#hate a situation?
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well that was awkward
#happy belated ace week everyone#i miss season 2 when everything was still kind of silly#and jon didn't make tim hate him yet :(((((#instead was just tim playing matchmaker#and being terrible at it#i like to hc basira as aro so it makes their situation funnier for me#tma#the magnus archives#magpod#tma s2#tma season two#timothy stoker#basira hussain#jonathan sims#tma fanart#asexual#aromantic#my stuff
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Don’t mind me I just like to see him go bananas about cartoonish Autobot rules
Maaan…..if Prowl was in tfp he would spontaneously combust at least once a day
#maccadam#transformers#prowl#tf prowl#there is no Prowl in Tfp so Optimus can pull all kinds of heroic cartoonish bullshit#and only Ratchet actually calls him out on it#but Ratchet also kinda has soft spot for Optimus#Op does sad eyes and Ratchet is like okay okay sorry I understand#Prowl would see the whole situation and lose his marbles immediately ahahahah#lol hey hey you. two people who read tags. imagine little au realquick#Autobots find the escape pod with Smokescreen right#but there’s two bots instead of one#back on the base humans look at the new guys and like#Smokey is fun and energetic and eager for heroism and adventure#and then there’s Prowl. The final boss. The ultimate MOM.#He makes one step into base and immediately starts scolding Optimus and everyone except for Ratchet#agent Fowler listens to him talking and decides that Prowl is his favorite autobot#damn. Prowl would SO not approve keeping humans around. Kids would hate him#but also he would be completely right. Because by keeping humans that close Autobots basically show that the humans can be used as leverage#against them you know.#He would immediately suggest getting rid of kids and hiring actual competent adults instead. So all hacking can be done by professionals#and all infiltrating can be done by people who are at least old enough to drink you know#yea kids would haaaate him so much#he would also build make all kinds of little annoying gadgets bc I have read Covenant of Primus and tfp Prowl is smart like that#he would be going around sticking trackers on every enemy he fights#and then triangulating Cons positions by the coordinates where their signals stop tracking#bc Nemesis blocks them#He would also keep sending Smokey to ghost through walls and steal all kinds of valuable shit from Megsy#they would be such a menace together#man this is getting kinda long I should probably stop
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"I wrote in my diary to never be horrible to Dream again, it's not worth it, because I didn't like when he was mad with me, it made me too sad" it's a quote I would expect from c!tommy during the Exile arc, not from Tommyinnit, the content creator, talking about how Dream, the content creator, treated him when he was 15/16
#what the fuck#I'm with jack on this one I hate dream#rosa's garden#dream neg#dream situation#tommyinnit#shut up im talking#shut up I'm talking podcast
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Permission to maim, sir?
#sth#sth fanart#silver the hedgehog#espio the chameleon#charmy bee#vector the crocodile#team chaotix#espilver#<- i guess#knights and poets au#roonies doodles#more knights and poets chaotix shenanigans bcs their dynamic makes me laugh really really hard#like its such a tense situation. they hate eachother but equally they also care for espio. so tolerance it is#vector and his son and his other son who is a noble and that sons weird intense guard dog who is only barely holding back from killing them#also sidebar but silvers called both silver and galahad with the latter being his formal way of address and also the most common#all this just because i find it really cute if espio eventually starts calling him silver when theyve started warming up to eachother
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it’s crazy that rouge straight up said this and people still see her as a mother figure lmaooo
#edit: for the love of god ‘aunt/sister’ is not meaningfully different than mother figure#explain to me how ascribing a woman to a different role in a nuclear family is super subversive actually or shut up. please#rambles#stole a robot for the purpose of creating a perfect thieving tool and ignored every sign of interiority or will he expressed#and ditched him the second it became clear that the situation is more of a pain in the ass than it is a benefit#and said she’d hate to be a mom to said robot#how maternal.#god i fucking love rouge she’s so awesome in this game#such a shame about amy.#battle posting
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"aphobia doesn't exist"
bitch literally not that long ago an aroace youtuber animator was insulted by almost half of its community for being it
#i did some research about it and found out that the problem was principally that she had previous experience in the romantic area#so people just didn't take her seriously and said she was lying#even though she stated multiple times that she wasn't comfortable in those situations#now things are more calmed but damn#mind your own bussiness#i believe she knows more about herself than you#sorry if i offended you with this comment but i hate how aro/ace/aroace people are always left behind#insulted and rejected because they “dont know what they are talking about”#or because they “just have to wait for the right person”#or because they are “psychopaths and they are missing something”#i love that animator and she helped me realise a lot about myself#and now that i know the context i think i will start making a list and killing aphobes one by one#aromantic#arospec#asexual#aroace#acespec
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tommyinnit r u hiring editors cause im a stan and i would love u be an underpaid worker at the innit corp. sweat shop


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Introducing another major character: Nezha!
For the AU I thought it’d be interesting to play with the design of Nezha having a younger appearance, since he is supposed to be the god of children and I’ve seen other medias do this too.
Nezha plays a major role in the development of the celestial realm and politics after Wukong ascends the role, admittedly this does not happen from the beginning. Nezha is allowed a role in the court around 400 years after the ascension of the throne due to his previous ties to the jade emperor and his court, his loyalty was strong until he realized he could help more from the inside and that his previous role on the court had not let him do much other than being a glorified guard.
