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originally written 20 august 2025.

When I applied to be a part of this zine, there was a question on the form which gave me pause:

What do you love most about Ganqing?

Something I’ve come to notice in my four-ish years of playing Genshin and participating in its fandom is that when you ask a Ganqing shipper what it is about these women together that makes them so interesting or worthwhile a ship, what I find to be most often said (aside from “I think they look aesthetically pleasing together”) is usually some variant of “mortal×immortal angst” or “enemies to lovers.”

And although I see where those people are coming from, those aren’t the things that come to my mind. Instead, the reasons why Ganqing compel me trace back to their original conflict. I assume that everyone reading the Ganqing Zine will be familiar with the basic premise of the Ganqing Ship, but I’ll spell it out anyway:

In the broadest possible strokes, Ganyu and Keqing disagree about whether Liyue should be run by maintaining tradition or embracing modernity.

I will say that, as a half-Taiwanese, the conflict between tradition and modernity is not just some trope or narrative theme to me. Rather, it is the core of the ongoing culture war about what it means to even be Chinese, into which I was drafted from the day I was born. As such, in order to be fully transparent about what Ganqing means to me and why they inspire such profound emotion in me, we will have to confront my Taiwanese identity.

There is no way around this.

A while back, I was chatting with my friend and fellow contributor Ridl, who asked me for help translating the phrase “home is where the heart is” into Chinese for her piece. As I’m not aware of any direct translation that would capture both the charm and the sentiments of the English phrase, I asked her to elaborate on her intentions so that I may look for a fitting equivalent, and she felt it reflected a very core tenet of Ganqing: that their love of each other is ultimately born from and built on a love of Liyue and her people.

Now that’s something I myself often think about as well.

You can see how that translation turned out on Ridl’s page. For now, let’s take a moment to talk about grief.

Do you ever wonder if the moment Ganyu first picked up a weapon felt like a betrayal? If the first blood she drew felt like a sin? If her acceptance and perpetration of violence ever felt like a violation of her own self?

(Or what if—just maybe—it felt like nothing special at all? Just another part of her (humanity).)

In Chinese culture, it is generally believed that the qilin is the benevolent ruler of the furry creatures, a symbol of good fortune which refuses to step on any living thing, even the grass which grows.^[1] Where the qilin is witnessed, goodness will surely follow. Even if this is not necessarily true in Liyue’s reality, we must remember the thesis of Rex Incognito: in the minds of everyday people, the veracity of history is often secondary to the magnetism of its mythos when determining its value. If the people believe the qilin to be “paragons of benevolence among the adepti”,^[2] then if a qilin is what they know Ganyu to be, a paragon of benevolence therefore becomes what they expect to see.

Does Ganyu ever doubt the claim she has over the guilt she might feel towards her own past actions? Although she is qilin by nature, she is human by blood too: human beings have never had qualms when push comes to shove and the blade of the knife is pointed at your throat. Considering her core conflict is a struggle of finding a world to belong in, human or adeptus, I wouldn’t be surprised if she ever felt her human blood negated any right she might have to feel guilty about behaving in a manner a qilin never would.

I’m mixed-race. I alluded to it earlier because it’s a fact I don’t really hide about myself. Yet, I rarely draw attention to it as I’m doing now, fearful that other people on the internet would paint over my every word in white if they knew.

I could never hope to explain to a skeptic why exactly it feels so important for me to maintain a connection to my specifically Taiwanese heritage, and for other people to view me, know me, understand me in that context. Likewise, I could never hope to explain why exactly I think Ganyu would feel a sense of guilt and failure about having grown into an adult qilin woman whose life was built through the blood staining her hands, who nevertheless carries out her duty, living piously and benevolently as a qilin otherwise always should in her current day.

It’s this struggle between should and reality which burdens her: she has to put away that old sense of self somehow, bury the pure and noble lin she and everyone around her expected her to someday become growing up. Yet she cannot, for to hide her qilin nature and embrace humanity fully feels ugly and dirty and so obviously like a lie. Her horns remain a permanent reminder that she could have been better—that she should have been better. Without anyone around to guide her—no fellow qilin to forgive her, no other half-bloods to understand her—I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s lost many a century in little more than a blink, trapped in that rabbit-hole of rumination as she clings to the word of Rex Lapis to give her direction.

(Perhaps if she lets enough time pass her by, the world she helped build with bloodied hands will be made new with cleaner ones. Perhaps then, these gaps between herself and both the mortal and adeptal worlds will close all on their own.)

((She has time enough to wait; she just has to find herself first.))

Whereas Ganyu struggles to find reconciliation between herself and the traditions and expectations of her past, Keqing seemingly seeks to dismantle the systems of tradition altogether when we first meet her.

