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starcurtain · 11 days ago

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Mydei: Legend, Reality, Agency

A while back on Twitter, I saw an excellent thread going around about how so many in-game sources of information on Mydei tell his story as if recounting an ancient myth, an unreal epic tale of a fictional hero, rather than a "real," existing being. (Thank you to @ruby019x for finding the link to the thread!)

Reiterating the point of that original Twitter thread: Unlike the other Chrysos Heirs, whose stories get treated as contemporary "real" events or whose tales are told through their own perspectives, almost everything we know about Mydei is framed through the filter of third party observers, resulting in a character that feels less like a person than a myth made flesh. Mydei's story doesn't come across as the coherent timeline of someone telling us true events--it feels like a jumbled, highly exaggerated account that might spread as rumors through word-of-mouth, or, more accurately:

It feels like storytelling.

The way Mydei's backstory and all of the sources of information we have on Mydei in-game unfurl in contradictory and overwrought manners has the ring of a legend passed down through generations, losing and gaining details over time, being misremembered, aggrandized, and taken out of context, until the heroic figure at the core of the story no longer has a human identity but has transcended to become a mythological figure, real history fading into romanticized narrative.

Mydei isn't a living, breathing "person," he's the untouchable "king of kings," the "greatest conqueror, the mightiest protector."

Overall, this storytelling effect is very apparent, in virtually every source of information we have about Mydei throughout the game:

Mydei's character stories are all third party accounts of his actions and past:

Phrases such as "legends state," "rumors swirl," "the author boldly speculates" etc. abound in Mydei's character stories, making it clear that all of the information contained in them is suspect at best--these are others' perceptions of him and the events of his life, not his own perspectives on what occurred.

Unlike virtually every other character in the game, instead of Mydei's character stories being a chance for players to get to understand Mydei's inner world, to see him from his own perspective, we're given this strange distance, these observations from "outsiders" who clearly fail to grasp who Mydeimos is as a person or real his motivations. In one character story, Mydei's own advisors struggle with their complete lack of understanding, questioning his decisions and rewriting his actions as being "bewitched" by Aglaea and the Flame-Chase Journey, instead of genuinely committed to the cause:

There's even confusion and speculation among fans about who wrote the handwritten notes at the end of each of Mydei's character stories. Are these Mydei's notes, answering the accusations, setting the records straight, and adding his own personal perspectives at last?

While I'm still somewhat inclined to say these are Mydei's notes, the fact that these notes are supposedly from books "in the archive of the Library of Garbaniphoro"--a library this lifetime's Mydei shouldn't actually have had any access to--definitely complicates that reading, not to mention that Mydei doesn't seem to demonstrate the level of self-interest that would drive him to look up and read a bunch of books about himself in the first place...

The fact that we fans can't even fully tell whether these notes were actually written by Mydei or by someone else--such as Khaslana, seeking accounts and histories of the person he cared for, trying to set the record straight even in timelines where his blade would eventually spell the end of Mydei's life--is just another hallmark of the confusion surrounding Mydei's life. In practically every moment, we're still not sure if Mydei is speaking for himself or not.

Mydei's chapters in "As I've Written" continue this exact same trend, giving accounts of his life through third party observations, rumors, and questions:

"They say," "others guessed," "rumors rife," a "wild tale," and literally "the protagonist"--this isn't a first person account of Mydei's backstory, his own thoughts on his situation, or his true life's timeline. It's a dramatized retelling of events through the lens of outsiders looking in, turning a "person" into a "protagonist," making him a fictional character in his own life (this is very meta, by the way).

