the pious servant and the skeptical dissident: the fundamentals of ganqing
originally written 8 july 2022.
this essay was written in the margins of a fic document i was sent to edit by a girl i met in co-op genshin, and references parts of the fic i felt needed improvement.
ganyu is a pretty hesitant and polite character, not the type to speak too scornfully, esp in the presence of the person she's speaking ill of. Keqing, on the other hand, seems the type to pitch in her two cents like that bc she's unabashedly opinionated.
while i agree that kq would find history to be a droll subject for the reasons given here ["It's full of the same tired old terms and dates. I don't like being too fixated on the past. I'm interested in new things. We live in an era of change and the old that has existed for a thousand years is long gone."], i don't think she'd be the kind of person to find school and the education system as a whole pointless, necessarily. Absolutely broken and in need of reform, yes, but she canonically comes from a rich family and understands that to make the most informed decisions, one must have a wealth of knowledge to draw from. One develops this knowledge through a proper education; however, memorizing and reciting back facts on demand is not that proper education. It is through practical experience and a rigorous understanding of how knowledge is derived that one becomes knowledgeable, and this is smth that is reflected in keqing's character stories.
[ganyu then responds with fond teasing, calling kq "our little skeptic"]
depending on how you plan to portray ganyu n keqing's relationship throughout the story, it might serve ganyu better to be more offended than amused at keqing's comments. Ganyu likes tradition, bc those systems have always served her well, while keqing is more of a revolutionary, who sees how the traditional systems affect the people around her and wants to affect the systems as she sees fit in turn. These differences in philosophy are where their personalities can naturally come into conflict, though as the world changes around them in canon, new experiences grant them new perspectives on each other that allow them to develop a sense of mutual respect for one another's ideas.
all this just to say that i feel like characterizing ganyu as teasing keqing in this situation would only make sense if they've resolved their underlying philosophical conflict and ganyu understood that kq's complaints come from a desire to better their school and aren't just for the sake of dragging the establishment's name into the ground.
this is also a lot of thought to put into one minor interaction between minor characters, but i find it good to consider when writing fanfiction.