So I like Genshin.
That’s it. That’s the bit.
No but fr I wouldn’t really describe myself as a gamer, I played with my dad, brothers and friends A LOT growing up and I do adore and buy new releases of like 5 or 6 franchises every time they come out but I don’t just buy new games anymore really if i dont have that already connection. There was a time in uni id buy story ones to just complete and dissociate to. that time has passed.
But like I ended up playing genshin for a bit during covid and just fell in love.
I thought I’d hate it cos I’d seen how horny and gross the fanbase could be and some of the outfits and jiggle physics 💀💀💀 i mean all the outfits are beautiful and I’d absolutely wear them but like omg who’s fighting gods in heels with no support RAIDEN?!
but like what I think what hooked me was the fact that outside of their aesthetic design, all of the women were written great.
Not like feminist icons to stand out (lmao they absolutely do cos the blatantly male lead staff have a bias towards the female characters) but just how they are written as people.
I can’t quite put it to words in how it’s different from a jrpg but like when I’ve played jrpgs in the past I feel both ashamed of my body and an object as the opposite/foil to all the usually positive traits male protagonists get given.
In genshin I just feel bad about my body!! Yey!!! 😭😭😭😭😭😭
I’m not making sense maybe. Genshin women feel like people. In terms of their characterisation they are people with motivations, not women with motivations if that makes sense?
When Jrpgs do it they get close but then BAMN the writers could not make some sexist reference or comment or characterisation. And it reduces us back to “women” vs a person who is a woman.
Actually that said there’s like a few character that fancy the MC. What’s funny is because I’m playing as Lumine, for me Genshin characters (ayaka who you dancing for girl? I fell for childe like an entire chapter ago, im locked up) who have flirted with me now makes my teyvat wholy sapphic and I love that.
So yeah it’s not feminist by any stretch but it’s also not sexist (relative to comparable games) in how it depicts women. It’s genuinely been a pleasure to play the story as it’s just powerful female character after powerful female character AND it feels like I’m just playing a life bite anime sometimes and that’s so fun.
I dunno nobody feels like they are written as an object for men either or as a women to just push the male characters along. Instead women are written as real characters and that’s so refreshing.
And then like furina, the whole ptsd plot hit hard. She’s my favourite and nobody else is allowed to like her now (as well as siegwinne, mualani and citlali. Sorry not sorry)
I dunno, feels like in the west and Japan even when writers try to write strong women or just not be sexist they end up condescending us somehow. Here’s genshin that I seriously doubt set out to do anything for women and did a way better job by accident.
If we ignore the aesthetic design and jiggle physics, WHICH I CANT AAAAAAAAAAAA THEY ARE SO BAD SOMETIMES.
But like yeah I dunno, it’s weird that I’m seeing better written female characters in a gooner gacha mill and outside of a few romantically leaning scenes (childe 😍) when I’m playing everyone’s just a person. Not a man or woman but just a person and imo I think that’s why I personally got so attached to all of the characters and their little stories and motivations.
Also melusines, the melusines are the best bit and they are so cute and precious and I love them and my bf says I like them because I’m similar in my manorisms but that’s stupid because they are so adorable and I’m not so narcissistic (I hope) and they have this big back story about how they were discriminated against and they get they’re rights eventually and become beloved by the fontanian citizens and it is a legal decree to use she/her pronouns for them instead of it and that’s super cute and I feel so happy for them and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa snxkdkfmelcnskwmdmekxjenxnend3mdms
Can we have some melusine emojii gif things please 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Edit: tbh childe is just the meme, it’s all about our sensitive soft boy neuvillette and bad boy wriothsley 😍
I wish I could like Hoyoverse’s work, but they’re worse than CBU3 about knowing how to represent melanated people; or even trying to. After my tenth or twentieth argument with Genshin touchers about lack of proper representation, whitewashing of melanated cultures, and how these crackers think I should just be okay with that because it’s a Chinese game and these poor wittle indie developers can’t be expected to get our skin tone or hair coarseness right, I gave up on anything Hoyoverse put out, as well as its player base. Genshin and Star Rail players are literally a singular rung above League touchers to me at this point lmao
I remember seeing some stuff about natlan and people saying “oh but everyone’s white washed including china->liyue so it’s fine that’s just anime art style” and being like 😐😐😐 not sure that’s it champ.
I saw one that made a comment about China aren’t imperialist, don’t have the same history of imperialism and therefore it’s not got a historical racist element to it like is being suggested or something and again it’s like are we not now weaponising socialist rhetoric to justify our treats instead of just taking the L? Especially given how much some of the community spoke over others.
Lmao poor indie devs? Hoyo own a nuclear reactor don’t they or something silly from all their whale bucks.
I’ve not played star rail, my adhd can’t hack turn based games outside of pokemon and persona lol.
I remember seeing some stuff about natlan and people saying “oh but everyone’s white washed including china->liyue so it’s fine that’s just anime art style” and being like 😐😐😐 not sure that’s it champ.
Yeah that’s exactly where I got off the bus lmao. Like, even having all the 5*s I cared about wasn’t enough to keep me around after that. The whole “well they’re Chinese, they don’t have Black people like that, representation wasn’t on their mind bc Chinese product”-- that doesn’t fuckin matter to me anymore as soon as a property goes international; but these white treathounds will never internalize that because their developers can’t get us right either! I just hit a point of “y’know what, this is gonna be a waste of an argument if I ever have it again no matter how I slice it next; lemme change the password on this account to a twenty-character random noise generation and fuckin forget about these people”.