Undeniably arrogant (and probably really annoying, in that “those who are good at everything usually are also good at being insufferable”^[3] kind of way), the radical new Yuheng has little patience for anyone who can’t keep up with her^[4], so set in her own rock-hard head that she refuses to compromise with anyone in a nation whose deepest cultural value is that of Contracts—of fairness and agreement and compromise. And this woman, who asks, “Does Morax really know everything?”^[5] must surely make Ganyu, who herself had witnessed Morax lay down the very foundations of everything in their lives, incensed with rage.

A big part of Taiwanese identity, to me, is a sense of pride in tradition and the ways of old. This was instilled in me by my mother, whose childhood happened to perfectly overlap with the Chinese Cultural Renaissance, a movement in direct response to the Cultural Revolution’s violent crusade against the “Four Olds” across the strait. Having had A Normal Number of personal phases where I poke my nose into the events, ideas, atrocities, and aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, it should not be a surprise that I find myself wary of Keqing’s potential. She was born into wealth and a world where the struggle to remove all its fangs—or in some parts, any signs of fangs at all—has been rendered invisible by time.^[6] (Before you ask if Morax really knows anything, shouldn’t you first know enough to properly test him yourself?)

Growing up in a land whose own mountain peaks were shaped by the hands of the very god she doubts, it’s natural to assume Keqing’s wealthy, high-class background has simply made her prone to sheltered, myopic viewpoints and out-of-touch stupidity when it comes to dealing with the real world. She calls her actions progress, but isn’t it easy to move forward without your past choices burdening your shoulders?

(Does she realize what her hubris may bring when granted real power?)

When looking strictly at a pre-Osial Incident Keqing, I don’t think she does. There is simply no escaping the fact that no matter how many carts she pulls or tables she waits,^[7] she will always live in a paradigm boxed in by her own comparatively meager experiences. Because while it’s true she works hard and gets a lot done in service of her ideals, those ideals were born (and until Osial lived) in what was largely a mere hypothetical: “What if Rex Lapis stops fulfilling his duty?”

What if you were grateful your head wasn’t made to roll for asking that?

Keqing’s first voiceline about Ganyu gives no indication as to whether she’s aware of the latter’s adeptal status, but I think there’s a good chance Ganyu is hiding it from her, especially considering the Yuheng’s disdain for the Adepti is no secret. Since it’s pretty clear from Ganyu’s Character Quest I that the Adepti represent one’s forebears, who have witnessed much in their long lives and have much wisdom to give because of it, the line suggests to me that Keqing may in the habit of avoiding opinions she considers associated with the Adepti, symbolically rejecting the wisdom of those who have experienced similar before because they are traditional.

And you know, I can’t even find it in myself to blame her for it. A lot of the time, people are in love with the aesthetics of tradition, rather than the substance of them, and this was true even of Confucius's time. To Keqing’s perspective, I’m sure this must look as if everyone around her is in love with tradition for the sake of tradition, hence her stubborn skepticism and rejection of it altogether prior to the Osial Incident.

As such, the world Keqing plans to build in the wake of the Osial Incident has no room for those deeply flawed systems of old, nor for any of the immortals who once stewarded their mechanisms. Unable to separate herself from her identity as an adeptus, Ganyu likely feels at best unwelcome and at worst unsafe in the Harbor when she says, “When the adepti entrusted humans with overseeing Liyue, I knew it was only a matter of time until I had to leave.”^[8]

(But why would Ganyu ever believe she wasn’t wanted? Is she not human, too?)

She is indeed, but time is a flat circle. Something I noticed while reading accounts of the Cultural Revolution is that if you have even a speck of dirt on your past, then loyalty in the present will not save you. Ganyu herself likely bore witness to the sentences of the dissenters, reactionaries, and other undesirables during the early days of Rex Lapis’s rule. Is it not reasonable for her to assume that whatever was done unto Rex Lapis’s enemies, there is a risk of the same being done unto her and everything she’s worked hard to create for the good of Liyue?

I don’t think Keqing (or any of the Qixing we know for that matter) would turn on Ganyu like that. I just don’t think Keqing is the type of person to be obsessed with people’s pasts or ideological purity, especially in such a way that would endanger anyone’s physical safety. It just doesn’t mesh with her beliefs about objectivity and pragmatism, as we can see from her treatment of her Vision.

Whereas Ganyu’s sense of grief had once given her pause for want of direction, Keqing’s thoughts and feelings propel her endlessly onwards. Perhaps this makes her look, to a perspective like Ganyu’s, as if she has never felt grief or hardship in her life, but just because Keqing doesn’t linger on something, that doesn’t mean it won’t stick with her forever—her ideal is for eternity, after all.