The mission and journal text throughout Amphoreus's plot, even all the way from 3.1, also echo this, with second person point of view instead of first person, emphasizing Mydei's title as if that were more important than his personhood, and dictating his feelings as if they're "absurd," not earned or valid, while mission text in 3.4 paints Mydei as a completely overblown figure, a larger-than-life myth:

Even NPCs, particularly the Kremnoans, often speak of Mydei in this way, as if he was not a person but a figurehead, a symbol they are rallying behind, rather than a human being with challenges, hesitations, and thoughts of his own:

The end result of all of this together is that Mydei comes across much more like a fictitious character than nearly any of the other Chrysos Heirs. Is he a lingering hero of the Chrysos War one thousand years in the past? Is he the re-embodiment of the spirit of Kremnos itself, son of both "Queen Gorgo" and "Gorgo, the Founder of Kremnos," as the game so likes to conflate? Is he a conquering tyrant, the king of kings, an embodiment of the sea, the Guardian of Amphoreus, the beloved crown prince of his country or the patricidal traitor?

Even in the meta sense, we players struggle to separate fact from fiction, leading to the sensation that all along, Mydei's single "story" has actually been multiple stories, at least two different timelines interweaving into a jumbled, incoherent past full of made-up events that couldn't have occurred, contradictions, and out-of-context plot points coloring even the player's perceptions of Mydei and his past.

And all of this, I think, is very intentional.

If you were to ask me "What's is Mydei's real role in Amphoreus's story?" I think the best answer to that question is: Mydei's role in the story is a commentary on the nature of storytelling itself.

The theme of storytelling is essential to Amphoreus's plot, with the "As I've Written" text being treated as the core model for each character's memory-identity that the Trailblazer is inscribing and bringing with them into the past (and therefore also the future) of Amphoreus. The idea of storytelling and narrative is so central to Amphoreus that the entire plot effectively revolves around it: The Flame-Chase Journey, and therefore the entire core reveal of Amphoreus being a simulation instead of a real world, is tied to Plato's allegory of the cave, itself a story about people who believe facsimile (their shadows cast by flame on the cave wall) is reality--in other words, a moral about mistaking narrative for truth.

It is only by rejecting the false reality--breaking free of Irontomb's simulation--that Amphoreus's people can become "real," escaping the digital unreality to enter the actual universe. In essence:

It is only by escaping "fiction" that one can embrace "true" existence.

But there's a second layer of the moral quandary: If the fiction is more beautiful, more entertaining, and more glorious than reality, would it be better to stay in the story, to turn your back on reality and just be the heroic protagonist of a fairy tale epic?

The game itself asks us to confront this idea:

"Do you care how true a memory is?"

Mydei is a walking, talking manifestation of this exact theme. Are we actually supposed to care how accurate his backstory is?

If Mydei is just meant to be a narrative symbol of kingship, of guardianship, of Strife, then does it really matter if things about his past do not add up?

If Mydei is a pure stand-in for the concept of "the mythological hero," do we really need his timeline to make sense?

Is an aggrandized, dramatized recounting of his past and deeds not perfectly in keeping with the way every mythological hero's past is told?

Consider our real world heroes of yore--Beowulf, Odysseus, Gilgamesh--do any of them feel "real"? Do we think of them as actual historical figures who lived and died like we do, or are they larger-than-life heroes whose actions are all so fictionalized and exaggerated that they never could have happened in real life? Do we understand our heroes as sentient, three-dimensional existences? Do we know their thoughts, their feelings, their struggles outside the narrow confines of their legends?

Or do they exist just to be morals, role models, symbols?

In fact, there is evidence suggesting that many mythological figures like Gilgamesh and Beowulf were real kings who actually lived in our real world--but we will never know the true stories of those men, because their truth has been entirely consumed by narrative.

Fiction eclipses fact.

We take the shadows on the wall to be "truth," and never see the real world beyond the cave.

Mydei's story is a microcosm for what is happening in Amphoreus's plot as a whole, a concentrated example of what occurs when memory becomes "blurry or gets idealized."

It's a pointed commentary on the nature of storytelling, because you never tell the exact same story twice. Over time, as you recall the tale, it changes, minute details being washed away in favor of remembered generalizations, hyperbole, and shifting interests. Every person who retells the story, every new perspective on the original material, brings their own agenda to the table, further altering the original until it barely resembles what really occurred.

