1. Introduction
[1.1] On September 28, 2020, nearly half a year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese gaming studio MiHoYo launched its new fantasy game, titled Genshin Impact. The game was at first jokingly labeled as a free-to-play version of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as caused by comparison of the game's initial world design, gameplay system, and enemy encounters (Tassi 2024). As the game developed, and after the release of Liyue, a new, more uniquely styled in-game region inspired by Chinese culture, the production gained a massive following across the globe, leading to the formation of a highly active online fandom. What might not have been anticipated, however, was the rise of queer voices and narratives in the game's fan-created content.
[1.2] Groups of dedicated fans, confined at the time to their living spaces and internet devices, produced art, fiction, and video edits that embraced different same-sex pairings of characters in the game. These ships soon became dominant not only in online spaces but also in the merchandise and advertisements produced by individual vendors and MiHoYo.
[1.3] While the most popular pairings are those of male characters, the female couples of Genshin Impact are also notable in the fandom phenomenon. Amanda Phillips (2020, 101) asserts that female characters in games often lack any meaningful depth or complexity and seem to be designed specifically to appease the male gaze "in which men are active gazers and women passive objects." However, the queerness the fandom applies to female characters is usually not fueled by further sexualization, but by the purpose of giving them a personality. This practice allows queer, female gamers to reshape the femininity represented in the game and removes its purpose of male gratification. I examine this approach toward female sexuality in Genshin Impact and fan-created texts, with an emphasis on fandom-applied character queerness. Furthermore, I pose a question about whether imagining characters created under voyeuristic purposes in same-sex relationships can be interpreted as a form of women's reclamation and self-empowerment in the male-centric gaming environment.
2. The politics of Genshin narratives and character creation
[2.1] Genshin Impact's official site invites players to "experience an immersive single-player campaign. As a traveler from another world, you will embark on a journey to reunite with your long-lost sibling and unravel the mysteries of Teyvat, and yourself" (https://genshin.hoyoverse.com/en/game). The game is presented as a free role-playing experience with content that could satisfy a variety of game enthusiasts, including unique regions, enemies, and challenges that require both skill and logic. However, such descriptions omit the crucial element of the game: "character pulling," which Jessica Famularo (2017) defines as a paid feature "in which players gain the opportunity to roll for new, exclusive characters using currency that they can earn in-game (albeit slowly) or through paying real cash for in-game currency to allow for somewhat instant gratification." Pulling is a gacha game mechanic in which players can get a randomized item or character after they pay the required amount of money. It works like a lottery—the player cannot choose what they will pull. This gaming system is often described as gambling-esque, as it tempts the players to spend their money on a seemingly free-to-play game to get the characters they desire or to maximize their gaming potential, for example, in combat. While Genshin guarantees access to at least one character from every elemental skill group, the rest are mainly obtainable through the pulling system.
[2.2] The gacha aspect in Genshin is crucial to its character design. Players are enticed to wish for the new characters; thus, their design must be appealing and worth spending money on. Amanda Cote (2020, 64) mentions that "game designers are assuming first that players identify as male and second that men would appreciate having female characters pay them attention and appear sexually available, drawing on patriarchal masculinity's notions of men as sexually voracious." Since the characters must look appealing for players to wish for them, the female characters possess overtly sexualized and feminine features. Their design often includes short skirts or pants, tight trousers or pantyhose, and intricate tops that emphasize the characters' chests. Additionally, the clothing includes strategically placed holes revealing more of, for instance, the hips, cleavage, or thighs. The male characters' designs also tend to uncover some body parts: For example, men who are considered more fashionable or flamboyant have deeper cleavage, while those who are fighters from more wild territories don't wear shirts at all. This can also be considered stereotypical usage of the male body, showing the game's problem with bodily representation of both genders.
[2.3] Such problems also appear in the characters' offered body types. Cote mentions that female gamers are often limited in their choice of characters, as they are presented with the "overly sexualized, model-pretty characters or deliberately ugly characters, with few options in between" (2020, 63). Genshin Impact offers little to no diversity in its character design; from 104 characters overall, there are three types of female characters (tall, medium, short) and two of male characters (tall, medium). The only other features that distinguish the female models are height, breast size, and implied age. To fit the desirable, sexy stereotype, the women are very slim, fit but not muscular, and have noticeable bouncy breast movement colloquially referred to as jiggle physics. All playable women have a similar design and hence limit the players' choice of identification. The body stands far from reality but meets the voyeuristic expectation of those who perceive the female body as a source of erotic fulfillment.
