So yesterday I talked about the NPC you get to know doing the Chasm quest. You actually end up with more to do with her after the quest. The series is called Valor's Afterglow and it doesn't end very well.
But in the middle of it Zhiqiong reaches an epiphany and I feel conflicted over what to make of it.
Last time I felt that Zhiqiong's behavior and persistence was perfect for a Hydro Vision. She's even reaching an impasse based on her human limitations so it wouldn't surprise me if the next time we met her she had it. But that cheapens her message in a way. She speaks to the average person who doesn't do anything notable enough to get noticed by the world but the part they play in society is nevertheless crucial.
That's a very real world problem where you have these public figures that everybody knows about but then you have what ends up being called "unsung heroes" because the stuff they do just doesn't feel as interesting. You have construction workers who have built all of our infrastructure. Without them hard at work we wouldn't even have our modern civilization. Actually in Liyue itself we recently saw how many people were involved in bringing back the Jade Chamber but in the end the "important" scenes were Ningguang announcing its return and Shenhe beating down Beisht.
I'm noticing even with the Genshin community. You have content creators that have made it. They have a pretty significant following but what's really the difference between the videos and streams they produce vs the ones that aren't as popular? For example TSoul22 is one of my go to Genshintubers for guides. But he's hardly known when compared to guys like taka gg. And meta creators like TenTen are tiny compared to Envi or IWTL but they provide just as if not more information. And even then all of us Genshintubers pale in comparison to the big Youtube gamers like Markiplier.
So it'd probably be even more important to see her again as a normal human just to show that even us normal people are still making contributions to the world.
Sadly I don't think that's the message of Genshin Impact. I know most people still believe that the Visions are evil but based on what I'm seeing the idea is that Visions are a tangible sign to show that a person's strived hard enough or done enough to become notable. So it's not that allogenes are just special or picked by chance to get a Vision like Zhiqiong believes. They have to earn them by struggling just like she's doing. Only they got to the end of that struggle and reached a threshold to justify getting a Vision that'll help them go even further. That's why Zhiqiong probably deserves a Hydro Vision at this point. Meanwhile sure the everyday person like the cliff hanging herb collector also contributes to society but the question is have they gone the distance? Have they killed a giant sea beast or run a wealthy nation without help from an Archon? It is good that everybody is pitching in but the specific people in Genshin at least have all earned their notoriety and Vision.
In other news Zhiqiong has definitely earned hers and because of this find.
Apparently there's fallout when the forces of Celestia and the Abyss clash. That's probably something we can look forward to in the future and it might even be this that actually caused Khaenri'ah's fall. We've heard about the balance of the Three Realms already but while they talk about it like 3 equal parts I feel that the Light Realm and Human Realms are actually the separate pieces that need to be in balance while the Void Realm is actually just an antagonistic force. From the old v2.5 event we more or less learn that Abyssal Energy is just poison maybe even a physical representation for the imbalance between the other two realms. So direct confrontation like Celestia going head on against it creates this messed up crystal thing and probably turned Khaenri'ah into monsters.
Anyway it'll be really cool to see what comes next after this. The Dainsleif quest itself was already amazing but I was not prepared for an unvoiced World Quest to be this lore heavy. And that also makes it annoying that it wasn't voiced. Hopefully MiHoYo will see that stuff like this also deserves our full attention and they'll invest in voices for them in the future. I mean they already invested in really gorgeous cutscenes so all it's missing is the voices. And Anne Yatco has already done voices for a couple of NPCs at this point so if MiHoYo has trouble finding good voices just have the ones they already hired do additional voices for these few important World Quests.
What are your thoughts on all this stuff with Zhiqiong? Have you gotten through these quests yet?
Tips and Tricks from a Super Casual Genshin f2p
