Veritas vos liberabit

In our real world, nineteenth century Russian literature was shaped largely by the political, social, and economic climate of late imperial Russia, when steep social stratification and growing disillusion with the Tsars' governance, combined with the philosophical spread of individualism through the Romantic and Realist Movements, gave rise to a generation of writers whose primary goal was to critique the growing soullessness of their own society. Many of the world's greatest novels--War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Sons, Dead Souls--come from this time period, and one of the key figures in a large number of these famous Russian novels and poems is the "Superfluous Man."

The Superfluous Man is the exact image that might come to mind if someone asked you to describe a "flawless Russian nobleman." He is the man who seemingly has it all. He is young, beautiful, and comes from old money, with a powerful family lineage making him one of the most important people in any given room. He's a central figure in the highest rungs of imperial society, but also witty and above materialism, at least enough not to fall for the scheming or the unrefined greed of his fellow noblemen.

Yet, for all the outward appearance of grace, class, and power, something has gone terribly wrong in this man's mind: Some awakening has occurred that has caused him to see through the pomp and circumstance of his own society and recognize the glamorized imperial world for what it is: sound and fury, signifying nothing, meaningless, soulless opulence with absolutely no substance behind it. From the outer edges of glittering balls and aristocratic dinners, this disillusioned young man watches his fellows engage in endless empty performances, living their lives exactly as demanded of them by entirely pointless social pressures, without a hint of authenticity or freedom of the heart in their actions.

Yet even as he watches his country sink into iniquity, watches injustices be perpetrated by the powerful onto the weak, this character is paralyzed--his money and status have no true value, and he finds himself a powerless bystander in his own world, unable to change the massive machinations of the political and economic systems churning around him. In time, he responds to this helplessness by withdrawing, becoming cynical and jaded. Often, his story ends with a message of deep and abiding existential despair: There is no meaning to anything in life, no purpose for this man's existence, and no hope of improvement.

Historically, the "Superfluous Man" as an archetype came about from a confluence of two central elements in nineteenth century Russian society:

1) The presence of the serf class effectively created an entire upper class in their society who did not need to do any meaningful labor in order to profit; while others worked their land and produced for their estates, these aristocratic land owners basically just had to exist--they did not need to work for a living and thus really had nothing to do other than seek constant and mindless entertainment in the courts of the Tsars.

2) However, people became increasingly disloyal and disillusioned with the Tsars in the mid-1800s due to failing and inconsistent policies towards the nobility, collapsing economic structures, uprisings and unpopular wars, and the over-abundance of ineffective, in-name-only bureaucratic offices. This meant that the traditional "job" expected of young noblemen in Russian society--going into government/political service--no longer had any prestige or meaning.

An entire generation of upper-class young men became, essentially, "superfluous"--existing, still living disgustingly privileged lives, but entirely lacking any sense of direction or path to self-actualization.

The Superfluous Man has been described by scholars as "a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in life."

Okay, enough of the history lesson--what's this all got to do with Flins?

Flins is Genshin's unique twist on Russia's classic failed Byronic Hero (filtered through the lens of gacha games' need to produce endearing and morally unassailable characters, of course).

We know that at the court of the Belyi Tsar, Flins was always on the "outside." He was one of the lords who "never danced" and had "little interest" in the parties. He describes the "friends" one might make at these court balls as "second-hand" and speaks of his fellow fae nobles' love for cocktail parties and romanticized gossip with some sense of disdain:

By all accounts, although we're given multiple reasons to believe that Flins also laments the loss of his old world, we're not given any impression that what he actually loved was the lifestyle of the nobility--and, in fact, it appears that he (like all Superfluous Men) found the social expectations and performative nature of court life to be vacuous and shallow, even as he went along with it and "performed" just like everyone else.

Like other examples of this archetype, we're given hints that Flins possibly had core philosophical or moral reservations about those in power in his society:

And most importantly, Flins reflects the classic Russian archetype in how he responded to losing his original sense of purpose. We know that, in the past, Flins was perhaps a more social or at least more idealistic person--he tells Traveler than once upon time, he had "turned his heart to humanity" and "labored much" for his cause:

The "loss" that he mentions here cost him his "point, place, and presence in life." Without his original sense of purpose to anchor him, he apparently grew so dissatisfied with the aristocratic world around him that he responded--as Superfluous Men do--by withdrawing, removing himself entirely from the court life to become a nameless wanderer (by the way, this may cross-over with another famous Russian literary archetype, the strannik [странник]), separated from society by an insurmountable wall of emotional and physical alienation.

