Natlan Genshin - Tumblr Posts

What natlan character are you saving for?

i personally want da blue girl and if I can't get her im going for cryo fu xuan

Thank you to everyone who submitted their answers:3 and the winner is the pyro archon! (Poor kachina getting zero votes🥲)

What natlan character are you saving for?

i personally want da blue girl and if I can't get her im going for cryo fu xuan

woo slight iansan redesign!!! my goal with this was to make her resemble more the orixá she was based on, without sacrificing her original design!

i also made a version with black hair (because she looked adorable) and the sketch/some of the refs!

also for the record, i have a slight background in umbanda and candomblé, but my main inspiration for doing this was this talk i had with my mother about iansan and ororon/olorun. my plan was to redesign both of them in the same post but i'm not so sure if i'd be that comfortable depicting an supreme religious figure like that, i'll think about it and see what i'm going to do, no promises!

HOYOVERSE YOU’VE STARTED AGAIN.

ORORUN REDRAW GUIDE !

i think we’ve all seen the atrocity that is genshin’s unreleased character, ororun. the entirety of natlan is a mess really, but as a yoruba person myself i CANNOT keep quiet about ororun specifically.

outside yoruba mythology, in yoruba, ‘Olorun’ (the name ororun is based on, pronounced o-law-roon , with o pronounced as in orange and the ‘roon’ pronounced shortly, not dragged on at all) is actually the same word we often use to refer to God in Christianity. Christianity is the primary religion among us yorubas so honestly, i was kinda glad they misspelled his name. it would feel SO disrespectful referring to whatever that thing is with the same word we use to refer to God who we actually worship. religion aside, genshin’s depiction of Olorun (cultural god, not Christian one) is downright disgusting. i’d never paid too much attention to genshin and its poor representation, but now that my culture has fallen victim to it, i completely understand all the outrage.

edit: please note that while we use ‘Olorun’ to refer to the Christian God, Olorun is just a general word for ‘god’ itself ! for example if i say “God in heaven” and “god of thunder” we know i’m referring to two different beings, in yoruba it’s the kind of the same—the same word is used to refer to both the Christian and other gods, but we know it’s different, even though olorun can be capitalized regardless of what god we’re talking about (unlike english where the Christian God is capitalized and other gods aren’t) at the end of the day though, when we say “olorun” even without context, we are usually referring to the christian God !

1. PLEASE DO NOT DRAW HIM WITH ANIMAL EARS !

i’ve noticed that hoyoverse has this nasty habit of portraying every dark skinned character as wild or animal-esque. kaeya seems to be the only exception to this. even xinyan, though lacking any animal features, has this wild energy to her. some might call it a stretch, but i feel like her features are pretty feline in comparison to other liyue characters.

Olorun in our culture is the supreme god of the heavens. In my opinion, it is disrespectful to liken him to something akin to an animal. normally i wouldn’t even mind that much, but with how hoyo makes its few dark characters more and more like animals, i can’t help but feel weird about it. its really off putting.

2. HIS HAIR WOULD NOT BE CURLY !

majority of nigerians have 4C HAIR. not wavy hair or loose curls. some have 4B, but 4C is the usual here, that is, kinky or coily hair. Olorun is often portrayed as bald in traditional art, but trust me if he had hair his hair would resemble his people’s, not Tyla’s.

DREADLOCKS ARE A YES ! outside nigeria, locking hair is pretty common, but in nigeria a lot of people have locks naturally. our hair sometimes just grows out that way, no treatment no nothing. dreads are 100% an appropriate style, they look good asf too.

3. PLEASE USE CULTURAL FABRICS IN YOUR DESIGNS !

when i saw ororun’s outfit, i almost started crying. they couldn’t even bother to dress him up a little. they really dressed my brother in a scarf and cape and called it a day 😭 upon how fashionable we nigerians are know to be, hoyoverse still made it their mission to embarrass us stylistically. God knows my people have suffered man 😭

ankara is a traditional nigerian fabric that features bright colors and lots of patterned designs. see below:

here in 9ja, we love our ankara. it’s a big part of our fashion here and trust me it would look excellent in your designs. it’s perfectly fine to draw ororun in normal fabrics since he’s a deity and it’s not like ankara existed back then, but if you really want to represent nigeria, ankara is a must 🙏

i’m going to address another fashion piece because if you search up nigerian fashion you’ll see it a lot: beads.

