Sumeru Didn’t Need Another Archon – A “Genshin Impact” Analysis

SPOILERS FOR ALL GENSHIN IMPACT ARCHON QUESTS AHEAD!

Four Archon Quests deep into the overarching narrative of Genshin Impact, a couple of patterns have started to emerge. It’s pretty much a given at this point that in each new region we visit, our slowly meandering protagonist (who just wants to find her/his sibling and leave the world of Teyvat forever) will begrudgingly grow attached to a new group of characters all destined to be playable as we come together to try and prevent our common enemy, the Fatui Harbingers, from capturing the Gnosis of that region’s respective Archon. Each and every time, the situation escalates out of control and eventually requires us to put our life on the line for the people of Teyvat and their gods, and each and every time, the mission fails because at the last moment the Archons only ever halfheartedly try to stop the Fatui (to be fair, if we ever stopped to question why that is, we might realize that they’re not the bad guys in this story, but our self-righteous protagonist has a hard time comprehending that anyone they don’t get along with is a good person).

Lesser Lord Kusanali in Genshin Impact
Lesser Lord Kusanali | oneesports.gg

But while we fail more often than not at whatever it was we originally set out to do, letting the Fatui slip through our fingers with another Gnosis in their possession, there is something we’ve learned from all our encounters with the Archons and interactions with their subjects in three of the four regions – namely, that gods are intrinsically unfit to govern humans, and it’s only by moving forward without them and their impossible ideals that Teyvat can adapt to overcome the challenges it now faces. I don’t believe it’s merely coincidence that the Traveler’s journey began in Mondstadt, the one and only region in Teyvat whose respective Archon willingly stepped down hundreds of years prior to the events of Genshin Impact to ensure he would never become a tyrant, or that in Liyue, we helped the Geo Archon fake his own death so he could do the same for his people.

In Inazuma, the transfer of power was not peaceful – but only because the immovable Electro Archon turned out to be a semi-sentient yet emotionless puppet whose programming physically prevented her from allowing any change to occur in Inazuma. Once we got through to the real Electro Archon, Ei, who had been cooped-up for centuries meditating on the meaning of “Eternity”, we very quickly convinced her to step in and put a stop to the strife she had inadvertently caused in a misguided attempt to keep her people safe from her own intense emotions. In her second Story Quest, Ei agreed to come out of isolation entirely and rule Inazuma alongside her puppet, imparting with her what she now believes wholeheartedly; that the nation and its people can change over time and still last forever. That being said, the two of them act as a line of defense against existential threats while Inazuma’s internal affairs are now managed primarily by regular humans and youkai belonging to the Tri-Commission.

But in Sumeru, Genshin Impact bucked the trend entirely. Here, our protagonist’s intention is not to help a god abdicate, but to install a god on the closest thing Sumeru has to a throne. This seems to go against everything else the game has to say about gods and their dealings with humans, and it’s bewildering to me that more people aren’t talking about what it means – not just for Sumeru, but for the regions of Teyvat we haven’t yet visited, like Fontaine, Natlan, and Snezhnaya. First thing’s first: let’s take a closer look at what really happened in the Sumeru Archon Quest.

Sumeru, prior to our arrival, was a nation in desperate search of a god. Their current Dendro Archon, Lesser Lord Kusanali, was a mere child in god-years who had barely grown in strength and wisdom over the last five centuries, concerning her citizens and particularly the sages of the Sumeru Akademiya, who fondly remembered a time when the original Dendro Archon, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, effortlessly kept her people safe from all manner of threats. In every corner of Sumeru, worshippers of an ancient deity named “King Deshret” had started popping up, prophesying his imminent return and eagerly looking forward to the overthrow of the weak Dendro Archon. But in the heart of the Akademiya itself, the sages were hard at work designing a god of their own – a being far stronger than the Lesser Lord Kusanali, powered by the Electro Gnosis stolen from Inazuma by the Fatui Harbinger Scaramouche, who volunteered his mechanical body to be this new god’s vessel.

Scaramouche Boss Fight in Genshin Impact
Scaramouche Boss | gamespace.com

Ultimately, the sages had to be stopped – if left to their own devices, they would have surrendered the care of Sumeru to a god beyond their ability to control, all while Lesser Lord Kusanali languished in a cell, incapable of protecting her people from the obvious machinations of the Fatui. A civil war between King Deshret’s worshippers and the Akademiya loyalists would have been inevitable, thousands would have died, and the nation would have tumbled into chaos, until the Akademiya itself was weakened to the point where they would have no choice but to bow to their new god’s every order. Sumeru would have become a vassal-state of Snezhnaya, and the Fatui would have gained the accumulated knowledge of the Akademiya without shedding a single drop of their own blood.

So we collaborated with Lesser Lord Kusanali to stage a coup in the Akademiya, round up the corrupt sages, and defeat Scaramouche. It was an excellent plan, and we would have pulled it off without a hitch if the Fatui Harbinger Dottore hadn’t been waiting on the sidelines the whole time, waiting for the last possible moment to swoop in and steal both the Electro Gnosis and the Dendro Gnosis, which Lesser Lord Kusanali traded for the immediate destruction of Dottore’s small army of clones and information regarding the “false sky” of Teyvat, respectively. Satisfied, the Fatui departed Sumeru, leaving Lesser Lord Kusanali to pick up the pieces and begin reassembling a deeply-divided Akademiya.

That’s where my problem arises, because that’s the situation in which we leave Sumeru, with Lesser Lord Kusanali governing the region from her position of power in the Akademiya – a prison no longer to this most indefatigable deity. It is nowhere stated, suggested, or even implied that this is to be a temporary situation, or that Lesser Lord Kusanali intends to step down at any point in the future. The Traveler believes (for reasons I think I understand, and will elaborate upon in a minute) that she will mature into a competent Dendro Archon despite her lack of experience in pretty much every scenario, and sure, she proves time and time again that she listens attentively to all her peoples’ prayers…but she’s also the first to admit that she still doesn’t fully understand human emotions, and she doesn’t know when or whether she ever will. I fail to see how even a benevolent god with good intentions can rule Sumeru the way its people deserve when the message that Genshin Impact has sent in every previous Archon Quest is that gods inevitably make mistakes and mortals always pay the consequences. It’s not like there weren’t plenty of other candidates for the job, including all the uncorrupt sages at the Akademiya (Tighnari’s master being one of the most notable).

