SorteGreiner

When it comes to character design, a company that makes all of its profit from selling characters will always, always, always have viewer perception (gathered through extensive market research) as their foremost determining factor. Every single aspect of a gacha character's design is there to sell that character to you. Their looks, their gameplay, their role in the story, their personality--every aspect of that character's "existence" is designed to make them "lovable" to as many members of the player base as possible, so that people will be so charmed they are willing to shill out literally hundreds of real dollars for pixels on a screen.

When a character is assigned a trait--any trait!--it is absolutely and always done because the developers believe that large swaths of their viewership will find that specific trait extremely appealing.

Ergo: Many of Mydei's traits were given to him by the writing team with the intention of selling him to Hoyo's biggest target audience for their male characters: heterosexual women.

Mydei's assigned traits (like being good at interacting with children, "watering down" his juice with milk to make it pink, getting flustered when the idea of romance is brought up, etc.) are have all been added to his character for two very specific reasons:

These traits deliberately "soften" him, evoking the very, very intentional "gap moe" of seeing a tall, buff, stone-faced warrior god doing things stereotypically (please let me say it again: stereotypically) associated with "homemakers" and young women. The idea Hoyo has here is that the target audience of straight women will actually find stoic, purely battle-focused male characters unappealing; the logic behind Hoyo's decision is literally just "Girls want guys who are actually soft at heart!" How do you show that a male character is "soft at heart"? You give that male character traits that your player base is socially groomed to consider "soft"--that is, traits that societies stereotype as being "feminine."

To a certain extent, what is happening here is an attempt to invoke "seeing the Self in the Other." Hoyo identifies what they perceive as traits of their female player audience--"Girls like pink," "girls like flowers," "girls act shy when it comes to romance" (Are statements like these incredibly reductive and generalizing? For sure! Are these kinds of statements absolutely core products of audience analysis in marketing research? You bet!)--then, they take those traits and add them directly on to a designated male character in order to try to evoke a sense of "You have so many things in common with this character! He's not a big scary man; he's got a sweet side that's just like you, my beautiful, gentle female player~!" It's actually a little gross and a lot condescending, but once you get into the weeds, all marketing tends to be.

Assigning a male character perceived "soft" or stereotypically "feminine" traits also helps Hoyo sell the character to a second and overlapping audience demographic: M/M shippers.

Whatever your take on M/M shipping is, an avoidable truth is that women make up the vast majority of the people who actively engage in M/M ship fandoms, and even more specifically, women who are attracted to men (heterosexual and bisexual women) make up the large majority of that large majority. (Also, before anyone brings it up, no, I am not saying only women who are attracted to men like yaoi--I'm ace myself and enjoy it; people of any sexuality can like M/M ships, obviously. I'm talking strictly about the "majority" here.) Therefore, a huge percentage of the fan content you see for M/M ships is filtered through the lens of women's experiences, attractions, and perceptions, all of which are irrevocably shaped by the societies those women grow up in.

Although there have been enormous strides in trying to create more authentic and less heteronormative designs and stories for M/M media written by women in recent years, it also remains an unavoidable fact that fans creating content for M/M ships bring a lot of their personal preferences and social baggage with them into their shipping (including what they collectively consider "feminine" versus "masculine"), which is exactly where we get stuff like the endless and infamous top versus bottom discourse.

It is absolutely stereotypical and again reductive, but among many M/M fans, there is still a drive (subconscious or conscious) to directly connect the concept of "femininity" with the concept of "bottoming." When a male character is perceived as having "feminine traits" (using society's generalized view of how "feminine" is defined), it is much more likely for shippers to label that character as a "bottom"--and therefore it is that much easier for fans to envision that character in a M/M ship in the first place.

Hoyo has a profit motive to inject their male characters' stories with M/M ship tease because shippers produce ungodly amounts of free marketing in the form of fanart and fanfiction. Shippers spend ungodly amounts of money on merchandise for their favorite ships. It's a statement of objective fact: The easier it is to envision a male character in an M/M ship, the more money he generates.

Hoyo absolutely and with every intention injected what they perceived as "feminine traits" into Mydei's character in order to increase the likelihood of his ship with Phainon gaining popularity, particularly with their anticipated female target audience. Someone in some marketing office somewhere was, at the very least, thinking to themselves: "When we write that Mydei makes Phainon eat bad food after they fight, the female players will definitely envision Mydei as Phainon's angry wife!"

(Do you think they were marketing the Mydei plushie using "cutesy" stuff like hair bows on accident? Do you think Hoyo's marketing team perceives bows as masculine?)

Femininity isn't real. It's made up by society. It's a collective fever dream that varies entirely by culture and demographic. Cooking for others, being good at taking care of children, liking pink, etc. etc. are not "inherently feminine," but:

The key is that Hoyo thinks they are.

Hoyo has given what they undoubtedly perceive as "feminine" traits to specific male characters to deliberately make them appealing to their target audiences of heterosexual female players and M/M ship fans. They are intentionally using "Big strong male character actually has (stereotypically) 'girly' behaviors deep down!" to sellllll Mydei to you.

It's propaganda, pure and simple, and failing to perceive how a multi-billion dollar company is using gendered stereotypes while tailor making each aspect of the character through market research to drive you to crack open your wallet is actually a little bit scary. Claiming "Mydei wasn't given feminine traits!" isn't woke--it's naive.

Hoyo absolutely gave Mydei what they believe to be "feminine" traits, with every intention of making you love him so much for his "soft side," his endearingly contradictory personality, and the ease with which you can imagine him in a M/M ship that you will never think to question the extent to which all of that was engineered to feed the capitalist machine.

The fact that they got the library's name wrong again is sending me.

In their post-quest cutscene, Phainon and Mydei reunite in a hilariously awkward initial showing ("Yo!" "Sup?" I'm cryingggg from laughing), and then we're treated to these devastating lines: Phainon acknowledges that his quest for vengeance and then subsequent desperation to become the hero that Amphoreus required left him entirely void of any sense of self, unable to articulate his own desires separate from what everyone else needed him to be.

Mydei tells us players that he thought Phainon's dream would be to return to Aedes Elysiae.

But Phainon says no.

Phainon says that that wish was fueled by his frantic attempt to run from the reality and pressure he faced, and that his true desire--his first desire all of his own since his childhood--is to be with Mydei. (Like, look at the wording there; it's not even "I want to go to the library," it's "Can you take me there?" Hello???)

Man, let's just take a second for that to sink in.

Phainon's marketing, Phainon's role in the story, Phainon's entire character arc dragged us kicking and crying to the conclusion that Phainon had entirely lost his sense of identity, that he wholly severed himself from his own emotions, that he couldn't even formulate his own wishes, let alone articulate them--

And then the writers deliberately linked Phainon's healing to his relationship with Mydei. Phainon's budding attempts to reclaim his identity and define himself as a person with individual desires is now inextricably tied to his wish to remain near to Mydeimos--to the promise they made to each other.

It's just crazy. As one of the two main push characters of Amphoreus, a massively anticipated expy of one of the most well-known Honkai Impact 3rd characters, Phainon was given a character arc that sees its "Hero's Journey" end when he is able to return to the side of another man and tell that man ("formally," even) that the very first wish of his new life is to spend time together in a cherished place.

Phainon's relationship with Mydei (hell, even if you don't define it as a ship!) isn't just for decoration. It isn't just for fanservice. It's central to Phainon's character development arc, central to his sense of closure and personal growth, and central to his first step in healing from the trauma he went through over 33 million cycles of suffering.

This isn't even close to queer bait anymore--like heterosexual romances have been the backbone of young characters' coming-of-age/self-identity-quest stories for ages, this is a queer romance being directly woven into the narrative's resolution and to the story's most apparent theme: No matter how hard the struggle, life is worth fighting for, because one day you will reach your happy ending.

Actually, while that is wild (for Hoyo) in and of itself, one of things I think is even more wild is how explicitly this cutscene is laid out to mirror a love confession or a confirmation of two characters' romantic feelings.

Phainon and Mydei stand alone beneath a dome full of stars. When the Trailblazer walks up, it's to discover that the pair are being painfully and uncharacteristically awkward with each other, clearly struggling to get out any of the words they actually want to say. Trailblazer is even given the option to point out the extreme strangeness of the atmosphere:

For a few lines, they try to banter with each other to take the emotional weight out of the moment, but in the end, both of them seem to know there's nothing to be gained by being roundabout anymore.

Mydei's words reveal that he was watching Phainon basically from the moment they returned, while Phainon's words imply the exact same thing in reverse. Despite reuniting with long-lost family, both of them were looking for an opportunity to speak to each other. More than this, Mydei effectively says "I thought you would only get around to greeting me later" and Phainon says "Of course not!"--because Mydei is not less important to him.

Then we get:

He might as well be saying "There's something I want to confess." This moment was explicitly and very intentionally designed to mirror the famous confession scenes of shoujo romances everywhere, where trembling girl holds out her confession letter or stuttering boy meets his crush behind the school and fumbles his way through "I like you. Like-like you." This line was supposed to make fangirls' hearts skip a beat, that's why it cuts off with the "...", so you're stuck for the two seconds it takes you click and load the next line, wondering if THIS IS THE MOMENT(?!) that the protagonist will confess his true feelings--of course he can't, it's a Hoyo game, but the devs deliberately invoked romance confession scenes in this cutscene to imply what cannot be said out loud.

Despite the deliberate invocation of a confession scene here, savvy players know the actual confession took place already, back at the end of 3.1, when Phainon gave Mydei a ring and Mydei effectively accepted, asking Phainon to meet him again in the library in their next lives, with the implication being that the new world of peace would allow them the chance to finally be together:

And even realer fans might realize the actual "promise" that Phainon is referencing may not be this moment but yet another moment they swore that fate would not be able to separate them and that they would reunite again:

(The word in other language translations is "promise".)

Thus, Phainon and Mydei's reunion scene is framed not just as a confession but also as a "renewal of vows."

We can actually see Phainon fishing, trying to find out whether the commitments he and Mydei made are still on the table after everything that's happened:

"Are you going to introduce me to your parents? Please say you're going to introduce me to your parents."

And Mydei, of course, being who he is, simply drops the most devastatingly romantic confirmation he possibly could:

Okay I know this line is supposed to be nonchalantly beautiful and all but I'm kind of dying; dude was so focused on making up a metaphor to imply his heart has and will always belong to Phainon that he forgot that doors without locks don't have keys. No thoughts, just declarations.

But Phainon is the king of rationalizing, metaphor is no good for him, so it gets to the point that the Trailblazer feels they have to interject, interrupting to literally clarify for Phainon that "The promise still stands":

Yes, Phainon, the wedding is back on.

To which Phainon reacts with enormous relief and excitement (three whole exclamation points, oh I know the boy was doing that dumbass fist pump in his head):

This is what he was there for. This is what he actually came into that conversation hoping to hear. Phainon wasn't sure whether any of the past he and Mydei had together had survived their 33 million battles to the death, whether Mydei was still committed to the promise they made so "long ago," and he came into the conversation with the intention of telling Mydei: "I'm figuring myself and my desires out, and the promise we made to each other is the thing I desire most. Even with all that's happened, do you still feel the same as you did in our past lives?"

And Mydei says yes, again, always.

It's about the library, but also no, it's not. The promise to visit the library has clearly and unmistakably, very intentionally on the writing team's part, become a metaphor for the deeper promise to simply "be together," to spend their new peaceful lives doing the things they weren't ever able to do together before.

The Trailblazer even hammers this home for the player by interjecting in the "confession" scene to tease Phainon for the fact that his dream was always to go to Castrum Kremnos, even from the time he was a silly, carefree kid:

Because the writers cannot say out loud "They want to be by each other's side" as part of the text of the story, given the game's circumstances, they instead code this message clearly into the story's subtext, letting symbolism do its work. The library isn't just a place--it's a symbol for both of their dreams and hopes for a future spent together.

(By the way, tiny aside, but I think that making this symbolic place a library of all things, in a plot that is commenting in a very meta way about storytelling itself, is just a fantastic choice: A "library" is a place full to the brim with stories--that is, it is a place full of both uncountable memories and myriad new beginnings, every tale in it a world onto its own, with its own happy ending, just waiting for people to come find it. In a story about storytelling, a library represents infinite possibility, and therefore also, finally, freedom--the freedom to embrace new ideas and new joys by finding the story you end up loving the most.)

A final thing I think is worth considering about Phainon and Mydei's reunion is that framing this as a "confirming where our relationship stands" scene doubles down even harder on the fact that Phainon's act of returning the signet ring to Mydei was meant to be seen in a romantic light, evocative of a wedding proposal. Throughout the course of Amphoreus's story, players get to see three rings shared between characters: Mydei's ring returned by Phainon, Trailblazer receiving a ring from Castorice, and (presumably) Trailblazer giving a ring to Cyrene.

In the latter two cases, the rings are undoubtedly meant to be read in a romantic light: Castorice can't embrace the Trailblazer (or at least thinks she can't), so the ring represents a symbolic form of being able to wrap around and touch someone directly. This ring was written by the devs as part of Castorice's (relatively mild) ship bait with the Trailblazer, and no players who have Castorice as their waifu would have remotely mistaken the fact that the devs wanted her gift to come across as something like a "promise ring" for the player.

And then of course there's Cyrene's ring, gifted by the Trailblazer (I'd assume), as part of the animation in which Cyrene reinforces her love for the world as a whole, but which absolutely and inherently evokes images of wedding proposals and engagement rings:

By insisting on romantic readings for both Castorice's and Cyrene's rings, the game strongly associates the very act of ring-giving with love, retroactively insisting even harder on a romantic reading of Phainon and Mydei's ring exchange as well.

With this connotation in the background, the fact that Mydei and Phainon's reunion centers specifically on answering the question "Is our promise still in effect?" basically makes it impossible to read the scene as anything other than "checking to see whether the engagement is still on"--then confirming that nothing in the world could ever have undone it.