these orange beads are igbo (another tribe here in nigeria) NOT yoruba. does this mean you can’t use it in olorun’s design ? no ! let me explain. tbh, here in nigeria there’s a bit of...tension between clans. it’s not that common, but older people are definitely a lot more tribalist. as a yoruba i love my igbo brothers and sisters, i truly believe they’re the most fashionable clan and i adore their festivities, they always go over the top. please, just look at them:

(only one image because of image caps, ugh)

anyway, we yorubas wear beads too. but the specific way the beads are worn around the head and in multiple layers round the neck is igbo, not yoruba. though i personally wouldn’t care too much if i saw olorun with igbo beads since all i want is for him to at least look nigerian, at the end of the day he is a yoruba deity. it might be disrespectful to dress the god of one clan as if he belongs to another, especially since there is so much historical ( and very slight but uncommon present ) day tension between both clans.

here’s a more yoruba outfit. sorry yall, it might be hard for you to distinguish if you’re not yoruba or igbo, but a lot of nigerians can tell the difference at a glance. ( actually nowadays, there is so much overlap between yoruba and igbo fashion, but there are many specific styles that may be associated with one tribe and not the other, for example how beads are worn in the above paragraph ) please do your research, he’s not only a nigerian god, but a yoruba one.

one more thing, because i know it will start discourse : skin tone.

nigerians have a very diverse range of skin tones. some of us are so pale, if not for our afrocentric features we could maybe pass for another race. however, ororun is yoruba.

light skinned nigerians are usually igbo. not to say that yorubas can’t be light skin, but here in nigeria if you saw a light skinned person, we’d automatically assume they were igbo. igbo people usually have lighter skin tones. majority of yorubas fall on the more milk to dark chocolate end of the skin tone spectrum. i’m saying this now because i know a lot of people are going to start arguments over ororun being redrawn as ‘too light’ or ‘too dark.’ i don’t really care about complexion, but i thought i’d help you all get your facts right.

that’s it ! if you read all this i’m super thankful. i don’t usually post about this kind of stuff but i honestly love my country and could go on about it for days. nigeria is such a beautiful place with a diverse range of cultures— from hausas to fulanis to so many more. natlan was supposed to be Africa’s time to shine, as well as latin americans, but hoyoverse said fuck you and your people. they did this to an extent with sumeru but natlan was done straight up dirty—not a single melanated character in sight, and the only one who does have melanin, iansan, looks so desaturated you might as well call her grey. i saw someone on tiktok call mualani a dark skinned character—it was at that point that i knew genshin was done for.

please REBLOG this post so it reaches more people and artists in the fandom !! this is literally the third time i’m making this post because tumblr refuses to show it in the tags for some reason 😭 i encourage other cultures who feel misrepresented to make posts like this too. it’s a perfect opportunity to educate and inform people about the diverse cultures genshin has once again failed to represent properly.

Hoyo has never been one to make customer satisfaction their top priority, but we’ve been able to call them out before and i truly believe we can do it again. Natlan is not poor design choice. it is blatant racism, a nation based on POC ethnicities with not a single colored character insight. Hoyoverse has been able to escape racism accusations for as long as i can remember, but natlan is the icing on the cake. we CANNOT allow hoyo to proceed as planned without giving them the appropriate backlash.

Also, if you redraw ororun using this guide, make sure to tag me here or on my main blog, @heartkaji !! i’d love to see all your redesigns. once again, thank you all for reading and have an amazing day !!

Genshin Impact 5.0 Leaks Suggest New Natlan Update Will Change Characters Forever https://screenrant.com/genshin-impact-50-leaks-natlan-update-characters-animations/

ScreenRant

Genshin Impact 5.0 Leaks Suggest New Natlan Update Will Change Characters Forever

Natlan updates in Genshin Impact sound promising.

HMMMMMMM

‘It’s gonna be like Sumeru all over again’ where th were your complaints during Fontaine then?!

