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kromaticglass · 10 months

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I've been sitting on this for a while because I'm not usually one for writing out my thoughts on characters in media that I like but honestly I need to yell about just how much I love Wriothesley as a character and how his story is written.

Don't get me wrong, I love Scaramouche, and I love his story arc, but there's something about this absolutely horrific past that Wriothesley grew up in and despite everything that should have made him a bitter person, he's so selfless. Selfless to the point of completely overturning a system that had been working in it's own horrific manner for hundreds of years as a teenager/young adult in order to make it better and actively work on fixing people, not just let them fall between the cracks of a society that sent them away to be forgotten.

Putting this under a read more because I'm going to yell about this a lot.

When we're first learning about Wriothesley we're introduced to the fact that he was an orphan. This brings up questions to start with; how was he first orphaned? By the sounds of things he wasn't willingly given away to the foster family that he ended up living with, he was on the streets or at the very least was on his own for a time before he ended up there. The first thing that my mind goes to is that this means either his parents abandoned him or they died/were killed, which may also be the reason he seemingly was desensitized to death as a kid - I'll get to that point later, it's important.

Just how long he was on the streets before he was taken in by his foster family isn't mentioned, but I'd expect it was at least a year or so, just from some context clues we got from both his story quest and his character stories that you unlock with friendship. When in his foster home, things were supposedly a picture perfect family, a dollhouse where people looking in would only see the perfect picture but as soon as curtains closed it was something very different.

Households like that are traumatising, it's no wonder that Wriothesley's ability to trust in people is shot. The people who were supposed to care for him after promising a good life were nothing but a front and in his eyes he once more was on his own. For a child to decide to willingly orphan themselves a second time is so taxing on the mind, I could only imagine the stress he would've been under.

But what really gets me is the fact that he eventually came to the conclusion that in order to stop the cycle of picking up kids and selling them off to the highest bidder and killing the ones that didn't sell, Wriothesley didn't think about contacting gardes, didn't go to anyone else about it, he took matters into his own hands.

Not just that, but that he had to kill them.

It takes a lot for someone to work themselves up into killing another person. If you've never taken a life before, most people will hesitate, they'll be sick, or they'll completely shut down and remove themselves mentally from the situation, there's a very visceral reaction that happens in the human brain when you're pushed so far into stress responses that you'll take another life, and this was a teenager. This is why I feel like he would've been desensitized to death or at the very least gruesome scenes like this from a much younger age.

One can only wonder just what was going through his mind during the time he was away, taking the odd jobs to create that first prototype of his gauntlets that he used to shoot nails at his parents. It may not be as personal as taking a knife to someone, but using a nailgun is a bloody affair, the wounds needed to make that fatal are grievous if done by an inexperienced hand. And from what we're told in the character story, it sounds like his parents fought back, hard enough that it very nearly killed Wriothesley as well.

It makes me wonder just what he was thinking, or feeling in that moment, was it fear? Anger? A mix of many things? Or was he simply numb to it until he woke up in the hospital bed later? From what we hear in his tone during the story quest, he sounds apathetic about retelling the story, but that could be a result of trying to compartmentalize the renewed trauma that was rekindled thanks to the gem he touched.

And the trial, lets not forget that. On the day he wakes up from his injuries, he's served papers to face in court, and given a timeline for his recovery. The character story says the trial went with little fanfare and that he accepted the charges with little to no protest, it makes me think about just what could've gone through his head during the time he was recovering.

Wriothesley states that he knew he was guilty in the eyes of the law, and that his methods were extreme and he knows that. Because he survived his injuries when he expected to die from them, it makes me think that he knew he would be going to the Fortress of Meropide once he got to the trial. Given how much of a lawless land the Fortress was back then, I wonder if this was Wriothesley's own way of putting himself back into the hands of fate again, or maybe in some way, taking it back into his own hands.

Character Story 2 and his Vision story tells us more about his time in Meropide before taking it over, and how chaotic it sounded. He arrived in the Fortress and found his Vision in his pockets when being processed, and the first thing he's told is "hide it well". This was the only warning he got from anyone about how life in the Fortress was at that time, and he took that to heart in order to not lose anything precious to him.

Meropide was a place you could pay for someone to die in back then, among other things like drugs and probably far more things that Hoyoverse wouldn't mention for the sake of keeping things PG. It certainly doesn't seem like a place a teenager would be safe in and yet despite all odds, Wriothesley thrived and amassed a massive collection of credit coupons in order to make his name known.

It doesn't say much about what a feat that is, especially the line where it mentions that he amassed more coupons than anyone else in the Fortress combined. He figured out how the place ticked and made it sing to his own tempo instead of simply falling in line, that's such an impressive feat for anyone to do, let alone someone who would've had to fight tooth and nail to even get the respect needed for people to see him with as much power as he seemed to gain by the time he took over.

When he challenged the former administrator to a duel, the story mentions how Wriothesley was saved from having to get another person’s blood on his hands because he fled from the Fortress instead of showing up. And sure we could gloss over this as he was glad about not needing to fight him in the end, but this also implies that if the fight had've gone on instead of what happened, Wriothesley would've either beaten that man within an inch of his life or taken it. He would've taken another life for the sake of other people, once again.

This is something I've noticed is a theme with Wriothesley. He has either little regard for or at the very least places his own safety below others, so long as it's doing what he thinks is right or protects other people. During his story quest when he's being shot at, Wriothesley does little to protect himself aside from some minimal protection with his cryo vision against the bullets shot at him, but the moment that the gun is turned to the Traveler, he spent absolutely no time in very nearly killing Dougier (if the Traveler hadn't been there, I think there would've been a 75%-85% chance that he would've killed Dougier) and putting him in his place.

We see this again with the Archon quest where Wriothesley and Clorinde fight back the Primordial Sea. He spend his own safety and energy icing over the doors in order to save people in the Fortress from the Primordial Sea until Neuvillette could get there, at the risk of his own safety and very nearly getting trapped and dissolved by the waters.

That's not even taking into consideration the work he did on the Wingalet. We saw so little of it in the 4.2 Archon Quest, I was almost disappointed, but the fact that instead of staying idle about the prophecy, he spent so much time and energy making a ship like that and keeping it a secret from most parties until the time came all for the reason of saving as many Fontainians as possible just kills me.

Wriothesley has been through so much, and instead of that horrible backstory and all that trauma turning him into a bitter and hateful person, he instead uses it to give others a better life than he had just crushes me. He took over Meropide and reformed it into a place where not only does it help people now, but is such a nice place to be that inmates want to stay afterwards warms my heart. Like, for sure there's the fact that people staying down there reintegrating into society would be a challenge but I love the fact that there's even the choice to stay down there after the term is over instead of simply turning people lose and risking them returning back down after repeating crimes.

Anyway what I'm trying to get at here is that Wriothesley is such a well written character and I want Hoyoverse to give us more characters like this. I'm rambling way too much and I'm sure like 80% is incoherent bullshit but I needed to get my feelings off my chest about this lol.

If you made it this far thanks for putting up with my rambling LMAO.

#genshin impact #wriothesley #i have so many feelings about this man #got me wanting to dust off my old fanfic bones to write something #but i havent written a fic in over 8 years and thats such a long time to get back into it #and i feel like i could not do it justice #but ugh #i have feelings #and none of them are okay #long post #im so sorry for anyone who is not in the genshin fandom getting subjected to my bullshit #if you see typos no you dont

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