no1chigdaenjoyer

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

new reaction image just dropped

me looking for my fucks to give

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

TOGETHER WE WILL DEFEND THIS INFINITELY RADIANT WORLD BELONGING TO LORD CHIGDA

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

if i hear anyone disrespecting lord chigda they’re getting pounded by my hammer

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

Another con, another Chigda commission :D

As the artist was passionate about drawing creatures, I could not pass the opportunity for Chigda as a ✨ Creature ✨, left the rest for the artist's own invention. I ADORE the results!!

The artist: @dogrom, also found on Instagram

Thank you thank you thank you, he's so fucked up I love it 🥰

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

An artistic rendition of what pops into my mind whenever I hear people say "double Chigda"

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

Haha what if we kissed in the Desperate Vines........😳😳😳

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

oh shit reddit is aware of the avichigda fandom, SCATTER

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

Chigda being railed by Giroda and accidentally screaming Kuroda's name

And that's how our little Giroda finds out he wants to be like his grandpa in more ways than one

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

The Sacred Knight armor stays ON during sex

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

狂った未来に迎合 終わった抵抗 いっそこのまま目を塞いで

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

None of the outfits in the preview enticed me to pull at first and it was supposed to be my saving season but then I realized that the cat outfit has the longest and most flowy outerwear we have to date - which, of course, lit up the "Wish Master cosplay" neurons in my brain

So I pulled for the second evo to make it white

But then I looked closer at the outerwear of the dragon outfit and realized that??? It actually fit with the Faewish aesthetic too???

So I ALSO pulled for the second evo to make it white

(so much of the saving season... now I'm left with mere 340 pulls *wipes tears with money*)

Anyway here are my concept outfits for now... I'll try to refine the dyeing and the accessories but. Just to make you see my vision

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

.

I am very normal about this

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

And did the chosen one have a choice?

Gijinka doodle of a thing I think about a lot with regards to Avicinda...(somewhat based on a scene I wrote in Devotion Chapter 3)

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

faewish brainrot told me chigda should have ridiculously long anime magical hair

I bet he makes Avicinda style it

loooooove the idea of the further he falls into desperation the more Fucked his hair gets and it just gets tangled into the vines, plants, ect.

Oh yeah also Chigda gijinka becaaaaaaaaaause 💅✨ I guess

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

The Questions and Answers of Danqing Season

I titled this as if it were a proper analysis/essay, but it's really just some unhinged rambling thoughts on the messages of the season now that I have had time to process the story.

The concept of "Yin Yuan" (or yuanfen) is a real thing, in the sense that it is a word that exists in real life and not made up by Infinity Nikki. The game briefly explains it as "fate/destined connection", but I want to touch on it further. It's a very real belief in Chinese culture and stems from Buddhism but doesn't have to be tied to it (as Infinity Nikki shows in disconnecting from that aspect).

The idea is that because people are reincarnated after death, you could thus become anything. You could become a blade of grass, or the cow that eats it, or the butcher who slaughters the cow, or the person who eats the cow's meat. If you could become any of those things, it must be some kind of destiny (usually related to your karma) that makes you the butcher who slaughters a cow, or makes you the grass that the cow eats. Perhaps, if you were the cow, you wronged the person who reincarnated into the butcher at some point? Or perhaps the one who became the blade of grass wronged you? It must be so, because the lives on this planet are countless, how could a certain interaction between lives at the exact time it happens...not be fate?

And this concept of a predestined connection could well apply to anything. Perhaps it's fate I quit [redacted: a certain other dress up gacha] at the exact time that I did and thus picked up Infinity Nikki so I could end up here on this blog posting Faewish Sprite yaoi? This too is yin yuan. I'm sure it's easy to think of examples where you could go "that must have been some kind of fate at work"

(Personally...sure, i suppose on some level I believe in this system just because it's something I'm used to hearing about IRL. At the very least, I can explain how it's supposed to work lol)

So it's interesting that the villagers of Danqing Island celebrate the Yin Yuan Festival to forge those connections themselves. By exchanging gifts, they establish a connection they want to exist--one that might not have been there in the first place. (Don't think too hard about this part: is it thus fate that they happen to know this person they now want a yin yuan with? Was it yin yuan in the first place to lead them to making this connection? That they met before/just in time for the festival?)