Aether standing before the Irminsul Tree in Genshin Impact
Irminsul Tree | pcgamer.com

What’s worse, the people of Sumeru have very little say in the matter. Upon defeating Scaramouche and the corrupt Akademiya sages, the Traveler and Lesser Lord Kusanali took steps to ensure no such internal threat would ever arise again by venturing deep into the pulsating heart of the Irminsul Tree, which contains all of Teyvat’s accumulated data from its past, present, and future. There, we encountered the faint remnants of Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, Sumeru’s first Dendro Archon, who had been waiting patiently for us to come along and help her erase herself from Irminsul completely. The Traveler, being an outsider to the world of Teyvat, is soon the only person who remembers Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, while the rest of Sumeru is deluded by Irminsul into thinking that Lesser Lord Kusanali was always the Dendro Archon, and that the sages were guilty of committing treason against their god.

In essence, the Traveler has eradicated every challenge to Lesser Lord Kusanali’s reign not because she’s the rightful leader of Sumeru (that claim could potentially be disputed by King Deshret, if ever he returned, but we trusted Lesser Lord Kusanali and the Akademiya sages without hesitation when they told us he was dead), nor because she proved she was the most qualified person for the role, nor even because the people of Sumeru told us they wanted her (but we “corrected” their memories, so that’s no longer an issue)…no, everything we did for her, we did because our protagonist decided for us that she was our best friend after first meeting her. And while the Traveler is certainly capable of making mistakes, this decision of theirs is not framed as one within the story, and the fandom certainly doesn’t seem to see it as one. People assume Lesser Lord Kusanali will be a good Dendro Archon because they like her character.

And that’s fine, by the way. But it’s been bothering me for weeks now that the Sumeru Archon Quest seems to set a precedent for our protagonist going around forcibly suppressing the memories of the people without their knowledge (much less their consent), rather than actually addressing the root cause for their discontent and working to change the unsustainable status quo in each region, as we’ve done in the past. In particular, I’m thinking of the Eremites, King Deshret’s loyal worshippers, and how the persecution they endured for hundreds of years (all of it perpetuated by the Akademiya, mind you, and in the Dendro Archon’s name) is swept under the rug so that they will accept Lesser Lord Kusanali as their god without argument: actually helping them is far from a top priority for the Traveler, and that responsibility is shifted onto the character of Cyno by the end of the Archon Quest.

Aaru Village in Genshin Impact
Aaru Village, home of the Eremites | pcgamesn.com

In the most recent Archon Quest: Interlude, Inversion Of Genesis, the Irminsul Tree is tampered with yet again, this time with the effect of erasing all memory of Scaramouche. Every mention of that name, even voiced lines of dialogue, have been removed from the game entirely. The lore surrounding Irminsul is all very interesting, don’t get me wrong, but the act of altering Irminsul is already a lazy plot-device that I want to see less of going forward (the easiest solution to this problem was already foreshadowed in the Winter Night’s Lazzo trailer).

But I’m getting way off-topic. Back to Lesser Lord Kusanali, I do have one theory (that, believe it or not, came to me in a dream) for why we helped her take control of Sumeru without any caveats – a theory which I believe could also provide clues about the three Archons we have yet to meet, and their eventual fates. Bear with me here. The seven Elements personified by Archons in Genshin Impact are Anemo (air), Geo (stone), Electro (electricity), Dendro (plant-matter), Hydro (water), Pyro (fire), and Cryo (ice). You need only skim through this list to recognize that the outlier is and has always been Dendro, Lesser Lord Kusanali’s Element. Where the other Elements are inanimate and incapable of changing without external pressure, Dendro is alive. Crucially for my theory, Dendro is capable of growing, of adapting to different conditions on its own, of evolving and changing.

See where I’m going with this? It makes a great deal of sense to me that the Traveler, as the only person in Teyvat capable of wielding all seven Elements, would know that growth and adaptation are fundamental aspects of the Dendro Element (not only in real-life, but in Genshin Impact‘s gameplay as well), and would therefore know that Lesser Lord Kusanali will adapt to become the Archon her people need because it is her Element’s natural inclination to do so. I can’t actually confirm this is the case, but looking back at the free-spirited Anemo Archon, the old and stolid Geo Archon, and the shockingly violent Electro Archon, it wouldn’t be the first time an Archon’s Element has dictated their actions and personality on some level. And I doubt it will be the last.

Very soon, our travels across Teyvat will take us to Fontaine, a land presided over by the Hydro Archon, Focalors. We know from Lesser Lord Kusanali’s description of her that, like any body of water, she can be unpredictable and temperamental at times; but it may be because she’s especially susceptible to the gravitational pull of a celestial body hovering directly above Fontaine (that would be Celestia, a floating city inhabited by the suspiciously silent gods who originally put Focalors and the other Archons in power). My theory is that the raging tides within Focalors will only be calmed when Celestia is finally unmoored, whether by us, by the Fatui, or by a maddened Focalors herself. Beyond that, we know nothing for certain, but the Pyro Archon erupting before having to be extinguished and the Cryo Archon’s cold, dead heart being thawed by some demonstration of love both sound like safe bets to me.