As Trailblazer and Co. struggle with the question of how to make Amphoreus real from the memories we have gathered--and whether we want to recreate the world accurately or pen a different, much happier ending--we see that same struggle play out in miniature through Mydei, whose true life and true voice are being subsumed in before our very eyes by myth, by legend, by others turning him into a convenient symbol or source for their own speculation.

Through Mydei, we see the dangers of what can happen when memory becomes "beautified," capturing fiction rather than truth.

But more than its reflection on his overall role in the story, I think there's a fascinating side effect of choosing the concept of "storytelling" as Mydei's central theme: Writing him as a character whose real thoughts and feelings are eclipsed by other people's perspectives puts Mydei in a position normally occupied by female characters in media--the position of having to fight for agency.

(Before I go any further with this point, because the Star Rail fandom has literacy issues, let me doubly clarify: I am not talking about the experiences of actual real world women here [although they do often reflect fictional women's experiences]--I am talking strictly about the roles and struggles stereotypically assigned to female characters in media. If you can't keep that context in mind, stop reading here, because I don't want to deal with pancakes-and-waffles people who think saying "Media frames X as a feminine trait" is equivalent to saying "Real people can't be feminine if they don't experience X." PLEASE.)

Okay, with that out of the way, what I mean is this:

One of the most common experiences of female characters in media, especially in media written primarily by men, is being unable to speak for themselves. The stories of female characters are often told almost exclusively through the lens of their male protagonist counterparts, and female characters are often given less interiority. Even in cases where female characters are able to express their own individual thoughts and feelings, those thoughts and feelings are often dismissed in favor of others' interpretations. ("Oh, so you actually mean ____" or "You don't really feel that way.")

Because Mydei is a character whose role in the story is defined by his truth being eclipsed under mythology (his actual thoughts and feelings hidden behind the game sharing only the perspectives of outsiders), he also effectively becomes a character who does not speak for himself, willingly or not.

Obviously Mydei's character stories are perfect proof of this, locking us out of his own inner world by giving us almost entirely the views of others, one of whom even rejects the very notion that Mydei could be exactly who he is, saying "There's no way such a person could exist," no way this would be real behavior, no way Mydei could be an altruistic and kind person:

The "As I've Written" chapters double-down on this notion, stating multiple times that Mydei is "a man of few words" who rarely conveys his thoughts on any matter. He is repeatedly described as "going silent." Worse, even when he does convey his thoughts, others find his words to be "absurd" and abandon him:

Hell, even Mydei's marketing materials get in on this impression:

But this trend towards silence happens outside of Mydei's written materials too. Over and over again, the game puts Mydei into positions where other people tell him how he should be thinking or feeling. It isn't that other people are always wrong about Mydei's feelings, but that the game consistently frames Mydei's emotions through other characters, rarely letting him be the one to express himself.

It happens with Krateros numerous times, but most clearly in the memory fragment after Mydei kills his father, where Krateros literally tries to tell Mydei what he's supposed to be feeling and how he should react to what just happened:

It occurs with the Chrysos Heirs several times, such as Tribbie telling Mydei how he should feel after Phainon's failed trial (no, I'm not blaming Tribbie here; she didn't do this maliciously):

We even see this happen with Phainon, who ends up interpreting Mydei's feelings on Mydei's behalf:

There's actually a running joke throughout 3.0, 3.1, and Mydei's "As I've Written" about other people (read as: Phainon) acting as historian in Mydei's stead, to speak about his past on Mydei's behalf, instead of Mydei sharing his own perspective on Kremnos's culture:

In 3.1, we get to see a Mydei who struggles to articulate his own thoughts and find the "right' words, and a Mydei who is keenly aware of the many times his thoughts fall of deaf ears, when his words fail to move the people he truly needs to persuade:

And nowhere do I think this futility in speaking for himself is clearer than in Mydei's highly symbolic relationship with language itself. It's no accident that Mydei "rarely speaks his native tongue" and the Kremnoan dictionary is jokingly referred to as "blank":

Since Mydei is synonymous with Kremnos, we can say that the game's refusal to let him speak much Kremnoan--and the game's refusal to let the Kremnoan language speak for itself--is equivalent to Mydei's inability to express his "true" self on his own terms. The emptiness of the Kremnoan language, though played as a joke, also effectively mirrors Mydei's silence as a character. Just as Mydei does not embrace his native language, he's not comfortably able to express the things he wants to say as a whole.

