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So…Natlan Is A Disappointment

It’s been almost two years since the release of Sumeru in Genshin Impact Version 3.0, two years since the last time that Genshin faced a sizable backlash from players over the pervasive issue of racism and colorism in the game’s character design, two years during which the developers have been hard at work on Natlan, the Nation of War, set to release about a month from now in Version 5.0 – and in those two years, Genshin Impact has not gotten better in this regard…if possible, it’s actually gotten worse somehow. Because while there is no one in Natlan (yet) with a design as blatantly offensive as Sumeru’s Dori, for which I suppose I should be grateful, there is also no one whose design bears out the idea, put forward by the music, environment design, architecture, and the characters’ names, that this region is inspired by the cultures and mythologies of pre-colonial North, Central, and South America, Polynesia, and West Africa.

The character of Kinich from the region of Natlan in Genshin Impact, swinging through a canyon. He has shaggy dark-blue hair with blue-green highlights, and green eyes. He is wearing a black short-sleeved shirt under a black sleeveless vest with gold and blue geometric motifs on the front. He has large earrings, and a green-and-gold headband. He is holding an orange-and-purple ball. Beside him flies a dragon rendered in 8-bit animation for no discernible reason, bright orange with green scales and wearing sunglasses.
Kinich (based on the Mayan sun god Kinich Ahau) | youtube.com

Is this exactly shocking, after the Sumeru debacle? Well, no. To be honest, my expectations for Natlan were already extremely low, and had been ever since Sumeru. But I was still holding out hope that something would have changed, and I can’t help but be disappointed to learn that HoYoverse doesn’t care how many surveys you send back with complaints about the game’s lack of diversity in skin-tones, or about viral tweets and petitions. They make too much money off of Genshin as it stands for them to have to care, and unless players stop spending exorbitant amounts of money on this game every month to get six copies of every new character and five copies of their signature weapon, frankly, change isn’t happening. If Genshin can get away with not including Black and brown playable characters in a region inspired by majority Black and brown cultures, they’re not going to suddenly start in the next region, Shezhnaya, inspired by Tzarist Russia.

Some context on Natlan: it’s the sixth region players will visit on their journey across the world of Teyvat, after Mondstadt (probably still the region with the least culture, but just enough to tell that it’s supposed to evoke Germany, anytime between the Renaissance to the 1800’s), Liyue (rooted in a rich and beautiful depiction of late Qing Dynasty China, with subareas representing various Chinese subcultures; no surprise there, seeing as Genshin Impact is a Chinese game), Inazuma (unmistakably inspired by Meiji Restoration-era Japan, with specific islands aligning closely to Hokkaido and Okinawa), Sumeru (a messy assortment of disparate cultural references, from Algeria through ancient Egypt and Abbasid-era Iraq all the way to Iran and India), and Fontaine (grounded in 18th to 19th Century France, but built on the ruins of an older, Celtic civilization and a Roman Atlantis). Four of the five regions in the game to date are based in a pretty specific period of time in one specific real-world region’s history (and Shezhnaya, as mentioned, seems likely to continue that trend). Sumeru and now Natlan are the odd ones out. No bonus points for guessing what else they have in common.

With Natlan, the vibe Genshin seems to have been going for is “what if all the Indigenous peoples in the Global South had formed an intercontinental, pre-colonial utopia…with dragons”, which is an intriguing premise, even if Genshin‘s writers probably aren’t the best people to pull it off. But somewhere along the line, and maybe I’m naive for believing it was relatively late in the development process because of how the character designs all look so much more cohesive with darker skin, as though the colors of their clothes and hair were deliberately chosen to complement darker skin-tones, I have no doubt that someone higher-up demanded that the characters’ skin be lightened…a little more….and then a little more…until what was meant to be a pre-colonial utopia came out looking distinctly post-colonial in the final product because almost everyone was now white.

I’m not absolving the character designers themselves of all fault, however, because I have issues with the playable cast of Natlan that go beyond their skin-tones and are baked into their designs at a fundamental level. To start with, all of Genshin Impact‘s 84 playable characters (95 if we include the eleven revealed in the Natlan teaser trailer) use one of just five basic models (tall female/male; short female/male; and child-height female) with hardly any variation in facial features apart from eye color and the occasional mole or marking. Natlan didn’t need to break the mold to still do a good job, but it’s a missed opportunity to give characters body-types, facial features, and hair textures that diverge from the Eurocentric beauty standards that Genshin‘s characters currently adhere to almost by default.

The character of Citlali from the region of Natlan. She has purple eyes and long violet hair, loose in the back with pig-tails in the front, and a headdress of purple feathers. She is wearing a dark purple sleeveless top with fabric gauntlets on her arms and gold bracelets. She is holding an orange and purple ball in her hands.
Citlali (the Nahuatl word for “star”) | youtube.com

But while that would have been a nice touch, it was not nearly as imperative as simply getting the designs right. Clothes, accessories, and hairstyles make up each character’s distinctive and highly individual silhouette, allowing you to identify each character’s cultural background at a glance. Fantastical elements are to be expected in a fantasy game – there are characters with animal ears, antlers, wings, and tails, sometimes multiple tails – but most of these characters are based in the mythological creatures or native wildlife of their home region’s real-world equivalent. Ganyu, from Liyue, is part-Qilin, a horned beast in Chinese folklore. Gorou, from Inazuma, has the ears and tail of a Shiba Inu, a Japanese dog breed. And their outfits, apart from being a bit more revealing than historical clothing, are still very clearly Chinese and Japanese, respectively. The same largely holds true for Mondstadt and Fontaine.

