#AzurLane | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

osinfulserpent · 8 months

Text

who is duke of york?

(fair warning - this is a look at how i characterise duke of york, and the character arc that i envision when writing her. also, thank you to @cursedalthoughts for starting the shipgirl appreciation trend and encouraging me to write this! )

that's a question with many answers, because doy is fundamentally an actor. to understand where this comes from, we have to understand what her environment is.

the royal navy is obsessed with appearances. not (always) in terms of vanity, but the combination of strict hierarchy and the rife repression issues causes an environment where disputes are waged behind backs (the perfect place for both talking and stabbing, after all.) and the air is thick with tension and secrets. doy is the third ship of the king george v class, a battleship line that has manifested only second in importance to queen elizabeth herself. this position means that in such a class-based hierarchy, people look to them for how to act, and look at them to scrutinise their moves. this has impacted how the kgv class goes about their lives: george throws herself into being the perfect leader (without overshadowing the qe class of course, because that's not proper), wales lives up to being a lady in polite company but the rumours that abound about her being lecherous show that her time in the us was likely a way to escape the public eye and live her life, and howe plays into the sweet girl next trope. doy?

doy plays herself.

doy is a vampire - the sole one of her family to be (so far, pls prove me wrong anson) and the friction this creates... doy's nature instantly sets her apart from her family. combined with the physical differences (being the only kgv without red eyes or blonde hair is distinctive enough) she is also the only kgv class with a dietary preference that isn't accommodated in waitrose, which means she is already excluded from enjoying what her oldest and youngest sisters create, which is an expression of love for them - a love she cannot eat, or else she'll be sick. and on top of that, george is a doting sister when not on duty, and george also has a sun motif. her skill activation calls upon the empire and the sun which never sets, wales refers to her presence as like a sun in her memory, 'bright and indiscriminate'. which is a bit of an issue when doy takes after something to which the sun's touch is lethal. every time george reaches out to doy it'll only hurt her more, and the only thing that hurts george more than seeing her sisters in pain is not being able to be there for them, which happens as doy pushes her away thinking that george does not care for her (because she stopped trying to reach out, and because when she does it only causes hurt due to their incompatible goals - george wants her family to be seen as the pinnacle of royals even if it means that george has to sacrifice her time, doy wants to be able to live true to herself even if it means pushing away her family)

doy cannot be true to her nature in the royal navy, where she is in the public eye so often - it opens up her, her family, and her nation to criticism by having a monster among them. she cannot be like wales and be sent to another country to mitigate scandal - that would be seen by some as an act of war. at the same time, many think keeping her among the royal navy is like letting a fox into the chicken coop. yet doy cannot deny herself, either of blood or of her sense of self - she suffers death either way, be it the death of her body or the death of her mind.

her 'solution' is, in the words of shakespeare (and in a play about her namesake no less), she shall play the villain. doy shall be the moon to george's sun, and make the royal navy unite under george for fear of her. she puts herself at odds with the royal navy, but only in a way that the royal navy can see. the cut of her jacket may be daring to an outsider, but it's thoroughly improper for a knight-lady of her status - which one would only know from inside the royal navy. as such, she straddles the line between ship and human and monster in a way few others must. doy paints herself as a monster, a predator, and uses that bloodlust to defend the royal navy, because she is an incredably powerful combatant, and leverages this - the royal navy cannot let her go because else they lose one of their most valuable ships, capable of defeating sirens with both gun and blade. so in return, the royal navy gives her a ration of blood bags and pretends not to see what she gets up to. (officially. maids talk, after all, and ladies are horrible gossips.) so now when doy stalks the halls of the base, it is with a cape and whispers behind her. she can play at being a lady and take tea in the garden gazebos, she can stir up rumour by seducing a maid. she doesn't have to worry about what is proper for one of her station, because anything she does will be commented on but none of them can do anything about it. no one knows what is proper for her station, because no one knows what her station is. she is free of the shackles of royal society, and bound in the ones she cast herself - by casting herself in this role.

