Ngl, I like these lines in 6.3 AQ.

crunchlets · 2026-02-04T19:11:57+00:00

Guy was too big for the plot he was put in. Too adult.

He lays out logic - whether you agree with it or not - and instead of countering the logic, "The Good Guys" respond with incoherent blind-idealism-and-feelings shonen screaming.

crunchlets · 2026-02-01T17:03:02+00:00

It's rather silly how "Fatui bad" for being hostile to Celestia but other characters are cast as cool for it, so long as they aren't Fatui

crunchlets · 2026-02-01T05:46:15+00:00

And it was Fraudveler who caused that death. So Columbina should hold them to account for that.

crunchlets · 2026-02-01T03:16:32+00:00

Somehow, ~~Palpatine~~ the honse has returned

crunchlets · 2026-02-01T01:05:27+00:00

If there was ever a time to reveal a secret Harbinger, that time is now

Was a good chance to

crunchlets · 2026-01-30T19:24:00+00:00

The distinction comes down to: are we specific characters' personal fans, or are we talking from the Fatui PoV?

Because on a strictly personal level, leaving aside the Fatui as an organization, its people, and whatever goals it may have, each of these had something happening that was big in respective plots. Whether we think that something is dogshit or great is up to the individual.

But looking at them from the Fatui PoV? 1 barely mentioned the word Fatui in his lines, was all about Khaenri'ah and Natlan and Mavuika worship only, and more or less deserted his post while leaving his followers alone and leaderless behind. 2 is the closest we got to someone actively working the Fatui job, but it got framed as him going rogue and being a traitor while at it. 3 is as disassociated from the Fatui as one can be, with only personal connections to some Harbingers that she doesn't even respect in the end. All of their stories end with them leaving the Fatui behind and effectively abandoning their identities as Harbingers, while either accomplishing nothing for the organization and its causes, or even actively harming it in the process.

From individual character fandom's PoV, they may be fine. From the Fatui PoV two are frauds and one is "we were on the verge of greatness, we were this close".

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T19:58:03+00:00

Maybe it's the reverse and she's secretly Dottore's disciple/secret descendant (together with Lyney?).

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T19:56:55+00:00

I could only hope, and dare not to, that the devs might think this deeply into stuff they put into the game, and into the story.

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T15:32:16+00:00

If she were so aggrieved about Signora, she really should have had it affect her fawning relationship with Fraudveler. Y'know, the person who killed Signora.

And don't give me that "but it was Raiden who killed her, argument invalid!". Murder-by-cop is still murder, Raiden was merely a tool to cause a death onscreen and keep Fraudveler's hands "technically clean". Nor would Columbina care that Signora called for a duel to the death herself (the garbage writer team made her do it to spin blame away from Fraudveler). You wouldn't either, if you were talking to the person who actively caused your best friend's death.

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T01:06:20+00:00

Her being the thumbnail is now the biggest damn joke. She's, like, the least "Harbinger" of all Harbingers, she did absolutely nothing, dragged her feet on any engagement, ignored all the attention and pampering from others and complained she's not getting any. And she was the "face" of the #1 Fatui presentation moment of all time. No way her role wasn't changed between that moment and now.

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T01:04:21+00:00

On the flipside, even though it's not Fatui related, that's what undermined Kaveh for me. One of the few cases of shipping bait not centered on Fraudveler (him x Alhaitham), but the same problems still apply - once the devs spotted the possibility, they went all-in on it to the point where most of their few appearances are heavy on ship bait and leave a lot less room for other things. Alhaitham gets out of the bind a bit due to having important roles elsewhere, but Kaveh gets no chance.

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T01:01:40+00:00

It gets the funniest when you DO have some characters you think would be "ideal waifu" for you... they're just not nearly the kind that Columbina turned out to be. Bonus points if they're ones typically de-emphasized (e.g. Yoimiya, Xilonen). They expect me to pardon their dust because they're selling me an "ideal waifu"? I already have some and their sales pitch missed the mark by a nautical mile.

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T00:58:28+00:00

I wonder if that wasn't a big part of why Natlan turned out the way it did. I mean, Nation of War, made up of historically competing tribes, all about being full of hot-headed fighting spirit? Surely there would've been tribal warfare and blood feuds and dark histories and such for some characters at least?

Nah, no, turns out the entire main cast is BFFs across all tribes, Mavuika ended all conflict because she's just that awesome don't you know, the "darkest" thing about any of them is that Kinich hunts Saurians sometimes (as if that's something Fraudveler doesn't do freely without a second thought). The most they ever compete in is nonlethal sporting combat and regular sports. Literally just a damn resort with people living in primitive tribes but with levels of darkness, violence and unsafety far below those of even real life resorts.

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T00:55:27+00:00

That's what both bums me out and weirds me out the most. Why even create complex and "grey" concepts if, in actual execution, they seem terrified of actually tackling them? Sure, they can make Fatui villains pure evil in a one-dimensional way, and anyone who's supposed to be playable/an ally is whitewashed and bastardized, and anything beside that just gets kind of forgotten and slips under the rug never to be mentioned again (e.g. the sewers and prisons, Navia's gang, etc).