In order from left to right: Raiden Ei, Lesser Lord Kusanali, Venti, and Zhongli from Genshin Impact
Raiden Ei, Lesser Lord Kusanali, Venti, and Zhongli | dotesports.com

This simple theory can ultimately only justify the Traveler’s choices in-game, and perhaps help us understand their reasoning for deciding which Archons have to go, and which can stay – it doesn’t make me feel any better about the fact that even a single Archon will remain in power at the end of the day, and it doesn’t necessarily allay my fears that HoYoverse will muddle the themes of Genshin Impact‘s story. But hopefully now that I’ve gotten this off my chest, I won’t have to stay up at night scouring the internet trying to find any discussion of this topic, only to have my most convoluted search-terms produce zero results, because now this post will be out there. If anyone has similar feelings on the Sumeru Archon Quest, I encourage you to elaborate on what I’ve written here and share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

Everything We Learned From Genshin Impact’s Version 3.3 Special Program

My fellow Ittorou shippers, our time has finally come.

What’s that? You thought I’d start off by talking about the long-awaited gameplay preview for Scaramouche, who graces the thumbnail of the Genshin Impact Version 3.3 trailer (above)? Well, if it’s commentary on Scaramouche’s redesign and unique gameplay mechanics that you’re looking for, allow me to redirect you to a post from earlier this month where I went over most of the information that was only officially revealed in yesterday’s Special Program, including what I would consider to be a far more concise description of his Elemental Skill than what was offered on the livestream, which got a little bogged-down with ornate names for everything under the sun. Seeing as that post has not yet been outdated by any new information from the game developers, there’s actually not too much more to say about Scaramouche – I mean, besides the fact that he’s getting his own Archon Quest, apparently. Don’t worry, we’ll go over all the details in due time.

Arataki Itto in Genshin Impact
Arataki Itto

But first thing’s first, and the thing in question is Ittorou – which I suppose is its own kind of ornate term, so let me explain. “Ittorou” is the nickname for a popular queer ship in the Genshin Impact fandom that involves the characters of Arataki Itto and Gorou. The one is a Geo on-field Main DPS, the other a designated Geo support, and they are apparently both at their best when played alongside each other (I wouldn’t know, having never gotten my hands on a copy of Gorou, despite him theoretically being the easier of the two to obtain as a four-star character). They debuted simultaneously in December 2021, and Gorou has only ever received a drop-rate boost on Itto’s limited-time banners; in fact, he is likely to reappear on a banner next month when Itto gets his second rerun. Yet despite their obvious synergy, they’ve never interacted onscreen.

Until now, that is. For the main Event of Version 3.3, Akitsu Kimodameshi, characters from all over Inazuma have been invited to participate in a “test of courage” organized by the Yashiro Commission…and the trailer confirms that Itto, Gorou, Heizou and Yoimiya are amongst the champions hoping to venture into Chinju Forest on Narukami Island, where malevolent spirits roam under the cover of eternal darkness, and come out the other side unscathed both physically and mentally. Now, as much as I hate to see my favorite characters suffer, just think of the potential interactions we could see – Itto cowering behind Gorou at every strange sound, Gorou leaping into Itto’s arms in a moment of weakness, Gorou’s fur bristling and Itto trying to comfort him by patting his head like a dog. Even though we know damn well that MiHoYo has no intention to put any of its characters, straight or queer, in canonical relationships, they’re giving me what I want, which is a canonical basis for the very much non-canonical fanfic I intend to consume in massive quantities after the Event.

And to be fair, despite never having interacted with each other previously, Itto and Gorou are already about as blatantly queer-coded as the male characters in Genshin Impact can get (it’s a very different situation for female characters: although they’re just as unlikely to ever state that they’re queer, it’s no secret that Jean and Lisa, Ningguang and Beidou, and Ei and Yae Miko are more than just extremely close friends). The reason fans started shipping Ittorou in the first place is because Itto has a voice-line where he talks about the warm, fuzzy feeling that he gets around Gorou, and also because he has a massive crush on Gorou’s alter ego, the advice columnist “Ms. Hina”, who is depicted on posters and standees as Gorou wearing a dress. But we still don’t know how Gorou feels about Itto, so this new Event is sure to be very illuminating in that regard.

As an additional incentive for participating, one of the limited-time rewards obtainable through the Akitsu Kimodameshi Event is a new weapon named the Toukabou Shigure, technically classified as a sword but more closely resembling an umbrella with a claw-like handle, a leering mouth, and a single eye. The weapon’s distinctive design is based on depictions of the Kasa-obake, a type of yōkai or demon, found in Japanese art and literature dating back to the Edo period. And looking at the amount of research that went into this one weapon, I can’t help but again be reminded of the stark difference between how MiHoYo lovingly takes inspiration from Japanese culture when expanding the region of Inazuma and its accompanying lore, and how they grabbed a bunch of random, orientalist stereotypes of Southwest Asia and North Africa when it came time to do the same for Sumeru.

Kaeya in Chinju Forest posing with a Tanuki, in Genshin Impact
Kaeya posing with a Tanuki in Chinju Forest

In fact, despite the region still being fairly new, Sumeru and its roster of characters are already being neglected by MiHoYo in favor of Inazuma, Liyue, and Mondstadt, with only one Sumeru-based Event announced for Version 3.3 and no Hang-out Event for the new four-star character, Faruzan, whom I was excited to learn more about after it was revealed during the Special Program that she’s over a hundred years old and knows a great deal of lore pertaining to Sumeru’s desert-dwelling ancient civilization, having spent decades trapped in the ruins beneath the desert. Unfortunately, it’s possible we won’t see or hear from Faruzan until some random side-quest or Event brings us back to the desert, and that could take a while. She was not mentioned in association with Misty Dungeon, a popular Event that will return in Version 3.3 with a desert theme.

Cyno posing in the desert of Sumeru, in Genshin Impact
Cyno in the deserts of Sumeru

Misty Dungeon first appeared in the spring of 2021 under the title Battlefront: Misty Dungeon, and was so popular it was brought back later that same year as Misty Dungeon: Realm Of Light. This year’s reskinned version of the Event is titled Misty Dungeon: Realm Of Sand, and will take place in Sumeru, but it will still follow the same general concept, requiring players to move through a labyrinth, completing puzzles and timed challenges until they unlock an encounter with a final boss. And it won’t be the only fan-favorite Event making a comeback in Version 3.3 – Windtrace, Genshin Impact‘s version of hide-and-seek for co-op mode, will also be returning with some cool new perks for both hiders and seekers, including giving players the ability to continue participating in the game even after being captured.

