A Comprehensive Rating of all The New Nike Kits that Literally No One Asked Me For:
starting off strong with England:
listen when i first saw this i was like hmm okay 😐, then i saw it on the players and i was like hmmm okayyyyy 💅💅
home is clean, classic - i like it. collar is a choice but i think it works, sleeves are nice, retro kits slay always - 8/10
controversial but purple as a colour in general sucks. however, i would barely call this away kit purple, the charcoal vibe is actually fucking sexy. it’s almost a grey kit, and a grey kit is almost a black kit, and i love black kits. love the pattern down the side, love the gold, my only reservation is that it looks like a training kit (specifically that ugly purple kit the lionesses had a few years ago) - 7.5/10
special shout-out to that eyesore of a goalie kit, i absolutely fucking love it
——
now Portugal is a serving us a game of two halves:
the home is… a kit. it’s nice, it’s clean, but it literally could not be less forgettable. it’s fine - 5/10
the away on the other hand - masterpiece. that pattern is actually gorgeous, colours are so cute, and it’s actually unique! love when kits have nods to culture/history- 10/10, stunning
——
United States - yea girl give us nothing!
listen the home is fine. but one word springs to mind and that word is boring. where’s the flavour? the flag collar saves it - 6/10
the away is absolutely vile i fucking hate that- 1/10
—-
France said how big can we possibly make our badge:
again home is fine. it’s nothing special, it’s clean, it’s whatever, it’s a home kit. i’m bored. however both kits suffer from the ailment of that absolute fucking monster chicken. why is it so huge - 5/10
the away is nicer. pinstripe is nothing to write home about, but at least there’s a little something something going on. again, the chicken is hard to get past - 6.5/10
—-
Canada gave us the classics
these are both nice kits. the home is proof that nike do know how to make plain kits that don’t look like they just stuck a badge on a primark t-shirt. simple done well - 8/10
again, the away is simple but effective. does look a bit like an exercise book, but that’s fine. sleek, classy, it’s a decent kit - 7/10
—-
Brazil proves once again that they know the meaning of cool:
listen, when the colour scheme of your team is yellow and green, you just have to commit to garish. this kit is an eyesore in a good way. this is not a great picture of the pattern but let me tell you it’s gorgeous. i’m not sure about this weird collar though, it looks fine on some of these other kits but idk it’s just not doing it for me here - 8/10
again, this away pattern is hurting my eyes just looking at it, but i like it a lot. makes me wanna go to the beach. brazil knows who they are, and you will know about it. nice colour, bit of fun! more fun kits please! - 7.5/10
—-
just like it’s football team, Poland’s kits are pretty forgettable:
yeah sorry poland i really don’t know what to tell you here, it’s just really fucking dull. the collar does look nice here, but other than that it’s really not saying much - 4/10
again, not much to say. this does have a bit of a cross stitch pattern which i quite like, but other than that it’s average. normally i like a centred badge but here it just looks like weird. think it’s too big. sorry poland - 5.5/10
—-
sorry Turkey, the only thing worse than boring, is being boring and ugly:
this away shirt makes polands kit look like the sistine chapel. i can’t even comment because there is absolutely nothing going on - 3/10
and yet somehow… the home kit is worse. i will never be a fan of a block stripe across the chest. the centred badge might have worked if it didn’t have a circle around it. boring and ugly - 2/10
—-
meanwhile, South Korea blew it out the fucking water!
now this is how you make a kit! take notes turkey! this home kit is literally beautiful. colour is stunning, pattern is gorgeous! 11/10 no notes
and it doesn’t stop there! black kits are stunning anyway, but this?! i adore it. so fun, so sleek. - 10/10
—-
The Netherlands just couldn’t really be arsed:
i fucking hate this. orange kits done well are beautiful, and this is neither one of those things. at least the players will be up to code if they visit a construction site. the colour is quite literally named ‘safety orange’ - 2/10
the away kit is alright. i quite like it, the patterns decent. the colours are nice. it does look a bit like a bus seat though. - 5.5/10
—-
China took the stripped back approach :
these aren’t my favourites, but they are nice. the home is classic, nothing fancy, but it’s smooth, it’s sleek, it’s smart. the sleeves are a nice touch - 6.5/10
the same goes for the away. not as nice as the red, but it’s cool. i like it. - 6/10
—-
Norway forgot which continent they’re from:
now i’m aware the home kit is unpopular, but i actually like it. idk it’s something different, it’s a smart little pattern, centred badge looks good - i’m a fan. i like when countries incorporate their flags into their shirt. it is, however, the flag of thailand. - 7/10
this is a nice away kit. it’s giving fjords, it’s giving glaciers, it’s giving norway. reminds me of the adidas wwc kits, and we all know how nice those were. - 9/10
—-
Nigeria only knows how to serve cunt!
