Some Dynamics and Character Lore From GGZ
Given the title, this won't cover everything, especially the dynamics that are present for GGZ-only characters, but I thought I'd make a post for Hi3 characters that are present in GGZ for those of you who like to draw fanart/write fanfiction. As well as the fact that I like talking about GGZ.
Fair warning: this is going to be long, I have a bad habit of going into too much detail on things like this, so please bear with me.
For this post in particular, I was going to focus on multiple characters but this ended up being so long I relegated to it just being about Kiana and Mei, and more specifically two versions of them. I might make a follow up post for Bronya/Seele/Sin at another time.
Trigger warning for attempted suicide below. I feel like I should include this just in case.
Short introduction but that's all I have to say before diving into the material.
It shouldn't really be a surprise that Kiana's greatest dynamic is with Mei and only Mei. The two are a lot more blatant with their feelings and relationship in GGZ. However, their relationship is also more tumultuous than in Hi3. They are a good example of doomed yuri, besides the ending to the Reborn storyline, which is bittersweet at the least and good at the most.
The writing of GGZ carries the same theme as Honkai 3rd, fighting against the fate of the world and for all that's beautiful. GGZ tends to explore the darker aspects to this setting, often times mixing in heavier themes while doubling down on the struggles of the characters. At times, it can be almost over the top, but I think its cohesive and still a finely crafted story.
It should come as no shocker that Kiamei is the primary ship of GGZ, it's outright confirmed that they love each other at points throughout the story. Sometimes it is for lesbian bait, but on the whole I think their writing is good and the way they rely on each other for support is nice.
Kiana and Mei are more grounded in GGZ, if I had to word it. They're still incredibly resilient, but there are times where they crack mentally. It happens to Kiana more than it does to Mei (save for the last arc, where it's all about Mei suffering), but seeing them work through these things does deepen the bond they have.
Now with all that said, let's move on to the actual content of this post.
Retro is the story you play when you first start the game, this is the "first half" of GGZ's story in some regard. GGZ's story and setting is divided into separate eras, with the main two being Retrospective and Reborn. Era Zero, taking place before both of them, was never fully completed unfortunately.
In Retro, Kiana and Mei initially start off on the wrong foot. Mei is sort of hostile towards Kiana (a result of her becoming a Herrscher) and Kiana is a bit insensitive to Mei on introduction, but after learning about Mei's past, Kiana manages to get through to Mei after their battle and the two make up.
Will put it out there that much like Kiana in the Hi3 mangas and early Hi3 story, she's a perv here. Yet her crush on Mei is a genuine thing.
Things calm down for a while, but when Bronya enters the picture and Mei begins to dote on her like a big sister, Kiana gets a little...possessive, and jealous. She's quite immature when it comes to romance in Retro. And while Mei is more serene about things she does care for Kiana too.
The two have their own unresolved matters, however. For Kiana, it's finding her dad who went missing when she was young (note: Kiana in GGZ is not a clone like in Hi3, this is the real and original Kiana Kaslana). And for Mei, it's regarding Ryoma's sentencing and his ties to Anti-Entropy. The two bring it up at points and reassure each other that they will find their dads which is sweet.
Things take a turn for the worse when Cocolia attacks St. Freya with the Moonlight Throne battleship. When the ship crashes into the church where the furnace containing the core of the second Herrscher is (yeah they stored Sirin's core there), Kiana somewhat fuses with the core and has a complete mental breakdown when Cocolia reveals the truth about Siegfried and how Kiana murdered him when she accidentally became a Herrscher while young.
This causes Kiana to become a Herrscher due to the rising amounts of Honkai energy in her body. If you're wondering about Cocolia, she dies by heading into the Honkai furnace and gets swallowed up by all the Honkai.
Kiana kills everyone after becoming the Herrscher of Finality (or Herrscher of The End, Final Herrscher etc), and the last person she kills is Mei.
It's a sad scene through and through, and the CGs are great. Even more so because at the end, when Kiana and Mei are floating above the world, Kiana still cries while the world ends.
See you in the next world originates from this scene. Very good piece of music.
So what happens after? The world ends, Mei and everyone die, but what happens to Kiana?
Kiana became a puppet for the Honkai, even after the initial catastrophe that occurred at St. Freya, small groups of people managed to survive the world-wide Honkai eruption. But they too would be wiped out by Kiana.
She didn't move, she didn't think anymore, and she had no emotion. Only when the Honkai needed her to kill whatever remnants of civilization rose up did she move.
This carried on for hundreds of years, or tens of thousands, but by the end Kiana had killed all of humanity.
And then she regained her consciousness and was faced with the reality of how many she had killed and how much blood she had spilled. To save herself from the suffering she tried to end her life, but because she was a Herrscher, she was immortal.
No one could kill Kiana, not even Kiana herself. When Kiana realized this fact she gave up all resistance. She deluded her mind with memories of the past and paralyzed herself on the spear she had impaled herself with, until the day Honkai disappeared from the world.
