Every time I think the devs have pushed the Phaidei envelop as far as Hoyo is willing to go, they surprise me once again.
Back at the beginning of 3.1, I publicly questioned whether what we were seeing was just Hoyo-typical yaoi bait for that sweet fan money, or whether we might actually be seeing deliberate coding of a pair of major male characters in a significantly more centralized way than previously done.
Despite the fact that Hoyo has been very consistent in their ship tease for Phaidei, the question of whether or not they actually intended Phainon in particular to be read as a gay character was still up in the air. It's one thing to have male characters dropping slightly sus innuendo for laughs and low-hanging fan service, or to make a male character flamboyant without actually committing to showing him in any close same-gender relationships... but it is another thing entirely to imply that a male character wants a committed queer relationship, and even through 3.3, although Hoyo was certainly pushing the boundary hard, I think a case could still have been made that the devs' primary goal with Phainon and Mydei ship tease was little more than wink-wink-nudge-nudge service for the yaoi fans to push the sales of male units in an otherwise waifu-oriented game.
But I think this trailer might finally be the answer to the question I originally asked, and it has laid some of my last doubts to rest: No matter where things go with Phainon in 3.4 and beyond, at this point I am willing to give Hoyo the benefit of the doubt and say, yes, players are supposed to read Phainon as a queer character (whether you interpret him as bisexual, strictly gay, or some other variation of mlm is free game)--and, importantly--to understand that his relationship with Mydei is not just an ancillary bonus for fans but central to Phainon's own sense of self-identity.
The key is in remembering that nothing happens in media by accident. Every single frame of Phainon's trailer was scripted, and therefore every frame shown after the question "What is your dream?" was deliberately chosen to convey a specific message.
In answering the question "What is Phainon of Aedes Elysiae's dream?" the dev team had several clear, obvious, and perfectly understandable options:
We could have seen Phainon mentally rewind the time and return to his idyllic childhood in Aedes Elysiae. We could have seen him reunited with his parents and, more importantly, Cyrene (who was conspicuously absent from the entire trailer). Over and over, the game has told us that Phainon loved his home, loved his people, and loved the peace that he used to have, so absolutely no player would have questioned it if "Phainon's dream" was to return to the paradise of the childhood he used to know.
But the devs didn't do that.
The power of friendship and found family could have been emphasized by showing quick flashes of Phainon with each one of the Chrysos Heirs: We could have seen Aglaea helping him pick clothes, seen Tribbie, Trianne, and Trinnon playing with Phainon and chimeras in the Garden of Life, glimpsed Phainon getting scolded by Anaxa at the Grove with Hyacine and Castorice cheering him up, could have seen Cipher tricking him into buying a worthless relic dressed up as a real antique, and then we could have seen him sparring with Mydei, as just one more example of Phainon envisioning a happy life with all his friends and found family beside him.
But the devs didn't do that.
The devs built a trailer that asked Phainon the question "What is your dream?" and then let their massively hyped male protagonist answer: "Let me experience joy by the side of my equal."
This trailer says, unequivocally, that Phainon doesn't need to return to Aedes Elysiae to be happy. He believes the life he desires can be found in Okhema, and his only requirements for that life, for that joy, are peace (a parade of heroes with Mydei and Aglaea, the guardian mother figure, by his side), domesticity (caring for the children of Okhema's next generation), and a return to normalcy (defined literally by the presence of Mydeimos).
The implication is that Phainon had already found his happy ending, had already achieved his dream--and all he wants now is to get it back.
The dev team had every option to say something different, to imply that Phainon had never been truly happy with his life in Okhema, or that Phainon's happiness revolves around everyone he's ever known and loved because he's the Deliverer of all--but instead they decided to tell us explicitly that Phainon doesn't need every single friend and Chrysos Heir to return to him in the same form as they left him (Castorice and Polyxia return not as adult friends but children to be nurtured, for example).
He doesn't need to go back to Cyrene's side to know joy again for the first time since his youth.
Look at this happy bug-eyed bean. Have you seen my son? Now you have.
When Phainon thinks of his own dream, he envisions himself where fate has already brought him--to Okhema, to Mydei.
This isn't tee-hee fanservice. This isn't a quick innuendo for the yaoi cash grab.
This is the dev team deliberately building Phainon's relationship with another male character into the thematic core of his story, linking the completion of his entire hero's journey with a return to the side of another man.
(Image from here.)
Whatever you might think of Joseph Campbell, in a very meta way, universal awareness of Campbell's monomyth has essentially permeated the writing of every modern hero character. (We can argue that the hero's journey never consciously existed for the original writers of mythology, but we can't argue that it doesn't exist for the writers of hero characters today.)
Phainon's arc clearly, step-for-step, maps to the hero's journey, likely in a very intentional way so that the devs can play with the notion of the thin line between hero and villain, the burden of heroism as the conduit for resentment and violence, etc. etc. In light of the fact that Phainon's case so closely maps to the monomyth, it is near inevitable that we see him experience the call to adventure (Flame Reaver's attack) and leave his "known world" (Aedes Elysiae) to pursue the saving of their planet, a conflict which will inevitably push him beyond the brink of death and into apotheosis as an ascended being, a changed man.
But then the hero is supposed to return. Whether or not Phainon's return to normalcy is possible as a changed man, we're supposed to see him try. His journey is meant to be rewarded, his lessons are meant to be learned, and he should be able to go back to the place he calls home, having achieved all he needed to in life.
Aragorn ascends the throne of Gondor with Arwen. Rose Dawson returns the Heart of the Sea to Jack. Odysseus is reunited with his Penelope.
The return Phainon is supposed to long for, the place he is supposed to envision as his normal world, his home, his reward for a journey finally fulfilled... It should be Aedes Elysiae.
But this trailer tells us it's not.
Okhema is the home Phainon dreams of returning to.
Mydei is the person Phainon dreams of being reunited with.
This wasn't a necessary message to send. The devs did not have to link Phainon's individual heroic character arc, the conclusion of the thematic evolution of his character, to another man.
No matter what happens in 3.4, nothing will erase this moment in which the Star Rail writers consciously implied that being with Mydeimos is the end that Phainon would choose for his own journey, the future he would write for himself.
And all of this is improved by the knowledge that Phainon has faced this question about his dreams before. In 3.3, Anaxa asks him this same thing. But when Phainon answers:
Anaxa scolds him for the paleness of the answer, how generic and passionless it is to wish to protect people without even being able to name who you wish to protect:
Phainon's trailer, then, becomes the wham line to this wind-up, the parallel story structure returning to a focal, character-defining moment: Anaxa isn't asking Phainon to voice a practical answer to his query--he's asking Phainon a core question about Phainon's self-identity.
In the past, Phainon was unable to communicate a specific wish or vision for his future because he had no true attachment to the world. He wants to "protect the people he cares about" but isn't able to articulate who that even is anymore, or why he cares about them, how deeply, or what they mean in his life.
In Phainon's trailer, Castorice wishes for a "normal life," and Phainon says "That's not a wish" because it should be hers by right, it should be a given.
In 3.3, Phainon says "I don't want to lose anyone else," and Anaxa effectively says "That's not a wish" because it should be a given, because caring about everyone and placing the weight of their lives on your own shoulders ("being a hero") is a perpetual losing game--it's the same as not actually being able to freely live at all.
So Phainon's trailer becomes an echo. Phainon gets a second chance to answer Anaxa's question, a second chance to tell the world what truly matters to him.
He gets a second chance to show us players what he really wants to protect, not in a vague and detail-less single sentence but with color, life, and specificity.
He still isn't able to say the words, he still doesn't manage to articulate his answer, but we get to see it, nonetheless--the fact that Phainon does have something he longs to possess just for himself: a personal wish for happiness that requires another man to fulfill.
That's how you queer-code a male character, my friends.
Comparing Phaidei and Other Hoyo MLM Ships (Part 2)
<- Part 1 is back that way.
In the first part of this, I laid out some of the ways Phaidei fits within Hoyo's normal pattern for queer-coded MLM ships: They're equals but opposites, perfectly matched; they've ostensibly got a "rivalry" as a cover for their laser focus on each other; their models are deliberately placed closer together in cutscenes than other characters' are, and they're intentionally paralleled to a heterosexual married couple. All of these are traits that other Hoyo MLM pairs also show, a sort of foundational standard for Hoyo's queer-coded MLM ships.
But then Phaidei just took a huge side-step around all of them, and started doing things that Hoyo hasn't done in any of their other recent games. (Tiny aside here: HI3 does wildly different things with its characters; I think that being first published when Hoyo was a more obscure company allowed them to get away with things--like the Bronya/Seele kiss and Welt and Co.'s cross-dressing, for example--that "modern" Hoyo games cannot get away with due to greater levels of public scrutiny.)
I said it in the other post, but it bears repeating:
You really aren't imagining things--Phaidei is actually different.
So I wanted to take a closer look at what was making it feel so unique, by comparing its differences to other popular Hoyo MLM ships.
Here we go:
1. The Feeling's Mutual
There was no heterosexual explanation for this framing.
In Part 1 of this post, I noted that Hoyo has a typical personality pattern they follow when queer-coding their male characters, particularly in using "difficult" personalities to create an artificial sense of distance between the characters. If one character is angry all the time, or tsundere, or using sarcasm to cover for their fear of getting close to others, Hoyo can mobilize that personality gap as a shield to give anti-LGBT+ players plausible deniability. Hell, there are people still out there genuinely convinced that Alhaitham and Kaveh have a toxic relationship. There are people out there saying Ratio despises Aventurine because he was mean to him one (1) time while undercover. That's how effective injecting a little bit of bickering into a queer-coded relationship is.
Hoyoverse is very, very familiar with creating this delicate balance of teasing the ship while feeding anti-LGBT+ players and censors just enough "Look, they don't like each other; they're arguing!" contrary material to avoid setting anyone off.
Which... makes it absolutely bizarre that they made almost no effort to do this with Phainon and Mydei.
Sure, on paper we're told that Phainon and Mydei are rivals. Phainon describes it as "He's both my friend and my foe." And yes, they have their quips (Phainon's "It's exhausting talking to you sometimes" comes to mind).
But animosity--the genuine desire to one-up each other--is completely missing from Mydei and Phainon's "rivalry." They aren't Sasuke and Naruto. They aren't Izuku and Bakugou. They don't actually even want to beat each other--they want to be equals. If you defeat Mydei in the 3.0 competition, Phainon immediately folds and calls the contest off. If you let Mydei win, Mydei immediately folds and declares no contest.
Although Aglaea notes they compete because they're "impulsive youths," what she was actually missing is that Mydei only let himself be goaded into Phainon's hot bath competition because he was worried about Phainon and wanted to take Phainon's mind off the failed trial. Then, immediately after beating Phainon in the hot bath challenge, he lets Phainon win the "take more people home" challenge, to tie up their score again.
In fact, Mydei and Phainon's relationship is so devoid of the actual back-and-forth typical of other Hoyoverse MLM ships that at one point, Phainon even asks for it:
(Though he's equally quick to demand compliments from Mydei too.)
Instead, virtually every line from Phainon and Mydei through both 3.0 and 3.1 reiterates that they care deeply about each other, and are concerned for not only each other's physical well-being but also each other's mental and emotional health. They freely and consistently support each other both on the battlefield and off, confessing their struggles and relying on each other for advice. Whenever they're separated, the game intentionally hammers home how worried they are without the other around.
Over and over and over again, the devs tell you how well Mydei and Phainon know each other and how much effort they're putting in to take care of each other:
The game doesn't let us forget that they are one another's
"closest person," and that the respect they have for each other is mutual. Although I wouldn't go so far as to speculate they actually recognize romantic feelings, canon makes it clear that they are aware their emotional connection goes both ways. They don't just value each other's battle prowess, intelligence, or usefulness--they value each other's feelings explicitly, every single time emotions are expressed between them in the game's text.
In fact, Mydei even scolds Phainon for approaching their goodbye with a straight face; he knows that Phainon is hurt by their parting, and he wants Phainon to be honest, as Mydei is being honest in turn:
The rainbows in the background really sold the scene, ngl.
This isn't Renheng, where resentment has taken away any glimmer of joy. This isn't Ratiorine, where even if Aventurine were in a more stable mindset, Ratio's inability to spit out his feelings might keep them from going anywhere. Even with Haikaveh, the Hoyo ship known for Alhaitham's devotion, Kaveh's own struggles and refusal to accept Alhaitham's kindness are an active plot point keeping them from progressing. Maybe you could draw a parallel between Phaidei and Cyno/Tighnari for levels of "mutual," but even then, Cynari interactions are often left off-screen or in the background, for the players to fill in the blanks. On the contrary, Phainon and Mydei's fondness for each other is constantly in our faces.
The devs wanted players to know Phainon and Mydei are invested. We're supposed to see how much they want to be near each other.
More than that, we're supposed to understand just how deeply they trust each other.