What do you even say?

Oh wait, I know:

I'm not even going to say anything else about this; they really just said "If we get fined by the censors, we get fined by the censors."

So... yeah. That's... Yeah.

We all know that Hoyo will never be able to make a M/M ship canon--they've been sanctioned for W/W content before too and rules are even stricter for content depicting men--but this closure to Mydei and Phainon's story by doubling down on the answer "These two male characters want to be with each other across lifetimes" was so overt that I'm actually shocked that it made it past all the barriers to stay in the final release of patch 3.7.

This wasn't a small thing. This took major commitment from Hoyo, a major gamble on whether or not enough fans would buy hard into the Mydei/Phainon ship to make putting themselves out on the limb like this worthwhile, and I'm sure that some long and serious talks were had about whether making their most pushed male character ever read as queer to just about every player (who isn't in blatant denial) was really a "safe" business decision...

After the release of 3.1, I wrote:

From the very beginning, I felt that Hoyo was moving on Phaidei in ways beyond how they had pushed their M/M ships before, and to the end of Amphoreus we see that act borne out, going so far as to now label Mydei and Phainon "the perfect ship" in their own game text.

Genuinely, my hat is off to them for this part of Amphoreus's writing.

I'm sure there are still those who will deny Phaidei, who will always deny it, simply because the developers can't have the characters flat out confess to each other. (Some people simply won't accept what's presented to them unless the actual words "I love you" are said, like the incels abandoning Star Rail over the line "It's a date, Mydeimos" but managing to overlook the literal suggestive-of-sex scene in the baths lol.)

I've seen a lot of people suggesting Mydei/Castorice, Phainon/Castorice, and even Mydei/Castorice/Phainon, but for all the fandom's shipping (and everyone should feel free to ship what they love; your ship is valid, fam!), I actually kind of think that...

Castorice is a bit of a Mydei/Phainon shipper herself.

Although Castorice is of course just a good person who is doing what she can to help Okhema, she also is quick to assist Phainon specifically to save Mydei, quick to try to keep Phainon calm because that's what will help him get to Mydei quicker, and she just brings Mydei up out of the blue to Phainon several times throughout the story.

It's Castorice who halts Phainon's ascension ceremony to ask where Mydei is, because she expected him to be there for Phainon.

It seems to be a given for Castorice that if Phainon needs him, in Phainon's most important hour, Mydei should obviously be with him. She knew Mydei would come.

Even before that, when Phainon was feeling down, Castorice admits she doesn't know how to comfort Phainon herself, and instead... brings up Mydei to comfort Phainon???

Girl thought Quick, how can I raise Phainon's self-esteem? and Mydei's nickname for Phainon was the first thing that seems to have come to mind. 😂

She really said "You're not lame, Phainon; Mydei thinks you're a hero!"

Okay, being more serious--even putting shipping aside entirely, it's just overall clear that Castorice perceives the close comradeship between Phainon and Mydei (probably moreso than Phainon himself) and understands how important having that close friendship is to Phainon, who seems to have nothing else left outside of the Chrysos Heirs at all.

She seems to be able to tell how much Phainon needs people in his life who believe in and can stand beside him, and seems to have clocked that Mydei is definitely one such person. The game tells us players clearly that Castorice is an incredibly perceptive person who is sensitive to the feelings of others, and part of that includes her continuing to verbally recognize, throughout 3.0, the support Phainon gains from his close connection to Mydei.

I think this is just another cool touch--but also maybe another subtle nod from the devs. Castorice won't even let Phainon have a single scene where Mydei isn't mentioned lol.

And finally, one last crumb based on a pet theory...

"As I've Written"

We don't yet know who is responsible for actually writing the character profiles in the "As I've Written" book--although the rewards section is called "Author's Recompense" and the player get rewards for "composing sagas," alongside the interact button being "Write Story," there's actually an entire achievement teasing the fact that the Trailblazer doesn't know who actually wrote the book:

It's not remotely written in a style the Trailblazer would write in, and it also contains information the Trailblazer (at least currently) has no way of knowing at all, like the details of Castorice's backstory.

At this point, the real author could be anyone. But I feel like there's a few things pointing in favor of the idea that the real author might be Phainon. It could also be Anaxa or Cyrene or even Mem too, but hear me out...

First, the book's design is reminiscent of Phainon: the book features prominent sun/moon symbols, has the same blue-white-gold color palette, and even the design at the bottom of the book resembles the design along the front of Phainon's coat:

The book also seems to be strongly foreshadowing that someone is going to lose their way, step onto a dark path, or end up making a terrible mistake.

In Tribbie's chapter:

In Aglaea's:

And of course in Phainon's chapter, where the foreshadowing is strongest:

If this "one who has lost their direction" and "lost themself," the "flawed hero," are all references to Phainon, then the book over and over again seems to be--for the player--foreshadowing Phainon's downfall. Or, from the other perspective: This is a record written by someone who has witnessed (or experienced) the downfall and knows what is coming.

There's also the fact that while Phainon's chapter is written in third person, the narrator occasionally slips in some hints that they know what's going on in Phainon's mind:

And there's also this moment from Mydei's chapter:

We already know that this is not how Mydei behaves around people he doesn't know. When Mydei isn't familiar with a person, he doesn't banter with them--he doesn't even bother with them. He barely speaks directly to the Trailblazer the entire 3.0 plot, for example! He doesn't remotely seem like the type of person to sit down at a table and drink with someone he doesn't know.

We also know that he's already scolded Phainon several times for trying to act like an expert in Kremnoan legends:

(Thank Streetwise Rhapsody from Youtube for these screencaps because I forgot to screencap it myself lol.)

And the icing on the cake:

The exact phrase "amateur historian" again.

To me, this all but confirms that the "true" author of the "As I've Written" chronicle is probably Phainon, which finally brings me to the actual Phaidei crumb I wanted to discuss all along:

Mydei's story is listed as chapter 10 of the book. Yet for some reason --even though we get the book only after completing nearly the entire 3.0 questline, when the player has definitely met Aglaea, Castorice, and Tribbie already--Mydei's story comes first.

While Castorice, Tribbie, Phainon, and Aglaea all share the same memory crystal, Mydei has his own separate memory crystal, not shared with any other character, and it is given to the player first, before anyone else:

Phainon really said "My man is more important than the rest of us combined."

Tribbie is chapter 1. Phainon is chapter 7. Aglaea is chapter 9. But for some reason, we jumped all three of those characters to present chapter 10 first. Theoretically you could say that it's because we went to Castrum Kremnos and fought Nikador? But, story-wise, was Mydei the most important? The Trailblazer met Phainon and Tribbie first, got to actually play Aglaea for a sequence of this story, and traveled alone with Castorice. Mydei is the character the Trailblazer actually had the least connection to in the whole 3.0 storyline, so it doesn't seem that the story is truly what determined the order characters' chapters were given to us.

At the end of the day, in a book that seems it could be written by Phainon (from the future? the past?), Mydei was given special treatment and came before anyone else.

The long and short of it is: Hyacine is a female character designed for a female audience.

It's rare, but it happens!

As part of Hoyo's standard design philosophy, there is a largely unspoken but very obvious general rule: You should design your female characters to appeal to a male audience, and you should design your male characters to appeal to a female audience.

The assumption on Hoyo's design and marketing teams' parts is that male players pull for female characters more than women do, while female players pull for male characters more than men do. Whether or not this is true doesn't even matter (meta usefulness is actually the strongest predictor of who will sell in a gacha game, but that's another story); the assumption that this statement is true is the driving principle behind a majority of Hoyo's design choices when it comes to their characters--particularly their female characters.

Hoyo has a very consistent set of limitations for female characters, which typically boils down to some combination of the following: (Just a few examples here, by the way, this is not exhaustive.)

Bare shoulders, back, or legs--designed to highlight female character model proportions and expose skin to tantalize.

Short dress, mini skirt, or micro shorts--pants are not allowed because Reasons™.

Purple is fine for women to wear, but pink is not; pink and most pastel colors are limited to hair (about 80% of pink on HSR's and Genshin's female designs is pink hair), eyes, and the rare accessory or trim because apparently Hoyo thinks their modern male playerbase will combust if forced to play a female character who actually wears a primarily pink outfit.

Every woman must wear high heels or bare feet (for that foot fetish appeal). They literally warped their entire tall female models in multiple games around the idea that "woman = high heels." The exceptions to this are so rare as to be negligible.

Large breasts and (often) visible cleavage, or conversely, very small breasts with an "immature"/"young" personality because (some very gross) players can associate flat chests with prepubescence and youth in girls.

Design elements and accessories that deliberately draw the player's eye to erogenous zones. Female characters' designs will often include arrow/V-shapes, dangling elements, or have angled patterns added to their clothing to intentionally draw the eye visually across the design to their chests or hips, for example:

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Yelan's design, by the way, just that it's a perfect example of a common Hoyo design trend where the lines and angles of the outfit are very deliberately placed to draw the eye to specific zones the designers want to emphasize. Hell, they even added a convenient moving target with the tassel placed directly in Yelan's cleavage here, to specifically draw your eyes there when the tassel moves. This is Male Gaze Design 101 and I ain't judging because I like everything about Yelan other than that fuckass bob.

Women will always be shorter than men. There is no exception; every female model will be shorter than the corresponding male model of the same height group, at all times.

Aventurine is taller than Jade, dawg, make it make sense.

Animations will deliberately highlight specific elements of female anatomy in ways that male character animations rarely (although not never; Mydei you will always be famous!) do:

"Hoyo designs aren't fanservicey!!" - HSRtwt, completely unironically.

Because I can already hear the clamoring "what about"s, some disclaimers:

"Wearing a revealing outfit isn't automatically fanservice aimed at men! Women showing skin are just existing!" Real women can show as much skin as they want without intentionally attempting to appeal to men because real women have agency and control over their bodies and their clothing choices. Female characters in gacha games do not have agency and their design choices are always, always at the whims of their designers, who are often male. A woman wearing a revealing outfit in real life is probably freely expressing herself as she chooses--a female character in a gacha game wearing a revealing outfit is always performing fanservice, largely for an assumed-male audience, because 1) all gacha characters are intentionally designed to be fanservice for someone, and 2) that outfit was obviously meant to make her appealing enough that players attracted to women would spend real money to buy her.

"Having big breasts doesn't automatically mean being sexualized; real women have big breasts all the time!" I absolutely agree that real women's bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and it isn't fair that people sexualize the very existence of breasts. But if you genuinely believe that a female character in a gacha game has big boobs or a skintight fit over her well-shaped backside because Hoyoverse's game developers had a heartfelt and entirely pure desire to create "authentic depictions of women's varied body types" in their games (which have publicly courted an incel audience), and not, because, you know, they have a "big booba = sexy" design mindset, you should probably log off the internet and go outside, because you may actually be so naive you're not safe in online spaces.

"It's misogynistic to call female character designs fanservice!" This statement only holds true if you actually believe there's something morally wrong with fanservice, but uhhhh we're not in the 1600s anymore; the original 13 colonies called and want their Puritans back. Acknowledging that literally all of Hoyo's character designs are based on some form of fanservice will not kill you, I promise. There isn't anything inherently wrong with fanservice (except when fanservicey designs undermine the character's themes--see Genshin's Lauma for a recent example, where Nod-Krai's story tells us one of Lauma's main struggles is having to constantly appeal to others and how harmful this objectification has been to her... and then the game invites us to goon over her so that she's objectified by us players too). Fanservice is how Hoyo makes their money; it is literally what keeps the games running. It would be very silly of me to complain about the female characters being designed for a male audience while praising the male characters for being designed with a female audience in mind; and it is equally silly when people try to gaslight others into believing that the obviously fanservice-focused designs of most of Hoyo's female characters aren't, you know, obviously fanservice.

Anyway, all of that was just to establish a general truth:

A vast majority of Hoyo's female characters are designed to have widespread appeal to men.

And... then there's Hyacine, whose design is 100% intended to appeal to women first.

This one's for the girlies.

Hyacine's design is focused on a brand of "hyper-femininity" (/positive) that privileges aesthetics almost exclusively culturally associated with girlhood: glittery rainbows, ribbons, unicorns, puffy fluffy hair ties, cutesy pink drill curls, and so on. It's a design that insists on capturing pure and condensed (socially determined) "girlishness" and throwing it at you all at once. It's the Barbie aisle. It's My Little Pony. It's schoolgirls clutching their stuffed animals. It's "Let's play imaginary princess angels!" It's Chibiusa and Helios. It's Pretty Cure and Cardcaptor Sakura.

It is--I'll elaborate in a minute--very literally Lisa Frank.

Hyacine's design rejects the limitations imposed by the stereotypical male gaze by exceeding the boundaries of the femininity that heterosexual men are normally (socially conditioned to be) comfortable engaging with on their own.

Again, before the "what about"s start: Yes, of course there are plenty of real men also into hyper-feminine "cutesy" girls. I'm sure that there are whole groups of guys out there (not to even mention the sapphic women) who would kill for a bubblegum princess girlfriend, who would be willing to move into a house painted all pink simply because that house had a woman in it. If a character is female, she will appeal to some men in some way; this is just a statement of fact.

But in terms of Hoyo's overall marketing strategies, "rainbows and unicorns" are NOT what Hoyo normally considers appealing to men.

In the developers' internal "things that our male players will shell out money for" list, pink drill curls and ponies, bells and ribbons, sunshine and flowers are almost certainly not high up.

But why? If heterosexual men supposedly like women so much, shouldn't hallmarks of femininity--the things societies deem most stereotypically feminine in modern times--be most appealing to men?

This where design meets the strange social phenomenon in which femininity is generally appealing to heterosexual men only so long as it is performed to men's expectations and tastes.

Yes, also, I know: Not all men. Please understand that everything I'm saying in this post is broad, generalized statements based on how society (generally my own U.S. society) views men and women, as a single tumblr post could never hope to encompass the dizzying spectrum of gender identities, perceptions of masculinity/femininity, and personal attractions across every single person on the internet.

