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Whoa, who let the dogs out?! Why, HoYoVerse did with its most recent trailer featuring Yunli in Honkai: Star Rail! She’s feet out for the summer and she’s not afraid to let us know it. Or, more precisely, HoYoVerse isn’t afraid to let us know it. I just wish it didn’t choose Yunli to be the ambassador for the Isle of Dogs.
Let me put it out there first: I don’t care about the sanctity or rights of fictional characters. Sure, I have my personal icks and squicks and all that. But bad things happening to fictional children or characters aren’t going to make me clutch my pearls or demand an apology from the creator. Yunli flashing her feet at me in Honkai: Star Rail does not necessarily disgust me. However, it does make me ask the very simple question of “Why?” Why is it Yunli who is introducing herself toes-first from out of frame? Why must the game subject me to Yunli’s grippers when I want to use her in battle? I can’t ignore it like I can with Clara in the same game. She’s pushing them at me like a Tarantino film would. Or, to be more precise, HoYoVerse is.
It’s an honest surprise to me from Honkai: Star Rail. Zenless Zone Zero has a stronger fanservice bent to it. So the framing around Yunli’s paws wouldn’t be out of place there. But Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, at the very least, feel like they’ve been a bit less, shall we say, asset-forward with its characters compared to other gacha games on the market. Yeah, there are a lot of fanservice moments and designs. But I felt the same surprise I did when it released that Dan Heng Imbibitor Lunae Light Cone trailer (the one that Japanese fans literally call “an official doujinshi.”)
There was backlash online about the feet when HoYoVerse first released the Yunli drip marketing for Honkai: Star Rail. People discussed her design in the context of her description and character introduction, with some questioning the feet and others claiming they’re perfectly fine for a dancer. She’s the same age as Yanqing, whose in-game biography blatantly states he’s not of age yet. The both of them are Xianzhou natives. So numbers might be off when it comes to their age. Nonetheless, if they’re not considered “of age” in-lore, they’re still kids. At the time of this little controversy, I rolled my eyes. This is just the usual outrage from terminally online minors, I figured. Absolute nonsense. Yunli’s design seems to take inspiration from the Dunhuang Feitian murals and dance, but it’s not a one to one. Creative liberties in fantasy character designs are fine. It’s a nothingburger of an issue.
But then I actually saw Yunli next to March, rather than just her on her own in the splash art. Then, I saw her animations and the way the trailer introduced her. And then I started feeling that impulsive distaste. Yunli is such a child. When I saw her splash art, I thought she would be someone closer to Rayfa from Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice or Saber from Fate/Samurai Remnant. The thing that’s weird to me is how Yunli seems like a typical kid (I mean, she’s not out yet, so who knows what she’s like personality-wise), yet her overall design is at odds with HoYoVerse’s usual way of doing things when it comes to kid characters.
People tend to compare Yunli to Clara, as Clara is also clearly a kid and walks around barefoot. It’s strange that Svarog hasn’t given her shoes considering she’s one rusty nail away from needing to rush to Natasha’s for a tetanus shot. But I digress. To my recollection though, no animation from her kit or the story ever focuses on her feet. It’s just a part of her design, like Aventurine’s and Dan Heng Imbibitor Lunae’s chest windows. Yunli, on the other hand, is show feet first, ask questions later. You cannot escape them in battle as her animations emphasize the weight of her sword and how much strength she puts in wielding it. In the trailer, she introduces herself to the team with a shot from her feet.
Sparkle is another character whose design and mannerisms cater to the foot fetish crowd. It’s not so obvious in the game, but her trailer features scenes that really draw focus on her toes. One memorable scene has the camera zoom in from below while Sparkle sits on a defeated mook, with her foot vying for attention from the viewer. Her teasing and playful personality matches this kind of behavior. If you’ve seen Jade’s Ultimate, then you know she’s hitting multiple interests with her animations. Nothing more to say about that IPC efficiency.
Despite all of that though, the game and marketing don’t put that much focus on their dogs. In battle and even on the overworld, Clara’s feet aren’t that obtrusive. In-game, Sparkle’s appeal seems to come more from her personality than her appearance. Jade’s “dominatrix mommy” animation is very blatant fanservice, but in a different route. The reason why I, to my eternal distress, cannot mentally get past the strangeness of Yunli’s design is due to her biography and her outfit.