Genshin Impact, in the past, has even boasted of its commitment to historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity, releasing a twenty-minute long video breaking down the development process for the character of Yun Jin, an opera singer from Liyue who is based in traditional Chinese opera culture, in which the developers speak of their extensive research, of how they tried to reference the costumes used for historical Chinese heroines in Yun Jin’s design, how they landed upon the concept of “striking a pose” as a key element in her combat animations, how they went out of their way to hire an opera professional to be the character’s singing voice. They did something very similar with the character of Furina in Fontaine, with a video describing how the original song “la vaguelette” came to be, and how the decision made upfront to write the song’s lyrics in French for the purposes of authenticity posed a challenge for the team until they got into contact with a French opera singer. HoYoverse is not incapable of accuracy; they make it a priority and use it to their advantage when it suits them.

Not in Natlan, though. If you run down the list of newly revealed characters, you’ll quickly discover that everyone is named after a deity or historical figure – Mualani, after a Hawaiian princess; Kachina, after an entire category of spirits in the beliefs of the Pueblo Native Americans; Kinich, after the Mayan sun god Kinich Ahau, and so on. A few are conspicuous misspelled in English, perhaps in an attempt to make the appropriation less egregious – but Ororon can only be in reference to Ọlọrun, the Supreme Deity of the Yoruba religion, and Mavuika, the name of the Pyro Archon, is a very slight variation on Mahuika, a Māori goddess of fire. You wouldn’t be able to guess any of their backgrounds from their designs, however, without squinting (and even then, I think, you’d have a hard time of it).

The character of Ororon from Natlan in Genshin Impact, standing against a dark background. He has shaggy dark-blue hair and heterochromatic eyes, one blue and the other pink. He is wearing a blue-and-purple scarf with a half-hood over a black leather sleeveless vest, with black fingerless gloves and gray skintight pants. He has a tattered black cloak. His face, shoulders, and forearms are heavily tattooed.
Ororon (a misspelling of Ọlọrun, the Supreme Deity of the Yoruba) | br.ign.com

Ororon is probably the best/worst example of this, as his design is not only isolated from cultural context but downright boring – a blue-green scarf the only pop of color in an outfit comprised of a black leather sleeveless vest and ripped-up skintight jeans with fingerless gloves. I have not seen anyone point out so much as a single cultural reference on his person, and I am highly doubtful that any will be found. The rest are not much better, to be honest. Kinich appears to wield an oversized macuahuitl (a bladed wooden club used by Aztecs and Mayan warriors), which is something, and I suppose there are some vaguely Mesoamerican-ish motifs in Mavuika’s jewelry and the patterning on her…black leather zip-up bodysuit.

Now, in a world where knights in armor and rock’n’roll musicians exist simultaneously, anachronistic clothing choices are pretty much inevitable, but with that said, I do think it’s worth examining why every other region’s fashion is (for the most part) historical with some modernizations, while Natlan’s is the exact opposite: modern clothing – including puffer-jackets, short-shorts, vests with zippers, and visors – with a few scattered and debatable references to traditional Indigenous clothing and patterns. I would not be surprised to learn that this choice was made to avoid having to use actual traditional clothing almost entirely.

Almost, I say, because there is one character in the trailer wearing non-modern (not necessarily historically accurate) clothing; Iansan, named after the Candomblé goddess Iansã, one of the very first characters revealed back in 2020, and still the only character in Natlan with brown(er than the rest) skin. She is one of the very few characters I can see myself pulling for in the upcoming patches, on account of her having darker skin, though I’m not sure what to make of Natlan’s darkest-skinned character being the only one wearing non-modern clothing, with a skull (originally thought by some to be the skull of a water buffalo, sacred to Iansã, now very clearly a cartoonish dragon skull) as a headdress and a necklace of dragon teeth. They already have a habit of casually referring to the brown-skinned Eremites of Sumeru as “barbarians”, and anyone who’s played the Dirge of Bilqis world quest remembers how aggravating it was to have the game force you to stand aside and say nothing while Liloupar, the spirit of a slave-owner, heaped shockingly racist vitriol on Jeht, an Eremite NPC and a friend of the player character’s, so I’m nervous to see how Iansan especially is handled.

The character of Iansan from the region of Natlan, walking determinedly through a forest underneath a waterfall. She has short shaggy white hair with a black, yellow and purple headband, to which a dragon skull headdress is attached. She has long, elf-like ears and bright green eyes. She is wearing an orange and purple tunic with detached black sleeves and a fur collar, with a necklace of what look like dragon teeth and a large circular medallion.
Iansan (based on the Candomblé goddess Iansã) | youtube.com

So…Natlan is a disappointment. I’ll be honest with you, I have very little hope left that HoYoverse will make any changes to the existing characters’ designs or skin-tones at this point. I appreciate that several of the game’s English voice-actors have put their jobs on the line to publicly call out the company, and that some high-profile content creators have done the same, but as I said earlier, unless players rally to make sure that Genshin Impact suffers a financial loss, by not spending money on the game, I do not believe they will pay attention. Now, just to be clear, I don’t think anyone’s necessarily a bad person for continuing to spend money on Genshin, and if you’re from any of the cultures represented in Natlan and having a certain character means something to you, I understand that…but this is where we’re at. Two years since Sumeru, and the conversation hasn’t changed because HoYoverse hasn’t changed; and I don’t know if they ever will on their own.