But how are we actually supposed to interpret this silence?

Is Mydei being spoken over or is he just choosing not to speak? Is this solely a case of Mydei making the mature decision not to respond to others' provocations, not to lower himself to deny false accusations? Does he just want to keep all his feelings hidden deep down?

I think you could easily interpret Mydei's constant returns to silence, interpret the game's decision to have all of his story told through others, as an example of classic "manly" stoicism, a male character simply refusing to be vulnerable or speak his true thoughts or feelings out loud. Maybe we could argue that Mydei simply doesn't see the point in telling the truth about himself, because he knows people will invent their own stories anyway.

But... to be honest, I think the framing is a little different with Mydei. He's not actually that stoic or detached from his feelings. In fact, he's frequently rather candid about his emotions, significantly more so than Amphoreus's other primary male characters, Phainon and Anaxa. Although he rarely speaks his own inner thoughts, Mydei readily tells others (namely Phainon) to stop trying to hide their emotions, and in 3.1, he does actually try repeatedly to share his personal concerns, frustrated by the irony that his own language supposedly doesn't even have words for the things he's feeling.

While he is certainly reserved, Mydei does not seem to ascribe to the toxic idea that men should never express their feelings, and he doesn't aggressively hold his cards close to his chest. I don't get the impression that Mydei wants his life to be eclipsed by rumors and others' distorted, biased perspectives--I don't think he really wants to be silent.

In fact, in several moments across 3.0 and 3.1, Mydei tries quite hard to articulate his true wishes and thoughts... only for others to talk over and dismiss what he is saying.

We see this happen even all the way back when Mydei was a child, trying to express his dreams:

As a joke, this happens during 3.0 with Phainon, who "translates" Mydei's lofty way of speaking for the Trailblazer into different (inaccurate) words during their journey through Kremnos, even at one point going "Yeah, to be honest I have no idea what Mydei's trying to say either. Let's just move on."

We see it happen in 3.1 with Aglaea, who (for her own valid reasons) refuses to acknowledge Mydei's feelings about the coreflame of Strife, writing his reservations and fears off as "foolhardiness and indecision."

We see this happen even with Chartonus, who questions why someone like Mydei would be "terrified" of fulfilling his destiny, only for Mydei to struggle to explain the depths of his fear of losing himself to Strife.

"Why wouldn't I be terrified?" he says in 3.1, only for literally everyone to ignore him.

We see this happen with Krateros and the Kremnoan elders, who both explicitly scold Mydei for acting like a submissive (read as: stereotypical impression of femininity) prey animal instead of an dominant (read as: stereotypical impression of masculinity) predator.

I've written about this elsewhere, but this is the direct rhetoric that feeds into Mydei's "As I've Written" story based on the proverb "Until the lion has its own historian, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." This proverb directly targets the duplicitous nature of storytelling, where one side of the story often gets told and the other is forgotten--clearly intertwined with Mydei's case, where the truth of his story goes untold in favor of the other side's perspective, where predator and prey are switched, and the lion becomes the victim, not the victor.

In fact, Mydei taking this supposedly "prey" role (serving another's cause, where his wishes are a distant second to the wishes of others), becomes one of Eurypon's foremost complaints when Mydei is confronted by his father's ghost: Mydei is the kind of person to quietly support others (a role stereotypically given to female characters), which flies directly in the face of Eurypon's near constant attempts to project himself and his own violent, "kingly" emotions onto Mydei.

