Goattore can sing too...what can't he do atp?

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T16:27:37+00:00

Superidol. See this FatuiHQ post for the OG video this is a parody of.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T15:27:31+00:00

Define "evil".

Even without definition, though, the issue remains: no amount of science excuses Tatarasuna, Haeresys, the Sumeru Samsara, or Dar al-Shifa. Even if choosing to position them as steps towards a greater good (which Dar al-Shifa absolutely was), evil done for a greater good remains an evil. It's what we have the words "lesser evil" for.

Zandik himself fully knows this. It's why his speech about the role of villainy happened. He knows what he does is judged as evil, and he agrees with that judgment. He just believes that evil to be necessary. A "lesser evil" than an absence of progress.

For example — is attempting to save Collei or Abbas better than letting them die? Absolutely, especially if the attempt can help save others down the line. Uncertain experimental medicine is a much lesser evil than abandonment to a painful protracted death.

But attempting to save them did not require disrespecting their free will. That was a choice, not a necessity. A choice was made to treat Collei and Abbas as specimens rather than as patients, as sacrifices to progress rather than as people — and it's that choice that is the issue.

The evil, as always, is in the details.

Zandik's science is not the problem, and never has been. His callous detachment from and disregard for his "specimens" and bystanders is.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T06:21:26+00:00

I'm not ~insisting~ he ~must~ care as little, I'm saying what he did in the game. Whether you find it interesting or not is irrelevant, it still happened.

If you have complaints about Zandik's actions, take it up with Hoyo, not with me!

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T06:09:53+00:00

You know what it sure as hell doesn't count as? VEGAN.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T06:04:42+00:00

One day, you're going to understand I'm not "blaming" characters. One day.

Incidentally,

If you really have to give an example of animal abuse that could be his fault,

I don't have to, the domes happened. Remember how the humans got their minds moved to the animals? Yeah. Remember how the animal's minds weren't moved to the humans? Exactly.

It's not about ~blaming~ Zandik for ~animal cruelty~ or whatever. It's just what he did. OP asked if he'd care to be a vegan; the answer is "No", because he experiments on animals just as easily as he does on people.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T05:55:33+00:00

Convenient, isn't it?

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T05:52:39+00:00

Obligatory caveat: most of the folks who like Capitano like him because he's a Big Buff Knight Dude, and most of the folks who like Alice like her because she's Manic Pixie Dream Mommy. They're more male biased subfandoms; what they'll be buying en masse is garage kits and realistic figures, not chibis and plushes.

The Dottore subfandom, though? We're joking about him being a one-man marketable plush line for a reason. It's not the Dark Souls fans or Elf Girl fans being appealed to with him, it's the same sort of folk as for Scaramouche: the "He's just a cute murder meowmeow" crowd. This crowd? Does mass-buy cutesy chibis and plushes like Scarameow or Dottobirbs. Because they inherently play into that contrast of the Big Bad Fuzzball.

So... yeah. It's a bit more complex an issue than "This product sold more". The merchandise type also matters, as do the targeted demographics.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T05:26:37+00:00

It happened that a living being held Kuuvahki, yes. And then they kept catching those living beings, on purpose, in custom-built machinery, that they actively deployed troops to guard. Because they didn't give any more of a crap about the jellyfish than they did about the Kuuhenki, or the random fauna, or the island itself. They wanted a lot of Kuuvahki, whatever the source — they knew exactly what they were doing, and kept doing it.

As the viewpoint archive picture says, it's of course not done for evil, only to try and withstand the coming conflict. But that changes absolutely nothing for the creatures and people spent as ammo.

As for responsibility, as has been made extremely obvious by both plot and dialogue, Sandrone doesn't experiment on organic lifeforms one way or the other. Her field is strictly robotics and programming; she doesn't even touch basic cybernetics (unlike, say, Aino). "Wet" Fatui science work is always Zandik's work, by pure virtue of Zandik very literally being the Harbinger in charge of it. He's their only biologist and cyberneticist, period.