Okay, okay, yes, I know this is massive foreshadowing to the inevitable betrayal and tragedy impending (come on, Amphoreus wouldn't qualify as an ancient Greek drama without it!), but I think that a lot of people are missing the key here: By this point in the story, Mydei already knows how he's going to die. He knows someone is going to stab him in the back and finally end his immortal life. When he entrusts Phainon with this secret, he's not trusting Phainon to keep him safe. He's trusting Phainon to do the opposite.
He's telling Phainon: "I want it to be you."
If the prophecy can't be changed and fate is set in stone, then Mydei wants Phainon to be with him in his final moments, to be the one to finally set him free from the "curse" he perceives his own immortality to be. Of course it would be Hoyo who makes "I want to die by yours hands" into a declaration of ultimate trust, but it is an explicit statement of trust, in a way that very few--if any--other modern Hoyoverse MLM ships get to show each other on screen.
Phew, that was a lot!
But I think this is one of the clearest and most defining differences between Phainon and Mydei and other Hoyo MLM ships--the devs took away players' ability to claim they don't get along. You might still be able to call them "just friends" or "brothers in arms," but unlike Alhaitham and Kaveh who fight, Ratiorine who scheme, or Renheng who are actual enemies, Mydei and Phainon explicitly like each other. They trust each other. They seek one another out.
It might seem like a small thing on paper, but this is actually a big thing in practice. Hoyo is pushing the boundary here, reducing the avenues for deniability. It is harder for anti-LGBT+ fans to claim that Phainon and Mydei don't have obvious in-game ship-tease than for virtually any other modern Hoyoverse MLM ship. (By the way, this is why people have resorted to calling Phaidei "industry plant yaoi;" because they can't deny the queer-coding is actually there this time, they instead have to try to de-legitimize the ship in other ways, such as dismissing it as nothing more than bait.)
This also means Hoyo has less of an "out" if people start to really question. It would be harder to explain away Phainon and Mydei's relationship than it would be to explain away even Alhaitham and Kaveh's. Alhaitham and Kaveh have "They're always arguing" and "Their friendship was ruined by their fight" or "They're just roommates," etc. to lean back on. Phainon and Mydei... are really bad at even pretending to be rivals...
All of this to say: Hoyo made a bold and deliberate choice allowing two of their mainstream male characters to be so emotionally close and attentive to each other on screen. They went outside their own current comfort zone for this one, guys.
2. We're Conspicuously Missing a Twink
Moving on from Phaidei's emotional differences, I wanted to talk specifically about Hoyoverse's perspectives on gay men, and how easy it is for companies to slip into not only stereotypes for gay characters, but also extremely heteronormative portrayals of gay relationships. As sad as it is, it is easier to market queer-coded male characters to yaoi fans (who are often--although obviously not always--heterosexual women) if they fit into the expected pattern for heterosexual relationships: a highly masculine man to "wear the pants" in the relationship, paired with a delicate, effeminate man to obviously be the bottom.
Now, don't get me wrong: Gay relationships come in all varieties; people have different preferences, and categorical groups like "twinks" and "bears" exist so people who have those preferences can find each other. Obviously plenty of hyper-masculine (and just masculine-leaning) gay men do want more effeminate partners. Plenty of real guys consider themselves twinks and have great relationships with men ranging all the way up the most masculine dudes you've ever seen. But "masculine man with feminine man" isn't the only kind of gay relationship around, despite the fact that that's what Hoyo's yaoi shiptease might lead you to believe.
(Edit: I can't believe I have to say this, but it seems some portion the HSR fandom cannot read, so apparently I do: Stop using my post in your hunk/twink or hunk/hunk discourse; if you didn't bother to read the paragraph above this in which I word-for-word point out that real gay relationships come in all varieties, including lots of relationships between masculine men and more effeminate men, then that is on you--this post isn't about how "hunk/hunk" is more "real gay" material or "hurr durr twinks bad;" it's about how Hoyo has served up the exact same ship with different clothes on 13 times in a row, with their constant modus operandi being yaoi genre staple tropes in which one character is essentially designated as the bottom and the other as the top specifically using masculine versus feminine coding, because that is what sells to the yaoi fan demographic they are targeting, particularly to heterosexual female yaoi fans, who are predisposed toward heteronormative relationship patterns even in the gay media they consume. The only situation in which hunk/hunk is "more progressive" than hunk/twink is for Hoyo, who clearly have hunk/twink as their comfort zone and only very, very rarely step out of that established pattern. This entire post is about Hoyo's patterns for creating their mlm ships, not about gay rights activism--read the essay in the context of Hoyo's design philosophy or just stop reading here, fucking please.)
I don't want to say that Hoyo's track record on this front is bad, because honestly it's not. Their male characters often have surprisingly complex expressions of gender identity, with interesting blends of masculine and feminine traits. But... Hoyo does have a pattern. Plenty of their queer-coded MLM ships fall into this same general (and kind of stereotypical) profile: Alhaitham is inexplicably ripped and represents calm rationality, while Kaveh is "the spitting image of his mother," has to wring out his wrists when he uses his own weapon, and represents passion and romanticism. Ayato is the head of his clan; Thoma holds housekeeping classes for Inazuma's other housewives. Xingqiu is the "refined" rich boy in ruffles; Chongyun is the down-to-earth working lad. Wriothesley is the most masculine man in Genshin Impact; Neuvillette mothers the entire race of Melusines. Over in Star Rail, Aventurine covets pink diamonds, bathes himself in sparkling perfume, and is so tiny Ratio's hands can encircle his waist. (I don't actually think Aventurine is as feminine as some other people read him, but trying to pretend that he isn't designed to evoke queer tropes is just silly.) Moze is as ripped as Alhaitham, while the game itself mocks Jiaoqiu for being a pink-haired male character. I'm going to talk more about Renheng in a sec, but Renheng is also this way, with the more "delicate"-looking Imbibitor Lunae to Yingxing/Blade's solid frame.
Mydei and Phainon don't fit this pattern at all. Both of them are as tall as Star Rail models come, and while Mydei's build has an impressive degree of bulk, Phainon is no slouch either:
Neither one of them is visually effeminate in any manner, and they're also not stereotypically effeminate in their roles in the story. Neither of them is a housekeeper or a home-maker; (again, poor Aventurine catching strays, but:) neither of them is in the business of blinding people into deals with their good-looks or careful facade of helplessness.
Theoretically we could say the devs tried to squish Mydei into a more heteronormative role by giving him traits traditionally perceived as "feminine": he cooks, he plays house with children, he puts milk in his juice and turns it pink, he's paralleled almost exclusively to his own mother... But his role in the plot is such a quintessentially masculine story (son of a self-fulfilling prophecy, father-killer, god-slaying warrior, king to his people, aura-farming champion of the Amphoreus battle cutscenes, etc.) that clearly we are not meant to perceive him as a solely effeminate figure. The whole "malewife Mydei" thing comes across as so comedic because the game continually insists on asserting his masculinity.
Conversely, Phainon, despite being the "gentler" of the two characters, the one who is described as having a soft heart and being outgoing and kind, is even less suited to being called feminine. His "Messiah"-esque role in the story, literally being the "prodigal son" of Amphoreus, paints him as the very picture of a classical male hero. Even more so than Mydei, he is a private and closed off person who hides his heart--and his own identity--from those around him, traits more often stereotypically associated with emotionally-closed-off men than female characters.
Up to this point, Hoyoverse had a relatively stable pattern in the MLM ships they baited in their recent games. They primarily played it safe, sticking to queer-coding relationships that both visually and narratively reflect heteronormative relationships.
But Phaidei once again broke the mold.
This time, Hoyo chose to queer-code not the more delicate-looking man (although I guess there's still plenty of time for Anaxa, I shouldn't sell him shorter than he already is lol), but two overtly masculine male characters, who can't be readily projected on to a stereotypical heterosexual relationship by a heterosexual audience. This was a big departure from Hoyo's norm, and I think this actually deserves a lot more respect than people are giving it. Hoyo didn't have to pick their two muscle-bound warrior male leads and make them close and caring. They didn't have to expose themselves to the obvious question: "Why are two 'manly' characters being so soft on each other?" It is harder to pass off Phainon and Mydei's queer-coding as accidental, or suggest the fans are just reading too much into it, when nothing about them can be mistaken for a "traditional" heteronormative relationship that heterosexual yaoi fans are familiar with. For a game produced in China, where standards for depicting men and masculinity in media are so high, making the choice to bait two masculine men together (let alone this expansion's "hero," who is an expy of a beloved former character), was a very bold and risky choice on Hoyo's part.
Companies don't make bold and risky choices on accident.
Finally, I wanted to make one more point about why I appreciate Phaidei's emotionally attentive depiction--it's because there's a whole other realm they could have taken the "definitely going to turn into a villain" queer-coded main character. As I mentioned in the first part of this post, queer-coding villains is a trope as old as dirt. When you queer-code a male villain particularly, you add an extra layer to the danger: Now the male villain is not just a physical threat, but a sexual one. Adding queer-coding to the male villain has often, in past media, been used to conflate homosexuality with deviance or perversion and suggests sexual violence even if nothing ever truly occurs.
Maybe the real Hoyoverse queer-coding was the red flower petals we threw along the way.
I said I was going to bring up Renheng, and here it is: Unfortunately, Blade and Dan Heng fall into this latter pattern a bit. Although he has his reasons, the game's portrayal of Blade's "pursuit," especially in the early portion of their story, casts Dan Heng into the role of the victim, a young man being hounded by a crazed stalker who refuses to let him go. Their cutscenes, including Dan Heng's nightmares, paint Blade as an overwhelming presence who invades both Dan Heng's physical space but also his mental space, making it impossible for Dan Heng to escape his clutches. This "We must pay the price together" absolutely reads, out of content anyway, as some sort of yandere death pact. Their lightcone is literally called "Nowhere to Run."
Even though Blade is not deliberately engaging in any form of sexual behavior, his obsession with Dan Heng in their early scenes can give players the impression of a cliched "depraved homosexual," and the implication that sexual violence could occur is present through their early interactions. This isn't on accident; Hoyo was playing with the yandere trope on purpose! I'm not going to lie, part of Renheng's early appeal for many players was how scary and dominating Blade came across as. The subtle sexual implications of pursuit are the point, and if you think Hoyo wasn't capitalizing on the intersection of "sexy" and "dangerous" with Renheng's early interactions, then you're probably a little too pure for this world.
As things progress, of course, we see this dynamic between Renheng dissipate, shifting his narrative from "crazed pursuer for unknown reasons" to "potentially the victim" of their past scenario, an effect which they achieved through the slow drip feed of Yingxing and Dan Feng's backstories. This, I think, speaks to not only a shift in the devs' intentions for Blade and Dan Heng's relationship (there's more to be said here about the Yingxing-Baiheng-Dan Feng mess that is the cut lore, etc.), but also to a shift in the way the devs wanted Blade to be perceived by fans, from a potentially predatory figure to a much less toxic potential love interest.
Anyway, back to Phaidei: We know that Phainon is headed for a downfall. It's been so obviously foreshadowed at this point that there's really nothing much more to say than that--however, even though he will likely also descend into villainy like Blade, and even though we know he's very likely going to kill Mydei... I don't think that the devs will use Phainon's queer-coding as part of his villainous identity. I don't get any sense that the dev team has any intentions of conflating Phainon's potential homosexuality with depravity, or using it as a motive for his descent into villainy (he might be gay and a villain, but he won't be a villain because he is gay). I definitely don't think we will see the kind of sexually-threatening physicality between Flame Reaver and Mydei that the devs did earlier with Blade and Dan Heng, even if "stabbing someone from behind" does have an inherent sort of sexual symbolism.
I appreciate that even in a story headed for the obvious "stabbed in the back by the villain form of the man I loved," the devs seem like they have moved on from falling into the pitfall (accidentally or intentionally, to sell yandere tropes) of portraying of gay men as predatory.
3. Leave Room for the Trailblazer
In part 1 of this post, I mentioned that Hoyo uses the placements of characters in scenes to indicate closeness, and I already pointed out that Mydei and Phainon stand really... really... close together, much closer than they stand to other characters.
However, it's not just that their models are literally positioned closer together in cutscenes--it's that their body language explicitly closes other characters out. Plenty of Hoyoverse MLM ships are ship-baited by moving the models of the male characters closer together, but very, very few of them are positioned to so consistently exclude even the player.
For comparison, consider the well-known scene where Alhaitham brings the Traveler and Paimon to his and Kaveh's house, which was framed with both domesticity and intimacy:
Although Alhaitham and Kaveh are also prone to the "stand shoulder-to-shoulder" thing that Hoyo does when they want to imply closeness between characters, the framing of their scenes nevertheless leave enough space for the Traveler and Paimon to be active participants in the conversation, enough space between Alhaitham and Kaveh for Traveler to not look blocked out.