Lmao white treathounds is funny.
With the community it does feel like a moment where someone starts mouthing off and you try to just shut them up but you can’t. Every day. All the time. Omg.
Like i don’t think splitting hairs between white fetishisation in anime art style and racism in western games or whatever is productive especially when it’s about genshin of all things lmao. At least thats what it felt like some people were doing. Like regardless of how it’s split or framed it’s still supporting the structures of white exceptionalism right? I’m powerfully white and a genshin fan lmao so I could be way off I’m sorry if I am.
What 5*s did you have??? Can we talk about that or is it still raw?
Honkai Star Rail by the same developer has a small story arc that is essentially a light political drama about an IMF-equivalent loan shark, a new leader of a nation, and a former rebel leader. Not in a million years would this story being told in another, less goonery context feature three young women as the main characters, without them being women being the point of the story. At times the games feel like they are from a future where we are free of sexist tropes in storytelling, at least if you squint your eyes.
IMF-equivalent: Interstellar Peace Corporation
Former rebel leader: Seele
New leader of Byelobog: (spoilers)
Now, Idk what type of revolution this is…
tidbit on Seele
(yk what’s funny, I remembered this youtuber named “Hero Mei”, chud , who complained about her critical nature against masculine people in the English dub (that’s literally consistent with her character in the main game’s plot, you idiot)), specifically when you pair her with other characters in your HSR team (there’s a feature where exclusive voicelines play, when a character is matched with another, whether friendly or not to them, like Blade with Kafka)
There’s a lot of moments where Hoyoverse’s writing for its female cast could have been just as obnoxiously gendered as many anime are but it doesn’t. I’m talking about tha whole “I’m a fighter/strong/performing a traditionally masculine-delineated role and this has erased my femininity! Woe is me, who never experienced being a ‘woman!’” garbo genre. There used to be a manga called “A Story About Treating a Female Knight, Who Has Never Been Treated as a Woman, as a Woman” and it had hundreds of chapters and would get posted on the r/manga subr*ddit every week. I would smash the downvote button everytime I saw that long-winded gasbag title show up on the feed.
It is absolutely a shame that Hoyoverse is unable to resist whitewashing characters from non-white inspired cultural backgrounds because it does a lot of the other things right. Hoyo gets the game dev’s dream of building up a truly international playerbase and they can’t even give them representation in the game. Ironically, speaking now as a leftist, Genshin is probably the biggest modern soft power cultural export from China and Hoyo instead built up a global audience only to use that platform to tell everyone how obscenely colorist the company is. Also, now there’s a reverse racism problem where global players are using Genshin to scapegoat the entirety of the Chinese population as racist just because of Hoyo’s colorist design team leads.
Ugh. I stopped following the company after Natlan when it seemed like all three of their games were just spamming streetwear character designs. Obviously playing it safe with modern motorcycles for Natlan is better than racist tribal loincloths that some people were worried about but it would have been even better to see Aztec/Incan character designs, with the skin tone to match.
Also, Melusines are objectively the perfect potential communards and it’s a travesty that there’s somehow 200K Genshin fanfics on AO3 and not a single one is about a Melusine-led Fontaine Commune.
Melusines are the best i love them omg.
I don’t know enough to comment but while the clothing is all streetweary for some, there’s tonnes of Astec/incan inspiration in the naming, areas and other stuff.
I dont know how bad or good that representation or borrowing is though.
I’d love to see more poc characters that aren’t just candace and cyno if you could even call tanned anime characters POC representation. Like they are tanned from living in the desert is my understanding 💀 I hope this is a learning experience for them cos there is such potential for the game.
I’m so disconnected from the genshin community i didn’t even know the natlan controversy was a thing until it had released which I feel bad about.
Edit: also fr but we don’t need a melusine commune because we already have merusea village and they are even trading with fontaine selling ore to the clock Smith npc and the quest where you make sure the melusines aren’t being exploited and its a fair deal aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa BEST THING ABOUT GENSHIN!!
Team Melusine for sure. I wanted to buy some Melusine plush and there are LITERALLY NONE ON ETSY WTFFF. Common capitalism L.
Yeah the whole bullshit of Chinese people as a whole are racist is ridiculous, when the west is the one that institutionalized it. Honestly I never got into genshin because of a lot of reasons but one of them is that they really can’t just darken the characters just a tiny bit?
Played Genshin for 2 weeks when it came out, dug out my account about half a year ago then stopped halfway through Sumeru again, after realizing I don’t wanna waste my time on it.
I would’ve loved Genshin so much if it only was a single player game, even if that meant that it was limited in scope.
I’m not making sense maybe. Genshin women feel like people. In terms of their characterisation they are people with motivations, not women with motivations if that makes sense?
Yes it does make sense because it’s in the lore even lol. Everybody whose ambition is strong and resolut receives a vision, and with that powers which represent the ambition or may be used to live up to their destiny or whatever. You probably know what I talk about
Another factor may be that this amount of power levels the playing field, at least among vision-bearers and archons. They are not bound or dependent on anything or anybody anymore after recieving their vision. It is possible, but really hard to fuck up the character writing with such good story and lore premises
See i like hard disagree sorry.
Maybe because you stopped in sumeru but there’s plenty of npc female characters that are just as well written.
Sowwi 🙃
No that’s not what I… fuuuuck just forget about it lmao my English sucks ass
For every building made with pride, the architect remains inside
Peeling paint, a marble heart, that’s what makes a work of art
