#i don't take kindly to people who try to lessen her and her impact

[stomp-that-ho-regard]

I saw one of your old posts about C/lexa shippers latching onto Yasha and BOY IS IT TRUE. Looking back Lexa had very little personality besides ruthless leader but fandom!Lexa was secretly soft and loved candles and flowers. It feels like fandom just latched onto her as a new chance at Lexa and didn't care that she was essentially just a different shell with some equally problematic cultural appropriation.

Slow your roll there, anon. We do not shit-talk Lexa in this house. 

While I do agree with you that fanon Lexa was indeed softer than canon Lexa, she did have soft moments in the show. Did fandom take that idea and exaggerate it? Absolutely, yes. But they didn’t pull it out of their asses. Which is NOT the case with the Yasha situation.

Also, can we (by ‘we’ I mean fandom in general) please learn the difference between ‘no personality’ and stoicism? 

Something that’s always pissed me off is how stoic male characters are consistently lauded and fawned over, and stoic female characters (which are already rare) are described as ‘having no personality’ or ‘having one facial expression’. Which simply isn’t true in most cases, and certainly isn’t in this one. ADC played Lexa beautifully and showcased plenty of emotion while staying true to Lexa’s grim and strict warrior upbringing. I really think that in anyone else’s hands, the character would’ve either completely fallen flat, or would’ve been so overacted that it became theatrical and cringey.

Lexa was stoic, pragmatic, and a leader. Yasha was none of those things, which is why I was confused by the comparisons. She was socially awkward and... that’s it. Which was clearly meant to be a charming trait, but didn’t really land with people who didn’t already have Yasha tunnel vision. And it didn’t land because it didn’t stem from Yasha’s backstory, it stemmed from Ashley. She’s awkward and goofy and in turn it seeps into her RP, even when it makes no sense for the character.

Maybe some people did see her as ‘a new chance at Lexa’, but that’s hard for me believe considering that the obsession started the second her official art was released. At that time, we still didn’t know much about Yasha. Same with all of the characters. They were literally just going off of her introduction and a portrait.

On The 1/00, we learned about Lexa’s view of the world and of herself. The pain she was still feeling from Costia’s death. How she trained the Nightbloods, and was essentially a mother figure for them. That despite her being capable of ruthlessness, she truly wanted peace for her people, and was trying her hardest to get the clans to quit warring with each other by forming The Coalition. For the extremely short amount of time we had her (just 16 episodes), we were given a whole fucking feast of a character. There’s a reason the Guest Star™ outshined the mains. (In addition to that, she just happened to be god damned beautiful too.)

Yasha however, largely remained an enigma for the better part of a 141 episode campaign. So I can’t agree with you about Yasha being ‘essentially just a different shell’ of Lexa. Unlike Lexa, the main reason people fell for Yasha was her looks, because they literally didn’t have much else to fall for.

These are two wildly different characters with two wildly different fan situations.

So no more comparisons, please and thank you.