i got lazy
Hi, i dont know your request are still open, but. Maybe Arlecchino! reader? where the batfam first time met them, they think she is a enemy? (well she is actually, idk) by her mysterious manner? they know her from Damian, who is friends with Lyney and Lynette. Damian never met with reader. But, one day. Lyney and Lynette is been bring to the Wayne Manor by Damian. For a simple dinner, yes. They tell that they are orphans that live in a orphanage named "House of Hearth" at France.
They come to Gotham for study. And yes, Bruce feels sympathy for them (actually want to adopt them.). Well thats just an idea he have in his mind. But, now. Bruce interested as they said that "Father" which is reader is a woman. And lucky, Reader is at Gotham for some "business", Bruce added that he like to make this "Father" came to have dinner with them tommorow.
(Fatui Harbinger is a netral organisation. Yet, still indeed dangerous. They only search something important for their own fortune, maybe like a mafia or something?)
Anyway. When the Batfam met with Reader, they cant help. But find, reader is.. Strange, and mysterious. But cant help by their charming aura. And, why is reader suddenly accept the offer to met with the Batfam? because, she want to make sure about her guess that Bruce Wayne is the Infamous Batman. (okay, maybe the fatui harbinger have some issues with the superheros ig). As Batman was the one who failed her mission for seeking a Hydro gem. She managed to escape of course.. (Idk, its your choice to finish the rest of it, im already fucked up to think the rest of it.)
Anyway, love your writing. I mean, the things i imagened of batfam have a crossover with genshin or hsr became true by you. I never found a writer that made such a Batfam x Genshin/Hsr/Honkai impact one like you. Maybe later make a Ada Wong! reader x Batfam? Im sorry if i have a lot things to say. Thank you for reading this shitty words of mine. Rest well, may God bless you. 💕💕💕💕💕💕
omfg i was just about to start a draft on Arlecchino reader!!! but i wanted to wait for when our dear Father is out first so I can read her story, etc.
I’ll save the bulk of my ideas/fic for when I fully know her lore but this is what I got from the story quest.
The name Arlecchino was the most people got from digging information on you.
You were this mysterious entity among the notorious Fatui Harbingers. Neither vengeful nor greedy. Nor were you ever known to actively seek out blood outside of the Tsaritsa’s orders.
Your priority has and will always been the House of Hearth. Your children. You were never too far from them.
After one of the relics your master told you to obtain was destroyed, you were to punished by being forced to help with the next acquisition. The Crown of the Pyro Clan.
You were stationed in East America. Particularly Gotham for investigation.
An ordinary Wayne Ent. office worker by the day, mafia capo causing havoc by night.
You weren’t really taking your job seriously, so you were soon caught by Gotham’s finest.
And soon after that, their obsession.
God is Tim such a great pair for Arlecchino reader tho. I already see him drooling all over them-
*raiden shoguns lucifer:3*
just for your reminder, mondstadt literally means "moon city". moon being "mond" and city as "stadt". fyi on why i'm talking about this is because i am a literal moon enthusiast and whenever i come across this thought in my head i think "wow. my favoritest city in my favoritest game is really named after my most favoritest thing to look at." and then it just ends up strengthening my love for mondstadt even more
just wondering if there are any mondstadt enthusiasts who are also fellow moon enjoyers? plus points if you're a lore enthusiast because i REALLY wanna know the lore and origin behind mondstadt's name.
Kaveh ass experience my dad had, he took a whole ass baby bird while being dive bombed because he was worried
Girl that was his parents
Alhaitham ass experience I had getting him to return it
i decided to do this trend but as Winnie and Auggie from Cold Front because someone's comment gave me the idea!!