Huge spoilers ahead for Chapter 2 of Danqing Season (also cut because this got absurdly long).

But of course, the Yin Yuan Festival was established in the first place to create those connections for lives that didn't have them because the lives in Danqing Island began artificially from Artist Cat's own ink soul. When she gave her ink soul up, it transformed the various objects she had in her painting into lives to populate the island. But they didn't have connections to each other because they were just...objects. Thus, the Yin Yuan Festival so they might create bonds, both ones that break (such as the ones they made with Yue Bai) and ones that continued on into the next life when they reincarnated through the ink pool (such as the two fathers in Chapter 1 who are said to have been enemies in a past life but in this one, are brought together by the connection of their children).

And well, I've said a lot about yin yuan here, but that's not what this post is really about.

The real philosophy of Danqing Season is not just the concept of yin yuan, but what yin yuan brings, and this is the part of story that sticks with me: that it was the thousand years of yin yuan across the generations and reincarnations that made the world of Danqing Island into a real world.

But what makes a real world? Let's take a small side step into the concept of timelines and observers.

Now, I can't explain science for shit and I don't think this is even scientifically theorized or anything. So I'm going to explain using another fandom.

Several years ago I was part of a different fandom that dealt with multiple timelines existing. Within the canon of this fandom, a character had been pulled outside of their timeline by accident. This character watched with alarm as the time within their world continued without them, then reset back to the start, then continued, then reset, over and over. But as they watched, all those timelines began to layer on top of each other.

Imagine an art program with layers like Photoshop or Clip Studio. If you have a shitton of layers at once that are all the exact same with maybe minor differences and turn them all on, they start to meld together and become kind of one new image. The minor differences become part of the new image and are indistinguishable as their own layer.

That's what happened to the timelines this character was observing. They became one timeline. Because an observer existed for this timeline, it became reality. When they re-entered their world, the new timeline had completely replaced all previous timelines and was now reality.

Yes that's a huge tangent but I swear it's relevant, because i want to posit that in the context of Danqing Island, in the context of Nikki's universe and many worlds that exist, the Sea of Stars itself is the observer. (I guess the Seer too, whatever.)

Do worlds exist, if the Sea of Stars is not aware of them? Well, sure, Danqing Island had existed for a thousand years within its own spacetime.

But was any of that real?

What makes a world more real than another? What makes a world shine bright enough for the Sea of Stars to catch a glimmer of it and thus decide that it is real?

The main story of Danqing Season already tells us the answer. This world is real because of a thousand years of Yin Yuan being formed. Because lives made connections. Because people formed bonds. Because these bonds both broke and persisted.

Over a thousand years, what began as artificial constructs--both the yin yuan formed during the first festival and the ink souls of these people born from objects--became real. And they became real because they formed connections with each other. And those bonds became fates and destinies that began to naturally occur. Until it is yin yuan itself that brings Nikki to this world at the exact time she arrives, within the very short time frame the Sea of Stars recognizes it as a reality (because had she been a moment too late, the stoppered cycle of reincarnation--and thus the completely broken yin yuan of the world--would have stopped qualifying the world as a real one in the Sea of Stars' view).

But what about before the Sea of Stars recognized it?

Wasn't Danqing Island real before that? For there to be a thousand years of yin yuan, wasn't anything in this world real?

Infinity Nikki actually gives us one answer in a sidequest: "A Mysterious Resident of the Bamboo Grove".

Spoilers for this sidequest.

In this quest we meet the hermit Zhou Zhiwei. After Meng Xiuzhu disappeared in the rain before his eyes, and then things started turning into ink, and then more people began to disappear, Zhou Zhiwei drove himself to near insanity by questioning the reality of his world and, ironically, stumbled upon the truth: "what if Danqing Island is nothing more than a painting, the Loong a being within in it, and we, mere figures drawn upon its canvas?"

But he had no way to know the truth for sure. As a "mere figure drawn upon its canvas", how could he possibly exit his world and observe it to confirm the reality of it?

And then he tells Nikki that he decided it didn't matter at all. Whether Danqing Island was just a painting or not, the years he lived are real to him. "And that is enough."

