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merik72-blog · 20 days

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What if Furina wasn't a girlfailure for 500 years? (Shorteneder Version (still long))

Off the top, I'm not a lore expert. If this doesn't make sense lore-wise, feel free to tell me all about it. Expect it, even. I just wanted to write this down because after experiencing her story, (when it dropped months ago in version 4) this idea just never got out of my head. I process media in a way where I'm constantly thinking on the level of "why did the authors make these specific decisions?", and I couldn't shake the feeling that the authors lacked a bit of imagination when considering just how long 5 centuries is. I have like over a thousand words of why I think this which includes a discussion of historicity and biblical allusion. I cut it all -- nobody wants to read that.

That being said, this is somewhere between a rewrite and like a notes document. In this, Furina is still fundamentally the same character. Her personality and mannerisms should be basically identical, even if she's more competent. This rewrite hopes to preserve the main beats of her arc: The confrontation by Arlecchino, the disaster which causes people to doubt her godliness, the trial, and a backstory which makes you pity her. I'm going to lay these out in chronological order, rather than plot order.

Backstory

Focalors told Furina the prophecy, leaving her terrified and overwhelmed. All the people of Fontaine will drown, and she will be left alone, crying on her throne. Despite her horror, some rebellious gumption rose up in her soul and allows her to steel herself. Much like Focalors before her, despite being handed a doomed situation, Furina decided that there was nothing she couldn't fight back against, even fate. Knowing that there's a flood coming, she put together a plan.

Furina decided that she would hold grand competitions every decade, gathering the greatest tinkerers, engineers, architects, anyone with interesting ideas in her nation to show off their most creative inventions, no matter what those inventions did. She would call these competitions Fontaine's Utopique Rendezvous for Industrie Nouvelleté, et Audacé* (FURINA). As their god, Fontainian culture was her privilege and responsibility to shape, so innovation and technological advancement would be placed at the core. With great patience, she would lead Fontaine from the Medieval age to the Industrial revolution. During FURINAs, as she strolled through the streets of Fontaine, the entrants displayed and described their creations to her to each would be personally judged by her. There is not a maximum or minimum of winners, there are only those who do and do not catch the eye of the Hydro Archon. At the end of the competition, she rewards the winners with her patronage to sponsor them and their ideas. These winners would come to be informally known as FURINA Scholars. She created these patron relationships usually with the goal of creating or improving a public infrastructure project or taking a particularly fascinating or promising invention from an impractical novelty to mass producible technology that anyone could use. FURINA Scholars had a hard time limit of 10 years, being required to present their progress publicly at the next FURINA by the latest. The results of these varied from practical, aesthetic, to insanely niche novelty toys you'd expect a French aristocrat to buy.

A lot of real kings and queens can't dedicate themselves to advancement in this way because their bureaucracy, the power structure beneath them, know that they don't have to be beholden to them forever. Each bureaucrat knows there will be another younger ruler eventually who would could be manipulated into giving more to them and less to the people. Not so with Furina. She would use the royal coffers however she wanted to, and nobody could speak out against her, lest they be hit with the combination blasphemy-treason from the judgement of the Oratrice Mechanique d'Analyse Cardinale.

(*This is intentionally butchered French, in line with the Oratrice Mechanique d'Analyse Cardinale. If you can't read it, it's basically Fontaine's Utopian Conference for Industry, Novelty, and Audacity. It's a funny acronym, and a bit on the nose in multiple ways, but I think it would be something she would come up with. I imagine that Furina would never call it FURINA, but over time people would start calling it "the FURINA" and eventually "the FURINA de Fontaine" in the way that people always start butchering acronyms when they become normal words.)

Every day, Furina's free time between these FURINAs was spent studying, learning, testing, and inventing in her study. If Fontaine was to be flooded by rising waters, she herself would be dedicated to finding a way to allow Fontaine to survive any flood. Out of the public eye, she found ways to spend every spare moment honing her skills and iterating her designs. She quickly learned to dismiss attendants that came to her with some spurious legislative work whenever she left the Opera Epiclese. Go to Neuvillette! She had a duty which so obviously rendered such things spurious. Paperwork? When Fontaine could be drowned any year now?