this is nice. it’s giving me like early noughties vibes, with the font and the tick, and i’m a fan. i’ve never seen a bad green and white kit. well played nigeria, well played. - 8/10
i love black kits. i love green kits. i love patterned kits. and i love this kit. it’s a sick pattern, and it’s just gorgeous. good job - 10/10
—-
Croatia is… also here:
yeah croatia what the fuck is this? this home kit is absolutely atrocious. boring and ugly - 3/10
i honestly don’t know if the away is better or worse. just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. i don’t know, it’s alright. weird - 4/10
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I've been thinking about actor/actress s/o and gojo reading the most cringy the most vile s/o x reader fanfic idk 🤭
fame with a price — gojo satoru x f!reader
a/n: so while i try to finish to the gojo angst, have this <3 being sick in exams weeks is the literal worst but oh well
“hello, I am y/n gojo!”
your husband smirks, “‘y/n gojo’ always sounds like music to my ears.”
you elbow him and he winces in pain, but quickly recovers to introduce himself, “I am satoru gojo, the amazing and handsome husband of this gorgeous woman beside me.”
he wraps an arm around your shoulder and pulls you close, “we are the hot couple who acted the normal couple: Elien and Arthur from Lover’s Potent!”
the interviewer smiles, “you guys know why you are here, right?”
the both of you nod, and the interviewer chuckles at you pulling gojo’s arm away from you and instead holding his hand and stroking it which makes him smile rather goofily.
“so, gojo,” she starts, “would you mind telling our viewers what we are doing today?”
“which gojo?” your husband smirks, earning a kick to the shin, “I mean! today, we are going to read a ‘x reader’ fanfic about my wife!”
“you are awfully enthusiastic, ‘toru, even more than usual,” you hum.
he stretches and places his hands behind his head, “I am just enthusiastic to rub it in people’s face that I can have you and they can’t.”
you take the phone handed to you by the staff, and clear your throat, “I am going to start; so the first one sound rather promising.”
gojo hums and you elaborate, showing him, “look? even the title is adorable.”
“‘the stars were made for you’, well I can certainly take the stars for you if you want,” gojo boasts but you ignore him.
you, then, read it out loud, “‘as I gazed into her eyes, that sparkled under the moonlight, my heart almost beat out of my chest at the sight of her smile that dazzled me’,” you giggle, “that was actually pretty cute.”
you hear gojo groan and snatch the phone away from you, “I can say things better than that!” he scrolls through the number of options displayed before him, “aha!”
“y/n x alpha!reader, smut, +18 minors don’t interact,” he finishes with a smirk.
you sweat-drop, “honey, how about you skip that one? we’re on TV.”
“absolutely not, do you know how many views will this get us?”
the staff, on the other hand, are tip toeing between whether to keep the following scene or not.
gojo clears his throat and gets ready with his most elegant voice, “she was in front of me bare, looking oh so delectable and ready for me to devour and indulge in her— this is in first person by the way— I sunk my **** into her ***** as my teeth ***** **** **** and my growling only grew stronger when she ***** *** **** ***.”
“satoru, please how are you not ashamed to read this or even bothered?!” you exclaim smacking his shoulder repeatedly.
he tsks, “wife, I am absolutely livid, but! they can dream all they want because I don’t plan on giving up on you.”
“toxic much?”
“giving up on you as in trying my best to make you stay in love with me,” he huffs.
