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sincerelyandyourstruly · 5 months

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#boyyuri

on xiaoven & yearning

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so as we all know, "yuri is when there’s themes and motifs and yaoi is when there’s two blokes who do fuck all. if you reblog this you love trans people." (tumblr user dyggot, 2023.); that "yaoi is about entanglement and yuri is about yearning." (tags by tumblr user thyminesquared, 2023, screenshot and archived on this post.)

as should be clear from these definitions, this essay is not going to concern itself with whether a pairing counts as "yaoi" or "yuri" on the sole basis of the genders of the characters involved. although i understand the deeply gendered connotations of both of these terms, to ME, yuri is about the distance between one’s self and others around them (maybe people, maybe dreams and ideals), and the deeply-rooted desires that grow in that gap as a result.

as a post made to tumblr, put in the xiaoven tag, everyone reading this knows the basic lore surrounding their characters and world: that venti is the anemo archon, god of wind and freedom; that xiao is the last yaksha, who wields the power of anemo in battle to protect his homeland of liyue; that Visions are considered to be representations of a person's dearest wish, crystallized into physical form. but let's run over the basics again real fast, just to keep this piece from having external dependencies to understand, yeah?

venti is a wind sprite from mondstadt who ascended to godhood at the end of a rebellion against the at-the-time god of storms keeping his people in a cage made of windstorm thousands of years ago, and he chose his ideal of freedom to honor the bard who led said rebellion and died at the end of the final battle, but whether the nameless bard even got to see the clear skies he fought so hard to live under is currently up to interpretation. either way, venti took on the nameless bard's appearance so that his nation's people would never forget the true hero who won their freedom, but because thousands of years have passed the people have kind of forgotten by now anyway, and venti probably has a lot of identity issues about it!

also he's a bard who plays music in exchange for wine because singing to pass on the memories of heroes past and then drinking to numb the grief of people's forgetting is how he Copes™.

AND ALSO he will occasionally sleep for hundreds of years at a time.

Meanwhile, xiao is an immortal/"illuminated beast" from liyue whose true form is technically that of a bird, but he goes around in the form of a hot emo boy, ostensibly because he needs hands to don his mask, hold his spear, and do his dance to conquer the remnants of evil gods, the act of which literally taints his soul with their sins— his karmic debts.

anyway he was enslaved by an evil god in his youth because said evil god (probably) knew his True Name and because we're going by fairy rules this means he was forced to commit atrocities (namely eating people's dreams) against his will until the god of contracts geo archon zhongli killed his previous master, gave him a new name, and contractually tasked him with the job of subduing the demonic remnants of other defeated gods, which he has since proceeded to unflinchingly, unwaveringly, and unquestioningly obey for the last few thousand years. however, despite his unfathomable obedience and devotion to his duty, his Vision (his life's greatest desire) is that of anemo (of freedom).

also a few hundred years ago when he was about to succumb to the weight of his karmic debts, xiao's life was saved by the sound of someone (venti) playing the flute in the marsh where he'd been working, and so now his dream, the deepest wish he holds closest to his heart, is to someday "wear the mask and dance — not to conquer demons, but to the tune of that flute amid a sea of flowers." (xiao's character card, genshin impact, 2021)

…can you guys believe that the dihua flute moment was like all we xv shippers had to hold onto for like two years?! that, and xiao's extremely yearnful voiceline abt venti that's just like, "venti? is that what he goes by these days? his tunes are… nevermind." but the point of this recap i hope has become clear by this point: that the relationship btwn xiao and venti seen through these few snippets alone is just rife with potent yuri energy.

like, to elaborate on the opening of thie essay, yuri is specifically about the uncrossable distance between two people who are already sitting right next to each other, so close that only a single thread of wind could even hope to weave its way between them— although, as evidenced by the fact that such a thread of wind could weave its way between them, they are still shy of truly touching— and the painful yearnings of being unable to close that gap… even though you both exist so close to one another, so similar in both place and time, you are the only thing stopping yourself from reaching across that seemingly infinite distance.

as a result, i think that unlike yaoi, yuri— thematically speaking— tends to have a greater mutuality to it: whereas i understand being in a yaoi to be more about acting on one's impulses towards one another and passing along cycles of power, i believe that an important aspect of being in a yuri is the constant fear and anxiety of violating an unspoken boundary because you're afraid that you aren't actually on the same page about those.

deep down inside, you know that you're not supposed to want all the things you've built for yourself in all those private daydreams and self-indulgent fantasies you've created about yourself with the other person, because you know you're not supposed to have drawn your boundaries the way you have, such that the other person would be let in on the most intimate parts of your identity (if they were willing to see all that is ugly sleeping underneath your skin.)

as mentioned in the paragraph summarizing his lore, xiao's youth was marked by the fact that his very autonomy was continuously violated in service of forcing him to violate others' boundaries, crushing their hopes and devouring their very dreams. his deep cultural ties to liyue as the land of contracts means that he carries within him a keen sense of obligation as inseverable as the need to breathe; thus, saddled with guilt and believing himself to be incapable of gentility, he has come to view himself as nothing more than a weapon for others to use.

