being fifteen: the fast and the furinous
originally written 19 august 2023.
before i get started. i would just like to clarify: i do not think that furina is Literally fifteen years old! i know that as an archon, she is several hundred, if not over a thousand, years old, and that she will have experienced life and the world on a much grander scale than an Actual fifteen year old!
what we are doing here today is what i like to call an act of interpretation (i forgot the name of the actual rhetorical device bc 'metaphor' does not seem right </3) ok? ok.
tbh, when i first started playing the fontaine archon quest the other day and we got to actually meet miss furina in-game, i wasn't all that sure if i was going to like her all that much, since she wasn't at all what i had been expecting.
i'd been hoping she'd have a lot of confidence and self-certainty, to the point of destructive vanity, but instead, they made her kind of insecure and constantly transparently bluffing her way through everything. and i didn't really like that bc for one thing, like i said, it wasn't what i'd been hoping for, and for another, i felt kind of tired of all these male characters in genshin being allowed to be kind of batshit and unique in personality, while a lot of the women are either "overworked but learning to take a break!" or "insecure and needs reassurance" nicegirl moeblobs.
so, like, suffice to say, i had a hard time understanding and liking furina in the first act of the fontaine archon quest, which i played all in one night!!
but after giving the first act some time to settle in, i ended up deliberately letting go of my expectations for furina and allowed her to be herself, tried to watch her n understand her on her own terms as i played through the second act. it admittedly took some time to reconcile my expectations of "girlboss who knows she's being criminal" against the "this is a child who is seeking attention and should be treated as such" we have been presented in canon, but now that i've let go of those expectations, i've decided i'm actually rather fond of her, bc— to me, at least— she feels exactly what it's like to be fifteen.
like, i remember very vividly what it was like to be fifteen. i remember the desire to have my thoughts articulated, the desire to have those thoughts feel listened to and respected by my peers and elders, and the desire to have myself taken seriously.
and i remember still wanting to be silly and immature and very much myself; i remember being brash and impulsive and a little bit too over-the-top and always very much getting carried away by my feelings and actions. and i remember being reined in by my seniors like 98% of the time, yet still given the space to, like, do what i wanted, to put my money where my mouth was if i so desired, because i was reaching an age where it's important to start realizing that we are all active agents in this world, and our actions can make a difference, no matter how small.
and oh, ofc i remember being fifteen and reading about the same fandom discourse fandom still discourses about today. and i remember wanting to be good, to be seen by others as being good, and making a conscious effort to come across that way. you know how it is, being fifteen.
fifteen, to me, is the age at which a person is just old enough to start having experiences that might start to take your opinions out of alignment with your parents, and furina, in the second act of the fontaine archon quest absolutely nails that feeling for me:
"And of course, for every performance, there is a script. Everything has unfolded exactly as I expected from the very beginning. As the embodiment of the very concept of justice, the Oratrice shall never render an arbitrary judgement!"
like, we all know this moment, right? ("the archon quest came out like a week ago—" shhhhh we all know this moment by now.) the oratrice judgement machine judges childe as guilty when everyone present has seen a trial go down saying exactly otherwise, and about a minute before this screenshot, furina had been going, "that's so strange… i didn't think it would say that… i wonder what its reasoning is?"
furina's character and general behavior feels exactly like she's at that age where she's starting to question her parents and the opinions they'd basically given her growing up, that she had trusted wholeheartedly without any reason to dispute— but she's not yet confident enough to start truly breaking away from that sort of thing.
she's constantly looking to others for validation and reassurance that she's doing things Correctly, in the Grown-Up Way, because that will make them all respect her!! plus, everyone Knows because grown-ups always know exactly what they're doing all the time, right?
and that's what a lot of her nervous, awkward recoveries started coming off to me as towards the end: furina is but this deeply impulsive child who just wants so badly for the people around her to like her (because maybe if enough people like her, then she will feel as if she is loved).
she feels so much like how it is to fifteen years old and a sophomore in high school To Me. like, that's the age when you're just starting to absorb enough discourse that you can start tracking the patterns and rebuttals and incongruencies that allow you to start synthesizing your own thoughts and opinions on it. that is approaching The Age of Opinion, in my eyes.
furina is starting to form her own opinion on what it means to apply justice, how to run a nation in a just manner, and how to best do right by her people, because deep down inside, she cares about the people of fontaine, very very dearly. it shows in how greatly she values their opinion of her!
and it's just like being fifteen!!!! that desire to start making a mark on others and the little world you live in, yet still seeking the guidance and reassurance and approval of your peers and elders!!!!!!
and yeah, this essay is probably a little (a lot) repetitive, but i think that coming to view her in this lens has allowed me to become far more sympathetic towards her. bc yeah… that's what it's like to be fifteen.
IN CONCLUSION:
i care her <3