He respects Wukong’s strength but he is not yet trustful of his abilities as the ruler of all realms, so he demands to be his assistant, to keep him on track and on the matters that are important. Although, once he does start working for him he does figure out that Wukong is not as bad as ruler as he was expecting, politically, his court is full of people who are experts in their own matters and provide a variety of discussion and solutions during meetings, and while he though Wukong had stayed the same Monkey King he knew from the wars and mayhem, he had grown as a ruler and cared about the realms in ways that Nezha had not seen other celestials had.
Nezha is closed off and even hostile for a while at the beginning, but he does start mellowing out around the time that Macaque is expecting, being the god of children he can’t help but be protective and clingy, leading to the Six-eared Macaque having a kid following him around like a duckling.
Also I find it really funny that Nezha was the first to find out Macaque was pregnant even before he did






Nezha is not shocked because Macaque is expecting, no he thinks he’d be a good parent,
He’s more in shock that Wukong procreated.
Bonus:
(Nezha becomes so close to the royal family that there is an inside joke in the court that he is the Emperor’s eldest child. Much to Nezha and Wukong’s dismay and Macaque’s amusement.
Remember this.)
#lmk#shadowpeach#sunset!au#time traveling monkey au#ttm!au#lmk nezha#lmk mk#lmk sun wukong#lmk macaque#six eared macaque#Nezha is so adorable#he actually glamours himself most of the time to appear older#he mainly shows his child appearance with people he trusts not to take advantage of it#although once MK is born he kinda rewinds his glamour to slowly grow with Xiaotian#to stay the kids older brother#also cue confuse monkeys who start having parental instincts over a celestials who is older than the#I think#what do you mean he’s older than them?? he is but a wee lil cub!#nezha hates it#the clinging to Mac situation did not help him at all
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Say hello to Jumping Spider AU! Where Orange DIDN'T get to talk it out with Alan and was dropped to the Outernet. Where TDL got into another massive fights with TCO much more early that got them seperated before Orange was created and the whole Virabots thing (TCO kept the house. But only cause TDL refuse to live in the same house as he is)
TDL is convinced that he doesn't care about TCO, or that now he's alone, he doesn't need anyone! Until some Orange kid with the same head as him crashes onto him. Literally. Fate seems to hate him (or pity him?)
#alan becker#animation vs animator#animator vs animation#ava#ava the dark lord#ava tdl#ava orange#ava the second coming#the duo that is the most depicted to hate eachother's guts#but I am very curious about their dynamic beyond that in certain situations/circumstances#what IS TDL to Orange? a bad but only companion? an annoying big bro? a tough love dad?#maybe all of them in the worst way possible#they are in no way fits but unlike TCO and TDL#fate kept them close and force them to bond it out#jumping spider au
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More drawinfs <3 the usual art dump
#paper ii#oj ii#payjay#inanimate insanity#osc#ii oj#ii paper#payphone#ii mephone#mephone ii#payphone drawing is for my beloved#sorry if the context is confusing its an au where they get together (and are celebrities) and the drawing is a. tv interview situation#tacomic#microphone ii#ii microphone#taco ii#ii taco#cheesy ii#ii cheesy#knife ii#ii knife#suitcase ii#ii suitcase#theres ocs here which i hope you enjoy reading about#theres more to them though. weird awful lesbian relationship#theres a knife gijinka concept righttt at the end there#and i had a lot of fun drawing oj bathing. he hates it so much hes getting a stomachache from the soap#payjay ii#ii payjay#juice art
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TW// Abuse implication
Thinking about possible Vox and Angel's interactions and how they'd go down. Theres such a unique mix of hatred to each other and common ground with their different experiences with Valentino, has me thinking.
Also just want to clarify I love Vox's character a LOT but ofc obv don't sympathise with him or think he is any way shape or form a decent individual, cant with stupid toxic dumbass x
AND IF YOU SEE ANY MISTAKES OR TYPOS NO YOU DONT- (i was so tired when drawing it forgive me TwT)
#Man though the ANGST potential!!!!#vox and angel are in such different situations#but they have one thing in common that keeps them really close#val#and like we all know vox is super jealous#even though vals a dick#i just think the way they would go about interacting is so so interesting#ALSO THIS IS NOT HATE TO VAL OR VOX i think they are really well written and I love how shitty they are#but also no apologizing for them either ygm? :>#SENDING LOVE AND KEEP YOURSELF SAFE OUT THERE. 🤍🤍#hazbin hotel#vox#angel dust#hazbin hotel vox#huskerdust#voxval#hazbin#hazbin hotel fanart#tribbleart#<3
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Comparing Phaidei and Other Hoyo MLM Ships (Part 1)
I barely know how to begin, honestly, because I'm still so taken aback by the absolute Phaidei feast that was 3.1. But perhaps because we were so overfed by the patch, I was actually jarred a little out of the story itself--too busy turning over the broader ramifications of such blatant queer-coding of two male characters in a modern Hoyoverse game.
Of course, Hoyo isn't remotely new to queer-coding their characters (or to queer-baiting, either, gacha games gotta hustle at all times). They absolutely have a history of hinting at both WLW and MLM ships and of including fanservice between the player's MC and other playable characters regardless of gender. Strangely enough, due to the unique confluence of their target audiences' tastes, the Hoyoverse team has an active profit motive to create gay characters:
WLW ships are appealing to heterosexual male players.
MLM ships are appealing to heterosexual female players.
Simultaneously, WLW and MLM ships are appealing to queer players.
