Wow Nadeku OneHand

The admin at the WIXOSS wiki, also known as Haruna. I am involved in a great many fandoms, but am most heavily involved in Revue Starlight.

[romanoffblitzer]

This is something I commissioned from @akamirai a year and a half ago. It's the pinned post on my Twitter, but it just occurred to me that since now you can't look at Twitter posts unless you have an account, not everyone will be able to see it there.

[thememedaddy]

[oh-cosmia]

They made me play yaoi chess in my open world game bruh

[i-was-yuu]

this has been in my incomplete art for so long decided to just get it over with

[miothle]

fly into a pink tomorrow🌠

[cheseely]

A commission I did for honkai star rail 💕

[lovely-v]

I’m gonna propose “I guess you haven’t read the silmarillion then :/” as a default response to anyone not understanding a reference to something obscure. even if it’s not remotely Tolkien related. I want to build up a perception that perhaps the sum total of human knowledge is contained in the silmarillion

[lovely-v]

[10-4ward]

This is the polar opposite of this:

[froginakettle]

[myonlypen]

[marxistlesbianist]

Only a general women's movement has the power to liberate trans women, but only a union of trans women organized within such a movement has the power to ensure that it does liberate trans women. Likewise, only a proletarian socialist movement has the power to liberate women in general, but only a general union of women organized within the proletarian movement has the power to ensure that it does liberate women.

As an oppressed people, we cannot rely on the privileged classes to discover our own interests, but as a minority we also cannot rely on our independent forces to overthrow such powerful systems. A strategic alliance of all oppressed people's is needed to build socialism, whilst autonomous unions of oppressed people are needed to protect ourselves and advocate for our interests within the coalition.

Do not mistake the failures of particular movements in the US for an indication of the general impossibility of such a strategic alliance. The reactionary hegemony is a temporary phenomenon, whilst class struggle is the permanent condition of class society. No movement will appear if we don't build it, but history is on our side.

[romanoffblitzer]

Pet peeve: framing people that have unreasonable expectations as having high standards. No, you don't have high standards, you're just stupid.

[mycroftrh]

Far worse, in my opinion, than the famous “he wouldn’t fucking say that” is “he WOULD fucking say that, as part of his facade, but you seem to think he would mean it genuinely”

[chantylay]

Se also "he DID say that and he was LYING, and somehow you didn't notice."

[speculative]

Taiko no triangleposting by airuei

[johncraft2003]

[oddyseye]

Hello! Could you elaborate on Cyrene's lesbian coding? I know she's an Elysia variant, however variants do not always share the same sexuality, and I wondered if there's anything else. Personally Cyrene always seemed aroace to me due to her being all about platonic love. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this, and also on possible trans and aro/ace coded HSR characters if there's any.🫶

a huge part of lesbian coding in hoyo games is intertextual. they know the audience knows elysia, and they know what elysia represents in the larger hoyoverse ecosystem. when you deliberately invoke a character already associated with queer femininity and sapphic aesthetics, people are naturally going to read those echoes into the new incarnation too.

of course, a character’s variant does not need to share the same sexuality as another version of themselves. however, hoyo also tends to keep a character’s thematic identity and romantic coding surprisingly consistent across incarnations like...a solid 90% of the time.

there are honorable exceptions of course (dr. mei and raiden mei, as well as su and anaxa). but generally, hoyo likes preserving a “core.” especially with characters who are heavily defined through emotional archetypes and relationship dynamics.

ALSO. important distinction: a character can absolutely be monosexual while still being marketed as “yumebait.”

for people unfamiliar with the term, yumebait basically refers to characters intentionally written/marketed to encourage self-insert fantasy. they’re emotionally available to the player, speak intimately to the player, prioritize the player, have ambiguous romantic framing, etc. gacha games LOVE doing this because it boosts attachment and monetization.

that does NOT inherently erase queer coding.

i actually agree with the second part of your ask: cyrene and the trailblazer’s relationship is fundamentally written as platonic. deeply intimate, emotionally transformative, soul-defining perhaps, but platonic.

and this is not me saying “platonic means lesser,” because hoyo very clearly does not think that either. one of cyrene’s names is literally PHILIA. and “philia” in greek refers to affectionate platonic love. companionship. devotion between friends. profound emotional trust.

it’s love without eros (lust and romance).

now, greek is messy because homoerotic male relationships in classical texts sometimes also used forms of philia (like achilles and patroclus in the iliad), especially when discussing companionship and intellectual intimacy. greek concepts of love were never perfectly compartmentalized the way modern fandom discourse tries to make them.

but overwhelmingly, philia is associated with friendship, found family, soul-companionship, and mutual understanding.

cyrene’s entire existence is also detached from patriarchal structures of desire. she isn’t “for” men (narratively, my point is separate from marketing). she isn’t defined through male approval, heterosexual aspiration, motherhood, or conventional romance.

actually, a lot of lesbian coding in media isn’t “this woman explicitly dates women,” it’s “this woman exists outside heterosexual frameworks entirely.” which is why so many lesbians resonate with characters that other people interpret as aroace, divine feminine, detached, etc. there’s overlap there historically because lesbianism has often been coded through separation from normative heterosexuality rather than explicit desire. similar to how some historical sapphic literature frames women loving women as something spiritual, untouchable, impossible to fully articulate materially.

her relationship with the trailblazer is entirely philia-based, but she has been known to be intimate with women in the game anyway. she jokes about stealing hearts with cipher:

she expresses a wish to go on a date with hyacine:

she is featured in hysilens’ most vulnerable moments in her AIW passages, she says that hysilens’ voice and charm make her heart swell, and she is also flustered by seeing hysilens in her bath.

