aoxizu - Tumblr blog

[aoxizu]

if the jing yuan dan heng collab is not real and ends up being a dream i apologize in advance for the person i will become

watched the livestream and jing yuan is in penacony. i repeat jing yuan is in penacony

he is there alongside dan heng in il form and they have this very cool shot together

and i really hope they are not like illusions from sparkle or hallucinations brought by the memoria and actually there for real

penacony has made me so distrusting of everything you "see"

anyway that is the single highlight of the entire livestream. nothing else is as important as jing yuan in penacony

i do wish blade was also here but that would probably get even more chaotic

sadly dr ratio, aventurine, and topaz all seem to be away, though topaz is making an appearance in the form of a first half rerun

i wish i could get boothill but i'm going for topaz to complete the aventiopaz trio and then i need to save for screwllum, the other robot, even though screwllum may not be released anytime soon

what if i start another series under the tag i am so normal about this guy but about screwllum this time

that could be fun

[aoxizu]

watched the livestream and jing yuan is in penacony. i repeat jing yuan is in penacony

he is there alongside dan heng in il form and they have this very cool shot together

and i really hope they are not like illusions from sparkle or hallucinations brought by the memoria and actually there for real

penacony has made me so distrusting of everything you "see"

anyway that is the single highlight of the entire livestream. nothing else is as important as jing yuan in penacony

i do wish blade was also here but that would probably get even more chaotic

sadly dr ratio, aventurine, and topaz all seem to be away, though topaz is making an appearance in the form of a first half rerun

i wish i could get boothill but i'm going for topaz to complete the aventiopaz trio and then i need to save for screwllum, the other robot, even though screwllum may not be released anytime soon

what if i start another series under the tag i am so normal about this guy but about screwllum this time

that could be fun

[aoxizu]

once again i am qlipoth. that is me. i am the true architect, i am the builder of walls, the amber lord, the firmamend arbiter. 5/5 preservation characters (ok only 2 of them were limited 5 stars but still)

(this is from back in october or september while i was pulling for lynx)

so the count is e0s0 gepard and aventurine and e2s1 fu xuan

nanook still hates me. i had to get misha from the event and still have not seen any sign of arlan or xueyi, though i did get clara on standard, so that was nice

i still need topaz, which i could have gotten in 1.4, but it was 100% worth it to save for 3 updates and get 373 wishes for jing yuan, which does mean now that i have to really start trying in moc/pure fiction to get enough for topaz and to guarantee screwllum, who will ideally be able to use jing yuan's light cone but who knows if his kit gets sudden drastic changes later on

i do also. need another dps. but who needs dpses when you could just pull for supports right

but honestly fu xuan is so nice to use that i've mostly retired gepard, so we'll see if aventurine can convince me to start running preservation again over jing yuan and if he can carve out enough of a niche for me to go back to the double preservation days

but also this puts me in a bad spot with topaz, since i have so many areas where it's like 26 out of 27 chests found, and also topaz can work with jing yuan in addition to just ratio

in an ideal world i would simply wish enough to guarantee topaz but with so much uncertainty (what mihoyo wants ):< ) i am probably just going to be a normal player and continuously gamble throughout the banners

[aoxizu]

i have discovered customization and i am now unstoppable

artist of the star rail icon is muyingbumuguang on lofter

bonus very easily readable layout:

[aoxizu]

If the inventory is a log of things that are in the Trailblazer's possession, then that means Stelle is the one holding the Express' half of the jade abacus Jing Yuan gave them, which in turns means that Stelle is the one who can contact them.

And that's funny as hell, because it's Stelle. She probably goes around threatening to call the Luofu for anything. The IPC pressuring Belobog? She reaches for her pocket and pulls out the jade abacus. Duke Inferno wreaking havoc in the Herta Space Station? Pulls out the jade abacus and says Jing Yuan is going to kick his ass just like he did to the Heliobi. The Family and the IPC are acting weird in Penacony? Well, they won't try shit if the Lightning Lord blows the whole hotel away!

[aoxizu]

it took me this long to make the connection between pier point and 庇尔波因特 because literally who translates pier point as 庇尔波因特. who. who came up with this. i've been coming across these terms since probably before 2.1 or whenever people started using it in fanfiction and only now am i drawing the conclusion because i just did not expect them to go with a literal transliteration instead of translation. i've been assuming these were two completely different places this whole time for some reason because pier point feels like a name that could be easily translated instead of transliterated, whereas 庇尔波因特 gives off unique foreign language vibes and feels very space-y. like pier point feels real almost like an average name and then 庇尔波因特 is like future novel unknown or whatever

anyway. can't believe it took me this long after being fully aware of both terms.

but it's also interesting how one translation choice completely changed my first impression of the area just based on the name and how it sounds

and once you sound it out it's so obvious. how did i miss it. how did i go so long without realizing that they were the same thing.

