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So It's Phaidei After All

Way back at the launch of HSR 3.0 (I can't believe it's been almost a year?!), I started posting about Phaidei, combing for tiny crumbs with the assumption that a little *wink wink nudge nudge* fanservice might be the best we could expect from Amphoreus's dedicated "regional yaoi." After the feast that was 3.1, I spent a lot of time wondering whether we were seeing queer bait of the highest caliber, whether Hoyo actually had any intention of making Phainon and Mydei's relationship relevant to their story and character arcs or if they were just being pushed massively for that quick yaoi fan cash grab.

But by the time Phainon's 3.4 trailer rolled around, I wrote:

And look at where we are now.

The fact that they got the library's name wrong again is sending me.

In their post-quest cutscene, Phainon and Mydei reunite in a hilariously awkward initial showing ("Yo!" "Sup?" I'm cryingggg from laughing), and then we're treated to these devastating lines: Phainon acknowledges that his quest for vengeance and then subsequent desperation to become the hero that Amphoreus required left him entirely void of any sense of self, unable to articulate his own desires separate from what everyone else needed him to be.

Mydei tells us players that he thought Phainon's dream would be to return to Aedes Elysiae.

But Phainon says no.

Phainon says that that wish was fueled by his frantic attempt to run from the reality and pressure he faced, and that his true desire--his first desire all of his own since his childhood--is to be with Mydei. (Like, look at the wording there; it's not even "I want to go to the library," it's "Can you take me there?" Hello???)

Man, let's just take a second for that to sink in.

Phainon's marketing, Phainon's role in the story, Phainon's entire character arc dragged us kicking and crying to the conclusion that Phainon had entirely lost his sense of identity, that he wholly severed himself from his own emotions, that he couldn't even formulate his own wishes, let alone articulate them--

And then the writers deliberately linked Phainon's healing to his relationship with Mydei. Phainon's budding attempts to reclaim his identity and define himself as a person with individual desires is now inextricably tied to his wish to remain near to Mydeimos--to the promise they made to each other.

It's just crazy. As one of the two main push characters of Amphoreus, a massively anticipated expy of one of the most well-known Honkai Impact 3rd characters, Phainon was given a character arc that sees its "Hero's Journey" end when he is able to return to the side of another man and tell that man ("formally," even) that the very first wish of his new life is to spend time together in a cherished place.

Phainon's relationship with Mydei (hell, even if you don't define it as a ship!) isn't just for decoration. It isn't just for fanservice. It's central to Phainon's character development arc, central to his sense of closure and personal growth, and central to his first step in healing from the trauma he went through over 33 million cycles of suffering.

This isn't even close to queer bait anymore--like heterosexual romances have been the backbone of young characters' coming-of-age/self-identity-quest stories for ages, this is a queer romance being directly woven into the narrative's resolution and to the story's most apparent theme: No matter how hard the struggle, life is worth fighting for, because one day you will reach your happy ending.

Actually, while that is wild (for Hoyo) in and of itself, one of things I think is even more wild is how explicitly this cutscene is laid out to mirror a love confession or a confirmation of two characters' romantic feelings.

Phainon and Mydei stand alone beneath a dome full of stars. When the Trailblazer walks up, it's to discover that the pair are being painfully and uncharacteristically awkward with each other, clearly struggling to get out any of the words they actually want to say. Trailblazer is even given the option to point out the extreme strangeness of the atmosphere:

For a few lines, they try to banter with each other to take the emotional weight out of the moment, but in the end, both of them seem to know there's nothing to be gained by being roundabout anymore.

Mydei's words reveal that he was watching Phainon basically from the moment they returned, while Phainon's words imply the exact same thing in reverse. Despite reuniting with long-lost family, both of them were looking for an opportunity to speak to each other. More than this, Mydei effectively says "I thought you would only get around to greeting me later" and Phainon says "Of course not!"--because Mydei is not less important to him.

Then we get:

He might as well be saying "There's something I want to confess." This moment was explicitly and very intentionally designed to mirror the famous confession scenes of shoujo romances everywhere, where trembling girl holds out her confession letter or stuttering boy meets his crush behind the school and fumbles his way through "I like you. Like-like you." This line was supposed to make fangirls' hearts skip a beat, that's why it cuts off with the "...", so you're stuck for the two seconds it takes you click and load the next line, wondering if THIS IS THE MOMENT(?!) that the protagonist will confess his true feelings--of course he can't, it's a Hoyo game, but the devs deliberately invoked romance confession scenes in this cutscene to imply what cannot be said out loud.

Despite the deliberate invocation of a confession scene here, savvy players know the actual confession took place already, back at the end of 3.1, when Phainon gave Mydei a ring and Mydei effectively accepted, asking Phainon to meet him again in the library in their next lives, with the implication being that the new world of peace would allow them the chance to finally be together:

And even realer fans might realize the actual "promise" that Phainon is referencing may not be this moment but yet another moment they swore that fate would not be able to separate them and that they would reunite again:

(The word in other language translations is "promise".)

Thus, Phainon and Mydei's reunion scene is framed not just as a confession but also as a "renewal of vows."

We can actually see Phainon fishing, trying to find out whether the commitments he and Mydei made are still on the table after everything that's happened:

"Are you going to introduce me to your parents? Please say you're going to introduce me to your parents."

And Mydei, of course, being who he is, simply drops the most devastatingly romantic confirmation he possibly could:

Okay I know this line is supposed to be nonchalantly beautiful and all but I'm kind of dying; dude was so focused on making up a metaphor to imply his heart has and will always belong to Phainon that he forgot that doors without locks don't have keys. No thoughts, just declarations.