By its most common current definition, the term "performative femininity" refers to a type of femininity that is not self-driven but an act that a woman feels forced to put on in order to fit society's often rigid gender expectations. (Also to clarify: All gender is essentially performance, as "gender" itself is a combination of social expectations and traditions, but in this case I'm speaking only about feeling compelled to perform in a specific manner, rather than living by one's own desires.) This may mean a woman feeling like she has to wear make-up for others to consider her good-looking (as opposed to wearing it just because she personally likes it) or that she has to wear a dress to work or special events even if she normally dislikes wearing dresses. It can mean a woman feeling like she needs to be quiet when a man is talking because that's the "polite" (read: womanly) thing to do, even if she really wants to speak up instead. It can even be the tendency of women to pit themselves against their compatriots ("Oh, I'm prettier than her") instead of uplifting fellow women, and so on.

When it comes to character designs, it is essential to remember again that fictional characters are not people, and therefore they have no agency and no ability to choose what degree of femininity (or not) to perform for themselves--their designers are always and totally in charge of that decision. This means that, in the case of a vast majority of female characters in Hoyo's gacha games, feminine traits are present in their design largely to perform the exact level (and only the exact level) of femininity that Hoyo assumes will actually appeal to their general male audience.

Femininity in Hoyo's female character designs is often limited to the scope of what Hoyo's marketing research tells them men like to see when they look at women, rather than what women might choose for their own designs. Feminine elements are allowed in these character designs only so long as the assumed heterosexual male audience can interpret those elements as for men, deliberately designed to appeal to them. If something is socially perceived as "for girls only," it's almost uniformly banned from the female character designs: There's no glittery princess tiaras. There's no purses. There's no plushie keychains. There's no childhood-rekindling ribbon-coated cupcake dresses (Navia almost made it there though, she almost made it).

There's nothing in the vast majority of Hoyo's female character designs that would challenge the (often delicate) sensibilities of the general male playerbase.

But when it came to Hyacine, Hoyo really said "You're going to have that rainbow unicorn plastered on your screen 24/7 in Amphoreus's meta and you're going to like it."

As a fictional character, of course Hyacine is never in charge of her own appearance, but to the extent that her design exceeds the levels of femininity that heterosexual men typically want to engage with, Hyacine's design evokes a very familiar--and very historical--brand of non-performative femininity (or, rather, femininity performing only for itself): Kawaii Culture.

Pictured above: Little Ica's ancestral lineage.

While "Kawaii Culture" got its start in Japan and is, in many ways, shaped specifically by Japanese social circumstances of the 1970s to the 1990s, the core concepts and styles--and the underlying philosophy--of Kawaii Culture have since been exported globally, with corresponding movements and fashion trends in basically every other society in the world, including in China with things like 萌 (meng) culture and "girly pop" movements in the U.S.

Although the history of Kawaii Culture is too long and complicated for me to fully summarize, its first solid spark was a form of minor protest when teenagers in Japan in the 1970s began using personalized "cutesy" writing styles for schoolwork, defying the expectations and demands for sterile professionalism placed on them by rigid education and career systems. "Cute" handwriting became a form of rebellious self-expression that privileged women's styles over conforming to rules dictating "proper" behavior. The movement in particular began to pick up steam with the late-1970s launch of Sanrio's Hello Kitty characters, whose innocent charm--designed specifically to appeal to both children and adults--evoked a very specific feeling: Things that are "soft," "weak," and "dependent" have a unique brand of cuteness. The etymological roots of the Japanese words "kawaii" (cute) and "kawaisou" (pitiful) are the same. That is: helpless things are cute because they are helpless.

Contrary to expectations that these "helpless," adorable things (read as: anything feminine) might be disenfranchised or at the mercy of those more powerful, this cuteness-from-helplessness combination actually became a political tool for young women in Japan in the 1970s: By embracing icons of childishness, things associated with "girlhood," and the "helplessness of a little child" instead of adopting symbols of adult life (professional appearance, calm and respectful behavior, etc.), Japanese young women protested the intense and highly gendered expectations placed on them by their staunchly patriarchal society.

"Kawaii" in women could be perceived as pushing back against the demand that all women "grow up" in a timely manner so they can become either working women or wives and mothers, beholden to the whims of the men in their lives and expected to behave in very structured ways to support their families--instead, young women promoting this sub-culture sometimes sought to delay and reject their country's "adult" social pressures by embracing childhood and girlishness instead. By refusing to perform to the expectations of "the system" (read as: men), Japanese young women of the 1970s and 80s sometimes used "cuteness" to rebel against attempts to force women to conform to social expectations and repress self-expression.

Although not quite to the same extent and lacking the specific social context of Japan, rises in "girly" fashion trends and the popularity of feminine aesthetics and merchandise have often corresponded with women's power movements across the globe. The revival of Hello Kitty and its mass popularity in the U.S. in the 1990s corresponded well with the heyday of third-wave feminism, which prioritized solidarity among women, emphasized intersectionality, and advocated for celebrating "Girl Power," making things that were "girly"--like Hello Kitty, Barbie, girl pop groups like the Spice Girls and Destiny's Child--trendy and centered in the lives of young girls. It was the age of the glittery gel pen, the sparkly butterfly hairclips, and the platform sneaker.

And it was also the age of Lisa Frank.

First, while there's certainly much to be said about the controversies that occurred within the Lisa Frank company in the late 1990s, I won't get into that here; I'm really interested only in the message the company sold and promoted publicly for young girls--namely that "All things girly are gorgeous," and that not only should one celebrate girlhood but that one should celebrate it to the extreme, embracing not demure or quietly feminine designs but loud, aggressively feminine designs.

If color is good, then using the rainbow with every color at once is even better. If bright tones are awesome, then we will aim for eye-searing neon. If stars and clouds and bubbles and rainbows are what the girlies are buying right now, then fill the whole sky with them. If cute baby animals and unicorns and pegasi are what girls like, then slap that shit on every item a young girl could possibly need, from her hair bows to her color-changing sneakers, from her school notebooks to her stuffed toys.

Lisa Frank's style has been described as "the purest, uncut concentrations of girliness known to girlkind."

While I won't make any claims suggesting Lisa Frank was an active feminist warrior determined to spread a pro-feminine message (perhaps to combat the 1990s movements that privileged grunge and violent moody boys, old-school jocks and Tony Hawk), that is part of the ultimate effect the brand achieved: Lisa Frank artwork gave young U.S. girls in the 1990s a hyper-feminine "culture" to rally around, in the same way that boys were (still are) encouraged to rally around loving sports teams. For all the behind-the-scenes failures of the company, the social effect was that Lisa Frank's merchandise made publicly announcing one's love of "all things girly" the go-to choice for many young U.S. girls in the 90s.

Like the Kawaii trend across the sea, in Lisa Frank's aesthetic, the helpless--cute baby seals, leopard cubs, puppies and kitties--becomes the privileged, proud and unrepentantly "feminine," refusing to apologize for its own boldness. (Do I actually like this aesthetic, looking back at it as a grown adult? Frankly, it's garish. But to little girls who often experienced being laughed at by little boys for liking anything perceived as "girly"? This shit was gold.)

And here's where it gets interesting: While the Kawaii Culture that would go on to inspire Hyacine's design got its start in the East and migrated to the West through cultural transmission, Lisa Frank's aesthetics have also traveled backwards since the 1990s, creating the chain of inspiration (often through internet memes) that would later obviously influence the development of Hyacine in China as well, in a sort of "globalization of cuteness" loop.

Although I certainly won't go so far as to say any particular artwork was the direct inspiration for Hyacine's design or animations, it's clear that the original 1990s' trend of combining rainbows-stars-bubbles-unicorns-glitter (which regained popularity the 2020s on the global internet after artists nostalgically began imitating elements of Lisa Frank's style, such as in some works of Frutiger Aero art)--

--formed a maximalist "hopecore" aesthetic that had obvious influence on Hyacine's design:

If this girl had been born in the 90s her color palette would have been neon, I know it.

While the influence of "kawaii" on Hyacine's external design is clear, the most important thing in all of this is that "uncut concentrations of girlishness" aren't just inspirations for Hyacine's appearance--the philosophies behind Kawaii Culture directly inform Hyacine's role in the story and the themes of her character arc.

"With Just a Glimmer of Light"

Although we are introduced to Hyacine in 3.2, her character quest and the bulk of her screentime is in 3.3, where our establishing scene already paints Hyacine as different not only from others in general but even from her fellow Chrysos Heirs.

When Anaxa asks his class "What is your dream?", he's displeased by the answers that Phainon and Castorice give--Phainon's wish is vague and therefore meaningless (he wants to protect the people he cares for, but doesn't even list a single actual person who means anything to him), while Castorice's wish is unfortunately short-sighted (she wants to rid the world of the sorrow of "death," but has no real concept of what a world without death would even be like).

Meanwhile, Hyacine's answer establishes her as an emblem of kindness, modesty, and sympathy:

On the surface, this first scene could be seen as establishing Hyacine as a reductive stereotype of femininity played perfectly straight: She's not a warrior, she's the healer, a supporter, a caretaker--all roles to which women (especially women in fantasy media!) have been constantly and continually pigeonholed. It's tempting to start viewing her already as the "heart of the party" healer archetype whose overflowing gentleness and warmth is met with equally overflowing misplaced optimism and naivete, sweet as sugar but vapid as an empty platitude.

Yet Hyacine's answer for the future is the only one that Anaxa accepts. The only one that he calls interesting, because it possesses what both Phainon's and Castorice's wishes lack: A view of their fairy-tale-hero's-journey world that has its feet on the ground, instead of a head in the clouds.

Hyacine's dream speaks to the reality of their world: 99% of the people in Amphoreus will never be heroes. They will live, and die, in obscurity.

With her answer, Hyacine's very first establishing scene challenges the viewer to consider what "true" heroism is: Does Phainon's desire to protect those he personally cares about carry the same weight as Hyacine's aspiration to protect the lives and preserve the stories of the countless unsung people who lived and died in the course of Amphoreus's fairy tale epic?

Much later in Amphoreus's plot, this exact idea will be echoed to form the basis of Cryene's ultimate story of sacrifice and love, where the conclusion of Amphoreus's arc will insist on the power of all people, not just on Chrysos Heirs, and where preserving the memory of Amphoreus itself will require not just immortalizing its heroes but all its life--every being worth remembering, down to the tiniest chimera.

The grand story of selfless love for humanity that Cyrene will unravel in 3.7?

Hyacine already had that answer in 3.3.

It's true this first major scene may lure some viewers into over-simplification: "Look at Hyacine, she's the pretty princess whose biggest character trait is kindness and empathy, because oh wow, sooo ground-breaking, she's a girly girl and those are the traits of every girly girl!"

But Hyacine's candy-coated optimism, even from this first scene, is tinged with a very particular brand of realism that her fellow young Chrysos Heirs Phainon and Castorice are lacking. Phainon is still envisioning that "flawless" hero who can protect everyone without ever making mistakes, while Castorice dreams of a neverending world so removed from their human reality that Anaxa ironically says he "weeps" for it.

Hyacine's view of Amphoreus's "fairy tale world" recognizes (but does not tolerate) the sad reality of their turbulent times: Not all stories are created equal and not everyone will get to survive to the end of the legend. Her dream tells us that Hyacine understands a core truth about existence: No matter how rare they are, the world will always privilege heroes over everyday "mortals," and some lives will always been seen as more worthy. The real world isn't a fair or gentle place...

Yet Hyacine says: Let me make it one.

Amphoreus's male heroes, namely Phainon and Mydei, both represent a very stereotypical social alignment of masculinity with destruction, conflict, and bloodlust, and in embracing violence as the medium for their heroism, they both reinforce a specific worldview that suffering is essential to the human experience. Mydei repeats multiple times "Strife is the agony this world needs," aligned to his belief that the only way to end conflict is through conflict--that peace can only be obtained through war.

Yet through Hyacine's story (and later Cyrene's), the game asks us to directly confront that worldview, to question for ourselves whether conflict, violence, and the slaughter ever-present in heroic epics really can create a peaceful world in the end. Can actions born of suffering really bring about a happy ending?

Phainon's collapse into Flame Reaver and his ultimate passing of the "Deliverer" title to the Trailblazer reinforces this question even further: Can you bring pain to the world and still call yourself a hero?

At the core of this question is a philosophical debate that has been raging in the real world since the Classical Era or even before, the concept that things can only be defined by the existence of their opposites: We know what hot is because we've felt cold, we understand what light is because we have experienced darkness, we know wet because we have felt dry. Ergo, the conclusion many people draw is: In order to understand happiness, you must first experience hardship.

In embracing this mindset, people often take on a perspective that makes suffering into something noble. Pain builds character, isn't that what they say? If strife and hardship are inevitable in this life, then let's accept them as learning experiences that help us grow, that make the high points of our lives that much sweeter.

But this philosophy is ultimately one that risks breeding apathy, because if suffering is inevitable in life, then what is the point of trying to eradicate it? If we need conflict in order to keep feeling joy, then some hardships in the world will just have to be over-looked, won't they? Some losses are "acceptable." If pain is a core part of human existence, then isn't evil also a core part of human existence? And doesn't history show that it's our human default to reduce ourselves to war and thieving and backstabbing over and over and over?

This philosophy inevitably descends into a deeply pessimistic view of both the world and humanity, one that assumes that suffering, greed, and all things awful in the world are inherent parts of life, perhaps even more inherent to humanity than goodness and peace. This view, despite (or perhaps because of) its pessimism, is perceived by many people as a "pragmatic" or "realistic" view of the world.

Certainly, this is the conclusion that Seliose reached at the end of her long journey:

We're told, as we slowly unravel Seliose's mysterious past throughout 3.3, that she originally had an overwhelming love for humanity, that she was naive because she genuinely believed that defeating Aquila would magically solve the conflicts between the Skyfolk's warring clans.

