I just want something to soothe the angst
Friday, August 30th, 2024 17:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cashewSpent a whole day reading way, way too much 卢俊义×燕青 fanfic. One, Water Margins fanfic is significantly better written. Two, Water Margins fanfic almost exclusively fades to black when it comes to porn because no one can figure out how to write passable porn in Classical Chinese, so like, kudos that that one explicit PWP in Classical Chinese for Jing Yuan/Dan Heng ship. Three, all this just makes me even sadder about the state of Jing Yuan in HSR.
I feel like miHoyo bit off more than they can chew with this character. MiHoyo writing is already pretty shit, but they really don't seem to know how to write characters as bad-ass. The voice acting is pulling a lot of the weight, but the plot makes no sense. (Yes, I finally watched the next part of 2.4 patch...I'm not impressed.) Character motivation is all over the place, or it's opaque for the sake of being "mysterious", but I suspect even the writers themselves have no fucking clue what they actually want to do with Jing Yuan anymore. Cool and tactical, a gentle giant with nerves of steel and...that's it. Is he meant to be tragic? Heroic? Scapegoat or savior? There is no plan!
Why does Xianzhou higher ups want to pull down an immensely talented general who has proved himself over and over and over? Who knows...the writers are just throwing in the "evil magistrates" trope and ignoring that those "evil magistrates" characters had personal interests that conflicted with whomever they're trying to frame/slander/murder. What is the political structure of Xianzhou? Who knows, let's just drop cool names that sound ancient. What's the chain of command and how is the military organized? Who the fuck cares, here's a new character, pay us.
I feel like Xianzhou is miHoyo's attempt to do Wuxia (or Xianxia) but in SPAAAACE, and it honestly sucks. It has all the dressing of the genre but none of the emotional core. Wuxia is a genre that's defined by its exploration of what makes a hero, both in feats and in the emotional journey of trying to live up to conflicting expectations while fighting for a balance between personal desires and social responsibility. Xianxia is an exploration of the complex interaction of elements that makes up an identity set in a fantasy world where rules don't always follow that of our human understanding, which allows us to breakdown how lineage, upbringing, ideology, sexuality, gender norms, and inter-personal relationships contribute to fully realizing personhood.
Meanwhile, HSR is...Heeeeeey, look, funny rivalry.
What's frustrating is that there's actually so much here that can be expanded upon. A deeper delve into these characters by having their actual backstories, seeing them deal with events and respond to other characters, would have been a rich mine of genuine emotion. Showing us, the players, characters with vulnerability and flaws and frustration and failures would serve so much more to make these characters fleshed out and real. Instead, miHoyo is too busy vibing and thinking up new game mechanics to question the character of the characters they've released.
All we're left with is just a bunch of walking tropes. Here's the sly one, the cool one, the reserved one, the scheming one, the brash one, the thoughtful one, the loner one, etc. etc. etc. Accidentally, they'll create something that has so much potential that it almost seems like a fully realized character. But then the story proves that actually, no, there's nothing. It's just all smoke and mirrors.
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Date: 2024-09-01 05:43 (UTC)Besides, the powercreep will always favor the "next" story centric character. As long as there are future chapters revisiting the Xianzhou (like the current patch), there will always be new Xianzhou characters. Feixiao, from all accounts, is a meta DPS, replacing Dr. Ratio in the follow-up meta team. Sales are likely to be high, though at least partially also because she's going up along with the first triple rerun banner, which includes Robin, a highly anticipated rerun. *shrug*
As for the Xianzhou theme... I think the Xianxia in space was planned all along. The problem is the genre clash with the more...western themes of the other planets is kinda glaring. I do think it would help if we got the other Xianzhou ships as separate "planets", each with a different take at the Space!China idea. Like, a modern-china-themed Yaoqing (which I'd imagine to be a bit like New Kaineng from GW2 :p), a cyberpunk-themed Zhuming, maybe a bronze-themed Yuque or something... and then with slightly different cultural themes as well to go with...