(Just as in the real story, it's implied that Neuvillette is vaguely aware that she must be working incredibly hard, but she deliberately hides her toil from everyone, including him.)

Obsessively, tirelessly, she toiled single-mindedly towards in designing super-structures capable of diverting, pumping, or otherwise controlling vast amounts of water. As she would sketch mockups of grand designs, she was thinking of public excuses for doing this rather than just using her "archon powers." It would make her seem more benevolent to say something like "I cannot be everywhere at once, and I need to be sure that the people of Fontaine shall not suffer a disaster under my rule, even out from under my watchful gaze." It was even true, in a way. Over the centuries, she carried out plans for every major Fontaine settlement's coastline and the entire capitol city to be protected by works of engineering which were equally intricate and gargantuan. At the same time, they balanced preserving the beauty of coastlines and consistency in aesthetic that is paramount for France. She directed the creations of these superstructures over generations with clarity and consistency in intent. She eventually became capable of concocting ideas that were not possible with currently invented technology, her innovation outdoing the rate of technological advancement. That meant she was not nearly finished. Waiting for technology to catch up with her ideas was always a good opportunity to update the physical build of her superstructures.

Despite her having already gathered vast and unmatched generational knowledge after her first full century of study, she still continued FURINAs to find the best and brightest minds of each generation. (If it must be done for Genshin's thematic consistency or ideology, these can all even be vision holders). These inventors who all grew up in the context of Furina's unparalleled genius had the privilege of standing on the shoulders of a giant. Innovations begot innovations, forming a virtuous loop which drove unprecedented progress in industrialization leading to evolutions in technology especially in civil engineering and hydrodynamics. As Furina's knowledge and mastery over engineering slowly but surely surpassed mortal limits, FURINAs seemed to be more and more judged based on eccentric, incomprehensible whims. With relative frequency, participants would watch seemingly impressive inventions be passed over, meanwhile random toys that just made her giggle and applaud would win. She would say "I just find these trinkets so charming!" but in truth, she saw potential in central conceits in inventions that had the chance to change the underpinnings of Fontaine's infrastructure. Or she just genuinely found them charming.

As time passed, Furina's structures continually improved to a point that they did not just avoid, but very publicly Dominated countless floods and storms that would have been disastrous otherwise. These creations legitimized her godhood and won her adoration in the eyes of the people, who wove countless folktales over the ages telling the tales of Furina's power - herding hurricanes and subjugating tsunamis. At the same time, this made her prodigious skill for the dramatic arts even more impressive through the plurality of her talents. This resulted in many full circle moments, where Furina would play herself in epics about her overcoming disasters, not that she wrote, of course. These would sometimes exaggerate her powers, like giving her omniscience or visions of the future, the perfect designs flowing freely and naturally from her hands, as though they were as effortless as breathing.

Of course, she was not truly invincible. Slowly, she started to fray. As new innovations became more difficult, technology caught up to her designs. After the superstructure renovations commemorating the 4th century of her rule, she was distraught. This was the first time she had updated her superstructures without the plan for the next one at least partially completed. She needed to spend more of her energy pondering, as just her "free" time was insufficient. This led to her to becoming more absentminded during official duties, having forgone sleep or being still caught up ruminating on how to optimize designs, improve existing technology, or apply them in a novel way, but for some reason nothing was coming to her after a few years of different experiments and trials. Even in discussions with her FURINA Scholars, they stopped having new ideas in hydrodynamic engineering projects, being drawn towards other directions where they wouldn't need to compete with god. As she crossed the 450-year mark, she was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that her designs weren't nearly enough to protect the entire country and even further from perfect. For the better part of the last century, any improvement had been like trying to squeeze water from a stone. In the last ten years, she has probably improved her latest flood barriers by less than a liter of water. 30 more years restarting from scratch over and over with her current knowledge, no meaningful improvement.