What can we take, then, from these questions and answers? Nikki is unique in that she is connected to the Sea of Stars, so for her, a world is real if it says it is real.

But for you and me? Are we not more like Zhou Zhiwei, who can't confirm the reality of our world beyond what we live ourselves?

Or perhaps, we could also take from this season an idea that we cannot be real to others without forming bonds and connections?

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

阿维星达 | Avicinda's Chinese Name

Disclaimer: I'm 3rd generation diaspora so my CN is not the best and I am not familiar with modern/internet CN slang. This is based purely on dictionary meanings.

I've mentioned this before but I love Avicinda's Chinese name so much. He is, from what I can tell, one of the only, if not the only, Faewish Sprite with a name where the characters reasonably string together into a phrase that not only means something, but directly relates to the character (and incidentally, one of the few prior to Revelry Season with no repetition in his name).

Which makes sense to me, since he's ostensibly meant to be the primary villain until the final twist.

So there are four characters in 阿维星达 (ā wéi xīng dá).

达 (dá) is the standard suffix for all da Sprites, and does not really mean anything in the context of Faewish Sprites.

阿 (ā) is a prefix that similarly does not quite mean anything--it's typically used on its own just for the short "a" sound.

So we can disregard the first and last characters when looking at the meaning of his name and look at the middle instead:

维 (wéi) can mean "to preserve/maintain" i.e. keeping something together.

星 (xīng) just means star/s or heavenly bodies.

Thus: "To preserve the stars."

I want to note by the way that in the Chinese profiles released prior to the game launch, as with all the other characters, Avicinda's English name was already as written, so there were deliberate choices made behind character names to work in both Chinese and English, at the very least, right from the star.

Some personal analysis:

I find this name very fitting. Not only do Faewish Sprites have a starry aesthetic, many things imply a strong connection between the stars (the Starlink Stone, the song titles "Breath of the Stars"/"Close to the Stars") and the Faewish Sprites' relationship to the Wishing One. thus, during the main story, Avicinda fights to preserve the legacy of their god, believing in the resurrection of the Wishing One in order to fulfill his family's mission.

There's also a fair amount of correlating "stars" with "wishes" within Wishfield. Shooting Star Season as a whole, for example...so perhaps, we could also read this as "to preserve wishes". Or perhaps, in the context of his being a Paladin, "to defend wishes". Or, taking the symbolism around wishes another whole step further..."to defend the Wish Master", perhaps?

We can take it and apply it post-canon too. As Avicinda comes to realize he can find his faith in the Wishing One in the small, everyday things around him as well as in the community of other Faewish Sprites he had been neglecting--he shifts his focus to serving others instead, flipping the original meaning. He goes from maintaing a legacy, from defending just one at the very top of their society, to preserving all stars.

[no1chigdaenjoyer]

chigda was so unloved, man. dude had one (1) genuine supporter and it was avicinda. the rest followed him because he was the wish master, but for no reason beyond that. they would have been just as happy if not more if kuroda was the wish master instead of him and he knows it.

even morimoda, who is ostensibly the wish master's #1 fan, didn't know chigda well enough to realize the sketch he found couldn't have been made by him.

if he had anyone who cared about him before his claim to power, there are no surviving records of it; there's one mention of him that could be interpreted as friendship (a new member's diary) but is textually neutral, and the other mention of him pre-wish master (that one book in the swordsmith ruins cave, i forgot what it's called) does NOT speak favorably of him whatsoever.

and nowhere is this truth more evident than in the one place chigda shows up onscreen, in his boss fight. they gave him a final phase that stands out from the other two, but like...it is so starkly different to what you'd come to expect from a boss's final phase in other games. like, the final phase is typically where they get ultra powered up, extra scary, your chance as the hero to take down an impossible titan.

but chigda? he throws more attacks at you, sure, but he just gets desperate. they switch up his boss music but in faith, shattering despair! you can hear him losing. his failure is inevitable at that point. his motif is being snuffed out. the little outro that plays when he's finally defeated has these bells that call to mind funeral bells, but they're muted, muffled sounds in the cacophony of what is otherwise a dramatic and powerful theme.

it's almost like the bells toll in the distance for chigda's death, but no one is there to mourn him.