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Date: 2024-09-01 06:37 (UTC)I mean...doesn't that also correlate to the fact that male characters are generally less meta than female characters as a whole? The fact that Feixiao is replacing Dr. Ratio so quickly seems to be an indication that male characters aren't going to get much of a fair shake in the meta cycle chase.
Yeah, this is why I'm not super sold on the CN themes having been "planned all along". They should've been able to recognize how poorly the two aesthetics integrated and chose one over the other.
I doubt it would've helped much given the story we're seeing right now. Unless you're saying making each ship a separate planet would somehow avoid the current internal politicking period drama plot altogether.
I guess it really comes down to the development production chain: does the plot dictate the maps or do the maps dictate the plot? Because if we stick to the current plot, being able to visit other maps and then getting told these maps are all connected in one giant alliance is only going to make the battle of side- vs main arc even worse than it already is.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-01 16:37 (UTC)Hm... while I do get that Hoyo is trying make their "star" characters female for the sales, I don't get the feel they are intentially making male characters..."lesser". Aside from individual male characters (*coughYanqingJYcough*) there are a lot of limited 5 star male characters which are all pretty good. Gepard was the core of the preservation path in Simulated Universe until he was replaced by Aventurine, who has in turn been the best-in-slot overall sustain ever since he came out.
Dr. Ratio had some of the highest damage numbers out there, and was staple to the follow-up meta team. While he is getting replaced by Feixiao, he still had a good run as meta from 1.6 up to 2.5 patches, covering almost a year.
DHIL is still valid for general damage by all accounts, which is more than could be said for the similarly highly advertised 1.x DPS Jingliu. Argenti and Boothill, while having low rates of being possessed by the playerbase, both consistently make it to the top teams statistics for endgame.
The only meta team that's going to be all-female is the superbreak team once Lingsha comes out, since she's intended to replace Gallagher (4 star male character). But given the test numbers and predictions from the leaks forums, I'm not sure how much better Lingsha will be in pure numbers. She might turn out similar to Jiaoqiu, where she's a bit of a buff over her 4 star counterpart but not spectacularly so enough as to motivate people who are getting by with the existing team, and saving up for other plans/3.0.
> this is why I'm not super sold on the CN themes having been "planned all along"
I think it's unavoidable that a CN company making a game with multiple different themed areas is going to have a CN based setting among them. It's one thing if the whole game is based around a single non-CN theme. But if there's multiple different themes, their majority target audience is going to question why there isn't a CN one. Like, Genshin had Liyue in their 1.x patch. Star Rail had Xianzhou. It's kinda expected.
Given that, the decision to make the aesthetic of the Xianzhou to be stereotypical fantasy ancient China is...also pretty unsurprising. Like, if you took the average Liyue character and dropped them into the Luofu, they wouldn't raise an eyebrow. Heck, if I took my Guild Wars Cantha characters dressed in any of the Shing Jea sets, and dropped them into the Luofu, they would blend right in too.
Then given that aesthetic, the decision to make the culture into a Xianxia-theme is also...not too surprising. The unfortunate fact is that CN doesn't have any major sci-fi franchise that's easily identifiable. (The only other common interstellar setting I've seen, usually in quick transmigration novels, is imperial CN version of Gundam, but that's more copying anime than intrinsically CN.) Xianxia is the most well known genre that goes up to the cosmic scale. So, I can see the chain of design decisions that arrived there.
> does the plot dictate the maps or do the maps dictate the plot
Probably character design & sales predictions come before both. :p
no subject
Date: 2024-09-02 03:02 (UTC)I recommend miHoyo fix this by releasing new versions. It's starting to sound like part of the reason Yanqing & JY suck is because they were some of the first 5-stars to get released/designed (I hear Jing Yuan was released quite early, even before Kafka?) and they were balanced against a bunch of 4-stars, making it seem like they were good but were quickly overtaken by later 5-star releases.
