#hsr discussion

[iodrawsandtalks]

A long-ass testimonial as a player of Honkai: Star Rail. please read if you have the time. I wish all honkai content creators would bear to understand this

goin through exhaustion rn but thats just normal and not something id complain about. Anyways when this game released in summer 2023, I was just as hyped as everybody else. I had started playing since the last closed beta where I had gotten bailu and mained qingque cuz she felt so real for being lazy on the job plus i LOVED playing hard and winning big.

I had a fun time later when the game ACTUALLY did release though I had to say goodbye to my bailu who I replaced with Clara and mained Seele who I knew from playing Honkai Impact for quite a while. I felt like i fit in with every other HI3/HSR player, running high spd seele with bronya and taking my silver wolf to every Simulated Universe fight, and laughing about getting rolled by the blue gorilla that hates when people use skills. I laughed at the launch memes everyone else was laughing at and usually was the first person to beat new bosses fights and stories when they came out.

I've realized that just because you think you fit in with people, doesn't mean they'll act like you do fit. They watch you trip, and struggle, and when the thing you like starts slinging venom at you, they let you fall. They laugh when you get hurt and protect what hurt you. Now when I started this game, as a black guy I was aware dumb, racist things were gonna pop up, as we know with genshin impact with the whole ass glass bottle floating around calling desert explorers/fighters "sand-lickers", and Honkai Impact's one black character being one who hates her dark skin and bleaches it consistently with makeup. She's also the only character to never get special outfit effects. Naturally, I did not bat an eye at the dark skin lightning guy having the SHACKLE BREAKER and SWIFT HARVEST SKILLS.

as we may know im a lore guy who thinks a lot. there is no "character reference" or wordplay that holds up here. This is dumb associations made to dark skinned individuals for doing slave work(harvesting.) and being held in chains(shackle). Anyways somehow even though this eluded me, I found it odd that the one dark skinned character in the roster was the bad one. People would make all kinds of excuses but never show anything concrete. Arlan himself is lacking the skill point mechanic which literally bars him from an entire simulated universe path. see my notes on him here . Point is this got worse as time went on, to a point where this fan that was still crazy hyped after the Xianzhou arc hype was watching every promotional video for the next region. Penacony, and got hit with the revelation that their next region was going to be based on the Jazz Age. Jazz is known throughout the world as one of the most widely celebrated creations of black people for the rest of the world, and the soul of Jazz, Funk, Pop, and many other types of music rest in black history, black stories, and black emotions. I'd rather not revisit the complete amalgation of this soul that is that dumb fucking region with the slave master and the incel-heaven slur slinger invading the quantum meta, but I should still add that the story is an incredibly half-assed take at introducing evil concepts like slavery and trying to add nuance to them. I played through so many routes where there was some implication of slavery benefitting a future society, and there was this one awful point i had to check out at where the player uses CLOCKWORK TO FIX THE MIND OF A DISCONTENT FREED SLAVE SO THEY SEEK THEIR MASTER AGAIN. There is no "makes sense in context" or "theres lore behind this" because that should be taken at face value. Their disgusting apparition of the Jazz Age should not be justified and glorified the way it is today. I believe in protecting the history of those who paved the way for me and I also would like to believe that I shouldn't have to fight to not deal with mockery within games or shows I enjoy. This whole experience I've had has tainted this game for me. I was listening through my fighting game playlist earlier and WHITE NIGHT came on. The first time I had heard it I thought it was amazing and wanted to make a cover of it and enter the 2024 fan art contest. But when I heard it for the most recent time, I wanted to vomit. This 'fun party' song was empty and felt like it was slinging lies of joy and entropy in my face. I couldn't celebrate the media that glorified excusing my people from society. And I really don't get WHY everyone else does. As somebody whose played a lot of mainstream games I've seen a crowd that acts woke to social issues and seemed to stand up in the face of injustice. I don't KNOW any internet culture so i thought activist = good person. recently ive seen and interacted with a lot of "activists" that were willing to watch this billion dollar company perpetuate racism, stereotypes and appropriation. This is usually because the company had given them a "complex" png with "emotions" that was "coded" to be made for them. and their character's emotions outrank real people's emotions in their interactions. these activists were more likely to listen to the billion dollar company's machinations of a white girl fairy princess or whatever their latest obsession was, than real people.

its been tiring and its been sickening. excuse me for being too real for a second but I AM SICK AND TIRED OF MENTALLY ILL WHITE PEOPLE ONLINE TELLING ME RACISM IS A CHARACTER TRAIT OR SOMETHING THAT CAN BE DONE RIGHT, OR SOMETHING THAT SPICES UP A NARRATIVE. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. what if we had characters that were abusers, huh? or pedophiles? and what if those characters never had to deal with consequences of their actions? and what if everybody was worshipping the writing team making these hero abusers, and hero pedophiles? would it suddenly make sense then?

can people stop hyping this awful shit up? Pick up a different game or something. stain their brand. Have an audience for your star rail content? can you draw like trees or something,..... instead? this is not a good game and it does not do good things. The developers are incels with a large cult following. They are not good people, they say the right things. stop feeding them. do something else. pick something else up. play something else. I know people may find their games and content dear to yall but if racism is worse to you than losing a game, boycott these rich, selfish snakes.

