riicky-ye

[riicky-ye]

I am extremely happy to partake in #NuFuHoliday, and even more happy that I got the chance to gift one of my favourite nvfr ficwriters @missdema !! happy holidays, although a tiny bit delayed, and may your journey be full of wonder ❤️

Here’s Hades!Furina & Persephone!Neuvillette

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"Cheer! Give praise! Be awed! Raise your glasses! Every night bereft of banqueting is a sordid squandering of sore, sober daylight... And, uh, those who are not yet of age may have grape juice instead!"

— Furina de Fontaine, the wisest woman of them all.

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furina's a lesbian

no need to force your headcanons into other people’s personal space pookie ❤️now get the fuck out of my blog, she’s my bisexual queen who prefers women and neuvillette as the only exception

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soooo you’re telling me in the span of the last two years Neuvillette mentioned both his wife and then his husband with his daughter in the birthday letters? Truly THE family man.

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Hear me out that’s Furina during the process of restoring her original memories. A hellish mix of remurian slurs, old fontish curses and oceanid chants.

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Guys, we don’t talk enough about the depth of Furina’s grief over Focalors. Allow me to fix that.

Imagine: you wake up in the middle of an empty stage, a voice calling you. You don’t know who or what you are, you don’t know where you are, but the voice calls you Furina and you know it’s your name.

Then you see the mirror and there’s you, too! Your name is Furina, then there’s a mirror — the Mirror — talking to you, and of course there’s the lines of a prophecy carved into your very being. You know absolutely nothing besides that. How and why did you get on this stage, how old are you, what’s your favourite colour (you wear blue tailcoat so it must be blue), who named you Furina and where you’ve been before.

Everything is blurry and fogged and your head hurt thinking about it. So you stop thinking. You brush those questions off and try to never recall they exist somewhere in your mind — you have a more important thing to do.

That’s right, your name is Furina, and the Mirror talking to you says you were invited to avert the inevitable doom. She says it in Her soft and compassionate voice, like it’s truly an invitation — but you know you’re meant to take the task. This is why you’re here, on this stage, and how did you get there — it doesn’t matter anymore.

Not long after that, the Mirror turns empty, and now there’s only your puzzled face in the reflection, not the perfect, precious, darling She you just saw. Then you feel it. A weird thing in your chest, chilly and uncomfortable. You don’t know what it is but since then it doesn’t leave you.

You live, you play your part, you learn. You actually like the colour blue, and desserts, and you have a beautiful singing voice, and this it, an unsettling feeling behind your ribcage, is called emptiness.

You accept it as a part of yourself. Just like the way you like the colour blue and the way you can’t die and the way eyebags under your lower lids, already heavy when you wake up on the stage, turns heavier and heavier and darker.

Then there’s a trial — a trial of our god, ladies and gentlemen! — and it means you failed. You look at your people and at first you see their suspicious, hostile gazes, but then you see them as puddles of water on the luxurious opera floor, and it doesn’t matter anymore how much they hate you. They can hate you all they want, just please let them stay alive.

Now you know what the Mirror meant when She said about a magnificent and dramatic trial. You were diligent in your duty, you made sure every proceeding ran in this nation was dramatic enough, you dragged the Witness of Teyvat in court, and then, when it didn’t helped, you did the same with the 11th of the Fatui.

Now you know it wasn’t enough. Now you know why. Now you know…

this is why you’re here, on this stage.

It all makes sense now, and for once in your 500 long years you realize with crystalline certainty what you’re needed to do.

It all makes sense now, so you play your part.

You play your part and you fail. No matter how good you argue, how quick you are to find answers, Witness of Teyvat, the damned Traveler, just overpowers you with the force of their charisma and people’s already existing resentment towards you. You fight, and then you ask, and then you plead, and then you beg them to believe you, and they don’t.

They just don’t believe you.

It seems you spent all your parlour-trick smokemirrors pseudo-magic, and none is left.

It would’ve been such a fitting end for a deceiver such as yourself, if not for the fact that your exposure doomed all those who you loved and cherished. All their precious, darling lives will be lost to the Primordial sea. Your knees give up, and you fall back on your fancy — stupid — chair. The Oratrice stirs alive, ready to deliver the death sentence. You don’t have enough willpower to care, not anymore. You sit and cry on your throne, just as it was foretold . Is this why you’re here?

Gears and cogs and pistons of the intricate system that is the Oratrice work faster and faster, and your vision is suddenly clouded with black, so thick you feel blind, but maybe you just blinked because it doesn’t last more than a fleeting second, and right after that…

Something snaps deep inside your chest, like a string broken.

