#god fontaine msq

[rowan-shadowblight]

It's raining again...

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

Must know your Furina thoughts cause I’m forever a Furina defender. I see her as different from Focalor and like… I get why Focalor did what she did but god I’m so… I don’t like her

I have more thoughts but I’d like to know yours and then I’ll explode

Heyy hiya hi hey! Sorry for getting back to this a bit late, I have been in a hole. You know how shrimps are

But the short answer is, regretfully, MHY's writing made me really viscerally dislike her, at first. There was definitely resistance in my heart and that was frustrating in itself, because I do not hate Her exactly and I see why a lot of people liked her a lot (my friends liked her too. I was pretty solitary in my extreme disdain of her). I just hated the story that MHY is trying to tell with her, I hated what she represents (to me, at least), and I hate that I'm seeing people being a lot more forgiving with her (compared to Ei) because she's shown to be more emotionally vulnerable, which makes her more relatable (this isn't so much as like, a 'her fans are bad!' take from me, just to clarify. More so, it is an observation about how MHY is able to very easily use their storytelling to sway the audience and keep their attention on certain narratives, and I don't like the effect of their writing decisions).

Disclaimer, though, I hate, hate Marie Antoinette and that "sad, helpless, rich (white) woman" archetype, so when Furina/Focalors clearly has some inspiration (and when I see the audience immediately make some of that connection), it was immediately rigged against her in my head, lol. She had no chance.

In retrospect, though, the Marie Antoinette reference isn't that strong, but I don't know if that's because MHY really chickened out of the French Revolution inspiration, or because they just vaguely wanted the vibes of it without ever intending on committing to it, and I end up looking silly because I'm making connections where there are none. MHY writing is notorious for making people do that because it expects you to extrapolate from minimal and vague writing at times.

Anyway, then I started writing her. I wrote her into the family dynamic of the WRLT family, streamer modern/future AU thing I've got going on, and even for my canon rewrite/reinterpretation/filled-in-the-shit-I-didn't-like-and-made-it-work-for-me fic where she shows up very briefly at times, I couldn't exactly make her completely villainous either. That role I reserve solely for Focalors (who, arguably, isn't portrayed as a villain in canon, either. I just hated her more, and she's specifically written as a scapegoat for Furina Criticisms by MHY, anyway, so she's literally used, narratively, as an excuse for Furina's action as the ruler of Fontaine, so. It's functionally the same shit as Ei being like "erm that was the robot, not me..." just much, much better executed).

And she's really grown on me! Like, if I'm not so hung up on her whole "I may be the ruler of a police state, but I have feelings, too" thing, I think her personal story of having to perform a role, and having to meet an expectation that just gets further and further out of reach, and how she was shown to quite literally fall apart under that pressure was (through gritted teeth) well done. I Guess. I liked the way they unravelled her on a literal stage at the end of the MSQ. If anything, I will give it to MHY for their understanding of effective visual storytelling.

In her defence, Neuvillette also had the whole "I may be the ruler of a police state, but I have feelings, too" thing going for him. In many ways, you can argue that he's Worse because he's the actual, functional facet of Fontaine's Justice System, while she was treated more as the theatrical side. But, I will Say, MHY tried to sneak it in there that she also does work behind the scenes to help vulnerable people, and they also tried to say that she takes her job very seriously behind the scenes as well. She just acts like she's all fun. But, once again, because of their writing, I think it's horribly executed. Because aside from those Few Specific Moments where they showed her doing these things, no actual impact of her leadership was ever shown within Fontaine aside from the way she represents the Theatre-Court thing, BUT EVEN THAT MEANS NOTHING ANYWAY.

(So once again, in the same way as my Neuvillette ramble, you have MHY being like "is she actually helpless? Is she not? Can she actually make changes, can she not???" and they end up playing Accountability Hot Potato between her and Neuvillette where they're like, No, Actually. You're the one In Power! No You! No You! I'm a clueless Sovereign, I don't know humans, you're the Archon! But you are the one people actually take seriously as the Iudex, you're the one with actual political influence, and I'm not the real Archon anyway! Then Focalors is like, Wah, Celestia! That's the actual party you should blame! I'm actually the martyr here! Feel bad for me! And if Celestia pops up with playable characters you know they're gonna be like erm, actually, we also have clones who's been acting as us who's the actual evil ones, but it's not us I prommie.)

Like how the fuck have they not figured out about the Primordial Waters shit, like, a hundred years ago. You're telling me they are so damn good at their jobs, but it took them this long? To realise??? The Primordial Waters can be a big ass problem in the future that they should have prepared for in the past? It's almost like a nod to how IRL governments will ignore global warming and line their pockets allowing big corpo to continue wrecking the environment at the cost of the common people— oh wait, MHY vaguely suggested that too in the world lore about pollution caused by Fontaine's rapidly growing technological landscape, but they didn't do anything with it, because the Government that would get narratively criticised in Fontaine is Entirely Made Up of the Two Characters Products they're trying to Sell?

Oh, you're telling me the way Oratrice Mechanique D'Analyse is feeding off the people's belief in Justice while it literally hoards all the energy of the nation in order to fulfil Focalor's plan can almost be seen as commentary on how Media like True Crime commodifies Justice while platforms like TikTok literally profit off your engagement— oh wait it falls apart the moment you try to say that Focalors did this out of necessity in order to give Neuvillette back his sovereignty because those vaguely evil, undefined Ceslestia people?

And I'm sure someone could pop up and say like That's The Point! They're trying to show that someone is always above someone else, pulling the strings, and that Everyone has to do a little evil sometimes! As if that's not the easiest excuse for MHY to wave off writing accountability into their character stories.

But you know what poisons all of their writing to me? Knowing that they make products first, stories after. Every writing decisions they make, I am sitting there like, "This is designed for an audience, this is specifically made this way to sell to the most people possible." I can't look at Furina and think "they're trying to make a sympathetic and relatable character" because I Know there is a board of Rich Guys somewhere who sits there and say "but she has to be redeemable, she has to be relatable, and she has to be just a little bit of everything to be palatable to the widest swath of people."

Like, all the "flaws" of Genshin's writing are barely "flaws" at this point, in terms of intention. There's no one sitting there being like "this is what we wanted to achieve, but we went about it wrong", it's more like "this is good enough to make us money. Some people might complain or look into it deeper, but most are still gonna buy and keep using our product." And they're right. Fuck, I might come back for Natlan just to see what the fuck they'd do. And I hate it lol