So, like, I made some blah blah blah posts about 仙舟 being a homophone for 先周 and something something 六军 stuff.

But but but! There's another more obvious homophone I wasn't thinking of and only just recently thought about because I was listening to some old songs and got reminded.

So, in Chinese, 神州 (Shen Zhou) is the shorthand for 赤县神州 (sourced 《史记·孟子荀卿列传》). 赤县神州 is the ye olden name for the political entity know as 中国 (Middle Kingdom). (Technically not China due to complicated political definitions across historical eras, but also is China.) Later, 神州 became the poetic name referring to 汉地九州 (Han Di Jiu Zhou). 汉地九州 refers to the, uh, Han dynasty's territory of nine provinces (冀州、豫州、兖州、青州、徐州、扬州、荆州、梁州、雍州). (Yes, that one's literal.)

Now, the character 神 (shen) is often compounded together with the character 仙 (xian) to make the compound phrase 神仙 (which can refer to either gods or god-like immortals). What I'm trying to say here is that 神 and 仙 has a very strong association. (Although they do in fact mean different things; 神 is god while 仙 is immortal, and the two groups of divine people have very different cosmic bureaucratic responsibilities.)

Sooooo, if we replaced 神 with its commonly associated 仙 and 州 with the homophone 舟, then we effectively turn 神州 into 仙舟. And and and, the Xianzhou fleet had nine ships initially. Guess what 神州 has? Nine 州 (provinces). (Chinese language does not have plurals. So yeah, the singular and plural is context dependent and interchangeable.) So.

What am I saying? Well, I feel like it's reasonable to conceptualize each ship in the Xianzhou fleet as a "州" (province) in terms of its political reach. Like, I get that canon says technically these ships are the size of planets, but at the same time, the political system is more like a provincial government than a country level government. At least scale-wise.

Of course, this doesn't change the fact that there's still this complication that the transportation carrying 天将 (Arbiter-Generals) from each ship is also called 使节舰, a diplomatic envoy, which implies that these 天将 are more similar to being an ambassador/emissary. That suggests the governance on these ships have a certain level of autonomy. Yet at the same time, there's apparently some kind of higher-up/hidden political body that can apply political pressure on the Marshal...

There's essentially no real consistency to the political structure and either interpretation ("each ship is a province" or "each ship is a state") is completely reasonable.

Not sure how to end this blathering, so I'll just stop.

As I said, I was going to expand on this point because it's too complicated of a concept for a single bullet point.

How Ethics Inform Writing

( Long explanation of the basic principles )

In short, what the narrative frames as "good" vs "bad" is determined by the writers' ethics. We must keep this in mind as we continue to dissect HSR's 2.4 and 2.5 patches.

What HSR writers consider "good"

There's four major conflicts the mainline narrative of patches 2.4 and 2.5 uses to drive the plot. I'll go through each separately and break down what the narrative frames as "good" vs "bad" and why there are...issues.

( 4 arcs, all bad )

In conclusion:

Even looking past the terrible technical aspects of HSR writing, the ethics underlying the story is genuinely horrible. Again, this does not refer to what the characters consider good or bad. I'm talking about what the narrative is portraying as "good" vs "bad". To concoct a situation such that ethically unsound actions can be portrayed in a positive light does not speak well of the writers' as people.

I've actually been meaning to bring this point up for a while now...

So, Hoolay is supposed to have been defeated by Jingliu about 700 years ago.

The Sedition of Imbibitor Lunae happened 721 years ago. (Source: see video description. Patch 1.3 date 8100 - Sedition date 7379 = 721 years.)

The other thing we can be fairly certain is that Jingliu loses it while killing the abomination dragon (based on that one egg memory that recalls seeing Jingliu stab the dragon and kills everything around her, so she's clearly losing control). Even if she doesn't immediately go crazy, it's still within a very short time, seeing as she escapes prison in 7380 (the year after Sedition).

And immediately preceding the Sedition was Battle of Shuhu during which time Tengxiao plus >90% of Cloud Knights died.