For example, despite standing next to each other in that moment above, the camera deliberately cuts Alhaitham out, so that only Kaveh and the Traveler duo occupy the shot. Later on, Alhaitham bridges the divide between the Traveler and Kaveh, turning away from Kaveh toward the Traveler--once again, the conversation and scene are open to the Traveler, and thus, to the player.
Here's a live demonstration of my earlier point: Alhaitham and Kaveh stand closer together than the player and Candace, indicating their closer connection.
Other scenes play out similarly--although Alhaitham and Kaveh are close, their body language doesn't actively exclude other characters or the player from feeling like part of their conversations.
Over in Star Rail, we see the same general situation. We know that Aventurine rarely stands close to other characters, with Ratio being the one relatively consistent exception, but even so, the camera will usually give them some breathing room, making it feel like there's enough space for the player on the other side of the screen to be part of the moment:
Meanwhile Blade excludes both Dan Heng and the player, putting us on equal footing to Dan Heng and giving the impression that the player and Dan Heng are standing against Blade together. There is still room for "us" in this scene.
However, once again, Phaidei proves the exception. Mydei and Phainon don't just stand close--they don't even want to share air with anyone but each other.
A very normal way to have a group conversation. Definitely.
Consistently when standing side-by-side, they turn inward to face each other, rather than facing other characters in the conversation, literally forming a closed unit despite the fact that they're supposed to be in a group scene:
The thirdest third wheel to ever third wheel.
If it wasn't enough for the devs to just imply that the Trailblazer isn't able to break through Mydei and Phainon's circle, they decided to call it out in the text itself, echoing the player's own thoughts: "What about me?"
As I mentioned in the first part of the post, the devs also consistently use specific camera angles to capture both Mydei and Phainon in the frame together, at the same time, further emphasizing the closed nature of their conversations.
You will never see so many over-the-shoulder shots again in your life. You are the outsider looking in!
Perhaps most telling about the devs' intention to create an intimate air for Phainon and Mydei's conversations is that literally everyone else disappears when they speak to each other. For example, Phainon and Mydei's first goodbye takes place in the Garden of Life, which is actually a pretty bustling plaza with numerous NPCs. But every single NPC was deliberately removed by the dev team for Mydei and Phainon's scene there, to allow them a private moment:
Even in their final farewell, where Mydei was seen off by a literal bustling crowd of NPCs, not a single person is visible during their goodbyes--until the exact moment Mydei reminds Phainon that the whole rest of the world is waiting for him. The whole rest of the world didn't even exist for Phainon until Mydei forced him to remember.
It's not just the Trailblazer (and us, the player) who is third wheeling Mydei and Phainon's relationship. They literally exist in a world of their own when they speak to each other. No other modern Hoyoverse ship is on this level of excluding even the player--excluding even the damn NPCs!--to make a point about their closeness.
I thought I was going crazy the first time I was watching these scenes, thinking "It can't be that the devs actually went that far in framing Mydei and Phainon as a pair." But they did. They actually did.
The envelope has been pushed off a mountain, my guys.
But that still wasn't enough for the devs. They needed to go further.
4. Deploy Shoujo Manga Trope #57
I know I just said that Phainon and Mydei's relationship doesn't map well a typical heteronormative male/female relationship, but that doesn't mean the devs gave up on any and all attempts to apply typical romantic cliches to Phaidei. On the contrary, the dev team's thought process seems to have been "Hey, we're doubling-down on our queer-coding for Phainon and Mydei. How can we make it really, really, really obvious they're a ship?" And then they literally spun a roulette wheel of romantic tropes and threw every single one of them at patch 3.1 at the same time.
We have the "romantic lead beautifully framed by red rose petals blood glitter":
The "You used my love to manipulate me" subplot:
Phainon begs for compliments, and Mydei's reaction is to look away demurely and call him a scoundrel?? Am I seeing things?!
This is where he'd be blushing like a tomato if he was a female character.
The "please look after my dear husband when I'm gone" tragedy trope:
THE RING???
"LET'S MEET AGAIN IN THE NEXT LIFE"?!!
What do I even say about all... this...? Do I even need to say anything at all? Has any MLM ship in a recent Hoyoverse game gotten remotely as many romance flags? Alhaitham, where is Kaveh's ring?!
What I actually want to say isn't a specific breakdown of any of these moments, but what they mean in totality. Remember that Hoyo made every one of these choices with deliberate intent. They knew what the picture would add up to. These are explicitly romantic tropes that are extremely difficult to interpret in other lights.
You are supposed to read "If there's a chance in the next life" as "I want to be reincarnated with you; I want to meet you again; I want to be with you in a softer world."
You're supposed to think of the ring as a wedding ring. For one, Gorgo would only have gotten it through her marriage to Eurypon, but even more so--there was no reason this item needed to be a ring in the first place except to evoke images of wedding rings. We already knew from 3.0 that Castrum Kremnos used crests and seals for identification. Why make it a ring and not just the crest of Castrum Kremnos? Furthermore, why involve Phainon at all? The audience would never have known any different if Chartonus just said "Found this I did, have it you should, Mydei." It's a ring and it's a ring deliberately from Phainon because the devs want you to see it as a wedding ring.
What an incredibly bold move on Hoyo's part, and I don't even really mean just in the context of being a Chinese company, but even in the context of being a global company. Hoyo lives and dies by the revenue of their character banners, and choosing to explicitly and (nearly) exclusively apply romantic tropes to their male lead and deuteragonist in a brand-new patch cycle was a legitimately daring choice. Their deliberate application of romantic staples to an MLM ship, in a way that is difficult even for anti-LGBT+ fans to write off, was a very, very calculated decision. I genuinely hope it pays off for them. I hope Mydei and Phainon's banners both sell well, so the devs' receive a clear message in turn that fans appreciated their boldness and their commitment to creating queer content for these two characters.
I'm just going to end on one final note, about a scene that you may have noticed I conveniently skipped. Yes, the most conspicuous scene of them all:
5. A+ Censor Dodging
By some miracle of obliviousness, some Olympic-level mental gymnastics, or by sheer force of will, I think some people might still have made it to this point thinking that Phaidei was not being deliberately baited by the devs. You could maybe, somehow, convince yourself that the blood glitter rose petals and the shoulder-to-shoulder emotional conversations were just coincidences, that the tsundere "I'm not worried about him" was just dudes being tough guys, that the Trailblazer was a third wheel because Phainon and Mydei are "just good friends."
But then devs said "No, we need to be unmistakable. We need to make ourselves 1000% clear. We are baiting the yaoi fangirls, guys; please stop ignoring our hard work."
If going further than they've ever gone with Mydei and Phainon's body language wasn't enough, if Phainon's being willing to kill a god to save his man wasn't enough, if implying a wedding ring wasn't enough, what else could the devs possibly do to remove all plausible deniability and make it undeniably clear that Mydei and Phainon are queer characters (even if it is only for the benefit of yaoi fangirls)?
They can do something they've never done in their recent games before: Imply actual sex between male characters.
(Side note, Hoyo lesbians have had this implied sexual content pass from the beginning. You will always be famous, Beiguang. It's only the male characters that can't even have implied sex. 😂)
Obviously Phainon and Mydei are not having sex in the game. The dialogue even goes out of its way afterward to remind us that they remained fully clothed in that bath, thank you. But the refusal to show what was actually happening--censorship used as a tool to imply--the cut to the black screen, the narration of one animal pursuing another, the discretionary water droplets between the moaning... (And another little edit because @mynabirb made such a good point in the tags: The fact that they chose to "censor" this with a butterfly, the literal symbol of romance in Amphoreus, is almost too much. The devs really did say "Time to silence all doubts.")
From the player's perspective--and examining this as a choice on the dev team's part--there is no way to read this scene other than "sexually suggestive." You're supposed to think "This sounds incredibly sus." Because it is sus. Because the devs added this scene knowing that it would intentionally make people think about the idea of Phainon and Mydei having sex.
Sure, this scene is really funny in context. You're supposed to come out of it laughing, going "Wow, they're idiots." But you will also, whether you like it or not, come out of this thinking "Damn, Hoyo really went all in on the yaoi bait, didn't they?"
You can't "Devs didn't mean it" out of this one.
Which is brave as hell on Hoyo's part, to be honest! Even if this is nothing but queer-baiting, they saw that sick yaoi fan money and decided to go all in on it.
Say it with me: A dev team from a country with notoriously strict rules against depictions of homosexuality in media, from a company with a huge global fanbase including many conservative and religious countries, and with a majority male target audience, went out of their way to undeniably include sexually suggestive gay content in their game.
Whatever their motivation--be it simply money or from a genuine desire to tell gay stories--this wasn't a casual decision. This took commitment. This decision almost certainly went all the way to the top brass of the team for clearance. Someone probably had to fight to get this added.
But they did it, and not with Kaveh and Alhaitham (the previously undisputed kings of current Hoyoverse queer-coding) but with two brand-new (to Star Rail at least) characters who have extremely important roles in the game's on-going narrative--major characters who can't be overlooked.
Phaidei is literally built different.
But I'm still left with one lingering question:
Is Hoyo queer-coding or just queer-baiting?
Even though I played 3.1 in a sort of stupefied haze because I actually couldn't believe what I was seeing in Phainon and Mydei's scenes, I also ended it with a pretty bittersweet feeling.
How amazing that Hoyo pushed the envelope so far with Phaidei... But at what cost?
Did Mydei really have to leave Okhema never to return? Or is he being banished from the plot because his relationship with Phainon was too intense?
Isn't this just the "bury your gays" trope, in essence?
Lore-wise, there isn't any reason Mydei actually has to leave Okhema forever. Sure, he presumably is going to fight the Black Tide where it manifests across Amphoreus, but what about that requires him to "never return"? Demigods aren't geographically bound to the locations their Titans blessed, or Aglaea and Anaxa wouldn't be able to leave the Grove. There shouldn't be any reason Mydei can't visit Okhema when he wants.
The more you think about it, the worse it looks that the dev team implied Phaidei harder than they've ever implied an MLM ship before, only to immediately turn around and go "And then Mydei left forever." As if the only way it's okay to make characters that gay is if you then get rid of at least one of them. (Speaking humorously, at the rate Phainon and Mydei were going, if the devs didn't get rid of Mydei, he and Phainon probably would have been making out on-screen by 3.2, but you know what I mean.)
Sure Phaidei can be the MLM Star Rail ship with the most support in canon--but only at the cost of never being seen together again, apparently.
I'm not sure I like this trade off.
However, I am telling myself to remain cautiously optimistic. We know that Mydei's role in the story is not done, and that he and Phainon are destined for at least one more reunion, even if it won't be a happy one. We've been told that Amphoreus's story will be "heart-warming." I choose to believe that the devs will try to scrabble some sort of positive ending out of all this. At the very least, perhaps we'll end with a "in another life montage," and get to see Phainon and Mydei finally meeting in that library.
So is Hoyo queer-coding from a genuine desire to include gay characters or just baiting hard to sell Mydei to fangirls?
I'd say let's wait and see. Amphoreus has barely started cooking.
In the meantime, I think it is worth examining (and appreciating) Hoyo's willingness to mix up their own patterns, break their own trends, and to try something truly new and different with Phaidei. Even if this is all the content we ever get, Hoyoverse did things they haven't done before in any of their recent games, and showed that they're willing to push the limits for queer content in order to tell the stories they really want to tell.
I am a served fan, Hoyo. Well played, well played.
Comparing Phaidei and Other Hoyo MLM Ships (Part 1)
I barely know how to begin, honestly, because I'm still so taken aback by the absolute Phaidei feast that was 3.1. But perhaps because we were so overfed by the patch, I was actually jarred a little out of the story itself--too busy turning over the broader ramifications of such blatant queer-coding of two male characters in a modern Hoyoverse game.
Of course, Hoyo isn't remotely new to queer-coding their characters (or to queer-baiting, either, gacha games gotta hustle at all times). They absolutely have a history of hinting at both WLW and MLM ships and of including fanservice between the player's MC and other playable characters regardless of gender. Strangely enough, due to the unique confluence of their target audiences' tastes, the Hoyoverse team has an active profit motive to create gay characters:
WLW ships are appealing to heterosexual male players.
MLM ships are appealing to heterosexual female players.
Simultaneously, WLW and MLM ships are appealing to queer players.
Heterosexual ships with characters other than the MC are unappealing to a large percentage of the game's playerbase, particularly to heterosexual male players who want to keep their waifus to themselves but also to female yumeshippers.
Hoyo's market is literally telling them that 1) male characters sell better when they're ship-baited with other male characters, and 2) players don't actually want heterosexual ships between playable characters if the MC isn't involved. (Hell, look at Firefly--players hate romances with the MC too lol!)
But at the same time as the market is telling the devs to keep making queer characters, Hoyoverse also faces immense social pressure to avoid including actual queer content.
