#man furina's teaser is still one of my favorite things of all time

[fanfaire]

anemone : how does your muse view the world ; as a cruel & unforgiving place , a land full of wonders , or something in - between ? where does that world view come from ( what experiences , life lessons , etc . ) ?

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　「　★　botanical headcanons !　」

is it lazy to just use canon text to answer a question osksdgkj

i present exhibit a: furina's character teaser.

theatre is an art that stands between reality and fiction. because even though the story is fiction, as far as the characters in the story are concerned, their fate is real. then the question becomes — are you and i the ones watching the show, or the ones within it? . . . none can say. after all, there's nothing easier to deceive than the senses.

this more or less sums up furina's view on the world — a stage. this was, in its basest sense, true while she was pretending to be archon, and after leaving behind her role as the hydro archon, she anticipated that it would be different now; that she would no longer have to pretend, no longer have to act, and that she would finally be able to " step off " the stage, as it were. but what she finds is that it's not that simple or black and white, and that, especially so long as she remains within the culture of fontaine, performance and reality are not diametric opposites. the two are so closely intertwined in fontainean society that there's almost no use, at any given moment, arguing whether something is " real " — or what it even means for something to be " real ".

and for furina herself, seeing the world as something other than a stage, and seeing herself as something other than an actor or an audience member, is not as easy as being the hydro archon or not.

she still performs every day, even when she doesn't mean to, even when she thinks she's not performing. she finds that other people do, too. trying, then, to discern what is drama, or what is real, for her is in some ways a lesson in meaninglessness, and this is something that she does slowly begin to realize more consciously as time goes on. sometimes one isn't concealing the other; sometimes they are both existing at the same time and in the same way.

many times, performance is just the medium to communicate the real in the only way the world and its people know how.

it probably goes without saying that this worldview comes from both her own 500-year acting stint — five centuries becoming a role in order to sustain it does something to the human brain lemme tell u — as well as fontaine's culture as a whole.

the show never ends!