It hurts so bad you think you’re dying, and at the same time — it doesn’t hurt at all. You feel nothing, and yet, you also feel pain you never felt before, and this lingering emptiness, your loyal friend and closest confidante, it swallows you whole.

You stop breathing, because breathing hurts. You stop moving, and it still hurts. Your head, your throat, your chest, but what hurts the most is a fleeting concept of your useless heart, weeping for a precious thing you never knew, because She, the dearest, the loveliest person you ever saw, was never there with you, not really.

She’s dead, you realise with utmost confidence you always lacked.

She’s dead, and her death reverberates through your whole body like a march, like a tsunami, like an agonising crescendo of rainstorm droplets falling down and washing away all that you held dear.

She’s dead, and you’re not.

Why, you ask yourself, because now you have nobody else to ask.

Hours later, when waters give up on destroying the land and everyone is not dissolved, you meet Neuvillette. There’s no resentment in his eyes, no hatred. Only sadness and exhaustion, and something soft and tender, akin to a pity, so you scowl at him, because you can take his hostility, but he has no rights pitying you.

He tells you a story.

This story’s plot sucks, and the twist is the cheapest tears-squeezing crap you saw only in soap operas.

The precious darling goddess in the Mirror was You this whole time, and it’s hard to wrap your head around it, you’re not sure you understand.

It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?

Funny, you think.

I’m tired, you say. I need some rest, Monsieur Neuvillette.

You return to your suite to pack some of your belongings. You see the Mirror, the same one you ordered to drag all the way from the opera Epiclese to your personal rooms in the first day of your life, and there’s no You in the Mirror, only the same old you.

You’re suddenly reminded about the tiny snap deep in your chest, the mind-shattering non-existent pain. You cover the Mirror with your bedspread, and you leave the suite.

You cover all the mirrors in your new house first thing when you move in.

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imagine my face when:

70/215 hutao with homa and the whole team of her best supports: barely makes 5 stars on the 12th floor.

70/140 (passive activated) clorinde with craftable fontaine sword, a poorly built team and whatever tolerable artefacts I pulled from BoL set after a couple days of farm: m’lady, here’s your first ever 12 stars.

to be honest, I always thought I can’t reach the abyss-conquering level of characters’ power despite having somehow good artefact stats or I just can’t play, maybe both. simply put, I thought I don’t know how to genshin. though it seems I just don’t know how to hutao. which is a pity actually, she’s one of my favourite characters and I put tons of effort into building her (crimson witch obviously hates me but that’s not the point today)

I guess y’all can just congratulate me. from now on I’m gonna concentrate on building clorinde. being in despair after hutao 5 stars flop, I decided to pull for arlecchino despite her being anti-climactic for my account (I don’t like her). maybe I will reconsider that to focus on cons and/or weapon for clorinde. if some of you has an experience with clorinde gameplay, feel free to share your tips, teams or an advise on what’s better for her: c1 or weapon.

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Consider this: Furina is a boomer old lady, there’s a chance she knows NOTHING about mental health despite being one of the most emotionally intelligent and empathetic people in Teyvat. When Clorinde says she’s expressing signs of depression and neurosis, Furina is like “nonsense I just need to go out more and stop being sad” and Clorinde is just what the fuck is wrong with you (compassionately)

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I bet it awakened something in him 🥵

Neuvillette seeing furina in a breeches role for the first time…

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I like to think Neuvillette and Furina are considered to be weirdos among the immortals. They’re both workaholics with 5/2 office job, wearing stiff white collars willingly AND personally presiding over most of the trials. Don’t they have better things to do with their lives? Weirdos.

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i love characters who are always like fear not, i shall take care of this problem for you….. by sacrificing myself!! and everyone else is like i swear to god if you pull this shit again i’ll kill you

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Neuvillette is Persephone and Furina/Focalors is Hades tricking him into staying in the land of Dead (Fontaine)

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my final prediction before 5.2 trailer: Mavuika will entrust us with her Gnosis and probably the role of an archon.

I’m relatively sure in the first part about Gnosis, because we will spend some more time in Natlan, and said time won’t be darkened by Tsaritsa setting her plan to action which she would do the moment she get the last Gnosis. Most likely we will enter Snezjnaya with Pyro Gnosis and then willingly give it to Tsaritsa after hearing her reasoning which will be quite valid because hyv need to sell her & she’s not the big baddie some people claim her to be.

About the Traveler becoming an acting archon or even ascending: that’s just the next logical step, but I’m not putting a lot of emphasis into that. In any case, even if she’s gonna die in 5.2, Mavuika will somehow return in 5.3 and will take her rightful place as a her nation’s archon.

UPD: it seems there’s no main AQ in 5.2, only the Interlude, but my prediction is still valid.