Heterosexual ships with characters other than the MC are unappealing to a large percentage of the game's playerbase, particularly to heterosexual male players who want to keep their waifus to themselves but also to female yumeshippers.
Hoyo's market is literally telling them that 1) male characters sell better when they're ship-baited with other male characters, and 2) players don't actually want heterosexual ships between playable characters if the MC isn't involved. (Hell, look at Firefly--players hate romances with the MC too lol!)
But at the same time as the market is telling the devs to keep making queer characters, Hoyoverse also faces immense social pressure to avoid including actual queer content.
Let me hold off on the political and legal consequences of including gay characters in Chinese media for just a second, and look at the situation from the perspective of Hoyo's target audiences first:
Take this data with a grain of salt though; I'm not sure where they got their numbers.
First, Hoyoverse games are increasingly global and surprisingly popular in conservative/religious countries such as Russia, Malaysia, and the UAE. The western world as a whole is shifting increasingly right on LGBT+ issues. For the games to be marketed well across the globe, they've got to avoid challenging the morals of these highly varied audiences. (Perhaps this is why past Hoyoverse titles seemed more open to LGBT+ content than present Hoyoverse games do; a broader audience actually means more restrictions on content.)
Second, even though conservative heterosexual male players are actually surprisingly fine with MLM ship tease, that only applies so long as it stays at the level of "I can pretend I don't see it." As long as anti-LGBT+ players can write off any MLM content as "just close friends," the dev team can get away with frankly shocking amounts of queer interaction between male characters. (I'm sorry to any straight male fans reading this [could there possibly be any?], but half of y'all could win gold medals if mental gymnastics were a sport. The lengths I have seen some male Genshin players go to try to explain away Haikaveh are honestly awe-inspiring. 😂) However, the boundary must be respected. The moment a male character's queerness exceeds subtext and becomes text, when even mental gymnastics cannot come up with a heterosexual explanation, and the plausible deniability goes out the window, it is no longer acceptable to anti-LGBT+ players, and they will be "turned off" from pulling that male character en masse. In essence, the market is telling the devs: 1) Huge amounts of queer-coding = a-okay, but 2) Actual canon queer content = that's gayyyy, no wayyyy.
And third, the obvious: China's stance on LGBT+ people is weirdly stricter in media than it is in "real" life. It is not illegal to be gay in China but it is illegal to be gay in a video game in China. Restrictions on media portrayals of gayness are significantly more strict than restrictions on actually being gay (which is interesting cognitive dissonance for those from outside the country, but that's an essay for another day). Hoyoverse legally cannot show characters engaged in any explicitly queer behaviors--at least that can't be explained away.
Furthermore, the rules apply very differently for male and female characters. WLW content gets way more of a pass from the censors. Bronya and Seele can blush at each other, but Alhaitham and Kaveh cannot. You would never see "Rondo Across Countless Kalpas" happening with male Hoyoverse characters. The censors literally would not allow it, strictly because Chinese standards for portrayals of men are different--and more strict!--than standards for portraying women. Legally, there are strong and serious limitations on what Hoyo can do with their male characters.
Summing all of this up, in trying to create their male characters and content, Hoyoverse is actually fighting a battle of conflicting pressures: Male characters sell better when they are queer-coded, but their interactions can never rise to the level of being canonically gay.
Everything must exist in the realm of implication.
(Yes, I can hear you: "Can you please get to Phaidei already?" 😂)
All of this foreword was to lay a foundation for the actual point I want to make about Phaidei: Because Hoyoverse can only queer-code and not actually queer their male characters, they have (in their modern games), fallen into a sort of pattern with their MLM ship bait. Certain plots and personalities keeps reappearing again and again. They've developed a sort of short-hand set of traits to give to their male characters--the Hoyoverse "queer-coded MLM starter pack" if you will lol.
While not every popular MLM ship in Hoyo's games has the same traits (obviously not), certain elements seem central to creating the delicate necessary gray area between "They're just baiting fangirls" and "The devs intended these two characters to be canonically gay but just couldn't state that textually."
And yet... And yet...
You're not imagining things: Phaidei is actually different.
To demonstrate just how different though, I wanted to take the time to compare Phaidei with other popular Hoyoverse MLM ships, looking at both the similarities (the patterns that Hoyo relies on to reliably queer-code their characters) and the noticeable differences (where Hoyo pushed their own boundaries in surprising ways).
Unfortunately, in the interest of full transparency, my own Hoyoverse experience is limited, so I can only use examples from Star Rail and Genshin Impact. I just haven't played HI3 or ZZZ, so I don't feel comfortable trying to use examples from those games, although I think there may be many ships that fall into similar patterns in those games as well. (Maybe some people can share in the comments?)
Anyway, let's start with similarities:
1. A Pair of Equals
The number one "rule" for popular Hoyoverse queer-coded MLM ships is that the two characters must be evenly matched. This isn't to say they have to have identical levels of physical strength (although that is also often the case); instead, the audience needs to perceive them as being on equal footing in some way. They must either be intellectual equals (Alhaitham and Kaveh), political equals (Ratio and Aventurine; Neuvillette and Wriothesley), equal in social standing (Tighnari and Cyno), or, yes, actually physically equal their capability for going toe-to-toe against each other (Blade and Dan Heng; possibly Zhongli and Childe; for those who ship it, Diluc and Kaeya).
