#tl;dr there were ingredeince there but nothing cooked right

[pyreo]

☝️☝️☝️

I feel like you can't really even compare Natlan to the prev two regions because they've completely changed tactic. For me Sumeru and Fontaine's strengths outweighed their weaknesses bc they were fundamentally stories about people doing things wrong. The wrongness of Nahida's imprisonment, the dismissal of curiosity in favour of ChatGPT, Scaramouche's entire thing. Furina being asked to give herself up as a person for her people. The entire justice and incarceration system being downright ridiculous. Those things grabbed you because they were human problems and humans needing change.

Natlan flipped that into 'oh no, war' and just had the abyss become the entire force of antagonism in the chapter. None of the characters had any downsides. They're all nice and available and on your side, with no personal distance like how Nahida was kept away from you, or Cyno and Alhaitham kept slapfighting or Furina was too famous to approach or Wriothesley had his own domain that he could threaten to keep you trapped in.

I cannot understand why people who demonstrated decent mastery of narrative coherence just up and abandoned it, but my pessimistic side thinks they internally changed tactic from a story driven game to just a 'good job hero' simulator where women with their tits out tell you you were a good boy (and nobody plays as lumine obviously). Mavuika is like... okay? But she has nothing going really other than whooaaa determination whooa

I mean when her character's vindication is to cheat her prophecied death and be allowed to live 'for herself' after essentially cutting her 'real' life short so she could see through her plan... shouldn't we have some idea what she wants to do with her life now its her own? Shouldn't she have some 'if only I could have lived long enough to ___' to drive it home? She doesn't die and then just kinda looks around like 'huh. um. okay'. Genshin also always has huge problems trying to stretch out its second act to fill time and this was one of the worst. The characters can't have issues or problems, so we just fuck around with chasca and citlali for a million years until the devs nod and go 'yeah that's long enough, they should all want to gamble for them now'.

The only characters who had something approaching a growth problem were kachina and ororon, kachina's being a simple 'I'm not good enough' (joins war and immediately dies) and ororon's... actually he's fine with himself, but everyone else is awkward about him because they tried to make him a human sacrifice as a baby and it didn't take but he's fine with it or something?? But it's not expanded on?

Anyway I loved how you put this

I wish there was more fanfare or resistance over her not being the one to sacrifice herself in the end omg. She just gets talked down a bit by Citlali & Traveler & then just kinda stands there like “oh…ok :(“ when Capitano shows up with a power point presentation about why this should be His self sacrifice moment now

like... YEAH. I think the strongest part of the AQ could have been the foils of Mavuika and Capitano that at least the shippers have latched onto. It was all right there. Opposing elements, evenly matched in strength, ending up aligning on a common goal, but the writing seemed to do everything possible to avoid letting them have any true contention or really to show anything in lieu of just telling us and moving on.

The idea of Mavuika being prepared to die a second time because it's demanded by the rules of the universe only to be outplayed by her counterpart who's been cursed to never die is really good, I just wish that had commanded the narrative and not hey. look at chasca's sister. look at her. she's hiding in a bush. are you attached yet? hey go look at citlali's house. she gets drunk sometimes don't you wanna fuck her? here's her house key. here's mualani. she's peppy. that's a personality right? here's iansan. she's uhhhh (looks at post it note that says 'To Do')

I used to dislike alhaitham a little for always getting to be right, but now I feel like I'd do anything to have him sit down and ignore us and rebuff any attempt at conversation, that was funny. I'm not into the 'yayyy everyone worships you wheee' type of Traveler.

Guys as someone who really enjoys the Archons on a thematic level the way they executed Mavuika as a character kills me omg