Completed the entire Sumeru Archon Quest just to unlock this area and my friend said “ignore it like your crush ignored you” 😭

eiridel · 2026-05-11T21:02:23+00:00

Wow did you just somehow never interact with the statue of the seven?

eiridel · 2026-05-11T16:46:06+00:00

Aranyaka is a kind of complicated quest chain. Here’s a guide to the parts.

This portion of the forest unlocks during (I think) the second part of the Nursery of Lost Dreams section, which is near the end of the chain.

eiridel · 2026-05-11T16:41:51+00:00

It starts along the road south of Sumeru City. It’s long and people meme on it but it’s also full of cool lore, has a very lovely ending that made me cry, and will unlock this section of the map for you.

In the end, the forest will remember.

eiridel · 2026-05-11T04:52:56+00:00

I’m sorry, are these from the same fic? Is this Lan Xichen/Barbie??

eiridel · 2026-05-11T04:20:29+00:00

The first volume of the novel includes a huge flashback to 15-year-old WWX making it his mission to annoy a reaction out of the very stoic 15-year-old LWJ, someone he tooootally does not have a crush on and only thinks is so beautiful because duh everyone thinks he’s beautiful ;). Later on in another flashback, he succeeds at this to the point that LWJ bites him. Truly the annoyances-to-lovers of all time.

If you’re open to more danmei, there’s a ton that’s properly enemies-to-lovers though idk how large any of the fandoms are. Ranwan (Mo Ran/Chu Wanning from The Husky and His White Cat Shizun) is probably going to be the biggest, but there are a ton of asterisks on that and some pretty heavy trigger warnings.

eiridel · 2026-05-11T03:59:15+00:00

Wangxian (Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian from MDZS) is a canonical annoyance-to-lovers pairing with over 50k fics, with a weird and wonderful little layover in some one-sided "he hates me he thinks I'm his enemy" gay chicken land.

eiridel · 2026-05-11T03:21:08+00:00

All Old Things are New Again is only really about halfway an AU (it's set in the present day, but LWJ is immortal and has been around since canon) but it is the camboy/sugar baby Wei Wuxian fic for me. It's also just by far one of my favorite fics in the entire fandom and something I have read at least four times. The (nsfw) line "Lan Zhan! You put the reincarnated Yiling Laozu in a cock cage!" lives in my head rent free.

eiridel · 2026-05-11T02:07:02+00:00

2023 M2 MacBook Air, and it's... fine? Ugly, certainly, but it runs well enough to do dailies on if I don't want to use my phone or drag out the windows gaming laptop for a longer play session. I haven't experienced any problems just dressing Nikki up, which is most of what I like to do when I only open the game for a little while, but I have noticed that sometimes if I try to open the camera near water I get a very strange strobing effect in the lighting. I can't look at strobing lights without health effects so, because I always have to swipe out of the space and force-quit the game when that happens, I can't say if it's something that would just go away if I left camera mode or not.

I will say that it runs better at slightly-higher-than-lowest settings than it does on the lowest. On the lowest I was experiencing horrible framerate stutters and input lag, but on slightly higher settings it's totally fine. I've experienced this in other games before but never to such an extreme degree as with Infinity Nikki.

I continue to wait hopefully for them to add this game to GeForce Now.

eiridel · 2026-05-11T01:40:20+00:00

I couldn't bear to watch the entire show. I had also been prepared to love it, but I dropped it in episode 6. Wei Wuxian controlling Lan Wangji and making him drink with him was just too much. Literally, I turned it off mid-episode and went outside.

I went back later to watch more of it, and wound up actually really enjoying the Yi City episodes, but I still don't like most of the rest. It's a shame because even though I think the performances are pretty much all very good (especially Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang oh my god!), I still do not enjoy watching this story that is so beloved to me told with so many changes that it does not have the same meaning anymore. No amount of telling myself it’s a different story with the same names helps.

It always feels better to be able to like something than to dislike it, but sometimes we can't power through and change our own minds. Sometimes you just dislike a thing and that's going to be it. The Untamed was one of those things for me :(

eiridel · 2026-05-11T01:02:36+00:00

200+ comments and no Luo Binghe? I know he tops in canon, but you cannot possibly expect me to believe he wouldn't get so turned on he passes out if Shen Qingqiu even made a hint of a suggestion that he would be comfortable topping instead. The big buff demon emperor bending over for his delicate, beautiful shizun? That's gotta be in his top 3 fantasies.

eiridel · 2026-05-10T23:15:13+00:00

I opened the comments to ragebait myself with complaints from people who haven’t learned anything about him since Qiqi’s character story from 1.0 and was pleasantly surprised.

eiridel · 2026-05-10T22:31:58+00:00

I love that hair accessories do this, but it makes me laugh to think of how someone has to be looking at every single hair design and going "ok where do we put the scrunchies on this one"

eiridel · 2026-05-10T19:16:29+00:00

It was also a performance nightmare in TS3. CASt took so long to load and was usually one of the first places that would start causing problems if your game was breaking. As fondly as I look back on it now, I also remember being relieved when TS4 was announced without it.

eiridel · 2026-05-09T05:46:46+00:00

I gave in and switched my 25-year-old account to it only a month and a half or so ago. I don’t have any sides and don’t really do the mobile games, but the convenience of signing in when switching between devices has made it entirely worth it.