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Barrow-wights Abound In The Rings Of Power Season 2

There’s never been a better time to be a fan of three specific consecutive chapters of The Fellowship Of The Ring that have never been adapted from page to screen. The Old Forest, In The House Of Tom Bombadil, and Fog On The Barrow-downs make up a strange, at times surreal, and largely self-contained story that seemingly holds up the book’s overarching narrative instead of moving it forward – and for filmmakers Peter Jackson and Ralph Bakshi, that’s justification enough for their decision to pretend the Hobbits made it from the Shire to Bree without incident along the way. The plot is essentially unaffected (the Hobbits are given their swords by Aragorn, who conveniently has three small swords on his person), and moves to its destination quicker. But so much texture is lost. The world of Middle-earth is less rich, less vibrant, without Tom Bombadil and Goldberry; less dangerous, less of a character in its own right, without Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wights. These chapters play an underappreciated role in making The Lord Of The Rings, and this year, they’re finally being paid their dues.

Cover of Empire Magazine, with artwork by Einar Martinsen, depicting the Barrow-wights - floating, skeletal figures with glowing pale blue eyes, draped in crimson rags and gold jewelry, advancing through a forest under cold moonlight.
Barrow-Wights (artwork by Einar Martinsen) | empireonline.com

As previously revealed by Vanity Fair, the upcoming second season of The Rings Of Power will feature Tom Bombadil, an enigmatic character who was already capering about in J.R.R. Tolkien’s head years before he started writing The Lord Of The Rings, but became so firmly grounded in Middle-earth as to now be frequently associated with the in-universe God. Recently, Empire Magazine confirmed that the Barrow-wights, terrifying adversaries of Bombadil, would also appear in season two; which did not come as much of a surprise to keen-eyed fans who had already caught fleeting glimpses of them in the trailer and accompanying behind-the-scenes video released over a month ago, but did allow us to get a much closer look at how Amazon is adapting these iconic monsters for television. So let’s get into it.

First, however, I feel like “barrows” and “wights” are sufficiently unfamiliar concepts to the general audience that a brief explanation is in order. Barrows, or tumuli, are tombs covered by a mound of earth, and while the practice of building them was fairly common across the world in ancient times, with examples everywhere from France to Japan to Australia, Tolkien’s barrows are distinctly English, while the incorporeal, undead monsters inhabiting these mounds come from Norse folklore. There are several words in Old Norse to describe such a creature, including draugr or vættr, which was translated into English as wight (an existing, if somewhat archaic Old English word that once applied to just about anything living, but came to refer almost exclusively to supernatural beings). Tolkien had probably also encountered the specific term “Barrow-wight” at least once, in Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris’ Grettis Saga (1869), which adapts the Old Norse word haugbúi or “barrow-dweller” thusly.

A Barrow-wight - a floating skeletal figure with glowing pale blue eyes, draped in crimson rags with a gold circlet upon its bony brow - hovering over Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, whose back is turned to the camera. She has gold hair braided on top of her head. She wears a dark cloak over a white tunic, and has a quiver of arrows and a bow strapped to her back. She is using her sword to ward off the Barrow-wight.
Galadriel vs A Barrow-wight | empireonline.com

Draugar, traditionally, are understood to be something other than ghosts, a kind of parasitic spirit that possesses and reanimates dead bodies for its own malevolent purposes, and may fiercely guard a treasure (hence their association with barrows in particular, which often housed a deceased ruler’s riches as well as their remains), or wander around by night in search of its prey. Tolkien’s wights check all the boxes. Though little is said of how they came to be, we know for a fact that they were not innate to the barrows:

“In the days of Argeleb II the plague came into Eriador from the South-east, and most of the people of Cardolan perished, especially in Minhiriath. The Hobbits and all other peoples suffered greatly, but the plague lessened as it passed northwards, and the northern parts of Arthedain were little affected. It was at this time that an end came of the Dúnedain of Cardolan, and evil spirits out of Angmar and Rhudaur entered into the deserted mounds and dwelt there.”

— The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King: Appendix A; (iii) Eriador, Arnor, And The Heirs Of Isildur

In Unfinished Tales, the appearance of the wights in Cardolan is explicitly linked with the Witch-king of Angmar, mightiest of the nine Ringwraiths, whom Tolkien at one point conceived of as wights themselves:

“[The Witch-king] had known something of the country long ago, in his wars with the Dúnedain, and especially of the Tyrn Gorthad of Cardolan, now the Barrow-downs, whose evil wights had been sent there by himself.”

— Unfinished Tales: The Hunt For The Ring

Whether the wights were creations of the Witch-king or had merely fallen under his control is a mystery. During the events of The Lord Of The Rings, he again “roused” the wights in an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to blockade the Shire and prevent Frodo Baggins from escaping to Rivendell. The wights may have perished off-page when the Witch-king was killed in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, or afterwards when the power of the Nine Rings was ended, but for my part I believe they were older than either Rings or Ringwraiths. The wight’s song speaks of a “dark lord”, which can be read as a reference to Sauron, of course, but looks forward to a time when he will lift his hand to bring about death and destruction on a cosmic scale, extinguishing the sun, moon and stars in a black wind. Sauron, for all his many faults, is not a nihilist (part of what makes him so interesting to me), and the wight’s imagined future sounds a lot more like the universe according to Morgoth.

