Role Reversal AU

RIP to victor frakenstein but if shen qingqiu found out his huge, handsome man-creature was sad and lonely he would simply fold Immediately.

"oh no i have to fuck him now" no one said you have to do that sqq.

its been.. So Long since ive posted, but finally i snagged some spare time to draw this...... on GOD

for context, this is mainly for a hc of mine where zhongli is actually long the permanence from hsr, and i know i sound crazy, but trust me, i have many thoughts and points of interest that make me very Happy to think abt so shush shushsushushushs

please do write an essay about wanderer one day i would love to read it <3

i love you. he is so <3 (essay under the cut because im crazy)

scara/wanderer/whatever you want to call him is so interesting to me because like. out of the train wreck that was inazuma, he managed to be one of the only well-written characters. and he wasn't even on the playable roster for that nation. incredible. why was inazuma so bad

in a way, his character actually functions to draw attention to a lot of the problems i personally have with the way ei/raiden and inazuma are written, namely that ei sucks and never sees a single consequence for her actions or even like. tries to fix her mistakes in any tangible way. Scaramouche was her prototype puppet, meant to be a test run for the eventual figurehead for inazuma which would run on unchangeable ideals while ei fucked off to her mind palace forever. he was not actually used for this purpose because ei saw him CRY and decided he wasn't fit to rule a country, and instead of like... idk doing anything RATIONAL with him she was just like ok. i'll let him sleep forever i guess. surely he will not wake up and resent me for this and turn evil. anyway. obviously he wakes up and realizes why mama ei abandoned him. he of course does not take this well. he internalizes the idea that his emotions made him weak and useless from. basically the moment of his conception. his emotional response is the reason he wass essentially abandoned by his mother. (to be fair, it's unclear if ei was aware that he retained consciousness, but still. throwing him out like trash because he had EMOTIONS was fucked up). this sets the stage for the way his mental state deteriorates over the course of the next couple hundred years.

so the poor kid has been abandoned by his mother for feeling things. bad start. but another important piece of this story is that, as per ei's original design for a puppet figurehead of inazuma, scara was essentially built to house her gnosis (essentially the heart of an archon.) since he never actually got used for that purpose, though, he feels as though he is missing a fundamental part of himself. as he wanders inazuma, he feels that lack of a heart harder and harder as he attempts to connect to humans and finds that he can't quite connect with them. (this is what i think of as his 'trying to be human' era) He struggles with the idea of mortality--specifically, a child that he befriends dies prematurely, and scara can't help but view it as a betrayal--"how could he break his promise and leave me behind?" he becomes acutely aware of the fact that he is not quite human and not quite god, but something in between--something that lacks the ability to feel like a human but was too emotional to fulfil its purpose as a god.

mortality and emotional response, to scara, become signs of weakness. he was discarded due to his emotionalness. his human friends' mortality took them from him. he grows to despise and reject both, which kickstarts his 'trying to be a god era,' which is how we've seen him in-game thus far. the thing is, he doesn't REALLY want to be a god. he wants to be loved. he wants validation and respect and family--everything that was taken away from him when ei threw him out, and when his human friends abandoned him. he tried it one way, tried playing pretend as a human, and only found more pain and suffering, so he decides to swing hard in the other direction, developing a superiority complex as a cover-up for his insane abandonment issues. No one can hurt a god. no one can abandon a god. no one can call a god weak. a god doesn't need friends or family or love because a god is all-powerful. he is convinced that if only he can attain true godhood--a gnosis, the item he was created to house, he will FINALLY be happy. and he decides that it doesn't matter how many people he has to hurt to do it.

(btw, throughout this entire time, ei has been in her mind palace being a deadbeat mom and deliberately ignoring the havoc her son is wreaking on the nation SHE IS SUPPOSED TO BE RUNNING. he even sends a message of introduction to the raiden shogun at some point ("tell her my name is kunikuzushi") which i can only assume was meant to make it back to ei and maybe get her to CARE A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE KID SHE BROKE but she either never recieved it because the raiden shogun sucks equally as hard as she does or she heard it and didn't care. ughhhh.)

anyway. obviously this little insane attempt at attaining godhood does not end well for scara. i cant rewatch that sumeru archon quest cutscene without losing all brain function but you know what i mean. he fucks up. his hubris is his downfall. his attempt to bury his emotions and his humanity in order to ascend to godhood give him far too much confidence, and he loses the battle. nahida takes the gnosis and then fucking immediately gives it back to dottore because she sucks. scara's final attempt at finding some sort of place for himself in the world fails spectacularly and leaves him mentally and physically destroyed.

and in 3.3 he is going to wake up and keep going. and i am so so so so excited. i want to know how he heals. I want to see him reconcile with his humanity and his emotions AND with his origins in godhood, and i think having nahida and the traveler help him do that is gonna be so good if they do it right. i LOVE that they're allowing him to still retain a lot of that selfishness and smugness and attitude that makes him compelling as a villain, while ALSO seemingly letting him reconnect with his humanity and become better. i do still hope he gets to beat the shit out of ei tho

I'm literally crying because if the “Alhaitham is King Deshret” theory is true then there were so many people talking about King Deshret's resurrection right in front of King Deshret's reincarnation

There is something about the mirroring of how Ei and Nahida handled their respective Harbinger enemies (abandoning Scaramouche and killing Signora versus reasoning with Dottore and taking Scaramouche in when no one else cares to). It's like.... Nahida had every reason to toss Scara aside and blame him for the wrongs of the Sages, and she IS angry that he has benefitted from the suffering of her people and continues to lash out at both Nahida herself and the traveller. But he's just. He's a puppet and he was made to do things and in the aftermath of the cataclysm he couldn't live up to those expectations, Ei denied him the opportunity. So now he's scrambling for a semblance of purpose and dragging Sumeru into his identity crisis, but Nahida sees the tool he's being used as, sees that he's been denied personhood by those who control him (like her! Her heart (gnosis) powering the akasha while she rots) and she treats him with kindness.

She could kill him. Could send him back to the Fatui. Could have him imprisoned. He's a comatose robot, he doesn't need her to fuss over him but she's!!! She's a kind goddess and she understands what it's like to be tossed aside and denied your birthright purpose.

(And Ei kills and commits to violence and cruelty, but she's also just a product of the trauma she's had. But then did Signora deserve to die? She sowed chaos in Inazuma, but Ei let that happen. Ei killed her not out of anger or malice but cold judgement when she lost the duel, an uncaring punishment where Nahida is overflowing with compassion even for those who've hurt her).

Errrrrmmm concept art of an OC for a ihnmaims AU im doingfffggg….. (prolly gonna change her a lot + I don’t have much lore yet. Yes she’s an excuse to kiss AM SO WHAT!!!!! IM CRINGE BUT IM FREE!!!!!1!1!!)

thank you doraemon <333

since you did Stan and Hermes, why not Ford and Athena?

Perhaps he wrote about this in Journal 1 😁

Oh yeah also I love the Idea that the protag turns around a corner, sees some ghost shit happening right in front of him and is completely unfazed by it, calmly pulls out his notebook just to write down something like "scary girl climbing around walls in hall 3" then continues on his merry way without really acknowledging anything that just happened.

hee-min is made of pure Video Game Protagonist