He became "superfluous" because he lost any sense of purpose.

An outsider looking in on a world to which he felt he could never again belong, unable to conform to the vapid social expectations--to just go along like "everyone else"--Flins followed the common "end" for Superfluous Men in Russian literature to a "T": He found himself overcome by existential ennui, determining that life itself was "monotonous" and "meaningless," and deciding that it would be better to not be part of the world at all.

Framed as seeking "peace," Flins built himself a grave with the intention of "sleeping for eternity," a state he describes as "absolute emptiness" that spared him pain but also meant he was "without joy"--without any form of consciousness at all.

This complete withdrawal and refusal to engage with the world, sparing oneself suffering at the cost of being unable to achieve any meaning in life directly mirrors a long-line of doomed Russian protagonists like Lermontov's Pechorin (whose boredom and "emptiness" are so intense they eventually lead him into a downward spiral of self-annihilation) and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (whose failure to achieve any meaning in his youth eventually leaves him spiritually, if not physically, dead).

Flins is a quintessential failed Russian Romantic hero--marked not by his ability to perform all the trappings of nobility and courtly life, but by his despair at the world that endlessly goes through the motions while true beauty and worth lie forgotten.

In short, if you really want to write a "realistic" Flins, you should probably be reading some of those great Russian classics.

As a last note on this, though, it would be a bit remiss of me not to note that Genshin doesn't play the Superfluous Man trope perfectly straight; Flins is certainly a twist on the archetype in many ways, chief among them being that the Superfluous Men of Russian classics are normally kind of asshole-ish at best. While we as readers can sympathize with their suffering, we are also aware that most of their suffering is self-inflicted, with their own self-centered approaches to the world and callousness toward their fellow human beings often being the ultimate cause of their existential crises.

Flins, by virtue of being a male gacha character--a group of characters that sells primarily by how marketable they are to heterosexual female players--does sand off the roughest edges of the classic Superfluous Man archetype, with his boredom and despair about the world coming from a place of personal grief and (possibly, based on the hints) moral righteousness, rather than any immorality or selfishness. He's a good bean, unlike many of his classic Russian counterparts.

However, I do find it interesting that there was such a natural bent among fans--even now!--to believe that Flins is definitely some sort of two-faced person whose seeming admiration and respect for humanity must simply be a facade, hiding a self-serving and colder nature deep down. These fans are anticipating the second half of the Superfluous Man trope, even though Flins doesn't actually match it. That's quite interesting, I think.

There's also the fact that, unlike many other Superfluous Men in classic Russian literature who eventually die tragic, empty deaths, unable to escape their own despair, Flins has been able to pull himself back from the existential "brink" by finding a new purpose in life:

By deciding to commit himself to the Ratniki and protect Nod-Krai's humans from the Wild Hunt, Flins has found a new reason to remain in the world, a new goal to commit himself to, to make the endless days and nights of his life less "monotonous." He notes in his teapot dialogue that there's no actual contradiction between yearning for peace and yet choosing to live an "unpeaceful" life for the sake of a righteous cause--that is, his service with the Lightkeepers is just a different (and more meaningful) way of pursuing peace, even if doesn't have the same promise of "success" that effectively killing his own consciousness did.

Okay, that's enough literature and history for now, promise. The rest of the things I've observed are a little simpler and more straightforward in terms of characterization:

Flins is the kind of person who needs (and makes) time to process his thoughts and experiences.

Repeatedly over the course of his character stories and his role in the Luna I quest, we are told that Flins is a deeply introspective person who both needs--and takes--time to process the events and emotions he experiences. He is the type who needs to think things through before he can feel comfortable about them.

Spoiler alert: He's going to pointedly ignore all Nefer's advice. But he will at least think about it!

Flins makes art to "organize" his thoughts about the violence and danger he experiences in his daily life; the implication is essentially that, for all his own spookiness, Flins is actually discomforted by the bloodiness of the battles and death he undergoes and needs to work through these events afterward in a safe environment, where he is able to transform chaotic memories into orderly "simulations," effectively distancing himself from those experiences in order to rationalize and beautify them.

