#but people make up that environment

[presiding]

I'm not a new follower and I've been here long enough but i do have a relatively bad memory

So I've wanted to ask, what's your opinion on "Dishonored: death of the outsider"?

Right now I'm replaying Dishonored games not in the release order, i already finished DH2 and started Daud dlcs. Maybe I'll go for vanilla DH later

But thoughts about going through death of the outsider again makes me feel something that i can't explain... 😬

It has some interesting ideas but antagonists are underused. Locations repeat a lot. And Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

I'm genuinely debating if i should revisit *this* one or pretend that DH2 is the last game. I know that some people love DOTO but i can't find strength in me

love to chat about death of the outsider, ty for the ask!

i feel your pain. it's the one game i struggle to revisit. but! i was thinking about your points and how DotO has the feel of budget cuts.

it's been about a year since my last DotO post - so, essay time -

a measured response to common DotO criticisms

(the thousand bugs of dishonored 2 I had borne as I best could, but when doto ventured upon sidelining billie and retconning daud's arc I vowed revenge*

*can't resist a cask of amontillado joke

criticism is easy and creation is hard, so, if this isn't the type of response you wanted, you can read my other DotO posts:

how i'd write death of the outsider

that post i did after trying to play doto a third time and couldn't make it past the opening scene (you might like my tags on this re: your comment "makes me feel something i can't explain")

billie lurk as a nonprotagonist & misogynoir (more on this below...)

gonna leapfrog off your comments cause I agree!

antagonists are underused/locations repeat a lot.

who is steering the boat?

let's start up at the top; everything stems from there.

DotO was caught up in ownership/transition issues. here's an article about harvey smith and raphael colantanio at that time. if you didnt know, colantonio is the main founder of arkane (semi-related but just for fun look his appearance up then go through arkane's protags and tell me what you notice...).

quote from harvey smith re: DotO -

“Then, just as I move back, [Colantonio is] announcing that he’s leaving. Going forward, I’ll focus more and more on the Austin studio and what we’re going to do there. Death of the Outsider is my wrapping up with the guys in Lyon – the first half of that we planned together while I was living there, but the second half was worked on while I was living in Austin. I’ve been communicating with them through video conferences and stuff, so they carry a lot of the load of the second half of it.”

so the founder jumped ship and the co-creative director has to step away from his usual position (over to sinking ship Austin). meanwhile, DotO is still in development. i'm a big believer in people making art, and not companies (even in this article Smith acknowledges much of their "secret sauce" can be traceable to specific devs but i digress)

$$$ kaching - some speculation

on the note of founders - past this point in arkane's history (ie. the main founder stepping back), arkane would have been being primed for sale. this translates to high scrutiny on project expenditure (such as hiring cheaper early career staff, hiring less workers, denying your best staff raises causing them to leave and hiring cheaper workers in their place, etc) to make the company's EBITDA look more appealing to buyers (briefly, its the piece of paper that proves you're profitable). based on speculative timelines, from a purely $ perspective within the first year of dh2 being released is when you'd be looking to slim down your capitalised expenditure (aka: cutting staff while the revenue is at a peak to make number go brr and make your company look like a better investment) because to maximise the profit of a company's sale, you really have a great track record for a few years.

this is purely speculation based on timelines. companies are very careful to hide when they're doing this, ideally they want ~3 years of a great track record (and staff that will keep working their hardest).

big goals and no money

DotO was meant to be a two-part DLC like the Dh1 DLCs, so shout out to what could have been made if their original pitch had worked.

On locations & antagonists & budget - this dev's site discusses the Conservatory level in game AND specifies it was budget constraints being the reason for cutting off traversable area from that mission. Great link for comparing the original level & the DotO version, especially re: your point about reused assets/levels.

We could pick other examples here but this post is already long so -

Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

i would forgive this game anything if there was any good billie storywriting.