Let me hold off on the political and legal consequences of including gay characters in Chinese media for just a second, and look at the situation from the perspective of Hoyo's target audiences first:
Take this data with a grain of salt though; I'm not sure where they got their numbers.
First, Hoyoverse games are increasingly global and surprisingly popular in conservative/religious countries such as Russia, Malaysia, and the UAE. The western world as a whole is shifting increasingly right on LGBT+ issues. For the games to be marketed well across the globe, they've got to avoid challenging the morals of these highly varied audiences. (Perhaps this is why past Hoyoverse titles seemed more open to LGBT+ content than present Hoyoverse games do; a broader audience actually means more restrictions on content.)
Second, even though conservative heterosexual male players are actually surprisingly fine with MLM ship tease, that only applies so long as it stays at the level of "I can pretend I don't see it." As long as anti-LGBT+ players can write off any MLM content as "just close friends," the dev team can get away with frankly shocking amounts of queer interaction between male characters. (I'm sorry to any straight male fans reading this [could there possibly be any?], but half of y'all could win gold medals if mental gymnastics were a sport. The lengths I have seen some male Genshin players go to try to explain away Haikaveh are honestly awe-inspiring. 😂) However, the boundary must be respected. The moment a male character's queerness exceeds subtext and becomes text, when even mental gymnastics cannot come up with a heterosexual explanation, and the plausible deniability goes out the window, it is no longer acceptable to anti-LGBT+ players, and they will be "turned off" from pulling that male character en masse. In essence, the market is telling the devs: 1) Huge amounts of queer-coding = a-okay, but 2) Actual canon queer content = that's gayyyy, no wayyyy.
And third, the obvious: China's stance on LGBT+ people is weirdly stricter in media than it is in "real" life. It is not illegal to be gay in China but it is illegal to be gay in a video game in China. Restrictions on media portrayals of gayness are significantly more strict than restrictions on actually being gay (which is interesting cognitive dissonance for those from outside the country, but that's an essay for another day). Hoyoverse legally cannot show characters engaged in any explicitly queer behaviors--at least that can't be explained away.
Furthermore, the rules apply very differently for male and female characters. WLW content gets way more of a pass from the censors. Bronya and Seele can blush at each other, but Alhaitham and Kaveh cannot. You would never see "Rondo Across Countless Kalpas" happening with male Hoyoverse characters. The censors literally would not allow it, strictly because Chinese standards for portrayals of men are different--and more strict!--than standards for portraying women. Legally, there are strong and serious limitations on what Hoyo can do with their male characters.
Summing all of this up, in trying to create their male characters and content, Hoyoverse is actually fighting a battle of conflicting pressures: Male characters sell better when they are queer-coded, but their interactions can never rise to the level of being canonically gay.
Everything must exist in the realm of implication.
(Yes, I can hear you: "Can you please get to Phaidei already?" 😂)
All of this foreword was to lay a foundation for the actual point I want to make about Phaidei: Because Hoyoverse can only queer-code and not actually queer their male characters, they have (in their modern games), fallen into a sort of pattern with their MLM ship bait. Certain plots and personalities keeps reappearing again and again. They've developed a sort of short-hand set of traits to give to their male characters--the Hoyoverse "queer-coded MLM starter pack" if you will lol.
While not every popular MLM ship in Hoyo's games has the same traits (obviously not), certain elements seem central to creating the delicate necessary gray area between "They're just baiting fangirls" and "The devs intended these two characters to be canonically gay but just couldn't state that textually."
And yet... And yet...
You're not imagining things: Phaidei is actually different.
To demonstrate just how different though, I wanted to take the time to compare Phaidei with other popular Hoyoverse MLM ships, looking at both the similarities (the patterns that Hoyo relies on to reliably queer-code their characters) and the noticeable differences (where Hoyo pushed their own boundaries in surprising ways).
Unfortunately, in the interest of full transparency, my own Hoyoverse experience is limited, so I can only use examples from Star Rail and Genshin Impact. I just haven't played HI3 or ZZZ, so I don't feel comfortable trying to use examples from those games, although I think there may be many ships that fall into similar patterns in those games as well. (Maybe some people can share in the comments?)
Anyway, let's start with similarities:
1. A Pair of Equals
The number one "rule" for popular Hoyoverse queer-coded MLM ships is that the two characters must be evenly matched. This isn't to say they have to have identical levels of physical strength (although that is also often the case); instead, the audience needs to perceive them as being on equal footing in some way. They must either be intellectual equals (Alhaitham and Kaveh), political equals (Ratio and Aventurine; Neuvillette and Wriothesley), equal in social standing (Tighnari and Cyno), or, yes, actually physically equal their capability for going toe-to-toe against each other (Blade and Dan Heng; possibly Zhongli and Childe; for those who ship it, Diluc and Kaeya).
For modern Hoyo games, queer-coded MLM ships with noticeable discrepancies in power dynamics are particularly rare; possibly the only one that comes to mind is Ayato/Thoma (though this is mitigated by the game deliberately telling us that Ayato treats Thoma like family, rather than like a servant). And I think this actually says a lot about the devs' thought process: They are deliberately avoiding scenarios in which one male character seems capable of "preying" on another, where the queer-coding could accidentally be perceived as sexual perversion due to a discrepancy in power dynamics.
They're intentionally averting the "depraved homosexual" trope by--sometimes literally--spelling out for the players that both male characters in their queer-coded MLM ships perceive each other as, and are interested in each other as, equals.
We see this explicitly with Ratio and Aventurine in Star Rail:
And Alhaitham and Kaveh in Genshin:
Even Blade and Dan Heng are likened to "a pair" of identical objects:
So of course, Phainon and Mydei push this to an extreme. Phainon describes himself and Mydei as "friends and foes," and the game goes out of it way to reiterate over and over that they are perfect equals. Although they compete in everything they do, there is never a clear victor; their score card is constantly balancing out because they match each other's skill and power perfectly.
But there are even hints in the game that this isn't just happening naturally, but also by choice: Even when one of them triumphs over the other, they both backtrack and insist on getting on equal standing again. Whether you win or lose the "competition" in Kremnos in 3.0, the outcome is the same:
Phainon and Mydei perceive each other as perfectly matched (in strength, right, right...) and are actively working to keep it that way.
The game also goes out of its way to insist that Mydei and Phainon aren't just equals in terms of strength but also in social standing. It theoretically should be impossible to match Mydei's place on the social ladder--he's the literal crown prince of an entire nation of world-renowned conquerors. Even Aglaea is not a queen; we see her on screen being forced to contend with Okhema's Council who are fighting her for power. There technically isn't anyone in Amphoreus (at least that we've met so far) who should be able to stand on equal political or administrative footing to Mydei.
Except, of course, for Phainon, who supersedes all others by virtue of being the literal prodigal son, the "Chosen One."
The game insists on putting this in our faces over and over again: Mydei may be a king in the making, but Phainon is the "Deliverer." They are equally matched in terms of authority.
The game even goes out of its way to tell us they're perfect mirrors in personality too:
Hoyo, in the kitchen cooking up another gay ship: LISTEN GUYS, they're equals, do you understand me? A MATCHING SET.
But also...
2. Diametrically Opposed
It isn't enough for the queer-coded men to be each other's perfect equals. They also have to be opposites, typically in terms of their personalities. This is the pattern that repeats itself most consistently across Hoyoverse MLM ships with strong textual support: the two men may be equal, but they're also nothing alike. (At least on the surface.)
Alhaitham and Kaveh's entire plot hinges on their directly opposing personalities and morals, representing the clash between rationality and sensibility. Dan Feng was reserved and cool-tempered, while Yingxing was "arrogant" and brash. Hell, Xingqiu and Chongyun are "refined and clever" versus "forthright and trusting." I actually think Zhongli and Childe, despite being the most popular Hoyoverse ship in the western fandom, have very little canonical support, yet they still fit this pattern, with Zhongli as the refined gentleman to Tartaglia's blood knight tendencies.
We know how Ratio sees himself and Aventurine:
Hoyo really said "Opposites attract" and ran with it for every single MLM ship they ever teased.
And there's a logical reason for this. Making the two male characters dead opposites actually slightly decreases people's ability to argue that they're "just friends"--if they have next to nothing in common, they're not usually bonding over mutual hobbies or basing their connection on shared similarities. It becomes harder to portray two male characters as "bros who just get along great" when they're deliberately written with opposing tastes and personalities. (Real friends can sometimes be dead opposites, obviously, but most friendships are built on mutual interests rather than opposing ones, while romantic relationships hilariously have the "opposites attract" stereotype.)
There's no reason to shove polar opposites together again and again except to watch the sparks fly.
Even Hoyo's male characters' color schemes are often perfectly opposite. Plenty of people have figured out if you palette swap Alhaitham and Kaveh, Dan Heng and Blade, and Ratio and Aventurine, you end up with the same colors. Ayato and Thoma match the pattern here too ("red and blue gays" is a well-known trope).
But once again, the devs pulled out ALL the stops for Phaidei:
They're red versus blue. They're sun and moon. They're outgoing versus introverted. They're a king and a peasant (if we believe what Phainon's telling us about Aedes Elysiae). They're the "outsider" and the "golden boy." One fights with strength and the other with technique, brains versus brawn (actually they're both kind of idiots though, so take this one lightly lol).
However, what I think is most interesting about Hoyo's pairs of MLM opposites that is that the devs deliberately subvert expectations by assigning the opposing traits to the "unexpected" character. In both Haikaveh and Ratiorine, it's the rational scholar who is more overtly caring and attuned to their partner's feelings. In Renheng, it's the kind-hearted Yingxing who is consumed by anger, while the aloof, expressionless Dan Heng's voice trembles in wonder at the mere mention of Yingxing's name.
For Phainon and Mydei, this inversion of opposite traits occurs with their personalities specifically. People expected Mydei to be a gruff, hot-headed, battle-hungry berserker with a sarcastic or arrogant personality at best.
Instead, Mydei is an extremely thoughtful person, who struggles with his fate not because of what will happen to himself but because of a desire to bring the greatest good to the greatest number of his people. He's a respectful, gentle (when he needs to be), and even sentimental young man who continues to hold on to love for those who have long passed away. He's reserved around strangers but generous and warm to his companions, and struggles to express himself but has a clear desire to be considerate of others.
We also know he's deeply aware of and emotionally affected by the racism his people are experiencing in Okhema; one NPC in Okhema reports how Mydei, despite being new to Okhema himself, stood up to the very council still plaguing Aglaea in order to protect his people:
Despite having difficulties expressing his own thoughts, he even scolds Phainon for approaching their farewell with a nonchalant expression--Mydei doesn't reject emotions or shy away from becoming close with people he cares for.
Instead, it's Phainon who actually struggles to be honest. While he might connect easily with others on the surface, seeming outgoing and kind-hearted, he is actually a much more private person, one who is reluctant to show his true feelings and dismissive of questions about his past and identity. As opposed to Mydei's desire to avoid Nikador's power, Phainon is (despite his doubts) eager to prove himself, spurned on by the pressure of the prophecy telling him he needs to achieve greatness. We're told that he craved the power of strife specifically, while Mydei summarily wishes to reject it.
It's Phainon who frequently has to be reined in by others--he was ready to kill Oronyx for delaying his rescue of Mydei--and Phainon who fails to let go of his hatred and desire for revenge, causing him to fail Nikador's trial, which Mydei easily clears.
By inverting the traits of the characters, creating designs which visually oppose each other while assigning the actual opposing personality traits to the "mismatched" character, the devs hammer home an implicit message: These two characters complete each other. They fill in each other's gaps. What you expected to find in one of these men, you will instead find in the other. What they wish to be, they will be drawn to in each other.
(Frequently bought together, do not separate!)
3. The Distance is Artificial
Okay, so if they're so obviously written as a "pair," being perfect equals and perfect opposites, how are they just "queer-coded" and not explicitly queer? How is Hoyo keeping up the illusion of the characters not being an obvious couple when they're literally written to complete each other?
Hoyo has one major tool in their arsenal to do this: Prickly personalities.
With the exception of Renheng, which I'll get to in a second, Hoyo has a favorite method for enforcing the rule of plausible deniability, the idea that "Nooo, we promise, they're not in love; they don't even like each other, see??"--and that's giving one of the characters an intractable personality.
This can manifest, like Alhaitham and Kaveh, as constant bickering, where the pair's main method of communication is to devolve into petty arguments or sarcastic quips.
Fans who support the ship can view this as an "old married couple" dynamic; but for those who do not support the ship and choose to insist that Hoyo isn't actually queer-coding their male characters, they can lean on these arguments as "proof" that the characters don't actually love each other.
A similar pattern was recently repeated with Sethos/Wanderer, with Wanderer's prickly personality being used to keep Sethos at bay.