All of which is to say that I personally have no problem with wights appearing in The Rings Of Power, an Age of the world before the wars in Arnor where they make their official entrance into historical record. The show could call them wights rather than Barrow-wights to clear up any lingering confusion, but even that I think is unnecessary as long as these wights are not already inhabiting the Barrow-downs east of the Shire – and from the looks of it, they’re not. The trailer and first-look images show Galadriel, Elrond, and a squadron of Elven warriors surrounded by wights in a swampy forest, while the Barrow-downs are described and consistently depicted in artwork as “a country of grass and short springy turf”, devoid of trees or visible water. One could argue this is the result of unchecked deforestation by Númenórean colonizers, and while I wouldn’t normally expect a commitment to fictional ecohistorical accuracy from a show, I remembered that the marketing for The Rings Of Power kicked off with a remarkably accurate map of Middle-earth in the early Second Age, so I checked…and the forests, while blanketing much of Eriador, deliberately skirt around the Barrow-downs.

The Stoney Littleton Long Barrow, a low hill of turf with a stone wall built into it, in which there is a door leading into a tomb.
Stoney Littleton Long Barrow | worldhistory.org

So then, where are these wights from? That’s a question that has become especially relevant now that we’ve seen the wights up-close via Empire, because their costumes – specifically their headwear and jewelry – have raised legitimate concerns of orientalism. Regardless of whether or not The Rings Of Power‘s costume department meant anything by dressing monsters in what is seemingly SWANA and Central Asian traditional clothing, I believe it is important to amplify these concerns. The Rings Of Power, and all adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, have a responsibility to tackle head-on the orientalist and racist tropes that he wove into the text (again, whether intentionally or not). I would not see The Rings Of Power repeat the critical mistake Peter Jackson made when he opted instead to ignore and arguably even lean into the xenophobic connotations of a story about predominantly white heroes from the West cutting down hordes of nameless dark-skinned enemies out of the East, which in the aftermath of 9/11 made the films and books extremely popular amongst white Christian nationalists and Islamophobes (including Gimli actor and voice of Treebeard, John Rhys-Davies), who have dominated the fandom space and tried to shape mainstream perception of The Lord Of The Rings as an exclusively white and Christian story for the last two decades, in part because they were never challenged.

The Rings Of Power played an indirect role in exposing the fandom’s racism and revitalizing interest in the study of racist themes in Tolkien’s works, but has actually done surprisingly little in and of itself to challenge the status quo, and in some ways is decidedly regressive. Many fans raised eyebrows at the decision to erase important examples of gender nonconformity in Middle-earth by depicting most Elven men (and only the men) with short hair and Dwarven women without facial hair, while others noted how odd it was that most of the nameless Elven women in Lindon wear veils and nun-like garments. Some of these issues have been addressed heading into season two (there are more Elven men with long hair now, and Princess Disa is growing out her sideburns), but the Barrow-wights serve as a reminder that The Rings Of Power still has a long way to go in confronting the legacy of orientalism in Tolkien’s works that has overshadowed every adaptation. With the series expanding its scope to encompass the eastern lands of Rhûn, while in the real world, Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric against SWANA people is on the rise, it’s more important than ever that they make the effort.

What do you think of the Barrow-wights, their look, and the role they could potentially play in The Rings Of Power season two? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

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Tom Bombadil To Make Onscreen Debut In “The Rings Of Power” Season 2

I’m aware of how ridiculous this will sound, but J.R.R. Tolkien actually showed remarkable restraint as an author and worldbuilder. Yes, he seeded historical detail and mythology throughout his writings, and squeezed as much of it as possible into the Appendices to The Return Of The King, but as anyone who’s ever gone looking there for more info about the Entwives, or the Blue Wizards, or the cats of Queen Berúthiel can tell you, it’s still a pretty bare-bones summary of Middle-earth’s fictional history. The published Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales are a bit more useful, but sometimes, Tolkien would write something down and simply refuse to elaborate any further. And there’s no better example of this anywhere in his work than the character of Tom Bombadil.

Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil in The Rings Of Power, close-up. He has long curly reddish-brown hair and a beard. He is wearing a tall brown hat with a dark blue feather through it, and a blue-gray coat over a tunic of indeterminate color with a brown leather belt.
Tom Bombadil | Twitter @TheRingsofPower

Most people, if they’re familiar with Tom Bombadil at all, will know him as the capering curiosity who strays into the central narrative of The Lord Of The Rings, rescuing Frodo Baggins and his friends from a sentient and decidedly malevolent willow-tree in the Old Forest, entertaining them for a few nights at his home deep in the Withywindle river-valley before sending them on their way without even so much as a magical gift of no readily apparent purpose or a piece of advice that will prove particularly helpful in the future, the sorts of things that heroes typically earn from seemingly trivial side-quests. Nope, nothing of the sort. Technically, Tom comes back in the very next chapter and saves their lives again, this time from Barrow-wights, and he does tell the hobbits to help themselves to the wight’s treasures, including the swords that Merry, Pippin and Sam use throughout the rest of the book, so that’s something, but it’s not a gift from Tom, per se.