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So I don't even really know if gods work that way in Genshin, but I can't stop thinking about Neuvillette just still having faith in Furina even though he knows now that she's not an archon anymore (and that the version he knew never was)

and it's always been equal parts exasperation and fondness, but he's always believed in her, and now in the aftermath, even knowing that she's not anymore, it's a reflex he can't quite give up

and maybe, even though the archon's throne is broken now, it's enough to rekindle just a spark of divinity

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my headcanons about Erinnyes’ appearance, both with Focalors delulu and without is. Not gonna lie, she’s kinda ugly, but that was actually the intention.

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Do you know why I love “Focalors/Furina is Erinnyes” theory so much? Because it straight up gives us a perfect setup for Focalors and Furina’s already existing personality trait: their (verbal) hostility towards the other gods.

In Focalors’ case it’s more or less clear: as the god of Justice, she must not close her eyes to the way Heavens wronged the dragonkind. She explicitly states she would love to make a tribunal for Celestia (what a goat she is) and then entrusts Neuvillette with this very task.

But Furina is actually no better. In the end of her ascension speech, she just suddenly drops the bomb of an intent to judge the gods of other lands. You may say it’s just a random bluff to convince people she’s strong — but I’m saying her personality is intricately, inseparably intertwined with Focalors. Don’t forget: she is Focalors’ very own body, just amnesiac and powerless. She inherited the original Focalors’ selfless sense of justice. She may also inherit the dislike for godkind, get it carved deep in her gut.

So, long story short, both Focalors and Furina has some grudge against the Divine. And you know who, among the Fontaine crew, has the utmost motivation to feel the same way?

That’s right. Erinnyes.

Erinnyes was wronged by the godkind not once and not twice, but thrice. First: Heavenly Principles claiming fontainians guilty and bestowing a prophecy of inevitable doom upon them. Second: Remus, a foreign god with questionable ways of defeating the prophecy which led fontainians to the entrapment in the bodies of stone. And finally third: Egeria telling Erinnyes to give up and accept her fate when asked how to save her people.

And we all know well how damn determined Erinnyes was. I dare say that for her, failed and wronged by gods, it would be only natural to next seek help from their enemies. Anything for Fontaine, you know.

And the “Anything for Fontaine” mindset already feels kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

So, while Erinnyes’ whole ordeal may be just another mirror to show and reflect Furina’s journey, it would be extra cool of Hoyoverse to hide her backstory on the plain sight.

(Also, both Furina and Erinnyes are trusting to the point of being dumb and I’m all here for it. Furina had shown an immense amount of trust in Mirror-Her by pushing forward her act for 500 years without the knowledge of the possible outcome, though it’s not as bad as Erinnyes’ case because Furina could have a gut feeling about Focalors being reliable and trustworthy in a familiar way. Erinnyes on the other side spent her whole life chasing castles in the sky, dreaming about Egeria stepping up and saving everyone, only for Egeria to say there’s no way for Erinnyes and her people to be saved.)

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I was writing another post and suddenly got reminded about how terrifyingly unhinged Focalors — the original Focalors — was. This twink is so damn smug, but her plan is literally falling apart. One variable change and everything is ruined. She’s either a genius, a gambler, or just fucking dumb. Most likely she’s all of it at once.

She cut herself apart, leaving behind two incomplete shards meant to suffer and eventually be sacrificed. She deprived one of her halves of body, the other - of power and memory. She was dreaming of judging Celestia. She cursed herself and was so freaking proud of it. She knew defying fate is impossible, so she tricked it. She killed herself 500 years ago to give way to Furina and Oratrice Mechanique d’Analyse Cardinale. She was the god of Justice, and her statue is holding the sword, not the scales. It’s not the most obvious thing, but she was representing the vengeful, unforgiving face of Justice, especially compared to Neuvillette’s scales symbolism in his design and his soft, compassionate approach. Her plan was to lure Neuvillette into loving humanity so he will give them a verdict of innocence. And she succeeded. Her body left behind is named Furina, and some of you may say this is a reference to the goddess of springs, but the most obvious association are Furies, the entities of vengeance. She’s paranoid. She trust no one, even herself. She killed herself twice — once her memory, and secondly her divinity manifested personality. She’s awful, a complete psycho. I hold her very dear.

Her plan is equally stupid and absolutely genius. Teyvat is so very lucky she’s good because she WOULD find a way to tear the world in shreds if she had the motivation to do so.

It also makes me mad how people can say Furina’s story is ended when we have all of this. Like, I will not find peace until I learn what the fuck was wrong with pre-split Focalors. I hope I’m not the only one thinking this way.