“that will prove to be very useless, I am afraid,” you smile smugly.
gojo panics and sits up, looking at you, “wait why?!”
your smile only turns to a grin as you shrug, “the next fanfic is called ‘lover’s paradise’!”
the man beside you, who was presumed defeated and deflated, takes the phone from your hand and silences your protest with a quick kiss.
“the next fanfic is actually ‘the ****** for y/n’,” he says.
“aren’t we off to a great start, even part of the title is considered not suitable to be shown to the public,” you muse sarcastically and can only watch as the staff laugh their hearts out.
“I am going to start reading! ‘***** *** ***** *** ** *** *** y/n and me *** ***** **** *** **! then when I heard her **** *** ****** ***, my **** th****** so hard that it blew up.’”
you started cackling and soon you fall to the ground, wheezing and tears start to form in the corner of your eyes, “they wrote that?!”
“y/n! that’s not nice! they put all their sussiness in it!” your husband argues, but his words reach no one, even the staff.
the camera man is visibly shaking while the director is rightfully disgusted.
“that’s enough I think,” one of the staff squeaks out and the rest nod in approval while you’re trying to compose yourself with your husband helping you sit on your chair once again.
the interviewer speaks up after a, very, long time, “so that it wraps it up, I believe!”
“aw man, we won’t be reading anything else?” gojo pouts, “I wanted to see the fanfics about me too!”
he, unsurprisingly, is smacked on the shoulder even if it’s weak as you’re still taking breaths in to calm down.
the director gives his own opinion, “yeah no, that’s enough; thank you for your time!”
“rude,” gojo mumbles and intertwines your fingers, “like the director said, that’s enough for today, my loyal followers and fans!”
“see you guys in another episode where we hopefully don’t do this again!”
“this was more boring than I thought,” your husband whines after the the director announces the end of the episode.
you sigh, “it was certainly an experience for me.”
he pokes your shoulder lightly and leans in slightly towards your ear, “how about we try doing some of what we read?”
gojo pauses the episode and looks back at you from the couch, “we were amazing, weren’t we!”
“I can’t believe they left in the last part without telling us,” you grumble while taking out your anger on the dishes you’re washing.
your husband, on the other hand, is more than pleased, “I think we made the best episode ever for them.”
“satoru, half of the episode is censored.”
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my take on sagau lore / logistics
summary: sagau lore! includes you the creator, self-awareness, khaenri’ah, celestia, literally everything i could think of
word count: ~4.1k
-> warnings: spoilers for literally everything bar the sumeru archon quests. khaenri’ah lore, kaeya + albedo lore, celestia lore, archon quests, all of it. i ramble and stray off topic and swear while doing so.
-> lowercase intended. forgive the format pls
taglist: @samarill || @thenyxsky || @valeriele3 || @shizunxie
< masterlist >
ok, so, just off the top of it, let’s address the largest problem with this au, specifically my genre of it:
how can teyvat be real if it’s a game?
great question! the answer is that it’s both.
i haven’t thought this through entirely, only enough that i personally can suspend my disbelief about the fics i read, but the way i see it is that you, the creator, made teyvat a billion (or more idk) years ago. you made the people—or the animals, if you still wanna subscribe to evolution—the lands, the waters and the mountains. everything was carefully pulled and molded by your hands, your influence stretching to how the wind blew.
(that’s because the god who controls it wants your attention so badly but whoooo that’s cultish territory)
anyway. fast-track past the archon war, yeah? after that was sorted, you began to hand out visions, personally at first before assigning celestia to do so. there were simply too many people, and you could not judge them all. it would not be fair.
so you didn’t.
but i’d be lying if the archon war didn’t take a toll on you. you’d been influencing it from the sidelines, carefully making sure as few innocents were harmed as possible, trying to keep the terrain intact. you were technically fighting, but on the side of teyvat itself.