And with that, he’s gone (for real), and the hobbits very soon find themselves surrounded by dangers that push all memory of Tom Bombadil to the back of their – and our – minds, like an odd but not unpleasant dream. Most authors, upon realizing that they had accidentally written three straight chapters of what might arguably be called “filler”, would have either cut this section entirely or retroactively amended it to have some plot-significance, but J.R.R. Tolkien, thankfully, was not most authors. He left Tom in, and later justified his decision in a letter to Naomi Mitchison:

“Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”

— The Letters Of J.R.R. Tolkien, #144

As Tolkien makes clear, Tom actually originated in a poem published two decades prior to The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, and later republished in a 1962 collection of Tolkien’s poetry titled The Adventures Of Tom Bombadil (a slight misnomer, as only two of the sixteen poems feature him). The original poem follows Tom as he prances unconcernedly around the Old Forest in his iconic bright blue jacket and yellow boots, racking up a rogue’s gallery to rival Batman’s, including creatures such as Old Man Willow, the Barrow-wights, and Goldberry, who becomes Tom’s wife by the end of the poem. At this point, Middle-earth already existed in Tolkien’s mind, and had begun spilling over into the settings of his poetry and short stories, but he had not yet expanded the scope of his invented world’s history beyond the bleak First Age, in which a character as whimsical as Tom would have felt utterly out-of-place. It wasn’t until several years later, while writing The Lord Of The Rings, that Tolkien would finally yank Tom out of the nebulous space where he had existed and into the Middle-earth mythos – the book, conceived as a sequel to The Hobbit written in the same whimsical style, was getting out of Tolkien’s hands, becoming larger, darker, and more complex by the moment, and Tom Bombadil might have seemed like the perfect character to help get the story back on track.

It’s interesting to think about, the possibility that Tom feels like such an interloper in the story because he represents Tolkien’s last desperate attempt at “righting course” before he gave in and let the book lead him in a different direction entirely. When Tom conveniently shows up in the nick of time to save the hobbits from murderous willow-trees and the vengeful undead, a trick straight out of Gandalf’s playbook in The Hobbit, maybe it’s not so much for their sake as it is for Tolkien’s – but that’s just my speculation. Regardless of whether Tom responded to a subconscious cry for help from the author or not, once he arrived, he became as intrinsic a part of Middle-earth as characters that had lived there much longer, and even more so than most.

It’s not for no reason that fans have long speculated as to whether Tom and his wife Goldberry are the gods Aulë and Yavanna made flesh, or if Tom is Middle-earth’s maker, Eru Ilúvatar, Himself (a theory Tolkien rebuked, for what it’s worth). At the very least, Tom is older than anyone or anything else in the world. In his own words, “Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the King and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside.” Look past the use of third-person pronouns for a moment, and focus on the phrasing and ominous capitalization that seems to suggest Tom is not from “Outside”, i.e. the universe or Eä, where all the gods including Melkor (the Dark Lord of whom Tom speaks) were gathered before they descended to earth. Of course, if that were the case, it would mean Tom Bombadil was already on earth from the very very beginning, and we can’t even begin to comprehend what that makes him. The only other lifeforms of a possibly comparable age to Tom are the “nameless things” gnawing at the roots of the Misty Mountains, which are said to be older than Sauron; himself a lesser god. Maybe some questions are better left unanswered…

Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil, standing in front of Daniel Weyman as the Stranger, who is sitting in a wooden chair. Tom has long reddish-brown hair and a beard. He is wearing a tall brown hat and a blue coat over a tunic with a brown leather belt and yellow boots, carrying a wooden walking-stick. The Stranger has long gray hair and is wearing a moss-colored robe. They are in Tom's house, which has star-charts etched on the stone ceilings and rugged furniture.
Tom Bombadil | Twitter @TheRingsofPower

While we’ll never know for sure what Tom Bombadil is, I for one have made peace with that, because I’m frankly more interested in the function he serves, as Tolkien put it. He is more than merely “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside”, though that description may have been sufficient when used in 1937 by Tolkien, before The Lord Of The Rings had even begun to take shape. Allow me to share with you another illuminating excerpt from his letter to Naomi Mitchison:

“The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side….moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.”

— The Letters Of J.R.R. Tolkien #144

It’s for this exact reason that the Council of Elrond decides against giving the One Ring to Tom when the matter is discussed. Ironically, it would have too little effect on him! He would never use it, but neither would he remember to hold onto it, and after a while he might throw it away or misplace it, and give it no further thought until Sauron was on his doorstep. Would that be selfishness on his part, or on the part of those who gave him the Ring? It is not within Tom’s abilities to destroy the Ring, anyway, so this course of action would only stall Sauron for a short time, during which he would muster more force with which to crush the Free Peoples.

Tom’s neutrality, so to speak, is as much a factor in the decision by multiple filmmakers to leave him out of adaptations of The Lord Of The Rings as his insignificance to the plot or his garish wardrobe and tendency to break into song in the middle of a sentence. Especially in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, where even the Elves are villainized for not doing enough to help humans and have to be “redeemed” by sending an army to the Battle of Helm’s Deep, or by Elrond hand-delivering Andúril to Aragorn in Dunharrow, it’s hard to imagine Tom Bombadil being let off the hook. I can all too easily envision a scenario where a staunchly isolationist Tom Bombadil has to be coerced into fighting Sauron somehow, or leading the Ents into battle against Saruman.

