Hi there! I’m BlueSails (or Toffle) depending which circle you know me from. Making a pinned post for my mutuals reviving their tumblrs, since my handle doesn’t match my usual ‘brand’ lol.
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the stream yesterday...
I just had a thought about how Genshin tells its story, and about the rule of Show and Don't Tell
Because in my last post about how Genshin shows that the Traveler's mind was connected indirectly to Scaramouche during the experimental phase LONG before we even step into Sumeru City, I was also thinking about the interlude quest where Scaramouche erases himself... and I remembered a very important message the game delivers to the player at the end of it.
"Don't trust anything about this world, except for what you see with your own eyes."
That's not a direct quote, but that is the sentiment the quest leaves us on--and I think that if I'm right, then the writers of Genshin are insane and I'm here for it.
Now Genshin players have been complaining a lot about the amount of tell and don't show Genshin has--and it's TRUE, theres a lot of that.
But... what if that's the intention? What if the telling instead of showing is the lie we cannot trust?
We go through hours of dialogue telling us a ton if information about the characters and the world--but that's the genius of the idea. Everyone is an unreliable narrator. They have their own biases and limited insight, but never the whole picture. Never the whole truth.
Like for example: There are NPCs in the world who tell you that it is the Archons who hand out visions. Yet in Ei's dialogue, she states that the Archons don't do that.
There are characters who call the members of the Abyss and Hilichurls monsters, but we know they're cursed humans from Khaenri'ah.
This whole world of Teyvat is lying to the player. Its inhabitants dump false information at the player as unreliable narrators, to the point where it is literally hammering it into your skull, while the truth of the world can only be revealed by your own experiences. What you encounter and see for your self--what this world shows you--is the part where you need to pay attention.
If that is what the writers are intending, and they're deconstructing the very first basic rule of writing in such a way... then color me amazed and impressed.
I won't say this is for certain by a long shot--but if you think about it... it makes a LOT more sense as to why Genshin has such subtle "show" moments and such obvious "tell" moments. Normally inexperienced or just unskilled writers aren't very consistent with their "showing" like Genshin has proven to be--and while I'm not ruling it out completely, Genshin has done Show don't Tell in fantastic ways before.
It makes me think they're using the rule and purposefully breaking that narrative rule to tell their story, one that is filled with lies masking the truth. And even if I'm just reading too much into it and it's not true... idk, the very thought of it is awe inspiring.
this is absolutely what the game is going for, though, from the moment Lisa (who is well known for being an Akademiya genius) calls Hilichurls mindless monsters and then we are shown they cook and use languages and have their own tribes and have friend groups (all in-game from launch day), to the sheer amount of contradictory tales we have regarding seelies, to the constant statements of elements only being available to people with visions contrasted with Mona using hydromancy before ever obtaining hers, to how celestia is said to give out visions but Enkanomiya, a land which is outside of Celestia's reach, has elemental monuments, implying that the people there had access to elements, to the in-game books being notoriously unreliable (biggest off the top of my head being the books about Liloupar, which paint her as an innocent bystander, which! checks out! no human would have known her role!). I'd argue 1.0 and 1.1 set this theme up incredibly well by showing us Morax's death, giving us a lot of hints outside of main story/dialogue that Zhongli is Morax, and then giving the reveal a month later. What we are told often conflicts with what we see in the environment/from ghosts/from historical records.
Often, what we are told reflects only a portion of reality, but moreso the world's/nation's cultures and the fact that humans are incapable of knowing the full truths of situations, especially when that information is hidden from them.
Most of these contradictions also benefit Celestia/the gods, who are noted to rely upon the power of prayer/faith in order to survive and gain strenth. Those in power are given reason to hide the truth. I do not believe for a second that this is an unintentional choice. Celestia is also regarded generally positively by humans and negatively by dragons/archons/other gods, which know more about it than the average human who is only told Celestia is benevolent. Venti's refusal to discuss Celestia, Zhongli's admittance that he is unable to discuss Khaenri'ah due to a contract he had (presumably with Celestia), Celestia regarding texts about the beginning of the world as forbidden, and the Akademiya banning the study of the origin of language all indicate that Celestia is actively trying to hide any information about itself and how the world existed without it
and to top it off, from Alhaitham (beloved):
Oh I agree that the unreliable narrator thing IS what Genshin is going it's sort of why I don't even bother trying to lay out many theories or predictions regarding the plot. None of the information is reliable--the whole world is lying to us, intentionally or not.
What I mean is that they are SPECIFICALLY breaking the "show don't tell" rule of narrative writing to enhance the unreliable narrator that is the whole world. That when we get huge infodump of lore, or when Paimon repeats it back to us, it's not just bad writing. That its purpose is to indicate, specifically, that the information we are being told is not the reality of the world--at least not in full.
What I'm saying is, they're specifically telling the reader information yo contrast the times they show it--like telling the lie verses showing the truth.
And to use a fundamental narrative rule to such an extreme (like this is a common trope among unreliable narratives, but usually unreliable narratives are told from a limited perspective. This is the entire WORLD lying to the player), to basically overwhelm the player with information that is unreliable and playing with the rule itself, is what I think is so amazing of a concept.
I want to add on regarding the way the Entire World is lying to the player: this is so true, and not even in terms of just story.
The world, physically, in and of itself, is lying to is, or is at the very least contradictory to itself/our expectations. Even from just a geographical/map standpoint.
Case in point: weapon billets. Trounces in Mondstadt, Liyue, and Inazuma drop Northlander Billets, while Sumeru is the first region to drop Midlander Billets (with presumably a few more regions to come to drop the same?). But in the map, Mondstadt, Liyue, and Inazuma are not particularly "north" of Sumeru. In fact Inazuma is far "south." (In quotes of course, because the map doesn't provide a compass) But assuming north is up and south is down, and east and west are right and left respectively, it doesn't really make sense for Mondstadt, Liyue, and especially Inazuma to be Northlander billets. If these regions are north, and Sumeru is middle, then is the map turned on its side?