While this can more easily be interpreted as her desire to leave a permanent legacy on Liyue, events like Moonchase reveal Keqing to be a sentimental person inside. She commits herself so hard to putting her money where her mouth is that she will sometimes briefly forget that there is only so much she can bite off without needing a moment to chew; yet when she makes these mistakes, she pulls their lessons forward with her rather than lingering on the fault of it all. She feels her feelings by acting on them, because if nothing else, Keqing is going to live her life to the fullest, and I see no reason why her memories and experiences wouldn’t simply become a permanent part of her motives in some way. Even when grief affects her like with the loss of her grandfather, she’s not going to stop her from moving forward.

She’s not like those other dissenters of the past, who complain about things without understanding anything about their origins or function. Once her little bubble of hubris bursts in reality, she hits the books,^[9] becoming—as our dear Head Mod Velvet said when I was first discussing this piece with her, “a student of history and legend and legacy.” She looks at how things got to be the way they are, studies their current workings very hard, all while continuing to live thoughtfully under the same systems, and still she decides all on her own:

“We could do better than this.”

But just because Keqing has studied her history, that doesn’t mean her criticisms (and therefore her proposed solutions) are without flaw. Perhaps to her view, Rex Lapis knew nothing of the day-to-day lives and struggles of Liyue’s residents the way she does, for the skies are high and the emperor is always far away, but there is a mythos even the greatest skeptic can buy into. History is never the same as what actually happened, as details and perspectives get sanded away by time.

At some point, Keqing must learn about Ganyu’s qilin heritage.

Although she would never revere the divine for the sake of their divinity, there has to be a point post-Osial where Keqing is forced to pause and realize that these supposedly-distant, supposedly-ignorant adepti do, in fact, have a lot of humanity in them, and that they do a lot for humanity, even if she hadn’t necessarily witnessed it before. We know it happens soon enough with her ideas of Rex Lapis,^[9] but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens several times in multiple different situations as blind spots come to light. This, I think, is how she comes to recognize the place heritage has in her life, and how everything that entails, both good and bad, has shaped her world.

I think that, more than any other character in Genshin, Keqing puts a lot of effort into understanding the exact shape of her place in the world, into discovering where her exact limits and boundaries are, because in understanding every sharp edge of where she begins and ends—what exactly is the system at work and the environment surrounding it—she is better able to affect change on the world around her.

Perhaps she seems vain for it, always going on and on about how she wants to transform Liyue according to her vision for it—after all, the world doesn’t revolve around her, and she should know it by now. But we must remember: Keqing is neither ignorant of the past, nor does she scorn it for its crimes of having passed any longer.

But because Ganyu is a creature of habit at the end of the day, I doubt that even having witnessed Keqing’s contributions during the Osial Incident she’ll have truly put their original animosity out of her mind. How could she?

Reinventing your own identity and sense of self is a process of grief in itself; it would be hard for Ganyu to grieve the loss of Rex Lapis while still trying to untangle her own place in the new world. By the time she comes to terms with her Archon’s death, she may very well wake up to a life where she still struggles with feelings of isolation because she couldn’t put her true self into it while it was still forming.

I get the feeling that Keqing would never let that happen, though. Intentionally or not, I think she’d force the changes into Ganyu’s view.

At some point, Ganyu must witness Keqing’s sincerity.

It shows in all the lengths she goes when striving towards her ideals, putting down what had once been her character-defining pride to ask Ganyu, “What would Rex Lapis have done?”

And I think the fact that Keqing is so strong-willed and stubborn, as well as so singularly focused on implementing change in Liyue, would be a lot better for Ganyu’s identity-searching than she herself may realize at first. Without Rex Lapis around to guide her forward, she needs to pick a direction for herself to march in, and she needs to have the same strong sense of faith in herself as Keqing for her to remain as steady and stable as she’s always been otherwise. Is in allowing that self-certainty rub off on her character that Ganyu can reorient herself in space and time, and for the first time in a very long time, there will be nothing in the world which could cast doubt upon her self.

It is undeniable that both women are changed through their relationship with one another. In knowing Ganyu, Keqing strives to understand things at their intentions, in the context of their conception, while in watching Keqing, Ganyu remembers that traditions bloom and grow from the meaning poured into their creation, rather than the simple motions of their rituals. They’re always searching for the heart of something, rather than falling for the shape of the shell it takes before their eyes.

And in uncovering the core which drives the other woman’s every action—“I love the plain, everyday lives of the common people because I think we are all valuable just for our existence”—the very pith of her desires—“I want to change my homeland for the better because I love it”—I think it is inevitable that Ganqing should eventually fall in love.

How could they not, once they realize their hearts are the same?

That’s what I love most about Ganqing.

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