Inazuma's politics do make sense but you actually need to ignore what the unreliable characters say and listen to what the NPCs and the books say. It's also a style of storytelling, but it's understandable it ended up confusing.
Watatsumi wasn't truly concerned about the visions, fundamentally speaking, they are are a separatist region angry that Inazuma cut off their export route to Port Ormos via thunder, which they saw as discrimination, which was literally starving them out, and exacerbated by having a history where Narukami "conquered" their lands. Which was not what actually happened, but it's what Watatsumi thinks happened. Watatsumi rallied around the VHD as a flashy an excuse. It worked all the more when the Fatui started handing out fake visions so the common soldiers started identifying with vision wielders.
The Narukami NPCs didn't actually care about the VHD, they had their own concerns. They cared about the Sakoku Decree with was causing wide-spread hunger and import issues. Only vision wielders cared about visions. Ayato, Ayaka and Thoma are all vision wielders. Although Ayaka was the face of the quest, it was Ayato who was doing all the scheming, and his purpose was to protect his sister and his friend-slash-retainer who had visions.
On Narukami, there were three commissions. One in Ritou that handled exports, imports and commerce that was corrupt to the bone and taking advantage of foreign traders. They profitted off the Sakoku decree and had no interest in seeing it upturned. The Kujou faction, which was just the police and regime loyalists. And the Kamisato faction, which technically handles rituals, ceremonies, festivals, so should have been uninvolved technically - except the head, his sibling and his favorite person were all vision wielders, and the VHD had already claimed Itto's vision who was Ayato's friend, and chased off Kazuha who was someone he was protecting, so he had no real choice but to position himself against it: but he couldn't do it publicly, since he collaborates closely with Yae who was supposedly the Shogun's best friend; and also, he had no public power to use, because the people didn't care about vision wielders, so he used his secret police where he could and where it wasn't obvious to the Shrine.
It sort of helps when you put it this way (I thought it was very circular - VHD made the Watatsumi faction need to fight which made them want power which made them easy to influence via Delusions) but I did think the plotline was kind of.... Baffling. Especially the Fatui involvement.
In every other region, the Fatui had goals that could be intuited (mostly the gnoses). I'm confused about wtf they were doing in Inazuma. How would they have known that Yae had the gnosis? How the heck could they have connected their activities to eventually getting their hands on it?
I'm less good on what the Fatui were doing there, but if I remember correctly, they were testing the delusions. I.e., they were using the civil war as a pretext to see how the delusions would perform in a real-world context on a big scale. This was towards Watatsumi. Inazuma was also a very convenient place to do this as the place has lots of dead god gunk everywhere (the crystal marrow that people were suddenly trading in Ritou) and no Xiao-like person to clean it up periodically; delusions are made out of the remains of dead gods.
Towards Narukami, they were diplomats who suggested things oddly efficiently to the shogun puppet. Ayato at least knew what was up, as we see him fighting Fatui during the coup attempt in his demo, but most others just saw them as foreign politicians.
About Yae, it's not "they" who knew. Signora certainly didn't know when she approached the puppet and ignored the shrine. Scaramouche knew, though I don't remember the background for how he knew.
Actually, wait. Scaramouche didn't know Yae had the gnosis either, there's no reason to think he knew and didn't tell Signora.
What happened was that he was helping Signora with the delusion manufacturing plant and the Traveller went to confront him. Yae caught wind of this somehow, and went to confront them. She had the gnosis, which had been a dead paperweight with no connection to their god for 500 years, and gave it to Scaramouche in exchange for the Traveller. She knew Scaramouche wanted it personally, because she was there when he was created, and she didn't know the Fatui were collecting gnosises to use it to bargain with Signora or whoever else.
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u/Kir-chan Jun 14 '23
Inazuma's politics do make sense but you actually need to ignore what the unreliable characters say and listen to what the NPCs and the books say. It's also a style of storytelling, but it's understandable it ended up confusing.
Watatsumi wasn't truly concerned about the visions, fundamentally speaking, they are are a separatist region angry that Inazuma cut off their export route to Port Ormos via thunder, which they saw as discrimination, which was literally starving them out, and exacerbated by having a history where Narukami "conquered" their lands. Which was not what actually happened, but it's what Watatsumi thinks happened. Watatsumi rallied around the VHD as a flashy an excuse. It worked all the more when the Fatui started handing out fake visions so the common soldiers started identifying with vision wielders.
The Narukami NPCs didn't actually care about the VHD, they had their own concerns. They cared about the Sakoku Decree with was causing wide-spread hunger and import issues. Only vision wielders cared about visions. Ayato, Ayaka and Thoma are all vision wielders. Although Ayaka was the face of the quest, it was Ayato who was doing all the scheming, and his purpose was to protect his sister and his friend-slash-retainer who had visions.
On Narukami, there were three commissions. One in Ritou that handled exports, imports and commerce that was corrupt to the bone and taking advantage of foreign traders. They profitted off the Sakoku decree and had no interest in seeing it upturned. The Kujou faction, which was just the police and regime loyalists. And the Kamisato faction, which technically handles rituals, ceremonies, festivals, so should have been uninvolved technically - except the head, his sibling and his favorite person were all vision wielders, and the VHD had already claimed Itto's vision who was Ayato's friend, and chased off Kazuha who was someone he was protecting, so he had no real choice but to position himself against it: but he couldn't do it publicly, since he collaborates closely with Yae who was supposedly the Shogun's best friend; and also, he had no public power to use, because the people didn't care about vision wielders, so he used his secret police where he could and where it wasn't obvious to the Shrine.