Really? I was reading that Topaz outstripped him by far. This was the same thread where some girls were complaining that being a collector of male characters meant having to suck it up and accept her teams were never going to be meta. (Same thread agreed that Huohuo was a better sustain and Yunli's counter-attack mechanic basically nullified the Erudition line's advantage.)
Although both are completely shit stories released by miHoyo, at least in Genshin the Liyue area was an entire area with a self-contained plot. And there's no "fixed" team of in-story characters like the Express party, since it's an action RPG. And unlike Star Rail, Genshin takes place in a medieval fantasy setting, which makes the ancient China aesthetic fit at least in terms of being period appropriate. (Also the cold weapons makes sense in a world where there aren't guns, rocket launchers, battle mechas, space ships, etc.)
Meanwhile, Star Rail is a sci-fi space travel setting... I feel like I shouldn't need to explain the obvious.
The problem is that the ancient part of "ancient China" aesthetic. It's one thing if people are just wearing clothes with elements inspired by ye-olden-times (much like how a lot of modern Chinese fashion incorporates old patterns and themes into modern material and cuts, such as the use of danglies, 如意 patterns, traditional flower-bird motifs, etc.). It's another thing to have the entire social structure emulate ye olden times, too. Star reading as a hobby past time by the plebes? Sure. But Xianzhou elevated it into a serious intelligence/counter-intelligence department. Generals are fighting on the front lines. There's still paperwork instead of digital forms. People are still writing with brush pens. All these "ancient" elements ought to have been updated. Make those paper scrolls actually tablet screens or something!
In summary, the character visual designs are fine, it's the world design that's the problem.
Yeah, and Genshin is a medieval fantasy while Star Rail is a sci-fi adventure... That's a problem.
While this is true, it's still stupid to lift the Xianxia aesthetic and plop it into sci-fi without updating the technology. Just like Star Wars is essentially "Samurai in Space", the same can be done with Xianzhou. But work has to go into re-shaping the tropes to fit the sci-fi framing. As mentioned earlier in my reply, the scrolls could be turned into pull-out tablets. Phones can be shaped/colored to look like 玉佩. Elevators can look like nimbus clouds (and make you feel like Wukong riding into the skies or something). Make the cold weapons shoot pew pew lasers when swung. Earrings can serve as headsets for communication. The door guardians double as retinal scanners. (To give credit where it's due, incorporating food delivery mechanical birds was a good decision and more of this should have happened elsewhere in Xianzhou designs.)
So many things can be done to "futurize" the ye-olden aesthetic, but instead miHoyo just plopped everything more or less untouched into a futuristic setting. Hence the lack of integration.
And beyond just visual integration, the story elements need to be updated, too. Kind of like how Dune had to update/modify the medieval politics so that it can span a galactical civilization, so too must Xianzhou's politics and political structure be updated to properly integrate the bigger scale of governance. A political system that works for a couple thousand square kilometer area is going to fall apart when scaled up to govern multiple planet-sized ships. But miHoyo didn't put any thought into what kind of political system is needed to reasonable govern/regulate a civilization this big.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-02 05:57 (UTC)Topaz is a sub-DPS, not the main DPS, and before Hunt-March and upcoming Moze, she's great at supporting a main DPS, but usually not the only/primary DPS in the team. That's why she's prioritized higher by meta chasers for the follow up team, as it's easier to replace the main DPS (depending on enemy element) than it is a high value sub-DPS (who's there more to buff the main DPS, and damaging the enemy is just side benefit).
> male characters meant having to suck it up and accept her teams were never going to be meta.
That is true, because there's zero male harmony units, and you can't have a meta team without usually two harmony buffers. Well, I guess male version of the MC could technically count, but that's still only 1 slot.
Maybe once Sunday comes out (he's leaked to be harmony), there might be a viable all-male high performance team consisting of male-DPS + male-sustain (Aventurine or Gallagher) + MaleHarmonyMC + Sunday.
> It's another thing to have the entire social structure emulate ye olden times, too.
