Patch 2.4 Reactions - WIP
Tuesday, August 6th, 2024 19:28![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cashewI'm watching cut-scenes and figured I'd jot down some reactions as I go before I forget stuff.
彦卿 still annoying me, hope he gets better, but his handling of the surprise attack is terrible. Given he's second-in-command, he should have either taken control as the commanding officer or delegate to the local Cloud Knights and focused on getting the guests to go meet up with the general. Unlike the situation when 景元 came to the rescue, where it was necessary to keep the Cloud Knights' involvement on the down low, if 彦卿 was going to charge in himself, he should have mobilized far more bodies and immediately taken control of the situation and shut down all the exits. Instead, he just charged into the fray without making sure the exits were closed off first.
Next, after the fight, the party witnesses the resulting bureaucratic mess (which is being enforced by Cloud Knights). Here, 彦卿 could've stepped in and directed the IPC worker to get their paper work done or told the IPC worker due to the heightened security, they need to be redirected to another place for processing. Instead, he left things "as is" because it's "complicated"... Again, as the second-in-command, he could have done much, much better here.
Third, the biggest mistake the kid makes is to completely miss how sketchy 路君's explanation is with respect to violating the prisoner transfer protocols. 朱明's diplomatic envoy ship comes along, saves the IPC ship, then proceeds to, this bears repeating, go against prisoner transfer protocol... This should have been a huge warning flag. These are military protocols, you can't just override them because of convenience! Anyone who does this is immediately suspicious. The fact that 彦卿 just accepted the flimsy excuse rather than have MPs arrest the guy for, again, violating military protocol is... Ugh.
As far as I can tell, the Cloud Knights are not a civilian organization. They are a military organization, thus they run on strict military regulation, which is not easily "over-ridden" by a higher officer. Now it's unclear if 路君 was the one who allowed the diplomatic envoy ship to dock whilst the ship is holding prisoners or if he was trying to get the captain in charge off. Either way, it's overstepping his rank and it's shocking that 彦卿 just...walked away. WTF? Is he seriously so distracted by his lost sword he's completely ignoring the obvious conspiracy in front of him?
And on that subject of 朱明 sending diplomatic envoy: so, I don't know how the English translated this, but the Chinese called it "使节舰", which implies the ships carrying people from other ships in the Xianzhou fleet are treated as "international" travel. Again, this makes sense if we conceptualize each ship as a state in the Xianzhou alliance a la the Zhou dynasty. However, there's a little bit of confusion with respect to how power hierarchy works in the alliance, as it seems like the six departments (六司) is universal across the Xianzhou fleet. But it's unclear how the Cloud Knight's chain of command is structured across ships. The amount of autonomy each ship has from another ship in the fleet is also still vague AF. So what I'm saying is there's more questions than answers regarding the world building of Xianzhou society.
Wait, Yunli is older than Yanqing?! Ahahahahah!
Anyway, so I actually quite like Yunli. She made a good point about her not "stealing" the sword...she took it by force instead. At least call her a robber instead of a thief! ROFL I'm amused at Jing Yuan letting the situation run a bit first before smacking down Yanqing for failing to realize he's in diplomatic situation and should've handled it with a little more care.
Interesting lore bit about Huaiyan, seems like he took up the General position on and off, which is what kept the professional jealousy at bay. Also liked the pointed comment about Jing Yuan having a bunch of jealous people eyeing his position and are waiting for him to fuck up as an excuse to get rid of him. My only problem with this is that it makes it sound like 帝弓司天将 is civil officer position, which raises the question how military officers are able to also serve as civil officers. On top of that, it sounds like the 6 generals from each ship are still under the direct order of the marshal. So even though there's technically 7 天将, six are serving under the seventh. If there's going to be hierarchical difference between them, I feel like the marshal should have gotten a different title.
So there's also the complication that Dan Heng revealed about the practice of sending personnel from other ships to serve as department heads. Instead of working up the ladder, apparently there's a lot of cross-ship departmental transfers in high ranking positions, including the head of the department. This suggests 六司 functions far more like an intrastate institution. Between this and calling the vessels from other ships a "diplomatic envoy", we're getting conflicting information on the institutional structure. Of course, there's also the chance that miHoyo has no fucking clue what they're doing, so they just throw in whatever sounds cool and fuck the world building.
