I'm too brain-dead to work on any of my assignments right now, so instead I'm reformatting some of my thoughts from a convo I had with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
huafeihua the other day about Ororon and Citlali after they read some of Ororon's character stories. Some context for all of this is that Ororon has kind of a weird character in my brain in that he's not really a blorbo or a character I particularly favor actually, just that his character stories hit pretty close to home for the point I'm at in my life right now. So after playing through Natlan and watching his many interactions with Citlali that seemed like they were supposed to be comedic, instead of laughing I found myself feeling very distinctly gross about the whole thing.
What sparked from that, plus my own original reading of Ororon's character stories was a fic idea (as many such observations of the game do, at least for me) in which it gets brought to his attention by Ifa that the way Citlali absolutely loses her shit every time he does even the slightest thing that she doesn't agree with. Because the two of them hang out and Ifa is absolutely the type of reasonable guy who would see the way that Ororon never sticks up for himself even when Citlali is definitely being unreasonable (rather than slightly more justified fits like when he teamed up with the Fatui) and feel some obligation to say something because Ororon is his friend and he cares about him. More stuff then ensues where Ororon does talk to Citlali and it goes poorly until they both do some soul searching and work something out idk this is only an idea not an outline.
So when I tell this to Hua, I get a "tell me more", so here's me telling it more (rephrased from my texts in that conversation):
Basically, I look at the way Citlali and Ororon interact and see them as having a very toxic family dynamic. The two of them very obviously care for each other, but neither of them are good at communicating in general, and they're especially bad at communicating with each other. On top of that, their entire connection is founded on obligation born from guilt, which does not a healthy relationship make.
Citlali's guilt comes from what happened when Ororon was a baby, where he was almost sacrificed so that his soul could be used as a vessel to help lost souls return to the Night Kingdom. Meanwhile, Ororon's guilt stems from the fact that he was told about the fact that his soul could be used to save hundreds of other people but instead of doing that they left him to grow up and live his life instead, so he feels like he owes this debt for his very existence.
So with that in mind, while it can't be denied that the two of them care about each other, it feels like they're tied together only be these negative experiences, and because of that they're also trapped in viewing each other through the lens of those past experiences. That's what causes Citlali to still see Ororon as a child that she needs to protect at all costs as a kind of repentance for how she failed him before, which results in her overbearing behavior where she scolds him like an unruly child whenever he makes even a slightly unwise decision even though he is literally (and canonically) a 20-something year old man.
(Insert Hua's later comment of "grandma he is a grown man. the waitress thinks u have dementia" lmao)
Meanwhile, to Ororon, Citlali is his granny and he has this kind of compulsory deference to everyone he sees as older and wiser than him, because those were the people who were deciding the worth of his life when he was a baby. Then, following that, they kept him at arm's length for his entire life because of their own guilt for that incident. So even though Ororon is fully self-sufficient and living on his own and capable of making his own decisions, he sort of regresses back into the role of a child in front of Citlali because that's what he's been made to believe his place is when interacting with people like her.
These two modes of operation that they both have then go on to compound on their poor communication skills and other flaws and personal struggles (i.e. Citlali's abrasive personality and self-imposed emotional distance from others, and Ororon's difficulties in understanding other people that stem from his heavily-coded neurodivergency), which all comes together in this really nasty stew of problems on both sides. However, I don't really think that either of them are capable of coming to this realization on their own, which is what led me to thinking about an outside perspective bringing it to their attention.
(Ifa was the most likely option to me out of all the connections that the two of them have, because Xilonen and Lumine would probably look at this whole mess and decide it's really none of their business.)
Hua then commented that they could see an intentionality behind the way these characters operate, but then I went on to argue that this interpretation wasn't intentional at all. A lot of my discomfort with Citlali and Ororon's interactions stems from the fact that they seem to mostly be played for comedic relief by the story because of the often overblown animations that are used to accentuate Citlali's outbursts. The cognitive dissonance I felt from that presentation vs. how I was perceiving the interaction made me feel incredibly icky every time I had to see the two of them on screen together.
Ultimately though, I think the whole thing is summed up best by this really smart thing that Hua said, which was that "regardless of whether they mean it as a joke or not, it definitely means something to the art and says smth abt the characters that they don't view it as unhealthy or wrong" (Bolding added by me). The scrap of a fic idea that sparked this whole conversation came from the believable idea that neither Citlali or Ororon would see anything unhealthy about their relationship, because it slots very neatly into the rest of their characterization, especially when looking at their individual social ineptitudes.
