#i love honkai and i talked ab the reasons why in here

[hovkinnie]

honkai domination and kolosten arc spoilers/rambling+ some heavy complaining after the read more (it's basically a whole ass essay im so fucking sorry lkfjdslkfjdslkfj)

thinking ab how fucking rad and meaningful kolosten would've been if the domination arc had ended with kiana and HoV coexisting instead of what we got.

It definitely would've been better to do that with more setup of them actually talking throughout the story (which is the same thing you can say about the way it went, imo) but even without it- it would've been even more in line with what I think are the most resonant themes of that story.

The thing that made me fall in love with honkai like I did was the themes around victimhood and antagonism. Sirin, Wendy, Bronya, basically all the Herrschers we've seen- whenever a character that wasn't Otto during the beginning stages of the story became a threat to the world, it was never really because they were "evil". They were victims of the cruel world around them, sometimes victims of the same organisms that fought against the supposed real evil of the honkai, and either broke or lashed out because of their real vulnerability.

But in a lot of those moments the story understood two things: one, that that's a tragedy, one that deserves to become motivation to change the world so this kind of thing can't happen again, and two, that if at all possible, despite the threat they might pose to our characters or the world, what they deserve isn't hostility but compassion. Because they aren't the perpetrators of their own violence, only the victims through which it becomes externalized.

This compassion IS extended to Sirin, not only in Second Eruption but also through Kiana, who, despite being a danger in a sense because of HoV, is shown compassion as one of two different people carrying on from Sirin's past.

But imo, it undercuts this theme that HoV isn't extended the same compassion. Because HoV is not only a more direct threat to the world than just Kiana by proxy, she's a much more direct inheritor of what Sirin could represent: A righful anger at the world that victimised her, one that isn't content to fight to protect that world.

And in a story that had at that point so wonderfully allowed characters who were framed as villains to be accepted for who they are, to be recognized as the victims they are and shown a path forward that didn't end with them burning out, in a story with Bronya's self-determination being fought for, with Mei becoming a Herrscher that fights in her own way to protect who she loves, with HoS being shown compassion, Fu Hua being stopped from sacrificing herself for absolution and a pointless so-called victory, with Seele being allowed to live in harmony with her other self and taking her own name, it's just painful that HoV's anger cannot be accepted and coexisted with.

I know that it's not a hugely popular opinion, but I think kolosten drops the ball with Otto, and I think it's because until that point, we had seen Otto from the perspectives of those who were the most hurt by his actions, some of whom might have developed a sort of stockholm syndrome but who were still able to see the hurt he's caused the world. We knew, always, that his view of the world did not include the real compassion that we'd seen growing in the main cast towards those victimised by him, the thing that to me was the emotional core of honkai. Where kolosten fails for me is that now we got so, so, SO much from his own perspective, his own hand-washing, while getting absolutely NOTHING about the people he'd hurt.

We knew throughout the story, always, that the kinds of experiments he'd done to people en masse for hundreds of years were a kind of mass torture that was what created Sirin as a Herrscher in the first place, the pain that created her anger. We knew that Kallen would've been better off if he'd never been so obsessed with her because we got her perspective on that history, and we knew that the world would've been better off in the years after that because we got the perspectives of the people most hurt by his actions. And yet kolosten gave us none of those perspectives, only focusing on him, the people with the most stockholm syndrome for him, and Kiana as a newly-reborn protagonist who isn't about to let anger cloud her judgement.

All kolosten felt like was a pity party for what was undoubtedly one of the most horrid men imaginable in that world. And that's really only because there were perspectives that were sorely lacking, perspectives that could've been there, ANGER that could've been there, if HoV was allowed to exist, if she was allowed to be there to say what I wanted to say the most to every character that I otherwise adore throughout that entire arc.

"Fuck this garbage fire that's been burning for 500 years. He doesn't get his pity party, or his one in a million shot to save someone who never wanted to be saved by him. He's hurt too many people to deserve anything other than a million void lances tearing him apart, one for each person whose life he ruined by existing."

Because if your compassions for victims doesn't extend to accepting that they're allowed to just fucking HATE those who hurt them, then it isn't worth shit.