By placing the characters at odds with each other through bickering, Hoyo introduces just enough doubt to make the "They're only friends/roommates, we promise" argument hold some water. This allows them to get--quite honestly--a lot of queer content past the censors and past homophobic audiences too.
We see them repeat this trope with Aventurine and Ratio in Star Rail, introducing the two characters as initially "at odds" with each other and trying to pass it off as Ratio despising Aventurine.
Even after revealing that they were plotting together, the game insists on introducing some lingering doubts, suggesting that Aventurine fears Ratio would actually betray him.
This creates the necessary "gray area," the gap that Hoyo can use to hide in--no, Aventurine doesn't trust Ratio at all, see? Maybe they don't even like each other? Who knows! The doubt doesn't exist because the story particularly needs it, but simply so that Hoyo has a shield to hide behind if people begin to question how close the two male characters are.
Even in comedic material, Hoyo intentionally keeps this "necessary distance" in order to allow themselves wiggle room. Is Ratio an enamored tsundere who can't spit his real feelings out, or does he actually think Aventurine is illogical, mediocre, and ridiculous? Was the "Keeping Up With Star Rail" video an example of Hoyo deliberately baiting by making Ratio flustered over Aventurine "on air," or is he being Aventurine's biggest hater in this clip?
It's just questionable enough that those players who hate MLM to interpret it as the latter, and provides just enough doubt to help Hoyo slip queer-coding under the radar. Those who want to see it will see, while it's written just vaguely enough that those who don't want to see it will not see it.
(That's the point Owlbert, that's the point.)
When in doubt, and when stuck with a pair of characters who aren't likely to bicker with words, Hoyo sometimes has to progress to the next level: making them actual enemies.
What's better for creating plausible deniability than one of them trying to kill the other? (They definitely were not fooling around in a past life. We promise.) In an ironic twist with Renheng in particular, the fandom seems to have somehow come to the (mistaken) consensus that Dan Feng and Yingxing were "confirmed canon" (truly, I see this stated everywhere; we love when reading comprehension fails in the right direction for once lol), leaving only Dan Heng/Blade as being of questionable "canonicity." However, this still works as far as Hoyo is concerned, because only Dan Heng and Blade are left on screen.
By insisting on their present inability to reconcile, Blade and Dan Heng are able to introduce just enough doubt into the equation to offset even significant ship tease for Dan Feng/Yingxing.
Enemies to lovers 150k+ slow burn, please look forward to it.
Okay, but back to Phaidei. At first, it seems like Phaidei is going to follow this pattern to a T: When Phainon first introduces Trailblazer to Mydei, the two seem to be at odds, bickering over how Mydei is choosing to confront the enemy. Mydei even calls Phainon out for an unintentionally insensitive statement (when Phainon demands to know why Mydei isn't "protecting the citizens," Mydei asks "Who are you implying is not a citizen here?" i.e., "Are you saying because I'm Kremnoan I don't count as a citizen?" You can see Phainon practically bite his tongue to take back his words.)
Also known as: Mydei experiences a microaggression.
Mydei's very first line directly to the Trailblazer is to insult Phainon's hospitality, and we know they definitely have plenty of silly insults to lob at each other while competing.
But this is actually where we see the first deviation from the pattern for Phaidei. Although there's a few cursory lines throughout their early dialogue, that's all there ever is--just cursory attempts at suggesting the two bicker and don't get along.
Within one scene, the "tension" present in their first meeting entirely devolves into purely playful banter, and it is clear by the time we finish 3.0 that Phainon and Mydei are actually very close and get along well, with virtually none of Haikaveh's biting comments, Blade and Dan Heng's violence, or Aventurine and Ratio's questions of loyalty. Phainon and Mydei took one look at the rest of Hoyoverse's MLM ships and said "How about we skip that will they-won't they?" lol.
But I'm not quite ready to talk about the places where Phaidei departs from the normal pattern yet, so I'll leave this point by just saying that Hoyo did start Phaidei on the same path as a majority of their other MLM ships, making a vague attempt at using their rivalry to suggest they wouldn't get along--thereby allowing for the alternative interpretation to quiet the haters (and the censors).
4. The (Physical) Distance is Non-Existent
Okay, but if Hoyo uses personalities to inject just enough distance into their queer-coded pairings to avoid crossing any boundaries, then what do they do to tantalize the audience, to make it seem like the characters might actually like each other?
They use body language!
First, just to reiterate a basic video game design principle: All animations and character placements have to be programmed by someone, and that means that all animations and the physical locations of characters in scenes are intentional. Nothing happens in cutscenes by accident.
Designers are constantly making a series of choices any time they have to put together a cutscene, and one of the key choices they have to make is how to express each character through their movements and their positions relative to other characters. (I've talked before, for example, about how Aventurine frequently turns his back on people, forcing their eyes to follow him throughout his cutscenes, taking physical control of the reactions of people around him.)
Hoyoverse games have somewhat standardized scene layouts for conversation cutscenes, with characters typically being placed at different distances from each other depending on their relationships. A majority of conversations happen from a generally cordial conversational distance, which means that any time characters cross this gap and close the distance, the dev team is intentionally sending the players a message.
Like, no one mistook what this was about, right?
Heterosexual jumpscare in my queer post; I'm sorry, I was just too tired to find a video with Lumine lol.
Repeating for good measure: Unless it is with a male playable main character (where the presence of the female main character is what lends the deniability), Hoyo legally cannot show their male characters engaging in physical contact that could be construed as romantic. Male characters can't hold hands; they can't even really hug unless it's "caught you as you fell after battle" (props to Dan Heng for being the only male character in Star Rail to get a "hug" with Jing Yuan lol.) There's a boundary that Hoyo male characters do not cross, and that's almost universally the realm of physical touch.
But Hoyo can place their queer-coded male characters into scenarios of physical closeness that they don't typically show among other characters.
Alhaitham and Kaveh's table says hello.
So does Tighnari and Cyno's single tent from this same quest; Cyno's Story 2, truly the quest that kept on giving.
Aventurine, a character who traditionally keeps half a room's distance between himself and the people he's talking to, suddenly doesn't seem to mind closing the distance with Ratio:
And even Renheng, the eternal enemies, are depicted as crossing physical boundaries, explicitly "getting in each other's faces." Yes it's a battle, but also, I've seen yaoi with less domineering poses lol.
You might think these lightcone examples are a stretch, but seriously: Go look at all the lightcones in the game. Does a single heterosexual couple have a lightcone where they are in each other's space in this manner? No, because physical closeness is actually a tool Hoyo is consistently using to queer-code. (Well, there would probably be more heterosexual closeness too if the incels weren't so weird...)
Anyway, when I saw the devs might be heading the direction of baiting Phaidei, I fully expected that we would see them side-by-side more consistently and with less of a gap between them than between other characters. But I wasn't remotely ready for the degree to which Hoyo would take that.
Here is an example of Phaidei exhibiting the "normal" Star Rail conversational distance:
Andddd... here's where they spend the other 90% of their scenes together:
The unnecessarily large distance between them and the Trailblazer gets me every time. Like they are not leaving room for Jesus Kephale.
Even when they aren't standing practically on top of each other, the devs deliberately choose camera angles that frame them both in the cutscene at the same time, which is relatively rare for Star Rail (not unheard of, but usually the camera will just go for the "first person POV" when two people are speaking, allowing for a close up of the speaking character). Instead of back-and-forth close ups, many of Mydei and Phainon's conversations are framed from a "behind-the-shoulder" angle, to catch them both in the frame. This creates the illusion that they're standing closer together than they are, and also reinforces a sense of intimacy in their conversations--the camera (and thus the player) becomes an "outsider" while their bodies turn toward each other.
Again, Hoyoverse is under pressure to avoid showing physical contact between male characters that could be construed romantically. They can't show Mydei and Phainon tangoing like Black Swan and Acheron. When it comes to queer-coding male characters, they have to use the tools available to them, and their primary tool for visually signifying the possibility of romantic closeness is physical closeness.
The camera is telling you that Mydei and Phainon are close.
Anyway, just one more point I wanted to make before moving on to discussing how Phaidei completely crushed the mold for Hoyoverse queer-coding, but...
5. Oh God, We're Turning Into Your Parents
Listen, I'm a reasonable person. I can fully accept that I play games with LGBT+ goggles on at all times. Despite being fantastically aroace myself, I love yaoi. I love yuri. I even like plenty of straight ships. I'm a fangirl first, academic second, so believe me when I say that I understand how skeptics might view some of the points above. "You're just fangirling. Being equals and opposites doesn't automatically imply romance. The devs might have intended close friendship, not a relationship." This counter-argument is valid!
So I want to end with one more point which I think is actually the lynch pin to proving that Hoyoverse isn't "accidentally" making their male characters come across as queer. Hoyo's queer-coding for certain ships is very intentional and even sometimes very overt. In a few cases prior to Phaidei, they were already skirting the upper limits of plausible deniability, and I think the modern ship that previously pushed the boundary the most is Haikaveh.
You can say what you want about other Hoyo MLM ships and their lack of canon textual support (I love you ZhongChi, even if the devs actually hate you lol), but I believe people who unironically say "The devs are not baiting Alhaitham and Kaveh as a ship" are so media illiterate that it's actually embarrassing to share air with them. Whether you think the devs are just doing it to cash in on yaoi fangirls or because they actually want to depict gay characters, it is indisputable at this point that Alhaitham and Kaveh have in-game ship tease. They just do, and one of the most obvious and unmistakable instances of this is when Kaveh's hangout paralleled Kaveh's relationship with Alhaitham to the heterosexual marriage between Kaveh's mother and father.
To draw a direct connection between Kaveh's father and Alhaitham, who is repeatedly described as not being able to understand Kaveh's artistic sensibilities and idealistic world view but nevertheless chooses to stay by Kaveh's side through his many troubles, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that Kaveh is his mother's spitting image, both physically and emotionally, can really not be interpreted in any other way.
Hoyoverse took a queer relationship and made a one-for-one analogy to a heterosexual relationship--Alhaitham and Kaveh are a direct reflection of Kaveh's very married parents.
This isn't something that can happen on accident. This is deliberate and unmistakable queer-coding.
Which makes it absolutely wild that it happened twice.
I've posted already about the obvious parallels between Mydei's parents and Phaidei, and I'm actually almost out of room for new images here, so I can't post the images again, but I hardly need to at this point: Mydei's parents met when Gorgo challenged Eurypon at the Kremnos Festival. They fought for ten rounds, determined that they were (what do you know) perfect equals, and Eurypon proposed on the spot. Eurypon is explicitly described as a swordmaster, while Gorgo used a spear.
Later, the game repeatedly (and in various separate instances), emphasizes that Mydei and Phainon's first meeting consisted of a duel lasting ten days and ten nights, where neither of them could secure the victory, proving them to also be each other's perfect equals. Phainon's role as Okhema's swordmaster is emphasized, while Mydei wields a spear just like his mother when killing his father and after taking on Nikador's divinity.
Then there's... everything that came after. Eurypon betrayed Gorgo, effectively stabbing her in the back, and took her life. The foreshadowing that Phainon will do this exact same thing to Mydei is unmissable.
Phainon has even expressed an explicit desire to take part in the same competition where Mydei's father crowned the winner his wife:
In the (very limited) Kremnoan dictionary, I'm pretty sure this is how you say "I'm down to fuck."
Just as in the case with Haikaveh, there is no way that this parallel could have occurred by accident. The devs did not go out of their way to give us entire flashbacks of Gorgo and Eurypon's meeting and downfall for no reason. You're supposed to see the one-for-one connection between Mydei's very heterosexual, married parents and Phainon and Mydei's relationship.
Simultaneously, the devs also parallel their MLM ships to heterosexual relations by incorporating shades of domesticity normally reserved for "traditional" male-female relationships into their MLM ships--including levels of domesticity that heterosexual ships in Genshin and Star Rail usually don't rise to. One of Genshin's most popular MLM ships shares a single-family home and has a chore chart. Thoma is Ayato's housekeeper. Tighnari and Cyno are just flat-out joint raising a child. Jiaoqiu cooks and Moze cleans. Yingxing and Dan Feng accidentally(?) made a baby.
And Phainon and Mydei aren't any exception. They live an apocalyptic world that is constantly calling them away to battle, but the devs went out of their way to tell us Mydei is an extremely good cook who prepares everyone's food and deliberately ruins Phainon's when he's annoying, which is definitely old married couple behavior lol. Mydei is framed repeatedly as being good with children, not just in the distant fatherly way but in the "plays house" and follows-along-after-unaccompanied-kids-like-a-mother-hen way. Yet when Mydei has to leave, taking the classic "I'm going off to war" ancient Greek exit, he doesn't depart without leaving Phainon his people--with the camera panning specifically to the little Kremnoans. Phainon got the kids in the divorce. D; The tragic domesticity is already off the charts, and then they hit you the second punch when Mydei's last question (just one or two lines later) confirms that it was Phainon who got the ring for him. Hoyo couldn't actually have given us a more heavy-handed "parting husband and wife" parallel if someone held them at gunpoint. That whole thing was some Odyssey level bullshit. I see you devs, I see you.