For the 48th FURINA, she decided out of desperation to hold a hydro-themed FURINA. As she walked the streets of Fontaine, talking to each inventor as they presented their work, she was distraught. A marked decrease meaningful innovation. Worse than this, she noticed that inventors were less interested in creating submissions for this FURINA. The sentiment she was picking up on was that they felt futility in even trying. What was the point of trying to innovate in a field that they can hardly understand? The cutting edge of hydro-related innovation was driven so far by Furina that they felt mortals need not apply. Who could even be given the privilege of becoming the decade's FURINA Scholars from such a lackluster field...? As always, she found a way to get out of a dismaying situation. She crowned herself as the winner, made a grandiose speech about who she was still unmatched in the domain of Hydro, and unveiled her side project of the Aquabus.

At the end of the hydro-FURINA, Furina had never felt so alone. For the first time since her first decade, she had not the faintest idea of what to do from here. Nobody did. She had already pushed to and past limit of her knowledge, of her peoples' knowledge, and the limits of material possibility in Teyvat. All of these centuries had passed her by, all these sleepless nights, all her evolutions in the design of Fontaine to fortify it, for what? A worm, wriggling on a stone, drying out in the sun. If she failed to prevent the flood now, what would any of that time mean?

Furina found herself standing in her study, towering alone above the room crowded with her innovations, blueprints, experiments. Her gaze floated over each page; her life's work surrounded her. Broken mechanisms, meaningless scribbles, trials without results. Countless wasted mines of materials, countless wasted gallons of ink, and countless wasted centuries of labor by her precious hardworking people. Not realizing she was fully sobbing, she slumped to the floor, picking up the blueprint of one of her latest redesigns. She couldn't see anything aside from bodies floating in the water. Her mind replayed the faces of every person whom she's ever worked with or learned from, whose families she met, and every child of Fontaine whom she watched grow. They died all the same. Her vision started to swirl as their faces closed in around her. They rose up all around her from the waters in her blueprints. She grasped at them desperately, begging them to stay with her. On her side, shaking, sobbing, with a bundle of ripped and crumbled papers clutched against her. For the first time since she was told the prophecy, she felt truly helpless. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mirror. She scrambled through a carpet of papers, trinkets, and tools to touch her forehead to the glass.

"Mirror me, I-I've been doing everything I can. Our people have been trying, too! They worked so very hard, and they've built my all of designs beautifully."

Silence.

"Please, tell me you know something, anything that I can do now. I need to know. I can't let it end like this."

Silence.

"I never imagined that... that we'd even make it this far, mirror me." Furina was sitting now. With a smile on her face, she still couldn't stop the tears as she leaned against the mirror. "They truly are my pride and joy." Barely more than a whisper, an "I'm sorry" escaped her lips.

She had been doing her best for so long, but she had certainty now. Her best would not be enough.

A real Archon would be able to overcome this. On her own strength.

Furina cursed her inadequacy, mourning the people of Fontaine in her heart. It was torture. Every day, her job was to look at all the wonderful people that she was failing every day, people whom she was dooming through her weakness. During trials, she entirely lost the ability to focus on what's happening in front of her, her comments in the Opera becoming nonsensical and detached. More often, she handed off interpretations directly to Neuvillette, and tears sometimes leaked through when doing her fan meetups. Somehow, she still managed to hide her turmoil with audacious bravado as always. She felt more internally frantic as more years came and went. It was like desperately treading treacherous waters as she needed more and more effort to simply maintain surface appearances. The 49th and 50th FURINAs were brief respites from the gloom. Despite all of the stress in her life, the silly novelties of her people could still bring her joy. But when she returned to her private abode, she found that sometimes, not every time, she didn't want to work anymore. Instead, she would lay in her bed. Stillness without rest.

Her dead eyes blinked slowly, making no tears. She pondered, "How long has it been?" When she stared down at her hands, she could still see the souls of every Fontanian leaking through her fingers. The harder she tried to hold onto them, the further they'd splatter away. If only she had more time. Time, as always, passed anyway.

Plot time

Now, this is when the incident happens. Furina just hit rock bottom as the Traveler comes to town. Everything in the plot that played out in the main story happens mostly the same. This retroactively explains why all of Furina's arguments in the Mysterious Disappearances trials are so weak. Sure, she has a lot of experience presiding over trials, and it may be a top priority for her since this Furina is also excited about the opportunity for a Grand Trial that Focalors told her about, but she is so far from being on the top of her game right now.