But I don’t yet know enough about how Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne operate to predict how they’ll utilize Tom in the fast-approaching second season of Amazon’s The Rings Of Power, which will become the first major film or TV adaptation to feature the character (a bizarre 1993 Finnish miniseries titled Hobitit technically has the distinction of being the first). Tom, played by Rory Kinnear of Black Mirror, will be one of the first characters that Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot and the Stranger will encounter in the lands of Rhûn, which stretch beyond the easternmost boundaries of Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth, encompassing an inland sea. Tom has come to Rhûn, the showrunners revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair, to see for himself what effects the power of Sauron seeping from Mordor is having on the plants and animals there. He’s built a house in the wasteland surrounded by cacti and lemon trees, with star-charts etched on the ceilings. He’s been waiting for the Stranger, who “he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about.”

How large a role Tom plays in the story will, I think, decide how I ultimately end up feeling about his inclusion – if he shows up out of nowhere to save Nori and the Stranger from a carnivorous cactus, gives them directions, maybe teaches them both the same song that Frodo uses three-thousand years later in the barrow to summon Tom back to his side, and rescues them once more at most before vanishing, preferably never to be seen again on the show, that could work. But if at any point he starts to move the Stranger’s subplot along a little too forcefully, or if he takes any interest in the plot at all, I’m afraid of “contrivance” becoming an issue. Tom is an anti-contrivance, if you will, his house standing not at a figurative crossroads but somewhere on a scenic detour.

Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil, standing outside in a sandy garden of cacti, with beehives, lemon-trees, and pink flowers climbing the stone walls of his house. He has long reddish-brown hair and a beard, and is wearing a white tunic with rolled-up sleeves and yellow boots.
Tom Bombadil | Twitter @TheRingsofPower

As for his look, I have very little to say on the subject. His clothes are maybe a tad shabbier than I imagined, and he’s standing still in the first-look images, which I think is jarring because Tom Bombadil is so often described and depicted in artwork as “hopping and dancing”, “leaping up in the air”, “clattering in the kitchen”, “waving his arms as if he was warding off the rain”, or “charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink”, but he’s instantly recognizable regardless, and I’m very excited to hear Kinnear speaking and singing in the Cornish accent he says he and dialect coach Leith McPherson settled on for the character. Oddly, there’s no sign of Goldberry anywhere. Maybe the showrunners want her to be a surprise, or maybe she’s elsewhere in Middle-earth, or not even Tom’s wife yet, but it’s a curious omission.

But I’ve rambled long enough. What are your feelings on Tom Bombadil? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

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Everything New In The Genshin Impact Version 4.7 Special Program

With the third and final expansion to the region of Fontaine behind us and travelers gearing up for the next leg of their voyage across the world of Teyvat, there’s still a few things left to do before Genshin Impact Version 5.0, and one of those is our annual encounter with the enigmatic Khaenri’ahn knight Dainsleif, who usually shows up soon after we’ve completed a region’s three-act Archon Quest to take us sightseeing around some underground ruins infested with Abyss creatures, drop some massive lore-bomb about our protagonist’s sibling, or about the Cataclysm, or both, and then leave. The Traveler is better than me, because if I were given the option, at this point I would gladly beat the living daylights out of Dainsleif until he would just tell me what else he knows that he thinks we’re not worthy of learning yet or something, but that’s why the protagonist is not a self-insert.

Close-up screenshot of Clorinde in Genshin Impact, surrounded by crackling purple lightning as she holds her sword, glowing purple, up in front of her face. She has short dark purple hair, a tricorn hat, and golden epaulets on a purple uniform with white gloves.
Clorinde | dexerto.com

But I think everyone has a bone to pick with Dainsleif this year, because he’s late by a whole patch or two, and the last time we saw him, we accidentally got trapped in one of our sibling’s memories from hundreds of years prior (long story), which revealed to us that they played a key role in the foundation of the Abyss Order when they helped a Khaenri’ahn survivor of the Cataclysm named Chlothar heal his son Caribert, who was cursed to devolve into a Hilichurl along with most of the population of Khaenri’ah (another long story), using Abyssal power obtained from a not-at-all-creepy, sentient, talking, chained-up purple crystal suspended over a void simply called “The Sinner”, who was somehow gone when they went back to talk to him but is now worshipped as a god by the Abyss Order. Dainsleif seems to have a guess as to the Sinner’s true identity, but of course won’t tell us anything, except to say that it can see through space and time and, uh, definitely knows now that we know, bye! All of that, coupled with the fact that we found the skeletal remains of Chlothar but not Caribert, means that Travelers have a lot of questions for Dainsleif the next time we run into him.

And that day fast approaches, because the trailer for Version 4.7 prominently features Dainsleif, as well as the Traveler’s rarely-seen sibling, colloquially known as the Abyss Sibling, because, yes, at some point, after traveling the world with Dainsleif for a while, they went back to Chlothar and joined his fledgling Abyss Order of their own free will, apparently as a result of some terrible, mind-blowing truth they had learned on their adventures, something they are certain we too will come to accept. Well, we’re officially over halfway through Genshin Impact’s overarching storyline, with just two regions left to explore (plus Khaenri’ah), and I still don’t know what that “something” is, but theorists smarter than myself have some good guesses, that it has to do with the gods in Celestia, who may or may not be alien invaders, and would explain why they keep randomly dropping enormous spikes into the planet, annihilating entire civilizations. The Abyss Order’s plan to overthrow Celestia is titled the “Loom of Fate”, and Chlothar called Caribert the “Loom of Fate”, implying that Caribert would be able to weave his own destiny, but in the new trailer it’s said that the “Loom of Fate” is now complete, so it’s also a plan, and…I’m confused, quite frankly. I’m just gonna wait for Dainsleif to explain it to me.