Another example of this is Flins' anecdote with Ineffa; if Traveler chooses to scold Flins for trying to distract Aino during her engineering classes, Flins' primary (if obviously light-hearted) complaint seems to be that there's just way too much to learn being thrown at him at once.

Hyperbole, thy name is Flins.

Overall, I think you'd be on the right track to characterize Flins as usually "slow to warm up to new things." He wants to do things on his own and think things through by himself before engaging, and he prefers to take plenty of time to reflect on the emotions and events he goes through--on his own, without wanting to share those feelings or thoughts with others.

This is the kind of guy who gets confessed to and goes "Let me think about it," then ghosts you for a week.

When Sousi died, Flins' first course of action was to ask to be taken to the scene so that he could see it and process it for himself, trusting his own perceptions over what the Traveler or anyone else could report. Even when dealing with an imminent threat like Rerir, Flins' idea for how to proceed is to go look through the past notes he maintains in an orderly fashion, spending a whole night reading through records rather than attempting to take a direct route to the conflict. If he and Traveler hadn't been aided (presumably by either Alice or Nicole), they probably wouldn't have gotten very far very fast using Flins' methods.

Although Flins is obviously capable of taking decisive, immediate action, particularly in combat scenarios (the few who survived the battle of the Final Night Cemetery wouldn't be alive without him doing so, and neither would Nod-Krai after Rerir's attack), it seems likely that his preferred approach to life--new knowledge and new experiences both--is just at a slower pace, with a lot more time to dwell on and go back over his own thoughts and actions to determine whether he's on the right track. I think this kind of introspective and (perhaps) more thoughtful approach to the world is an interesting and somewhat rarer personality trait for male characters in video games, who often get "brash" or "decisive" personalities instead, making this habit of self-reflection well worth noting.

A Walking Contradiction

Another of the key elements of Flins' characterization--and maybe the hardest to deal with, it seems to me--is that when it comes to himself, Flins is massively contradictory, and it can be extremely difficult to discern what is true from what is distraction. This fact is even acknowledged by his character stories, where the game tells us that Flins knows there are significant discrepancies between his words/thoughts and his actions, but that he doesn't let that bother him:

Flins' character description and first character story even directly contradict each other--Flins is a storyteller, but also no, he isn't. He tells stories to shield himself from people's curiosity, but also doesn't want to tell stories because stories "spark" curiosity. His stories are both true and completely made-up, falsehood and fact intertwined.

We are told that Flins uses his stories to distract people, to avoid them finding out about the details of his existence and particularly about his past, yet the game shows us that he also lights up with interest the moment someone mentions legends of his past life:

He also regards himself as a non-social person, stating that he doesn't want visitors, he prefers gloomy isolation and silence, and that he likes being alone. He avoids going into Nasha Town as much as possible, seems to keep his distance from most people he meets, and his fellow Lightkeepers supposedly rarely know anything about him other than his current location.

Yet in practice, the game shows and tells us that Flins interacts with quite a large number of people, many of whom have come to care about him deeply. While Lauma, Nefer, Aino, Ineffa, and Jahoda all interact with each other, Flins interacts with all of them and with an entire extra cast of Lightkeepers like Sousi, Illuga, and Nikita. We also see him reaching out to a whole host of NPCs that other playable characters never interact with, like the character anecdote that shows Flins trying hard to make contact with a fellow coin collector in Nasha Town, as well as hidden interactions where the bartender in the Flagship does his damn best to flirt with Flins invites Flins to personally drink with him in a private location because they apparently know each other that well(?!), or the teasing and playful interaction Flins has with the representative of the Voynich Guild who sells him a fancy pocket watch:

Bruh has half of Nasha Town charmed at this point.

It's entirely improbable that his out of the way island should regularly have visitors, but Flins is somehow even friends with Varka.

For being the self-proclaimed least social person in Nod-Krai's cast, Flins sure has a remarkably bustling social life!

And, more importantly, for someone who repeatedly claims he prefers solitude... Flins' character stories go out of their way to make it clear that he actively enjoys his social interactions with others.

(By the way, before he managed to make his way into the card game, the story tells us Flins stood next to the human Lightkeepers for over an hour, just kind of awkwardly lurking there--quite odd for someone who claims he prefers to not spend any time around noisy humans, right?)

There's plenty of other contradictions between what Flins says and what he does as well. In one character story, he flat out says he absolutely doesn't need a cat or a dog for a pet. Then a later character anecdote shows us...