When talking about him, I tend to loosely identify Ororon as being autistic, and he's certainly not the first Genshin character who has autistic-coded traits (See: Shenhe, Al-Haitham, Lynette, Albedo, etc.), but he is the first character who has these traits who also has a fraught relationship with their guardian.
As an example of a healthier dynamic, Shenhe has Xianyun as a mentor/guardian figure, but Xianyun and Shenhe tend to operate in very similar ways, and we very rarely see any sort of conflict between them. In Xianyun's anecdote from last update (5.4 for posterity), Shenhe was scammed by two men selling a fake retreat for people to send their aging parents on, and when she was refused a refund, Shenhe beat up the two men until they promised to pay her. This is Shenhe's usual way of dealing with conflict, because she isn't very accustomed to interacting with people in the mortal world. This doesn't put her in disharmony with Xianyun, however, because Xianyun is also unused to interacting with mortals after spending so many years up in Jueyun Karst, so instead of enforcing a more "normal" social standard, Xianyun was proud of Shenhe for showing her martial skill in standing up for herself and also helping to bring the scammers to justice.
When it comes to Citlali and Ororon, however, the way she treats him reads more as the infantilizing way that some neurodivergent children and young adults are treated when their guardian's way of functioning in the world clashes with the child's. We know from the Archon Quest that Citlali is near-constantly paranoid about how she is perceived by other people, and hides that anxiety behind her abrasive attitude. Ororon, on the other hand is seemingly either oblivious or ambivalent to how he might be perceived by other people and acts very earnestly even when he's actively lying to someone. While this doesn't necessarily factor into their conflicts directly, it's an indicator of how the two might end up approaching a situation differently, and especially with Citlali being the one who is hyper-aware of the people around her at all times, it could possibly be a contributing factor to the way that she still treats Ororon like a child who cannot properly make decisions for himself.
That about sums up my thoughts on these two. It's a very odd experience to have such detailed thoughts about two characters that I don't necessarily care for. Citlali in particular I have a lot of issues with even outside of her relationship with Ororon. But Genshin's writing is just bad enough that there's so much that can be extrapolated from what seem like pretty frivolous character interactions. Bad writing said, of course, with all of the affection in the world.
huafeihua the other day about Ororon and Citlali after they read some of Ororon's character stories. Some context for all of this is that Ororon has kind of a weird character in my brain in that he's not really a blorbo or a character I particularly favor actually, just that his character stories hit pretty close to home for the point I'm at in my life right now. So after playing through Natlan and watching his many interactions with Citlali that seemed like they were supposed to be comedic, instead of laughing I found myself feeling very distinctly gross about the whole thing.What sparked from that, plus my own original reading of Ororon's character stories was a fic idea (as many such observations of the game do, at least for me) in which it gets brought to his attention by Ifa that the way Citlali absolutely loses her shit every time he does even the slightest thing that she doesn't agree with. Because the two of them hang out and Ifa is absolutely the type of reasonable guy who would see the way that Ororon never sticks up for himself even when Citlali is definitely being unreasonable (rather than slightly more justified fits like when he teamed up with the Fatui) and feel some obligation to say something because Ororon is his friend and he cares about him. More stuff then ensues where Ororon does talk to Citlali and it goes poorly until they both do some soul searching and work something out idk this is only an idea not an outline.
So when I tell this to Hua, I get a "tell me more", so here's me telling it more (rephrased from my texts in that conversation):
Basically, I look at the way Citlali and Ororon interact and see them as having a very toxic family dynamic. The two of them very obviously care for each other, but neither of them are good at communicating in general, and they're especially bad at communicating with each other. On top of that, their entire connection is founded on obligation born from guilt, which does not a healthy relationship make.
To review from the plot (placed under a cut for spoilers just in case):
Citlali's guilt comes from what happened when Ororon was a baby, where he was almost sacrificed so that his soul could be used as a vessel to help lost souls return to the Night Kingdom. Meanwhile, Ororon's guilt stems from the fact that he was told about the fact that his soul could be used to save hundreds of other people but instead of doing that they left him to grow up and live his life instead, so he feels like he owes this debt for his very existence.
So with that in mind, while it can't be denied that the two of them care about each other, it feels like they're tied together only be these negative experiences, and because of that they're also trapped in viewing each other through the lens of those past experiences. That's what causes Citlali to still see Ororon as a child that she needs to protect at all costs as a kind of repentance for how she failed him before, which results in her overbearing behavior where she scolds him like an unruly child whenever he makes even a slightly unwise decision even though he is literally (and canonically) a 20-something year old man.