i cannot get into her relationship with aglaea without discussing every single parallel (which is a whole different topic) and foil between them, but their relationship is very intimate, and both of their stories connect to the topic of femininity without any focus on heteronormative roles or relationships.

moving on, cyrene actually seems inspired by none other than the sappho of lesbos!

both use flowers as symbols of impermanence and longing, they are associated with poetry and flowers simultaneously, they are both connected to remembrance...so on, and so forth.

anyway, stop me if anything from here on out sounds familiar:

additionally cyrene’s role as the demiurge mirrors sappho’s historical role as leader of female ritual communities. she led thiasoi (female ritual groups) on lesbos, where poetry, song, and worship of aphrodite were central. the poet pindar says that poets are given a special reward in the afterlife. in other words they are sent to elyisum (cough, aedes elysiae, cough). sappho herself was immortalized thanks to her poetry and became the tenth muse.

not to mention, when you compare her interactions with men and women together, her relationship and opinions of the male characters are...very lackluster. aside from phainon (who was her childhood friend and also her brother; cyrene was adopted by the village, see image below) she has little of value to say about any of them.

anyway, cyrene having no explicit romantic pursuits despite very obvious preferential emotional framing toward women actually makes PERFECT sense for her character archetype. she does not need a female lover to be a lesbian. she marries eternity:

cyrene’s “beloved” is not a person.

amphoreus literally being shaped like the infinity symbol/eternity symbol is not subtle symbolism 😭 her entire narrative revolves around preserving, loving, remembering, and eternally carrying the world and its people forward. she does not orient herself toward romance, even when it comes to women, because her devotion is already consumed by something larger than an individual relationship.

the woman who belongs to no man because she already belongs to something infinite is an EXTREMELY old sapphic archetype.

sappho herself is arguably one of the oldest examples!

another being artemis, the goddess who surrounds herself almost exclusively with women, rejects marriage entirely, belongs to the wilderness/moon/hunt instead of domesticity, and repeatedly punishes men who attempt to possess or sexualize her. her “devotion” is to freedom, nature, and sacred feminine space rather than romance. and importantly, artemis is not usually framed as “lonely” because of this, she’s COMPLETE. that’s a huge part of the archetype.

also wonder woman historically. the amazon archetype has been interpreted by lesbians for DECADES because those women exist outside patriarchal civilization and heterosexual dependency!

for centuries women could not exist and say they were not attracted to men. therefore they “married” themselves to concepts they could express their femininity in.

mm, i wonder who that reminds me of, oh geez...

huh, another lesbian character who becomes a concept out of their sheer love for humanity...

hm, must have been the wind!

EDIT:

i just realized i forgot to answer the second half of your question hh...apologies.

when it comes to aroace coding, i am not sure when it comes to hsr. you ought to ask a person more educated in that, unfortunately. i have not yet dedicated lots of time to researching aroace coding in media (in part because it is so rare...) so i cannot help with that. if anyone has anything for me, i am more than glad to look into it!

as for trans coding in hsr, firefly and anaxa are the strongest examples.

firefly’s entire existence revolves around the disconnect between the body she was assigned/created for, and the selfhood she actually experiences internally.

SAM is literally a constructed role forced onto her body. she was engineered to function as a weapon before she was allowed to exist as a person. SAM is also perceived by many as a man, while firefly’s femininity is something she actively cultivates and cherishes rather than something naturally afforded to her by her existence as a weapon.

anaxa’s trans coding on the other hand...is a tougher nut to crack. because unlike firefly (whose coding leans very clearly transfeminine in how it frames bodyhood, vulnerability, imposed masculinity, etc), anaxa genuinely feels like hyv themselves could not decide whether they were writing transmasc coding or transfem coding so they accidentally created a character that resonates with both.

that mirror scene is probably the clearest example of why his trans coding is so hard to pin down cleanly.

for transfem readings, it can feel like:

the rejection of an imposed “perfect self” that is not truly hers/him.

the violence of being forced into an identity that looks correct from the outside but feels alien internally.

the fracture between idealized form and lived embodiment.

the moment where self-perception cannot hold under external expectation and shatters.

for transmasc readings, it can feel like:

the rejection of an external “perfect intellectual self” that predates his chosen identity.

the refusal of a reflected self that does not align with his internal becoming.

the breaking away from inherited frameworks of identity (cerces as system/structure/precedent).

and what makes it even more complicated is that his entire character arc is built around this ongoing instability between names and identity. anaxagoras vs anaxa is not just a nickname thing, it’s a core identity conflict. but it goes largely underexplored and makes it hard to connect with all else.

so depending on what angle you approach him from, you will keep finding different “truths” that don’t fully cancel each other out...if anyone has a better explanation, feel free to reblog this post!

[romanoffblitzer]

It starts off as "Fumi and I will never get together anyway because we're doing different things with our lives, so I might as well hang out with her a lot, flirt with her endlessly, and let it all out," except it then goes "wait I thought my crush on her was supposed to have naturally fizzled out by now, why am I crushing on her harder now???"

[romanoffblitzer]

Apparently I am top 1 in Seeleland's new leaderboard for Cyrene where the Amphoreus planar set is put on another character. All the other leaderboards have Remembrance Trailblazer on Lushaka and only take Amphoreus's SPD boost into account if the set is on Cyrene herself, which is troublesome as someone who uses Cyrene as a DPS and has her on Bone Collection. Although I've been trying to perfect my relic build on those other leaderboards anyways, even though it's kind of like judging a fish by its ability to fly.

[american-boyboss]

[doodlejoltik]

so true. inflicting infinite spheal on everyone who sees this post

[officervermilion]