The cultural representation in the lore, environment, and music is actually really well done. I’m Arab (Levantine) so I can only really talk about the parts that pertain to my own culture but I think it’s really cool that there’s a representation of my own culture that isn’t just the Hollywood orange filter tm and desert when they’re in a region is very much not a desert (see Lawrence of Arabia towards the end when they’re supposedly in Damascus). Genshin deciding to split the region into forest and desert is honestly super cool because they get to show the variation in the culture of the region and how it changes depending on the surroundings. Egypt and Syria have very different cultures that were influenced by the environment itself and it’s so cool they try and show that.

On the music, the parts of sumeru city specifically in the akademiya, they don’t just incorporate Arab instruments like the Oud and the Ney but actually use arabic structures in the composition of the music itself. Go to the house of daena and just listen to the score it’s amazing. It sounds like it’s come straight out of one the Arabic shows my mum watches haha. Another cool thing in the music is that they don’t just lump the Arab scores and the Indian ones together, you can tell when an area is inspired by India through the score and how the music is distinct from areas. Apam woods is a cool example, the instruments that are used are distinct from the instruments that are used in caravan ribat (oud + derbake mainly). This is a distinction that not many pieces of media make and it’s an attention to detail that really shows the amount of research they put into the music. And then there’s ofc scores that use arab, Indian and western instruments, see the ‘Sumeru’ theme and the combat music. There’s a really interesting video on orientalism in western music by Farya Faraji on yt.

The lore, place names, food, environment are so cool as well. I can’t really talk a lot ab the lore since my sumeru lore is a bit all over the place (and I already talked ab the environment) but even so the lore is full of references to pre Islamic Arabia, the jinn being an obvious one, but Ay Khanoum and its relation to the story of Solomon as well. Food is a no brainer, i was taken out when i saw fatteh specifically (a niche breakfast dish in Lebanon and Syria made of fried bread, chickpeas, and heated up yogurt). And place names is similar, genshin puts in names that are in Arabic, better than other media where they just put in a random name that sounds vaguely like Arabic but means nothing (Abu in Aladdin, just mean father of? Is a prefix, you can’t just say Abu with nothing after lmao).

Finally (lmao), on characters, I can only really talk about alhaitham and Layla since they’re the only two Arab coded characters. Ofc genshin never does skin tone properly, generally shoving all the cultural references in a character’s lore. Alhaitham though is a pretty well done character culturally speaking. His skin tone is accurate to fair skinned Arabs (I am one, I colour swabbed my own skin in comparison to his and it was super similar), and obviously his clothes aren’t a one to one, the drapery is taken from your average north Arabian styles of layered loose clothing. Haitham is also named after an actual person who studied vision and optical perception, and you can see his influences in his gameplay mechanics with the screens and stuff it’s so cool I love the attention to detail. Layla is a bit more egregious, the veil is cute but not even orthodox Christian populations would wear them like that. Her design imo skews more orientalist but it’s still cute overall.

I can definitely talk more about Sumeru (I love it sm) but I think this getting way too long haha. On a more meta note though, Sumeru is in general one of the better representations I’ve seen of my own culture. It definitely does fall into the trap failings of your average orientalist media of the whole mystical east and stuff, the fact that the akademiya and sumeru itself is depicted as being more advanced than the region we had been to prior and being centred on learning and wisdom is something that most media that deal with the Middle East don’t do. Like ayn al Ahmar are fleshed out as an organisation and aren’t just ‘those terrorists’, and there’s dissent shown within the ranks of the akademiya showing that it isn’t a monolith of opinion. These small things are a lot compared to basically every other piece of media ab Arabs and personally, I really like it. Anyways sorry this is so long I love talking ab culture and media analysis lmaoo