For modern Hoyo games, queer-coded MLM ships with noticeable discrepancies in power dynamics are particularly rare; possibly the only one that comes to mind is Ayato/Thoma (though this is mitigated by the game deliberately telling us that Ayato treats Thoma like family, rather than like a servant). And I think this actually says a lot about the devs' thought process: They are deliberately avoiding scenarios in which one male character seems capable of "preying" on another, where the queer-coding could accidentally be perceived as sexual perversion due to a discrepancy in power dynamics.
They're intentionally averting the "depraved homosexual" trope by--sometimes literally--spelling out for the players that both male characters in their queer-coded MLM ships perceive each other as, and are interested in each other as, equals.
We see this explicitly with Ratio and Aventurine in Star Rail:

And Alhaitham and Kaveh in Genshin:
Even Blade and Dan Heng are likened to "a pair" of identical objects:
So of course, Phainon and Mydei push this to an extreme. Phainon describes himself and Mydei as "friends and foes," and the game goes out of it way to reiterate over and over that they are perfect equals. Although they compete in everything they do, there is never a clear victor; their score card is constantly balancing out because they match each other's skill and power perfectly.
But there are even hints in the game that this isn't just happening naturally, but also by choice: Even when one of them triumphs over the other, they both backtrack and insist on getting on equal standing again. Whether you win or lose the "competition" in Kremnos in 3.0, the outcome is the same:
Phainon and Mydei perceive each other as perfectly matched (in strength, right, right...) and are actively working to keep it that way.
The game also goes out of its way to insist that Mydei and Phainon aren't just equals in terms of strength but also in social standing. It theoretically should be impossible to match Mydei's place on the social ladder--he's the literal crown prince of an entire nation of world-renowned conquerors. Even Aglaea is not a queen; we see her on screen being forced to contend with Okhema's Council who are fighting her for power. There technically isn't anyone in Amphoreus (at least that we've met so far) who should be able to stand on equal political or administrative footing to Mydei.
Except, of course, for Phainon, who supersedes all others by virtue of being the literal prodigal son, the "Chosen One."
The game insists on putting this in our faces over and over again: Mydei may be a king in the making, but Phainon is the "Deliverer." They are equally matched in terms of authority.
The game even goes out of its way to tell us they're perfect mirrors in personality too:
Hoyo, in the kitchen cooking up another gay ship: LISTEN GUYS, they're equals, do you understand me? A MATCHING SET.
But also...
2. Diametrically Opposed
It isn't enough for the queer-coded men to be each other's perfect equals. They also have to be opposites, typically in terms of their personalities. This is the pattern that repeats itself most consistently across Hoyoverse MLM ships with strong textual support: the two men may be equal, but they're also nothing alike. (At least on the surface.)
Alhaitham and Kaveh's entire plot hinges on their directly opposing personalities and morals, representing the clash between rationality and sensibility. Dan Feng was reserved and cool-tempered, while Yingxing was "arrogant" and brash. Hell, Xingqiu and Chongyun are "refined and clever" versus "forthright and trusting." I actually think Zhongli and Childe, despite being the most popular Hoyoverse ship in the western fandom, have very little canonical support, yet they still fit this pattern, with Zhongli as the refined gentleman to Tartaglia's blood knight tendencies.
We know how Ratio sees himself and Aventurine:
Hoyo really said "Opposites attract" and ran with it for every single MLM ship they ever teased.
And there's a logical reason for this. Making the two male characters dead opposites actually slightly decreases people's ability to argue that they're "just friends"--if they have next to nothing in common, they're not usually bonding over mutual hobbies or basing their connection on shared similarities. It becomes harder to portray two male characters as "bros who just get along great" when they're deliberately written with opposing tastes and personalities. (Real friends can sometimes be dead opposites, obviously, but most friendships are built on mutual interests rather than opposing ones, while romantic relationships hilariously have the "opposites attract" stereotype.)
There's no reason to shove polar opposites together again and again except to watch the sparks fly.
Even Hoyo's male characters' color schemes are often perfectly opposite. Plenty of people have figured out if you palette swap Alhaitham and Kaveh, Dan Heng and Blade, and Ratio and Aventurine, you end up with the same colors. Ayato and Thoma match the pattern here too ("red and blue gays" is a well-known trope).
But once again, the devs pulled out ALL the stops for Phaidei:
They're red versus blue. They're sun and moon. They're outgoing versus introverted. They're a king and a peasant (if we believe what Phainon's telling us about Aedes Elysiae). They're the "outsider" and the "golden boy." One fights with strength and the other with technique, brains versus brawn (actually they're both kind of idiots though, so take this one lightly lol).
However, what I think is most interesting about Hoyo's pairs of MLM opposites that is that the devs deliberately subvert expectations by assigning the opposing traits to the "unexpected" character. In both Haikaveh and Ratiorine, it's the rational scholar who is more overtly caring and attuned to their partner's feelings. In Renheng, it's the kind-hearted Yingxing who is consumed by anger, while the aloof, expressionless Dan Heng's voice trembles in wonder at the mere mention of Yingxing's name.
For Phainon and Mydei, this inversion of opposite traits occurs with their personalities specifically. People expected Mydei to be a gruff, hot-headed, battle-hungry berserker with a sarcastic or arrogant personality at best.