You might be tempted to say that is just heteronormativity, which it could be, but I actually think it serves a very specific place in Hoyo's queer-coding repertoire. In comparing gay relationships to heterosexual marriages, the devs effectively "legitimize" their queer characters, suggesting that the relationships between gay male characters are no less real or valid than those between men and women. In demonstrating that male characters can achieve stable and healthy domestic lives with each other, the devs reiterate that players are not supposed to notice a difference between gay and heterosexual relationships.
There isn't any clearer way for Hoyoverse to legally say "We want you to think of these two men as romantic partners" than to say "Wow, isn't it interesting that their relationship is identical to a married couple's." It's on purpose; at this point, you really can't say the queer-coding isn't deliberate without looking like you can't read, and if it was intentional when Haikaveh paralleled Kaveh's parents, then it was doubly so the second time Hoyoverse pulled this trick to parallel Phaidei to Mydei's parents.
PHEW! Okay, I finally made it through the foundational traits for Hoyoverse MLM ship-bait and where Phaidei fits in with those. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk! 😂
But... the whole reason I started this post was actually because I wanted to talk about differences between Phaidei and other Hoyoverse MLM ships, and particularly how bold Hoyo actually was in 3.1, pushing the envelop to an extreme degree to ship-tease Phainon and Mydei.
So, since the post was way, way too long, I've spit the rest of my point off into a second post.
I'm gonna put my two thirds of a classics degree to work here
When I said Phaidei can be seen as an allegory for Odysseus and Penelope, I meant it
Penelope encounters the returned Odysseus posing as a beggar. From a mural in the Macellum of Pompeii
Spoiler warnings: 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, as well as leaks towards the end.
TL;DR: Mydei is Penelope, Phainon is Odysseus.
Mydei and Penelope
Now, I know it may seem tempting to say that Mydei, being the big, strong, burly man that he is, is a parallel to Odysseus, but he’s actually Penelope! This whole fever dream of a "theory" actually stems from the parallels between Mydei and Penelope, specifically. Phainon was a secondary thought lmao.
Point 1) The theme of buying time
It cannot be understated just how much of Mydei’s core themes center around buying time, not just for others, but also for himself.
On multiple occasions, he goes to some pretty extreme lengths to do so, namely in 3.0 when he offers up his own immortal body as a means of keeping Nikador occupied in Castrum Kremnos. In that moment, he completely puts his own safety on the back burner – the team needs to hold Nikador off long enough to render them immortal once more, and Mydei has the solution, no matter the personal cost of dying a couple of times. Later, in 3.1, he puts his own personal feelings aside to shoulder the divinity of Strife, despite the fact that he was hesitant to do so in 3.0, simply because it would be for the best. Then, at the end of 3.1, he completely disregards his own wants and fears, and takes the fight to the Black Tide on his own because he is the only one capable of doing so. By sacrificing himself in this manner, he can buy his fellow Chrysos Heirs enough time to usher in the new dawn, and the miracle of Genesis.
But Mydei doesn’t just buy time for others, he also does so for himself. Throughout 3.0 and 3.1, his story leads up to one massive decision: what to do about the Kremnoans. He is torn between claiming the crown – his birthright – and leading his people back to Castrum Kremnos, or leaving them in Okhema.
However, to the Kremnoans, Nikador is synonymous with kingship, judging by Krateros’ reaction to Mydei surrendering the Coreflame to Phainon. In Krateros’ eyes, Mydei giving up Nikador’s divine power is the same thing as him “giving up the throne of Kremnos and forsaking his people”.
As previously stated, Mydei is hesitant to claim Nikador’s coreflame for fear of ending up like his corrupt forebears and leading his people down the wrong path, so obviously he wants to put off that decision for as long as possible. First, he enters a (frankly, pointless) competition with Phainon just to decide who gets to deliver the final blow to Nikador, and gives up his win ridiculously easily if Phainon loses. That way, they can ignore the decision they have to make for a while longer. Then, when Nikador is dead, he is quick to surrender the Coreflame to Phainon, and promptly shuts down Phainon’s attempt to discuss the subject any further. So, by sending Phainon to the trial of divinity, Mydei can avoid making his own decision regarding the fate of the Kremnoans, if we take Krateros’ words about kingship and Nikador’s powers into consideration. Effectively, Mydei makes sure the decision is out of his hands – he didn’t technically reject the Coreflame, after all.
So how does all of this connect to Penelope, exactly?
Well, Penelope’s themes also center around buying time – for herself, and for Odysseus. She also has a big decision to make: who should succeed Odysseus as the king of Ithaca, and just like Mydei, she wants to put it off for as long as possible. Naturally, she doesn’t want to choose, and comes up with increasingly desperate ideas to keep the suitors at bay. In the end, she does succeed; she buys Odysseus enough time to return home, and as such she never has to choose a new suitor. Unlike Mydei.
You see, Mydei actually fails in avoiding his decision. In the end, he is forced to take on the Coreflame when Phainon fails the trial. As a result, Mydei has to make a decision regarding his people and his potential kingship. In this sense, Krateros and the rest of the Kremnoans are the suitors, encouraging Mydei (Penelope) to make a choice.
If we view Mydei’s actions through this Penelope-esque lens, we can draw some pretty convincing parallels!
Point 2) The challenge
At the climax of Penelope’s story, right before her reunion with Odysseus, she makes a last-ditch attempt to hold off the suitors by presenting them with a seemingly impossible challenge. She sets up twelve axes and demands that the suitors shoot through them flawlessly using Odysseus’ old bow. What she doesn’t tell the suitors is this: the bow is nigh impossible to string. Then, as a sort of fail safe, she sits down behind the axes. That way, if a suitor succeeds, she is immediately killed and doesn’t have to marry them.
While this is more far-fetched than point 1, a connection to Mydei’s actions can still be made, in the sense that he, too, has made arrangements for the worst case scenario. In case he is corrupted by the Black Tide, and thus cannot buy the Chrysos Heirs enough time to bring about the miracle (i.e buy Odysseus enough time to return to Ithaca), Mydei has arranged a fail safe for himself by telling Phainon about his weak spot. Phainon is the only one who knows about it, and as such, he is the only one who can shoot through the twelve axes with Odysseus’ bow. The parallels may not be perfect, but the narrative is very similar.
Point 3) Sparta/Castrum Kremnos
My last point is their origins. Penelope is Spartan royalty, though she was never its ruler. It’s no secret that Castrum Kremnos is vaguely based on ancient Sparta, and Mydei is the prince-turned-king of Castrum Kremnos. It’s a pretty obvious connection, but I’ve chosen to highlight it, nonetheless.
Phainon and Odysseus
I'll admit that Phainon's connection to Odysseus is vaguer than Mydei and Penelope’s, but I can totally see it.
Point 1) The one time is being bought for
Penelope buys Odysseus time to return to Ithaca, Mydei buys Phainon and the other Chrysos Heirs time to a) render Nikador mortal, and b) bring about the miracle of Genesis. Now, post-3.2, we know that Phainon is meant to take over the authority of Kephale. If the plan proceeds smoothly, he will be the last one left alive to reforge the new world with his, in Anaxa’s words, “complete, intact memories”. While we cannot be certain that Mydei knows this, it can still be argued that Phainon himself is the one Mydei is buying time for.
Point 2) Nobody
Odysseus initially evades Polyphemus by calling himself “Nobody”. Phainon is called the “Nameless Hero”, and we have no idea what his real name is. Just like Odysseus, he has crafted a persona for himself.
Point 3) The journey to Ithaca
Phainon going on the Flamechase Journey is his version of Odysseus' journey of going to war and then trying to make it back to Ithaca. They're both put through the wringer a million times over on their journey, and express desires to go back home. In the end, they are both crumbling under the weight of their past actions and losses, and become increasingly more brutal because of it, if Phainon’s behaviour towards Oronyx in 3.0 was anything to go off of.
Also, LEAK WARNING:
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Going off leaks, we know that Phainon is both the Flame Reaver, and the final boss for Amphoreus. For whatever reason, we can guess that he lost his humanity somewhere along the line, and, if you can forgive the EPIC reference, became the monster. In the Odyssey, Odysseus ends his journey by slaughtering the suitors vying for Penelope’s hand, showcasing his potential for great violence, much like Phainon.
TL;DR: Mydei is Penelope, Phainon is Odysseus.
Now, this was obviously mostly for shits and giggles, but the parallels are pretty convincing, ngl.
Bonus: Phaidei = Patrochilles
Now, additionally: they can ALSO be seen as an allegory for Achilles and Patroclus, especially since the game has already drawn parallels between the Iliad and the Amphoreus story.
The game is obviously hinting towards Mydei being Achilles considering his whole weak spot-thing. Naturally, that makes Phainon Patroclus. If we regard Mydei as the “true” heir to Nikador’s divinity, Then Phainon was technically taking Mydei's place in the trial. Ultimately, he fails to pass, which is a nice parallel to how Patroclus dons Achilles' armour to lead the Myrmidons, and dies against Hector, who Achilles later slays in a fit of rage. In this case, Hector is Nikador, who first dies by the team’s hands during the fight, and then later dies by Mydei’s own hand in his trial.
My last post, casting doubt on 3.2's revelation that Mydei's immortality is deliberate on his part, led to some interesting discussion in the comments that definitely reinforced my earlier thoughts that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are too numerous to be accidental. Star Rail is not known for its flawless continuity (Robin and Sunday's backstory, I'm looking at you lol), but usually the inconsistencies are not so overt, and repeated so many times, that they become central to the entire plot of a character.
So I wanted to refine my earlier theory a bit: I'm cautiously optimistic that there are enough signs that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are deliberate, and that the Mydei of the current cycle in Amphoreus is actively experiencing an entanglement between two different timelines, without (yet) consciously recognizing the incompatibility of his own "memories."
When we work from the standpoint that the events of Mydei's backstory can be separated into two distinct timelines, the inconsistencies vanish:
The "Sea of Souls" Timeline
This is the most prominent timeline, and the one that appears most accurate for "our" Mydei. In this timeline, Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as a tiny infant and spent the first nine years of his life there. This is confirmed both in the flashback we're provided early in 3.1, as well as in Mydei's voicelines and character stories.
After nine years, he crawled out of the sea (possibly motivated by witnessing Tribbie's "star" in the sky). On the same day (or very near it), he met with a band of Kremnoan exiles.
Whether this was a larger group already, constituting a small "detachment" army of exiles, or just started with the five exiled friends and Mydei then grew into a small army by picking up other exiles over time, is still unclear. However, at this point, Mydei makes no mention of returning to Kremnos and instead goes straight from "leaving the sea" to "living ten years in exile:"
This is the key point of inconsistency between the two "halves" of Mydei's story--either he lived in Kremnos or he didn't. We can handwave here and say "Yes, he returned to Kremnos with his friends and they just hid their identities, leaving Kremnos years later in a self-imposed exile," but the story gives us absolutely no indication that this realistically could have happened. Mydei never once mentions hiding his identity, changing his appearance, or living a double life in the city, and never explains how he would have had access to the inner city of Kremnos ("as befitting a crown prince") and the royal library, yet still go totally unnoticed by his father or anyone loyal to Eurypon, including Krateros. (There's also no explanation at all for why he would have wanted to return to a city ruled by someone who tried to murder him and where he would have had to live life under a fake identity just to get by, but you know...)
Instead, the game does give us several pieces of information indicating that the five Kremnoan exiles did not return to Kremnos after meeting Mydei:
First, Mydei's character stories confirm that Mydei deliberately hid his name while traveling in exile across Amphoreus, indicating that he knew he would be recognized by Eurypon/Eurypon's loyalists if he didn't hide his identity. This awareness suggests it is extremely unlikely that Mydei could have returned to Kremnos without being identified:
This also suggests that, at this point in this timeline, no one in Castrum Kremnos knew for sure that Mydeimos had survived being thrown into the Sea of Souls and returned. This is further confirmed by a memory fragment where Krateros says there has been a "rumor" that the leader of the exiled Kremnoan army is one who "defied death." Krateros alone makes the assumption that this could be Mydei and decides to defect to aid him:
This memory suggests two things clearly: Mydei was not living in Kremnos at the time Krateros defected, and the exile of all of Mydei's friends must have taken place before they met Mydei, years in the past, as there is no way an entire small army could have been exiled from Kremnos, with Mydei in toe, and not at all attract Krateros's attention until after they were gone.
The idea that Mydei never returned to Kremnos is further enforced by Eurypon, who did not recognize Mydei when he confronted him, to the point that he didn't believe Mydei was even Kremnoan. This suggests that Eurypon not only didn't know Mydei's true identity--he'd never seen him before at all, making it extremely unlikely that Mydei was walking around Castrum Kremnos, talking to Chryseus Leo, and reading in the royal library all under some false identity for years. Eurypon certainly wouldn't have been capable of exiling someone he'd never seen before from Kremnos, in any case!