(Insert Hua's later comment of "grandma he is a grown man. the waitress thinks u have dementia" lmao)
Meanwhile, to Ororon, Citlali is his granny and he has this kind of compulsory deference to everyone he sees as older and wiser than him, because those were the people who were deciding the worth of his life when he was a baby. Then, following that, they kept him at arm's length for his entire life because of their own guilt for that incident. So even though Ororon is fully self-sufficient and living on his own and capable of making his own decisions, he sort of regresses back into the role of a child in front of Citlali because that's what he's been made to believe his place is when interacting with people like her.
These two modes of operation that they both have then go on to compound on their poor communication skills and other flaws and personal struggles (i.e. Citlali's abrasive personality and self-imposed emotional distance from others, and Ororon's difficulties in understanding other people that stem from his heavily-coded neurodivergency), which all comes together in this really nasty stew of problems on both sides. However, I don't really think that either of them are capable of coming to this realization on their own, which is what led me to thinking about an outside perspective bringing it to their attention.
(Ifa was the most likely option to me out of all the connections that the two of them have, because Xilonen and Lumine would probably look at this whole mess and decide it's really none of their business.)
Hua then commented that they could see an intentionality behind the way these characters operate, but then I went on to argue that this interpretation wasn't intentional at all. A lot of my discomfort with Citlali and Ororon's interactions stems from the fact that they seem to mostly be played for comedic relief by the story because of the often overblown animations that are used to accentuate Citlali's outbursts. The cognitive dissonance I felt from that presentation vs. how I was perceiving the interaction made me feel incredibly icky every time I had to see the two of them on screen together.
Ultimately though, I think the whole thing is summed up best by this really smart thing that Hua said, which was that "regardless of whether they mean it as a joke or not, it definitely means something to the art and says smth abt the characters that they don't view it as unhealthy or wrong" (Bolding added by me). The scrap of a fic idea that sparked this whole conversation came from the believable idea that neither Citlali or Ororon would see anything unhealthy about their relationship, because it slots very neatly into the rest of their characterization, especially when looking at their individual social ineptitudes.
As a footnote, I also think that Citlali and Ororon are interesting to examine because of Ororon's neurodivergent coding. I'm not a mental health expert and I don't even relate to most of the neurodivergent-coded traits that Ororon displays, so much of this is speculative. I've put it under a cut here in case you don't want to read about that:
When talking about him, I tend to loosely identify Ororon as being autistic, and he's certainly not the first Genshin character who has autistic-coded traits (See: Shenhe, Al-Haitham, Lynette, Albedo, etc.), but he is the first character who has these traits who also has a fraught relationship with their guardian.
As an example of a healthier dynamic, Shenhe has Xianyun as a mentor/guardian figure, but Xianyun and Shenhe tend to operate in very similar ways, and we very rarely see any sort of conflict between them. In Xianyun's anecdote from last update (5.4 for posterity), Shenhe was scammed by two men selling a fake retreat for people to send their aging parents on, and when she was refused a refund, Shenhe beat up the two men until they promised to pay her. This is Shenhe's usual way of dealing with conflict, because she isn't very accustomed to interacting with people in the mortal world. This doesn't put her in disharmony with Xianyun, however, because Xianyun is also unused to interacting with mortals after spending so many years up in Jueyun Karst, so instead of enforcing a more "normal" social standard, Xianyun was proud of Shenhe for showing her martial skill in standing up for herself and also helping to bring the scammers to justice.
When it comes to Citlali and Ororon, however, the way she treats him reads more as the infantilizing way that some neurodivergent children and young adults are treated when their guardian's way of functioning in the world clashes with the child's. We know from the Archon Quest that Citlali is near-constantly paranoid about how she is perceived by other people, and hides that anxiety behind her abrasive attitude. Ororon, on the other hand is seemingly either oblivious or ambivalent to how he might be perceived by other people and acts very earnestly even when he's actively lying to someone. While this doesn't necessarily factor into their conflicts directly, it's an indicator of how the two might end up approaching a situation differently, and especially with Citlali being the one who is hyper-aware of the people around her at all times, it could possibly be a contributing factor to the way that she still treats Ororon like a child who cannot properly make decisions for himself.
That about sums up my thoughts on these two. It's a very odd experience to have such detailed thoughts about two characters that I don't necessarily care for. Citlali in particular I have a lot of issues with even outside of her relationship with Ororon. But Genshin's writing is just bad enough that there's so much that can be extrapolated from what seem like pretty frivolous character interactions. Bad writing said, of course, with all of the affection in the world.