:')

its never just the writers

after revisiting articles to fact-check for this essay, i've seen a lot of articles blaming writers by name (you didn't do this anon which i love <3)

games are made by teams, and decision making is generally done top-down, so blaming individual contributors is shit. 1) writer's pay isn't good enough to cop this kind of abuse. 2) it's rarely in their control - you can write a beautiful scene only to have that level cut due to costs (etc), and then you need to work out how to make the story make sense. ideation & decision-making are separate and i guess 'this idea was [X]'s' should not be mistaken for 'this is the fault of [X]'s.'

on hiring fans (& imm-sim writing strategies)

the new writers [...] already had an idea of the world, as they’d seen it from the outside, as fans. “These are all people that knew this world we had created and they took it as canonical, as the gospel. Whereas, for us, it was bits and pieces we’d made up along the way.”

as someone who used to hire writers, and i promise this isn't in bad faith: don't hire fans unless your priority is cost then, sure, fans are likely to put in overtime (and not be in a position in their career where they can ask for higher remuneration - they'll pay the passion tax to be involved).

writers (esp new career writers) have to be open to receiving feedback assuming healthy/functional processes, and being a fan makes that harder because you care more. and, as a fan, you know what loose ends exist and that's where you'll naturally jump to, even though writers should start with target audience and branding, and build from there. if i expand on this i'll get offtopic so let's keep going!

DotO feels lifeless because it doesn't add anything to the DH universe, it only takes away by closing storylines without the satisfaction of closure. sure, stuff was added - the cult subplot, locations, some NPCs/enemies, etc. but they feel like part of the objectives, not part of the dishonored universe. you can feel the decision-making process when you play: there's a feeling that the priority was to finish the assets required for missions, instead of writing a story that feels immersive.

compared to standard videogame writing, where you can generally get away with "everything you touch and read relates to your objectives as the protagonist", as an imm-sim writer, you need to focus on:

how does this text build the universe so that the player feels like they're only seeing a small part of the world?

of course - this is difficult with budget/time concerns. i've said it before but this is part of why we rarely have games as rich as dishonored 1 & 2, because imm-sim design philosophy flies against the current videogame industry trends of microtransactions & cheap-to-make addictive mobile games. given a tight budget you focus on the high level story, but player immersion is a function of details.

most likely, dh2 was the end of an era. typing that out makes me sad.

what did the devs say about writing billie

*breathes deeply*

the death of the outsider protag was originally pitched as being about a regular human, someone not related to emily and corvo but instead an overseer or a brigmore witch. daud was also pitched.

this could have worked! really cool to have a nobody, or a heretic, or an overseer, be involved with the death of a god. and i've mentioned before that storywise DotO's protag could have been anyone (i think i made a joke about wyman? hah) and wouldn't change the story much, bar some daud bits.

quote from the same article:

eventually Arkane settled on Billie Lurk, Emily's companion from Dishonored 2. [...] Bakaba tells me that because Billie had already received her redemption arc in Dishonored 2, Death Of The Outsider's story could be about something more than that.

welp.

so there's two things here - a redemption arc claim, and DotO's actual story.

in addition to not being the first pick, the view was that billie's story was over. i question the 'redemption arc' claim - sure, billie helps the protag in dh2 but after her confession, if you tell her she's changed, she brushes it off and you part awkwardly without forgiving her... does that count? if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? if a character redeems themselves but the story never tells you, are they redeemed?

billie's role in dh2 isn't really that different to the dlcs, where she follows you around being Mr Exposition while withholding a LOT of information that could have actually helped the protag. given DotO's plot, going after the killer who shaped her doesn't scream 'reformed' either. ludonarratively speaking, the lack of chaos implies billie never changed from being a callous killer - which i'm not against, it would have been a cool story.

and! contrast this with daud who already had his redemption arc!

When first conceptualising Death Of The Outsider in around 2014, Smith and Duval knew they wanted two things: Billie Lurk being used to get to The Outsider himself, and closure for Dishonored villain (and later ally) Daud.

in the two DLCs, as we know, he comes to realise his actions sucked, and as the player you actively make things right (related: my post about ludonarrative dissonance in dh2). so if billie had "already received her redemption arc", why was this another daud story?