Therefore, we can assume the series of events in this timeline is pretty straightforward: Mydei entered the Sea of Souls as a baby, came out nine years later, went straight into a life of exile with his five friends, amassed power and support for ten years, and then returned to seek vengeance on his father.
The only remaining question in this timeline becomes "When did Mydei join up with Okhema?"
I think, in this timeline, it makes the most sense for Mydei to have only joined up with Okhema after killing his father. In 3.1, Mydei confirms to Phainon that all his friends died before he was able to kill his father, and that none of them ever made it to Okhema:
Therefore, the final order of events for the more prominent timeline is:
Dumped into the sea as an infant, nine years in the Sea of Souls
Ten years in exile with his friends amassing strength and support
Returns to Kremnos, kills his father, and the last of his friends dies that day
Then he defects to Okhema, leading any of the Kremnoans willing to follow him there.
By itself, this story makes perfect sense. If this was all the information we'd been given, there wouldn't have been any gaps.
Unfortunately, we also have a whole other set of information that massively conflicts with these events, which can only really be explained two ways: Either Hoyo messed up (again) and really dropped the consistency ball when it comes to writing Mydei's backstory... Or there's an entire separate timeline going on. Personally, I'm leaning toward the latter, because there are just too many seemingly deliberate fingers in the story pointing toward the inconsistencies for them to feel entirely unintentional to me.
Therefore, I propose that Mydei's memories are actually getting infiltrated by a second, entirely different timeline:
The "Gorgo Lives" Timeline
From 3.0 all the way to 3.2, we're given numerous pieces of information that point to a wholly different order to the events of Mydei's life, contrasting the story that Mydei tells Phainon in the Garden. At first, these events seem scattered and nonsensical, contradicting the "main" timeline in too many ways to be anything but errors... But when taken as a whole, we can build a second coherent timeline out of these events if we make one assumption: There is a timeline where Gorgo lived longer.
In the second timeline which is intruding on Mydei's memories, there appears to be one key point of divergence: Gorgo did not die dueling Eurypon. Either she never challenged him to the duel, or (more likely) she was never successfully poisoned, and therefore it's possible she won the duel, allowing her to rescue Mydei from the sea.
Working from that possibility, a second complete timeline emerges:
Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as an infant but did not drift there for nine years. Instead, he was rescued and brought back to Kremnos, where he was allowed to grow up in the inner city, with access to both Chryseus Leo, who served as his teacher, and access to the royal library, which he is proud enough of to call "his" library. He is able to lead Phainon and the Trailblazer around Castrum Kremnos even in its ruined state because he grew up there, spending enough time there to know the city like the back of his hand:
This is where we can slot in the inconsistent memories Mydei has of Gorgo:
(By the way, although Mydei writes this scene off as a dream, you can actually hear Oronyx's whisper play in the black screen seconds before this "dream" occurs...)
But okay, let's say this is just a wishful dream. Maybe this scene never happened. If all we got of Gorgo supposedly raising Mydei was this moment in 3.1, I might agree that it was just a dream (other than there being no reason to play Oronyx's sound effect there, but you know). However, in 3.2 they then hit us with this:
That's multiple moments now pointing to a timeline where Gorgo raised Mydei. Once is handwave-able--twice? That's deliberate.
In this secondary timeline, Mydei appears to have grown up as Kremnos's beloved crown prince, being warmly embraced by his people (at least until Kremnos fell into calamity). Apparently his days consisted of eating pomegranates, training for combat, playing with Kremnos's kids, and hanging out with his five friends. We see snippets of this idyllic life (along with his five friends appearing to be roughly the same age as him--something that likely wouldn't be true in the "main" timeline, by the way) on Mydei's long march back into Castrum Kremnos:
I know some people took this to be Mydei hallucinating or just wishfully imagining a life where he was able to be happy with his friends, possibly even some metaphorical "encountering the souls of the departed in a paradise," but I don't think this is true. Every single time Mydei phases in and out of this "hallucination," the visual effect and the sound effect of Oronyx are distinctly played--the exact same sound and visuals that play when Trailblazer activates Oronyx's prayer to jump between timelines.
Mydei himself doesn't seem to quite understand what is happening to him in this moment, as you can hear him stumble and pant as he repeatedly goes through flashes of Oronyx's power. You can listen to comparison video clips on the prior post I made about Mydei's backstory.
Furthermore, if we work from the assumption that these moments actually represent a rupture between timelines, then the rest of the inconsistencies can finally be cleared up:
In 3.0, Mydei says that his choice to leave Castrum Kremnos was not a forced exile but a "self-imposed" one:
And this aligns with what he stated in the Garden of Life to Phainon, that he and his friends "left Castrum Kremnos" to go into this self-imposed exile, rather than having never returned to Kremnos from the sea:
Furthermore, this also aligns with the angry NPCs in the past version of Castrum Kremnos that Trailblazer and Castorice travel back to:
Remember that this version of Castrum Kremnos was supposed to be occurring while Eurypon was still alive, so there is absolutely no way this line makes sense in the same universe where Eurypon didn't even know Mydei had survived. There isn't any way, in "our" timeline, that Mydei could have been both the "crown prince" of Kremnos for these NPCs and completely unknown to his father, the king.
These NPCs, furthermore, directly accuse Mydei of "deserting Kremnos," suggesting that Mydei was living in Castrum Kremnos as their prince, and then abandoned them to join Aglaea in Okhema, getting himself and everyone who went with him labelled as "traitors to Kremnos" in the process. None of this makes sense in the context of a timeline where no one in Kremnos knew he had even survived.
Instead, all of these elements point to a different sequence of events:
Gorgo lived, likely winning her duel and thereby (likely) giving her the right to save Mydei from the Sea of Souls and bring him back to Kremnos. He was raised by his mother as the beloved crown prince of Kremnos. Then, years later, as his father and Nikador both descended into full madness, Mydei and the Kremnoan detachment defected.
But what would have triggered this sudden need to defect after years of leading Kremnos as a well-liked prince?
The flashback between Mydei and Eurypon actually suggests a possible reason:
Apparently, at some point, in some timeline, Mydei knew about Eurypon's plan to break Nikador's divinity into separate parts and seal him away, harnessing the power of their titan for himself.
Yet the Mydei of 3.0 seems to have no idea about any of this, never able to give any explanation for how Nikador has degraded so much nor why Nikador is seemingly unkillable. Castorice, Mem, and the Trailblazer have to come up with the idea to go back in time to the past Kremnos by themselves, because Mydei never makes any mention of there ever having been a plot to break up and seal away Nikador's divinity, even when they walk past the very blades that did the sealing.
Finally, there's one last piece of conflicting information: While talking to Phainon in the Garden of Life, Mydei states that all of his friends died before the detachment could ever join up with Okhema and that all of their deaths occurred by the time he went to kill his father. But this conflicts with the NPCs above, who state that Mydei had already defected to Okhema and joined the Flame Chase Journey as a Chrysos Heir while his father was still alive.
This inconsistency is further reinforced by a memory fragment with Krateros, who confirms that Mydei had joined up with Okhema already before killing his father:
Putting all of this together, the complete series of events for this second timeline becomes:
Infant Mydei is quickly rescued from the Sea of Souls, is instead raised by his mother, and grows up as the crown prince of Castrum Kremnos with his five friends.
At some point, years later, he discovers Eurypon's plot to break up and imprison Nikador's divinity, and he and his friends and supporters defect from Kremnos as a result.
Either they go straight to Okhema (I'm inclined to say that "ten years of wandering" doesn't fit, chronologically speaking, into this secondary timeline) or they do wander a bit, but ultimately, Mydei reaches Okhema and aligns with Aglaea before killing his father.
After aligning the Kremnoan Detachment with Okhema, Mydei returns to Castrum Kremnos to kill his father, possibly to halt Eurypon's evil plan to harness Nikador's power.
At some point in this timeline, presumably before Mydei returns to kill his father, Gorgo likely still dies (possibly killed by Eurypon and/or Nikador), which explains why the Gorgo in the Sea of Souls seems to be the one convinced that she raised Mydei.
And this is just pure personal speculation, because there isn't enough evidence to really confirm it, but I almost feel like we can even pinpoint how/when the whole decision to defect to Okhema took place. At the end of Mydei's flashbacks to the "peaceful" Kremnos, Peucesta says that Mydei has been away from Kremnos for a while.
Leonnius assumes that Mydei was away on some apparently extended training trip, but this moment specifically ends with Gorgo welcoming Mydei home and asking him one very important question:
Obviously these lines are doing double duty, symbolically welcoming the present Mydei back to the ruins of Castrum Kremnos and asking him whether he's finally ready to take on his role as the "Guardian of Amphoreus." But as the wiki notes, this takes place in a flashback to the past, and for the "Mydei of the past" (aka the Mydei of the alternate timeline), this could very well have been Mydei disappearing from Kremnos to make contact with Aglaea in Okhema, and Gorgo questioning him about his decision to commit himself to the Flame Chase Journey, leading up to an ultimate and permanent defection from Kremnos. (This is just speculation though, trying to tie the last few loose ends together.)
Anyway, when taken from this perspective, that there are two separate backstories here, one from a world where Gorgo lived and the more prominent one where she died, we can sort all the seeming inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory into two surprisingly tidy and complete timelines.
I haven't yet found anything in any Mydei scene that doesn't fit one of these two scenarios, so I'm starting to definitely feel optimistic here that this writing was intentional, and that the "contradictory" backstory we're seeing for Mydei isn't "the worst continuity Star Rail has served up to date," but instead an actual deliberate choice to present us with a character whose memories are a hodge-podge of two divergent timelines, snippets of one timeline constantly erupting and "filling in the blanks" of the other.
I think this would be a fascinating way to lead up to the idea that Amphoreus's world isn't real, that it's a cobbled together story or set of memories that someone is barely holding together, and that it's constantly cyclical in nature, with events repeating with slight variations across times. The idea that Mydei is actually experiencing two different sets of memories crushed together into a tangled jumble and that he's only just now starting to become aware of the discrepancies would be such an excellent way to reinforce the "unreality" of Amphoreus's plot as a whole.
I really hope this is the direction that they take the story... Or at least that I won't one day be looking at all my Mydei posts and sadly thinking to myself that I put a lot more thought into the character's backstory than his own writers did, RIPPPPP. 😂😂😂
What in the World is Going on With Mydei's Backstory?
One thing I noticed while playing through the story is that there appears to be something very strange going on with Mydei's backstory. Namely: It's almost like he's got two different backstories going on at once.
And I wonder if that's on accident... or on purpose. On the one hand, Amphoreus's plot has my brain spinning wild conspiracy theories about time loops and multiple lives and even the whole world possibly being some sort of simulation, which would make "two simultaneous timelines" make perfect sense.
(On the other hand... Hoyo doesn't have the best track record for character timelines. Remember how Sunday and Robin's mother was killed when the stellaron fell on Penacony... the same stellaron that fell before the Astral Express crash landed... centuries ago... 😂)
But anyway, here's what I mean:
In 3.0, Mydei makes statements that suggest he lived in Castrum Kremnos:
Phainon also says that Mydei is "homesick" for Kremnos, implying this was his home at some point.
The Chryseus Leo in Castrum Kremnos recognizes him by the sound of his voice, and Mydei responds as if reuniting with a well-loved mentor:
This suggests Mydei spent long enough in Kremnos to be affectionate with Chryseus Leo (he even calls him just "Leo" like a nickname) and have learned from him as a teacher.
In 3.1, Mydei speaks about the Kremnoan royal library as if he has personal knowledge of what scrolls/slates are available there. He also calls it "my library" with a possessive but especially fond feeling, as if he's spent a decent amount of time there and loves it.
And, during Trailblazer and Castorice's visit to past Castrum Kremnos, which supposedly takes place before Eurypon's fall, an NPC on the street curses Mydei as a traitor and claims that all the Kremnoans who went with him to Okhema are "deserters."
Castorice and the Trailblazer even have a discussion about whether Mydei's choice to leave Castrum Kremnos was brave or cowardly. This indicates that Mydei's whereabouts were well-known to the people of Castrum Kremnos before the city met its downfall.
However... there's a big problem with all this: None of this actually make sense with the backstory Mydei himself states in 3.1.
According to the flashback we experience in 3.1, Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as an infant.
This correlates with what we know from his leaked voicelines (skip the image below if you want to avoid the leak!)
His earliest memory is in the Sea of Souls. He himself states he has no memory of living in Kremnos before his father threw him into the sea. He lived nine years in the Sea of Souls before returning to land.
Then, he states that he met his five friends directly after returning from the Sea of Souls:
And he states that they lived together "in exile" for ten years.
But... uh... who exiled them?