And if you don’t share in the nostalgia for Misty Dungeon and Windtrace, well, Genshin Impact has got you covered with Across The Wilderness, a brand-new Event where players run around rooftops capturing balloons. From the description and preview, it looks relatively stress-free, but there’s no doubt that having multiple Anemo characters like Venti, Xiao, Kazuha, and Scaramouche on your team will give you a literal boost while running, jumping, and climbing (if you needed any more reasons to pull for Scaramouche, he’s about to make exploration in this game ridiculously easy).

On that note, I guess it’s time we talked about Scaramouche’s Archon Quest: Interlude, which presumably picks up right where the final chapter of the Sumeru Archon Quest left off, with Scaramouche hidden away at the Sumeru Akademiya in the care of the Dendro Archon and making a full recovery from the traumatic head injury he sustained after falling from the cockpit of his giant robotic exoskeleton (long story). But of all things, an Akademiya inquiry into the events on the island of Tatarasuna leads the Traveler back to Scaramouche and forces the former Fatui Harbinger to begrudgingly sift through his scattered memories and construct a full account of what happened there roughly four-hundred years ago.

Scaramouche getting an Archon Quest in place of a Story Quest is interesting because Archon Quests aren’t optional, so whatever dark secrets are contained in Scaramouche’s backstory, MiHoYo wants us all to know this stuff. The only other characters in the game with that level of personal significance to the overarching storyline, besides the literal Archons of each region, are…honestly, maybe only Dainsleif and Kaeya, and they’re both so integral to the story of Khaenri’ah and its destruction that they literally can’t appear for too long or one of them will inadvertently spoil the game’s ending. I pray that we get a little more time with Scaramouche before he’s put in a similarly awkward position.

Genshin Impact Genius Invokation TCG gameplay
Genius Invokation TCG | pcgamesn.com

One more thing before we finish up here: new, completely optional permanent gameplay is coming to Genshin Impact in Version 3.3, in the form of an animated card game named Genius Invokation TCG, but for the time being there are no plans to offer rewards or allow players to track their progress in the game, and it’s subsequently unclear how MiHoYo intends to keep players from growing bored of this after the novelty of challenging friends and random NPCs to duels wears off, as I’m sure it will sooner rather than later. Until I sit down and actually read the rules, my first impressions of Genius Invokation TCG are neutral. Admittedly, I’m a little bitter about the absence of Itto – he literally plays Genius Invokation TCG! How is he not featured on a character card? – but the art and animations are the only things catching my eye in the gameplay preview.

Anyway, what did you think of the Version 3.3 Special Program? Will you be spending your hard-earned Primogems on Scaramouche’s banner, or waiting for another character? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

Scaramouche And Faruzan To Debut In Genshin Impact Version 3.3

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR GENSHIN IMPACT CHAPTER III: ACT V AHEAD!

For almost two years, ever since his very first appearance in the Unreconciled Stars event of November 2020, the Fatui Harbinger Scaramouche has been one of the most eagerly-anticipated characters in Genshin Impact, but until now HoYoverse has stubbornly tried to keep his eventual playability a secret from players – a futile and some might say pointless endeavor, seeing as Genshin Impact is the type of game where anyone with a unique character model is almost guaranteed to be playable in some way, shape, or form. The one notable exception to this unwritten rule is La Signora, another Fatui Harbinger with a resilient fanbase who don’t care that she got incinerated back in Version 2.1, but there may be hope for her too, now.

Genshin Impact
Wanderer, a.k.a. Scaramouche | pcgamesn.com

You see, Genshin Impact has a rigid internal logic for when, why, and which certain characters become playable – and something that’s generally agreed upon in the fandom at least is that a character has to be on good terms with the Traveler to earn a spot on their team. Hence why the only playable Fatui Harbinger to date, Tartaglia, is the one who literally has to remain friendly with us for the sake of his kid brother, Teucer. Of course, there are eleven Harbingers, and only so many excuses for them not to kill us the first chance they get, so in time we may start to see the rules bend ever so slightly to allow some morally ambiguous characters to join our teams, but I have a hard time believing that the rules could bend around characters like, say, Dottore or Arlecchino, two unapologetic sadists directly responsible for the deaths of multiple children, without breaking entirely.

In the case of Scaramouche, a twisted take on Pinocchio if he became a serial killer, Genshin Impact is experimenting with putting a different version of the same character in the Traveler’s team, and gauging fan response (which has been overwhelmingly positive). Near the end of the Sumeru Archon Quest, Chapter III: Act V, Scaramouche literally falls into a coma after tumbling from the cockpit of his colossal mechanical exoskeleton and is carried away to a safe place by the Dendro Archon, Kusanali, who promises to look after him while he recovers. We will presumably learn more about what the Archon’s treatment entailed in Version 3.3, when Scaramouche becomes playable, but we can already ascertain a few things: at some point between now and then, Scaramouche will be granted an Anemo Vision by the gods in Celestia (or by whatever entity distributes Visions), change his name to “Wanderer”, and subtly alter his appearance until he no longer resembles the Fatui Harbinger we once fought.

There is some evidence in the Version 3.3 beta test leaks to suggest that Scaramouche will retain his old memories and a little of his original personality, but Wanderer is essentially a different person, spiritually reborn. I can’t call it a redemption arc, because Scaramouche didn’t ever actually do the work of bettering himself, but it’s enough to justify the Traveler taking him under their wing and helping him reacclimate to the world, this time endowed with a sense of morality he was previously lacking – and if angst is what you’re looking for, I can assure you that our self-righteous protagonist will not pass up the opportunity to remind Scaramouche of all his past crimes and misdeeds, probably even encouraging him to personally apologize to his victims.