imo this isn't a budget issue but a misogynoir issue. "we want this story to be not about the protagonist so any random NPC will do, how about we go with billie lurk and get a black woman as a dishonored protag?" this logic, which is what i'm reading of the above two quotes, feels frustratingly tokenistic when she's an established character with a rich background. it's an example of surface level diversity because DotO is not about her by arkane's own admission. it's a similar vibe to the companies who say they have a diverse team but you check their staff page and all the people of colour have 'assistant' in their title and the board is all white, so it's not people of colour who are driving the business. maybe this was entirely by accident but these accidents add up to systematic failure - billie gets her own game but never her own story. it feels like she got assigned the caretaker role for these two guys. great.

for fairness, let's compare to dh2. corvo & emily are relatively hands-off protags in terms of their ongoing thoughts about their surroundings and the lore placement about them specifically is sparse, and this style continues in DotO. the issue is the core narrative: corvo & emily are both the protagonists of their story in the sense that dh2's story reflects their goals ("take back what's yours"), whereas Billie is an established character who has arguably little reason to go along with each mission. worse, the main plotline she's literally forced into going along with. in the opening scene billie gets assaulted and still helps the guy who assaulted her.

fundamentally, DotO's narrative is not about billie but about daud and the outsider, and this article makes clear that was by design.

whats the takeaway

DotO is the weakest entry in the Dishonored series for most people, and blaming budget & a corporate changeover makes me feel... uh well it doesn't really help me tbh but your mileage may vary. it does interest me to think about what we could have had!

for me, my opinion is that if writing billie was a priority (link to my own post where i describe the feeling of playing doto as someone interested in billie) arkane would have made it a priority, even amidst constraints. billie's redemption arc was not resolved imo, and putting her in a game without a chaos system feels like as much a backwards slide for her as daud's plotline to kill the outsider was for his arc.

we absolutely 🤝 on not being in a rush to play the game again.

on the upside. dishonored 2 is a really wonderful game and i love it very much.

[danielnelsen]

while i get where this comes from and it’s true to an extent, i reeeaaaally don’t like how people try to explain “trans men don’t [necessarily] have male privilege” with things like “some trans men don’t pass”.

like sure that’s the most obvious example (someone who is seen as a woman won’t have the privilege that comes with being seen a man) but you’re still acting like being a passing trans man is just a free opt-in to male privilege which is………kinda the issue.

[bonefall]

Heads up! There is going to be a very long and detailed post about making sausages dropping in a few hours.

It's got a big red content warning and a readmore, so nothing is going to get gruesomely dropped on you, but make sure you add "butchery" or "cw butchery" to your tag filters to be extra safe if the idea of processing animal carcasses is upsetting to you!

It also has an image of sausage casings before they're scraped. I tried to whack the post with as many CWs as I can think of but I'd recommend "cw meat" or "cw organs" if you need them.

[abirddogmoment]

today's hot take for dog people: management is not the same thing as training.

[sparkling12]

I'm curious, in general do we prefer Poison Ivy with Green Skin or Nah?

oh reblog for more responses please lol

[shokveyv]

shut up

[doodleodds]

Me? Uploading a Halloween comic on November 18th, almost four whole-ass weeks late???? Yeah that’s uh. yup. yeah

Thanks for reading! :) <3

[2hoothoots]

So I was going through your blog (again) and found some of your stuff mentions fsau Raz having ADHD, as somebody with adhd I’m intrigued, may I have some of those headcanons (canons??) related to that? Also, I would give “a penny for your thoughts” but I’m out of pennies, so here’s various images of a drawing of ur blorbo I put next to my animals, note that a rock had to be added in one picture to keep him from flying away (BONUS: his now permanent place with the wifi guardian frog)

NOTHING brings me more joy than seeing physical drawings of these guys, like, out and about. in situations. thank you for this gift, and ALSO for the great ask because it's a perfect chance to ramble

so first of all, canon Raz having ADHD is very real to me. he's constantly fidgeting and moving around, getting distracted by sidequests and scavenger hunt objectives, always talking to himself out loud, gotta write everything down so he remembers it because there's so much to DO!, running away from home because his dad yelled at him one time and now Raz assumes he must hate him forever... i could go on, but i think there's a lot of room for interpretation there!

in my headcanon, he never got diagnosed as a kid. maybe there were some notes about it in his reports each year, sure - but a little hyperactivity and distractability never seemed to slow him down. he excelled in lessons and on missions, and when he was with his family their performances gave him something to focus that energy into. it was only really when he turned 18 and graduated to a full agent that the cracks started to show.