Flins has accidentally gotten himself a dog.

Oh of course, he claims it's not his dog (with the confidence of every adult man who "never wanted a cat" and yet is found snuggling said cat a day later), but he is clearly happy to feed it, takes the time to try to understand its behaviors ("I think that means its still hungry"), and even refers to it as his "assistant"... Sir, be for real, that's your dog now.

Okay, more seriously: The clearest examples of contradiction appear in Flins' behavior toward his own well-being.

This man is absolutely the KING of understating and underselling his personal issues.

His health falls dangerously low in combat and he just goes "I'm a bit out of sorts." We can see that! He dies in combat? "See you at the graveyard." Sir, please. Bro nearly dies trying to fight one of the five sinners of Khaenri'ah all by himself and his only explanation after that is "Well, I think this situation speaks for itself?" He was jumped by a talking rock he got from the depths of the Wild Hunt corruption multiple times and he never once thought "Maybe I should tell someone about this."

He knew for a fact that Abyssal contamination was growing inside his lantern--that's his home, where his real body is?!--and he never once stopped and went "Hmm, perhaps I should look for someone who can help with that."

You could have died, sir??

Then of course there's the whole "going in to the grave" thing. I've written about it plenty elsewhere, so I won't go over it all again, but there's an obvious, obvious discrepancy between Flins' thoughts: "I never intended to take my own life" and the practical implications of his actions--he never intended to wake up from his eternal sleep, and knew that he'd eventually die there, underneath the tombstone he built for himself. He flat out tells Traveler later on in the Luna I quest that the only thing that stopped him from drifting so deeply into unconsciousness that he would actually die was being awoken by the Ratniki.

Flins tells us with his thoughts that he wasn't trying to kill himself, while telling us with his actions that he was fully ready to quit the world of the living forever.

Later on, in Flins' last teapot dialogue, he tells the Traveler that he's still longing for the time he spent unconscious in his grave, that he still wishes sometimes to be back to that state of emptiness, where he experienced absolute nothingness--neither pain nor joy.

Flins wishes to return to this state because he still associates living with pain--you cannot suffer if you're not awake to remember what made you feel suffering in the first place. Even after waking up, he still associates oblivion with peace, seemingly without awareness of what this says for his own mental state.

I'm reminded of an old comic:

(The artist is pocketss on twitter. Here's the original.)

The Traveler, who can tell this isn't a normal thing to say, replies to Flins' teapot dialogue by immediately asking him if he's planning to try to "kill" himself again--in fact, Traveler can't even finish the thought, likely because the concept of suicide is such a sensitive issue (particularly in closely monitored Chinese media, by the way):

Flins just laughs it off, denying that he has any intention, functionally, to harm himself again. But this still isn't a healthy mindset.

People are not supposed to long for the oblivion of total, dreamless unconsciousness.

In fact, it's a massively important, recurring and cross-game theme of Hoyoverse's storytelling that people must do everything in their power to combat "aimlessness" and "pain" about the future:

(Excerpts from a July interview about Hoyo game writing.)

The message of Hoyo games has always been and continues to be that life, no matter how painful, is still worth living, and that you should never give up--it's a theme that insists on positivity and directly defies Flins' idea that oblivion is peace. "Nothingness" is not peace, Hoyo games continually tell us--nihility is actually the deepest and most dangerous form that despair can take.

Flins can laugh his situation off all he wants. He might even believe in his own mind that he's perfectly fine now, that he never meant to kill himself, and that he's not depressed about his current place in the world--but given Hoyoverse's intensely life-affirming themes, his behaviors tell an entirely different story.

Overall, the impact of all these contradictory writing elements is to create the impression that we need to always, always look at what Flins does first, long before we consider what he says. He is absolutely a character whose behaviors speak louder than his words, whose physical responses to the world are more honest than the responses he's willing to speak.

Flins' actions are often in direct conflict with his thoughts.

When writing or creating content for this character, I think people should note that not only does Flins fabricate and stretch the truth quite frequently--when it comes to himself and his own health/well-being, absolutely nothing he says can be trusted. He's not fine, no matter how many times he says he is. Hell, he's not even an anti-social person when you start looking at how much time he's spending with others.