[aoxizu]

an interesting thing to note is that the when-hit-by-a-car expression is different from the angry expression you get when using the camera and opening up the facial expression panel

this is jing yuan's hit by a car expression

and this is jing yuan's angry expression from the in game camera

i tested briefly on other characters and they also have different expressions but i didn't take screenshots

did you know that if you get hit by the cars in penacony the character's expression actually changes

also i've actually learned how to crop videos now

[aoxizu]

did you know that if you get hit by the cars in penacony the character's expression actually changes

also i've actually learned how to crop videos now

[aoxizu]

eclipse happening but i will be in a classroom with no windows learning things instead of watching the sun go slightly dim because we are very far from the path of totality

and even if i was outside there are probably clouds.

[aoxizu]

Sometimes i think about the fact that Jing Yuan has no one he can lean onto and be completely vulnerable, you know those situations of "i look for an adult, but it turns out im the adult" situations? Thats him

Im not saying he has no companions, he does, old and new, but there always feels like a gap inbetween them, a bridge no one nor him wants to cross, either its from his fear of losing more people in his life without realizing or his title as a general

His position doesnt help him in that aspect either, because if the people sees their leader waver it would shatter the trust, he always has to be multiple steps ahead all the time and put a front that he knows what hes doing no matter if he does or doesnt

Hes not alone, and yet he keeps everyone at arms length, surely itd get lonely eventually?

[aoxizu]

if the genius society rewards depth then the intelligentsia guild (or maybe just dr ratio) strives for breadth

the genius society seems to be a lot more picky about its members, choosing only those who actually revolutionize their field instead of just people who are at the top

whereas dr ratio's whole thing is about increasing accessibility of knowledge to all life in the universe as long as they want to learn

i don't know enough yet about the intelligentsia guild to tell whether this is an opinion shared by the entire organization or if it's just dr ratio

but dr ratio has more or less completely diverged from the specific path down erudition that the genius society treads, and is going alongside the intelligentsia guild to make another

or in other words nous is a minmaxer with a glass cannon build and dr ratio is a generalist who levels up everything equally

[aoxizu]

i thought i would be free of simulated universe world 6 after i got jing yuan but no dr ratio has to show up with a good characterization and decent damage and now i guess i have to build him too

and gepard still needs work too so he's going to benefit on the side

and maybe aventurine as well if i end up getting him

i'm never going to escape cocolia

[aoxizu]

mafia au with friends

[aoxizu]

i need to get out of penacony as soon as possible shaoji's writing is making me go insane (in a good way)

[aoxizu]

i'm back on my regularly scheduled insanity with my regular guy, a certain general from the luofu

recently i saw a post about the resilience of ginkgo trees and then i ended up doing some more reading into the history of ginkgo trees and honestly it might be a stretch but i am drawing some parallels here

ginkgo trees are the only surviving species of their entire order, and have outlived many of the organisms in their ecosystems, including their pollinators, and have managed to survive this long because of their long lifespans which allowed them to just live until humans came along and decided that these trees were pretty and worth planting everywhere

the species has no close relatives because they all died (sound familiar? ok i'm sorry) and it is known as a living fossil, similar to horseshoe crabs because of how it has remained relatively unchanged over the course of its evolutionary history, all due to the species' extreme longevity and tenacity

that's the basics of it, and now we go into the "i've connected the dots/you haven't connected shit" phase of this post

ginkgo is a very obvious symbol on the luofu, appearing in marastruck soldiers, jing yuan's trailer, and, if i had better graphics, probably the particle effects in the exalting sanctum, though that's a bit more of a stretch

and also jing yuan literally takes a ginkgo leaf and puts it on the chessboard. it's right there

so clearly the really long life for a xianzhou general + everyone of his time being dead (except for maybe huaiyan? unconfirmed though i think) is really easy to draw parallels to

but i don't think ginkgo represents jing yuan necessarily, it feels like a more general symbol for the entire luofu as a whole, because in a way jing yuan and the luofu are one and the same

the luofu is currently in a period of relative stability despite having lost the vast majority of its military power due to both the sedition of imbibitor lunae and the shuhu thing that preceded it

and jing yuan is the single person responsible for tiding it over until the younger generation (yanqing, fu xuan, sushang etc) have grown up enough to be able to reliably take over the luofu

and like a ginkgo tree, jing yuan, the only one left from his time, stays with the luofu, waiting until the children are ready to step up and take the luofu to greater heights and back on the trail of the hunt

the marastruck and why they're represented by ginkgo is another question entirely that i cannot answer at this moment but yaoshi should've given the xianzhou people more long terminal repeats

i'm sure i sound like this right now

[aoxizu]