(it loved you for it. every blade of grass and leaf on a stem sung your praises.)
micromanaging like that, across an entire planet, let alone trying to simultaneously set up the constellations you wanted for vision holders… you’re exhausted.
now, you could, in theory, just burrow down into the heart of the earth and rest, but that felt… impersonal, almost. you still wished to look after your world, you just wanted to have a little less responsibility while you did so.
so you left the planet, momentarily, leaving that entire universe behind, and made another. it was, admittedly, not your best work, worse than even the rest planets you tried before teyvat, but you were tired. you half-heartedly scattered some resources, salted the water, and placed the beginnings of life. with a final goodbye to celestia, you allowed your soul to rest in the core of this new planet you called ‘earth.’
now, you weren’t just going to sit there, no. as the people above lived, oblivious to the god resting in the molten core, your subconscious pulled some strings. not enough to influence wars—so many wars, so much cruelty and bloodshed—or any major occurrences, but enough to shift some small details around. these people would start a company. this game would be launched. and when you, your soul, had finally recovered from the ordeal of managing a whole planet, a child would be born.
you knew mortal minds had a hard time conceptualizing the divine, let alone dealing with the knowledge that they were one, so you made the executive decision to remove your memory. call it a product of your pity, but you decided you’d live a human life here before returning to teyvat. the world’s time difference shouldn’t make it that much longer for your lovely followers, only about a year or so, so it would be fine. you set up some dominoes, then allowed yourself to be mortal when they fell.
bad call. turns out you shouldn’t try and fudge space-time when you’re overworked and burnt out. the time dilation ended up being reversed, meaning an average life of 80 years was 4,800 years for your followers.
still, not all was lost! you, human, came into contact with a device, came into contact with advertisements from a company you, god, had a heavy hand in. the world you had loved carefully recreated, admittedly with far less detail and nuance, but what could you expect of the technology at the time?
as you downloaded the game, a final domino fell into place. the traces of divinity in your blood bled into your machine, turning the screen from a screen, and into a portal.
billions of billions of light years away, exiting this universe and entering another, two twins approached your world. they had witnessed you build it all but frowned at your lack of presence. their world, one of many that you had also crafted, still was visited by you from time to time, but this... where had you gone? were your people okay?
they approached, only to be stopped by one of celestia’s guards. boiling red cubes stung the air, lashing at their sides as she—the sustainer, she said—fought. the two drew back, sharing a look, and when they dove-
your light filled the air, time seeming to slow to a crawl. your chosen traveller sucked in a breath, feeling the familiar aura envelop them. even as their twin was swallowed, as their stomach opened into a pit and their heart crumbled, as gravity took hold of their suddenly much weaker form, you were there.
and so your journey in teyvat began once more, this time not as the creator, but as the creation.
that’s the basic lore down. yes, i know ‘basic’ took nearly 1k words on its own, but oh well. anyway, now onto some other details outside of that, such as….
the raiden shogun!
the visions were signs of your favor—not that the comman man knew that, but the gods did—so why would she ever confiscate them? simple; after you had started giving out visions, you had first passed the duty to celestia, and then… left. it’s reasonable, in her mind, that the visions were sapping at your energy, keeping you away even longer. she hoped, in a twisted sort of desire, that she could hasten your return. celestia had tried to stop her, stopping giving out electro visions, but it wasn’t enough. other visions were still in her lands, and she needed to remove them. if only on her isle of eternity, anything harming you would not be allowed.
the tsaritsa!
ok, i admit, i’m not sure how much of what i’m about to say is canon. i watch too much game theory to be 100% sure that this is Actual Lore, but… whatever. so the tsaritsa is collecting all these gnoses, right? the gods’ connection to celestia? just… kinda taking them, collecting these connections, weakening celestia so she can take it down. her reasoning is very similar to ei’s, in that you created celestia and imbued it with some of your power. however, you must have accidentally given too much, wanting them to thrive, and had weakened yourself. so, she figures, by taking down celestia, she can restore you your strength!
but wait, you ask, why not do a vision hunt decree like the shogun? simple! you gave out visions before you involved celestia, so they clearly aren’t the problem. besides, she thinks there’s a lovely poetic quality to taking down celestia with soldiers bearing weapons they awarded.
delusions!
it’s people sabotaging their health to pretend their strength is god-given, not much changes in this au. there’s implications between it and the tsaritsa’s motives for gnosis-hunting—notably if she’s taking down celestia because your strength was drained, why drain the strength of her people—but that’s ~not my problem~
morax?