HOWEVER. The Marshal decided to imprison Hoolay on Luofu as a response to the Sedition of Imbibitor Lunae. In which case, it is highly unlikely that Hoolay was captured before Battle of Shuhu, as that would mean somehow the trial of Hoolay continued while Luofu is suffering through an absolute massacre by Shuhu then immediately had to deal with the Sedition of Imbibitor Lunae. Like, the Marshal just had the trial go on and on while a flagship is getting battered. This scenario seems a bit unlikely.

The other scenario is that in the small sliver of time between Sedition and her arrest, Jingliu went off to capture Hoolay...which also seems immensely unlikely given her mental state.

The only other way I can see this happening is capturing Hoolay was part of the extended Battle of Shuhu, in which case, Hoolay's immense longevity may have something to do with Shuhu. This seems the most likely explanation, but we know from Jingliu that she was assigned to protect Dan Feng during the Battle of Shuhu where he goes batshit, so it's unlikely she could be off capturing Hoolay then coming back to deal with Dan Feng.

In short, none of the explanations I can come up with fits comfortably into the timeline that the story gave us so far. Does miHoyo actually have a timeline or are they just throwing out numbers without looking at what they wrote before?

Ok, just watched a little bit of 2.5 and confirmation miHoyo has no timeline, since Jiaoqiu says "整整七百年过去了", meaning exactly 700 years. That would put Hoolay's capture at 21 years after Sedition of Imbibitor Lunae.

Either Jiaoqiu is bad at history or miHoyo is ret-conning.

If you want detailed responses, see previous two posts.

Specific to Part 9:

( Part 9 thoughts )

In summary:

• I maintain that this arc is set up around the politics of "some politicians hate Jing Yuan so now we have this mess". I get that it's meant to introduce new characters, but if that's the only drive, they really should've just have the story take place on another ship.

• One of the main problems with HSR writers is the inability to separate writer knowledge from character knowledge: Jing Yuan's reaction makes no sense when placed into the context of him knowing he's being targeted politically. Why write the plot such that he places himself into a vulnerable position constantly? Even in a "using himself as the bait" trope, this is really poor writing. (Plus, using himself as bait also does not inspire "genius tactician" vibes...)

• Feixiao is... I want to like her, but she's just a collection of tropes at the moment. Gimme more Jingliu. She's both metaphorically and literally cooler.

• Yunli is awesome. I like her. I will not hear another bad word against this girl.

• Yanqing continues to be feckless and annoying.

• The entire jail break stuff is just...an excuse to get the party into a new map. It's not very good. Also what is even the point of the super dramatic cutscene with 丹恒 throwing his spear and then we fade to black?

• Too much over explaining banal details, not enough showing, and not enough clarification of details that actually matter. Like, age is a big fucking deal in terms of understanding character, especially in East Asian cultures. 辈分 is huge in terms of social dynamics and relationships. Why is the game so reluctant to give this information?

• I really, really, really need one of the Xianzhou Alliance officers at some point say the line "宁仙舟人负我，毋我负仙舟人". This is such a key part of the (good guy) officers' mentality and I'd like to see it explored by having it come up against outsiders who believe self preservation is of the utmost importance. Especially since I think this is what's causing the clash between the other long lived species and Vidyadhara. But also the line is just cool, so I wanna hear the voice actors say it.

• Maybe I'm reading the situation wrong, but I feel like Jiaoqiu is still, hm..., what's the word for 顾全大局? He has his selfish reasons for doing stuff, but when it came down the wire, he seemed to pick the selfless option. But his voice actor sucks, and combined with the a lot of deliberately vague lines, it's like...you can read him as a traitor or read him as someone who's being strategic. Both seem pretty valid at the moment. We'll have to see how later patches play out.

Now...where do I find the sidequest cutscenes again?

So, I'm watching:

At 4:48, 青镞 is all "这样啊……持明转世，前生的一切果真烟消云散了。" I don't know how the English translation handled this line, but here Qingzu is confirming that yes, in fact, Dan Heng has forgotten his previous memories. But she's saying it a) very seriously and b) as if she were surprised.