Instead, Mydei is an extremely thoughtful person, who struggles with his fate not because of what will happen to himself but because of a desire to bring the greatest good to the greatest number of his people. He's a respectful, gentle (when he needs to be), and even sentimental young man who continues to hold on to love for those who have long passed away. He's reserved around strangers but generous and warm to his companions, and struggles to express himself but has a clear desire to be considerate of others.
We also know he's deeply aware of and emotionally affected by the racism his people are experiencing in Okhema; one NPC in Okhema reports how Mydei, despite being new to Okhema himself, stood up to the very council still plaguing Aglaea in order to protect his people:
Despite having difficulties expressing his own thoughts, he even scolds Phainon for approaching their farewell with a nonchalant expression--Mydei doesn't reject emotions or shy away from becoming close with people he cares for.
Instead, it's Phainon who actually struggles to be honest. While he might connect easily with others on the surface, seeming outgoing and kind-hearted, he is actually a much more private person, one who is reluctant to show his true feelings and dismissive of questions about his past and identity. As opposed to Mydei's desire to avoid Nikador's power, Phainon is (despite his doubts) eager to prove himself, spurned on by the pressure of the prophecy telling him he needs to achieve greatness. We're told that he craved the power of strife specifically, while Mydei summarily wishes to reject it.
It's Phainon who frequently has to be reined in by others--he was ready to kill Oronyx for delaying his rescue of Mydei--and Phainon who fails to let go of his hatred and desire for revenge, causing him to fail Nikador's trial, which Mydei easily clears.
By inverting the traits of the characters, creating designs which visually oppose each other while assigning the actual opposing personality traits to the "mismatched" character, the devs hammer home an implicit message: These two characters complete each other. They fill in each other's gaps. What you expected to find in one of these men, you will instead find in the other. What they wish to be, they will be drawn to in each other.
(Frequently bought together, do not separate!)
3. The Distance is Artificial
Okay, so if they're so obviously written as a "pair," being perfect equals and perfect opposites, how are they just "queer-coded" and not explicitly queer? How is Hoyo keeping up the illusion of the characters not being an obvious couple when they're literally written to complete each other?
Hoyo has one major tool in their arsenal to do this: Prickly personalities.
With the exception of Renheng, which I'll get to in a second, Hoyo has a favorite method for enforcing the rule of plausible deniability, the idea that "Nooo, we promise, they're not in love; they don't even like each other, see??"--and that's giving one of the characters an intractable personality.
This can manifest, like Alhaitham and Kaveh, as constant bickering, where the pair's main method of communication is to devolve into petty arguments or sarcastic quips.
Fans who support the ship can view this as an "old married couple" dynamic; but for those who do not support the ship and choose to insist that Hoyo isn't actually queer-coding their male characters, they can lean on these arguments as "proof" that the characters don't actually love each other.
A similar pattern was recently repeated with Sethos/Wanderer, with Wanderer's prickly personality being used to keep Sethos at bay.
By placing the characters at odds with each other through bickering, Hoyo introduces just enough doubt to make the "They're only friends/roommates, we promise" argument hold some water. This allows them to get--quite honestly--a lot of queer content past the censors and past homophobic audiences too.
We see them repeat this trope with Aventurine and Ratio in Star Rail, introducing the two characters as initially "at odds" with each other and trying to pass it off as Ratio despising Aventurine.

Even after revealing that they were plotting together, the game insists on introducing some lingering doubts, suggesting that Aventurine fears Ratio would actually betray him.

This creates the necessary "gray area," the gap that Hoyo can use to hide in--no, Aventurine doesn't trust Ratio at all, see? Maybe they don't even like each other? Who knows! The doubt doesn't exist because the story particularly needs it, but simply so that Hoyo has a shield to hide behind if people begin to question how close the two male characters are.
Even in comedic material, Hoyo intentionally keeps this "necessary distance" in order to allow themselves wiggle room. Is Ratio an enamored tsundere who can't spit his real feelings out, or does he actually think Aventurine is illogical, mediocre, and ridiculous? Was the "Keeping Up With Star Rail" video an example of Hoyo deliberately baiting by making Ratio flustered over Aventurine "on air," or is he being Aventurine's biggest hater in this clip?
It's just questionable enough that those players who hate MLM to interpret it as the latter, and provides just enough doubt to help Hoyo slip queer-coding under the radar. Those who want to see it will see, while it's written just vaguely enough that those who don't want to see it will not see it.

(That's the point Owlbert, that's the point.)
When in doubt, and when stuck with a pair of characters who aren't likely to bicker with words, Hoyo sometimes has to progress to the next level: making them actual enemies.
What's better for creating plausible deniability than one of them trying to kill the other? (They definitely were not fooling around in a past life. We promise.) In an ironic twist with Renheng in particular, the fandom seems to have somehow come to the (mistaken) consensus that Dan Feng and Yingxing were "confirmed canon" (truly, I see this stated everywhere; we love when reading comprehension fails in the right direction for once lol), leaving only Dan Heng/Blade as being of questionable "canonicity." However, this still works as far as Hoyo is concerned, because only Dan Heng and Blade are left on screen.
By insisting on their present inability to reconcile, Blade and Dan Heng are able to introduce just enough doubt into the equation to offset even significant ship tease for Dan Feng/Yingxing.
Enemies to lovers 150k+ slow burn, please look forward to it.