in signing his contract with the geo archon, xiao went from a situation where his agency was continuously denied and his boundaries intimately violated to one where he relinquished his agency and had his boundaries delineated for him by his new lord.

he has no desires of his own; immortals aren't so worldly. (if that were true, he wouldn't have a Vision.) he is not an active subject in his own life; anything he does is the effect of someone else's will. (if that were true, he would have stopped protecting liyue the moment that he learned his lord abdicated his rule.) he does not let anyone near him; it is inevitable that his karmic debts will force his hand against them. (if that were true, he wouldn't have been saved by the sound of venti's flute playing nearby.)

don't you see? he places himself in a subservient role to everyone around him, rigidly obeys every ritual of propriety, because he is afraid that by asserting agency over a situation, he will end up violating other people's boundaries again. except that this time, the responsibility for doing so would fall squarely on his own shoulders.

during the main quest arc for liyue, zhongli literally fakes his own death as an archon so that he can finally retire and be free from his own contractual obligation to the nation. this gives us reason to believe that xiao's contract with the geo archon has thus been rendered void, meaning he no longer has any obligation to continue his endless suffering for the sake of liyue— yet he does so anyway.

i think a lot of fans tend to view this as xiao needlessly chaining himself down to his duty, something that's often framed in fanworks as something rather tragic in venti's eyes. however, as the god of freedom, venti feels very strongly about giving other the freedom to make their own decisions, even if he himself may disagree with them or wish they had chosen differently. others' autonomy is deeply important to venti, perhaps even so far as to call it sacred: to order anything from anyone would be a violation for the boundaries venti has set for himself as an archon.

and because we're all familiar with genshin impact lore, what i have to say next should go without saying, we are all so familiar with it: the element of a person's Vision will be directly related to the kind of ideal they strive to meet and uphold, and as such, can generally tell you a lot about a person's desires.

xiao wields an anemo Vision— the only known anemo wielder in liyue until the arrival of xianyun, presumably because that is how deeply ingrained the binding sense of obligation is in its culture— and wears it visibly on his person at all times. it would be ridiculous not to believe that venti knows, and intimately so, just how xiao desires.

and i think that a lot of fans can fail to consider the idea that to xiao, his duty of protection is a choice he made of his own volition when he was first set free, and is, in all likelihood, one he continues to make in canon. yes, this choice comes with a great many obligations restraining him in various ways— but do our choices truly mean anything if they are not bound by obligation? this is something venti would obviously understand and respect as lines drawn in the sand by xiao himself, and he would never dare even suggest they be crossed.

it's clear from the various scraps of in-game lore that xiao craves proximity to and knowledge about his savior in the marsh. yet, he refuses to go out of his way to attain these things and will even deny ownership of these desires altogether because in a sense, they are blasphemy: venti, although not his archon, is still a god.

might seeking venti out over zhongli not be considered a sign of detracting, or perhaps even failing faith in the unwavering sureity of the geo archon? or even if it turns out that's not so— who is xiao to ask anything of venti? the god of freedom must surely be a flighty little thing, following his every capricious whim. to ask him to stay would be akin to tying him down, no?

clearly, there is no need for xiao to call out for him. if venti wants to be with him, he will simply be there.

(and if he doesn't, then he won't.)

((after all, it is the duty of the servant to wait on the master's call.))

it's easy to imagine that these two immortals might end up in a sort of song and dance of propriety for a while, that at fight might be genuine, but eventually just becomes habit and custom. they both want, in some way, for xiao to lay down his duty, to be free of the strict hierarchy of master & servant or god & disciple. but for venti to say it so plainly would feel like he's trying to convert xiao to his ideals— a discomfort that would more than likely only be compounded by how seriously xiao takes the word of god(s), and how expressly venti hates being treated like anything but an equal— and so he would hesitate on his feelings; whereas for xiao to speak of his desires so plainly, it would feel like a betrayal of his duty— that which he chose to shoulder as his first act of free will.

you see it, right? the gap between these two characters, whose lives will otherwise touch and cross over and over through their long, immortal lives, and the mutual desires they can both plainly and painfully read in one another, yet never individually act upon due to their already-established senses of propriety, tradition, and boundaries?

these are the basic yuriisms of xiaoven genshinimpact.

#xiaoven #long post #only reason i put part of this post under a cut is bc it's 2111 words so in the interest of being polite i put 1356 of them under the cut #anyway happy birthday to xiao my son my melancholy yearnful boy c':#adapting this essay to the context of tumblr was more work than i anticipated #but i think it pairs nicely w/my xv moon/moon essay from a while back c:#i've actually been sitting on this one for a few months now; this entire chunk got cut from my submission to yaoizine vol 3 (yurizine)#and if you haven't had your brain chemistry altered by the yaoizines published by tshirt. what are you doing. go read them

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