From a character perspective, this is a weird writing decision, since Qingzu herself is also a Vidyadhara, why would this be surprising to her? Like, if she were a normal Xianzhou Native, then OK, I can understand needing first hand confirmation, because she wouldn't have the same lived in experience. But she experiences this stuff herself. Why would she be surprised?! It's maaaaybe possible to read this as Qingzu isn't quite believing Dan Heng's claim that he doesn't have memories of the past but like...the voice acting definitely does not convey this.

And no, I don't think "Qingzu is a troll" is enough to explain this line. She's clearly someone who picks her timing when pulling on the protagonist's leg. 1.4 is an emotionally heavy story that touches on Jing Yuan's past emotional trauma. She's been shown to be very worried about Jing Yuan's mental and physical health, so she wouldn't be joking around with something this serious.

At 16:56, Yanqing finally remembers 白珩 from a book he read, suggesting that despite being Jing Yuan's disciple, Jing Yuan never talked to Yanqing about his past friendships. Makes me want to smack Yanqing, but also WTF, how is it possible that the names of the Quintet aren't remembered despite the Quintet being immensely famous? Like...just exactly how famous are the Quintet?

But also, why can you create star skiffs randomly during this quest? Like how regulated is the travel anyway? Again, I don't see why the story needs this frankly ridiculous excuse when it can just have us fold a paper boat and send off a light instead of making an entire star skiff to deliver this via cutscene...

At 28:45, Jingliu basically says Yingxing used the flesh of "丰饶令使" to help Dan Feng try to revive 白珩. So uh...which is it? The flesh of Shuhu (presumably what's being referenced) or was it 建木? I'm going with the corpse of Shuhu, mostly because this is directly from one of the original Quintet, thus probably the most accurate recounting of the event.

At 36:03 Bailu's advice to drink lots of hot water (多喝热水) is um... I'm pretty sure this is completely lost on any non-Chinese person, because that specific line is a well known slang for "useless medical advice". I can't tell if the story is trying to say Bailu is a good or bad doctor...

This is bringing up a point that I've been wanting to make about the Luofu/Xianzhou arc for a while now, and that's miHoYo's writing has been immensely inconsistent when it comes to the backstory. The lines are often written in a way that's meant to deliver lore without consideration for the character, which makes me seriously question what is and isn't canon, and how much editing the writing actually goes through.

For example, let's look at the two PVs for the story arc: A Flash and Ichor of Two Dragons. In A Flash, Jing Yuan never refers to Jing Liu by name, always uses 师傅 title, because he's a good little soldier. The events of A Flash is supposed to happen after the memory that Dan Heng is reminiscing in Ichor of Two Dragons, and yet, in the latter PV, Jing Yuan calls Jing Liu by name. Furthermore, JY also states that both Dan Feng and Yingxing are still sore over losing a sword fight to Jing Liu. This is patently nonsense since we know Yingxing never learned how to fight until after he got pulled out of jail by Jing Liu.

Meanwhile, in A Flash, the implication is Jing Yuan actually kills Jing Liu, what with the foreshadowing of Jing Liu telling Jing Yuan to cut her down once she befalls Mara. Yet this is in direct contradiction of the actual game plot. Similarly, it's impossible to place when Ichor of Two Dragons takes place during the game plot line, since in the game story Dan Heng only gets together with the rest of the party to fight Phantylia, then they immediately leave 鳞渊境 with an unconscious Jing Yuan in tow. There's basically no time during this for him to reminisce about the past.

So at least for these two PVs, it's heavily vibes based and metaphorical. Any literal reading would simply result in way, way too many contradictions. In A Flash, the general message is that despite Jing Yuan losing basically everyone that mattered to him, he puts the pain behind him and faces the future without letting the past crush him. In Ichor of Two Dragons, Dan Heng overcomes the memory fragments he inherited from Dan Feng to make new friends and find a new family that knows him as only Dan Heng.