But soon enough, this naivete turns into disillusionment and bitterness--Seliose, seeing the depths to which the Skyfolk were willing to sink, seeing humanity's cowardice and selfishness, turns her back on humanity, losing all hope for the future of her people.

Ultimately, Seliose, fused with Aquila, becomes a vengeful god who enacts divine retribution on the Skyfolk because she has come to believe that all humanity is irredeemable--that is, that evil is the essence of humanity and that human life itself has no meaning because nothing good will ever come of mortals.

Before I go any further, I want to clarify that I absolutely do not believe that there's an inherent link between being biologically male and committing more violence than others, or that you can empirically map the concepts of "kindness" versus "aggression" to the social spectrum of "femininity" and "masculinity" at all, but... there is a cultural bias that draws these associations implicitly.

Outdated and rigid gender norms in many societies paint men and boys as "aggressive" while expecting gentleness of women. "Boys will be boys" people say, when their sons get into fist fights on the playground or turn out to be bullies. Parents sign their boy children up for martial arts to "get their anger out" while signing their girl children up for the same classes to "learn how to defend themselves." Our heroes in video games are strapping men wielding giant battle axes and robed in the skins of their animal kills, while our healers are delicate elvish waif women in robes. War and violence are seen as the arenas of men, while it is assumed that women are somehow universally prone to being mediators who will shy from conflict. Even in feminist circles, there's a strongly held belief that a globe run by women would be far more peaceful than our current world still primarily run by men.

And accompanying this notion that aggression and bloodshed are the domains of men is the equal notion that darkness and despair are the domains of stoic, long-suffering men too, men who just have a so-much-more realistic view of the world than sweet, inexperienced women who haven't "seen the horrors" the way men can. (I hope you can feel my eye roll.) In this way, even concepts as dissociated from gender as plain old "optimism" and "hope" become the hallmarks of femininity, of childishness (and we all know, anything perceived as childish or "innocent" is basically treated as synonymous with "feminine" in many misogynist minds).

"Everyone cheer up!" - Go-to dialogue for the token female teammate in every series ever written by a man.

In an example of true misogyny, worldviews that prioritize kindness, generosity, hope, and belief in the inherent goodness of humanity are socially associated with women--and then immediately dismissed as naive, immature, or unrealistic in comparison to stereotypically masculine grim-dark "edgelord" perceptions of the future of humanity as a moral wasteland.

Despite featuring two women, Hyacine's story quest actually centers around this exact conflict and perception.

Throughout the wind-up of the quest, Seliose is repeatedly associated with conventional symbols of masculinity. She's described as a "knight" and a "god" whom the ordinary Skyfolk have no chance of physically standing up against. She is revered as a "hero of the epics," like any other Chosen One cliche male hero whose strengths lie entirely in martial prowess. While the quest initially describes Seliose as loving and beneficent toward humanity (traits Hoyo consistently assigns to their female characters, see Cyrene/Elysia), this is quickly lost behind the cold anger and violence of stereotypically masculine tyrant kings.

The story even doubles down on this alliance between Seliose's way of thinking and the vengeful, pessimistic worldview of many modern male hero figures, when, after revealing that she straight up murdered her entire civilization, Phainon goes:

Bruh please??? She just killed thousands of people by boiling them alive in molten metal!! From one fratricidal serial killer to another...

Even for Hyacine, Seliose is a larger-than-life heroic figure symbolic of the Flame-Chase Journey itself, to whom Hyacine obviously feels she cannot measure up. Over and over again, the game drives the dichotomy between Seliose and Hyacine home, with numerous NPCs and even Cipher comparing the two of them not just mentally but also physically:

Yet even while recognizing the gulf in power and authority between herself and Seliose, Hyacine never falters. She states that even if she may not have the individual strength to contend with a titan, she nevertheless is determined to redefine her people's story on her own terms.

Even as Hyacine discovers that everything she ever believed is a lie, that her own ancestor fed the future with falsehoods to cowardly save her own life, that her people were barbarous and prejudice enough to turn on each other in internal slaughter, and the heroine she was told her whole life she should aim to imitate had abandoned mortals entirely out of a fatalistic view that assumed nothing in humanity was worth saving, Hyacine still refused to give in to despair the way Seliose did, refused to waver in her love for the world and her faith that humanity can heal, grow, and improve.

She turns pinker and pinker the more and more powerful her weaponized positivity becomes.

When Seliose's towering violence (conforming to some extent with the masculine definition of "legendary warrior") clashes with Hyacine's empathy (opposing the masculine), Star Rail's writers had the opportunity to take a dark and edgy route--to crush Hyacine's eternal optimism with the idea that "saving the day isn't always possible" in the name of "realism." They had the chance to dismiss Hyacine's idealism as naive and childish, to tell us kindness has no place in the war-torn playgrounds of manly Greek war epics, or to tell us that "positivity lacks substance" in comparison to things like Mydei's grim determination to fight to the death against the Black Tide.

But that's not what the writers did. From the very start, they tell us Hyacine is unique and strong not in spite of her kindness but because of it:

Despite its name and relevance to the entire Flame-Chase Journey, "Proi Proi" is not Phainon's theme; it's not even really "all the Flame Chasers'" theme, given that it's never played again anywhere else in the game. It's placed at the climax of Hyacine's portion of the story because its message of defiance against a destiny that separates people into "strong" and "weak" is the pinnacle of Hyacine's theme:

The rebellion at the heart of "Kawaii Culture" doesn't just pervade Hyacine's external design--it is written into the very core of her character.

She isn't Phainon who can pull a god from the sky or Mydei who can tear a man's throat out with his bare hands. She is weak, Hoyo tells us. She is sweet, she is generous, she picks kindness when no one else will. She is the pitiful creature whose endearing, child-like vulnerability shouts in your face: "Isn't she cute?"

But in the context of Amphoreus's story, where the lives of everyone in their world dance in the palm of a single man, that exact cuteness is also an incredibly powerful refusal to conform to the masculine forces that dominate her world. Hyacine's rainbow skies push back against the all-devouring darkness of the Black Tide. Her active choice to see the goodness in everyone (even Flame Reaver) stands in direct opposition to Lygus's worship of destruction and Irontomb's wrath. Her intensely affirming views of the value of human lives absolutely rejects Zandar's casual cruelty.

As her world collapses around her and the Chrysos Heirs waver in their fears of whether Amphoreus can even be saved, Hyacine's refusal to accept that meaningless death is all that awaits their world, her intentional decision to choose selflessness over ambivalence and compassion over hatred, perfectly encapsulates the exact conflict that will mark Amphoreus's later climax in 3.7, when Cyrene defines the prime mover of life as "love."

In both appearance and theme, Hyacine intensely rebels against the symbolically masculine worldviews of darkness, pragmatism, and necessary violence, privileging a tenderness that society has stereotypically come to associate with femininity.

This is the message of every magical girl anime ever: Heroism is not and has never been limited to bulky caped crusaders with broody vigilantism. Pink cupcakes and chubby unicorns are perfectly suited to the saving the world too.

Thank you for this perfect contribution, random Youtube user.

Because, at the end of the day, Hoyo also tells us: Hyacine's right. She's right about everything--about her own strength, about the way only generosity and beneficence can enact real change in the world, about the value of human life, and about the absolutely essential nature of continually and purposefully choosing optimism in a world that insists over and over again on exacting despair.

Hoyo does not present Hyacine's idealism as frivolous, vapid, or stupid. That "child-like" belief in goodness isn't a weakness that causes her downfall but the literal strength that allows her to bring down the very god of the heavens. Through both her hyper-feminine design and her role in the story, Hoyo insists that we players engage with Hyacine's cheerful worldview unironically--that we embrace hope with complete earnestness. "Don't dismiss this as naive or meaningless," they tell us--and in doing so, also say: "Don't dismiss ideas associated with femininity as naive or meaningless either."

With Hyacine's character quest, Hoyo very clearly says:

The worldview that centers so many concepts that are stereotypically viewed as "feminine"--empathy, kindness, optimism, love for others?

There's nothing stronger than that.

The key is in remembering that nothing happens in media by accident. Every single frame of Phainon's trailer was scripted, and therefore every frame shown after the question "What is your dream?" was deliberately chosen to convey a specific message.

In answering the question "What is Phainon of Aedes Elysiae's dream?" the dev team had several clear, obvious, and perfectly understandable options:

We could have seen Phainon mentally rewind the time and return to his idyllic childhood in Aedes Elysiae. We could have seen him reunited with his parents and, more importantly, Cyrene (who was conspicuously absent from the entire trailer). Over and over, the game has told us that Phainon loved his home, loved his people, and loved the peace that he used to have, so absolutely no player would have questioned it if "Phainon's dream" was to return to the paradise of the childhood he used to know.

But the devs didn't do that.

The power of friendship and found family could have been emphasized by showing quick flashes of Phainon with each one of the Chrysos Heirs: We could have seen Aglaea helping him pick clothes, seen Tribbie, Trianne, and Trinnon playing with Phainon and chimeras in the Garden of Life, glimpsed Phainon getting scolded by Anaxa at the Grove with Hyacine and Castorice cheering him up, could have seen Cipher tricking him into buying a worthless relic dressed up as a real antique, and then we could have seen him sparring with Mydei, as just one more example of Phainon envisioning a happy life with all his friends and found family beside him.

But the devs didn't do that.

The devs built a trailer that asked Phainon the question "What is your dream?" and then let their massively hyped male protagonist answer: "Let me experience joy by the side of my equal."

This trailer says, unequivocally, that Phainon doesn't need to return to Aedes Elysiae to be happy. He believes the life he desires can be found in Okhema, and his only requirements for that life, for that joy, are peace (a parade of heroes with Mydei and Aglaea, the guardian mother figure, by his side), domesticity (caring for the children of Okhema's next generation), and a return to normalcy (defined literally by the presence of Mydeimos).

The implication is that Phainon had already found his happy ending, had already achieved his dream--and all he wants now is to get it back.

The dev team had every option to say something different, to imply that Phainon had never been truly happy with his life in Okhema, or that Phainon's happiness revolves around everyone he's ever known and loved because he's the Deliverer of all--but instead they decided to tell us explicitly that Phainon doesn't need every single friend and Chrysos Heir to return to him in the same form as they left him (Castorice and Polyxia return not as adult friends but children to be nurtured, for example).

He doesn't need to go back to Cyrene's side to know joy again for the first time since his youth.

Look at this happy bug-eyed bean. Have you seen my son? Now you have.

When Phainon thinks of his own dream, he envisions himself where fate has already brought him--to Okhema, to Mydei.

This isn't tee-hee fanservice. This isn't a quick innuendo for the yaoi cash grab.

This is the dev team deliberately building Phainon's relationship with another male character into the thematic core of his story, linking the completion of his entire hero's journey with a return to the side of another man.

(Image from here.)

Whatever you might think of Joseph Campbell, in a very meta way, universal awareness of Campbell's monomyth has essentially permeated the writing of every modern hero character. (We can argue that the hero's journey never consciously existed for the original writers of mythology, but we can't argue that it doesn't exist for the writers of hero characters today.)

Phainon's arc clearly, step-for-step, maps to the hero's journey, likely in a very intentional way so that the devs can play with the notion of the thin line between hero and villain, the burden of heroism as the conduit for resentment and violence, etc. etc. In light of the fact that Phainon's case so closely maps to the monomyth, it is near inevitable that we see him experience the call to adventure (Flame Reaver's attack) and leave his "known world" (Aedes Elysiae) to pursue the saving of their planet, a conflict which will inevitably push him beyond the brink of death and into apotheosis as an ascended being, a changed man.

But then the hero is supposed to return. Whether or not Phainon's return to normalcy is possible as a changed man, we're supposed to see him try. His journey is meant to be rewarded, his lessons are meant to be learned, and he should be able to go back to the place he calls home, having achieved all he needed to in life.

Aragorn ascends the throne of Gondor with Arwen. Rose Dawson returns the Heart of the Sea to Jack. Odysseus is reunited with his Penelope.

The return Phainon is supposed to long for, the place he is supposed to envision as his normal world, his home, his reward for a journey finally fulfilled... It should be Aedes Elysiae.

But this trailer tells us it's not.

Okhema is the home Phainon dreams of returning to.

Mydei is the person Phainon dreams of being reunited with.

This wasn't a necessary message to send. The devs did not have to link Phainon's individual heroic character arc, the conclusion of the thematic evolution of his character, to another man.

No matter what happens in 3.4, nothing will erase this moment in which the Star Rail writers consciously implied that being with Mydeimos is the end that Phainon would choose for his own journey, the future he would write for himself.

And all of this is improved by the knowledge that Phainon has faced this question about his dreams before. In 3.3, Anaxa asks him this same thing. But when Phainon answers:

Anaxa scolds him for the paleness of the answer, how generic and passionless it is to wish to protect people without even being able to name who you wish to protect:

Phainon's trailer, then, becomes the wham line to this wind-up, the parallel story structure returning to a focal, character-defining moment: Anaxa isn't asking Phainon to voice a practical answer to his query--he's asking Phainon a core question about Phainon's self-identity.

In the past, Phainon was unable to communicate a specific wish or vision for his future because he had no true attachment to the world. He wants to "protect the people he cares about" but isn't able to articulate who that even is anymore, or why he cares about them, how deeply, or what they mean in his life.

In Phainon's trailer, Castorice wishes for a "normal life," and Phainon says "That's not a wish" because it should be hers by right, it should be a given.

In 3.3, Phainon says "I don't want to lose anyone else," and Anaxa effectively says "That's not a wish" because it should be a given, because caring about everyone and placing the weight of their lives on your own shoulders ("being a hero") is a perpetual losing game--it's the same as not actually being able to freely live at all.

So Phainon's trailer becomes an echo. Phainon gets a second chance to answer Anaxa's question, a second chance to tell the world what truly matters to him.

He gets a second chance to show us players what he really wants to protect, not in a vague and detail-less single sentence but with color, life, and specificity.

