How Genshin Impact is Starting to Be For The Gays
Like most of the international gaming community, I’ve spent the last month working my way through Genshin Impact’s new 3.0 Sumeru update (and continuing the endless grinding to level up my obscure party members since the Wish system is a nightmarish game of absolute chance). Mind you, as of today I haven’t progressed in terms of the main plot past accidentally stumbling into Sumeru from the outskirts of the Chasm and meeting Collei and Tighnari, because I was immediately sidetracked exploring with Forest Ranger Rana. Rana offers to escort the player character partially towards Sumeru proper, as she returns to her hometown village, where all of the kids love her.
(She’s fun and can wield an axe, so…I get it.)
One of the children, however, Sudabeh (the only femme child in the rambunctious trio) expresses to Rana and the traveler that she wishes to marry Rana when she’s older. Rana brushes this off and one of the other children huffs that they hoped to get married to Sudabeh instead, but Sudabeh doubles down. Sudabeh then asks the traveler to recount a story from their travels. The player has to use the information that she “likes strong women” (same) to cater their story towards her interests, and I love that for her. I threw my controller in excitement and frantically took screenshots because, though subtle, this explicit canon mention of queerness (that was neither demonized nor fetishized) felt MONUMENTAL.
Genshin Impact is full of strong, competent women with fun aesthetics who can beat me up, and of course I’ve noticed that as I’ve played. It’s also, however, a large game with a large heterosexual audience, so I never felt like my queerness could interact with the game content outside of the semi-usual comment of how “I wish they were explicitly dating because that sounds extremely non-platonic.” These characters were usually playable protagonists instead of occupying the all-too-common position for explicitly queer characters as the villain. I was used to having to queer my interpretations of videogames myself, or resign myself to only having villains to look up to, but mainstream games have been slowly changing. Horizon: Zero Dawn and its recent sequel continue to delightfully surprise me in many ways, especially in terms of representation of disability and sexuality, but I felt so lucky learning that (spoiler warning) Elisabet Sobeck, the tech mastermind herself, was canonically in a queer relationship, even if I resigned myself to the fact that this type of mainstream queer content was an exception, and not a rule.
There have been hints towards non-platonic relationships between the many strong femmes in Genshin Impact (Lisa’s flirtations regardless of the gender of the player character, Yae Miko and Ei/The Raiden Shogun, Ninguang’s secretary’s fantasizing about her in lingerie, Collei’s questionably-platonic avid adoration of Amber at the beginning of the Sumeru storyline, Yelan), but rarely has there been such an explicitly queer line in the main game, and that should be encouraged as fans push for more respectful representation in Genshin Impact.
Especially in a game as popular as Genshin Impact, the idea that blatantly queer characters could exist and not be ostracized within the game universe made me very happy. There’s a quiet joy in watching someone matching your authentic existence being able to live comfortably within a game universe you already pour so much of your time and energy into. She’s not pointed out or sensationalized, and there’s no active celebration of her queerness, but she was intentionally programmed in to explicitly mention that fact, and that can be revolutionary in and of itself. It’s a nice reminder for all of us that there’s room for your queerness to comfortably exist in the game world without reducing your identity as a gamer.
