#also wuxia angle makes kaeluc more... well. not canon but it fits the tropes

[blood-orange-juice]

@a-yarn-of-purple-prose occasionally points out how Chinese players see a lot of Genshin plots differently from us and I feel like it needs to be written down.

(I'm mostly the messenger/humble scribe for this post but you can shoot me anyway)

Hoyo love hinting at well-known tropes rather than spelling them out, so if you haven't watched enough silly martial arts fantasy movies you'll misinterpret them.

For example, Kaeya and Diluc's fight seems like a random outburst of emotion to us.

Meanwhile, Mondstadt is a bunch of wuxia tropes in a European setting. Kaeya being adopted into a family tied to the Knights of Favonius is treated closer to the trope of being accepted into a martial arts clan than to modern western adoption or even medieval tradition of taking a ward.

Because, well, knights.

In that type of story if a pupil disagrees with his elders and wants to leave they are supposed to fight a teacher or an older pupil. As I understand it, it's not a rule, more like a symbolic expression of personal truth and resolve.

They are free to leave if they win but if the battle ends up in a tie or a distraction appears it means something is wrong with their personal truth. This is usually followed by a journey or an investigation to uncover the missing piece of the puzzle.

(which was exactly what happened. and Diluc did find something, we just don't know what)

This means that Kaeya didn't get his Vision for self-defense or as an expression of an inner conflict between his past and his current attachments. The whole reason he needed a Vision was to say "you are wrong, we are fellow knights" (or perhaps even family, although he doesn't call Diluc his brother, so I doubt that).

Personally, I find it much deeper.

As a funny twist, as I understand it, it also makes him the older one. Doesn't matter what age he is, he has accepted the role of an older brother/knight. The responsible one.

This also means these two don't need to reconcile, they already have (when Diluc learned whatever it is that he's learned, came home and took back his Vision). It's just a different relationship now.

upd: Rereading Kaeya's Vision story and perhaps it's not exactly like that, the story does frame it as him finding personal truth.

It's like they both wanted to leave but that duel somehow freed and bound them both.

also no one is in the older role in this case.