morax!!! silly boy. anyway, he doesn’t see any problem with stepped down as an archon, if that’s your worry. after all, you yourself left, letting the people run themself, so…. surely he could—should, even—do the same. he feels maybe a bit bad about leaving liyue without anything, but soothes himself knowing they don’t know you’re gone. most mortals don’t, really. but in a similar vein…
venti!
venti feels the same way. if anything, his conviction is even stronger. you left your people—not entirely, admittedly, but still, you did—so he should be able to as well. he knew you had left celestia in your wake, but he had left the knights! and surely, to be overly-controlling was worse, right? you had allowed decarabian to fall, so you must not want dictators(a good thing, as he doesn’t know how he’d handle you going against one of his most core virtues).
celestia!
for the sake of the au, celestia will be kinda proxy rulers of teyvat. i know there’s probably some lore out there suggesting otherwise, likely something in the 3.2-3.3 archon quests, but i haven’t done those and so it can’t be held against me. anyway, you’re tired after the war right? so you decide, as plan A, to create celestia as a council of proxy rulers, to enact your ideals—the heavenly principles—and take care of things. this goes south, because the act of creating celestia drains even more of your strength, and you really hadn’t taken a break since you started creating teyvat so maybe it’s time to pick up plan B off the back burner…
(in celestia’s opinion, burrowing into the earth should have been plan B. taking a nap in a gilded palace should have been plan C. leaving the planet entirely was the nuclear option.)
paimon!
OOOOHHHHH BOYYYYY the emotions i have about this little fairy aidjwrkfkkds
anyway. the way i see it, she’s a manifestation of the remaining divine energy in your body/teyvat. pick your favorite, the end result is the same: she’s attached to your traveller, to you, your device. she can vaguely sense the buttons you have—which is why the tutorial changes across platforms—and loves whenever you open the paimon menu, because she can bask in your light all the more. off camera, her and the traveller gush about you. canon, i said so.
anyway, she’s the one that gives us the ability to time travel so the way i see it, she has to be at least a little divine, or be able to wield power of that strength.
take a shot every time i say strength this fic
i have some feelings about the time mechanic, most notably that it’s likely an alteration of the (very scuffed) time dilation system you implemented, but i’m writing this during school hours and can’t really be bothered with trying to rationalize that. for now, just know that Its a Thing That Exists.
co-op!
if we’re operating under the ideal that your game is the only one self-aware, then how does co-op work?
um… it doesn’t—
ok ok ok uh there’s two interpretations you can go with, of which i don’t have a favorite:
Option 1: when you go to co-op, your (self-aware) characters are transported into the digital world of your companion. they’re confused, because everything seems flat and empty of detail and there’s these weird bars above enemies and HOLY SHIT IS THAT ME???
they eventually gather that this is a false recreation of teyvat, one run by another person. whether or not they can see the chat is up to you. umm regarding farming and stuff: that means tackling the inventory, which… i’ll talk about that later, i swear-
Option 2: when you enter co-op, you leave teyvat. your vessels go back to their places—again, i’ll touch on that later, promise—and your aura leaves. paimon’s the only constant, but that’s mostly because she follows you or the traveller at all times (if you don’t have your traveller on your team… wait a few paragraphs pls). she is fascinated by the digital world, more so of the replicas of your vessels within it. maybe she tells the traveller of it when they have time.
they’re kinda similar, boiling down to whether or not you want your vessels to have a cosmic-horror level freak out at the fact that that’s them. i don’t have a favorite, and usually kinda fluctuate between the two whenever it’s convenient.
the inventory!
the inventory!!! arguably the most convenient system in teyvat, of which my answer is wildly inconvenient.
the basic principle of it is that it’s a pocket dimension, much like the one paimon vanishes into. it’s a very cool pocket dimension, with a menu and filtration systems, but that’s all it is. it preserves the quality of food, it keeps things from burning each other(i. e. mist flower corollas and flaming flower stamens are right next to each other, yet the quality of both never dwindles), and generally keeps things frozen in a sort of stasis. i like to think that vessels with a good sense of detail can pick up on an odd taste/texture to the food if it’s been in there a while, with the effect lessening as the food quality(suspicious → delicious scale) and level (stars) increases, but it really doesnt impact anything all that much.
regarding co-op: this is where things get blurry. if the inventory is a pocket dimension, and co-op is fake…. the best option is to, once more, chalk it up to divinity. whether yours, as you pick them from the digital world, of the remains of your aura in teyvat, when you return.