because there's a big difference between the responsibilities you have as a minor, and the responsibilities you have as an 18-year-old living away from home! one who's expected to cook and clean for themselves, and take care of adult life stuff, and also work the 9-to-5 office job he's just graduated into that involves sitting in front of a computer and write reports all day.

short-term, he found he could get himself to power through a deadline with energy drinks and psi-pops (a lot of psi-pops...)

long-term, something had to give. he was working himself to exhaustion, constantly stressed, swinging between days spent staring at his computer screen doing nothing and all-nighters desperately trying to finish his paperwork before the deadline. it just didn't make any sense to him. he'd finally started his job as a Psychonaut, he was living independently like he'd always dreamed, he'd gotten top surgery after planning it for so long. he should have everything he ever wanted. why wasn't he happy?

following a deep post-surgical depression, about a month before his 19th birthday Raz was living out of his car, couch-surfing or sleeping in his office. he got kicked out of his apartment after falling behind on bills and rent. it wasn't that he didn't have the money, it was all just too much for him to stay on top of.

he'd probably have stayed in that misery hole for a lot longer if Frazie hadn't marched into his life and demanded he let her help him move into a new place, or she was telling mom that he was homeless. together, they sorted through all of his possessions from the last place - everything that had been hastily shoved in his car, or tossed in a box in his office, piled in a heap that was giving him anxiety even looking at it.

things do get better for him from there.

when he eventually explains things to Hollis, she gently suggests that he should get a roommate. he ends up moving in with Phoebe, and they become pretty good friends after a couple months! something about having another person around to help do the chores and wash the dishes and share the space helps, even if it takes him a while to admit it.

he gets his ADHD diagnosis, and finding the exact right medication and dose is a journey he's still on years later - but they're a huge help in getting him to actually knuckle down and finish his work on time. and the whole thing ends up being a chance for him to take a step back and really think about what he wants to do with his life. he'd always assumed that being a Psychonaut was his dream, but he'd never really reckoned with what that dream would look like before.

in the end, he sticks with it, but also decides to follow Lili's example in branching out. he applies to study a part-time Bachelor's in Psychology on a remote course, and gets accepted. juggling missions and paperwork and study and relationships (because the whole thing made him realise he also wasn't setting aside any time for himself, and wow, dating is a thing) is a lot - but he manages to figure it out, day by day.

(Lili comes back to the Psychonauts after graduating. she and Raz have both changed a lot over those four years, but on their first mission together they hit it off like a house on fire - and the rest is history!)

[possamble]

do you have any particular thoughts regarding marcille being a half-elf? its interesting to me considering the fact that she seems self-conscious about being a half-elf, but denies it when its brought up

i remember marcille looking visibly uncomfortable over laios simply asking her how old she is, which i think the only reason she might feel nervous about this is because it might reveal her as a half-elf to him.

she's never corrected anybody whose called her an elf either.

never mind the circumstances of the reveal, in which thistle goes on about how half-elves are inferior and accusing her of wanting to become full blooded elf, she seemed particularly upset like he struck a nerve-

i wish the half-elf thing was built upon more. also, underrated marcille line:

okay so i revisited this sequence just to make sure I could back myself up and it's just... man. there's a lot going on.

the first reaction we get from Marcille is this huge panel that takes up half of the page

she is viscerally affected. flushing to the tips of her ears with the intensity of it. and we see it again, a few pages later

so it might seem like she's embarrassed about it and lying to herself, but... I really think it's just that Thistle is accidentally hitting sore spots. If you really look at what he says to get these reactions

"you'll live out your entire life [...] and die that way too"

"a hundred years from now, nobody will be there"

Hear me out. I think, if he stuck to harping on about her inferiority without bringing up how terrifyingly long-lived she is, she wouldn't have been as bothered. But right now, Thistle is accidentally hitting all the marks on Marcille's deepest fears-- and this is after the Winged Lion promised her that her dreams could come true in an extremely vulnerable moment, so it also hits her slightly guilty conscience as well.