As the game itself lets the Traveler point out, Flins is incredibly perceptive and has keen intuition regarding other people's hardships, but when it comes to his own struggles, it appears he has a massive blind spot. He should probably go back to reflecting a little more lol.

Clearly, all of this is leading up to a narrative arc in which Flins will eventually learn to show himself at least a little of the same gentleness that he shows to others, where he will eventually recognize and articulate what he really needs to be happy in life (instead of feeling it would be better to withdraw from the living world entirely). Of course, I suspect this will coincide with finally forming those genuine connections to others that he's been so pointedly avoiding--connections that will help him find true purpose and joy in life again.

Story writes itself at this point, guys.

"My... Unique Situation"

Another thing I find particularly interesting is the strange reluctance that Flins seems to have when it comes to talking about his "true form" or his habits as a lantern fae. Whenever the topic comes up, he constantly resorts to euphemisms--"my unique situation," "my... special constitution," "my particular habitation arrangements"--and even though it is clear that his actual being is a ball of blue flame, it's the Traveler who brings this up more often than Flins himself does; in several voicelines, the Traveler worries about Flins getting doused by the rain or jokes that he could be the flame they blow out for their birthday candle, while Flins himself is like "There's no need to worry about those kinds of things..."

Flins only seems comfortable revealing his particularly non-human traits and behaviors after engaging at length with the Traveler. Most of his voicelines about being fae are locked behind higher friendship levels, and some of those voicelines imply having spent a significant amount of time with the Traveler ("Given that we are close acquaintances at this point") before he apparently felt they were close enough to talk about his identity.

Coupling this with the fact that Flins clearly goes out of his way to hide his lantern fae nature from others like Nefer and Lauma, and that he seems convinced that revealing himself as a fae would create "more trouble" in Nasha Town, the overall impression is that Flins believes the people of Nod-Krai will not accept him as he is.

The game tells us explicitly that he believes the humans around him will be frightened and uncomfortable if he reveals his differences:

And in several places he states that he's making active efforts to pretend to be as human as possible--something which he claims is entertaining for him, but still begs the question: Why should he have to pretend at all?

In fact, I think this is a good question in general, because for the most part, we're not given the impression that the people of Nod-Krai are sooo easily spooked that they couldn't learn to live with a lantern fae. For one, most people in Nod-Krai already know of the fae, even if they've never personally met any, while those migrating from Snezhnaya (like Netochka) have lived alongside fae and actually expect to see them coexisting with humans--only to be confused about their missing presence in Nod-Krai. Despite not regularly living with fae, most people in Nod-Krai make the automatic assumption that Paimon is fae and simply roll with that without issue. Humans like Nikita have already demonstrated that they can learn Flins' "secret" and be just fine with it.

Furthermore, even if they may not be 100% certain, there are also hints that many of the playable characters have (at least partially) figured Flins out: Ineffa seems like she might already know Flins' true nature (she's the first one that tells Traveler about the lantern fae in Nod-Krai and she deliberately attempts to get Flins to spell his meanings out because she's aware of his trickiness with wording); Lauma knows through her connections with animals that there's something very "off" about Flins; and when describing Nefer, Flins says he just hopes she isn't the type to pry into people's backgrounds... But I think we can all agree there's probably no secret in Nod-Krai Nefer hasn't pried into already. We have no particular reason to believe that any of the playable characters would have an issue with Flins' true form.

So when Flins claims that he's pretending to be human for the benefit of the humans around him, because surely it would just be so impolite to make anyone uncomfortable... It seems to me that the one who is actually most worried about his fae nature is Flins himself.

At the very least, Flins seems to be somewhat self-conscious (in the sense of "overly aware") of his differences and convinced that it's better to hide them, no matter the cost to himself (such as when he had to force himself to try to eat like a human).

It clearly takes a lot of trust before he's willing to show his "true self" to others.

Perhaps we'll find out in the future that Flins had some bad experiences with humans being frightened of his blue flame form before, and that's driven him to be more cautious about revealing himself, but as it stands right now, this strange hesitance to talk about or share any of his unique traits as a lantern fae just comes across like an unnecessary anxiety in Nod-Krai's "anything goes" environment--Flins appears to be making a negative assumption about how others will view him if they learn about his "true" self or if he lets himself act in ways that are natural to lantern fae, in turn contributing to his sense of isolation from the world around him.