(another option that doesn’t work as well is thinking of the inventory as a tally, as in there’s a number of items you have and when you access it the number goes down and it summons / creates the item. the number is a representation of the power stored for that specific item- kinda like the omni-ubiquity nets, i guess? anyway, this is kinda pushing things, and though i don’t prefer it, it definitely can be useful to think about in some situations, such as an imposter au where you(reader) can draw energy from the inventory via sacrificing food or supplies. that’s really cool actually wtf-)
KHAENRI’AH HOW COULD I FORGET KHAEN-
so. khaenri’ah.
….i don’t know a lot about the lore of khaenri’ah.
[one wiki check and a lot of deleted ranting later]
khaenri’ah was a godless nation. it didn’t have a god ruling over it, it didn’t have a god influencing or building it, it didn’t have a - oh my god khaenri’ah is the nation of hubristic greed.
sorry i had a revelation mid-sentence there: to clarify, khaenri’ah was built entirely by people. they may (read: did) worship a god, you, but refused to allow you to meddle with their nation. that was their creation. you could have all of teyvat—and they would give you some of their crops to try and satisfy you—but you could not have their nation. they lived underground, away from your holy light and the overbearing gaze of celestia, and in the dark of a cave with only the earth as their witness, they began to learn khemia. they began to learn how to create, how to mimic your power. theirs was more transmutation, less pure creation, but it was so close to it that rhinedottir let it get to her head. she started her program, created durin and [REDACTED]- sorry, subject two (have i mentioned how much i hate he doesn’t have a name? fucked up fr fr). eventually, finally, after many tests and trials and rifthounds, with abyssal magic beginning to stain her hands, she created synthetic life.
the port on its neck sealed into a shimmering star, crystal blue eyes fluttering open, chalk ribs expanding as it took a breath. gold watched with rapt attention, pen falling from her hand.
she’d done it.
high on joy, she kept going, neglecting her new creation, herself, neglecting even basic safety, and eventually, she had toppled the pride of man.
khaenri’ah fell.
this allows for khaenri’ans such as dainslef, albedo, and kaeya to all know of and worship you—important, since kaeya is a character we’re automatically given—while still being bitter and jaded over khaenri’ah. this keeps as much of the lore in-game as intact as possible, with the only big difference being that khaenri’ah dedicated itself to you, but it would not be influenced by you. it was toppled by its own hubris, its desire to be divine without ever worshipping the god that made them too much for mortal men to handle. they don’t hate you, and in fact the fall of their nation has made it clear that they should have respected you more. they don’t blame you for it, as it was their own desire that brought them down, but they are a little more aware of the power of a god.
FAQ!!
i don’t have the traveller on my team, how does that work lore-wise?
excellent question! i…. don’t really know—
the way i see it, this is mostly a problem attached to the concept of ‘parties’ in the first place(again, please put a pin in the idea, we’re almost there). paimon is always with us, but the traveller… since they don’t have ‘a place to be’ as with your other vessels, as you were with them from the start… you could say that they’re always with you. silently watching from the realm of stars just outside of reality, watching you level your characters and give them strength. they wish you could pay more attention to them, but they know that teyvat is your prize creation, the people within it your most beloved. while you had encouraged them and their sibling to traverse your other worlds, it made sense that you’d want to empower these people first. your choices were.. odd, but you seemed happy, mostly, so they were too. ultimately, they are just another of your creations, and they want you to be happy just as the others do.
what happens when the game closes?
this connects to both the party system and the ‘realm of stars’ i mentioned in the traveller’s section. now, the personal belief i subscribe to is that it’s… another pocket dimension sorry—
akcnkwdjdkd ok so you know in the character menu how the background is all hazy and star-like and tinted the color of their element? i think the hydro’s have bubbles floating around but i have just spent too much time in enkanomiya-
anyway, that’s a ✨separate dimension✨. i imagine its like a line, where your characters are arranged like the bar on the side (top if you’re a pc gamer). characters can look over if they wish, though that’s dependent on some other factors (i know this is already long but i’ll elaborate on this later). the poses for weapons, artifacts, etc. are all forced on them, like strings on a puppet—war flashbacks for my scaramouche. they’re tugged into place, and stay like that. your mains are used to you fussing about with their artifacts, and have learned to simply rest into the feeling. why shouldn’t they, after all?