I have noticed this problem with written works too, actually, not just games like Hoyo's. Like, I've read a lot of original webnovels, some involving sci fi settings, or quick transmigration stories that include settings involving sci fi. In the majority of cases, they always make the government into something with an emperor in charge, with aristocratic houses and all.
Not sure if there is just a lack of originality and worldbuilding, or if there is actually an underlying limitation that I'm not seeing. If I was feeling conspiracy theory about it, I'd think maybe they don't want to depict a government system anywhere similar to real life CN for fear of being censored as satire/parody. And they don't want to make it a government similar to, for example, the Star Trek Federation, for fear of being charged as unpatriotic and USA-loving by readers (I say this because most of the time there's multiple human government factions, it's usually the one called "empire" that's the "good guys" and the "alliance" or "federation" which get depicted as the "bad guys"). I dunno.
> While this is true, it's still stupid to lift the Xianxia aesthetic and plop it into sci-fi without updating the technology.
I'll agree with this. If they made it clearer that using brush and paper is like when Hanya uses her brush attack animation, for all Xianzhou people, it would seem less archaic, for instance. I feel like this is just an overall laziness and/or lack of imagination on Hoyo's part. -_-
no subject
Date: 2024-09-02 06:17 (UTC)...I feel like Jiaoqiu should've been designed as a Harmony unit given his "medical doctor who focuses on prevention via dietary management" characterization. Again, miHoyo not thinking about the characters and just throwing things whatever.
I honestly think this might be a limitation of imagination. Like, modern CN government is...uh...not that far away from previous Imperial system. The only difference is that there isn't a dynasty, but the current leader still hand picks the next one and 关系 still plays a bigger role in getting things through the bureaucracy than any laws or legal statute does. But even so, having only six departments running a planet-sized civilization is brain dead. Hell, even Ancient China had more than six departments. The Imperial Palace alone required 六司 to manage everything, let alone the entire country.
I mean, there's also the European Union....
But if they were really concerned about censorship, they shouldn't have written any politicking plot. Just have the Xianzhou war machine going to war with Abundance faction and keep it simple. Have Abundance drive Dan Feng crazy, break up the Quintet, then keep harassing Xianzhou Alliance. Dan Heng comes back because Xianzhou is so shorthanded they need the dragon powers. Boom. Done. Move to next planet.
Xianzhou is basically miHoyo trying to craft something much too complex for their writing skills.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-02 06:46 (UTC)Jiaoqiu's original kit during beta testing did have healing mechanics in it. But it was all nerfed out of him by the time of the final release. (There's usually 5-6 versions of any new characters that get tested before they get released.) I am guessing that the play testing revealed that such a kit was too broken. But the leaks forum was pretty much doomposting him with every nerf.
Harmony units are the best bang for the buck of Star Rail teams though. There are plenty of high end players who like to showcase their achievements of defeating endgame bosses with no sustains and 1 DPS+3 harmony (or even 4 harmony) teams.
> European Union
Generally shoved under the umbrella of "Alliance".
I'm not saying that Mihoyo is concerned about censorship in their xianxia government system. Just that the "trope" they are using maybe formed that way because of the concern of censorship on webnovel platforms. But again, this is just a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's just the genre as a whole is too new for CN that there hasn't been a Roddenberry or George Lucas yet to actually define a distinctively native trope.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-02 07:17 (UTC)This just means male units are being de-prioritized into less good roles... The game is still trying to cater to the "waifu" gaming crowd and girl gamers get thrown a bone from time to time.
Fair enough.
I mean I know Three Body Problem was a hugely popular CN sci-fi webnovel with distinctly CN narrative tropes. So like...it exists. It's just maybe too advanced for kids?