I do truly believe that Marcille isn't bothered about being a half-elf the way that people assume she'd be bothered by it. To her, the biggest problem with being a half-elf is that it's isolating.

On one hand, it's not hard to imagine why she'd distance herself from elves in the west. A lot of them can clock her as a half-elf on sight, unlike other races, and therefore she's always branded with this weird stigma of being Othered -- I would even say that she considers herself lucky for being born outside of elven culture instead of having to grow up in it. I mean, just... look at the way elves talk about her.

Skipping past the uncomfortable implication of what 'not tolerating the existence' of half-elves would actually entail, this is incredibly fucking annoying. You can see why she wouldn't want to be around elves much. You see a lot of Marcille reacting badly here, but honestly, almost all of it can be attributed to her freaking out that her bluff completely failed. She's honestly more paying attention to Izutsumi's footsteps and trying to coordinate an opportunity to escape.

And in the end, you see her built-up frustration at being asked if she wants to be a full-blooded elf like 2-3 times in a row.

Yeah, yeah, "the lady doth protest too much," and all. But we know Marcille. We know that she's a lot more embarrassed and horrendously unconvincing when she's being prodded about something she's actually self-conscious about.

Moving onto the flipside of things, it might seem weird that she "pretends" to be a full elf around other races, but it's not really that strange if you think about it. Again, people are weird about her being infertile or whatever, and a lots of them don't even know much about what sets half-elves apart from everyone else. I mean, look at how uncomfortable Laios is just asking her about it

and look at how exasperated and resigned she looks

And like... she's right. Where would that come up in normal conversation? Why would she go out of her way to tell them? She's functionally a normal elf to other races anyway -- got the ears, the abnormally long "childhood", and the huge mana capacity. Unless it's directly relevant or important for people to know, I don't think it's all that strange or indicative of insecurity that she prefers not to bother with it.

(This combined with her sense of being an "outsider" to elf culture also explains why she thinks elf superiority is embarrassing. She sees the way elves treat short-lived races from the "outsider" perspective nonetheless, and thinks it's obnoxious; especially more so because she usually has to play the elf around short-lived races and deal with the reputation of arrogance that elves have built up.)

The sad thing is, this all means that... she doesn't actually fit in anywhere. She doesn't like going out West much because of how elves treat her. But she's also an outsider in the continents she was born in, treated like this exotic long-lived alien choosing to live among short-lived races for some reason. She is always an outsider, the Other, no matter where she goes. Add in the fact that she'll live longer than literally anyone she knows, and it's honestly kind of heartbreaking.

And I think that's the crux of it. Marcille really doesn't act like she's at all self-conscious about being a half-elf because of any feelings of inferiority or being half-made or whatever. She considers herself a perfectly legitimate being and might even, in some ways, consider herself superior to normal elves because she's not blind with elf supremacy or whatever. (And whatever "elven biases" she displays, all of them are born more out of the fact that she's kind of bad at conceptualizing how other races age and mature compared to herself, not that she actually considers herself better or more mature simply for being an elf.)

I think that whatever self-consciousness Marcille has about being a half-elf is, instead, related to terror and loneliness. The reminder that it ensures she'll never truly belong anywhere for the rest of her very long life. The reminder that, in truth, even she's not actually sure how old she is by other races' standards (hence the discomfort when asked how old she is). She doesn't want to not be a half elf, or be a full elf or full tall-man-- in her ideal world, she's still a half-elf. She just gets to live out her life at the same pace with the people she loves and doesn't have to say goodbye again and again and again until she dies.

and one last very important panel, right after Mithrun tells her that all her desires would be devoured

In her ideal world, she's still a half-elf and reality magically starts marching at her pace. But failing that, the second best thing is that she's still a half-elf-- but one who is able to accept reality and let go of her fear.

(But the rest of the story pans out the way it does because, to Marcille, taking reality apart and reshaping it was less scary than simply and fully reconciling with it.)

[undead-moth]

I know I've been on about this for a while now and I'm being a hater but you're telling me SydCarmy was "always meant to be platonic" even though there are two seasons of writing making use of tried-and-true explicitly romantic tropes, themes and writing signals, and SydLuca is going to be romantic because...he was nice to her on screen for a few minutes?

