasn't for Misraaks and House Light, the Vanguard would have eliminated them from the system entirely, firing on civilians and protectors alike and sending agents in to wipe out as much of them as possible. And Eramis watched all of this happen from the outside, after seeing the entire collapse of her society and the faliure of the Final Attempt, as well as the Vanguard's moves to put Eliksni refugees in a bombed-out district with very little effort for actual reconcilliation to any Eliksni not House Light. She has a very valid reason to hate our guts, and her acting against us doesn't mean that she's a terrorist, but bc she's a refugee from a hostile nation that we meddled in (cough America cough), she's seen as the bad guy, even when the narrative of the story displays that its much more complex than anything we saw when we first started out as a New Light