The "Outside" Environment

Speaking of Flins' true form, a small thing I thought might be fun for fic writers/artists to note is that Flins likely spends more time "in the lantern" than we players get to see on screen. For one, his teapot line implies that he does, in fact, sleep in the lantern, rather than in his human form most of the time:

While we can find him in a human form when stumbling across him at the cemetery, typically when we do, it's when he's engaged in tasks that require hands and fingers--writing reports, fishing, and arranging his coins/gems. It seems likely, from the hints here and there, that while he is not in engaged in these kinds of tasks, Flins may spend more time in his "true form" than we get to see in the story quests.

In fact, Flins' description of the world beyond his lantern as "the outside" implies that there may be something more to the "inside" of his lantern, an idea that might be backed up by the fact that he was apparently able to store a large shard of Rerir's heart in that lantern without it being visible at all from the outside. Hell, we may find out there's a whole little pocket dimension in Flins' lantern where his fire form lives safely, protected from external stimuli and weather. It's interesting to think about!

And it also raises questions about what his "human self" is even made of. For one, we know that Flins' human body is actually not capable of swallowing food (or that, even if he can, he at the very least finds it physically unpleasant to do so). Alongside being able to dissolve into flame whenever Flins needs or wants to rest in his lantern, part of Flins' attack combo also involves his human self entirely disappearing to reveal that the lamp is what is actually controlling his polearm:

Imagine getting your ass beat by an angry lamp stabbing you with a spear. I think I'd die of embarrassment first, before the stab wound.

I'm inclined to suspect that Flins' human shape is something similar to Ajaw's physical form: a projection made of elemental energy and light, rather than an actual, physical type of shapeshifting. I feel like I'm bearing some sort of bad news to the Flins shippers when I say this, but while he seems solid enough to interact with objects in the real world, I think there's also plenty of hints at this point suggesting Flins' human form probably doesn't operate like a human body should. At one point, he and Paimon accuse Rerir's shapeshifting of being just "black liquid" under the surface, instead of a fully formed body or mechanical arm--to what extent might this be speaking from a sort of experience, using a form that looks whole on the outside while actually lacking the internal systems possessed by real human beings?

What Dreams May Come

Another small but interesting takeaway from Flins' teapot dialogue is that those eyebags on his model are not just for show--he really does suffer from insomnia!

Flins claims that the reason he can't sleep is because sleeping like normal beings do causes him to have dreams that are "too noisy." What he means by this isn't spelled out--it may mean that he literally finds any form of dream at all, good dreams or bad, to be too lively and mentally taxing for him. But I'm inclined to think this is just one more example of Flins downplaying his personal struggles to avoid making the Traveler feel like they need to step up and do something for him. (It wouldn't be proper to make other people put themselves out to solve your problems, now would it?)

"Noisy" almost certainly includes "nightmares."

Flins has plenty of reasons to be experiencing nightmares. For one, there's all the unaddressed baggage of whatever happened in his past (which we still know nothing about other than the fact that it was some form of "loss" and deeply affected his emotional state). Then there's the fact that he's clearly still suffering from guilt over the fact that he couldn't save all the Lightkeepers in the battle that woke him up from his eternal sleep, to the point that he feels it is his personal duty to continually keep watch over their ghosts, doing everything he can to try to help them rest and to eulogize their memories. His colleagues, like Sousi, also keep dying on him, leaving him with more and more people to mourn.

We also know that Flins possessed shards of Rerir's heart for quite a while, and that he was, over time, being slowly infected with Abyssal contamination leaking out from those shards. Storing Rerir's heart in his own lantern also seems to have even triggered some form of auditory hallucinations: When battling Rerir, Flins hears the voices of numerous other fae yelling (presumably at him, although to be fair, we can't 100% confirm that)--all saying rather painful and unpleasant things about someone being lonely, someone being to blame for a disaster...

All of this is to say that if Flins finds normal sleep "noisy," the "noise" that he's experiencing may be a lot of really terrible past experiences getting the better of him in sleep.

But there's also one other possible reason for Flins to experience nightmares. One of Flins' voicelines implies that he is acutely attuned of the state of Nod-Krai's ley lines:

This may help to explain why lantern fae are capable of seeing and interacting with human ghosts in general, by the way: In Genshin, ghosts are slivers of soul and memory that have yet had a chance to return to the ley lines and dissipate to be reborn in a new life; lantern fae (or perhaps all fae) may be closely attuned to the flow of ley lines and therefore more easily able to read both memory and emotion pouring out into the land.