He still isn't able to say the words, he still doesn't manage to articulate his answer, but we get to see it, nonetheless--the fact that Phainon does have something he longs to possess just for himself: a personal wish for happiness that requires another man to fulfill.

1. The Feeling's Mutual

There was no heterosexual explanation for this framing.

In Part 1 of this post, I noted that Hoyo has a typical personality pattern they follow when queer-coding their male characters, particularly in using "difficult" personalities to create an artificial sense of distance between the characters. If one character is angry all the time, or tsundere, or using sarcasm to cover for their fear of getting close to others, Hoyo can mobilize that personality gap as a shield to give anti-LGBT+ players plausible deniability. Hell, there are people still out there genuinely convinced that Alhaitham and Kaveh have a toxic relationship. There are people out there saying Ratio despises Aventurine because he was mean to him one (1) time while undercover. That's how effective injecting a little bit of bickering into a queer-coded relationship is.

Hoyoverse is very, very familiar with creating this delicate balance of teasing the ship while feeding anti-LGBT+ players and censors just enough "Look, they don't like each other; they're arguing!" contrary material to avoid setting anyone off.

Which... makes it absolutely bizarre that they made almost no effort to do this with Phainon and Mydei.

Sure, on paper we're told that Phainon and Mydei are rivals. Phainon describes it as "He's both my friend and my foe." And yes, they have their quips (Phainon's "It's exhausting talking to you sometimes" comes to mind).

But animosity--the genuine desire to one-up each other--is completely missing from Mydei and Phainon's "rivalry." They aren't Sasuke and Naruto. They aren't Izuku and Bakugou. They don't actually even want to beat each other--they want to be equals. If you defeat Mydei in the 3.0 competition, Phainon immediately folds and calls the contest off. If you let Mydei win, Mydei immediately folds and declares no contest.

Although Aglaea notes they compete because they're "impulsive youths," what she was actually missing is that Mydei only let himself be goaded into Phainon's hot bath competition because he was worried about Phainon and wanted to take Phainon's mind off the failed trial. Then, immediately after beating Phainon in the hot bath challenge, he lets Phainon win the "take more people home" challenge, to tie up their score again.

In fact, Mydei and Phainon's relationship is so devoid of the actual back-and-forth typical of other Hoyoverse MLM ships that at one point, Phainon even asks for it:

(Though he's equally quick to demand compliments from Mydei too.)

Instead, virtually every line from Phainon and Mydei through both 3.0 and 3.1 reiterates that they care deeply about each other, and are concerned for not only each other's physical well-being but also each other's mental and emotional health. They freely and consistently support each other both on the battlefield and off, confessing their struggles and relying on each other for advice. Whenever they're separated, the game intentionally hammers home how worried they are without the other around.

Over and over and over again, the devs tell you how well Mydei and Phainon know each other and how much effort they're putting in to take care of each other:

The game doesn't let us forget that they are one another's "closest person," and that the respect they have for each other is mutual. Although I wouldn't go so far as to speculate they actually recognize romantic feelings, canon makes it clear that they are aware their emotional connection goes both ways. They don't just value each other's battle prowess, intelligence, or usefulness--they value each other's feelings explicitly, every single time emotions are expressed between them in the game's text.

In fact, Mydei even scolds Phainon for approaching their goodbye with a straight face; he knows that Phainon is hurt by their parting, and he wants Phainon to be honest, as Mydei is being honest in turn:

The rainbows in the background really sold the scene, ngl.

This isn't Renheng, where resentment has taken away any glimmer of joy. This isn't Ratiorine, where even if Aventurine were in a more stable mindset, Ratio's inability to spit out his feelings might keep them from going anywhere. Even with Haikaveh, the Hoyo ship known for Alhaitham's devotion, Kaveh's own struggles and refusal to accept Alhaitham's kindness are an active plot point keeping them from progressing. Maybe you could draw a parallel between Phaidei and Cyno/Tighnari for levels of "mutual," but even then, Cynari interactions are often left off-screen or in the background, for the players to fill in the blanks. On the contrary, Phainon and Mydei's fondness for each other is constantly in our faces.

The devs wanted players to know Phainon and Mydei are invested. We're supposed to see how much they want to be near each other.

More than that, we're supposed to understand just how deeply they trust each other.

Okay, okay, yes, I know this is massive foreshadowing to the inevitable betrayal and tragedy impending (come on, Amphoreus wouldn't qualify as an ancient Greek drama without it!), but I think that a lot of people are missing the key here: By this point in the story, Mydei already knows how he's going to die. He knows someone is going to stab him in the back and finally end his immortal life. When he entrusts Phainon with this secret, he's not trusting Phainon to keep him safe. He's trusting Phainon to do the opposite.

He's telling Phainon: "I want it to be you."

If the prophecy can't be changed and fate is set in stone, then Mydei wants Phainon to be with him in his final moments, to be the one to finally set him free from the "curse" he perceives his own immortality to be. Of course it would be Hoyo who makes "I want to die by your hands" into a declaration of ultimate trust, but it is an explicit statement of trust, in a way that very few--if any--other modern Hoyoverse MLM ships get to show each other on screen.

Phew, that was a lot!

But I think this is one of the clearest and most defining differences between Phainon and Mydei and other Hoyo MLM ships--the devs took away players' ability to claim they don't get along. You might still be able to call them "just friends" or "brothers in arms," but unlike Alhaitham and Kaveh who fight, Ratiorine who scheme, or Renheng who are actual enemies, Mydei and Phainon explicitly like each other. They trust each other. They seek one another out.

It might seem like a small thing on paper, but this is actually a big thing in practice. Hoyo is pushing the boundary here, reducing the avenues for deniability. It is harder for anti-LGBT+ fans to claim that Phainon and Mydei don't have obvious in-game ship-tease than for virtually any other modern Hoyoverse MLM ship. (By the way, this is why some people have resorted to unironically repeating the "Phaidei is industry plant yaoi" thing; because they can't deny the queer-coding is actually there this time, they instead have to try to de-legitimize the ship in other ways, such as dismissing it as nothing more than bait.)

This also means Hoyo has less of an "out" if people start to really question. It would be harder to explain away Phainon and Mydei's relationship than it would be to explain away even Alhaitham and Kaveh's. Alhaitham and Kaveh have "They're always arguing" and "Their friendship was ruined by their fight" or "They're just roommates," etc. to lean back on. Phainon and Mydei... are really bad at even pretending to be rivals...

All of this to say: Hoyo made a bold and deliberate choice allowing two of their mainstream male characters to be so emotionally close and attentive to each other on screen. They went outside their own current comfort zone for this one, guys.

2. We're Conspicuously Missing a Twink

Moving on from Phaidei's emotional differences, I wanted to talk specifically about Hoyoverse's perspectives on gay men, and how easy it is for companies to slip into not only stereotypes for gay characters, but also extremely heteronormative portrayals of gay relationships. As sad as it is, it is easier to market queer-coded male characters to yaoi fans (who are often--although obviously not always--heterosexual women) if they fit into the expected pattern for heterosexual relationships: a highly masculine man to "wear the pants" in the relationship, paired with a delicate, effeminate man to obviously be the bottom.

Now, don't get me wrong: Gay relationships come in all varieties; people have different preferences, and categorical groups like "twinks" and "bears" exist so people who have those preferences can find each other. Obviously plenty of hyper-masculine (and just masculine-leaning) gay men do want more effeminate partners. Plenty of real guys consider themselves twinks and have great relationships with men ranging all the way up the most masculine dudes you've ever seen. But "masculine man with feminine man" isn't the only kind of gay relationship around, despite the fact that that's what Hoyo's yaoi shiptease might lead you to believe.

(Edit: I can't believe I have to say this, but it seems some portion the HSR fandom cannot read, so apparently I do: Stop using my post in your hunk/twink or hunk/hunk discourse; if you didn't bother to read the paragraph above this in which I word-for-word point out that real gay relationships come in all varieties, including lots of relationships between masculine men and more effeminate men, then that is on you--this post isn't about how "hunk/hunk" is more "real gay" material or "hurr durr twinks bad;" it's about how Hoyo has served up a hunk/twink ship 20 times in a row, with their constant modus operandi being yaoi genre staple tropes in which one character is essentially designated as the bottom and the other as the top specifically using masculine versus feminine coding, because that is what sells to the yaoi fan demographic they are targeting, particularly to heterosexual female yaoi fans, who are predisposed toward heteronormative relationship patterns even in the gay media they consume. The only situation in which hunk/hunk is "more progressive" than hunk/twink is for Hoyo, who clearly have hunk/twink as their comfort zone and only very, very rarely step out of that established pattern. This entire post is about Hoyo's patterns for creating their mlm ships, not about gay rights activism--read the essay in the context of Hoyo's design philosophy or just stop reading here, please.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming: I don't want to say that Hoyo's track record on this front is bad, because honestly it's not. Their male characters often have surprisingly complex expressions of gender identity, with interesting blends of masculine and feminine traits. But... Hoyo does have a pattern. Plenty of their queer-coded MLM ships fall into this same general (and kind of stereotypical) profile: Alhaitham is inexplicably ripped and represents calm rationality, while Kaveh is "the spitting image of his mother," has to wring out his wrists when he uses his own weapon, and represents passion and romanticism. Ayato is the head of his clan; Thoma holds housekeeping classes for Inazuma's other housewives. Xingqiu is the "refined" rich boy in ruffles; Chongyun is the down-to-earth working lad. Wriothesley is the most masculine man in Genshin Impact; Neuvillette mothers the entire race of Melusines. Over in Star Rail, Aventurine covets pink diamonds, bathes himself in sparkling perfume, and is so tiny Ratio's hands can encircle his waist. (I don't actually think Aventurine is as feminine as some other people read him, but trying to pretend that he isn't designed to evoke queer tropes is just silly.) Moze is as ripped as Alhaitham, while the game itself mocks Jiaoqiu for being a pink-haired male character. I'm going to talk more about Renheng in a sec, but Renheng is also this way, with the more "delicate"-looking Imbibitor Lunae to Yingxing/Blade's solid frame.

Mydei and Phainon don't fit this pattern at all. Both of them are as tall as Star Rail models come, and while Mydei's build has an impressive degree of bulk, Phainon is no slouch either:

Neither one of them is visually effeminate in any manner, and they're also not stereotypically effeminate in their roles in the story. Neither of them is a housekeeper or a home-maker; (again, poor Aventurine catching strays, but:) neither of them is in the business of blinding people into deals with their good-looks or careful facade of helplessness.

Theoretically we could say the devs tried to squish Mydei into a more heteronormative role by giving him traits traditionally perceived as "feminine": he cooks, he plays house with children, he puts milk in his juice and turns it pink, he's paralleled almost exclusively to his own mother... But his role in the plot is such a quintessentially masculine story (son of a self-fulfilling prophecy, father-killer, god-slaying warrior, king to his people, aura-farming champion of the Amphoreus battle cutscenes, etc.) that clearly we are not meant to perceive him as a solely effeminate figure. The whole "malewife Mydei" thing comes across as comedic in many cases because the game itself continually insists on asserting his masculinity.

Conversely, Phainon, despite being the "gentler" of the two characters, the one who is described as having a soft heart and being outgoing and kind, is even less suited to being called feminine. His "Messiah"-esque role in the story, literally being the "prodigal son" of Amphoreus, paints him as the very picture of a classical male hero. Even more so than Mydei, he is a private and closed off person who hides his heart--and his own identity--from those around him, traits more often stereotypically associated with emotionally-closed-off men than female characters.

Up to this point, Hoyoverse had a relatively stable pattern in the MLM ships they baited in their recent games. They primarily played it safe, sticking to queer-coding relationships that both visually and narratively reflect heteronormative relationships.

But Phaidei once again broke the mold.

This time, Hoyo chose to queer-code not the more delicate-looking man (although I guess there's still plenty of time for Anaxa, I shouldn't sell him shorter than he already is lol), but two overtly masculine male characters, who can't be readily projected on to a stereotypical heterosexual relationship by a heterosexual audience. This was a big departure from Hoyo's norm, and I think this actually deserves a lot more respect than people are giving it. Hoyo didn't have to pick their two muscle-bound warrior male leads and make them close and caring. They didn't have to expose themselves to the obvious question: "Why are two 'manly' characters being so soft on each other?" It is harder to pass off Phainon and Mydei's queer-coding as accidental, or suggest the fans are just reading too much into it, when nothing about them can be mistaken for a "traditional" heteronormative relationship that heterosexual yaoi fans are familiar with. For a game produced in China, where standards for depicting men and masculinity in media are so high, making the choice to bait two masculine men together (let alone this expansion's "hero," who is an expy of a beloved former character), was a very bold and risky choice on Hoyo's part.

Companies don't make bold and risky choices on accident.

Finally, I wanted to make one more point about why I appreciate Phaidei's emotionally attentive depiction--it's because there's a whole other realm they could have taken the "could end up a villain" queer-coded main character. As I mentioned in the first part of this post, queer-coding villains is a trope as old as dirt. When you queer-code a male villain particularly, you add an extra layer to the danger: Now the male villain is not just a physical threat, but a sexual one. Adding queer-coding to the male villain has often, in past media, been used to conflate homosexuality with deviance or perversion and suggests sexual violence even if nothing ever truly occurs.

Maybe the real Hoyoverse queer-coding was the red flower petals we threw along the way.

I said I was going to bring up Renheng, and here it is: Unfortunately, Blade and Dan Heng fall into this latter pattern a bit. Although he has his reasons, the game's portrayal of Blade's "pursuit," especially in the early portion of their story, casts Dan Heng into the role of the victim, a young man being hounded by a crazed stalker who refuses to let him go. Their cutscenes, including Dan Heng's nightmares, paint Blade as an overwhelming presence who invades both Dan Heng's physical space but also his mental space, making it impossible for Dan Heng to escape his clutches. This "We must pay the price together" absolutely reads, out of content anyway, as some sort of yandere death pact. Their lightcone is literally called "Nowhere to Run."