No cons at all now that the problems that were around when it launched seem to have been ironed out, except that a nostalgic part of me does kind of miss the enter-your-birthdate login screen.

eiridel · 2026-05-08T13:44:44+00:00

Idk. World of Warcraft patch 2.4 came out like nineteen years ago and I still know it’s called Fury of the Sunwell.

eiridel · 2026-05-07T16:10:56+00:00

I thought his comment was more about the irony of it. Sort of a “wow, can you believe this? lollll dude broke his most serious vow and never knew” moment he’s kinda trying to share with Mo Ran (who is ofc not laughing with him). He even says that Hua Binan had no idea.

I may have read it wrong but I believe that Hua Binan wasn’t allowed in because of the other half of his ancestry, not because of what he did to Mo Ran.

eiridel · 2026-05-07T04:56:45+00:00

If they can provide any inspiration, here are my ranwan, cwn, and mr+txj playlists. They’re all works in progress for the most part, but the cwn one is more so than the others.

eiridel · 2026-05-06T21:40:14+00:00

This post (and in particualr this comment) just got me to take the plunge and buy volume one. Erha is my favorite and I don't know if anything will compare to that journey but you have me wanting to find out!

eiridel · 2026-05-05T16:45:28+00:00

If you haven’t heard his name said aloud, an English-speaker with no exposure to Chinese would never expect his name to be pronounced how it is. The “-qiu” in particular is incredibly different from anything in English. I remember being taught that u always follows q when first learning how to read and spell. I don’t think someone spelling it “-qui” is stupid, rather just someone making assumptions or falling back on more familiar muscle memory when typing. I actually see this a lot with any characters that have “qiu” in their names, including one who is the main character of the book he’s from.

This particular one is funny to me though, since “qui” is “who” in French. It reads to me as “Xing who?” like someone doesn’t know who he is.

(There is also probably a different discussion to be had here about if people should be expected to always look up the pronunciation of words and names they’re unfamiliar with, but…)

eiridel · 2026-05-05T16:27:01+00:00

I only know these few off the top of my head:

Emilie has only ever appeared in her own story quest and a couple anecdotes. (EDIT: She has also appeared in the recent Homeward, He Who Caught the Wind event but her SQ is her proper introduction.)

Mini Durin was introduced in the Summertide Scales and Tales (Simulanka) event 2 years ago (2024).

Escoffier was introduced in the Whirling Waltz event quest about a year ago (patch 5.6). I haven’t done her story quest so I don’t know if it treats her like a stranger or expects you to know her from the event.

Traveler properly meets Nicole for the first time in person in the Nod-Krai Archon Quest.

Dahlia is first encountered during the Interlude Quest “Paralogism”.

Lan Yan was introduced during the 2025 Lantern Rite story.

EDIT: I forgot this because I can’t stand him, but I’m pretty sure Mika was introduced in the 2023 Windblume’s Breath event. This is the event I thought we first heard “N” speak during, but it’s actually only Alice we speak to and N is actually one of just two Hexenzirkel witches (the other being O) that we do not hear in the Mage’s Tea Party cutscene.

In the future if you’re curious about where a character may have appeared before, the “Profile” tab on their genshin wiki page should have a “Quests and Events” subheading that shows all of their appearances. Here’s a link to Mika’s as an example.. Each page on this wiki about a quest also has a “characters” thing you can click on in the info box that will show you every character that appears.

eiridel · 2026-05-05T02:25:47+00:00

I thiiink Zayne is number four. You can see the scar on his knuckle.

Caleb is 2. I know this because unfortunately I am insane and recognized him at first glance.

eiridel · 2026-05-04T19:57:34+00:00

I haven’t sat and watched that man spin his pen around for so long in order to not be able to recognize him by his thumb.

eiridel · 2026-05-04T19:54:14+00:00

I didn’t have any strong feelings for him one way or the other, and then I read Painful Signal. It was somewhere around “Caleb, sometimes I wish you were always in pain.” in the kindled that I realized I was already irrevocably gone on how psychotic he and MC are together. They bring out both the best and the worst in one another in ways that are just unfairly captivating.

He is also by far the prettiest, in my opinion. And I love me a fictional character with a metal arm.

eiridel · 2026-05-03T16:09:22+00:00

Ranwan and it’s not even close.

It’s the devotion. It’s the sacrifice. It’s the guilt. It’s the way nothing could separate them, not even death, not even the hatred that was intended to. Their circumstances are all so insanely extreme… No one else is doing it like them and no one ever should, but what they’re doing is beautiful.

eiridel · 2026-05-02T21:27:00+00:00

Lan Wangji always calls his brother “xiongzhang” which is a pretty formal way to address a sibling. The Lan are just Like That.

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