fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5796 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5796 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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07. [SPOILERS for Genshin]

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08. [SPOILERS for Rings of Power]

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09. [SPOILERS for Clown Corps]

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10. [SPOILERS for The Handmaid’s Tale]

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11. [WARNING for discussion of self-harm]
https://i.imgur.com/cJiBCtp.png
(linked for nudity)

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #829.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

what.... is Genshin

I mean, I have osmosed that it is some kind of anime gacha Diablo clone, but where does the Lovecraftian gnosticism come in

AYRT

Uh ... sometime after the Easter eggs about Buddhism, ancient Latin, Chinese cooking, and whichever other weird they felt like including. Not even going to get into the two times we were trying to figure out what the hell in the wake of child sacrifice.

But a lot of the day-to-day is tamer than the main questline, and the quality of writing varies a lot. I keep the voices muted because the voice acting in English is obnoxious, mostly thanks to the main character's mascot being squeaky and pretty much never having anything interesting to say. I also get aggravated with their copaganda and rah-rah government crappy bits, and wind up relying on game guides online to speedrun those parts without having to read the text. (But I would be happier if there was the option of just being like "no, main character is not going to help you with your stupid undercover sting.")

I can't straightforwardly recommend on story grounds, or characterization grounds, but it's a lot more interesting and textured when you mix canon with fanon. And it has other stuff - there are gacha mechanics, but you can do every challenge the game has to offer as a free player. It will take longer to get "five star" characters, but the characters you're just given as you play are solidly good.

My one piece of advice would be to not waste energy or in-game resources on the artifact domains: they are notoriously bad about giving trash artifacts. Whereas, in Genshin, you will wind up fighting the bosses a lot, and aside from dropping character level up materials, they drop artifacts from two simple sets that are useful to one group of weapon types or the other.

Basically all of the game's deeper lore is based off gnosticism.

Other than the obvious aforementioned bits of gnosticism (really that's all there is to it and I say as a lore enthusiast... whose psychotic breakdowns are triggered by gnosticism so maybe that's not the best combination of personality traits.) to me Genshin is more like honorary SMT than anything else. In my mind they're gonna pull alignments on us eventually.

But it's true that - as anon said - the quality of writing varies A Lot. And the worst thing is, sometimes they put lore-relevant bits in optional quests or even worse, time-limited events as if it wasn't easy enough to get lost and confused in the main story. And so. It's almost impossible to follow. Not to mention the translation errors, as the only thing harder than translating art is translating ongoing art. And so on.

As every Genshin lore enthusiast KNOWS, Genshin is like that one TV show that could have been amazing and an artistic masterpiece if it was just the good parts condensed in an epic movie but instead it chose to be a mediocre TV show with brilliant parts.

Yeah, it's kind of an open question in my mind how much more sense Genshin actually makes in Chinese. It would almost be nice if the problem was that the English translation was butchered, and there's something in clear language with (fairly) unambiguous meaning underneath the tangle of "character says four different contradictory things in quick succession and expects us to make heads or tails of it." But somehow, I suspect we are not so lucky.

Although, what I'd really like is if it were the sort of game that was hackable in that way that makes it possible for players to release deeply reworked mods, like Genshin minus all of Paimon's unhelpful filler lines. Or playable character models where the women DON'T have deformed legs (they're all obligatorily pigeon-toed).

AYRT - A lot I feel. If only because the English translation is so, SO badly butchered. But some things are deliberately confusing even in the original script, notably Dragonspine aka Sal Vindagnyr which the scriptwriters admitted to being ambiguous and confusing on purpose. But really, the more you look at least at the main story/quests, you will realize the contradictory things make sense more often than not. But the "point of view" of each character and what they see as truth or not really matters, hence honorable SMT. Not everything that is said is actually true. Items descriptions are the best lore sources, and they are so poetic and beautiful when they tell stories. But yeah, sometimes characters will say things that make little sense at first glance. At least that's my belief and nothing really contradicts it so far, hopefully someday I will write down my extensive thoughts on it.

The thing is... hmm... it's like sometimes they throw in stuff that wasn't in the initial plans, but "works" as filler-ish, but actually might work better in the world of Honkai because it's like B-grade isekai at best. But the deeper lore? The lost civilizations, Heavenly Principles and all that? That's some beautiful shit. And whatever glimpses we have (Enkanomiya, Mona's domain, quite a few Sumeru instances) only proves it.

Well. That at least gives me the hope that in the future, we could have a version of Genshin that is well translated. I've seen fandom make a huge difference with keeping translations honest or at least making sure everyone who's interested in the subject knows about it when the main translation is misleading or censored or whatever. And I appreciate your observation about reading item descriptions. I've looked at them some, but without a clear sense for, you know ... who the heck was supposedly telling me all these things? ... I wasn't assuming the information was especially close to the truth.

If you do write down your thoughts, maybe you should link in F!S. Or at least, I'd be interested.

AYRT - Same here. And there are plenty of theories on how Genshin may become just an offline game at some point in the distant future. Maybe we will get the whole condensed story in some type of media (at this point we can dream of an anime even!) in the future. That would be amazing ♥ But for the time being, yeah, fandom is super useful for that. Sadly I am not THAT much of a lore nerd so I can't pinpoint every inexact translation, but at this point we know some very important words and concepts, like Heavenly Principles, Primordial One and cataclysm have been butchered in translation, not to mention the "object that fell from the sky" / meteorite and so on. So it's really a mess so far.

The idea that item descriptions are the closest we have to the truths of Teyvat isn't something I made up, it was told by the developers at some point IIRC (gotta check my sources but pretty sure). As for the "who the heck", sometimes there is an answer (like the hypostasis descriptions are meant to be the Archons supposedly), often... not yet.

Aww, that's super nice, thank you for the interest. Sadly I am a bit behind in the story right now, kinda stuck in Sumeru AQ part 3 (thanks desert, lagging my computer was great!) but if I manage to catch up I will get to it and share here for sure.

AYRT *nods*

It sounds like something fandom at large might already know, but I'm glad you mentioned it because I didn't know that. The ... things where they talk to the audience about the game so far seemed like mostly time-suck to me, so I get the promo codes from places that just post the codes and get on with the game. And sometimes I miss things that way.

Gah, I was going a little cross-eyed trying to wrap loose ends up in the desert. Won't say more if you're still working on it, just wanted to commiserate.

AYRT - Yeah, I feel you. The dev talks aren't even a "version special program" thing, so it's even harder to find them + translations. As I started playing just before the 1st anniversary I had a lot to catch up on and by now I can't remember where I learned some things either. Whoops.

Gosh thanks a lot. Really I just wish I could turn on the "sandstorm" / dust effect 'cause that crap lags my computer a lot. See, I LOVE the desert, it's beautiful and fun and full of interesting stories. But I normally run Genshin very slowly on "very low" specs, so the desert is impossible for me :( sigh

[ SECRET POST #5796 ]

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