The flâneur of Teyvat

In this paper I interpret Genshin Impact’s protagonist, the Traveler, as a flâneur. I suggest my interpretation makes visible the veering qualities of the Traveler; a figure able to hold the labyrinthine aspects of Genshin Impact in relation to one another. I explore the Traveler’s flânerie in relation to the quests, events, detritus, and literature of the Narzissenkreuz Ordo: a mostly defunct secret society established over 400 years prior to the Traveler’s time in Teyvat. I argue the Traveler’s subjectivity and narrative position as flâneur references the evolution of the complex contemporary global figuration of the flâneur as a ‘vehicle for the examination of the conditions of modernity’ (Stephen 2013) in the twenty-first century. I examine the Traveler’s relation to the Narzissenkreuz Ordo via two influential conceptions of flânerie. First, Benjamin’s (2003) flâneur as ambivalent detective; at times an ‘observer of the marketplace’ (427) and at others a figure who resists alienation and is conducted into otherwise ‘vanished time’ (416). Second, Debord’s (see Debord, edited by Knabb 2006) Situationists, whose ‘wayward traversals’ (Luckhurst 2017 1049), guided by dérive or drift, resist the ‘apotheosis of speed’ (Solnit 2000 12) that increasingly characterises modernity in the twentieth—and now twenty-first—centuries. I consider the political stakes that each of these frames of flânerie imply, as well as the similarity in their capacity to lever open ‘other realities in the mundane world’ (Luckhurst 2017 1049): revealing hidden truths, falsehoods, and possibilities within the everyday. Throughout Genshin Impact the Traveler is regularly acknowledged by other beings in the world as an individual capable of resisting ‘fate’: an obtuse shorthand for the pre-ordained future of Teyvat. I suggest the Traveler is endowed with the ability to resist Teyvat’s master narratives by nature of their meandering: a form of action oft considered anachronistic and at times openly disdained in modernity (see Solnit 2000), thus hailing to the original aims of flânerie: to ‘subvert concepts of time and order’ (Comfort and Papalas 2022 33). The Traveler plunges their ‘gaze into a thousand lives’ (Balzac 1826 63, cited in and translated by Comfort and Papalas 2022 23) and allows non-hegemonic imaginaries to enter the world of Teyvat, thus exploring the ideological desires of flânerie that have enchanted artists and scholars since the nineteenth century.