finally hit the scaramouche cutscene in sumeru. it might have been more impactful if i hadn’t seen it before on youtube, thinking it was just another instance of genshin putting relevant character information not in the main storyline, instead of an actual cutscene from the main storyline

....oops?

anyway jokes aside, my favorite parts of sumeru are 100% when the fatui show up. everything else varies from yikes to boring, - even the dream loop got tiresome after a few repetitions, especially since i had worked out it was nilou’s dream (unspoiled!!!) like 3 whole attempts before the traveler did.

nahida and the traveler come off as SUCH hypocrites when discussing dottore’s mind altering. like, oh she’s so indignant and protective of her people, but it’s fine when she and the traveler torment someone for ‘the greater good’? the discussions about racism and dubiousness of this have already been done so im not gonna comment on it more, but i got kinda pissed off

that said, hypasia getting duped by scaramouche as a god was... good? because what’s stopping him from turning himself into a god, really? not much. he wants to be an archon-type god which is something else, but like... i think it would be interesting to see a god-cult form in real time in genshin, bc it would be a nice contrast from the prior themes of “the time of gods is fading” (ignoring inazuma bc i did not play it all and everyone just conveniently deciding they were okay with their archon again was such a boring take)

ngl, a direction i think this would be really interesting to take would be him doing the god-mind-jump-thingy that nahida does as well and then uh, getting stuck in the body of someone else. rip them but i just think it would be interesting to force scaramouche to co-exist with humans again, in a little human body. (nahida too, but ...)

on that note, as nahida becomes an increasingly one-sided character whose personality is uwu baby my interest in her continues to decrease... they could have taken her character in SO many different angles and they chose the most boring one.

ffs, make this a discussion about the power of gods and the legitimacy of them!!! make it about self-forming gods and what that means in a world where, canonically, the gods are just really powerful being who duked out for chess pieces a couple thousand years ago!!! make it about whether nahida should even be considered a god, since she doesn’t have her gnosis and no one really wants her in any way except “we kinda need an archon to be on the world stage so she fits i guess”...

like, i guess it’s already about those things??? but it also isn’t because genshin’s overarching plot was never examining the dichotomy between gods and humans in a world where divinity is sometimes akin to a political figurehead but can also be the result of cult-like devotion, and to be an archon one does not need to be a god but also just because you’re not an archon doesn’t mean you /can’t/ be a god or revered like one, and the era of archons is actively being pushed away by several of the archons themselves...

anyway nahida should have been selfishly keeping up the timeloop for traveler interactions and she should have accidentally killed dunyazard in the process and that could have served as a catalyst to have her examine her position; not “oh no she is so good :c look at how much she cares for her people :c but they do not love her except for these waifus we also want you to pull U.U”

i finally started to read all of the character lore and voice lines in genshin and it gets...surprisingly deep. like, i didn't expect that much character depth from barbara ok??

but also, i fell in love with thoma. i liked him during the archon quests but he's such...such a househusband haha. adorably diligent. his jpn va also suits him so well! i was genuinely impressed by the nuance in some of the voice lines.

genshin can be a little hit or miss with the vas, even the jpn ones. the line delivery is polished as hell as always in jpn, but some of the type casting or character interpretation can be a little off. like, i'm sorry, did they just pick kamiya hiroshi for neuvillette because he's an a-list voice actor? i think kamiya did great in the role, and if there was only one version and that version was jpn, i would think it was genuinely suitable. his voice, just, doesn't match the vibe the other vas give off. a similar thing happened with eng tighnari before they switched his va - chinese, jpn, and korean all had the same vibes and eng was the odd one out.

anyways, had to get that off my chest lol. on a more positive note, nothing delights me more than finally having venti! ayumu murase suits him perfectly, and i love his performance. the fact that he's venti's only male va is hilarious. also, i will keep saying this, but kakihara tetsuya as wanderer is perfection. he does that sort of bratty, arrogant role so well.

on a side note, i really wish they would invest in character songs from the jpn side...some of them can actually sing!! i don't follow the korean side at all, but the chinese vas sing occasionally and it's great.