she now draws the ire of detractors in the royal navy - wales got handsy with a eagle carrier? doy seduced, fucked, and drank the blood of a past defeat from the ironblood, so people forget about wales' deeds. doy is a protector in the same way a dagger is - subtle, deadly, and prone to driving people to madness. doy throws herself into tragedies because they are villains of circumstance and choice, like her, because each new play gives her her lines and stage directions because the moment she leaves her room each day she is on stage and even in the wings she must rehearse. even her room is set with props to further sell her character, as if each day that she wakes up onstage she'll believe her persona her true self. she sees herself in those pages because she cannot allow herself the hope of a comedy, not when her smile displays fangs. it is better, in doy's mind, to choose to lock yourself away than risk rejection.

and these are all things she unambiguously likes! doy is a creative person, and she loves the macabre too - but she cannot let such a weakness be exploited, and so when she must talk about it to others she introduces it with an air of cynicism, because she cannot be true to herself, not when she has spent so long cultivating an image under those harsh spotlights of the public gaze. doy is hesitant to step off the stage, and thus outside of the rules she's made for herself and caged herself in. even when she lets someone inside it still takes time for her to unmask, and even then it seeps through. even once she is comfortable to, she jests about her nature in a self-deprecating way.

and so, doy has locked herself in to a state of existing between scylla and charbydis - the greek monsters, not the maids (she'd likely not mind that) - where she cannot be herself, or risk being outcast by her reason for existing, nor can she be someone she is not, due to her nature.

doy played herself.

there's friction between her other sisters too - wales' career is... less glorious than doy, and it leads to wales' inferiority complex towards her sisters, which when doy plays the villain makes it easy for her to step in and show off her skills. the issue arises when doy gets as much attention as she does - after all, there's no better excitement for an audience than a villain they love to hate

and howe... howe, who is near universally loved, who has social calls and pleasant words aplenty is a cruel inversion of doy, who is regarded with fear on land but whose capabilities in war are never once brought into question, unlike howe, who wishes people would see that she's just as capable as her older sisters.

and doy envies her sisters for all that they can do - what is a duke, when compared to a king, a prince, or an admiral?

second-rate.

but doy is not the only vampire within the royal navy. surely a precedent must be set with vampire too? alas, not in a way that impacts doy. vampire's manifestation prepared the royal navy for the concept of a vampiric shipgirl, but vampire is a destroyer, not a royal knight. people do not look to vampire to lead, to sign policies, to deal the killing blow. this is something which creates a rift between the two - vampire can be herself and have a relationship with others in the royal navy, even if it is shadowed by her nature. vampire is perhaps the one person in the royal navy who would understand doy, but doy has convinced herself that she doesn't want to be understood - and in truth, is terrified of understanding herself, because it calls into question all the decisions she's made.

she plays her role with all the grandeur an actress could dream of, and those she shares the stage with, even for one night, are lavished with gifts - the only price is being tainted by the vampire. her estate is remote, unlike her sisters that reside at least somewhat close to civilisation, doy lives in the yorkshire pennines, in the dark peak, an area of the peak district known for its brooding moorland and bleakness - a place no one would come to unless in distress or invited there by doy. it is in her own home where doy is her most herself - as seen by dropping the iambic pentameter, which she adopted as a false heartbeat to replace the stillness of her own.

doy's desire for blood and the carnality that accompanies it is treated with distance, and so doy distances herself in order to spare herself the heartache, never addressing the core misconception, thus the cycle continues

and so, doy is an actor with many masks. the monster, the sister, the fiend, the lady. perhaps one day she'll figure out who she is behind it.

#haha get it bc second-rate is a way to refer to ships?#hms duke of york #azur lane #azurlane #azln #anyway pls ask me abt the queer parallels

26 notes · View notes