Okay, but back to Phaidei. At first, it seems like Phaidei is going to follow this pattern to a T: When Phainon first introduces Trailblazer to Mydei, the two seem to be at odds, bickering over how Mydei is choosing to confront the enemy. Mydei even calls Phainon out for an unintentionally insensitive statement (when Phainon demands to know why Mydei isn't "protecting the citizens," Mydei asks "Who are you implying is not a citizen here?" i.e., "Are you saying because I'm Kremnoan I don't count as a citizen?" You can see Phainon practically bite his tongue to take back his words.)
Also known as: Mydei experiences a microaggression.
Mydei's very first line directly to the Trailblazer is to insult Phainon's hospitality, and we know they definitely have plenty of silly insults to lob at each other while competing.
But this is actually where we see the first deviation from the pattern for Phaidei. Although there's a few cursory lines throughout their early dialogue, that's all there ever is--just cursory attempts at suggesting the two bicker and don't get along.
Within one scene, the "tension" present in their first meeting entirely devolves into purely playful banter, and it is clear by the time we finish 3.0 that Phainon and Mydei are actually very close and get along well, with virtually none of Haikaveh's biting comments, Blade and Dan Heng's violence, or Aventurine and Ratio's questions of loyalty. Phainon and Mydei took one look at the rest of Hoyoverse's MLM ships and said "How about we skip that will they-won't they?" lol.
But I'm not quite ready to talk about the places where Phaidei departs from the normal pattern yet, so I'll leave this point by just saying that Hoyo did start Phaidei on the same path as a majority of their other MLM ships, making a vague attempt at using their rivalry to suggest they wouldn't get along--thereby allowing for the alternative interpretation to quiet the haters (and the censors).
4. The (Physical) Distance is Non-Existent
Okay, but if Hoyo uses personalities to inject just enough distance into their queer-coded pairings to avoid crossing any boundaries, then what do they do to tantalize the audience, to make it seem like the characters might actually like each other?
They use body language!
First, just to reiterate a basic video game design principle: All animations and character placements have to be programmed by someone, and that means that all animations and the physical locations of characters in scenes are intentional. Nothing happens in cutscenes by accident.
Designers are constantly making a series of choices any time they have to put together a cutscene, and one of the key choices they have to make is how to express each character through their movements and their positions relative to other characters. (I've talked before, for example, about how Aventurine frequently turns his back on people, forcing their eyes to follow him throughout his cutscenes, taking physical control of the reactions of people around him.)
Hoyoverse games have somewhat standardized scene layouts for conversation cutscenes, with characters typically being placed at different distances from each other depending on their relationships. A majority of conversations happen from a generally cordial conversational distance, which means that any time characters cross this gap and close the distance, the dev team is intentionally sending the players a message.
Like, no one mistook what this was about, right?
Heterosexual jumpscare in my queer post; I'm sorry, I was just too tired to find a video with Lumine lol.
Repeating for good measure: Unless it is with a male playable main character (where the presence of the female main character is what lends the deniability), Hoyo legally cannot show their male characters engaging in physical contact that could be construed as romantic. Male characters can't hold hands; they can't even really hug unless it's "caught you as you fell after battle" (props to Dan Heng for being the only male character in Star Rail to get a "hug" with Jing Yuan lol.) There's a boundary that Hoyo male characters do not cross, and that's almost universally the realm of physical touch.
But Hoyo can place their queer-coded male characters into scenarios of physical closeness that they don't typically show among other characters.
Alhaitham and Kaveh's table says hello.
So does Tighnari and Cyno's single tent from this same quest; Cyno's Story 2, truly the quest that kept on giving.
Aventurine, a character who traditionally keeps half a room's distance between himself and the people he's talking to, suddenly doesn't seem to mind closing the distance with Ratio:

And even Renheng, the eternal enemies, are depicted as crossing physical boundaries, explicitly "getting in each other's faces." Yes it's a battle, but also, I've seen yaoi with less domineering poses lol.

You might think these lightcone examples are a stretch, but seriously: Go look at all the lightcones in the game. Does a single heterosexual couple have a lightcone where they are in each other's space in this manner? No, because physical closeness is actually a tool Hoyo is consistently using to queer-code. (Well, there would probably be more heterosexual closeness too if the incels weren't so weird...)
Anyway, when I saw the devs might be heading the direction of baiting Phaidei, I fully expected that we would see them side-by-side more consistently and with less of a gap between them than between other characters. But I wasn't remotely ready for the degree to which Hoyo would take that.
Here is an example of Phaidei exhibiting the "normal" Star Rail conversational distance:
Andddd... here's where they spend the other 90% of their scenes together:
The unnecessarily large distance between them and the Trailblazer gets me every time. Like they are not leaving room for Jesus Kephale.
Even when they aren't standing practically on top of each other, the devs deliberately choose camera angles that frame them both in the cutscene at the same time, which is relatively rare for Star Rail (not unheard of, but usually the camera will just go for the "first person POV" when two people are speaking, allowing for a close up of the speaking character). Instead of back-and-forth close ups, many of Mydei and Phainon's conversations are framed from a "behind-the-shoulder" angle, to catch them both in the frame. This creates the illusion that they're standing closer together than they are, and also reinforces a sense of intimacy in their conversations--the camera (and thus the player) becomes an "outsider" while their bodies turn toward each other.
Again, Hoyoverse is under pressure to avoid showing physical contact between male characters that could be construed romantically. They can't show Mydei and Phainon tangoing like Black Swan and Acheron. When it comes to queer-coding male characters, they have to use the tools available to them, and their primary tool for visually signifying the possibility of romantic closeness is physical closeness.