And then you can look at the placement of Temples of the Wolf, Falcon, and Lion in Mondstadt. Wolf of the North, Falcon of the West, Lion of the South, and Dragon of the East, though there's no Temple of the Dragon.
Temple of the Wolf (north) is just barely a smidge higher up on than Temple of the Falcon. Temple of the Lion (south) is definitely down on the map from the other two. Temple of the of the Falcon (west) is to the left of the other two. But without a "Temple to the Dragon," you can't really draw a fully accurate compass with these points. (These cardinal directions and associations get even funnier when you consider that Andrius is the Wolf of the North, and Dvalin is the Dragon of the East, but their present day locations/Trounces definitely do not match up with north and east at all.)
And since we're talking about how the game, how the world, does show not tell, there's also the Nameless Island. An island that fully Does Not Exist on the map. Except you can see it in the open world, you can glide to it, swim, ice bridge, travel method of your choice. But unless you're curious about the shadow in the distance (or you look up guides, or a friend tells you), you wouldn't even know the island existed from the map! Island shown in the open world, untold to the player by map. The very map of the world you play in is lying to you.
Finally, another fun and interesting thing with the directionality of the world: Spiral Abyss. Based on the text, we descend into the Abyss. When you complete floor 12, the message says "You have reached the bottom of the Spiral Abyss." Except if you look at the stairs, behind you and in front of you each chamber/floor? The stairs in front of you lead upwards. Floor 12 is the bottom of the Spiral Abyss, the deepest descent, and yet you ascend the stairs to reach it.
If the very world we travel through is lying to us, about something that should be as straightforward as direction, as up and down, what then? If such basic fundamentals can be distorted, contradicted, made unclear, it is even easier to conceal and mislead about the narrative and story.
(And I think there can also be something to be said for the fact that we, the main character, is a Traveler. And someone who travels would probably be pretty dependent on having the correct directions to navigate by. Except we don't. We just have to figure it out on our own instead! How exciting.)
"Are you okay?"
this is among one of the funniest ask i have ever seen someone get sorry
Chocolate guy did it again
A fire hydrant that releases milk to drink after you eat spicy cookies inside said hydrant. This guy is something else
The glossy red fire hydrant, the smoked vanilla milk, but we’re all 👀🌶️⁉️
Joder que tension
I didn’t realise this until adulthood but handmade birthday piñatas are the apex of parental devotion. I spent the week cooking for my ravenous teenage cousins and felt a bit crestfallen at times that I was spending so long making something that was going to disappear within minutes—but with piñatas it’s so much worse, they exist to be savagely maimed. Year after year my father asked his kids what shape they wanted this year’s piñatas to be and he spent weeks painstakingly making them in the basement after work, only to watch a bunch of oversugared bat-wielding kids gleefully destroy them in less than 10 minutes.
I mentioned this to him and he said he remembered researching tarantula anatomy for the giant spider piñata I asked for when I was 4, trying to make the fangs the right shape and to cut the crepe paper into very thin ribbons so the thing would look appropriately fuzzy, and I was like “and I don’t even remember it because I was four!! spending so long building a beautiful object only so your kids will have fun destroying it, knowing they won’t even remember it, is such a selfless endeavour” and he said “my other motivation was that you said you wanted the spider to look real & scary so the kids at your birthday party would be terrified of it and you’d get to scoop up all the candy and I wanted to support your slyness & ambition”
lowering the social stigma of gender nonconformity also lowers the threshold of how bad people have to be suffering before they’re willing to discuss their feelings openly. I guarantee you that a TON of humans who felt vaguely alienated by/uncomfortable with their assigned gender have lived and died within a cisgender identity framework, because the enormous social cost of being honest just wasn’t worth it if they weren’t miserable. that was a bad thing!
letting people weigh their options for themselves without putting a thumb on the scale is freeing. so of course we’ve started hearing people discuss wildly unusual ways of experiencing gender. it does not matter whether the teenagers who made up the goofy-sounding new gender term you’re annoyed about end up being capital-T trans or not. it just matters that they feel safe talking about it, because everyone benefits from that. you cannot lower one threshold without lowering the other. this is a feature, not a bug. this is a good thing!
Yes, and this is also why I’m such an advocate for pulling “crossdress“ and its derivatives back from the semi-stigmatized status as ‘outdated relics‘ within the queer community. Because even ignoring the way that “crossdressers and gnc folks are all just eggs”* rhymes well enough with “trans folks are just crossdressing“ that it may singlehandedly prove Horseshoe Theory, gender nonconformity is, in fact, alive and well as a separate phenomenon and should therefore not be lumped in with transgenderism.
I also want to expand OP’s second paragraph argument: Not only does destigmatizing gender nonconformity necessarily help destigmatize transsexuality, it can also help cis folks become more confident in their identity. There’s a post by @froody et al. about how “going through a period of questioning your gender that ends with ‘I am cis’ lets you unlock Cis+“ (1), and that fact’s entirely true. Experimenting with your gender presentation can both provide more pleasing ways to present cis and (help) determine if you’re trans.
*See, eg. the misuse (2) of Will Wood’s I/Me/Myself by some of his fandom to claim that he’s trans, rather than cis and gnc.
And like, we should also accept that the grey area between ‘being trans’ and ‘being gendernonconforming and cis’ is very fucking blurry and always will be and some people can’t be coherently describes as trans or cis and that’s good. That space between yet another binary is a thing to treasure.
