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 πππ 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!!! ππππππ
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 π) 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 πππππππ
Edit: tbh childe is just the meme, it's all about our sensitive soft boy neuvillette and bad boy wriothsley π
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 π 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.
OMFG SAME!!!
I did find these like KFC Japan tie in toys where it was a little melusine statuette thing but I don't live in Japan ππππππ and I'm not ordering a happy meal toy from Japan either
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 canβt just darken the characters just a tiny bit?