The camera is telling you that Mydei and Phainon are close.
Anyway, just one more point I wanted to make before moving on to discussing how Phaidei completely crushed the mold for Hoyoverse queer-coding, but...
5. Oh God, We're Turning Into Your Parents
Listen, I'm a reasonable person. I can fully accept that I play games with LGBT+ goggles on at all times. Despite being fantastically aroace myself, I love yaoi. I love yuri. I even like plenty of straight ships. I'm a fangirl first, academic second, so believe me when I say that I understand how skeptics might view some of the points above. "You're just fangirling. Being equals and opposites doesn't automatically imply romance. The devs might have intended close friendship, not a relationship." This counter-argument is valid!
So I want to end with one more point which I think is actually the lynch pin to proving that Hoyoverse isn't "accidentally" making their male characters come across as queer. Hoyo's queer-coding for certain ships is very intentional and even sometimes very overt. In a few cases prior to Phaidei, they were already skirting the upper limits of plausible deniability, and I think the modern ship that previously pushed the boundary the most is Haikaveh.
You can say what you want about other Hoyo MLM ships and their lack of canon textual support (I love you ZhongChi, even if the devs actually hate you lol), but I believe people who unironically say "The devs are not baiting Alhaitham and Kaveh as a ship" are so media illiterate that it's actually embarrassing to share air with them. Whether you think the devs are just doing it to cash in on yaoi fangirls or because they actually want to depict gay characters, it is indisputable at this point that Alhaitham and Kaveh have in-game ship tease. They just do, and one of the most obvious and unmistakable instances of this is when Kaveh's hangout paralleled Kaveh's relationship with Alhaitham to the heterosexual marriage between Kaveh's mother and father.

To draw a direct connection between Kaveh's father and Alhaitham, who is repeatedly described as not being able to understand Kaveh's artistic sensibilities and idealistic world view but nevertheless chooses to stay by Kaveh's side through his many troubles, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that Kaveh is his mother's spitting image, both physically and emotionally, can really not be interpreted in any other way.
Hoyoverse took a queer relationship and made a one-for-one analogy to a heterosexual relationship--Alhaitham and Kaveh are a direct reflection of Kaveh's very married parents.
This isn't something that can happen on accident. This is deliberate and unmistakable queer-coding.
Which makes it absolutely wild that it happened twice.
I've posted already about the obvious parallels between Mydei's parents and Phaidei, and I'm actually almost out of room for new images here, so I can't post the images again, but I hardly need to at this point: Mydei's parents met when Gorgo challenged Eurypon at the Kremnos Festival. They fought for ten rounds, determined that they were (what do you know) perfect equals, and Eurypon proposed on the spot. Eurypon is explicitly described as a swordmaster, while Gorgo used a spear.
Later, the game repeatedly (and in various separate instances), emphasizes that Mydei and Phainon's first meeting consisted of a duel lasting ten days and ten nights, where neither of them could secure the victory, proving them to also be each other's perfect equals. Phainon's role as Okhema's swordmaster is emphasized, while Mydei wields a spear just like his mother when killing his father and after taking on Nikador's divinity.
Then there's... everything that came after. Eurypon betrayed Gorgo, effectively stabbing her in the back, and took her life. The foreshadowing that Phainon will do this exact same thing to Mydei is unmissable.
Phainon has even expressed an explicit desire to take part in the same competition where Mydei's father crowned the winner his wife:
In the (very limited) Kremnoan dictionary, I'm pretty sure this is how you say "I'm down to fuck."
Just as in the case with Haikaveh, there is no way that this parallel could have occurred by accident. The devs did not go out of their way to give us entire flashbacks of Gorgo and Eurypon's meeting and downfall for no reason. You're supposed to see the one-for-one connection between Mydei's very heterosexual, married parents and Phainon and Mydei's relationship.
Simultaneously, the devs also parallel their MLM ships to heterosexual relations by incorporating shades of domesticity normally reserved for "traditional" male-female relationships into their MLM ships--including levels of domesticity that heterosexual ships in Genshin and Star Rail usually don't rise to. One of Genshin's most popular MLM ships shares a single-family home and has a chore chart. Thoma is Ayato's housekeeper. Tighnari and Cyno are just flat-out joint raising a child. Jiaoqiu cooks and Moze cleans. Yingxing and Dan Feng accidentally(?) made a baby.
And Phainon and Mydei aren't any exception. They live an apocalyptic world that is constantly calling them away to battle, but the devs went out of their way to tell us Mydei is an extremely good cook who prepares everyone's food and deliberately ruins Phainon's when he's annoying, which is definitely old married couple behavior lol. Mydei is framed repeatedly as being good with children, not just in the distant fatherly way but in the "plays house" and follows-along-after-unaccompanied-kids-like-a-mother-hen way. Yet when Mydei has to leave, taking the classic "I'm going off to war" ancient Greek exit, he doesn't depart without leaving Phainon his people--with the camera panning specifically to the little Kremnoans. Phainon got the kids in the divorce. D; The tragic domesticity is already off the charts, and then they hit you the second punch when Mydei's last question (just one or two lines later) confirms that it was Phainon who got the ring for him. Hoyo couldn't actually have given us a more heavy-handed "parting husband and wife" parallel if someone held them at gunpoint. That whole thing was some Odyssey level bullshit. I see you devs, I see you.