On the other hand, I have noticed a "modern Chinese aesthetics isn't really Chinese" tendency for some reason. And I guess I'm like WTF? 1930s, 1940s in China still looks nothing like the West. If we look at how much steam punk is influenced by Victorian era aesthetics, then the comparable era in Chinese history would be the 民国 era aesthetics. Hell, the Warlords Era (军阀年代) is essentially a modernized version of the Warring States. Same Chinese politics, different Chinese dressing.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-02 15:57 (UTC)There is Sunday coming up. Even though I don't like his character. But apparently he's really popular. I guess a lot of girls like his winged aesthetic. And it seems like a lot of CN players like his slogan of "everday being a weekend" due to the oppressions of the CN workplace, or something. *shrug*
> The game is still trying to cater to the "waifu" gaming crowd and girl gamers get thrown a bone from time to time.
Side note: Looking at recent earning records, it seems like there's a new otome based ARPG called Love and Deepspace which is doing very well and proving that there's plenty of female audience for ARPG properly targeted to their demographic. I'm not planning on taking up another game, but it might be something you can consider looking into?
> Three Body Problem
IIRC the social structure depictions of that novel, at least for Earth, doesn't really stand out. At least, not until either the TV or movie industry manages to make a successful enough adaptation of it that enters the social consciousness.
> then the comparable era in Chinese history would be the 民国 era aesthetics
I'm guessing that era is not often used because of the political sensitivity. Like, any novel that touches on the early development of the CCP run the risk of too much attention from censors. I have seen some historical fiction authors refusing to write for the Qing and Republic era because it's just safer to play in the more distant past, and they are only writing for entertainment/money.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-05 02:15 (UTC)But his "weekend" is stuck in a dream world and never leaving. Ever. And everything is fake.
Also, if players are mostly children, why is working age sector of the fandom driving the sales decisions? And if the working age sector is the majority, why not write a story that's more fitting for a more mature audience? I mean you can't have it both ways. Either the adults are driving sales, ergo write a more complex story, or children are driving sales, ergo no reason to cater to the "work sucks" adult crowd.
...oh I've been looking...
There's both a CCTV adaptation and a Netflix adaptation... I feel like that's as successful as you can ask a webnovel to get.
I mean, I get not explicitly naming those eras, but I feel like pulling on the aesthetics of those eras are still perfectly fine (especially Qing because...I mean just look at the ridiculous amount of Qing dynasty dramas). Like, one of the super popular re-imagined 哪吒 movies basically used the 1930's aesthetic while having nothing to do with the 1930's in terms of plot.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-05 16:07 (UTC)Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who would've preferred to live in his false sweet dream utopia and damn the long term consequences. =/
> Also, if players are mostly children
Young adults is the feel I get, anywhere from high school to college-ish age, but before starting a family.
> CCTV adaptation and a Netflix adaptation
I get the feeling they weren't all that popular though. The stats for the CCTV adaption wasn't all that high compared to other CCTV shows. And I've heard more waves in EN about the book more than I have about the Netflix adaptation. Certainly nothing that comes close to the cultural impression caused by major english IPs such as Trek, Star Wars, or even Marvel's GotG.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-06 01:03 (UTC)I mean a huge part of that is the US-centrism of English language media. Three Body Problem not only has to overcome a significant cultural barrier, but also has to compete with the fact that the story does't have an American protagonist. Just look at how long it took for anime/manga to make any kind of wave in US general media, and, to this day, general audience media publications still don't talk about anime/manga IPs. You need to look for dedicated anime/manga news sites to get any sort of idea of what's "hot". The only franchise that seems to have made any headway in the common cultural awareness was Pokemon, and compared to the US-centric media of Star Trek, Star Wars, GotG, it's also pretty...meh.
When the New York Times put out think pieces worrying about a Netflix adaptation and what it means for evil Chinese brainwashing, I think that's about as much as one can hope for in terms of international impact from any non-US made media. I'll take that back when I see Xianxia stuff getting the same kind of hand-wringing from US mainstream media.
As for the CCTV adaptation, yeah, I don't know, I haven't been following it very closely. But I figured if I'm barely paying attention and still know about the work, then surely it has pretty good word of mouth for me to hear about it.