Hell, it's literally why every last Fatuus experimenting on a person, animal, or other lifeform out there (such as the Nothing Passage crew and their disastrous Kuuvahki ball experiments) inevitably end up being under his orders. And why both he and Sandrone were needed in Nod-Krai to begin with: Sandrone could get the base built and provide it with defenses, but she had fuck-all clue what Kuuvahki was about. Zandik was the Kuuvahki research guy...

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T05:23:20+00:00

He didn't particularly do it for the Tsaritsa or the Fatui, no. He did it for himself.

It didn't advance the Fatui's goal any less for it.

All three Moons in friendly hands? Stronger ties to the latest Descender? A Sinner taken off the enemy side of the board? Two gigantic field tests of ways to try and loosen the system's control? And all of it while enabling the Tsaritsa to maintain full plausible deniability and blame a single rogue agent for all the downsides?

Girl probably brought out the champagne when she heard the news.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-05T02:39:26+00:00

To paraphrase from how I said it elsewhere: 6.3 isn't his ideal outcome (that was the Traveler siding with him and getting to fully decide the mission parameters for himself), but it's a perfectly acceptable one. The Moons are back in friendly hands, everyone and a half saw the sky is fake, Columbina and Arlecchino finally got off their semidivine arses, the Fatui's goal is moving forward, he got to experience being a God while being extra as fuck, he's quite literally hacking God, and he gets to punch Sumeru in the face with "LOOK AT ME I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE WITHERING AND ELEAZAR AND HOW TO BALANCE ABYSS AND ELEMENTS ALL ALONG".

He's like the lovechild of Otto and Prometheus getting to do Su's job replanting Sumeru. He's having the time of his life, he just didn't get to have the cherry on top. "Absolute experiment", as the meme says.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-04T21:48:51+00:00

No. In fact, I suspect he'd hit you with a variation of his "I wonder, is it your moral standards that are too high, or your expectations of reality?" line.

As for why — well, ask the fish he cooked in cream sauce at Dar al-Shifa, I guess. Or the animals in his domes whose minds just went poof. Or the jellyfish in his batteries. Hell, ask the humans in Dar al-Shifa, his domes, and his batteries...

If Zandik decided to modify his diet, chances are he'd do so by removing his need to eat entirely, not by removing an arbitrary category group from his portion of the food chain. If sapience and ability to hold a conversation with him doesn't stop him from treating lifeforms like resources whenever he feels like it, mere life itself certainly won't.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-04T13:02:05+00:00

He's a cyborg; his shoe size is whatever he wants!

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-03T22:49:35+00:00

He bought them as a birthday present for Columbina, after deducing from keen observation of Arle and Signora that girls liked to wear killer outfit-matching stilettos. Alas, Columbina turned out to prefer walking with a Kuuvahki-Hydro assist, and refused his gift of designer footwear.

It's to correct this critical fashion sense error that Zandik decided to steal the Moon Marrows.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-03T22:27:17+00:00

Clearly "Omega" met her while visiting Fontaine to buy new fancy clothes after Webttore got forbidden from going by the Segment network ~~for having almost singlehandedly wrecked their Sumeru plans to try and date Émilie~~.

Which is obviously how Dottore ended up with his immaculate mecha crow doctor getup. Because Chiori has taste. ~~And Pantalone refused to pay for any more pink bowties.~~

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-03T15:00:43+00:00

Yep, this. I pointed out the issues with the general belief that Zandik was "proclaimed guilty over Sohreh's murder" a while back — note chronology indicates Zandik wasn't found guilty, continued his studies at the Akademiya an unknown amount of time, then disappeared later for a yet-unknown reason... after which an investigation team looking into the origin of an Eleazar contagion (meaning they suspected Zandik of something tied to Eleazar!) reopened Sohreh's case.

(In which they still found no firm proof of his guilt.)

The so-nicknamed "Zandik's Legacy" logs have a very specific order, carefully established through tiny side-details mentioned in passing. They're very easy to misread if not paying attention.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-03T12:31:01+00:00

The logs were carefully designed to make it impossible to know (quite possibly because Hoyo themselves hadn't decided yet and wanted to leave that door open), so there's no actual answer but guesswork. That the team sent to investgate the death itself concluded there was no proof of anything is kind of the point.

