her childhood torture and the murders of her siblings are the two things that most inform her present in-game actions but they don't define her. she's not a character who does what she does because she's traumatized, but rather the traumas she's survived are thing she's decided to stand up to and do something about. i feel like this distinction is really important because she doesn't act strictly for personal reasons: instead, her personal experiences have informed her worldview and contributed to her building an ideology that she's expanded to include the entire world. she connects her own suffering to the broader suffering at the hands of the church and the nobility in fodlan and in this essay i will--