Genshin Impact
Scaramouche Boss Fight | gamerbraves.com

Off the top of my head, I can think of three other Fatui Harbingers who will probably receive similar treatment in the near future: Dottore, Sandrone, and La Signora. From what we know of these characters (not a whole lot in Sandrone’s case, admittedly, but I’m making a few assumptions here), they’re all much too evil to redeem properly but at the same time much too cool to waste entirely, and all three of them could very easily be swapped out for nearly identical alternate versions of themselves – Dottore for one of his clones, assuming any survived his self-imposed purge at the end of the Sumeru Archon Quest; Sandrone for one of her sentient puppets, perhaps even Katheryne, if the Adventurer’s Guild’s robotic receptionist is one of her creations; and La Signora for her younger self when she inevitably gets resurrected as the shy, soft-spoken Rosalyne. These alternate versions would conveniently all possess functional moral compasses as well as Visions.

And speaking of Visions, whether by chance or by design on HoYoverse’s part, Scaramouche possessing an Anemo Vision lends further credence to the widely-held theory that Anemo male characters are uniquely distinguished by their intimate understanding of loss – all stemming from the original tragedy of the Anemo Archon, who adopted the physical form of his best friend after the latter’s death in battle so his memory would never fade. Xiao, Kazuha, and Heizou are also well acquainted with grief, having all lost people close to them, but Scaramouche has not only been abandoned but outright betrayed by many of those who claimed to care for him, leading him to misinterpret every abandonment as betrayal. Beyond that, being an Anemo character makes Scaramouche ten times more desirable than he would have been if he belonged to any other Elemental type.

Scaramouche is, rather surprisingly, a catalyst user (making him only the second male catalyst user after Heizou) with the ability to move about in mid-air after casting his Elemental Skill, gradually consuming “Sky-Dweller Points” instead of regular stamina points until he either casts his Elemental Burst or runs out of Sky-Dweller Points and descends to earth. While hovering above the battlefield, he can jump to gain height, and his normal and charged attacks will still hit enemies on the ground. His Elemental Burst creates an Anemo vortex like Venti’s which pulls enemies towards each other, and that alone will make him very popular with the part of the player base that adores Anemo characters for their ability to quickly and efficiently carve through large mobs.

Genshin Impact
Faruzan | pockettactics.com

If you can’t get your hands on Scaramouche, a five-star character available for a limited time on a single banner, you have a pretty good chance at nabbing at least one copy of Faruzan, his more easily obtainable four-star equivalent on the permanent standard banner. Faruzan, a scholar of linguistics at the Sumeru Akademiya, is an Anemo bow-user whose gameplay also revolves around crowd-control – after casting her Elemental Skill, her first charged attack will fire a small vortex, while casting her Elemental Burst summons a polyhedron vortex that flits around the battlefield, pausing to knock clusters of enemies off their feet and simultaneously reduce their Anemo RES (resistance). She sounds like your run-of-the-mill Anemo character, honestly, but perhaps players can find a niche purpose for her. Her lore is what really excites me, because she sees visions of Sumeru’s ancient history.

With all that said, which of these two characters will you be pulling for? Both? Neither? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

Genshin Impact Finally Revealed All 11 Fatui Harbingers – And They’re Beautiful

We’ll probably never know if MiHoYo, anticipating backlash to the first official look at the three new playable characters coming to Genshin Impact in Version 3.0, revealed the identities of the game’s mysterious villains, the eleven Fatui Harbingers, as a distraction – something to keep the fans content, by feeding them hollow promises of more varied and interesting character designs in the far-off future while in the here and now, the game developers couldn’t even be bothered to experiment with different skin-tones for new playable characters, much less designing entirely new character models. But there can be no doubt that, whether by design or by coincidence, the distraction worked.

Genshin Impact
Fatui Harbingers | progameguides.com

In a new Teyvat Chapter Interlude Teaser titled “A Winter Night’s Lazzo”, nine of the ten remaining Fatui Harbingers gather in Snezhnaya to mourn the recent loss of their troupe’s eleventh member, La Signora, and to bury what little remains of her. But the solemn evening quickly devolves into chaos as the Harbingers begin hurling insults at each other from opposite sides of La Signora’s coffin, until only an intervention by the mysterious Pierro, first and foremost of the Harbingers, can put an end to their little lazzo.

For those unfamiliar with the now somewhat archaic Italian term, a lazzo is any short comedic routine in the Commedia dell’arte, typically improvised by its performers to smooth transitions between scenes or recapture an audience’s waning interest. The Commedia dell’arte were comedic or satirical plays performed by wandering troupes of actors that originated in Italy sometime in the 16th Century and later became popular across southern Europe (until they were outlawed by Napoleon in 1797) – these plays always involved the same stock characters with exaggerated personality traits, outlandish outfits and grotesque masks, but the plots would change around them depending on the audience a troupe was catering to at any given moment.

For reasons that remain unclear, the Harbingers have each adopted or been assigned the name of a stock character from the Commedia dell’arte, and they each share a handful of similarities with their Commedia counterpart – although there are key differences worth mentioning as we work our way through the Harbingers in order of appearance. But first, a little background on how the Harbingers came to be: don’t be impatient, this part’s not very long, anyway.

The only thing we can say with absolute certainty regarding the Harbingers’ origins is that they were formed shortly after the Cataclysm (the destruction of the nation of Khaenri’ah and the systematic genocide of its people by Celestia, or by Archons responding to Celestia), and that their founding member was a survivor of the Cataclysm known only by the Commedia alias he took when he first established the Harbingers – Pierro, the Jester. In the roughly five-hundred years since the Cataclysm occurred, Pierro has recruited ten new members (that we know of), and each one seems to harbor a grudge against a particular god, or just against gods in general.