You might be tempted to say that is just heteronormativity, which it could be, but I actually think it serves a very specific place in Hoyo's queer-coding repertoire. In comparing gay relationships to heterosexual marriages, the devs effectively "legitimize" their queer characters, suggesting that the relationships between gay male characters are no less real or valid than those between men and women. In demonstrating that male characters can achieve stable and healthy domestic lives with each other, the devs reiterate that players are not supposed to notice a difference between gay and heterosexual relationships.
There isn't any clearer way for Hoyoverse to legally say "We want you to think of these two men as romantic partners" than to say "Wow, isn't it interesting that their relationship is identical to a married couple's." It's on purpose; at this point, you really can't say the queer-coding isn't deliberate without looking like you can't read, and if it was intentional when Haikaveh paralleled Kaveh's parents, then it was doubly so the second time Hoyoverse pulled this trick to parallel Phaidei to Mydei's parents.
PHEW! Okay, I finally made it through the foundational traits for Hoyoverse MLM ship-bait and where Phaidei fits in with those. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk! 😂
But... the whole reason I started this post was actually because I wanted to talk about differences between Phaidei and other Hoyoverse MLM ships, and particularly how bold Hoyo actually was in 3.1, pushing the envelop to an extreme degree to ship-tease Phainon and Mydei.
So, since the post was way, way too long, I've spit the rest of my point off into a second post.
Check out Part 2 over here. ->
#honkai star rail#phaidei#mydei#phainon#hoyoverse#queer-coding#guess I should tag the other ships too#haikaveh#renheng#ratiorine#I feel like there's no point in me making a post trying to prove Phaidei is “real”#because you'd almost have to be blind to not see the obvious bait#so instead here is a post about how Hoyoverse has somehow gotten themselves into the bizarre market situation#where even their male majority audience actually hates straight ships#and every other character is queer-coded because that's what the market demands#oh phaidei#the ship that you are#they queer-coded too hard and had to pull a bury-your-gays on Mydei though#RIP
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I think when people dismiss wyll as being the Normal Guy companion they are overlooking a key piece of his character which is that yeah he's pretty normal in comparison to the rest of these messes but have u considered how much Effort it would take to stay that normal while putting up with mizora every day of your life. This guy isn't normal because he's boring, he's normal because he has moral fortitude rivaling that of every god. The fact that he's still so normal after what 9 years of being trapped in an insane psychosexual torment nexus is a HEROIC ACHIEVEMENT. This one will only make sense to the disco elysium fans out there but Wyll's volition stat is through the fucking roof. Nothing can shake this guy and it's not through luck or chance it is through more strength of character than any other person ever born. Wyll ravengard u will always be famous
#lich says shit#baldur's gate 3#bg3#wyll ravengard#bg3 wyll#baldurs gate 3#I used to be a true wyll neutral. didnt hate him didnt like him. I thought he was boring#but my eyes have been opened. Do You Know How Hard It Would Be To Remain Boring In His Situation. its on purpose. he's like this on purpose#plus hes a gentleman and it's delightful but thats not even the point
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Never forget peak
#did I change artstyle? yessir (I hated every second of it)#Sega was so evil for making the “I don't want to be separated from my friends” group play the “You will get separeted from your group” game#but it is still very much peak#I wish to put them into various situations#art#my art#project sekai#prsk#hatsune miku colorful stage#leoneed#leo/need#ichika hoshino#saki tenma#honami mochizuki#shiho hinomori#miitopia
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the taylor swift ai porn issue is such a bleak reminder of how inescapable the horrors of misogyny are. like obviously there's the talk of sort of "celebrity problems" like treatment by the tabloids etc, but beyond that there's just the constant heinous shit that women seemingly cannot escape no matter what. it doesn't matter that she (as well as other female celebrities) is extremely rich and famous and successful and has basically as much privilege and power as it is possible for any person to have, ultimately that's still not enough to escape the revenge porn and sexual assault and stalking and harassment. like there is literally no level of power a woman can have that puts her out of reach of all the men who hate women and want to control and humiliate and subjugate us in any way they can.
#with the obvious addition that if you do not hold these privileges of being rich/white/able bodied/straight/cis etc etc then it's even worse#(which is why even someone who hates taylor with their entire being should still root for her in situations like this.#because if someone with all of her power and resources and privilege can't fight something like this then what kind of hope is there for#any other random woman or girl who faces the same thing.)#talking
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you know what i really want to see happen in gavv? lakia turning back into his true monster form to try and scare sachika to see if she's really unafraid of him, only for her to be enthralled and amazed instead, confusing him
honestly, same. let her have her wicked adorable way with him.
Umashou 🤝 Hanty 🤝 Lakian = guys who learn very quickly that life with Sachika is just Like This and it's better not to try and stop her.
(you will succumb)
#art#kamen rider#gavv#the episode is (checks time) literally airing as i post this so forgive me if i totally misjudged the situation :')#based on the preview lakia gets his own little hapipare jumpsuit though so i'm looking forward to seeing him be subjected to sachika#and vice-versa honestly#lakia 'ugh i hate doing things' amalga versus amane 'if i stop doing things for one second I'LL DIE' sachika#immovable object meets unstoppable force#but in this case one is an eldritch jellyfish from another dimension and the other is a small business owner with a complex#sorry hanto and shouma#your descent into edgy chocolatedom/surprise legion of evil clones respectively are very nice and all#but i am just SO invested in seeing lakia be forced into Situations
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