So if the Abyss Sibling could maybe not kill him, as it’s implied she will attempt by the shot of her coming up behind Dainsleif with her sword drawn (because even though it’s not technically canon that the female twin is the Abyss Sibling and her brother is the Traveler, and plenty of players experience the story the other way around, I can’t recall the last time HoYoverse used the male Abyss Sibling in promo, if ever), that would be great! I mean, I know she won’t, but I am interested to learn how things get to the point where she might try. Until now, she’s been content to watch us from afar, confident that we’ll see her side of things and join her, but I could see where Dainsleif might start to pose a problem. It’s not like he’s a completely objective documentarian – he seems to believe Khaenri’ah was playing with fire, and that the Abyss Order is following in its footsteps by trying to revive the fallen kingdom. Maybe the Abyss Sibling is tired of having their side of the story recounted to us by someone who views her with a sort of condescending pity.

I have no idea what to expect from this confrontation, but HoYoverse is definitely hyping it up – even using today’s Special Program to premiere an animated short which beautifully summarizes the Traveler and the Abyss Sibling’s parallel journeys across Teyvat. I’m not sure if we should regard this as a teaser for the Genshin Impact anime that was announced well over a year ago, or something entirely separate, but the animation style and quality is exactly what I’m hoping for from the series, whatever topic it covers. Also, as a side-note, it’s really impactful to see certain moments between the siblings that the game has never shown us brought to life in such vivid detail, even something as seemingly mundane as Lumine, before she was “The Abyss Sibling”, braiding her brother’s hair, or of the two of them goofing around. It strengthens our emotional investment in what is truly the protagonist’s one goal.

But if the Traveler’s story doesn’t interest you (what are you, heartless?), there’s a lot of other cool stuff to do and explore in Version 4.7 – a surprising amount, actually, given that Version 4.8 immediately afterwards will be bringing us the year’s summer event and the closer on Fontaine, and before that there’s usually a bit of a dry spell in Genshin (I guess we already had that with Version 4.5, which I didn’t even cover). For starters, three characters are joining the game’s roster – two of them, Clorinde, a five-star Electro sword-user, and Sigewinne, a five-star Hydro bow-user, have been in the game since Version 4.0 and Version 4.1 respectively, while players only recently met Sethos, a new four-star Electro bow-user, in Cyno’s second Story Quest.

To break down all their kits in full would be exhausting, because to be honest, I still don’t entirely understand how the Bond of Life mechanic works. I just got Arlecchino because I think she’s neat, not because I have any idea how to use her properly. Clorinde applies a Bond of Life to herself when she uses her Elemental Burst, its value based on her max HP. Using her Elemental Skill, she enters the Night Vigil state, during which her normal attacks are infused with Electro, and using her Elemental Skill again causes her to lunge. In each of these different states, she gains different effects depending on the value of her Bond of Life – so for example, if you perform a lunging attack while Clorinde’s Bond of Life is less than 100% of her max HP, she will be healed based on her Bond of Life value, and her DMG and AoE will both be increased. Did you get all that? I hope so, because I sure as hell didn’t.

In the foreground stands Dainsleif, a tall man with shaggy blond hair and a dark blue mask covering one half of his face, wearing black with a high collar. Behind him stands the Traveler, with Paimon floating alongside him.
(left to right) Traveler, Paimon, and Dainsleif | gamertweak.com

Sigewinne’s Bond of Life is applied after she casts her Elemental Skill, which also causes a Bolstering Bubblebalm to bounce across the battlefield (the alliteration!), dealing Hydro DMG and restoring HP to all party members except Sigewinne herself upon impact with enemies (pressing and holding her Skill creates a larger bubble that will gradually reduce in size with each bounce, and these bubbles can even immobilize small opponents). When Sigewinne casts her Skill, two Sourcewater Droplets will be left behind, and picking these up gives her a Bond of Life worth 10% of her max HP, while clearing the Bond of Life restores energy. Her Burst seems fairly simple, a Hydro DMG cannon like Neuvillette’s, but because she’s a doctor, it’s a comically oversized syringe.

Last and unfortunately least, Sethos. He’s a charged attack-reliant four-star main DPS, and to make matters worse, his charged attacks are unusually slow and consume energy – and of course, because he’s a four-star, whatever increase in DMG you get from fully charging his Shadowpiercing Shot will likely be dwarfed by what any five-star bow user can accomplish in less time and without wasting energy. His Skill is a battery, recovering more energy when it triggers pretty much any Electro reaction, and his Burst converts his normal attacks into Electro. It’s not a great kit, which is sad, because I want him nonetheless for his design and personality, but I know in my heart I’ll take him out for one joyride and then never use him again.