In terms of details, I noticed that Luofu born Yanqing and Dan Heng saluted Huaiyan, while Yaoqing's Jiaoqiu and Moze just stood there when they formally greeted (拜见) the two generals. (Also can I just say that this is immensely difficult in English when the Chinese separate the military commander "将军" and the civil officer "天将"?) I mean, I get that Yunli's thing was to establish that each ship has different social ritual practices (I have no idea how to translate 礼仪), but surely there's some kind of ritualistic bowing involved when meeting up with a higher ranking person?
Linguistic detail, Jiaoqiu referred to Feixiao as 敝上, which is a super archaic way of saying master. This is immensely weird since Yaoqing is supposed to be far more, uh, I guess the best way is to say "Westernized" due to being a majority Foxian society with shorter lifespans and interacting more with IPC and outside forces, therefore is more culturally forward-looking than the more culturally archaic Luofu. So like...uh... What the hell is going on?
Also, what the hell is going on with Moze? For a guy that's supposed to walk the shadows, he's very eye-grabby and out in the open. I mean, I guess he had to at least show his face to the resident general to avoid a diplomatic incident...except for how it's not an interstate dynamic and...ugh. Whatever.
Having Dan Heng info dump on the party was really awkward and bad writing. As was the complete misuse of 阴阳怪气, which is an adjective, not a verb, WTF writers? But I see the canine people are all very loyal to one another, which kills any hope of seeing the two strategists testing each other out. Gah.
One last thing, 怀炎 called Yunli his 徒孙, suggesting that she's not his grandaughter. Instead, she studied under his disciple at some point and he's taking over her training now.
Negotiation is contrived, but whatever. The stupid thing is that 彦卿 apparently didn't even know Luofu's laws well enough to tell the IPC guy to back off on the shipment check. Which only makes 灵砂 kind of badass in that she apparently is a troll and calmly smacked down the IPC lackey. Objectively, this shouldn't even have been an issue, but as the writing shows, she at least knows how to work the laws in her favor, so she's at the very least more politically savvy than 彦卿, which to be fair is not a very high bar to cross at this point.
Not very fond of her character design, but maybe she'll show some more bite in later scenes.
That's about all the thoughts I have for this part.
So, got to meet 飞霄 in this part. Ugh. Feels a bit like 镜流 redux, in the sense that 飞霄 has some kind of uncurable illness (but not mara) and she knows she has limited time to do the things she want to do. Oh and she has to impart some deep sword lessons to the youngster. I'd rather we get more 镜流 in that case.
Interesting that 灵砂 is originally a Luofu resident and only left the place for 30 years. Makes sense why she'd get sent back to take over as the head as it sounds like she actually has experience working in Luofu. So at least it's not completely random assignments. Also sounds like 丹鼎司 and Cloud Knights have some bureaucratic...er, conflicts with each other. Like, there seems to be some kind of political rivalry over policy decisions and stuff, not to mention the 持明 of Luofu have been turning 丹鼎司 into a division mostly under their control. Which suggests maaaaaybe 800 years ago 丹枫 might have also been working in 丹鼎司 (on top of his political machinations within 持明 society). At least it's not completely out of the realm of possibility.
What I'm saying is I want more hurt/comfort from 景元x丹枫 stuff.
Yanqing still managed to annoy me and I really wanted to see Yunli kick his ass.
TBC...
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Date: 2024-08-10 03:31 (UTC)Perhaps it's from my console playing habits, I definitely try to collect everything (at least that's relevant to the plots I'm interested in) to get a full perspective of the game world. I talk to every NPC at least twice every time I enter a map because you never know when the progress triggered new dialogue...
I saw the video mentioned the Borisin live up to 300-500 years (no citation), but that just makes it sound like they live just an itty-bitty longer than Foxians. But the argument about Mara only setting in at 800-1000 years still feels a bit speculative rather than factual.
Even if the mara thing is factual, it raises questions about the lore miHoyo already put out about Foxian longevity being the result of suppressed senescence. Because, again, if Foxians aren't aging and mara isn't an issue until 800+ years, then what's limiting them to a lifespan of 200-400 years? (This is why I think miHoyo fucked themselves over trying to give a "science-based" explanation for longevity instead of going with magic. In a world that already has gods, they really should've leaned harder into science-fantasy rather than hard sci-fi tropes.)
no subject
Date: 2024-08-10 04:19 (UTC)