Even though Blade is not deliberately engaging in any form of sexual behavior, his obsession with Dan Heng in their early scenes can give players the impression of a cliched "depraved homosexual," and the implication that sexual violence could occur is present through their early interactions. This isn't on accident; Hoyo was playing with the yandere trope on purpose! I'm not going to lie, part of Renheng's early appeal for many players was how scary and dominating Blade came across as. The subtle sexual implications of pursuit are the point, and if you think Hoyo wasn't capitalizing on the intersection of "sexy" and "dangerous" with Renheng's early interactions, then you're probably a little too pure for this world.

As things progress, of course, we see this dynamic between Renheng dissipate, shifting his narrative from "crazed pursuer for unknown reasons" to "potentially the victim" of their past scenario, an effect which they achieved through the slow drip feed of Yingxing and Dan Feng's backstories. This, I think, speaks to not only a shift in the devs' intentions for Blade and Dan Heng's relationship (there's more to be said here about the Yingxing-Baiheng-Dan Feng mess that is the cut lore, etc.), but also to a shift in the way the devs wanted Blade to be perceived by fans, from a potentially predatory figure to a much less toxic potential love interest.

Anyway, back to Phaidei: We know that Phainon is headed for a downfall. It's been so obviously foreshadowed at this point that there's really nothing much more to say than that--however, even though he may also have a brush with villainy, like Blade, and even though we know Flame Reaver's very likely going to kill Mydei... I don't think that the devs will use Phainon's queer-coding as part of his villainous/Lord Ravager identity. I don't get any sense that the dev team has any intentions of conflating Phainon's potential homosexuality with depravity, or using it as a motive for his descent into destruction (he might be gay and potentially end up on Nanook's side, but he won't be a villain because he is gay). I definitely don't think we will see the kind of sexually-threatening physicality between Flame Reaver and Mydei that the devs did earlier with Blade and Dan Heng, even if "stabbing someone from behind" does have an inherent sort of sexual symbolism.

I appreciate that even in a story headed for the obvious "stabbed in the back by the villain form of the man I loved," the devs seem like they have moved on from falling into the pitfall (accidentally or intentionally, to sell yandere tropes) of portraying of gay men as predatory.

3. Leave Room for the Trailblazer

In part 1 of this post, I mentioned that Hoyo uses the placements of characters in scenes to indicate closeness, and I already pointed out that Mydei and Phainon stand really... really... close together, much closer than they stand to other characters.

However, it's not just that their models are literally positioned closer together in cutscenes--it's that their body language explicitly closes other characters out. Plenty of Hoyoverse MLM ships are ship-baited by moving the models of the male characters closer together, but very, very few of them are positioned to so consistently exclude even the player.

For comparison, consider the well-known scene where Alhaitham brings the Traveler and Paimon to his and Kaveh's house, which was framed with both domesticity and intimacy:

Although Alhaitham and Kaveh are also prone to the "stand shoulder-to-shoulder" thing that Hoyo does when they want to imply closeness between characters, the framing of their scenes nevertheless leave enough space for the Traveler and Paimon to be active participants in the conversation, enough space between Alhaitham and Kaveh for Traveler to not look blocked out.

For example, despite standing next to each other in that moment above, the camera deliberately cuts Alhaitham out, so that only Kaveh and the Traveler duo occupy the shot. Later on, Alhaitham bridges the divide between the Traveler and Kaveh, turning away from Kaveh toward the Traveler--once again, the conversation and scene are open to the Traveler, and thus, to the player.

Here's a live demonstration of my earlier point: Alhaitham and Kaveh stand closer together than the player and Candace, indicating their closer connection.

Other scenes play out similarly--although Alhaitham and Kaveh are close, their body language doesn't actively exclude other characters or the player from feeling like part of their conversations.

Over in Star Rail, we see the same general situation. We know that Aventurine rarely stands close to other characters, with Ratio being the one relatively consistent exception, but even so, the camera will usually give them some breathing room, making it feel like there's enough space for the player on the other side of the screen to be part of the moment:

Meanwhile Blade excludes both Dan Heng and the player, putting us on equal footing to Dan Heng and giving the impression that the player and Dan Heng are standing against Blade together. There is still room for "us" in this scene.

However, once again, Phaidei proves the exception. Mydei and Phainon don't just stand close--they don't even want to share air with anyone but each other.

A very normal way to have a group conversation. Definitely.

Consistently when standing side-by-side, they turn inward to face each other, rather than facing other characters in the conversation, literally forming a closed unit despite the fact that they're supposed to be in a group scene:

The thirdest third wheel to ever third wheel.

If it wasn't enough for the devs to just imply that the Trailblazer isn't able to break through Mydei and Phainon's circle, they decided to call it out in the text itself, echoing the player's own thoughts: "What about me?"

As I mentioned in the first part of the post, the devs also consistently use specific camera angles to capture both Mydei and Phainon in the frame together, at the same time, further emphasizing the closed nature of their conversations.

You will never see so many over-the-shoulder shots again in your life. You are the outsider looking in on their private moments!

Perhaps most telling about the devs' intention to create an intimate air for Phainon and Mydei's conversations is that literally everyone else disappears when they speak to each other. For example, Phainon and Mydei's first goodbye takes place in the Garden of Life, which is actually a pretty bustling plaza with numerous NPCs. But every single NPC was deliberately removed by the dev team for Mydei and Phainon's scene there, to allow them a private moment:

Even in their final farewell, where Mydei was seen off by a literal bustling crowd of NPCs, not a single person is visible during their goodbyes--until the exact moment Mydei reminds Phainon that the whole rest of the world is waiting for him. The whole rest of the world didn't even exist for Phainon until Mydei forced him to remember.

It's not just the Trailblazer (and us, the player) who is third wheeling Mydei and Phainon's relationship. They literally exist in a world of their own when they speak to each other. No other modern Hoyoverse ship is on this level of excluding even the player--excluding even the damn NPCs!--to make a point about their closeness.

I thought I was going crazy the first time I was watching these scenes, thinking "It can't be that the devs actually went that far in framing Mydei and Phainon as a pair." But they did. They actually did.

The envelope has been pushed off a mountain, my guys.

But that still wasn't enough for the devs. They needed to go further.

4. Deploy Shoujo Manga Trope #57

I know I just said that Phainon and Mydei's relationship doesn't map well to a typical heteronormative male/female relationship, but that doesn't mean the devs gave up on any and all attempts to apply mainstream romantic cliches to Phaidei. On the contrary, the dev team's thought process seems to have been "Hey, we're doubling-down on our queer-coding for Phainon and Mydei. How can we make it really, really, really obvious they're a ship?" And then they literally spun a roulette wheel of romantic tropes and threw every single one of them at patch 3.1 at the same time.

We have the "romantic lead beautifully framed by red rose petals blood glitter":

The "You used my love to manipulate me" subplot:

Phainon begs for compliments, and Mydei's reaction is to look away demurely and call him a scoundrel?? Am I seeing things?!

This is where he'd be blushing like a tomato if he was a female character.

The "please look after my dear husband when I'm gone" tragedy trope:

THE RING???

"LET'S MEET AGAIN IN THE NEXT LIFE"?!!

What do I even say about all... this...? Do I even need to say anything at all? Has any MLM ship in a recent Hoyoverse game gotten remotely as many romance flags? Alhaitham, where is Kaveh's ring?!

What I actually want to say isn't a specific breakdown of any of these moments, but what they mean in totality. Remember that Hoyo made every one of these choices with deliberate intent. They knew what the picture would add up to. These are explicitly romantic tropes that are extremely difficult to interpret in other lights.

You are supposed to read "If there's a chance in the next life" as "I want to be reincarnated with you; I want to meet you again; I want to be with you in a softer world."

You're supposed to think of the ring as a wedding ring. For one, Gorgo would only have gotten it through her marriage to Eurypon, but even more so--there was no reason this item needed to be a ring in the first place except to evoke images of wedding rings. We already knew from 3.0 that Castrum Kremnos used crests and seals for identification. Why make it a ring and not just the crest of Castrum Kremnos? Furthermore, why involve Phainon at all? The audience would never have known any different if Chartonus just said "Found this I did; have it you should, Mydei." It's a ring and it's a ring deliberately from Phainon because the devs want you to see it as a wedding ring.

What an incredibly bold move on Hoyo's part, and I don't even really mean just in the context of being a Chinese company, but even in the context of being a global company. Hoyo lives and dies by the revenue of their character banners, and choosing to explicitly and (nearly) exclusively apply romantic tropes to their male lead and deuteragonist in a brand-new patch cycle was a legitimately daring choice. Their deliberate application of romantic staples to an MLM ship, in a way that is difficult even for anti-LGBT+ fans to write off, was a very, very calculated decision. I genuinely hope it pays off for them. I hope Mydei and Phainon's banners both sell well, so the devs' receive a clear message in turn that fans appreciated their boldness and their commitment to creating queer content for these two characters.

I'm just going to end on one final note, about a scene that you may have noticed I conveniently skipped. Yes, the most conspicuous scene of them all:

5. A+ Censor Dodging

By some miracle of obliviousness, some Olympic-level mental gymnastics, or by sheer force of will, I think some people might still have made it to this point thinking that Phaidei was not being deliberately baited by the devs. You could maybe, somehow, convince yourself that the blood glitter rose petals and the shoulder-to-shoulder emotional conversations were just coincidences, that the turn-away-and-pout "I'm not worried about him!" was just dudes being tough guys, that the Trailblazer was a third wheel because Phainon and Mydei are just "really good friends."

But then devs said "No, we need to be unmistakable. We need to make ourselves 1000% clear. We are baiting the yaoi fangirls, guys; please stop ignoring our hard work."

If going further than they've ever gone with Mydei and Phainon's body language wasn't enough, if Phainon's being willing to kill a god to save his man wasn't enough, if implying a wedding ring wasn't enough, what else could the devs possibly do to remove all plausible deniability and make it undeniably clear that they are baiting Mydei and Phainon as queer characters (even if it is only for the benefit of yaoi fangirls)?

They can do something they've never done in their recent games before: Imply actual sex between male characters.

(Side note, Hoyo lesbians have had this implied sexual content pass from the beginning. You will always be famous, Beiguang. It's only the male characters that can't even have implied sex. 😂)

Obviously Phainon and Mydei are not having sex in the game. The dialogue even goes out of its way afterward to remind us that they remained fully clothed in that bath, thank you. But the refusal to show what was actually happening--censorship used as a tool to imply--the cut to the black screen, the narration of one animal pursuing another, the discretionary water droplets between the moaning... (And another little edit because @mynabirb made such a good point in the tags: The fact that they chose to "censor" this with a butterfly, the literal symbol of romance in Amphoreus, is almost too much. The devs really did say "Time to silence all doubts.")

From the player's perspective--and examining this as a choice on the dev team's part--there is no way to read this scene other than "sexually suggestive." You're supposed to think "This sounds incredibly sus." Because it is sus. Because the devs added this scene knowing that it would intentionally make people think about the idea of Phainon and Mydei having sex.

Sure, this scene is really funny in context. You're supposed to come out of it laughing, going "Wow, they're idiots." But you will also, whether you like it or not, come out of this thinking "Damn, Hoyo really went all in on the yaoi bait, didn't they?"

You can't "Devs didn't mean it" out of this one.

Which is brave as hell on Hoyo's part, to be honest! Even if this is nothing but queer-baiting, they saw that sick yaoi fan money and decided to go all in on it.

Say it with me: A dev team from a country with notoriously strict rules against depictions of homosexuality in media, from a company with a huge global fanbase including many conservative and religious countries, and with a majority male target audience, went out of their way to undeniably include sexually suggestive gay content in their game.

Whatever their motivation--be it simply money or from a genuine desire to tell gay stories--this wasn't a casual decision. This took commitment. This decision almost certainly went all the way to the top brass of the team for clearance. Someone probably had to fight to get this added.

But they did it, and not with Kaveh and Alhaitham (the previously undisputed kings of current Hoyoverse queer-coding) but with two brand-new (to Star Rail at least) characters who have extremely important roles in the game's on-going narrative--major characters who can't be overlooked.

Phaidei is literally built different.

But I'm still left with one lingering question:

Is Hoyo queer-coding or just queer-baiting?

Even though I played 3.1 in a sort of stupefied haze because I actually couldn't believe what I was seeing in Phainon and Mydei's scenes, I also ended it with a pretty bittersweet feeling.

How amazing that Hoyo pushed the envelope so far with Phaidei... But at what cost?

Did Mydei really have to leave Okhema never to return? Or is he being banished from the plot because his relationship with Phainon was too intense?

Isn't this just the "bury your gays" trope, in essence?

Lore-wise, there isn't any reason Mydei actually has to leave Okhema forever. Sure, he presumably is going to fight the Black Tide where it manifests across Amphoreus, but what about that requires him to "never return"? Demigods aren't geographically bound to the locations their Titans blessed, or Aglaea and Anaxa wouldn't be able to leave the Grove. There shouldn't be any reason Mydei can't visit Okhema when he wants.

The more you think about it, the worse it looks that the dev team implied Phaidei harder than they've ever implied an MLM ship before, only to immediately turn around and go "And then Mydei left forever." As if the only way it's okay to make characters that gay is if you then get rid of at least one of them. (Speaking humorously, at the rate Phainon and Mydei were going, if the devs didn't get rid of Mydei, he and Phainon probably would have been making out on-screen by 3.2, but you know what I mean.)

Sure Phaidei can be the MLM Star Rail ship with the most support in canon--but only at the cost of never being seen together again, apparently.

I'm not sure I like this trade off.

However, I am telling myself to remain cautiously optimistic. We know that Mydei's role in the story is not done, and that he and Phainon are destined for a reunion, even if it won't be a happy one. We've been told that Amphoreus's story will be "heart-warming." I choose to believe that the devs will try to scrabble some sort of positive ending out of all this. At the very least, perhaps we'll end with a "in another life montage," and get to see Phainon and Mydei finally meeting in that library.