I don't even care if people ship SydLuca, or if they just prefer it, but you can't honestly tell me that you believe Carmy was always meant to be a friend but Luca is an obvious love interest.

Just because Syd and Carmy haven't kissed or confessed their love to each other doesn't mean that isn't very obviously the direction this show is going. The Bear has already shown you who is endgame. It has shown you every episode of the show so far.

Honestly I really don't think The Bear fanbase understands this show or cares about these characters or the story being told here, which is unfortunate because this show is shockingly well-written in comparison to most shows right now, and we should be so grateful for it but all we're doing is complaining that the writers led us on by not making a ship canon fast enough. It's just. Sad.

[spywhitney]

How I sleep knowing I'll never trust anyone that hates Sydney but worships Richie:

[multifanbrainrot]

ah dead boy detectives and the idea/theme of being good, of choosing to do good regardless who you are or were and despite what you've been through

[insteading]

As someone who’s done bereavement care for almost 20 years, I’ve observed again and again and again that it is not staying with grief that cuts us off from other people, it’s suffocating grief and suppressing grief. It’s impossible to repress grief without also repressing all sorts of other things like joy and memory. Actually, expressing grief naturally connects us empathetically to other people. It is not an accident that right now when there is such a profound suppression of global grief, we’re also finding ourselves in a moment of such isolation.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla, in them magazine

I sought out this piece because Rabbi Kukla was quoted in today's sermon in reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza ("It is lifesaving to mourn our humanity in inhumane times").

But this paragraph about grief hit me so hard I wanted to single it out to share. It is relevant to corporate grief of the sort we might experience when a state is doing harm in our name (police brutality, displacement, execution). It is also relevant to individual griefs.

In the bereavement calls I do for hospice, I have noticed, this is precisely what gets people stuck in grief: the feeling that there is no safe space and time to express grief. Companies tend to give very little accommodation for bereavement, if they give any at all. Culturally we're expected to get over losses in a matter of days. But grief rewires us, and some losses-- particularly losses like war, displacement, and police brutality where a state or institution does the same kind of harm repeatedly-- are complex and ongoing.

Grief impacts sleeping, eating, executive function. (I don't ask people in bereavement calls, "How are you doing?" I ask, "How are you sleeping?" "How's your appetite?" Maybe "Are there moments from your caregiving, or from your [loved one's] dying, that keep coming up for you?" Because of course you're not fine! You just lost someone essential to you. What I want to know is, is your body getting a chance to repair itself as your mind and heart process what you've experienced?)

People have talked to me after a loss about feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by daily life. It's not unlike recovering from a major injury and having a sizable portion of your bandwidth given over at all times to the tasks of bone, muscle, and nerve repair that are not under your conscious control. When tasks you're used to thinking of as having one part suddenly make it clear how complex they are? Cooking a meal takes more out of you. Doing a load of laundry takes more out of you. If you're already an introvert, the cost of social engagement goes up, at a time when social engagement might actually be very helpful.

Doing some of our grief work with other trusted people shares the load. It recovers some bandwidth. But many folks learn early in the grieving process that they have fewer trusted people than they thought. Or that it feels like the wrong time to deepen an acquaintanceship they'd hoped might become a friendship. Or that they aren't as comfortable asking loved ones for help as they thought they would be.

And the bereavement model I'm trained in assumes that a grieving person has experienced one recent loss. We know that a recent loss might poke us in the tender spots left by earlier losses. But that's still different from the experience of a tragedy that affects a whole community at once (as in an entire region's population losing multiple loved ones in a very short time and being forced to flee).

I don't really have a conclusion here, but I'm finding the activism that feels most healing and hope-filled to me has lament built into it: a chance to name the people who've died in our county's jail, while advocating for better communication with families of people inside. A chance to call out the names of people lost to covid while advocating for policies that will mitigate risk to vulnerable people.

Maybe it takes days to name all the people impacted by ongoing genocides in Congo, Palestine, Yemen, while urging our government to end its role in those genocides. Maybe our systems and structures, which aren't even good at honoring our grief for members of the nuclear family we're taught is our primary world, are disinclined to give us that time. Maybe we ought to take it anyway.