(The fact that this completely kills the JY/DH ship is another matter altogether. I'm honestly surprised how much miHoYo keeps trying to push this pseudo-bait when they keep sinking the ship over and over.)

(Parenthetical 2: At this point, I think 凤求凤 is more appropriate to JY/DF ship than JY/DH ship, mostly because the plot points to a situation where all of JY's emotional connections to DH is carried over from his relationship with DF. Even if DH does reciprocate at some point, JY himself doesn't see DH as a close friend. He's seeing "offspring of my friend DF" in DH. JY's protective feelings over DH is because he sees him as an unfortunate victim of the Sedition, not because he sees DH as a person on whom he can actually rely. I know he said a few lines about how they still can read each other and he's trusting DH to watch his back, but he's basically talking to a ghost the whole time, which DH clearly sees and doesn't like. This is especially the case in 2.4 story when JY starts treating DH as his own person instead of an extension of DF, at which point he's significantly more reserved.)

(Parenthetical 3: I still haven't found anything that clarifies Jing Yuan is the youngest of the Quintet nor any indication that Dan Feng and Jingliu were old friends prior to her taking on a disciple. All I have is confirmation that Yingxing was shorter than Jingliu's sword when they first met. Which, again, doesn't tell us anything about their ages. I don't understand why people cite this patch as proof of Jing Yuan being youngest. What the hell am I missing?)

I'm seriously questioning the reliability of fans constantly citing Jing Yuan being the youngest out of the Quintent. (Am reading this and had to stop like five sentences in because of the huge leaps of logic that was happening.)

To be fair, I might be missing some kind of obvious clue, but everything I've seen in terms of "analyzing" the age is basically guess work with very little substantive evidence.

( Holy shit, this got long... )

Edit to add: Also, I would like to point out that it is erroneous to use modern Chinese to interpret some of the descriptions in HSR because so much of the language is pulling on the original Classical Chinese meanings.

In classical Chinese (up to the last dynasty, which ended in 1911), 少年 can refer to people as old as 30-35 years old.

And even if I give you the modern Chinese interpretation, according to modern standards, 少年 refers to anyone between the age of 12-17. So...the point is Jing Yuan of Blade's memory probably looked more like:

...and less like

A recurring theme in the analysis of JYxDH ship hints is the focus on JY's line: 我入估人梦，明我长相忆。

Which, of course, is a play on 杜甫's poem 《梦李白二首·其一》. A lot of fans have been freaking out over this, but I feel like maaaaaybe fans are a little too excited over a rather sad reality. See, according to this analysis, 李白's relationship with 杜甫 was a bit...uh, one-sided. Quote:

杜甫和李白的第一次相遇是在洛阳，当时的李白是国民偶像，杜甫是他粉丝中的一员。

两人一起游山玩水， 分别后，杜甫经常写诗思念李白。

他前后给李白写过十几首诗，每一首都满怀尊敬或思念：赠李白、忆李白、怀李白、梦李白……“白也诗无敌，飘然思不群”“世人皆欲杀，吾意独怜才”……

而李白却只给杜甫回过三首，其中还有一首是调侃的——《戏赠杜甫》：

饭颗山头逢杜甫，顶戴笠子日卓午。

借问别来太瘦生，总为从前作诗苦。

太扎心了，大部分都是杜甫在“单相思”。

Translating the basics, 杜甫 wrote tons of poetry talking about 李白, but in return, 李白 only wrote him three poems, one of which was making fun of 杜甫 for being too skinny and working too hard at writing poetry.

Ouch.

If we go with the fans' interpretation that JY's line is meant to compare his feelings toward DH with 杜甫's feelings towards 李白, this ship is so, so doomed.

Meanwhile, 李白's actual best friend was 元丹丘. Apparently the two of them lived together for a while, did a lot of traveling together, and sought out a bunch of monks/daoists to learn the religious scriptures and stuff. Also, 元丹丘 was fond of making longevity medicine (仙药) and 李白 was fond of trying them out.

If we're gonna look to archaic poets for inspiration (and presuming 丹恒 is 李白 in this analogy), I feel like maybe 元丹丘 is a better model when looking for BL hints.