So is Hoyo queer-coding from a genuine desire to include gay characters or just baiting hard to sell Mydei to fangirls?

I'd say let's wait and see. Amphoreus has barely started cooking.

In the meantime, I think it is worth examining (and appreciating) Hoyo's willingness to mix up their own patterns, break their own trends, and to try something truly new and different with Phaidei. Even if this is all the content we ever get, Hoyoverse did things they haven't done before in any of their recent games, and showed that they're willing to push the limits for queer content in order to tell the stories they really want to tell.

Let me hold off on the political and legal consequences of including gay characters in Chinese media for just a second, and look at the situation from the perspective of Hoyo's target audiences first:

Take this data with a grain of salt though; I'm not sure where they got their numbers.

First, Hoyoverse games are increasingly global and surprisingly popular in conservative/religious countries such as Russia, Malaysia, and the UAE. The western world as a whole is shifting increasingly right on LGBT+ issues. For the games to be marketed well across the globe, they've got to avoid challenging the morals of these highly varied audiences. (Perhaps this is why past Hoyoverse titles seemed more open to LGBT+ content than present Hoyoverse games do; a broader audience actually means more restrictions on content.)

Second, even though conservative heterosexual male players are actually surprisingly fine with MLM ship tease, that only applies so long as it stays at the level of "I can pretend I don't see it." As long as anti-LGBT+ players can write off any MLM content as "just close friends," the dev team can get away with frankly shocking amounts of queer interaction between male characters. (I'm sorry to any straight male fans reading this [could there possibly be any?], but half of y'all could win gold medals if mental gymnastics were a sport. The lengths I have seen some male Genshin players go to try to explain away Haikaveh are honestly awe-inspiring. 😂) However, the boundary must be respected. The moment a male character's queerness exceeds subtext and becomes text, when even mental gymnastics cannot come up with a heterosexual explanation, and the plausible deniability goes out the window, it is no longer acceptable to anti-LGBT+ players, and they will be "turned off" from pulling that male character en masse. In essence, the market is telling the devs: 1) Huge amounts of queer-coding = a-okay, but 2) Actual canon queer content = that's gayyyy, no wayyyy.

And third, the obvious: China's stance on LGBT+ people is weirdly stricter in media than it is in "real" life. It is not illegal to be gay in China but it is illegal to be gay in a video game in China. Restrictions on media portrayals of gayness are significantly more strict than restrictions on actually being gay (which is interesting cognitive dissonance for those from outside the country, but that's an essay for another day). Hoyoverse legally cannot show characters engaged in any explicitly queer behaviors--at least that can't be explained away.

Furthermore, the rules apply very differently for male and female characters. WLW content gets way more of a pass from the censors. Bronya and Seele can blush at each other, but Alhaitham and Kaveh cannot. You would never see "Rondo Across Countless Kalpas" happening with male Hoyoverse characters. The censors literally would not allow it, strictly because Chinese standards for portrayals of men are different--and more strict!--than standards for portraying women. Legally, there are strong and serious limitations on what Hoyo can do with their male characters.

Summing all of this up, in trying to create their male characters and content, Hoyoverse is actually fighting a battle of conflicting pressures: Male characters sell better when they are queer-coded, but their interactions can never rise to the level of being canonically gay.

Everything must exist in the realm of implication.

(Yes, I can hear you: "Can you please get to Phaidei already?" 😂)

All of this foreword was to lay a foundation for the actual point I want to make about Phaidei: Because Hoyoverse can only queer-code and not actually queer their male characters, they have (in their modern games), fallen into a sort of pattern with their MLM ship bait. Certain plots and personalities keeps reappearing again and again. They've developed a sort of short-hand set of traits to give to their male characters--the Hoyoverse "queer-coded MLM starter pack" if you will lol.

While not every popular MLM ship in Hoyo's games has the same traits (obviously not), certain elements seem central to creating the delicate necessary gray area between "They're just baiting fangirls" and "The devs intended these two characters to be canonically gay but just couldn't state that textually."

And yet... And yet...

You're not imagining things: Phaidei is actually different.

To demonstrate just how different though, I wanted to take the time to compare Phaidei with other popular Hoyoverse MLM ships, looking at both the similarities (the patterns that Hoyo relies on to reliably queer-code their characters) and the noticeable differences (where Hoyo pushed their own boundaries in surprising ways).

Unfortunately, in the interest of full transparency, my own Hoyoverse experience is limited, so I can only use examples from Star Rail and Genshin Impact. I just haven't played HI3 or ZZZ, so I don't feel comfortable trying to use examples from those games, although I think there may be many ships that fall into similar patterns in those games as well. (Maybe some people can share in the comments?)

Anyway, let's start with similarities:

1. A Pair of Equals

The number one "rule" for popular Hoyoverse queer-coded MLM ships is that the two characters must be evenly matched. This isn't to say they have to have identical levels of physical strength (although that is also often the case); instead, the audience needs to perceive them as being on equal footing in some way. They must either be intellectual equals (Alhaitham and Kaveh), political equals (Ratio and Aventurine; Neuvillette and Wriothesley), equal in social standing (Tighnari and Cyno), or, yes, actually physically equal their capability for going toe-to-toe against each other (Blade and Dan Heng; possibly Zhongli and Childe; for those who ship it, Diluc and Kaeya).

For modern Hoyo games, queer-coded MLM ships with noticeable discrepancies in power dynamics are particularly rare; possibly the only one that comes to mind is Ayato/Thoma (though this is mitigated by the game deliberately telling us that Ayato treats Thoma like family, rather than like a servant). And I think this actually says a lot about the devs' thought process: They are deliberately avoiding scenarios in which one male character seems capable of "preying" on another, where the queer-coding could accidentally be perceived as sexual perversion due to a discrepancy in power dynamics.

They're intentionally averting the "depraved homosexual" trope by--sometimes literally--spelling out for the players that both male characters in their queer-coded MLM ships perceive each other as, and are interested in each other as, equals.

We see this explicitly with Ratio and Aventurine in Star Rail:

And Alhaitham and Kaveh in Genshin:

Even Blade and Dan Heng are likened to "a pair" of identical objects:

So of course, Phainon and Mydei push this to an extreme. Phainon describes himself and Mydei as "friends and foes," and the game goes out of it way to reiterate over and over that they are perfect equals. Although they compete in everything they do, there is never a clear victor; their score card is constantly balancing out because they match each other's skill and power perfectly.

But there are even hints in the game that this isn't just happening naturally, but also by choice: Even when one of them triumphs over the other, they both backtrack and insist on getting on equal standing again. Whether you win or lose the "competition" in Kremnos in 3.0, the outcome is the same:

Phainon and Mydei perceive each other as perfectly matched (in strength, right, right...) and are actively working to keep it that way.

The game also goes out of its way to insist that Mydei and Phainon aren't just equals in terms of strength but also in social standing. It theoretically should be impossible to match Mydei's place on the social ladder--he's the literal crown prince of an entire nation of world-renowned conquerors. Even Aglaea is not a queen; we see her on screen being forced to contend with Okhema's Council who are fighting her for power. There technically isn't anyone in Amphoreus (at least that we've met so far) who should be able to stand on equal political or administrative footing to Mydei.

Except, of course, for Phainon, who supersedes all others by virtue of being the literal prodigal son, the "Chosen One."

The game insists on putting this in our faces over and over again: Mydei may be a king in the making, but Phainon is the "Deliverer." They are equally matched in terms of authority.

The game even goes out of its way to tell us they're perfect mirrors in personality too:

Hoyo, in the kitchen cooking up another gay ship: LISTEN GUYS, they're equals, do you understand me? A MATCHING SET.

But also...

2. Diametrically Opposed

It isn't enough for the queer-coded men to be each other's perfect equals. They also have to be opposites, typically in terms of their personalities. This is the pattern that repeats itself most consistently across Hoyoverse MLM ships with strong textual support: the two men may be equal, but they're also nothing alike. (At least on the surface.)

Alhaitham and Kaveh's entire plot hinges on their directly opposing personalities and morals, representing the clash between rationality and sensibility. Dan Feng was reserved and cool-tempered, while Yingxing was "arrogant" and brash. Hell, Xingqiu and Chongyun are "refined and clever" versus "forthright and trusting." I actually think Zhongli and Childe, despite being the most popular Hoyoverse ship in the western fandom, have very little canonical support, yet they still fit this pattern, with Zhongli as the refined gentleman to Tartaglia's blood knight tendencies.

We know how Ratio sees himself and Aventurine:

Hoyo really said "Opposites attract" and ran with it for every single MLM ship they ever teased.

And there's a logical reason for this. Making the two male characters dead opposites actually slightly decreases people's ability to argue that they're "just friends"--if they have next to nothing in common, they're not usually bonding over mutual hobbies or basing their connection on shared similarities. It becomes harder to portray two male characters as "bros who just get along great" when they're deliberately written with opposing tastes and personalities. (Real friends can sometimes be dead opposites, obviously, but most friendships are built on mutual interests rather than opposing ones, while romantic relationships hilariously have the "opposites attract" stereotype.)

There's no reason to shove polar opposites together again and again except to watch the sparks fly.

Even Hoyo's male characters' color schemes are often perfectly opposite. Plenty of people have figured out if you palette swap Alhaitham and Kaveh, Dan Heng and Blade, and Ratio and Aventurine, you end up with the same colors. Ayato and Thoma match the pattern here too ("red and blue gays" is a well-known trope).

But once again, the devs pulled out ALL the stops for Phaidei:

They're red versus blue. They're sun and moon. They're outgoing versus introverted. They're a king and a peasant (if we believe what Phainon's telling us about Aedes Elysiae). They're the "outsider" and the "golden boy." One fights with strength and the other with technique, brains versus brawn (actually they're both kind of idiots though, so take this one lightly lol).

However, what I think is most interesting about Hoyo's pairs of MLM opposites that is that the devs deliberately subvert expectations by assigning the opposing traits to the "unexpected" character. In both Haikaveh and Ratiorine, it's the rational scholar who is more overtly caring and attuned to their partner's feelings. In Renheng, it's the kind-hearted Yingxing who is consumed by anger, while the aloof, expressionless Dan Heng's voice trembles in wonder at the mere mention of Yingxing's name.

For Phainon and Mydei, this inversion of opposite traits occurs with their personalities specifically. People expected Mydei to be a gruff, hot-headed, battle-hungry berserker with a sarcastic or arrogant personality at best.

Instead, Mydei is an extremely thoughtful person, who struggles with his fate not because of what will happen to himself but because of a desire to bring the greatest good to the greatest number of his people. He's a respectful, gentle (when he needs to be), and even sentimental young man who continues to hold on to love for those who have long passed away. He's reserved around strangers but generous and warm to his companions, and struggles to express himself but has a clear desire to be considerate of others.

We also know he's deeply aware of and emotionally affected by the racism his people are experiencing in Okhema; one NPC in Okhema reports how Mydei, despite being new to Okhema himself, stood up to the very council still plaguing Aglaea in order to protect his people:

Despite having difficulties expressing his own thoughts, he even scolds Phainon for approaching their farewell with a nonchalant expression--Mydei doesn't reject emotions or shy away from becoming close with people he cares for.

Instead, it's Phainon who actually struggles to be honest. While he might connect easily with others on the surface, seeming outgoing and kind-hearted, he is actually a much more private person, one who is reluctant to show his true feelings and dismissive of questions about his past and identity. As opposed to Mydei's desire to avoid Nikador's power, Phainon is (despite his doubts) eager to prove himself, spurned on by the pressure of the prophecy telling him he needs to achieve greatness. We're told that he craved the power of strife specifically, while Mydei summarily wishes to reject it.

It's Phainon who frequently has to be reined in by others--he was ready to kill Oronyx for delaying his rescue of Mydei--and Phainon who fails to let go of his hatred and desire for revenge, causing him to fail Nikador's trial, which Mydei easily clears.

By inverting the traits of the characters, creating designs which visually oppose each other while assigning the actual opposing personality traits to the "mismatched" character, the devs hammer home an implicit message: These two characters complete each other. They fill in each other's gaps. What you expected to find in one of these men, you will instead find in the other. What they wish to be, they will be drawn to in each other.

(Frequently bought together, do not separate!)

3. The Distance is Artificial

Okay, so if they're so obviously written as a "pair," being perfect equals and perfect opposites, how are they just "queer-coded" and not explicitly queer? How is Hoyo keeping up the illusion of the characters not being an obvious couple when they're literally written to complete each other?

Hoyo has one major tool in their arsenal to do this: Prickly personalities.

With the exception of Renheng, which I'll get to in a second, Hoyo has a favorite method for enforcing the rule of plausible deniability, the idea that "Nooo, we promise, they're not in love; they don't even like each other, see??"--and that's giving one of the characters an intractable personality.

This can manifest, like Alhaitham and Kaveh, as constant bickering, where the pair's main method of communication is to devolve into petty arguments or sarcastic quips.

Fans who support the ship can view this as an "old married couple" dynamic; but for those who do not support the ship and choose to insist that Hoyo isn't actually queer-coding their male characters, they can lean on these arguments as "proof" that the characters don't actually love each other.

A similar pattern was recently repeated with Sethos/Wanderer, with Wanderer's prickly personality being used to keep Sethos at bay.

By placing the characters at odds with each other through bickering, Hoyo introduces just enough doubt to make the "They're only friends/roommates, we promise" argument hold some water. This allows them to get--quite honestly--a lot of queer content past the censors and past homophobic audiences too.

We see them repeat this trope with Aventurine and Ratio in Star Rail, introducing the two characters as initially "at odds" with each other and trying to pass it off as Ratio despising Aventurine.

Even after revealing that they were plotting together, the game insists on introducing some lingering doubts, suggesting that Aventurine fears Ratio would actually betray him.

