Spring Festival Genshin Musings
"I haven't watched the Spring Festival Gala in years, and the Bilibili New Year's party has grown stale. But the Genshin Impact New Year's concert made two hours of New Year's Eve thoroughly worthwhile."
Written on the first day of the Lunar New Year. No firecrackers this year—apparently confiscated. The Bilibili New Year’s party has grown stale and I didn’t watch it. The CCTV Spring Festival Gala I haven’t watched in years. But the Genshin Impact New Year’s concert made two hours of New Year’s Eve thoroughly worthwhile—orchestral arrangements, character interludes, the Lantern Rite’s warm amber aesthetic.
Last year’s Lantern Rite was dominated by Shen He’s storyline, and the Guizhong lore was the big talking point. This year brings more Sumeru, and with it, my favorite storyline in the game so far: the tale of Nahida and the Greater Lord Rukkhadevata.
The Greater Lord Rukkhadevata and the Red King (the Scarlet King) both loved Sumeru deeply. The Red King copied Celestia’s appearance to protect the people—mimicking the structures of divine authority without the cruelty—and was condemned for it. The Greater Lord sacrificed her own memory, her own personhood, to contain the forbidden knowledge that would have destroyed her people. History recorded them as petty squabblers. The forest, though, remembered everything.
“The forest remembers everything” is one of those lines that hits harder the more you think about it. History is written by the winners; mythology is written by the survivors; the land itself bears witness to what neither would record.
Nahida—Kusanali, Lesser Lord Kusanali—is a god who grew up in a library, imprisoned, knowing the world only through others’ memories. She is the inheritor of what was lost. Playing through her storyline felt like watching someone assemble a puzzle whose picture was deliberately destroyed.
Genshin’s worldview is something I’d call neo-Gnostic: the Archons are not God but demiurges, imperfect beings who love their people imperfectly; above them is a Celestia whose motives are unclear; and the entire system runs on an entropy of divine sacrifice. It’s bleak, but also strangely hopeful—the emphasis is always on what the gods chose to do with their imperfect power.
Games like this, with their vast collaborative mythologies—the accumulated work of hundreds of writers, composers, voice actors, designers—are the cathedrals of the industrial age: massive collective projects that express something larger than any individual intention. Perhaps that is why they can carry the weight of genuine emotion. The gospel of love and peace, transmitted through a gacha game: stranger things have happened.