Role reversal AU
windtrace is always such a joy
please do write an essay about wanderer one day i would love to read it <3
i love you. he is so <3 (essay under the cut because im crazy)
scara/wanderer/whatever you want to call him is so interesting to me because like. out of the train wreck that was inazuma, he managed to be one of the only well-written characters. and he wasn't even on the playable roster for that nation. incredible. why was inazuma so bad
in a way, his character actually functions to draw attention to a lot of the problems i personally have with the way ei/raiden and inazuma are written, namely that ei sucks and never sees a single consequence for her actions or even like. tries to fix her mistakes in any tangible way. Scaramouche was her prototype puppet, meant to be a test run for the eventual figurehead for inazuma which would run on unchangeable ideals while ei fucked off to her mind palace forever. he was not actually used for this purpose because ei saw him CRY and decided he wasn't fit to rule a country, and instead of like... idk doing anything RATIONAL with him she was just like ok. i'll let him sleep forever i guess. surely he will not wake up and resent me for this and turn evil. anyway. obviously he wakes up and realizes why mama ei abandoned him. he of course does not take this well. he internalizes the idea that his emotions made him weak and useless from. basically the moment of his conception. his emotional response is the reason he wass essentially abandoned by his mother. (to be fair, it's unclear if ei was aware that he retained consciousness, but still. throwing him out like trash because he had EMOTIONS was fucked up). this sets the stage for the way his mental state deteriorates over the course of the next couple hundred years.
so the poor kid has been abandoned by his mother for feeling things. bad start. but another important piece of this story is that, as per ei's original design for a puppet figurehead of inazuma, scara was essentially built to house her gnosis (essentially the heart of an archon.) since he never actually got used for that purpose, though, he feels as though he is missing a fundamental part of himself. as he wanders inazuma, he feels that lack of a heart harder and harder as he attempts to connect to humans and finds that he can't quite connect with them. (this is what i think of as his 'trying to be human' era) He struggles with the idea of mortality--specifically, a child that he befriends dies prematurely, and scara can't help but view it as a betrayal--"how could he break his promise and leave me behind?" he becomes acutely aware of the fact that he is not quite human and not quite god, but something in between--something that lacks the ability to feel like a human but was too emotional to fulfil its purpose as a god.
mortality and emotional response, to scara, become signs of weakness. he was discarded due to his emotionalness. his human friends' mortality took them from him. he grows to despise and reject both, which kickstarts his 'trying to be a god era,' which is how we've seen him in-game thus far. the thing is, he doesn't REALLY want to be a god. he wants to be loved. he wants validation and respect and family--everything that was taken away from him when ei threw him out, and when his human friends abandoned him. he tried it one way, tried playing pretend as a human, and only found more pain and suffering, so he decides to swing hard in the other direction, developing a superiority complex as a cover-up for his insane abandonment issues. No one can hurt a god. no one can abandon a god. no one can call a god weak. a god doesn't need friends or family or love because a god is all-powerful. he is convinced that if only he can attain true godhood--a gnosis, the item he was created to house, he will FINALLY be happy. and he decides that it doesn't matter how many people he has to hurt to do it.
(btw, throughout this entire time, ei has been in her mind palace being a deadbeat mom and deliberately ignoring the havoc her son is wreaking on the nation SHE IS SUPPOSED TO BE RUNNING. he even sends a message of introduction to the raiden shogun at some point ("tell her my name is kunikuzushi") which i can only assume was meant to make it back to ei and maybe get her to CARE A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE KID SHE BROKE but she either never recieved it because the raiden shogun sucks equally as hard as she does or she heard it and didn't care. ughhhh.)
anyway. obviously this little insane attempt at attaining godhood does not end well for scara. i cant rewatch that sumeru archon quest cutscene without losing all brain function but you know what i mean. he fucks up. his hubris is his downfall. his attempt to bury his emotions and his humanity in order to ascend to godhood give him far too much confidence, and he loses the battle. nahida takes the gnosis and then fucking immediately gives it back to dottore because she sucks. scara's final attempt at finding some sort of place for himself in the world fails spectacularly and leaves him mentally and physically destroyed.
and in 3.3 he is going to wake up and keep going. and i am so so so so excited. i want to know how he heals. I want to see him reconcile with his humanity and his emotions AND with his origins in godhood, and i think having nahida and the traveler help him do that is gonna be so good if they do it right. i LOVE that they're allowing him to still retain a lot of that selfishness and smugness and attitude that makes him compelling as a villain, while ALSO seemingly letting him reconnect with his humanity and become better. i do still hope he gets to beat the shit out of ei tho
Nyotalia PruAus (+poor little Holy Roman Empire)
Ok, Childe as a wuxia/xianxia trope. It's honestly a bit embarrassing how well this fits.