But Phainon is the king of rationalizing, metaphor is no good for him, so it gets to the point that the Trailblazer feels they have to interject, interrupting to literally clarify for Phainon that "The promise still stands":

Yes, Phainon, the wedding is back on.

To which Phainon reacts with enormous relief and excitement (three whole exclamation points, oh I know the boy was doing that dumbass fist pump in his head):

This is what he was there for. This is what he actually came into that conversation hoping to hear. Phainon wasn't sure whether any of the past he and Mydei had together had survived their 33 million battles to the death, whether Mydei was still committed to the promise they made so "long ago," and he came into the conversation with the intention of telling Mydei: "I'm figuring myself and my desires out, and the promise we made to each other is the thing I desire most. Even with all that's happened, do you still feel the same as you did in our past lives?"

And Mydei says yes, again, always.

It's about the library, but also no, it's not. The promise to visit the library has clearly and unmistakably, very intentionally on the writing team's part, become a metaphor for the deeper promise to simply "be together," to spend their new peaceful lives doing the things they weren't ever able to do together before.

The Trailblazer even hammers this home for the player by interjecting in the "confession" scene to tease Phainon for the fact that his dream was always to go to Castrum Kremnos, even from the time he was a silly, carefree kid:

Because the writers cannot say out loud "They want to be by each other's side" as part of the text of the story, given the game's circumstances, they instead code this message clearly into the story's subtext, letting symbolism do its work. The library isn't just a place--it's a symbol for both of their dreams and hopes for a future spent together.

(By the way, tiny aside, but I think that making this symbolic place a library of all things, in a plot that is commenting in a very meta way about storytelling itself, is just a fantastic choice: A "library" is a place full to the brim with stories--that is, it is a place full of both uncountable memories and myriad new beginnings, every tale in it a world onto its own, with its own happy ending, just waiting for people to come find it. In a story about storytelling, a library represents infinite possibility, and therefore also, finally, freedom--the freedom to embrace new ideas and new joys by finding the story you end up loving the most.)

A final thing I think is worth considering about Phainon and Mydei's reunion is that framing this as a "confirming where our relationship stands" scene doubles down even harder on the fact that Phainon's act of returning the signet ring to Mydei was meant to be seen in a romantic light, evocative of a wedding proposal. Throughout the course of Amphoreus's story, players get to see three rings shared between characters: Mydei's ring returned by Phainon, Trailblazer receiving a ring from Castorice, and (presumably) Trailblazer giving a ring to Cyrene.

In the latter two cases, the rings are undoubtedly meant to be read in a romantic light: Castorice can't embrace the Trailblazer (or at least thinks she can't), so the ring represents a symbolic form of being able to wrap around and touch someone directly. This ring was written by the devs as part of Castorice's (relatively mild) ship bait with the Trailblazer, and no players who have Castorice as their waifu would have remotely mistaken the fact that the devs wanted her gift to come across as something like a "promise ring" for the player.

And then of course there's Cyrene's ring, gifted by the Trailblazer (I'd assume), as part of the animation in which Cyrene reinforces her love for the world as a whole, but which absolutely and inherently evokes images of wedding proposals and engagement rings:

By insisting on romantic readings for both Castorice's and Cyrene's rings, the game strongly associates the very act of ring-giving with love, retroactively insisting even harder on a romantic reading of Phainon and Mydei's ring exchange as well.

With this connotation in the background, the fact that Mydei and Phainon's reunion centers specifically on answering the question "Is our promise still in effect?" basically makes it impossible to read the scene as anything other than "checking to see whether the engagement is still on"--then confirming that nothing in the world could ever have undone it.

What do you even say?

Oh wait, I know:

I'm not even going to say anything else about this; they really just said "If we get fined by the censors, we get fined by the censors."

So... yeah. That's... Yeah.

We all know that Hoyo will never be able to make a M/M ship canon--they've been sanctioned for W/W content before too and rules are even stricter for content depicting men--but this closure to Mydei and Phainon's story by doubling down on the answer "These two male characters want to be with each other across lifetimes" was so overt that I'm actually shocked that it made it past all the barriers to stay in the final release of patch 3.7.

This wasn't a small thing. This took major commitment from Hoyo, a major gamble on whether or not enough fans would buy hard into the Mydei/Phainon ship to make putting themselves out on the limb like this worthwhile, and I'm sure that some long and serious talks were had about whether making their most pushed male character ever read as queer to just about every player (who isn't in blatant denial) was really a "safe" business decision...

After the release of 3.1, I wrote:

From the very beginning, I felt that Hoyo was moving on Phaidei in ways beyond how they had pushed their M/M ships before, and to the end of Amphoreus we see that act borne out, going so far as to now label Mydei and Phainon "the perfect ship" in their own game text.

Genuinely, my hat is off to them for this part of Amphoreus's writing.

I'm sure there are still those who will deny Phaidei, who will always deny it, simply because the developers can't have the characters flat out confess to each other. (Some people simply won't accept what's presented to them unless the actual words "I love you" are said, like the incels abandoning Star Rail over the line "It's a date, Mydeimos" but managing to overlook the literal suggestive-of-sex scene in the baths lol.)

However, for the large number of fans who have been playing Amphoreus with an eye for Hoyo's own intentions, I think most people will now agree: Phaidei is about as canon as an M/M ship will ever be in a modern Hoyo game.

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mystic monkey business goin on here,,, stay away