Clorinde’s debut banner will run alongside Alhaitham in the first half of Version 4.7, featuring Sethos, while Sigewinne will arrive in the second half alongside a Furina rerun. Additionally, both Clorinde and Sigewinne will receive Story Quests, with Clorinde’s showing us a softer, possibly nerdier side of the stoic duelist, as an avid TTRPG (table-top role-playing game) fan, and Sigewinne’s giving us some insight into how the vastly different worlds of Melusines and humans have come to overlap in Fontaine. Cool, very cool, but now can we talk about the Imaginarium Theater?

Players of Genshin Impact have been asking for new endgame content since…well, forever. Don’t get me wrong, the Spiral Abyss is definitely still challenging in my opinion as somebody who has never fully cleared it, but it’s also really repetitive after a while, and outside of that, domains, and bosses, there’s been nowhere that players can really test their characters’ limits or their own strategizing skills. Until now, that is. Imaginarium Theater is set up so that players accustomed to breezing through every challenge the game throws at them with the same couple of characters will be forced to think long and hard about who to choose from a limited pool of characters. For instance, in Version 4.7, you can only choose Anemo, Electro, and Pyro characters – which all synergize pretty well anyway, so if anyone complains about this restriction I’d point out to them that it could be much worse, we could be forced to pick Anemo, Dendro, and Geo characters. Think about it, absolutely no Reactions. It would be infuriating.

With that said, up to four characters who don’t meet the season’s requirements can be chosen as “Special Guest Stars”, so again, there’s no reason to complain. If you don’t have enough characters to fill out your team, several Trial Characters equipped with flawless Artifacts will be provided, and players can even borrow or lend out their own characters for others to use, which sounds fun but also mortifying, because even my best characters are not where I want them to be and I would hate for someone to take my Lvl. 90 Dehya (hypothetically), only to discover that she’s been using an unleveled ATK goblet since I first got her because I could not – and cannot, try as I might! – obtain a Pyro DMG Bonus goblet from the Crimson Witch of Flames domain. These characters-for-hire are referred to as your “Supporting Cast”, not to be confused with your “Alternate Cast”, more of whom will gradually become available each time you complete a challenge in the Imaginarium Theater (keep in mind that your Supporting and Alternate Casts must meet the actual requirements of the season). Even as characters join your team, however, others will become unavailable. You can also trigger events inside the Theater, either randomly or by using Fantasia Flowers, and some of these will allow you to add more characters to your party while others will throw you into an unexpected battle and completely mess up your strategies.

The characters you choose to form your initial party, your “Principal Cast”, will all receive Fantastical Buffs, not only within the Theater but also outside of it, in the open-world, for the duration of the season. That means if I choose Dehya as part of my Principal Cast in Version 4.7, which I probably will, my Dehya’s max HP, ATK and DEF will increase by 20% until the Theater closes (temporarily: Imaginarium Theater and Spiral Abyss will alternate each month from now on). And there will be plenty of rewards, including Primogems, Original Resin, forging billets, and Toy Medals, the latter of which can be exchanged with the Theater’s concierge to obtain iconic poses for your characters, so that when taking photos, you don’t have to wait around for them to cycle through all their other idle animations and then frantically snap a dozen more pictures than necessary in the hopes of getting the one you wanted….which is an experience I’m sure we can all relate to. That totally isn’t just a me thing….right?

Version 4.7 will also see the return of a cute and fun minigame from way back in Version 3.8, the Spinoblaster, as well as a few other Events – Mutual Security Enhancing Simulation, in which players will take control of various monsters and maneuver them into battle against each other, for a chance to obtain the new four-star bow Cloudforged; Record of Reflective Writing, a platformer game where the objective is to collect coins and evade traps; and Endless Forms Most Martial, a classic combat challenge. Nothing too extravagant, but nothing there that sounds boring, either. If nothing else, it’s a few more Primogems ahead of Natlan’s release.

An aquatic Saurian swimming through a river of molten lava in Genshin Impact, orange streaked with vivid turquoise.
A Saurian in Natlan | youtube.com

I’ve saved our discussion of the upcoming region for last because that’s how they went about it on the Special Program, but of course it was all that anyone could talk about afterwards – our very first glimpse of a land we’ve only heard about from a handful of NPCs scattered around Teyvat, who have spoken highly of its hot springs and graffiti-artists, and described it as a colorful place with fashionable people. It’s hard to form a first impression of Natlan from the teaser because it doesn’t show us the culture, which I find curious and potentially worrying given that Natlan is or was supposed to be based on Mesoamerica, parts of Africa, and also…Spain (knowing HoYoverse, they threw Spain into the mix so they would have an excuse for when 90% of the playable characters and NPCs alike are white). The teaser is Saurian-centric, highlighting three of the different species of adorable dragons that players can apparently shapeshift into in Natlan, including one that burrows into the earth and speeds along the sides of graffiti-streaked canyon walls, one that can swim through rivers of lava, and one that uses its extremely long tongue to grab objects and propel itself through the air. It’s very much giving Dinotopia, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but was exactly what I was afraid of when Neuvillette first mentioned that the people of Natlan live alongside dragons, because it feels like another excuse to steer into full-on fantasy and abruptly away from the real-world cultures that informed everything from the architecture down to the literature of Mondstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, and Fontaine. In Sumeru, those influences are filtered through a layer of orientalism and exoticism so thick as to be almost impenetrable, and I fear something similar will occur in Natlan.

But maybe that’s just me being cynical. What do you think? As always, share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!