[2.4] The short female body type refers to characters who have the body of a preteen child. This type fits into a category of lolicon, which Miyuki Hashimoto describes as "a phenomenon of preference towards underage or young female characters" (2015, 185). These characters are designed to be small, slim, and equipped with wider hips, while their short and overtly cute outfits oftentimes reveal their undergarments and legs. While one of them (Klee) is narratively treated like a child under the care of other characters, the rest are usually associated with non-age-appropriate activities, like being a black-market merchant, bartender, or assassin. Their background creates the illusion of maturity, fueling the perception of these children as sexually accessible. Diona is canonically a preteen, but she also owns a bar and is described on the official website as "the rising star of Mondstadt's wine industry" and "a feisty feline." The Genshin Impact wiki states that she "find[s] comfort in the Traveler's touch," which highlights Diona's implied maturity and places her as a character able to crave a physical relationship with the player's avatar. This shows how the childlike characters, just like the adult female characters, are built to be enticing and lure players into the money-spending trap while fulfilling their desires.
[2.5] Apart from the overt sexualization, the game either lacks representation of more complex characters or flattens the narrative elements that make the characters interesting for the sake of likability. Theoretically, if the characters are playable, they are supposed to be treated as allies to the avatar. Thus, any personality trait or villain-esque affiliation must be diluted to fit this general assumption. An example of such treatment is that of Raiden Shogun, a goddess who serves as a dictator and leads her army in a civil war against rebelling citizens. At first, she is shown as a cold, ruthless leader who wants to strip her people of their power. Raiden tries to kill the avatar and murders a friend of a playable character. However, as she was destined to be a playable character herself, the story dilutes her villainy by making her mentally absent; the dictator was actually a sentient doppelganger puppet, and the goddess did not control it. This jump between bloodthirsty dictator and apathetic and clueless woman causes Raiden Shogun to lose potential as an interesting part of the story. Instead, she becomes a playable shadow of good character writing.
[2.6] Genshin also has a profound problem with whitewashing the regions (i.e., altering non-white cultural elements to cater to its white audience) and people the creators use as inspiration for new content. MiHoYo is a Chinese studio, and thus this issue might be connected to colorism—a discriminatory behavior toward people of darker skin color, common in East Asia. Genshin's creators draw aesthetic ideas and names from existing Native American, South American, and Arabic cultures while not exploring them further or providing an accurate representation of these communities (Diaz 2024). Two clear examples of such treatment are Natlan and Sumeru. Sumeru is an in-game region inspired by Middle Eastern, Egyptian, and South Asian cultures; while these cultures are recognizable in the design (e.g., Sumeru's central structure resembles a mosque, and there are massive pyramids and mausoleums in the desert part of the region), the culture and playable characters do not reflect their sources. The characters are mostly white, with three slightly tanned exceptions. The story of Sumeru also includes a conflict between white academics and tanned desert dwellers in which the latter are shown as uncivilized and dangerous. Natlan, visually inspired by pre-Columbian Latin American cultures, suffers the same fate, having two slightly tanned playable characters and two others who are "not pale." This design reflects how colorism works—while light skin is valued and privileged, dark skin is belittled and villainized.
[2.7] While all female characters have influential roles and are as active as their male counterparts, much of their powerful stance revolves around their relationship to the (assumed male) player. Cote (2020) writes about the power of the female character being heavily reliant on sexuality and the fixation on the female body by drawing on Susan Douglas's (2010) concept of enlightened sexism. Douglas focuses on the figure of the "girlboss" present in the media since the 1990s—a powerful female persona created to strengthen the illusion of equality. Douglas describes the media as treating sexuality as a desirable commodity that emancipates women. Although this phenomenon refers mostly to the 1990s MTV era of television, music, and fashion, a similar notion can be observed in the gaming industry. Power fantasy is accessible if the player accepts the sexual undertone. A female player can have a national leader, fearless pirate queen, or great witch on her team, but it comes with a package containing unreasonably high heels, unnaturally large breasts compared to stature, and moaning sounds while climbing.
3. Fan-created fiction and the reclamation of power
[3.1] Fan-created fiction has the subjective deconstruction of a medium at its core. As Alison Cummins (2021, 24) writes, "The general consensus surrounding fan fiction is that it goes beyond a passive interpretation and is an active reinterpretation of the source material: where the fan fiction author reinterprets the source material, a reader of the fan fiction reinterprets this reinterpretation, and so on, establishing a process of active reinterpretation." Furthermore, Cummins explains how a person's status, life situation, and experiences can heighten their attention to certain aspects of the consumed text or medium, which might be unnoticed by consumers from different backgrounds. Fan-created works can also be a method of inserting oneself in the narrative where there is a noticeable lack of representation. Thus, fan fiction can be considered a form of self-motivated fulfillment when engagement with the cultural text is unsatisfying or a personalized diversification of a beloved fictional world.