So, all together: A character whose actual feelings are dismissed, downplayed as too emotional and not befitting his station, who finds his words falling on deaf ears, who is perpetually projected upon by the men in his life, and is constantly having his thoughts interpreted by others on his behalf instead of getting to be his own "voice"?

It's literally the quintessential fight of female characters across centuries of storytelling, and Hoyo deciding to assign this conflict to what initially appears to be one of their most stereotypically masculine figures in the entire game is fascinating, because it changes what is otherwise a cut-and-dry story of the prodigal son refusing to carry on his father's legacy into a significantly more complex, gendered reading: What if the son is not intuitively an aggressive, commanding man, but someone who struggles to articulate himself, who despite being able to carry the banner of leadership whenever he must, actually seeks the quiet, supportive role for himself when given the freedom to do so?

When people say that they were pleasantly surprised by Mydei's charcter because he wasn't the macho brute they were expecting him to be, I think what they are actually perceiving is this, the incredible dichotomy of taking the most classic masculine story of all time--son surpassing his father, prince becoming king--and assigning it to a character whose central emotional conflict is, historically, feminine. This is cool! This is really, really unique and cool!

But if all that isn't enough to convince you that Hoyo is doing crazy interesting (and surprisingly gender-nonconforming) things with Mydei's role in Amphoreus's story, then that's fine, because I haven't even actually gotten to the wildest part:

Setting aside entirely whether Mydei is able to speak for himself, the game deliberately and constantly goes out of its way to put Mydei into situations where he has no say in the things that are happening to him, once again assigning Mydei a conflict typically given to female characters across centuries of storytelling: the quest to gain agency.

Despite the game initially framing Mydei as powerful leader and strong decision-maker who could never be swayed by others, a warrior who would fight against fate with his very life on the line, drilling down into his story reveals a character who has effectively had no control over the course of his life at any given point in time, both in a conscious sense and in the meta sense of being a simulation in Irontomb's loops.

From the time of his birth, a prophecy dictated the entire course of Mydei's early life, setting his path in stone in a way that he seemingly couldn't have avoided even if he wanted to. He's thrown into the sea, left with no choice but to fight every day for survival--but even inside the sea, despite actively saving fishermen, Mydei never saves himself, simply staying in the ocean he supposedly despises until... what? He achieves a level of power sufficient to fulfill his future prophecy? 🤔 Later, Mydei will go on to describe his destined clash with his father as merely an "obligation to be carried out"--not something that ultimately made him happy or felt like a choice he was making of his own free will, but a moral duty to avenge his mother, done in the service of her honor.

Even serving as Kremnos's crown prince isn't actually portrayed as something Mydei was ever excited about, something he truly wanted for himself. In his memories, it's his closest friends and Krateros constantly urging him to take up the throne, and it's of course the Kremnoan people as a whole endlessly begging him to guide them in their pursuit of Strife and glory...

Outside of just his thoughts and words, the game constantly shows us scenes of Mydei being told, as the crown prince, how he should act, what he must do:

Essentially, Mydei escaped from the sea and in very short order was thrust into the role of stewardship with little (to no) chance to choose a fate separate from Kremnos. This happens despite the fact that Mydei is personally and repeatedly framed as "the least Kremnoan of them all," a boy who seemingly never grasped the faith of his fellow Strife worshippers. In his flashback with his mother, Mydei's very first question is "Why do we have to learn to fight at all?"--not something a "normal" crown prince of Kremnos would ever be asking.

Yes, yes, before you get up in arms: Of course Mydei loves the Kremnoans and has enormous pride for his people, don't get me wrong. I don't think he hates being their crown prince at all. I think he would never give up the position unless he was 110% confident that his people were ready to lead themselves or that someone else could truly and completely rule them better than he could. All I'm saying is that it's also abundantly clear that Mydei never actually had any say in whether he would become the Kremnoans' leader; that the role was something put onto him from the moment he was born, with fate once again dictating the course of his life.