ANYWAY this is getting long. so when you’re in the field, your characters fall away save your party members, who move to the odd starry landscape of the party menu. there’s a large screen, which allows them to see like it’s your screen, almost. there’s a health bar, they can see the energy, and though that’s about it the important bit is that they can still see the character on field and the battle around them. this way they know what to expect, and where to aim, where to brace for an impact because sorry, they have the most hp and you need to tank this hit. when the game closes, you swap team members, etc. they are transported back to where they were prior to being on your team. now, for those you don’t utilize as often, they aren’t fully pulled into the character menu, as this would cause complications, but they are vaguely aware of when you open it. this way they can prepare in the rare case you switch to them for whatever reason.
additionally, when you shut down genshin, the traveller takes your characters’ place. they hold your place, often using the time to catch up with paimon and eat, both talking about their separate perspectives on your battle. paimon from the outside, watching the vessels switch in a shower of gold sparks, and the traveller from the inside, watching them lean on each other when their health was low and swap encouraging phrases during a tough fight. the traveller can’t really move all that much, but they don’t have to stay very still—what’s the chance you’ll notice they’re facing the wrong direction anyway?—which is good since they may have to defend themself against any enemies wandering in. if they’re off your team and unbuilt, it’s a little difficult, but between their status as an outlander and paimon’s influence, it’s not that big of a hassle.
(sorry this one’s real long but this is the concept i spent the most time developing. i have a very very long albedo fic where this mechanic is center stage so i have a lot of junk stored in my mind abt it)
what about friendship levels?
friendship levels!!! in-game they’re a metric of how long/much a character is with you, and it’s the same in sagau. the higher a character’s friendship, the more of your aura they emit by proxy, since they’re… in the absolute kindest way possible, you know how shoes have to be broken in -? yeah—
the harsh tugs of your device commanding them to move softens into a gentle guide, but they’re so in-tune with your playstyle that they go ahead of the strings, attacking slightly quicker. a high-friendship team has synergy like no other, the characters swapping just before you actually press the button to do so, their elemental reactions booming brighter, skills and bursts doing that much more damage just because they know what their doing by heart. they’re certain they could replicate it even without you, though they’d never dare, and your main sometimes finds themself repeating your usual rotation in their head to help them. swap, skill, swap, skill, burst, they mutter, their fingers tapping along where the buttons would be as they try to puzzle something out. swap, skill, swap, passive, swap, the familiar routine providing comfort.
how does the concept of being “self-aware” work?
lovely question.
…
it doesn’t.
jsksskdjd i feel like a software developer— ANYWAY-
google defines self-aware as “having conscious knowledge of one's own character and feelings”, which isn’t (inherently) the case. in relation to video games, it’s usually something along the lines of “this game is aware it’s a game” which doesn’t work since, as we’ve established, teyvat isn’t a game.
in this case, being self-aware means recognizing that you are operating through a device. it means knowing that you are not controlling them directly, that you instead use a proxy. it means, for characters like albedo, recognizing the sticky binds of code that limit his movements, it means registering that you are still far, far away, and that you only feel this close because of your device. it means, for some such as, say, diluc, there wasn’t a reason why kaeya was a vessel before him. it means knowing that their god is still lost, and knowing that they have to ensure you come back safely.
and that’s about it! discarding some icky topics such as the semantics of an isekai (which boils down to tapping into the divinity stored in your device so it doesn’t really matter much either way) and the abyss (which i don’t know enough about lore-wise, sorry) that’s everything i keep in mind when i write my genshin impact self-aware works!
if you have any further questions, feel free to either reply or send in an ask, or check out my masterlist if you want to see these concepts in practice.
have a good one!
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