[3.2] Fan fiction communities can also serve as a more accepting and diverse proxy to the gamer community, where non-white, non-male people have often been deemed unwelcome. Diversity within the audience is seen by some gamers as an attempt to spoil the medium, which was the core of the #GamerGate internet campaign. During #GamerGate, women in the gaming industry were harassed and sexualized in an effort to revoke their place in the community (Kaplan 2014). Since fan fiction circles tend to be more diversified, they can offer a space for female gamers who are met with such misogynistic pushback.
[3.3] Identification with a character is not necessarily reliant on their representation in their source context. Adrienne Shaw (2015, 66) highlights Judith Butler's concept of performativity, stating, "Identities are performed, but only within the context of systems of meaning that allow those performances to be intelligible...People are not simply playing parts in different social contexts. Rather, performance of gender is more like a speech act. That is to say, the performance of gender is what constitutes gender." Building on this concept, fandom character presentation can also be considered a performance of identity, an act that manifests their desired intent or position. The fan-altered version of the character can be empowering, reflect the situation of certain social groups, and the in-game representation of those characters becomes a vessel of a newly acquired personality.
[3.4] In accordance with the definition of slash fiction, fan fiction about queer female relationships is called femslash (derived from the label F/F, or female/female). As Alex Cranz (2016) writes, "Femslashers don't need to build on official canon, to create a series of hundred-thousand-word novels...They just need that look. That one brief moment between two women that isn't about a dude." The stories created within the fandom usually keep the core of characters' personalities but can largely change everything around them. Such might be connected to the fact that female relationships rarely cross the friendship boundary (and, when it comes to women in Genshin, they are not given any depth to begin with). In the mainstream media, queer female characters are rarely given main roles, and when they are, there is a high probability of them being killed. This phenomenon, present in literary and visual media, is known as the "bury your gays" trope (Cranz 2016). This treatment of LGBTQ+ characters leaves the audience with unsatisfactory levels of information and immersion and thus prompts them to interpret and reshape the narrative in their fan fiction. Fan-created fiction allows its authors to not only place underrepresented communities in the narrative but also to include the relationships and identities that are absent or erased from the main source. As Cummins (2021, 29) writes, "Women, queer people, and people of color thus use fan fiction as a way to write and reflect their own stories and desires when it comes to sexual encounters, validating their own sexual wants and sexual orientations, granting them agency and power in sexual scenarios where they so often do not have it in real life or in the media."
4. Queering Genshin Impact's female characters
[4.1] Considering the motors behind the creation of fan fiction, it is possible that fan texts and media surrounding Genshin Impact can serve a similar, diversifying role. From MiHoYo's inaccuracies and shortcomings, fan-created fiction fills in the gaps, allowing authors to fulfill their fantasies and place themselves within the context of the game. While the female characters in Genshin are designed to be enticing and desirable to men, they can nonetheless be interpreted differently by the audience, which can fuel the change of their perception.
[4.2] Among Genshin's most popular female pairings, the usual top three include relationships between women in leadership positions with other women who support and ground them. Jean, the grandmaster of an order of knights, is often paired with Lisa, a powerful witch who offers her wisdom and aids her with magic. Ningguang, a head of Liyue seen as an emotionless businesswoman, is usually depicted by fans as being in a loving relationship with Beidou, a pirate queen who confidently leads her crew and helps those in need. The powerful yet lost goddess Raiden Shogun is romanced by a meddling shrine maiden, Yae Miko. All these characters are powerful women whose sexuality is visually emphasized; thus, objectification is unavoidable. While Lisa, Beidou, and Yae Miko are seductive, dominant personas in the game, Raiden Shogun and Ningguang can be considered emotionally unavailable and mysterious characters who are subsequently narratively fixed or opened by the avatar. Placing them in a femslash relationship and exploring same-sex love allow these characters to escape their stereotypical role—they are not there to be seduced, they are not misunderstood, and they are not waiting for a male counterpart to gratify them by using them in their fantasies. They are given new interpretation and meaning that exceeds their original purpose. Thus, fan stories created about them not only allow a certain level of self-insert and sexual fulfillment for marginalized players but also shift the power balance in the interpretation of the characters' sexual display.
[4.3] On Archive of Our Own (AO3), fan fiction about Jean and Lisa totals 2,740 tagged works. Lisa is the official librarian of an order of knights called the Knights of Favonius. Jean is a woman leading the Knights and can be categorized as a caring, good-hearted character. Both of these characters have a significant appeal toward the male audience—one can be seen as an insecure yet sexy damsel in need of a manly companion to show her true worth, while the other is a half-nude seductress. However, applying queerness to them both and thus removing the male aspect can significantly change the interpretation of these characters and their roles.