Before going into the events that take place during the game's actual plot, I also think there's one other major aspect of Mydei's overall character that should be read as a denial of his agency, and that's Mydei's "curse of immortality." 3.2 tried to reframe Mydei's immortality in a weird way that frankly makes no sense (claiming that it was Mydei's choice all along, and that he was the one deciding not to die), but literally everywhere else in the game, it's made pretty clear that Mydei's immortality is indeed a curse, one that he can't be rid of unless he is stabbed in his tenth vertebra, and thus even the circumstances of the end of his life are largely outside his control. Phainon remarks on exactly this when Mydei describes losing all his friends, sympathizing with how Mydei was prevented even from joining his loved ones in death no matter how many times life was taken from him, no matter how many times he sacrificed himself on the altar. (This is why Khaslana's parting words to Mydei in the cycles are so meaningful, because Khaslana is actively choosing to view his violence against Mydei as a way of setting Mydei free.)

Okay, now the more recent stuff: The first time we see Mydei seemingly exercise any form of agency is in making the decision to bring the Kremnoans to Okhema, but from the players' perspective, we ultimately know this is no real agency either: The simulation demands that Mydei join the Flame-Chase--"fate" was always going to guide him to Aglaea in some shape or form. Furthermore, the decision to join Aglaea is framed by literally everyone else in the story as Mydei "submitting" to her authority, Mydei giving up his power to a "usurper," and Mydei being "bewitched," all phrases once again implying an inability to make his own decisions.

This ultimately proves true not long later, when, throughout the first portion of patch 3.1, we actively watch Mydei be manipulated, against his explicit wishes, into taking the coreflame of Strife.

Even though he says he doesn't condemn Aglaea and Tribbie for their manipulations, it doesn't change the fact that Mydei was being manipulated, pushed into a corner by Aglaea choosing to use the safety of the person he cared for as a weapon against him. It also doesn't change the fact that Mydei spends the entire first half of 3.1 admitting to multiple people that he's terrified of becoming the demigod of Strife and having that fear continually dismissed by people who basically tell him to just deal with it, because that's his role in the prophecy and his fears that taking on Strife will ultimately lead his people into meaningless death are really not that important in the grand scheme of things.

3.1 was literally "Watch the entire cast strip Mydei of his agency," the patch.

And then the craziest of them all: Finding out that it isn't just Cycle 33,550,336 Mydei who was struggling with a lack of autonomy but seemingly every Mydei, all the way back to Cycle 0, where he's once again put into a situation where he functionally has no choice but to comply:

In Cycle 0, we're told that Mydei brought the Kremnoans to Okhema and then went before the Okheman Council of Elders to sue for civil rights--literally all he asked for was equal rights for his people.

In return, Aglaea pulled the strings on the situation so that Mydei would lose this duel and she could make her demand of him: Join my emo band Flame-Chase Journey. (Again, nothing against Aglaea, she was doing what she thought she had to do, but damn what a cutthroat way to do it.)

Effectively, in 3.4 we get to once again watch Mydei trade himself to ensure the happiness of others, giving away his own freedom so that the Kremnoans could just have basic equal rights. What the fuck, Hoyo?

This was extortion in real time, right before our eyes.

Hell, Mydei not getting to make his own decisions happens even the game's silliest joke media!

Can't even sleep unmolested, constantly getting dragged around by Phainon? Just shaking my head, for real for real. LET MY BOY BE! 😂

Okay, back to being serious: Overall, Mydei's lack of agency is so consistent and so clear-cut, that even Mydei himself seems to be fully aware he has very little freedom amidst the crippling demands put upon him by his station and his prophecy:

This is why Mydei's decision in 3.1, to dissolve the Kremnoan dynasty, is framed so intensely as "taking back agency for himself," as choosing to make a decision that wasn't aimed at trying to make everyone else happy:

Making a decision that isn't to please others? Oh Mydei, you are so "single female protag finding her independence" coded.