It literally can't have been Eurypon, given that Eurypon doesn't recognize Mydei at all and explicitly had no idea Mydei was still alive the whole time:
A few lines later, Mydei also states:
"When we left Kremnos."
So Mydei... went back to Kremnos after leaving the Sea of Souls and meeting his friends...? And he lived in the inner city and had access to the royal library, apparently, but nobody loyal to the king ever noticed him? And then he was somehow exiled after that? For... some other crime entirely (since it wouldn't be for being the missing crown prince, given Eurypon didn't know he was back)? Or just decided to self-exile at some point, despite living presumably relatively peacefully in his home nation?
When could this even have fit in the timeline?
We're told that by "the fifth year" of Mydei returning from the Sea of Souls (Mydei would have been 14 years old) three of his five friends were already dead, and he'd already waged war with at least two different countries (Ladon and Aidonia).
We're never remotely given an indication here that there is room in the timeline for Mydei to have returned to Kremnos and just lived there as an undercover citizen. He instead specifically states that he and his friends lived in the wilds of Amphoreus, roaming the land for ten years.
He even notes that all of his friends died before he ever had a chance to bring the detachment to join up with Okhema:
There's also the entire aspect of Mydei's situation being paralleled to the children he meets in Okhema. When he asks them "How can you consider Kremnos your home when you never lived there?" we, as the players, are supposed to recognize that Mydei feels this way too: Castrum Kremnos was not his home--because theoretically the timeline is telling us he never actually lived here.
This is reinforced by the "As I've Written" chapter, where Okhema is once again posited as Mydei's only home:
So... Something is really not adding up here, especially if you think to the NPC in past Castrum Kremnos who describes Mydei word-for-word as both the "crown prince" and a "Chrysos Heir" who has already deserted for Okhema with his army before Eurypon's death.
In the Kremnos ruins, there's this memory fragment where Krateros confirms that Mydei and the detachment are already working with Okhema before Eurypon's death:
Except that this definitely conflicts with the timeline Mydei gives for his own joining up with Okhema. He says all of his friends died before the detachment went to Okhema, and explicitly that Hephaestion died after Eurypon:
So this is Schroedinger's detachment, both allied to Okhema and not at the same time. 😂
We also know that Mydei didn't live in Kremnos after killing his father, since he explicitly states:
Why would the people need to be led back into Kremnos... if they hadn't left yet...
Furthermore, some of Hepaestion's dialogue also makes it sound like Mydei already had the Kremnoan people with him at this time, and that the migrant Kremnoans were already waiting for Mydei to lead them back to Kremnos:
Theoretically, Mydei could have been traveling around Amphoreus just picking up random Kremnoan exiles and formed the detachment out of those random Kremnoans he picked up... maybe? I guess? Since it definitely doesn't make sense that he absconded from Castrum Kremnos with a whole army and his dad never even noticed!
And the icing on the cake even. During his confrontation with Eurypon, Mydei says:
He knew about Nikador's soul being split?! He knew about what had been done to make Nikador immortal way back then? And then he just... FORGOT before 3.0?! Whattttt is even happening herreeee?
The only way even part of this works as a single timeline is if the events are:
Mydei is thrown into the Sea of Souls as an infant.
Mydei lives 9 years as a feral siren child in the Sea of Souls.
Mydei finally returns to land, meets his five friends.
Mydei, despite knowing his father is out to kill him, sneaks back into Castrum Kremnos and somehow manages to find a place to live as an undercover citizen (under a fake name too, presumably?!) in the inner city even though he would theoretically be perceived as a penniless, nameless orphan at this point. Maybe he couch surfs at his five bros' houses, I don't know lol.
In some relatively short period of time (less than five years for sure), he manages to build an entire detachment army under his father's nose with no one giving away his identity to anyone loyal to the king (despite the fact that we see many Kremnoan citizens still loyal to Eurypon all the way to the end), then he exiles himself and his entire army from Kremnos, still without the king even noticing?
Mydei and his army pillage randomly for ten years, then Mydei returns and kills his father.
He leads the Kremnoan detachment to Okhema to join Aglaea's cause.
However, this still can't resolve the continuity error of the random people of Castrum Kremnos knowing he's 1) alive, 2) the crown prince, and 3) assisting Okhema all before Eurypon, the literal king, even learned Mydei was still alive, plus knowing about the plot to break Nikador's soul up and then somehow just flat out forgetting that lol.
Even Castrum Kremnos's timeline itself is confusing
There's also the weird stuff going on with Castrum Kremnos's timeline.
We know that Castrum Kremnos's last Kremnos Festival took place at the end of the Chrysos War. In 3.0, Phainon talks about this war and the tales of the Chrysos heirs involved with it as if it is something that took place long enough ago to have become the stuff of legends:
When being exposed to the present Kremnos, Gnaeus implies that a significant amount of time must have passed between Eurypon's death and the Trailblazer and Castorice's mission:
And Gnaeus also confirms that supposedly thousands of years have passed between Castrum Kremnos's last Kremnos Festival and the present:
Mydei implies that the people of Castrum Kremnos have been away from their homeland long enough for their traditions to have faded:
Aelius, who is a grown-ish looking NPC from the "Love in the Time of Black Tide" questline, notes that when he came with Mydei to Okhema, he was just a child:
All of this suggested that Castrum Kremnos's downfall actually happened years and years ago, some of it suggesting possibly decades or even centuries of lying in ruin.
The fact that an NPC aged to adulthood or near to it while Mydei didn't change at all definitely had people convinced in 3.0 that Mydei was literally "immortal" in that he did not age, suggesting he could be centuries old.
However, that... also doesn't make sense.
We have Damionis who managed to take a picture at the last Kremnos Festival, suggesting it wasn't very many years ago, given that he's clearly not an older NPC:
And Krateros, who clearly does age, is shown as an already grown man in the flashbacks with Eurypon and Gorgo.
To complicate matters even further, we have two Gorgos--one in the past and one who was Mydei's mother, but both of whom achieved the same feat. The devs even deliberately obfuscate on the original Gorgo's identity through the readables to further link the Gorgo of the past with the Gorgo of the present by refusing to state the gender of the Gorgo of the past:
It's not on accident. They want players to conflate the two Gorgos.
Andddd another edit, because I keep finding things that don't add up. When Phainon and the Trailblazer go to Kremnos to fight Flame Reaver, they run into a bunch of Kremnoans fighting the black tide. Phainon speculates that Aglaea must have rallied them, except...
That guy definitely has no idea why Aglaea would be giving him any commands, and, more than that--he doesn't even know who Phainon is. Could there really be any of the Kremnoan detachment that don't at least know of Okhema's Chrysos Heirs? And why would he imply that their "king will deal with you" if Mydei is aligned with Okhema?
I don't think these Kremnoans came from the time period we think they did...
How can we reconcile this?
We could just handwave this and say "Classic Hoyo, not great with keeping track of their own writing." We have evidence they've made mistakes (and retcons) before.
But with timelines being so central to Amphoreus's plot... I'm suspicious, enough so to suggest that there may be enough conflicting information here that this could be on purpose.
In fact, if you separate out the events that don't make sense together, it almost appears as if there could be two completely different timelines, or as if events from two different timelines have become stitched together, trying to create one coherent story and yet, like mismatched puzzle pieces, not quite adding up.
In one timeline, the one that seems most prevalent, Mydei (who ages normally) was tossed into the Sea of Souls as an infant despite his mother's protests, lived (and died) in the sea nine years, then was discovered by a band of five Kremnoan exiles who became his friends, wandered with them for ten years, and eventually returned to Castrum Kremnos to kill his father at around 19 years old. From there, he led any Kremnoans who were willing to follow him to Okhema as refugees and as a detachment army, and they've served in Okhema for no more than a few years--enough that Aglaea still calls him a youth and Mydei hasn't noticeably aged since he killed his father, and enough that Damionis, who visited Castrum Kremnos during the last festival, is still a young man.
In the other timeline, we have a much more ancient Castrum Kremnos, one which had already fallen into ruin long enough ago for its final king to turn to dust and the Chrysos War to become the stuff of legends, according to Phainon. In this timeline, a version of Mydeimos who was much more familiar with the city, one who apparently had access to the royal library and lived in the inner city of Castrum Kremnos (which Phainon says matches him having the status of a prince), suddenly decides to betray his country, possibly due to seeing his father decline into madness. He becomes a "traitor of a crown prince" according to the regular Kremnoans, but manages to assemble an army of his own loyal followers, which becomes the Kremnoan detachment that lays waste to enemy countries for years. At some point, he is recognized as a Chrysos Heir during the Chrysos War era and allies himself with Okhema, and then only after that returns to kill his father.
And the biggest hint we have to support this "alternate timelines" theory?
The game itself.
When Mydei returns to Castrum Kremnos, we actually see two different scenarios weaving together--the "truth" as we know it, with a destroyed Castrum Kremnos, and the other where the nation is whole and happy.
The assumption the game leaves players with on the surface is that Mydei is simply imagining things, envisioning a "dream" scenario where he reunites with his lost friends and gets to live in a flourishing Castrum Kremnos with his people.
However... I feel the need to point out that every time the scene cuts between the "dream" and "reality"... We actually hear the exact same sound effect that plays whenever you activate Oronyx's miracles to travel between timelines.
For comparison, Mydei's "dream":
And Oronyx's miracles sound effect:
In fact, the visual effect of swapping timelines (darkening on the edges of the screen, a flash of blue geometric shapes) is actually also perfectly identical, and you can even hear Oronyx's voice as Mydei shifts between "reality" and his supposed "dream."
If it were just the repeated sound effect, it might be easy to say it's just Hoyo reusing resources. But... why play Oronyx's animation and voice over the scene if this isn't a time shift?
Unless... all the confusion is on purpose.
Is it possible that what we're seeing unfold in Amphoreus isn't the truth? That the stories we're hearing and seeing might not be whole stories and are instead just scattered pieces? Different timelines stitched together, like someone telling stories about the past but misremembering the details? With memories overlapping, or overwriting each other, or being altered by timelines or time loops collapsing in on themselves? (Something similar happens with Tribios's story, by the way--Tribbie insists that in the ancient timeline, Tribios was completely alone and that we as time travelers with Oronyx's power are in fact only witnessing a memory, and yet Phainon notes several times that it's not possible for Tribios to have made it through without outside assistance, suggesting the two timelines are in fact overlapping, and what Tribbie remembers in her memory isn't actually accurate.)
Is it possible that the events of Mydei's backstory don't quite add up because they're not supposed to?
Is Mydei really imagining things as he returns to Kremnos... or are we actually seeing entirely different timelines or lives "resonate" with each other, collapsing into each other to create a single jumbled story that not even Mydei realizes isn't true?
Or... Maybe Hoyo just goofed again. I guess we'll just have to wait and see! 😂
"Back during the pandemic" "when covid was still a thing"
Covid is killing over 1000 Americans each week. Covid is the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. Covid is still spreading and mutating. Only 16% of Americans have gotten their boosters in a "vaccine only" strategy to fight the disease (that doesn't work because vaccinated people can and do catch and spread covid). Covid is still a very real threat to you and those you love. Stop talking about it in the past tense. Stop living a lie. It's not 2019. You'll never live in a "post covid" world. Our wishes for "normal" have destroyed any chance of a true end to the pandemic unless we act. Mask up and stop the spread if you really want to past-tense covid.
I got COVID early in October and had to close down my life and recover. Yesterday afternoon i walked to my local drugstore and got this year's vaccine (I'd already had a flu vaccine late in October).
I'll be on a big stage in front of 1500 people on Monday and Tuesday, being Charles Dickens, and won't be able to wear a mask. I hope enough of the audience each night masks up to help stop the events becoming spreaders.
The thing about covid is that we have people who actively do not believe it exists, people who think it was engineered, people who think it is just like the flu, people who think it is all a scam, people who get violent at the idea of getting vaxxed...
There are millions of them, and they refuse to get vaccines and are virus incubators. They practically volunteer their bodies and those around them to become incubators to create more mutations. Which then ravages through the population.
And so, yes, we continue to have thousands of people die of covid. It is their choice, or they are extremely immune compromised, and someone who doesn't believe covid exists infected them.
I saw someone on twitter bitching about how their brother-in-law knew he was sick with covid and infected everyone at Thanksgiving.
This is our world. All we can do is roll our eyes, hope someone we know doesn't die, and deal with their ignorance that is literally killing them.
Every year now hundreds of thousand of them are dying of covid. Darwin award stuff there.
Btw, 2k a week (nationwide) is 100k a year. The season flu killed 20k to 40k a year before covid.
Just covid fucks up your body like HIV. We are still learning more about it every day.
Millions may die of covid, but hundreds of millions are going to have perhaps life-long health concerns from it.
I just would like to thank everyone who ever reblogs this so that it somehow ends up back on my dash because I usually need the reminder (especially the drinking water one)
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