@ironunderstands yes exactly you get it. ratio's whole character throughout all of his appearances between 1.6 and 2.1 have all shown him to be a very action-oriented person, and he leaves anything almost as soon as he feels like it's wasting his time

like he is here to Do Things and he may know there's no inherent meaning behind it but it's still worth it to educate people

and because of his role as a teacher, he doesn't shove the answer in their faces but instead tries to guide them towards finding out for themselves, like how he used the situation on herta's space station to break people's blind trust in the geniuses

and his role is also very much like a stagehand guiding the main actors to the same stage, like with aventurine and sunday's meeting, being able to provide anything that is needed while also getting what he wants

it seems like so far ratio is one of the characters in the best positions, he's able to leave at any moment without really losing anything at all while still being involved enough to push the ipc's plot along

and i think he's able to do all of this because as anyone who's taught or worked customer service would know, sometimes there's just people so stupid you start to question the meaning of talking to them at all

but ratio does not care about inherent meaning. he's just here to cure the disease of stupidity. he's doing his own thing and no one's going to stop him from doing it. he doesn't need answers to nihilism because it is just not relevant to him, and given how much knowledge he has he absolutely knows of the question, but i feel like he would take an absurdist stance of "ok and? even if there is no objective meaning i'm going to do it anyway"

this could be called ignorance but i think it's more just apathy

and the theory that ratio was not acknowledged by nous was actually because he's been a follower of nihility this whole time is actually a really interesting idea that i hadn't thought about before that i'm now adding to my headcanons

i have another 2.1 character dynamic post in the recesses of my brain but i need to get this out first

star rail's 2.1 update main plotline leans a lot more into existentialism and absurdism than i thought it would which is a really nice surprise

like i thought before 2.0 that at most it was just going to be some "oh no capitalism bad ipc bad cults also bad" thing but honestly what we got is so much more interesting. the spoilers start now

also massive disclaimer i am not a philosophist and actually i really don't like philosophy because it makes my brain hurt and i would much rather just look at logical nice things like math and plants so. if i get anything wrong please correct me

acheron's past and how she became an emanator of nihility reminds me somewhat of the absurdist theme of how people always look for meaning when there isn't any, until they finally realize that the universe is meaningless

and the entire path of nihility basically is a road towards that realization that people tread on, and the difference between the real world and star rail is that in the real world here we have people who will see that and then go write a book about a guy not crying at his mother's funeral, whereas in star rail it seems that just accepting that the universe is meaningless turns you into a pathstrider or even emanator of the nihility (not sure if i remember the details, correct me if i'm wrong)

and then aventurine's whole motivation is trying to understand why the universe is so cruel to him, and to find meaning when you have everything except freedom, both of which are absurdist themes

the leap of faith argument often attributed to søren kierkegaard claims that even though there is no rational logic for believing in god, you should do it anyway because the alternatives are madness, suicide, and ignorance. this was one solution to the problem of confronting the universe's meaninglessness: choosing to believe in a higher being regardless

later world wars i and ii both contributed heavily to the rise of absurdism as people returned from the war, having seen so many others die around them, and then just going back to a normal society with none of what they as individual soldiers had contributed seemingly doing anything. and then it happened again, but on a much greater scale with even more deaths. both wars and the destruction they brought led many people to start questioning why a supposedly moral god could allow this suffering, and this is where camus comes in and says that actually religion and nationalism both aren't good solutions, and instead we should just accept meaninglessness and keep living despite the absurdity

and i think dr ratio's scroll thing kind of relates to that

he tells aventurine to open it when he's about to die, or when he's completely out of answers for the question of how to confront absurdity

and dr ratio's answer for aventurine is to just tell him to keep living, good luck

which is. yeah

it's the argument that there are more answers to nihilism than just 1) going insane, 2) pretending like it doesn't exist, and 3) dying

it's the bold claim that despite everything, you can still choose to live

sure nothing makes sense but that does not detract from your life. it doesn't need to make sense at all

and with the understanding that things do not need to fit our human definition of meaning, we can continue on knowing our true place in the universe

and with that aventurine walks into the very big black hole like look at that thing you cannot tell me there is no symbolism there

let's go back to acheron.

in the part where you get a snippet of acheron's conversation with some guy just before this cutscene, the other party states that "[IX] leave[s] woven strands of fate for humans to walk, and together THEY weave a great shadow...And this shadow silently envelops them."

which to me sounds like a statement on how people across time and space have again and again come to the same question, what is the meaning of life?

and acheron's whole color thing seems to mean that she is one of the few who, after walking so far on the path of nihility, somehow have not died yet, be it from madness or something else

like it seems implied that many many more have seen the meaninglessness of the universe and have not reacted as well as acheron has

ok i have more to say about the elation and how it in turn relates to the nihility but that will have to come later but there is. a lot of interesting things there to explore

once again disclaimer: I Am Not A Philosophist And Do Not Know What The Correct Definitions Of These Words I'm Throwing Around Are. thank you for coming to my ted talk that was more of a longwinded ramble

[aoxizu]

coming back to this in the wake of 2.1 and i am so right actually. the real harmony was the ipc all along

aventurine topaz and ratio would actually be amazing together they would have such an interesting dynamic

3 people who all kind of hate each other but not enough to like actually hate each other and are forced to interact because they all work for the same company

best friends and enemies at the same time

heavily reading into all of this with a strong fanon bias but who cares canon was never real anyway