This is framed as Mydei finally getting to make HIS OWN decision, his way to make a better future for his people. We're supposed to perceive this as Mydei casting off the shackles of others' perceptions of him to take the brave step forward and do what he believes is truly right. It's not about making others' happy, but about securing the only real way forward to a future, and the game tells us that Mydei only feels comfortable with his own fate after he's able to make this choice on behalf of his people--not with their permission, but by the virtue of finally finding his own voice.

Except thatttt... the moment you actually think about what is happening here, the illusion of Mydei having free will falls apart, and Amphoreus's cruel irony sets in.

Early in 3.1, Krateros says that Mydei is a headstrong person who always does what he wants:

But as we delve deeper into Mydei's story, it becomes clear that even Mydei's most headstrong decisions (such as bringing the Kremnoans to Okhema) aren't done in his own self-interest or simply whatever Mydei "pleases"--all of his decisions, every single one we're shown in the game, are done in the service of others, doing what Mydei feels compelled to do to fulfill his duty to protect the people he loves. He didn't bring the Kremnoans to Okhema just because he personally wanted to--he brought them there because he believed that was the only way to save them. He didn't join the Flame-Chase Journey of his own free will--it was just the only path to secure any future for his people at all.

As I've written before, even this decision in 3.1 (to dissolve the Kremnoan dynasty, take up the coreflame of Strife, and go home alone to fight the Black Tide) wasn't actually for Mydei himself.

In fact, it flat out runs contrary to Mydei's most deeply held personal wishes. Mydei didn't want to become Strife. Mydei didn't want to return to Kremnos's ways and spend every remaining moment of his life at war. Mydei was seeking a home to call his own--a land to finally belong in--and then had to give away all the peace and happiness he'd found in Okhema as his final gift to his people:

The decision in 3.1 doesn't actually represent Mydei gaining complete agency over his own decision-making or finally getting the freedom to pursue his own personal dreams--it's once again a decision he was obligated to make by his own unyielding sense of honor and his (admittedly noble) sense of responsibility for his people.

The fact that Mydei's decision to become the demigod of Strife still doesn't represent agency becomes doubly true with the reveal in 3.4 that all of Amphoreus is a pre-determined simulation, running on rails, with Mydei himself being a programmed figure unable to deviate from his assigned path. Every major decision simply leads down the same exact road that was decided eons ago: Mydei was always going to become the demigod of Strife. He was always going to leave Okhema. He was always going to die to Flame Reaver's blade.

The decision to return to Kremnos and take up Nikador's role is presented initially as Mydei's free will--but all along it was nothing more than playing into the "prophecy," playing on the side of the Black Tide and Lygus's goals. Mydei's character arc in 3.1 revolves soooo intensely around exercising agency, only for us to learn in 3.4 that he never stood a chance in the first place. (If this sounds familiar to Phainon's arc, that's because Mydei's arc is literally Phainon's arc, by the by.)

Ultimately, having the benefit of multiple patches of story now, we can look back over Mydei's current contributions to the plot and see the truly fascinating dichotomy of his character.

On the one hand, Mydei is a hyper-masculine character with a design that unquestionably insists on his identity as a man. A surface-level examination of his character presents a quintessentially masculine archetype: the wayward son, rejecting his father's shadow, growing into a role of stoic, solemn leadership, suppressing his own grief and loss to unwaveringly fulfill his duty as Chrysos Heir, prince, and king.

The obscured, hyperbolic retellings of his past paint him as a "hero of eld," an unmistakably male mythological figure akin to Achilles, Odysseus, or Gilgamesh.

Mydei refuses to be or even see himself as a victim, returning time and time again from death, stronger and more full of the wrath needed to survive in an apocalyptic world. Even when he has no freedom to actually make his own decisions, he does keep trying. He keeps fighting, endlessly, to make himself heard and to try to break the shackles of his fate, situating him firmly in the (traditionally) masculine figure of the "warrior."