Rosalyne, who became known as La Signora after joining the Harbingers, hated the Anemo Archon Barbatos because he was nowhere to be found when she prayed to him for help during the Cataclysm. Kunikuzushi, or Scaramouche as he was later known, was designed to be a container for the Raiden Shogun’s Electro Gnosis – but she deemed him unfit for the task and discarded him, leaving him to wander the earth aimlessly for centuries until he found the Harbingers. As for Ajax, later Tartaglia…well, I don’t really know what his deal was, but after falling into the Abyss at the age of fourteen and having to battle his way out I wouldn’t blame him for hating the gods just because.

Genshin Impact
La Signora | pockettactics.com

But gods can hold grudges too. At some point, Pierro aligned himself with the nameless Cryo Archon of Snezhnaya, who – despite being a god herself – was also angry at Celestia. We still don’t know why (although it’s been postulated that perhaps the Cryo Archon regrets the role she played in Khaenri’ah’s destruction, as she seems to have been a gentle goddess before the Cataclysm) and we don’t know whether Pierro is actually loyal to her or whether he’s been exploiting her guilt to get what he wants out of the arrangement. It’s telling that Pierro is playing chess with the Gnoses collected from the Anemo and Geo Archons at the beginning of the teaser, indicating that he hasn’t handed them over to the Cryo Archon despite taking them in her name.

Speaking of chess, I know for a fact that I was not the only one who gasped out loud when I saw the Anemo and Geo Gnoses on Pierro’s chessboard, standing in for the white queen and remaining white rook, respectively. The Genshin Impact “chess theory”, which has been around for a while now, has always hinged on the idea that the Archons correspond to specific chess pieces represented by the design of their Gnoses, but this outright confirms it: the Archons – or at the very least their Gnoses – are the pieces that Celestia has been using to protect themselves, but based on the layout of this board time is running out for them and the Fatui would have to make a grievous error for the gods to take back control of the game.

Mind you, we don’t know for sure that this chessboard represents the current state of affairs in Teyvat or if this is just one of many scenarios envisioned by Pierro for how the war could proceed, but the fallen black pawn certainly seems to stands in for La Signora, which means the white knight that took it off the board presumably represents Raiden Shogun, the Electro Archon whose Gnosis is still in the hands of the rogue Harbinger, Scaramouche. Pierro, however, is playing as white (I assume he’s gauging what his enemy will do next), and white is losing badly – at least according to people more knowledgeable about chess than me. I’m starting to regret having never finished The Queen’s Gambit

Speaking of queens, which piece on this board represents the Cryo Archon, and why doesn’t Pierro have her Gnosis in his possession? That’s very interesting to me. The Cryo Archon’s Gnosis should be the easiest for Pierro to obtain, but if he doesn’t have it does that mean she’s still somewhat distrustful of him even now? And who here represents the Traveler, and their twin sibling? If Celestia is white, what happened to both of their bishops, their other knight, and their other rook – or is Pierro leaving those pieces off the board because he hasn’t obtained the equivalent Gnoses yet? Is Pierro himself the black king, black queen, or neither? Are we overanalyzing all of this?

Anyway…I mentioned that La Signora is the fallen black pawn in this scenario, and that’s largely because a red moth symbolizing her lands on the pawn. Later, near the very end of the teaser, it alights on the stone lid of her coffin and bursts into flame. Because this is Genshin Impact we’re talking about here, we can’t be 100% certain that La Signora is dead. I mean, she’s definitely dead, but if a little bit of her consciousness was able to stay alive in a moth long enough to fly all the way from Inazuma to Snezhnaya, there’s no saying that other moths carrying fragments of her being couldn’t have escaped to various far-flung corners of Teyvat, where they’re just waiting for us to piece them back together and reconstruct Rosalyne.

Genshin Impact
Pierro’s chessboard | oneesports.gg

But for the moment, she’s dead – and for her sake, I hope that her little moth fragments can’t hear what her so-called comrades are saying about her over her literal dead body, because it’s appalling. The only Harbinger in mourning is Columbina, the Damselette, a young woman with what looks like a biblically-accurate angel strapped to the back of her head. Columbina (or Colombina, which translates to “little dove” in Italian) is arguably the most prominent of the female characters in the Commedia dell’arte due to the frequency with which she appears and her close relationships with other characters – she is Pierro’s adulterous wife, Arlecchino’s flighty lover or best friend, the Innamorata’s gossipy confidante and the object of Pantalone’s desires. It makes sense that her Fatui counterpart would be the only character close enough to La Signora while she was alive to even shed a tear for her now that she’s dead.

By contrast, the Harbinger Pulcinella declares loudly that he thinks half a day is all the time needed for Snezhnaya’s citizens to mourn La Signora before getting back to work, with a callousness in his voice that surprises even Pantalone and Arlecchino, who are both equally appalling in their own ways.  But if you know anything about the Pulcinella of the Commedia dell’arte, you probably know this much: that he cares about no one but himself. He takes no course of action that is not guaranteed to benefit him, and even when he misjudges a situation or is deceived and led into a trap by his enemies, he still somehow manages to come out on top in the end because he is extraordinarily lucky. The Fatui’s Pulcinella is referred to as “Mayor”, and I have no doubt that he weaseled his way into a position of power by the same means his Commedia counterpart would employ – bribery and deceit.

Before we move on, I want to take a moment to appreciate Pulcinella’s nose. Genshin Impact‘s characters are typically designed in such a way that their noses are almost invisible, but Pulcinella’s not only dominates his face, it dominates the entire space directly in front of him – it’s extremely long and pointy, extending far out beyond his bushy white mustache. We can safely assume this is a reference to the rooster, the bird from which Pulcinella’s name is supposedly derived, and to the long-nosed mask worn by Pulcinella in the Commedia. It hasn’t made him very popular with the Genshin Impact community, sadly, but if there’s any justice in this world, Pulcinella will one day be a terrific five-star unit – just you wait.