if this really matter to y’all, you wouldn’t have ‘taken a break’ when Fontaine came out. You would have stuck with it. YES, the MiHoyo lack of color representation is an issue. Does that make any of the characters any less cool, or amazing? No. No it doesn’t. MiHoyo’s whitewashing is a problem, yes. But people got rowdy over it in Sumeru, and nothing changed. And when Fontaine came around, instead of pushing for more change, they dropped it. In fact, people conveniently ignored characters like Sethos in favor of complaining about a total of six characters, only three of which are actually complaint worthy! I am not, in any way, defending MiHoyo for their lack of representation. But I’m also not saying that any of this is going well. We have six, maybe seven characters. We can be for sure Natlan will have at least ten, and so far three of them aren’t as bad as you guys are making them out to be. In fact, to some extent you guys are actually being somewhat racist (it’s incredibly rude to take a character with somewhat pale skin and make it look like they’re brighter than the goddamn sun. Yes, that is racism. No, I’m not white. Well… 50%). Meanwhile, proceeding to call another character ‘grey’ even though that was the lighting, as the character was in the shadows, is also… not great (and technically speaking, is also racism). Yes, I get the fight for rep is important but this is NOT how we do it. Review bombing ZZZ is definitely not how it’s done, and going out of your way to downright mock characters for not having darker skin isn’t how to do it either. Yes, being vocal is okay, but aggravating people is usually not the way to change their minds. Hurting something that has nothing to do with what you’re going for is not the way to get someone to listen to you. Find a different tactic.

I’d say the best way to change their minds is to change the fanart. If everyone starts depicting characters with different skin tones in the fanart, Hoyoverse has to notice. But I’m not talking the silly doodles, I’m talking the fancy ones that look exactly like Genshin’s style. We need to make people care- need to make the professionals care. And right now, it’s only driving people away when you do things like this.

Natlan whitewashing this, Natlan whitewashing that, how could y’all forget about the one and only Sethos?

What if I made Sethos the Natlan archon then, huh? HUH? Whatcha gonna do about it? Review bomb ZZZ some more? (Please don’t. Like it’s a waste of everybody’s time)

#sethosforpyroarchon

(Sorry Mavuika, I love you to death. I’m a simp for you. But I must protect Sethos, my child, my son)

Guys I’ve figured out the whole plot line of Natlan! (/s)

Basically what happened is that a curse was washed over the land, stripping all the characters, barring a select few, of their melanin. It will be us, the Traveler’s job, to go and retrieve it, one by one.

The ultimate reveal: there is a second version of Mavuika and the one we’ve been seeing is (unbeknownst to her) the facilitator for the curse. After freeing Mavuika there are two versions of her: the politically correct version and the kind y’all been review bombing innocent games for. Everyone is given their melanin back and a new pyro archon is appointed: Sethos.

#makesethosthepyroarchon

Natlan OC troubles- can someone help me?

So this is going to be complicated and I’m not fully sure what I’m doing, so I’ll dive in simply. Whenever there is a character in Genshin or Star Rail that I tend to favor (they’re all female, barring Sugilite but I’m not going to explain him) I’ll create an OC to ‘date’ them. (Also all female, barring Rayven, but I’m not going to explain him either) However due to recent Natlan controversies I decided to take a crack at a Natlan OC. While technically she is classified as for Mavuika, she’s one of two OCs that is more tied to the lore than the love interest.

Natlan is a huge combination of a lot of different cultures, and for my OC I took a ton of inspiration from Mayan culture. This takes place in the form of the character, which I named Ixchel (after the Mayan goddess). Now since most of my information is from Wikipedia, I want to make sure I’m writing my character’s connections right. Unlike some of the characters in Natlan, I want my OC’s design to carry some of the meaning of the name. For this I decided to give her cheetah [or perhaps Jaguar as what I’m getting is contrasting info] (?) ears and a tail, and additionally have a pet snake (leaning towards a type of cobra). I already know I want her to be a healer, and I’m leaning towards Electro for her element despite Ixchel being the goddess of Rain in certain aspects of Mayan mythology. I was originally going to make her a claymore but am now stuck between whether I should make her a claymore or a polearm user. I am still leaning towards claymore, but I’m not sure if it fees right considered what I’ve learned from various online searches.

I know that I’m never going to get a character perfect. I know her story vastly differs, with her being a traveling healer who specializes in using a skill to take the wounds from others and inflict them upon herself, but if I’m going to use the name I want to at the very least make sure my design matches its meaning. I refuse to be like MiHoyo and only look into what sounds cool. So I turn to you guys for help in making my OC as close as I can get while still being unique in her own right.

Also, have her intended color palette:

Skin tone - #eab676 (I’m sorry it’s so light but around this shade is what fits best in my mind’s eye for her design)

Fur, ears, tail - #ebb678, #e07b39, #cce7e8, #80391e, #69bdd2

Hair color: #69bdd2, #44bcd8

General outfit color: #9444d8, #510096, #c295e8, #a8a0b1, #f1e449, #b19d25, #ffdb05, #f1eddb, #cbcbca