This creates the necessary "gray area," the gap that Hoyo can use to hide in--no, Aventurine doesn't trust Ratio at all, see? Maybe they don't even like each other? Who knows! The doubt doesn't exist because the story particularly needs it, but simply so that Hoyo has a shield to hide behind if people begin to question how close the two male characters are.

Even in comedic material, Hoyo intentionally keeps this "necessary distance" in order to allow themselves wiggle room. Is Ratio an enamored tsundere who can't spit his real feelings out, or does he actually think Aventurine is illogical, mediocre, and ridiculous? Was the "Keeping Up With Star Rail" video an example of Hoyo deliberately baiting by making Ratio flustered over Aventurine "on air," or is he being Aventurine's biggest hater in this clip?

It's just questionable enough that those players who hate MLM to interpret it as the latter, and provides just enough doubt to help Hoyo slip queer-coding under the radar. Those who want to see it will see, while it's written just vaguely enough that those who don't want to see it will not see it.

(That's the point Owlbert, that's the point.)

When in doubt, and when stuck with a pair of characters who aren't likely to bicker with words, Hoyo sometimes has to progress to the next level: making them actual enemies.

What's better for creating plausible deniability than one of them trying to kill the other? (They definitely were not fooling around in a past life. We promise.) In an ironic twist with Renheng in particular, the fandom seems to have somehow come to the (mistaken) consensus that Dan Feng and Yingxing were "confirmed canon" (truly, I see this stated everywhere; we love when reading comprehension fails in the right direction for once lol), leaving only Dan Heng/Blade as being of questionable "canonicity." However, this still works as far as Hoyo is concerned, because only Dan Heng and Blade are left on screen.

By insisting on their present inability to reconcile, Blade and Dan Heng are able to introduce just enough doubt into the equation to offset even significant ship tease for Dan Feng/Yingxing.

Enemies to lovers 150k+ slow burn, please look forward to it.

Okay, but back to Phaidei. At first, it seems like Phaidei is going to follow this pattern to a T: When Phainon first introduces Trailblazer to Mydei, the two seem to be at odds, bickering over how Mydei is choosing to confront the enemy. Mydei even calls Phainon out for an unintentionally insensitive statement (when Phainon demands to know why Mydei isn't "protecting the citizens," Mydei asks "Who are you implying is not a citizen here?" i.e., "Are you saying because I'm Kremnoan I don't count as a citizen?" You can see Phainon practically bite his tongue to take back his words.)

Also known as: Mydei experiences a microaggression.

Mydei's very first line directly to the Trailblazer is to insult Phainon's hospitality, and we know they definitely have plenty of silly insults to lob at each other while competing.

But this is actually where we see the first deviation from the pattern for Phaidei. Although there's a few cursory lines throughout their early dialogue, that's all there ever is--just cursory attempts at suggesting the two bicker and don't get along.

Within one scene, the "tension" present in their first meeting entirely devolves into purely playful banter, and it is clear by the time we finish 3.0 that Phainon and Mydei are actually very close and get along well, with virtually none of Haikaveh's biting comments, Blade and Dan Heng's violence, or Aventurine and Ratio's questions of loyalty. Phainon and Mydei took one look at the rest of Hoyoverse's MLM ships and said "How about we skip that will they-won't they?" lol.

But I'm not quite ready to talk about the places where Phaidei departs from the normal pattern yet, so I'll leave this point by just saying that Hoyo did start Phaidei on the same path as a majority of their other MLM ships, making a vague attempt at using their rivalry to suggest they wouldn't get along--thereby allowing for the alternative interpretation to quiet the haters (and the censors).

4. The (Physical) Distance is Non-Existent

Okay, but if Hoyo uses personalities to inject just enough distance into their queer-coded pairings to avoid crossing any boundaries, then what do they do to tantalize the audience, to make it seem like the characters might actually like each other?

They use body language!

First, just to reiterate a basic video game design principle: All animations and character placements have to be programmed by someone, and that means that all animations and the physical locations of characters in scenes are intentional. Nothing happens in cutscenes by accident.

Designers are constantly making a series of choices any time they have to put together a cutscene, and one of the key choices they have to make is how to express each character through their movements and their positions relative to other characters. (I've talked before, for example, about how Aventurine frequently turns his back on people, forcing their eyes to follow him throughout his cutscenes, taking physical control of the reactions of people around him.)

Hoyoverse games have somewhat standardized scene layouts for conversation cutscenes, with characters typically being placed at different distances from each other depending on their relationships. A majority of conversations happen from a generally cordial conversational distance, which means that any time characters cross this gap and close the distance, the dev team is intentionally sending the players a message.

Like, no one mistook what this was about, right?

Heterosexual jumpscare in my queer post; I'm sorry, I was just too tired to find a video with Lumine lol.

Repeating for good measure: Unless it is with a male playable main character (where the presence of the female main character is what lends the deniability), Hoyo legally cannot show their male characters engaging in physical contact that could be construed as romantic. Male characters can't hold hands; they can't even really hug unless it's "caught you as you fell after battle" (props to Dan Heng for being the only male character in Star Rail to get a "hug" with Jing Yuan lol.) There's a boundary that Hoyo male characters do not cross, and that's almost universally the realm of physical touch.

But Hoyo can place their queer-coded male characters into scenarios of physical closeness that they don't typically show among other characters.

Alhaitham and Kaveh's table says hello.

So does Tighnari and Cyno's single tent from this same quest; Cyno's Story 2, truly the quest that kept on giving.

Aventurine, a character who traditionally keeps half a room's distance between himself and the people he's talking to, suddenly doesn't seem to mind closing the distance with Ratio:

And even Renheng, the eternal enemies, are depicted as crossing physical boundaries, explicitly "getting in each other's faces." Yes it's a battle, but also, I've seen yaoi with less domineering poses lol.

You might think these lightcone examples are a stretch, but seriously: Go look at all the lightcones in the game. Does a single heterosexual couple have a lightcone where they are in each other's space in this manner? No, because physical closeness is actually a tool Hoyo is consistently using to queer-code. (Well, there would probably be more heterosexual closeness too if the incels weren't so weird...)

Anyway, when I saw the devs might be heading the direction of baiting Phaidei, I fully expected that we would see them side-by-side more consistently and with less of a gap between them than between other characters. But I wasn't remotely ready for the degree to which Hoyo would take that.

Here is an example of Phaidei exhibiting the "normal" Star Rail conversational distance:

Andddd... here's where they spend the other 90% of their scenes together:

The unnecessarily large distance between them and the Trailblazer gets me every time. Like they are not leaving room for Jesus Kephale.

Even when they aren't standing practically on top of each other, the devs deliberately choose camera angles that frame them both in the cutscene at the same time, which is relatively rare for Star Rail (not unheard of, but usually the camera will just go for the "first person POV" when two people are speaking, allowing for a close up of the speaking character). Instead of back-and-forth close ups, many of Mydei and Phainon's conversations are framed from a "behind-the-shoulder" angle, to catch them both in the frame. This creates the illusion that they're standing closer together than they are, and also reinforces a sense of intimacy in their conversations--the camera (and thus the player) becomes an "outsider" while their bodies turn toward each other.

Again, Hoyoverse is under pressure to avoid showing physical contact between male characters that could be construed romantically. They can't show Mydei and Phainon tangoing like Black Swan and Acheron. When it comes to queer-coding male characters, they have to use the tools available to them, and their primary tool for visually signifying the possibility of romantic closeness is physical closeness.

The camera is telling you that Mydei and Phainon are close.

Anyway, just one more point I wanted to make before moving on to discussing how Phaidei completely crushed the mold for Hoyoverse queer-coding, but...

5. Oh God, We're Turning Into Your Parents

Listen, I'm a reasonable person. I can fully accept that I play games with LGBT+ goggles on at all times. Despite being fantastically aroace myself, I love yaoi. I love yuri. I even like plenty of straight ships. I'm a fangirl first, academic second, so believe me when I say that I understand how skeptics might view some of the points above. "You're just fangirling. Being equals and opposites doesn't automatically imply romance. The devs might have intended close friendship, not a relationship." This counter-argument is valid!

So I want to end with one more point which I think is actually the lynch pin to proving that Hoyoverse isn't "accidentally" making their male characters come across as queer. Hoyo's queer-coding for certain ships is very intentional and even sometimes very overt. In a few cases prior to Phaidei, they were already skirting the upper limits of plausible deniability, and I think the modern ship that previously pushed the boundary the most is Haikaveh.

You can say what you want about other Hoyo MLM ships and their lack of canon textual support (I love you ZhongChi, even if the devs actually hate you lol), but I believe people who unironically say "The devs are not baiting Alhaitham and Kaveh as a ship" are so media illiterate that it's actually embarrassing to share air with them. Whether you think the devs are just doing it to cash in on yaoi fangirls or because they actually want to depict gay characters, it is indisputable at this point that Alhaitham and Kaveh have in-game ship tease. They just do, and one of the most obvious and unmistakable instances of this is when Kaveh's hangout paralleled Kaveh's relationship with Alhaitham to the heterosexual marriage between Kaveh's mother and father.

To draw a direct connection between Kaveh's father and Alhaitham, who is repeatedly described as not being able to understand Kaveh's artistic sensibilities and idealistic world view but nevertheless chooses to stay by Kaveh's side through his many troubles, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that Kaveh is his mother's spitting image, both physically and emotionally, can really not be interpreted in any other way.

Hoyoverse took a queer relationship and made a one-for-one analogy to a heterosexual relationship--Alhaitham and Kaveh are a direct reflection of Kaveh's very married parents.

This isn't something that can happen on accident. This is deliberate and unmistakable queer-coding.

Which makes it absolutely wild that it happened twice.

I've posted already about the obvious parallels between Mydei's parents and Phaidei, and I'm actually almost out of room for new images here, so I can't post the images again, but I hardly need to at this point: Mydei's parents met when Gorgo challenged Eurypon at the Kremnos Festival. They fought for ten rounds, determined that they were (what do you know) perfect equals, and Eurypon proposed on the spot. Eurypon is explicitly described as a swordmaster, while Gorgo used a spear.

Later, the game repeatedly (and in various separate instances), emphasizes that Mydei and Phainon's first meeting consisted of a duel lasting ten days and ten nights, where neither of them could secure the victory, proving them to also be each other's perfect equals. Phainon's role as Okhema's swordmaster is emphasized, while Mydei wields a spear just like his mother when killing his father and after taking on Nikador's divinity.

Then there's... everything that came after. Eurypon betrayed Gorgo, effectively stabbing her in the back, and took her life. The foreshadowing that Phainon will do this exact same thing to Mydei is unmissable.

Phainon has even expressed an explicit desire to take part in the same competition where Mydei's father crowned the winner his wife:

In the (very limited) Kremnoan dictionary, I'm pretty sure this is how you say "I'm down to fuck."

Just as in the case with Haikaveh, there is no way that this parallel could have occurred by accident. The devs did not go out of their way to give us entire flashbacks of Gorgo and Eurypon's meeting and downfall for no reason. You're supposed to see the one-for-one connection between Mydei's very heterosexual, married parents and Phainon and Mydei's relationship.

Simultaneously, the devs also parallel their MLM ships to heterosexual relations by incorporating shades of domesticity normally reserved for "traditional" male-female relationships into their MLM ships--including levels of domesticity that heterosexual ships in Genshin and Star Rail usually don't rise to. One of Genshin's most popular MLM ships shares a single-family home and has a chore chart. Thoma is Ayato's housekeeper. Tighnari and Cyno are just flat-out joint raising a child. Jiaoqiu cooks and Moze cleans. Yingxing and Dan Feng accidentally(?) made a baby.

And Phainon and Mydei aren't any exception. They live an apocalyptic world that is constantly calling them away to battle, but the devs went out of their way to tell us Mydei is an extremely good cook who prepares everyone's food and deliberately ruins Phainon's when he's annoying, which is definitely old married couple behavior lol. Mydei is framed repeatedly as being good with children, not just in the distant fatherly way but in the "plays house" and follows-along-after-unaccompanied-kids-like-a-mother-hen way. Yet when Mydei has to leave, taking the classic "I'm going off to war" ancient Greek exit, he doesn't depart without leaving Phainon his people--with the camera panning specifically to the little Kremnoans. Phainon got the kids in the divorce. D; The tragic domesticity is already off the charts, and then they hit you the second punch when Mydei's last question (just one or two lines later) confirms that it was Phainon who got the ring for him. Hoyo couldn't actually have given us a more heavy-handed "parting husband and wife" parallel if someone held them at gunpoint. That whole thing was some Odyssey level bullshit. I see you devs, I see you.

You might be tempted to say that is just heteronormativity, which it could be, but I actually think it serves a very specific place in Hoyo's queer-coding repertoire. In comparing gay relationships to heterosexual marriages, the devs effectively "legitimize" their queer characters, suggesting that the relationships between gay male characters are no less real or valid than those between men and women. In demonstrating that male characters can achieve stable and healthy domestic lives with each other, the devs reiterate that players are not supposed to notice a difference between gay and heterosexual relationships.

There isn't any clearer way for Hoyoverse to legally say "We want you to think of these two men as romantic partners" than to say "Wow, isn't it interesting that their relationship is identical to a married couple's." It's on purpose; at this point, you really can't say the queer-coding isn't deliberate without looking like you can't read, and if it was intentional when Haikaveh paralleled Kaveh's parents, then it was doubly so the second time Hoyoverse pulled this trick to parallel Phaidei to Mydei's parents.

PHEW! Okay, I finally made it through the foundational traits for Hoyoverse MLM ship-bait and where Phaidei fits in with those. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk! 😂

But... the whole reason I started this post was actually because I wanted to talk about differences between Phaidei and other Hoyoverse MLM ships, and particularly how bold Hoyo actually was in 3.1, pushing the envelop to an extreme degree to ship-tease Phainon and Mydei.

So, since the post was way, way too long, I've spit the rest of my point off into a second post.