If Pulcinella is remarkably alike to his Commedia counterpart, however, than Pantalone is surely the furthest removed. Gone is the skinny old man dressed in tight, brightly-colored trousers and a comically large codpiece, his face hidden behind a half-mask with exaggerated wrinkles – in his place now stands a tall, broad-shouldered, bespectacled man of indeterminate age sporting a tumbling mane of luxurious raven hair and a permanent smirk. It’s only when he opens his mouth that he betrays his true identity, because just like the Pantalone of the Commedia dell’arte, this Harbinger can’t string together a sentence without slipping in a boast about his wealth.

There’s still a difference in their delivery, because whereas Commedia Pantalone is deeply insecure about himself and therefore boasts loudly to ensure his listeners know he’s still richer than they’ll ever be, Genshin Impact‘s Pantalone seems to be content, and thus his boasts are so subtle they might fly over a listener’s head entirely, only to circle back around later like one of those insults that our brains don’t register as insults at first. In short, he’s everything that Commedia Pantalone desperately wishes he were, but could never be.

I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll meet Pantalone in-person shortly before Version 4.0, probably as part of an Event Quest involving Yelan or in a second chapter of Yelan’s Story Quest, Umbrabilis Orchis. The two characters have already been established as archenemies, with Yelan’s character profile revealing that the Harbinger once stole an heirloom belonging to her family – so as payback she snuck into a Fatui camp, stole a priceless fur-coat that Pantalone had intended to present to the Cryo Archon as a gift, tailored it to fit her, and now wears it around all the time. I also firmly believe that every Harbinger has a nemesis amongst the cast of playable characters who will one day either face them in battle or convince them to turn their back on the Fatui.

Genshin Impact
Pulcinella | Twitter @dailypulcinella

And on that note, let’s move on to Arlecchino – because in my research for this post, I came across this theory by Reddit user u/catcul7 linking the Fatui Harbinger to the character of Eula, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. I’d call it a coincidence that the two women look remarkably similar if not for the fact that Eula’s family, the Lawrence Clan of Mondstadt, is known to have ties to the Fatui and at one point was even plotting to overthrow the Acting Grand Master of the Knights of Favonius with their help. Unfortunately, it’s been a while since we last had the chance to sit down with Eula and chat about her family, so here’s hoping she pops up randomly in an Event Quest sometime soon.

Arlecchino in the Commedia is a little bit of everything rolled into one character and stuffed in a checkered costume. He can be the trickster, the fool, the romantic lead, the master of physical comedy – and he can be all of these things separately, or simultaneously, depending on what will hold the audience’s interest at any given moment. The person playing Arlecchino needed to be able to quickly determine what that might be, and to improvise accordingly – sometimes even requiring the entire play to change course and follow after him. He is an agent of chaos, and there’s really no telling what he’ll do because even he doesn’t always know for sure.

That said, there’s only so many different routes you can take a character after two centuries of Commedia dell’arte performances, and certain patterns in Arlecchino’s behavior began to emerge – he was frequently the rival of Pierro, and the lover of Columbina (among countless other women, but Columbina was always his one true love). With Genshin Impact deliberately casting a woman in the role of Arlecchino, they’re teasing the kind of queer representation that fans have pleaded for in the past and never received, and there’s nothing to suggest this will be any different. Arlecchino and Columbina will have flirty voice-lines about one another, they’ll talk about each other in their birthday messages to us, their character arcs will intertwine and they’ll be inseparable in every event where they’re together…and their relationship will linger in that state of nearly-but-not-quite canon forever.

Next up, we have Tartaglia – but players will have already met him during the Liyue Archon Quest and might even have him in their party already, so I’ll just run through the basics real quick before moving along. Tartaglia is a fairly minor character in the Commedia dell’arte, just as he is the weakest of the Fatui Harbingers in Genshin Impact, and both are subjected to constant ridicule. The similarities end there. Tartaglia in the Commedia is typically a civil servant who stumbles through long speeches and “often will find himself stuck on the most obscene syllable in any given word”. Tartaglia the Harbinger is a friend and ally of the Traveler, but nonetheless remains devoted to the Cryo Archon and is currently hunting Scaramouche with the intention of recovering the Electro Gnosis in her name.

His attempts to capture Scaramouche have proved unsuccessful, and the other Harbingers need no further excuse to pile on the insults, with Sandrone remarking that he is “utterly risible”. Sandrone, typically depicted as a peasant from the Italian city of Modena with wooden puppets for a wife and son, has been reinvented as a small girl who uses Khaenri’ahn Ruin Machines as her playthings and servants, earning her the title of “Marionette” from her fellow Harbingers. Now, we know for a fact that Tartaglia is the youngest of the Harbingers, so despite her childish appearance, Sandrone must be older than him – and there’s a strong chance that even this child we think is Sandrone being carried around in the massive hand of a Ruin Machine (dressed rather handsomely, I must admit, in a top hat and ruffled collar) is actually a puppet speaking with the real Sandrone’s voice.

Genshin Impact
Il Capitano and Sandrone | Twitter @sandrone_fatui

Who knows, maybe the real Sandrone is one of those Russian nesting dolls – maybe we’ll never find her, we’ll just keep finding dolls inside of dolls inside of dolls inside of yet more dolls, until our minds fracture and reality crumbles around us and we begin to question whether there ever was a Sandrone to begin with, or whether this is all an elaborate prank. I’m just throwing out ideas here, but it could be cool in a trippy, existential-crisis inducing kind of way.

Then we have Il Capitano, the great military strategist responsible for leading the Fatui to their recent victories in…uh, somewhere we obviously haven’t been yet! The Harbinger talks a big talk for someone we’ve never once seen at the frontlines during any of our frequent battles or skirmishes with the Fatui – trust me, I would remember a seven-foot tall man with no visible face behind an iron mask. And what’s up with that, anyway? Is he hiding his face, or the fact that he’s not even in the suit of armor? That would track with what we know about Il Capitano from the Commedia dell’arte, which is that he’s almost always depicted as a coward who pretends to be a decorated war veteran in the hope that women will find him more attractive.