[iodrawsandtalks]

Criticism of Penacony and why i think HYV shouldve quit while they were ahead.

//vent towards the end, references to suicide while those references are quest spoilers Recently I've been doing world quests and grinding out the new region and been repeatedly finding myself walking straight into microagressions and slights to the point where it's been jarring enough for me to put my game down. As a black dude playing HYV games i know well enough not to act like the stupid billion dollar game company cares about appealing to minorities but its 2024 man.

First off, the obvious issue. Penacony has been repeatedly mentioned by the devs themselves to be based off of the Jazz Age from the U.S. a few decades ago.

The Jazz age was a period of time in American History between the 1920's and 1930s where the popularity of Jazz just boomed from being like an indie type of music to one of worldwide popularity. Obviously, Black people in that era are wholly responsible for Jazz itself.

So yeah, Penacony takes its origins from a key black history movement. Penacony, the region that released at the start of February. Black History Month. Star Rail is arguably one of the most popular games right now in terms of outreach because it's free, its new, and its colorful/futurisric etc.... And yet....

Just like with the rest of the HYV games that take real world inspirations, they fucked over black people and their stories.

In Honkai Impact 3rd, basically we had this one black girl who's like sandpaper brown and complains about how much her DARK SKIN ruins her look and how she bleaches her skin using various products to keep it lighter. She is ashamed of her DARK SKINNED mother who's a military woman. Her father is absent. Her mother is also a grown adult who is a B-rank soldier(main character white teenagers are S-rank for reference). Carole Peppers is her name if you want to go further down that rabbit hole.

In Genshin Impact, besides the fact that people with different skin tones are CLEARLY sectioned into certain regions(no seriously there's no real reason why i shouldnt see a black person in any of the existing regions.), and besides the unnecessary amount of whitewashing and besides the perpetuation of the idea of melanin NOT being natural, every single brown/black character in the game has awful playstyles and/or poor matching with weapons/artifacts, inaccessibilty, and they NEVER make it to the top of any meta tierlists. I'm not outright saying they're bad they're just harder and almost never get specialized weapons.

The only previously relevant example in Star Rail was Arlan, a lightning/destruction character. He chews through his own HP and unlike characters like blade/clara, does not have resistance or healing to handle that. Serval, the other lightning 4 star, out-dps's him veryyyyyyy easily. So yeah, the ashy black person character basically dies if you use him for too long and is never relevant TO ANY quests except where he needs to be the sidekick.

sometimes these games have dragons, animals that can understand and process english, or magic.... but then not black people...

Penacony has no black main characters. No black stories of relevance. Yesterday found an NPC whose name was detracted from chocolate and the player had the option to let commit suicide.

yeah ill get to that 💀. This large mass of at least 4 supernatural looking characters and yet no black person. NOT EVEN ANY OF THE CHARACTERS FROM penacony itself are black.

so yesterday I was grinding clockwork quests and had to help out some apathetic shopkeeper named Cocona. Her story was almost a bit sad but midway into going through her background i realized her name is one letter off of cocoa. now imagine being on a creative team coming up with a name for a melanated NPC and somebody decides on fucking CHOCOLATE with an extra letter. before anybody implies that one was something i shoehorned, think about how itd go if i had a bunch of POC characters and one white girl named crackerella.

Cocona and her once again sad backstory reach a hard tipping point as the player follows her to the edge of a building and can either grab her to stop her from jumping or simply let her end her life jumping off the building.

Yes we've seen how this game lets you make choices and watch the consequences of your actions, but there have been established rule-breaking predecents. Take Ruan Mei's quest where you have no choice but to eat the cake she offers you and once again lose the ability to make a choice on saying anything related to her. or any time the trailblazer gets pushed into a fight and cannot de-escalate. ....with this in mind consider why was saving the cocoa girl from killing herself NOT a forced option.

normally id be the kind of silly person looking for lore bits and stuff and making theories, (like how clockie is from the path of elation :v)but as a black dude this whole region is disgusting. THEY ARE GENTRIFIYING JAZZ AND COVERING UP ITS BLACK ORIGINS idk who said HYV cared about their audiences they fucking dont.

wouldve posted this on reddit but whoop dee do i am NOT getting doxxed today.