The key difference between her and fellow kid Clara is that Clara’s design and animations never feel like they’re meant to titillate. However, it’s getting incredibly hard to look at Yunli’s splash art without noticing little things like the extra-exposed midriff or the thigh fat around the “Classic Honkai: Star Rail 5-star Thigh Garter.” I will note that I saw some Dunhuang Feitian hanfu for kids that didn’t seem traditional, but featured a higher midriff and shoes. Yunli not wearing shoes places her closer to the “normal” version of the outfit. Her having a short skirt is likely due to the fact she’s a Xianzhou girl and is cursed to have that kind of bottom.
HoYoVerse comprises of Chinese people. Chinese martial artists fight without shoes or socks on, and there are a lot of Asian cultural dances that require the performers to be in bare feet. The hard camera angles on her feet in her animations and in the trailer might truly be an unfortunate coincidence since there’s nothing that odd about them. Heck, Jade also puts her best foot forward in her Ultimate so technically, you can’t escape that either if you have her.
I admit I looked up foot fetish communities in Chinese to see if they exist and they do. Unfortunately, I’m not that familiar with Chinese sites and slang to have a good grasp on the popularity of this particular interest. But, as a company comprising of otaku, I find it naive to believe that HoYoVerse designed this character and didn’t expect that it would invite keen interest from a certain crowd. Characters with bare feet are cool. But my surprise stems from the emphasis on a part that is a commonly fetishized area despite Yunli’s fictional youth.
This isn’t a knock on fanservice, mind you. I quite appreciate the fanservice-y designs of characters like Ruan Mei, Topaz, Black Swan, and Dr. Ratio. I’ve favorited that Light Cone trailer of Dan Heng Imbibitor Lunae chained up while his ears twitch and the camera zooms in on his chest window.
Yunli’s status as a kid and a dancer are what people tend to bring up to refute negativity about her design. I agreed with the dancer part as well. At least, until I saw how, unlike Nilou or Yun Jin in Genshin Impact, Yunli’s animations had very little “dance” aspect to them. As mentioned earlier, Yunli’s design takes inspiration from the Dunhuang dance. But I’m curious as to why it didn’t just save the Dunhuang Feitian aesthetic for another character and incorporate those moves into their kit if it didn’t weave it into her animations. Maybe I’m missing something though since I’m hardly a learned expert on the subject. I hope then that HoYoVerse releases a video in the future describing its creative process.
Personally, I think the alterations to Yunli, as well as the overall design, are cute from a visual perspective. But I can’t shake off the oddity of the optics. We have a character who’s explicitly a minor in-universe, wearing a dancer-inspired outfit that’s altered to show more skin. Her weapon of choice is a greatsword. But she walks around in bare feet due to the aforementioned dancer inspiration of the design. Despite that, her animations seem to reference something other than dance. I understand the cinematic reasons behind her Ultimate, even disregarding a possible shoutout to Buddyfight. That doesn’t dispell how different the framing is from other Ultimates in the game. There are a lot of strange choices here. It’s just not something I expected from HoYoVerse.
Everything about Yunli—her design, her bare feet (especially with the context of her real-world inspiration), the possible Buddyfight Gargantua Punisher reference—literally would not have made me bat an eye if she was an older sister figure to Yanqing. It’s when I compare her to the other kids in Honkai: Star Rail that I found her design bizarre. The feet aren’t the real issue. Rather, it’s odd how Honkai: Star Rail was good at avoiding any potential implications with its younger characters yet seemed to really put the spotlight on marketing Yunli in this way.
Since most of Yunli’s animations are pretty normal, it really is a nothingburger of an issue. By the time she comes out, I’m hoping that it’ll all be a misunderstanding or a coincidence. We only have two videos of her so far, and we haven’t even seen her trailers, after all. Hey, maybe you’re truly meant to think of Yunli as a martial artist kid with Dunhuang Feitian inspirations in her outfit. In which case, let those dogs roam free, Yunli, and I pray that I can soon expel the negative-online-experience worms from my brain.
Honkai: Star Rail is readily available on the PS5, Windows PC, and mobile devices. Yunli will appear in Honkai: Star Rail during the first phase of Version 2.4, which should go live on July 31, 2024.