Quite the terrible end. I won't be covering Reborn in this post, but I thought it would be cool to write about the Fire Moth DLC side story, since their relationship in that story builds off of Retro.
To understand Kiana and Mei's relationship in Fire Moth, you first need an understanding of the setting. The events of Fire Moth happen during Reborn's story, during the story chapters as a matter of fact.
But Fire Moth itself technically takes place in a stigma space where the world has turned desolate five years after Kiana became a Herrscher and destroyed everything. It should be noted that this is the world contained in the stigma space, so the setting of the story is not taking place in the real world. The backstories and characters are acting upon how they were in Retro (and were materialized by Kyuushou's memories of them).
This is Kyuushou's stigmata space, and she has the stigmata of both Kiana and Mei from Retro. Hence why this world bears so much familiarity to Retro.
Most life on the surface is dead, and the survivors in Nagazora have banded together to form the organization "Fire Moth", or "Moth Who Chases The Flame", under the leadership of an older Bronya.
Houraiji Kyuushou is the protagonist of Fire Moth, and you play through the story as her amnesiac self. Kiana is still the Final Herrscher, and rather than a being who is carrying out the Honkai's will endlessly, or someone who still has enough emotion and humanity to cry, this Kiana has gone deep into nihilism and has become devoid of most emotion.
This is a Kiana who knows what happened thousands of years ago and guilt has eaten away at her and left her with nothing.
CG of Kiana when Kyuushou first meets her in a dream.
To get a good idea of what Kiana and Mei are going through in Fire Moth, how about this short conversation I machine-translated. Might be inaccurate, I don't know Chinese that well! But hopefully it helps. Some of it has been taken from Guns Girl Z Cutscene Interpreter as well, I translated some of the text that was still in Chinese.
(Mei's text is purple, and Kiana's is blue).
Mei…what would you do if the world didn't fall apart?
If it hadn't collapsed...
I would probably have been like an ordinary girl, studying something I like, enrolling in a university I wished to go to, and then starting my own family, and walking through a happy and uneventful life with the person I love.
For me…as long as I'm with Mei, I'm already satisfied.
Really…don't say such embarrassing things...If it's Kiana then there must be something more worthy of pursuing.
If it's the old me…I do have hundreds of wishes I want to fulfill...
I wanted to attend the same school as Mei, eat our bento together under a cherry blossom tree, and spend our entire lunch break lazily.
I want to travel around the world with Mei, take pictures of us in beautiful landscapes, and keep our figures in a precious photo album forever.
I want to build a small cabin by the sea with Mei, watch the tide rise and fall together, collect seashells on the sand blown by the sea breeze together, and then fall asleep under the embrace of the moonlight.
There are so many more wishes…well there are so many more plans too..
I just want to stay by your side quietly like this forever.
Mei...please give me your hand.
If it's possible, will you stay with me until the end of the world?
Thank you for loving me so much. For protecting me so much.
But both of us, no, we all, we all understand.
That this is a long-cherished wish that simply cannot be fulfilled.
Because...because all of it...has been destroyed by your hands.
Every promise has been turned into ash... and we can never go back.
I'm so sorry Kiana...I'm so sorry.
It's time for us to say our farewells...
(Kiana alone with Mei's ribbon).
In fact, I understand it better than anyone.
This is the mistake I made...I've destroyed our future with my own hands.
Such an ending is the best punishment for me.
Alone in a world without you. Even death is too kind for me.
(There's a little bit more to this scene, but it's not relevant to this post).
During the final battle between Kiana and Mei (they're both in the same nihilistic and existential boat here, so naturally they are the two overarching antagonists), when Mei falls in battle, Kiana bids her farewell and calls Mei her "only regret".
At the end of Fire Moth, Kyuushou manages to reignite Kiana's wish from forty-two thousand years ago, which was to bring hope to the world. What Kiana was chasing all this time was a sliver of hope in a world that gave her none.
Kiana relinquishes her existence after their battle, so she along with Mei disappear from the world entirely. No one remembers them and nobody recognizes their names. Kyuushou remarks that Kiana's dream was to live in a world without Honkai, a sentiment echoed by both Kiana and Mei.
Fun fact: if you 100% all of Fire Moth, you get this wonderful CG of the two.
If you made it this far, thanks. I'm a bit out of my element when writing things like this, so if you have any questions on anything I'd be happy to answer them. I appreciate GGZ a lot, so making this was fun and I hope I can do more of it for the others.
I have a nagging feeling this was a bit too long, so I apologize for that. I ended up explaining a lot of GGZ's lore when this was mainly supposed to be about relationship dynamics...oops.
But to summarize, Kiana and Mei's relationship isn't entirely different from what they have in Hi3, but just like in Hi3 they have their own struggles and nuances. Mostly in the formed of doomed yuri but that's beside the point. I like their relationship in GGZ, at times its as simple as a few exchanges before a battle, and at others its the crux of the story itself.
With all that being said, I hope you enjoyed the read!!
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