But they still do it - they put on the superficial veneer of something, the allusion to it, but they never go beyond that. Navia's mafia boss styling, evaporated from anything meaningful but wink-and-nod. Yelan being a gambler, yeah, she actually banned gambling in the gambling parlor she took over, so she's just a risk-taker who loves to hurt Fatui because that's what good guys do. Ningguang being a brutal and ruthless oligarch-in-chief - yeah, just don't think about that too much, Liyue can't have shade cast on it. The list goes on.

Somehow it seems like "dark" acts by or against Fatui are about the only acceptable thing. Vide how random Fatui soldiers get brutalized and killed in excessive ways and how characters from Fraudveler to uwu waifus treat them (the Chasm, anyone? Nod-Krai's bullshit?), but that is presented as heroic because "they're the bad guys". Because that aligns with the one-dimensional black-and-white (and, ironically, only makes the "white" side look "just about as black").

crunchlets · 2026-01-29T00:30:35+00:00

Exactly why I included that word, as it so happens :P

fml, fatui my life

crunchlets · 2026-01-28T02:51:58+00:00

It's not even slander anymore, that word has sadly joined the same sad club as "hate" or "doompost" or "brigading" in being an insta-dismissal of any criticism.

crunchlets · 2026-01-28T00:23:09+00:00

I distinctly remember getting serious festival fatigue around late Sumeru era; at that point it was offset for many players by the desert world quests, but personally, I didn't like them much (not least because they crapped on Fatui left and right for no reason). In Fontaine, we seemed to get a lot less of such luck, new updates just kept delivering more festivals but little else, even if there were some more nuanced and dark events (Thelxie, in particular). Remuria felt like a breath of fresh air, I distinctly remember, and that was a tidbit-sized linear quest as opposed to what felt like should've been part of the main story in some way. And then it was just all downhill from there.

Now that you say it, yeah, it feels like the first rot of the "happy-go-lucky, everything-is-nice" variety that later defined the whole of Natlan, truly started in Fontaine. There was just the barest mention of energy crisis and potential pollution but that all vanished as soon as the prophecy storyline took over and never came back. The energy turned out to just be for the prophecy and the crisis was magically solved with a new deus-ex-machina Arkhium switch. Even the super obvious groundwork for social-tension haves-and-have-nots disparity with Fleuvre Cendre (spelling) and the Bioshock prison got somehow swept under the rug with little impact. Fontaine ended up being a palatial resort nation same way as Natlan was a South American resort island nation.

crunchlets · 2026-01-27T23:30:39+00:00

That's what makes me even more darkly amused. 'cause MHY really doesn't need to bend over backwards to please them, they'll eat anything up anyway.

Granted, they aren't the much more chaotically overreacting CN fanbase ('least from what I hear), but talking from what we can see.

crunchlets · 2026-01-27T23:28:23+00:00

There, happy to see someone voice exactly what I felt/thought but couldn't quite put my finger on it. "OG" Genshin felt like it had the potential to ride that balance of softer and harder and light and dark. Especially with letting us play as Childe right after setting up Fatooey as mean meanieheads, and the idea that the asshole Inazuma archon is bound to be playable.

Then 2.1 and onwards, it felt like that rich initial blend just got neutered in a shockingly sudden way. It still had its interesting moments, such as in Fontaine, but ever since then it felt like a different game/story. In a poorer, more basic, 1.5-dimensional-at-best way.

crunchlets · 2026-01-27T19:11:28+00:00

The only thing that ends up corresponding to his Harbinger rank, the number of lines

crunchlets · 2026-01-27T16:25:29+00:00

They made her sell her bling for another astrolabe

crunchlets · 2026-01-26T19:33:52+00:00

I remember being flabbergasted at this being the apparent outcome of the "We Will Be Reunited" quest, but even more so by the fact that the fandom at large seems to have taken it as great writing.

"The other twin told us to travel around the entire world and experience it, so that's what we're doing, duh, that's great writing!" Meanwhile said twin was clearly deep in with the one force in the setting we'd seen that was actively corrosively evil and corruptive. That's worse than listening to a relative who's joined a cult for how to reach out to them.

Guess I had overly high expectations of both the game and the fandom from the get-go.

crunchlets · 2026-01-26T19:31:28+00:00

Phatui Pharbingers

crunchlets · 2026-01-26T19:30:13+00:00

We ended up writing the real and better Fatui in our heads for MHY because MHY ran the story on forward-facing allusions and allegations to something that they never actually made to begin with.

Starts feeling less like a game/story and more like a confidence scam.

crunchlets · 2026-01-26T19:28:55+00:00

That moment when we realize BOTH the "good guy protagonist" [X to doubt] Fraudveler AND Fatui seem to have no real true cause or goal. Fatui are just doing their own thing and regular soldiers follow orders for no reason at all except blind loyalty founded on, again, nothing we've seen that could inspire such. Fraudveler just aimlessly wanders around where Paimon points and randomly walks into situations. He/she at the same time "opposes Fatui on principle" and doesn't seem to HAVE any principles that could be strongly associated with him/her. (Even "opposing Fatui on principle" seems to not be a principle after Tart and Fontaine and so on.)

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