But despite all of this exterior masculine trapping, Mydei's core inner conflicts are surprisingly feminine (that is, they're struggles more typically given to female characters in media):

Over and over and over again, we watch others speak for Mydei, rather than Mydei truly getting the chance to speak for himself. We're denied access to his inner world by the "they say"s and the "rumors rife," every single person getting their chance to weigh in on Mydei's story but Mydei.

In real time, we watch other characters dismiss his fears and hesitation as "foolishness," and interpret his feelings through their own lenses, without Mydei stepping up to correct them. We get to see Mydei struggle to articulate himself and make others take him seriously. People constantly tell him what he should do, what he shouldn't do, how he should act and how he shouldn't... His central conflict is explicitly centered on his fears of being unable to please everyone, and his ultimate role in the story is one of sacrifice, giving and giving and giving of himself to aid others.

One of the most common complaints about the roles assigned to female characters in media and one of the core litmus tests used to determine whether female characters have agency is the question "Does the plot happen to this character or do they drive the plot?"

The truth is that, for all his raging against the dying of the light, Mydei is a character who has things happen to him, rather than actually getting the chance to freely exercise self-determination in Amphoreus's plot.

So, so, so much of Mydei's character revolves around seizing back agency in a world that seeks to control every aspect of your existence--and this a story that has been told, time and again, with female characters. That's not to say that it's never been done with male characters before, of course it has, but that there is something incredibly interesting about making "finding your voice in a world that dismisses your feelings" the plot for a (supposedly) hyper-masculine character in a gacha game with a primarily male target audience.

Mydei, by all rights, should be one of the characters with the most power and most agency in all of Amphoreus. He's an extremely strong warrior, a kingslayer, a god. He's ripped, he's got a wicked heavy metal gore-filled trailer... On paper, he's "Man" with a capital M.

But Hoyo chose to do something more complicated with his character. They chose to do some truly interesting play on the question of autonomy, placing a Hero (also capital H) into the stereotypically restricted, silenced role where female protagonists have so often been relegated in the past, then left us players with the disconnect and discomfort of watching a male character be so bound by the expectations of others that even his greatest moment of defiance and free will turns out to just be playing into the hands of yet another person oppressing him.

Like so many female characters have in the past, Mydei doesn't get to be a "real" person with fully examined interiority. The game denies us this by insisting on his story being told almost entirely through the perceptions of others, by obscuring the truth of his past in a fog of confusion, by Mydei making the choices he is compelled to by duty and loyalty, not those that truly match his own inner wishes and dreams.

Mydei almost never gets the chance freely express his thoughts, have his feelings validated, or reclaim his freedom of choice from the systems exerting pressure on his life. The lion doesn't have its own historian, and we only get the truth of Mydei from Mydei himself in brief and barest flickers.

At the heart of Mydei's story lies a fascinating conundrum that creates a truly intriguing and layered character--all-powerful and yet powerless, hyper-masculine and yet voiceless, a myth more than a man.

Say whatever you want about Amphoreus's plot, pacing, etc., but geez, Mydei is a cool character.

#honkai star rail #mydei #hsr meta #character analysis #contains material up to patch 3.4 #have you seen my son #(who is kind of girl-coded)#now you have #I've been turning all this over in my head since I saw that twitter thread #because there's something so deliberate in Hoyo's insistence #on Mydei's story being told by everyone BUT Mydei #on the fact that the biggest glimpse of truth we have from Mydei #came from his ONE moment of opening up to Phainon #and yet over and over again the game takes words out of Mydei's mouth #takes the freedom of decision-making out of his hands #even in their jokes!!#also entirely unironically #this isn't a shipping post #but if you're wondering why there's such a massive discrepancy #in Phaidei versus Myphai dynamics in the fandom #I think that Mydei's central emotional conflicts having a historically feminine bent to them #is a genuine subconscious factor affecting people's perceptions of him #and that though it is stereotypical #there is still a distinct correspondence between “femininity” and “bottoming” in fandom #some food for thought there for those who are just here for ship fuel #lol

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