#competing with myself to find blorbos that are more and more mortifying to talk to to anyone Normal(TM)

[windcarvedlyre]

For the blorbo ask meme: 7, 14, 24?

Ask meme

Hi Toaster!! I assume you're here for Venti commentary; I'll answer for my more recent ones as well.

7. What’s the one thing the fandom gets wrong about your Blorbo?

Venti

I am not completely caught up with Genshin content right now and I'm not on top of what fandom's currently doing with him. When I saw his behaviour in Paralogism, though, and especially looking at his relationship with Dahlia, it made me think that maybe we (myself included!) have been putting too much angsty aversion to acting as a god and steering Mondstadt onto him?

Obviously that's specific to Venti enjoyers, though. Broader fandom sometimes completely falls for his lazy drunkard bard thing as all he is, takes his apparent weakness in the prologue at face value, etc etc.

Komaeda

The main thing that comes to mind is always the fandom's perception of his actions as Servant. Dadmaeda memes are really funny to me too, and I'd love exploration of a dynamic like that actually forming post-DR2, but to this day I still see people talk about Servant like he was genuinely just a glorified babysitter while all his friends were out doing actual terrorism. But he gave a whole speech in UDG about how he's been pulling strings the entire game! He's complicit in what was effectively a genocide of Towa City and Saw trapped a lot of the DR1 cast's loved ones on the side! It feels like the servant thing is a facade people are falling for.

Shadow Milk

I don't think I can really answer for this guy considering how little we still know about his backstory and his feelings about most other characters. Any interpretation of him involves a lot of speculation right now; I haven't even been around that long to fully dig through the source materials. I've been confused at how opinionated I've seen some people be about his past and AU selves, though, because I feel like there's enough room for interpretation with both (especially the Fount, we have pretty much nothing on his personality) that fully fleshing out either is fanfic territory atm.

14. Have you ever distanced yourself from your Blorbo / have you ever left a fandom because people in the fandom were being too toxic?

Don't think so! I've never been one to make decisions about media consumption based on how other people are acting on the internet about it. NGL, a factor in me never getting around to some DR metas I wanted to write was some nonsense half a year ago, but for the most part I've just been struggling to make things in general.

24. If you could change one canonical thing about your Blorbo, what would it be?

Venti

Put him in a story that doesn't shy away from letting playable characters be awful people and revisits people more than once a year.

But hmm... we still understand so little about how he fits into the lore, what horrible things he might be complicit in and how willingly, what he has going on with the Abyss, etc., and all of that would really impact how his current behaviour reads to me, so I'm not sure? I wish we got to see him getting involved in his people's personal lives, and other characters actually having to come to terms with what he is, onscreen more. He feels underutilised.

Komaeda

'Delete DR3' or 'rewrite DR3 to actually pursue what it started with his character instead of reducing him to flanderised comic relief half of the time' are the obvious things to say, but I usually ignore DR3 already. If I could change anything in DR2 it would be to make exploration of his baggage an actual part of the plot (and fix the translation errors, obviously). He should still self-destruct because it's really good thematically*, but DR as a series has a huge problem with using severely mentally ill characters for shock value and tucking away anything else about them such that only dedicated players/those already primed to empathise with such characters will see them as anything more than Crazy(TM).

*It would also be really compelling if he had his ch5 plan thwarted last-minute and was forced to face the flaws in his ideas in ch6, though.

I also wish he'd listed core symptoms of lymphoma and frontotemporal dementia in his final FTE, because you should not need to look that up externally just to understand a character. I've seen people questioning the latter diagnosis based on misconceptions that that could easily clear up as well, like thinking young people can't develop dementia or expecting him to have Alzheimers-like symptoms when (to my understanding) FTD can present differently in earlier stages.

Shadow Milk

Akin to Venti in that so much remains to be established about him that I can't really say. Anything I feel is unfulfilled potential right now are things that could be being saved for the future, and anything shitty about him is part of the charm for me. Is it a cop-out to say 'animate him more'? The small glimpses we get of higher-effort depictions of him, with his hair moving around/being meltier and the eyes in it looking around independently of each other, are so fun but those are barely apparent in his actual sprites.

Also like Venti, I wish the beasts were in a non-gacha story that could go all in on them, not dripfeed us little bits of story over years while constantly having to introduce and market new characters. At least CRK doesn't seem to shy away from making characters horrible, though.