[4.4] Across the works created about this ship, the authors often focus on yearning and tragedy. Drawing from subtle hints in the game's lore, fans theorize that Lisa might be cursed, which significantly shortens her lifespan. Authors expand on that, creating works in which Jean and Lisa are doomed lovers restricted by the bounds of death. Some works focus on Jean, who, as a selfless and overprotective character, refuses to accept her companion's fate. In multiple works, Jean is captivated by Lisa but has significant issues with letting herself develop a relationship due to her knightly duties. The authors draw from her social standing in the game and create complex scenarios in which the character struggles with her role model status, which adds depth to Jean's personality. Lisa, contrary to her in-game characterization as lazy, is often shown as having had to choose the slow, simple life due to the looming threat of death. Through exploration of their relationship, authors give these characters multidimensional personalities and develop unused or forgotten aspects introduced in the game.
[4.5] The pairing of Raiden Shogun (or Raiden Ei) with Yae Miko can be considered more popular than Jean/Lisa at around 3,414 texts on AO3. As mentioned previously, Raiden Shogun's story was diluted to make her the avatar's ally. Her pairing with Yae Miko in fan-created works often includes the subject of Raiden Ei's absence—according to the lore, she was locked in a prison of her own making while the dictator-puppet (the aforementioned shogun) led the nation. In some fan fiction, these characters must emotionally deal with their long-lasting separation, and Raiden Ei's behavior indicates her incapability to overcome her grief after the death of her sister. The lovers are deeply affected by their social status—one is a shrine maiden and the other an immortal head of a nation, which leads to complex relationship dynamics. In a sense, Raiden Ei's story becomes redeemed by fan fiction authors who write texts based on neglected storylines and give the character a new personality. Her dull, apathetic vessel from the game reemerges as an overwhelmed, grieving goddess unable to amend the relationships she abandoned.
[4.6] The whitewashing of the characters is also addressed in written fan works, although this is more common in fan art. Fan fiction such as How We Grew Closer by TheGloriousMagician, focused on the pairing of two women from Natlan, Mavuika, and Xilonen, in its description has hashtags such as "Mavuika is Māori coded," "Xilonen is Brazilian coded," and "both characters are brown for accuracy." Another queer text, Glow Of The Room by 1mars_on_Venus_in_Jupiter1, labels four characters from Sumeru included in the work as follows: "Candace, Cyno, and Nahida are all darkskin," "Tighnari is not white," and "people of color exist." Writers use the characters to manifest identities and cultures that lack accurate representation in the game. Here, the tagging system plays a crucial role, as it is used to state their opposition to the studio's colorism.
[4.7] Fan works regarding female couples vary on different platforms. Some texts explore women's desire and expand on their emotional connection, while others deal with loss and heartbreak, or even abandonment and depression. Fan fiction not only allows the audience to convey the feelings and dynamics that are usually not present in the game but also to manage the real-life issues they might struggle with. Removed from a male-centered context, Genshin Impact's women become a vessel of emotional contemplation and sexual exploration for those unsatisfied with the game's representation.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] Genshin Impact has a rather one-dimensional approach toward its female characters. Despite differences in their designs, its usual goal is to present them as desirable and worthy of sexual fascination for the male audience. Sexuality is part of the monetary exchange—players engage with microtransactions and gamble to potentially acquire attractive characters. The objectification of the female body is emphasized by its treatment as a commodity that gets to be decorated with revealing, sexualizing designs. This approach toward women in video games is not new. Additionally, the narrative might try to justify this presentation by using the girlboss persona as a defense—after all, these women are both powerful and sexy (Douglas 2010).
[5.2] Nonetheless, the game has attracted many queer female gamers who have formed a strong, dedicated fanbase. These fans create fiction in which they present overtly sexualized characters as queer, thus removing male gratification from their purpose. Such characterization in fan-created fiction can be considered an act of manifestation of power—the players create their own narrative in which they represent the characters as removed from patriarchal structures, focusing on female relationships and desires. Such performative utterances can be seen as a reclamation of one's power, a symbolic attempt at reshaping the narrative. Female queerness grants the separation from male gaze and traditional power dynamics present in heterosexual desire and thus can offer a reconsideration of the sexuality represented in Genshin Impact.
6. Acknowledgment
[6.1] I wish to thank Anna Temel, doctoral student at the University of Warsaw, for providing feedback and suggestions for the first draft of the text.