But overall, I'm not really sold on any of this trying to dig through the archaic literary references for hints of potential BL hints, mostly because it feels like a stretch and the game clearly is only BL baiting, they're not going to actually commit to text a canon BL ship. Also, if anything, it feels like JYxDH is a ship that's kind of doomed to fail because a) age gap, b) long distance, and c) JY just has too much on his plate to really deal with DH's angsty teenager phase. DH needs to seriously step up his game if he wants to be in contention for being shippable with JY. (This is why I prefer the already doomed JYxDF ship, because at least Dan Feng was dealing with stuff that's comparably difficult to the shit JY has been handling and thus they probably have more of a shared life experience.)

椒丘, other than the literal concept of a mountain of hot peppers, also refers to tall, pointy mountains. Aka, a mountain that looks like a pepper. The Anglosphere is probably not going to get the reference, since this is a geological phenomenon seen mostly in southern China:

For example, the above. These would be called, in classical Chinese, 椒丘.

English wiki is completely wrong translating 丘 as "hill". This is a modern reading of the word. Classical reading, 丘 is mountain.

If it is to be believed that the literary reference is in fact 屈原's 《离骚》, then ROFL. Because, if you are aware of Chinese holidays, 屈原 is the reason Chinese people eat rice dumplings (粽子) for the holiday 端午 (Duan Wu). No wonder 椒丘 is all food themed! q(≧▽≦q)

Previously...

To add to my 六军 theory, I present the following.

《新唐书·百官志四上》：“左右龙武、左右神武、左右神策，号六军。”

Quick transltaion: Left & right Long Wu, Left & Right Shen Wu, Left & Right Shen Ce, together are called the 6 Corps.

龙武 (Long Wu), 神武 (Shen Wu), 神策 (Shen Ce) are names for divisions of the military under the Emperor's control. Emperor, aka 天子 aka Son of Heaven. (Note that pre-Qin, there were no emperors, but there have been Son of Heaven since the Zhou dynasty.)

So, 六军 historically has been used to refer to military directly under the Son of Heaven's control starting from the Zhou dynasty onwards. Because of the limitation of military size passed down from 《周礼》. (See previous post.) If the Marshal does in fact have direct command (at the very least the PV said the six generals all support the Marshal), then the implication is that the Marshal is the literary equivalent of Son of Heaven.

Now you'll notice something familiar: 神策. Yes, Jing Yuan's title as 神策将军 uses those two characters. So, I find it highly unlikely the concept of 六军 was not on the writers' minds when creating the Luofu arc.

Additionally, has anyone noticed the repeated use of 骁? For example, the previous general was named 腾骁. Jing Yuan's previous position prior to becoming general was 骁卫. The Quintent's Chinese name is 云上五骁.

There's that saying, "Once is an incidence, twice a coincidence, three times is a pattern." Why so many references to 骁? I mean, it's not like there aren't other characters that carry similar meaning in Chinese.

Consider the following excerpt:

《南齐书·百官志》：“领军将军、中领军。护军将军、中护军……左右二衞将军。骁骑将军。游击将军。 晋 世以来，谓领护至骁、游为六军。”

Translating the importanting bit, the 骁骑 (Xiaoqi) are part of the six corps. (The other five are 中领、中护、左衞、右衞、游击.) Again, references to 六军 appears in word association.

Finally, there's the comment I made about the Xianzhou pun. 仙舟, as written, is a magical boat, which is just a literal description of the fleet. However, 舟 and 周 are homophones, so if we "hear" 仙周, there's the pun for "fantasy space Zhou dynasty". Of course, I originally thought of replacing both characters to turn it into "先周", aka pre-Zhou, because the civilization is over 8000 years old and would immediately place it into "mythology" era in Chinese history. (Written Chinese history started in the late Shang dynasty, so by Zhou dynasty, we have very well documented historical records. This results in much of Chinese myth taking place "pre-Zhou" to avoid accidentally pissing off the emperor.)

