Swamp Sounds

(aka an extremely rambley sentimental thing about my newest kintype)

About a month or so ago, in a conversation with a friend about Genshin, I said:

"It's one of those things where I miss how much it used to mean to me. Nowadays I feel very "yeah whatever" about it, and it makes me sad that I feel that way about it."

That feels a bit silly to say about Genshin Impact, the aggressively monetised gacha game, but I did genuinely feel super bummed about it. Genshin Impact, at one point, felt so important to me. I downloaded it as a joke back in 2020, wanting to see how bad the "BOTW rip-off" would be, but ended up loving it. I fell in love with its characters; Venti became my first gacha target and I distinctly remember scrambling around the mountains of Liyue in the final hours of his banner to try and scrounge up enough primogems to get him. Razor was my first main, I pulled Klee after 5 wishes as my first limited 5 star, and then Albedo as my second. The game quickly became part of my daily routine. Admist the second lockdown, college work, my family's hospitalisation and the growing friction in my real life friend group, it became a place where I always had something to look forward to. 

I later convinced my friends and sibling to join, and it became our virtual hangout space. I have so many screenshots from that time period.

I bought boba as a wishing ritual before Ayato's release, I wrote fan theories, I listened to Mondstadt ambience to fall asleep, I'd watch Venti's trailer every morning before college, Arataki Itto became my first character to get triple crowned, I caught every single livestream and I adamantly defended Scaramouche becoming Anemo - the world of Teyvat truly was my virtual home, a safe place to land after the turmoil of my life at the time.

And then.. I just stopped logging in. I got busy with university, I got caught up in an unhealthy and toxic relationship that demanded all my time, and the Sumeru desert, the new area at the time, really didn't appeal to me all that much. 

I took a year out from university to pursue an internship, affording me the opportunity of guilt-free free time and an escape from my evil ex, and in that summer, I returned to Genshin. But it was an extremely different beast than the one I'd left. Fontaine had come and gone in the time I'd been away - instead of being drip-fed content at a manageable pace I now had an entire region to explore and complete right from the get go, and that was more than daunting. I had a laundry list of quests to complete, my characters had been powercrept, and Natlan was of an aesthetic that felt so alien in comparison to the medieval fantasy Genshin I'd left behind. 

I caught up, though - I managed to get Kinich, I completed Fontaine and Natlan on shaky London trains with bad wifi, but the emotional spark wasn't there. Natlan didn't feel like home, and neither did Fontaine. My friends hadn't been online for months. I had returned home, but it had changed without me.

But I still thought of Teyvat as home, despite my emotional disconnect with the current content. Sometimes the wind would send a floral scent my way and I'd think of Mondstadt, I still bought Venti and Itto keychains whenever I was at Comic-Con, but every time I booted up the game my heart just wasn't in it.

And then Paralogism happened. And then Nod-Krai happened.

Durin happened.

It would be inaccurate to say that I returned to Genshin emotionally entirely because of Durin. Paralogism and Nod-Krai returned me to a style of storytelling and aesthetic I massively preferred over Natlan. I felt extremely invested, I was so excited to see Varka in action for the first time ever, and I fell in love with new characters Flins, Jahoda and Nefer. I really felt for Columbina and the Traveller. Paralogism was also an extremely cool trip down nostalgia lane - Albedo had long been a favourite of mine, I connected with his struggles to relate to humanity, so seeing him in a leading role was awesome... but who the hell was MINI Durin?!

I had missed Simulanka, so I had no context for a mini version of evil (and very dead!) dragon Durin showing up randomly in the middle of the quest. I rolled with it, Albedo aura-farmed his way into turning Durin human, and I got extremely excited upon seeing a clearly playable model at the end of the quest. I love characters with horns, of course I was excited.

Durin later gets a main role in the Nod-Krai quests, alongside Albedo and Wanderer, and oh fuck, he's me. The more I learnt about him, the more uncanny it got. 

Durin speaks with the same kind of intonation as I do. He rolls over his words and trips them together, particularly in his Ws and Ls, in the same way I do. He thinks humans are pieced together from bits of other people. He's extremely autistic-coded, struggles with eye contact and vegetables, he couldn't finish a drawing because he kept thinking of more details to add. He loves Albedo and Wanderer, he echoes others... and he's a boy from a story trying to learn how to be human.

And like, that's me, right? I alone have this fictotype in our system because I, Rin (and isn't it funny that my name is the tailend of "DuRIN"?), am also a boy from a story. I'm a fictive, I'm trying to figure out how to be in the real world and still be fictional too. 

For our system, I represent a lot of anger and trauma. I was the angry kid that was locked in a cupboard at age 5, I hold all of the trauma regarding being neurodivergent and having it hidden from me, and ostracised because of it. As I outlined in a previous post to the Fictionfolk Dreamwidth, my source reflects this. In source, I was locked up for being different, for being a demon, hated by my sibling and peers, treated as dangerous even when they accepted me. I was mocked, my tail pulled, my demonness treated as something to be put up with rather than something to be celebrated, and something to be hidden in hopes I just wouldn't be different if nobody told me I was. 

Not so with Durin. In Durin, the same traits that got me near executed (seriously) in source are treated with kindness and patience. I almost lose control, and I'm tucked into bed once I collapse and the Traveler asks if I'm okay. My mother created me because she wanted to give my real world counterpart a second chance. She saw that angry destruction and felt sorry for it. My brother doesn't hate me. My being a dragon is accomodated for, my desires validated (I got to fly with Dvalin!) in a way they weren't as Rin. In a way, being Durin is like getting a second chance. Discovering all these memories and emotions is, for once in my fictional journey, nice. It's positive, in a way my memories often aren't. And being from such a popular source, I have sourcemates to talk to, for once in my life - that's really nice too. 

And I'm home again, participating in events after a long day working, running around with my friends, buying Chinese food to eat on the final day of Lantern Rite, working towards triple-crowning Wanderer, falling asleep to Mondstadt and Dragonspine ambience again. It felt like a little piece of my soul that my ex had stolen from me had slotted back into place. It even pushed me to reach out to some old close friends who I fell out of contact with as a result of being too tired from losing my soul, and reconnecting with them has been so nice.

Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but this is my first fictotype that has felt... a bit spiritual? Destined? Which feels weird to say out loud, given how much my lack of spirituality colours my fictionkinity in general... but I've always known I'm from Mondstadt. I got Venti flickers a lot back in the day, but I don't think I'm him anymore. My connection with Venti was always a connection to his love of storytelling, a connection that's even stronger with Durin. I've always thought that I might be a dragon, I've felt a connection to dragons ever since I was a little kid, the label felt right, but frustratingly I could never nail anything concrete down, I've gotten wing-shifts for many years, and to get a bit superstitious with it, Klee and Albedo were my first limited 5 stars, and Wanderer came home in like 20 pulls from my recollection. I don't know, perhaps all this is a way of communicating the fact that it feels like this kintype was just waiting for me to find it, that unlike my other kintypes I have always been Durin, I just needed to discover it. 

Maybe Teyvat's stars really did make a place in the sky for me, after all this time. Maybe it worked to bring me back home. 


- Durin