Over centuries, Furina built this idea of infallibility, weaving a narrative to reaffirm her godhood. Fontainians believed that because each design was crafted by Furina directly, she made sure that none of them could ever fail using her uniquely intimate knowledge of the Hydro element. When Arlecchino called for an audience with Furina about the impending incident of unprecedented scale in Poisson, Furina was not just small or helpless with no excuse. Furina imposed upon Arlecchino as a god in her own land. There was to be absolute faith in her creations. Her power over hydro would never allow a Fontainian to come to harm.

"What does a puny rat like you think you know? I've thrown out socks that were older than you. Smarter, too."

Like a true god, she gaslit Arlecchino about what information Arlecchino had regarding the flood coming to Poisson. As the Regina of All Waters, not only did she have access to more information through her national information network, she also simply understood Hydro in a way that mortals couldn't comprehend. This is one of the only times that Arlecchino would seem even a little shaken by anything.

Furina didn't refuse to take precautions because she's a depressed NEET; Furina placed herself in this position where she simply could not possibly even suggest taking precautions. That would imply to Arlecchino and by extent the people of Fontaine that there was a weakness in her absolute power over Hydro and, by proxy, her status as archon. In previous centuries, she had only ever commanded upgrades to earlier designs as technology advanced to allow her to better realize her intended designs.

This made it all the more world-shattering for Fontainians when the symbols of their god, their faith in her power, warped and bursted under the immense pressure of more water than seemingly possible in nature (this flood is mega buffed in this plotline). The damage was horrific, but would be much much worse if not for the efforts of Arlecchino and the Spina di Rosula. This was the first time that anyone has doubted her as god, and nobody who doubted even wanted to because they've had faith for so long.

The trial proceeds nearly exactly as in the game, with the additional wrinkle that her centuries of age needs to be a hint as to how she could be such a genius of engineering without being the Hydro Archon.

After the trial

After her liberation, much of Furina's story is the same. She is so incredibly burnt out after finally being free that she has the same despondent attitude as she does in the game. She doesn't really invent in her free time, as she's a bit traumatized by the memory and sensation of using those tools. Even picking up a screwdriver reminds her of hundreds of years of sleepless nights experimenting desperately with the weight of the world on her shoulders.

The only real things that would change after the Archon quest would be -

In her character quest, Furina surprises everyone by proudly declaring her return to the stage on her own, having thoroughly enjoyed her time with the ragtag troupe. After a handful of lifetimes of endless labor with a dash of theatre, having the opportunity to do theatre full time sounds like great fun. The reason that she wouldn't have started before this quest is because of her burnout and exhaustion buildup ofc.

In Roses and Muskets, just take out all the times where Furina's trauma is played for laughs, or times where she's outwardly timid in a public conversation, especially when directing. Furina's reaction to imposing in public situations should be so well trained after playing archon should be instinctual after 500 years that she never gets caught slipping by an unfortunate circumstance. In private, she can still of course be her quirky self.

At the end of Roses and Muskets, she's not awkward about receiving the trophy. She's really happy, overjoyed even, having not been able to participate in any competitions herself in Archon era.

During Lantern Rite, Furina is on Cloud 9, going crazy and stupid finally leaving the country. She is positively giggly being charmed and intrigued by every single little thing in Liyue which is different from Fontaine. She walks around the street asking people about ridiculous and mundane things, like "What wood is this fence made out of?", "Do all your boats really need sails? Where are their engines?", "What techniques were employed to build villages on all these hills?", "Where is the toilet in this establishment?... oh Me... running hydro? DO YOU NOT HAVE ANY PLUMBING-", and various other questions about architecture, technology, and everything else she'd notice as someone otherwise incredibly knowledgeable who'd been stuck in one country for centuries.

Anyway, as a thanks for reading my yap, here are some drawings of tinkerer Furina loving life

#Tinkerina #genshin fanart #rewrite #character redesign #au idea #genshin #i love furina #maybe i should repost these drawings separately for anyone who doesn't want to read several thousand words of yapping #don't expect much more of this #i meant to give her a teardrop shaped gold pocket watch but i forgot to add it #in this essay i will #essay #how to stop my yap #first post #so yeah #if i don't post this now i'll never finish anything ever #furina #i want to yap about every decision i made when designing her too but like this is long enough so . 3.

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