[bitchthefuck1]

That one chef saying that the worst thing about a bad boss is how they unlock that behavior in you and seeing Carmy mirror the attitude of the chef that terrorized him and gave him panic attacks and then ending the season with Syd having a panic attack because of the stress of working with Carmy...diabolical.

[andersdotters]

I think the thing that's easy to forget about Arlecchino is that she is not the original Arlecchino. The one that set up the House of the Hearth, the one that greatly abused its members, the one that lied to Freminet about his mother, the one that brainwashed the members to be willing to give their lives for their family was the original Arlecchino, not the current Arlecchino. The current Arlecchino was previously a child raised by the House of the Hearth that succeeded the original Arlecchino through some kind of "serious clash."

The original Arlecchino was painted to be a very cruel person. She'd would greatly punish members that did not succeed in their missions. She lied to Freminet that his mother abandoned him, then used his mother's well being as a way to threaten Freminet into obeying. Going off of one of her subordinates actions, she would've been fine with the creation of orphans if that met taking them in to become later members of the Fatui.

When the current Arlecchino got into power, she changed many things. Where the previous Arlecchino wanted them to give up their lives for the family, the current told them that they must value their lives. Every single one of them was important. Where the previous Arlecchino would punish members for failing missions, the current does not do so, but chooses to give missions suitable to the person.

What I find really interesting about the current Arlecchino is that she is not without morals. When Lyney asks to receive a delusion to help his sister, though she does not react outwardly, her eyes were described to be full of "wrath." She then shows a startling amount of emotional intelligence and asks if that is what Lynette would want. When it comes to Freminet, not only was she furious upon learning he was cruelly lied to regarding his mother, what I'm shocked is she knew about his mother in the first place. She knew what his mother looked like. Freminet entered the House of the Hearth before she became Arlecchino, but she still knew. If you want to look deeper into this, this implies that she purposefully looked into his past and sought out his mother for him.

People may say she's acting. People may say she is acting "nice" to groom the sibings her way, but anger is not something easily faked. Those seemed to be genuine reactions. I do not think that was a lie. However, I'm not saying that she's not lying or manipulative either.

What the most important thing to keep in mind about all of this is what Wanderer and Childe have to say about her. They both fully state that she is insane. She has no problems betraying people. She seeks to control others. She is insane. No ifs, ands, or buts.

I'm just really curious to see how Genshin will reconcile this conflicting information about her.

((check the tags for more of an analysis on her that goes a bit deeper))

[mollysunder]

Idk who needs to hear this, but in the event Jinx and Viktor do partner up, Jinx is the more normal one of the two. Imo people in Zaun LIKE Jinx better than Viktor. Viktor's association with Jinx alone is damage control for his reputation.

If you think about it for even 10 seconds, you'd see how Viktor is just an offputting dude. Yeah Jinx has volatile outbursts of destruction, but that's concentrated at specific people and at Piltover. Jinx isn't out here performing strange feats of blood magic that turns innocent bystanders (Sky) to dust. Jinx dealing with hextech recognizes it's dangerous (it connects to the realm of Heebie Jeebies) and is hesitant with it. Viktor knows he doesn't know what he's doing and just keeps going. That's worse, that's so much more dangerous.

You could say that Viktor's well-meaning and eventually develops a cult following from it. But one, Jinx has a cult too, and it's more successful (they steal real estate). Two, Viktor's time in Piltover has really skewed what needs to be done. At best, as a part of the hextech duo, Viktor might have improved workplace safety with his inventions, maybe, but not really. He wants to help Zaun, but he's lost the plot in the frenzy of Piltover's trade expansion.

Ironically, Jinx almost certainly has a better handle on understanding Zaun's politics and issues than Viktor ever did. Jinx spent her formative years at the top of Zaun's hierarchy while being raised by the defacto kingpen/political leader and actively enforced Silco's regime as well. So Jinx knows who and what's up in Zaun because she kind of made it happen, lol.

Tldr: Between Viktor and Jinx, Jinx is the more charismatic and likable figure to Zaunites. Take a step back and notice how Viktor is an extra level of weird compared to Jinx.