(blame @a-yarn-of-purple-prose for this post and if anyone here is a wuxia fan feel free to correct me, I'm new to the genre)
Wuxia is a Chinese martial arts fantasy genre you are all familiar with. An adjacent genre is called xianxia, "immortal heroes", it ramps all the fantasy elements up to eleven and skews tropes a bit (we'll get back to that).
A common trope is some kind of unorthodox school/sect or technique, allowing to achieve greater power without the usual decades of training. It could be straight-out evil or just revolving around chaos.
Such a martial school is usually called an evil/demonic sect (sect is more like a clan in that setting, not the modern concept of sect) and their techniques tend to drive practitioners to insanity. Either because they are inherently corrupting or because getting too much power without growing as a person is really not the best thing for your mental health. They are also often cast from hp points.
And then there's the archetype of a demonic sect heir. The best pupil or simply someone who has inherited a lost art. Proud, always greedy for more strength, often noble in some weird way.
*points to our calamity of a boy*
Common elements of such stories include:
Falling into some weird realm or meeting a weird person who teaches the hero a Forbidden Technique
Learning a technique too quickly through some sort of magic/alchemy/memory manipulation
Some people are so singular in their pursuit they become insane (走火入魔)
Ambition bad, loyalty and family good
Conflicting loyalties, generally a conflict between a chosen path and personal weaknesses/attachments (could be both ego and familal love, and this is more of a xianxia trope)
Fits like a horoscope so far but wait.
There's a very interesting case of Korean murim genre (their version of wuxia) where sects are less varied (I recommend this post for a basic introduction) and we get three paths:
Justice/Righteous/Orthodox/Light — theoretically they keep the Evil Faction at bay, and protect innocent people, but usually are corrupt to the core
Evil/Unorthodox/Dark — these try gaining as much power as possible and attempt ruling the whole world
Demonic Cult — usually dont take part in evil and justice battles, follow their own code of conduct based on their religion, value strength above all else.
(I'm sure there's a similar distinction in wuxia too, I just can't find it in the deluge of lore)
"Demonic" is closer to "pagan" or "heathen" than Christian idea of demonic here, their beliefs are often based on Zoroastrianism and worshipping a sacred flame. Do you remember all the Persian themes used for Khaenri'ah? And Surtalogi being the flame on Surtr's sword in Norse mythology. I also had the impression that Genshin gnostic references are based on the Zoroastrian-flavoured branch of Gnosticism.
In murim the trope of demonic sect heir is called "heavenly demon" (I believe, a more correct translation would be "supreme heathen"), they are utterly badass, live for the glory of battle, seem more like forces of nature and follow a very strict honour code often conflicting with normal human ethics.
(do I need to spell it out)
TvTropes also says this about Korean stories:
(do I need to spell it out pt.2)
I'm not sure why a Chinese studio would focus on the Korean version of this trope but I'm sure something like this exists in China as well or maybe there's a popular manhwa that inspired authors.
Xianxia extends the fantastic element further, focusing on Taoist concepts and practices and adding all kinds of magical realms (celestial, demonic, etc) and magical beings and making immortality achievable. I still need to read more about it but if I understand that right, demonic heir trope turns into a demon prince in this case. An actual visitor from the demon realm or a practitioner who achieved immortality through dubious means.
These are fae-coded in a way very similar to Childe and have a certain nonchalance towards things most humans would consider traumatic. They are simply not bothered by them, having a different set of morals or faring from a realm that is much worse.
Our boy isn't that (he's still very much human) but he's aesthetically coded like one, same as Scaramouche is yokai-coded, despite not being a yokai.
So. When people say Childe's arc is a reference to Journey to the West, it's not entirely untrue, JttW is the classic of xianxia genre and Childe does belong to the same genre. He, however, is not Sun Wukong but a different, darker trope.
This also explains why he has that "shonen anime protag but not quite" vibe. Shonen was heavily influenced by wuxia but this trope never quite made it to anime or maybe never became popular enough. It's not a deconstruction, it's a different story. Or perhaps a deconstruction of that different story.