#listen this event is great for luofu character stuff

[msviolacea]

The current Honkai Star Rail ghost hunting event is maybe the best one yet - I love hanging out with Sushang, Guinafen, and Huo Huo, the social media thing is hilarious (especially once you know which canon characters belong to which screen names - i.e., that Jing Yuan is on fake ghost hunting tiktok teasing Fu Xuan about how short she is, lol) (I may ship it, just a little), and the lore they're dropping is really interesting. In that way, I'm really happy with HSR's "permanent" event setup, that future players can get this content without the special rewards, because if this was a limited time event I'd definitely be unhappy about how much character stuff and lore would disappear.

But anyway, the biggest thing I've come away with so far is feeling a LOT of sympathy for Yanqing, and considering the folly of a civilization/government attempting to erase their own history. Like, here's a kid, he's a member of an effectively immortal species, but he's a teenager - either in actuality or in relative age to his centuries-old fellows. Yes, he's a swordplay savant and has earned a place as a military officer at his young age, but he's still stupidly young. He's the protege of the Arbiter General, the most powerful man on the Luofu, but Jing Yuan has clearly not told him anything more of what truly happened with the High Cloud Quintet than is public knowledge. And that public knowledge appears to be no more than "So, these 5 were heroes, until Imbibitor Lunae and his (boy)friend did something unspeakable with Vidyadhara magic and got themselves exiled permanently. Also we erased the entire identity of the greatest swordsperson in our history and pretend she doesn't exist, don't ask us why." And I'm sure that there are plenty of people who are either old enough to remember what actually happened, or have parents/grandparents who witnessed what happened, but Yanqing is not one of them.

So we have this teenaged kid, with a relatively high level military rank and an ego to match that his mentor has indulged up until now, and a strong sense of right and wrong. He sees what he believes to be a blind woman wandering through an active combat zone and offers to escort her to where she's going. Unfortunately for him, that woman is the aforementioned sword champion whose entire identity has been erased from history, so he has no idea that she's a) the person he high-key idolizes, b) his mentor's old mentor, and c) gone semi-batshit with mara and here to fuck shit up. So she kicks his ass and laughs at him, which is the perfect way to get under a teenager's skin, and leaves him humiliated.

And then Yanqing hears that one of the two most infamous exiled criminals in the Luofu's history, who had been caught coming back and imprisoned, has escaped and is once again running around free. So, he goes hunting, because it's the duty of a Cloud Knight to capture this criminal, and also it's maybe a way to redeem himself. But once again, he doesn't have the full information, which is that a) this criminal is nearly as good at the sword as the woman who just kicked his ass, because she brutally trained him, b) this criminal is even MORE batshit marastruck because he's a more short-lived human, which shouldn't even be possible, and c) oh yeah, Imbibitor Lunae is also here, hiding as a member of the Astral Express crew, so now he's gonna have to fight BOTH of the most infamous exiled criminals in Luofu history. But he refuses to back down, so that goes about as well as one might expect.

But Jing Yuan shows up! So the day will be saved, right? But Yanqing hasn't really thought about the fact that these two criminals were once Jing Yuan's best friends - which he probably knew in the abstract, because he knows that Jing Yuan is the last surviving non-exiled member of the High Cloud Quintet - but has had no reason to contemplate what that might mean until now. And, well, these are the worst criminals in his people's history, right? So Jing Yuan is here to back him up?

Wrong. His beloved mentor actually snaps at him to back off, and then lets them go.

I mean, no wonder this kid is messed up. No wonder he lets a heliobus get into his head with promises of making him better, stronger, more worthy of being a Cloud Knight. I'm so glad that something permanent, that every player can access, addresses the way he's feeling after all that. And I'm glad that Jing Yuan acknowledges that it's his fault, his failing as Yanqing's master for not properly preparing him for this eventuality, or helping him process it afterward. Not that Jing Yuan did anything wrong in his dealings with Blade and Dan Heng, but the man is constantly playing 5D chess with the entire universe and never lets anyone in on his thoughts, which is his primary failing. An understandable one, given his circumstances, but not one that particularly helps anyone around him deal with the fallout from his schemes.

So yes. I have more feels about Yanqing than I ever thought I would. Join me next time when I have almost the same amount of feels about Qingque and how actually good she is at being a diviner when she's not using her clearly stellar brain to figure out new ways to slack off, and how I hope she ends up being Fu Xuan's second in command and is forced to bitch about it for the next several hundred years.