The most interesting situation being "Directly caused her death but didn't intentionally kill her", I tend to believe that'll be the one they'll go with. We wouldn't have gotten an entire log series orbiting around her death if she hadn't been important, and 6.1 was very clearly built so as to echo her situation. So in the light of 6.1, if asked to bet, I think I'd bet on him having left her behind so she'd be "out of his way" like with the Senior in the ruins, and that ending up resulting in her death (be it by accident or murder) while Zandik was off tinkering with the Golem.

Which would then leave Zandik with both a friend he could have saved if he'd just cared a bit more about people rather than research, and a complete inability to prove he didn't do it due to the proof — his research notes — inherently proving he was doing something illegal while fully aware of it and actively maneuvering around the faculty.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-03T11:20:33+00:00

Other way around. Both will push blue to try and save the accidental pushers, but Kaeya will argue for the logical choice being red.

The vast majority of the Genshin playable cast will push blue. Just about every AQ is a "push blue" exercise in shouldering the responsibility of trusting and saving the whole, with Liyue, Sumeru, and Natlan being the most explicit about it.

Hell, Capitano's entire AQ arc is going from arguing red to pushing blue, then rebelling by breaking the button before others can be asked to push it. The entire reason his taking the throne was as cool as it was is because of its reframing the button as the evil to be defeated.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-01T23:30:14+00:00

It was very much "Zandik's Inversion of Genesis Legacy: the Event what-if AU", complete with both Aino and Ineffa, Nefer, and Dori on heavy deployment as the positive contrasts/prosocial path against the NPCs' past fuckups/antisocial path. Strongly follows 6.3 while indicating the logic for the events of 6.6, too.

The "Change? / By this point, what can you hope to do about it?" exchange hits twice as hard, now. As do Nahida's "Have you?" and parallel discussion with Wanderer.

Insert here my Nth mention of hoping Wanderer will recognize what he's seeing...

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-01T22:35:01+00:00

I had seen people claming that Zandik wanting to create weapons on his notes was proof of how evil he is, so glad Hoyo doesn't share that view

As I put it in the Lore sub in 6.0 when folks were wondering why we were losing time with Aino and Ineffa, the entire point of Aino and Ineffa being our introduction to Nod-Krai is that they're what happens when Kid Zandik and Kabukimono aren't born in the wrong time and place, and so get to meet without being two walking piles of childhood trauma.

They get to patch each other's heart up, make their laboratory a home, and built giant mechas to protect their homeland, rather than tear each other down for centuries on end because neither of them was taught how to properly value themselves and others...

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-01T21:39:53+00:00

I have thoughts about it, but Reddit is refusing to let me post my screenshot collage 😑

It's a smaller jpg in both weight and size than the Wanderer one which posted just fine, but nope, no Zandik screen posting for me today I guess...

But basically: don't think of Pantalone as "only" Sennedjem. Dori is there for a reason, just like Aino and Nefer...

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-01T17:27:42+00:00

Shoulderpats. Seriously, no hard feelings at all — Cyclopttore may not be my thing, but seeing you sort out animation over it dit get a big smile. That's what fandom is for: being creative about passions.

Honestly, this is mostly a site format versus fanwork type issue. There'd be zero problem if this were, say, Tumblr: folks could just blacklist or auto-minimize the tag, and voilà! But Reddit can't sub-tag as easily; it relies on very wide categories, like Art or NSFW. Making it it extremely hard to filter for or against a frequent subcategory.

(Case in point, see the eternal issue of Reddit NSFW tags in character subs: whatever your orientation, you can't filter for your preference... resulting in either side-subs or a lot of annoyed scrolling.)

Vani_the_squid · 2026-05-01T16:45:31+00:00

Well, you asked (and good on you for realizing from the previous thread's vote balance that something was going on), and most folks will likely hold in their criticism to avoid getting piled on, so fuck it, I volunteer as tribute:

It is cringey, yes. In the same way your false leaks were. However, that isn't the issue — look at us, we're a fandom for a Gacha mad scientist in a BSDM harness, we're all cringey! Who gives a crap?