So far, we have very little canonical text to help us understand the scale of the Xianzhou fleet nor understand the political relationship between each individual ship. For example, it is curious to me that the fleet is called the "Xianzhou Alliance" (仙舟联盟), given that the fleet was sent out on the instruction of an emperor from "ancient times". Alliance implies that each ship has a great deal of political automony and are allied with one another to pursue a similar goal (presumably to follow the path of the Hunt). However, given the inspiration from Ancient China that went into the lore and aesthetic of Xianzhou, there's really not a lot of time during the 5000 year history where China was a collection of alliances...

...except during the Zhou dyansty. Because during the Zhou dynasty, Zhou was made up of an alliance of feudal states, with each feudal lord swearing fealty to the Zhou King aka 周天子 aka Son of Heaven.

So between 六军 being coined during the Zhou dynasty and the alliance nature of the Xianzhou fleet and the decision to keep only 6 of the starting 9 ships into current timeline, I'm inclined to believe that these hints are all pointing to a Zhou dynasty-esque political power structure. Again, I'm not saying that it mirrors the Zhou feudal states, only that the vibes from Zhou dynasty is probably what's being drawn on when conceptualizing the six ships' relationship with one another.

And completely random, I just had to write this down so I don't forget, a friend pointed out the Penacony arc might have been an allusion to "The Man Who Was Thursday". Villain named after day of the week, Sunday is a mastermind, takes place in a dream... It's honestly not a far off theory. And given this game's penchant for far fetched literary references, it gets more and more likely.

【景枫/景恒】半面妆

Locked in a room that can only open after sex trope. Emotional torture porn.

Pros:

• Jing Yuan tops!

• Biologically male bottom!Dan Feng!

• Gentle emotional sex!

• Emotionally torturing Jing Yuan for the entire PWP!

• Talking awkwardly about feels and still not being able to resolve anything because they'll just forget about everything as soon as they leave the room!

• Self-sacrificing Jing Yuan's biggest concern is making Dan Feng comfortable (both physically and emotionally)!

• Dan Feng has no fucking clue what happens in the future but can tell Jing Yuan is suffering. Maaaaangst.

• Metioning Jing Yuan's 300-years long military campaign backstory during the 721 year time gap. (I cannot find English references to this, so here in this Chinese article, screencaps show 青镞 explaining that Jing Yuan had to leave Mimi behind for 300 years after being sent out on a military campaign and, when he came back, an aged Mimi walked up to him and died in his arms. 〒▽〒 WTF miHoyo, what's your problem?! — But also, 300 YEAR MILITARY CAMPAIGN. So much angst!)

Cons:

• References to Jing Yuan being a kid during Quintet era... boo.

I...I like this fic. I can even forgive the minor drawbacks because holy shit, I love this emotional torture porn. Of course, the super tragic aspect is that despite the feelings being returned, all of this is will just get re-set back to the status quo, so no actual progression of the relationship.

Was it worth digging through literal hundreds of crappy fic for this? Um... I don't know but this fic makes me happy.

A slight follow up to the Mimi backstory: Since there's canon confirmation that Jing Yuan was leading a military campaign that lasted 300 years as the general, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that the Cloud Knights are actually kept pretty busy. If they're not defending themselves, then they're out there pre-emptively fighting something. So my headcanon persists that the "peaceful" years Luofu experienced is not "no active military campaigns" so much as "no invasions from enemies", but the Cloud Knights are engaged in a prolonged external war to keep the enemies at bay and too busy to organize an invasion of Luofu.

In other words, the Cloud Knights have been fighting this whole time. It's just the fighting was moved off of Luofu rather than taking place on Luofu while Jing Yuan was the general. It also makes more sense for the Xianzhou people to be in a relatively constant state of war, because why the hell else would they maintain such expensive war machines if they didn't have constant on-going military operations? Given the immensely high militarization of Luofu, it's hard to imagine they've been living "in peace". Also, I've noticed the Chinese descriptions actually never used "peace" to describe Luofu under Jing Yuan's leadership. They used things like "prosperity", "supremacy", or "stability".