It may not be Flins' own experiences alone that make his dreams "noisy"--but also the chaotic tangle of every human struggling in Nod-Krai's lawless society, filling the ley lines themselves with tension that Flins seems to naturally be able to pick up on.

I have a feeling this concept of memory in the ley lines will continue to be very relevant throughout Nod-Krai's story, so I hope we'll get to see more of this possibility in the future.

Okay, just one more note for now:

Flins' Jokes are Bad (and He Should Probably Feel Bad)

I don't need to provide too much background here because it's been noted by quite a few other people, but Flins has a very dark sense of humor. Many of his voicelines are dry or sarcastic plays on words related to death, while in other places he uses understatement for its full comedic effect (as I mentioned earlier, one of his combat death lines is just "See you at the graveyard"). He frequently laughs off references to his life-threatening sleep ("Hee hee, no, I won't 'extinguish' myself again"), and in other places makes off-color jokes about death and/or violence that make both the Traveler and Paimon gawk at him in shock. At one point, he jests that he'll replace Sousi as the new Lightkeeper commander in Nasha Town, which Paimon takes seriously until Traveler reveals that no, Flins is just making a really, really morbid joke.

But beyond Flins' sense of humor being just as gloomy as he is, I think there's something else worth thinking about here: While Flins' puns aren't quite on the level of bad that Cyno's can reach, the long and short of it is:

Flins' sense of humor is actually really... undignified?

In all other ways and in all other circumstances, Flins is the picture of prim and proper poise. He conducts himself with full decorum, speaks exceedingly politely, and attempts to always show as much courtesy as he can to everyone he meets. In one of Flins' character stories, Illuga remarks that Flins is an eloquent person--so much so that he can use his words to get exactly what he wants.

Flins' character description calls him "cultured and courtly," and most of his dialogue sounds like varieties on niceties like "It is an honor to have the company of your distinguished self."

By all accounts, his manners in virtually every case are what upper-class society would call "unassailable."

...Until he finds something entertaining. Then, suddenly, Flins is out here making lame "grave" puns, putting out vaguely inappropriate jokes at completely insensitive times, and even shocking people (particularly poor Paimon) with how indecent his comments can actually become.

In other cases, he also demonstrates a rather "low-brow" sense of entertainment: Between teasing and deliberately misleading Illuga just for the laughs, intentionally tricking Ineffa into doing work for him, and clearly having way too much fun blackmailing Aino with snacks, there's also the character story where Flins "learns to play" cards.

It's the gentlemanly thing to do to handle losses with dignity, but Flins is clearly not keen on losing in any competition he takes part in (even ones he's losing on purpose!). He makes Olav work extremely long and hard for his "defeat" of Flins in the first card game, and then turns around and mercilessly and repeatedly trounces Nikita in retribution, with the story going out of its way to emphasize how happy getting this kind of "comeuppance" makes Flins:

This brat lmaooo

While I'm on the side that thinks Flins was not intentionally frightening the Seelie merchant during his character teaser, it's undeniable that he was amused by the man's fear--not exactly a noble way to behave.

Put together, the picture is of someone who works very hard to exude a sense of propriety, to make himself appear courtly, put together, and polite--but who sometimes can't help himself.

Flins appears to be someone whose sense of humor is (deep-down) quite off-color and even a bit childish, not really suited for the aristocratic air he tries to maintain on the daily. He's the kind of guy who clears his throat politely and then drops the most jaw-droppingly inappropriate comment into the chat, I feel it in my bones.

While I actually think that Genshin's take on the fae might lean a little more toward the Tolkien-ish elf-like, with "mystical" and "pure-hearted" being core concepts of the race at least slightly more than "naughty" or "untrustworthy," it is clear there's at least a little vein of mischief hiding under Flins' calm, well-behaved exterior.

Not to resurrect the ancient terminology, but there's a nice bit of gap moe to these few little flashes we get: The flawlessly well-mannered facade cracks every once in a while to reveal a much more down-to-earth person, one who can be far more smug, self-pleased, and even (kind of) tasteless than he normally tries to let on. Not so above it all, are you?

But he'll apologize for the offense later--promise.

Anyway, there are a few other things about Flins that I've noted and wanted to talk about, but I'll be busy for the next few days, so I'll let this post stand on its own for now.