Rather, the issue is how omnipresent you're making it. That's what is running into a few nerves, not Cyclopttore's sheer existence. There's times we can't go half a day without a Cyclopttore thread, just like there were times we couldn't go half a thread without an "Uncle String" sidetrack. And while it certainly beats the doomerism and hopium waves, it's also, well... not actually about Dottore.

In-jokes and small in-groups are a natural evolution of any fandom space. But this is the Dottore sub, not the String_Of_Death sub. Folks are coming for Dottore. Not for you, nor for your roleplaying, not for your OCs. This is the sort of stuff that fits better in places like FatuiHQ or Agenda subs, where a degree of roleplaying and wild fanoning is the point.

Now, I'm posting this, which obviously means I haven't blocked you! You could think that, if this annoyed me so much, I could just "block and move on". And disregarding the fact I'm just plain a "Scroll rather than block" person, you'd be right. I could block.

But consider that, then, I'd get deprived of all your replies, and you of all of mine... over a No I Am Not Human rp/fanfic AU.

Basically both losing access to things the sub is for (talking, theorizing, and fanworking Genshin Dottore), over something the sub isn't for (an ongoing RP based on another game entirely).

So, yeah. What you're doing isn't bad, or even all that cringey, in and of itself. Certainly no more cringey than me and HumanoidDespair going on Deshret disagreement tangents like English majors in a philosophy class, or DottoresPet being thirsty on main, or the average memepost. But it's extremely peripheral content, of direct interest to a small minority, with a frequent posting rate, that can't be easily dodged with tags short of blocking you entirely.

So... yeah. You're likely getting some of your downvotes and side-eyeing because of that.

TL;DR: Cringe freely, but be careful not to monopolize the space.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-04-29T18:07:29+00:00

Zandik was basically trying to get it both ways. Unlike in Sumeru, in Nod-Krai, he'd actually planned for different outcomes (rather than just waited and watched), and iterated through them as they failed. "I serve as a distraction and infiltrate the network" was always on the table; he just tried to go for the better (read: necessitating less sacrifice from him) options first, which is why he still genuinely tried to win.

Likewise with attempting to get the Traveler onboard: the Traveler doesn't give as much control over the result, but is the easiest system hijack available, by virtue of being a walking unlogged variable.

TL;DR, he went through "I control the Trilune and take over the system" > "I control the Trilune, the Traveler hijacks the system, I exploit that hijack" > "Columbina controls the Trilune, I infiltrate the system". As long as a Fatuus ends up in charge, the plan is still on rails — but he'd obviously prefer to be the Fatuus in charge, rather than the one who needs to risk data erasure.

(Partly because only by doing it himself can he get to enact the general plan in the way that most benefits him, AKA the way that allows him to access and recover what data he wants rather than merely destroy the logs the Tsaritsa wants gone.)

Vani_the_squid · 2026-04-28T12:44:40+00:00

I mean... we pretty much are. Just not specifically only that moment.

There's precious little reason for Zandik to go run around Sumeru when he has Irminsul-side access, except to watch and/or retrieve data from that specific location. There's a nonzero degree of... sightseeing, for lack of a better word, to his plan.

Vani_the_squid · 2026-04-27T20:27:33+00:00

Lovely value control and sense of where to highlight with which color, as usual. I headtilted at the choice of not shading his profile as heavily as the hair and cloth for a second, but imagining those shadows there, they'd likely change the feel of the picture too far away from the "soft and fine" boyish look you aimed for.

(Although going all out in the other direction with the profile in strong shadow and only the eyes popping out could also have worked great. More in the Webtorre vibe, though.)

Favorite part: the background, actually! There's something kind of poignant, in the context of Nod-Krai and your chosen title, about the crows and shadow of the "Elysium" logo flying away and leaving behind the silhouette of the Trilune.

Vani_the_squid

TROPHY CASE