It’s still very early in the game, but I suspect that Capitano will play a significant role in Natlan (so probably around Version 5.0 and onwards), when we meet the Pyro Archon who has modeled her nation around the ideal of War. And until Capitano’s true identity is actually revealed, I’m gonna cling to my headcanon that he’s somehow associated with Natlan because I need Genshin Impact to finally acknowledge that Natlan actually exists. We’re two years into this game and we haven’t even met any NPCs from Natlan. I worry that there’s a correlation between that and the fact that we know of exactly one playable character from Natlan, who happens to be darker-skinned than the majority of the cast…but I’m also steeling myself for the inevitable reveal that the rest of Natlan’s playable characters are either light-skinned or white.

That was a bit of a tangent, but maybe not given that our next character is Il Dottore, and he’s the Harbinger we’re almost sure to meet in Sumeru when Version 3.0 releases just about a month from now. If I ignore everything about Sumeru that infuriates me to no end, like the white playable characters dressed in orientalist parodies of Southwest Asian clothing, I could maybe get excited for those interactions because Il Dottore is a character we’ve been waiting a long time to see (he first appeared in the Genshin Impact manga, albeit in a very different form), and he’s blessed with a phenomenal English voice actor (whose identity has not yet been revealed, as of this writing).

In the Commedia dell’arte, Dottore is a doctor – usually a very bad one, whose methods range from humorous to horrific. But because he went to university (or at least, so he claims), he regards himself as the foremost authority on every subject and often spouts utter nonsense to make himself sound smart. He is the rival of Pantalone, and in stories that revolve around the Lovers these two are usually the fathers of the male and female love interest, respectively. In Genshin Impact, Dottore studied at the prestigious Sumeru Academiya to become a doctor, but only avoided being expelled because he became very good at hiding the evidence of his abhorrent experiments on unwilling human test subjects. Yikes.

Genshin Impact
Il Dottore | Twitter @haithamhour

Based on an exchange between Columbina and Dottore later in the teaser, where the Damselette asks after one of the Doctor’s other “Segments”, specifically “the Segment in the prime of his life”, it sounds like the Doctor was able to successfully clone his younger self for posterity’s sake. Whichever Segment is actually present at La Signora’s funeral is presumably the most senior of them all, but he clearly has a great deal of faith in his younger self, because as he says to Columbina, he’s assigned him a task; some vague “experiment in blasphemy” that involves a burning tree somewhere. I’m guessing it’s somewhere in Sumeru, because from there we immediately cut to Collei, one of the new playable characters from Sumeru, waking up in a fright after a terrible dream.

Collei, another character introduced in the manga, was one of ll Dottore’s test subjects who narrowly escaped from his laboratory after being pumped full of Archon Residue to see if her body could contain the raw powers of a god. I don’t know whether everything that happened in the manga is still canon (Dottore, for instance, now wears the distinctive one-third mask of his Commedia counterpart, and his hair is longer, wavier, and a slightly paler shade of green than it once was), but I doubt there have been too many changes on that front. Collei is obviously the prime candidate for the role of Dottore’s archenemy, but there’s a strong case to be made for Dottore himself being his own archenemy.

In other words, at least one of Dottore’s younger Segments has probably had a lot of time to think things over and maybe they’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t actually want to be the person they know for a fact they’ll become if they continue down the path they took the first time around. I’m not saying this will definitely happen, but if Dottore is going to be a playable character someday (and he’s rumored to be, as are most of the Harbingers), I just hope people know that his playable version is probably not going to be the one whose hobbies include murdering children. The playable version of Dottore might have contemplated murdering children, but I highly doubt he’ll have gone ahead with it.

The first of the Fatui Harbingers is also the last to step out of the shadows and into the light – but Pierro seems oblivious to the theatricality of his own delayed entrance, and commands his minions to stop playing their parts so he can deliver a booming monologue about seizing authority from the gods and burning away the old world. That’s the thing about Pierro; he’s never in on the joke. In the Commedia, he’s most frequently depicted as a naïve and gentle-natured clown who is hopelessly with Columbina, although she will never notice him. When he tries to help his friends, they dismiss his advice and ignore his warnings. When he tries to take matters into his own hands, accidents ensue and he is shamed and laughed at by his castmates and the audience.

So for this man – whoever he may truly be – to go around calling himself Pierro and embracing the identity of the Jester (although not the outfit), well, that takes either remarkable courage or an equally remarkable lack of self-awareness on his part, and I have a feeling we won’t know which it is until we finally confront the guy…which probably won’t be for several years, but in the meantime I guess we can speculate about what he’s hiding behind that antlered mask that only covers the right half of his face. It’s a variation on the eyepatches that Kaeya and Dainsleif wear over their right eyes, which is notable because all three of these characters are originally from Khaenri’ah and we have reason to believe that their right eyes either contain esoteric secrets or somehow are esoteric secrets in and of themselves.

Genshin Impact
Pierro | oneesports.gg

It’s complicated. But basically, eyes are a big part of Genshin Impact‘s lore, and it’s very rarely a coincidence when two or more characters have similar eyes. There are already theories floating around that Pierro is Kaeya’s father, or Dainsleif’s father, or both their fathers, or perhaps their grandfather, and honestly…all of those sound plausible. It would be one thing if their left eyes weren’t all identical, but they all share ice-blue eyes with diamond-shaped pupils, and I refuse to believe that’s not intentional. The only problem is that even if it is, we still don’t know what it means or why it’s significant (Genshin lore is like that, though).

But now that we’ve made it through all eleven Harbingers (excluding La Signora and Scaramouche, because one’s dead and the other one wasn’t in the teaser so there’s nothing new to say about him), it’s time for you to tell me which of the newly revealed Harbingers is your personal favorite, and when you expect to see them in-person. Feel free to share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!