Let me tell you about my favorite gacha character.
(Spoilers for Honkai Star Rail below the image.)
(Gacha games are full of ambiguous trivia lore, this is just my experience of the character's story. I don't care what youtube videos you watched.)
Firefly or "AR26710" is former member of the "Iron Cavalry" of the planet Glammoth, the "Republic of Glammoth." However, as she would probably remember it, she was actually a warrior for the "Empire of Glammoth", defending her Queen from a galaxy-devouring horde of interstellar insects known as the Swarm, whose existence led to a known-universe-wide catastrophe lasting an immense amount of years and consuming an astonishing amount of life, known as "The Swarm Disaster." By the time Firefly slew her first couple thousand giant, ravening insects, the Swarm Disaster's catalyst had been gone for Aeons-knew-how-long-- but despite the death of the god of Propagation, Tazzynroth, innumerable amounts of insects still carry out their divine will, imbued into their flesh-- to devour so they can reproduce, interminably, forever. Glammoth was in the way of just such a remnant of the Swarm Disaster, a swarm of insects whose combined bulk could blot out their sun, the promise of imminent, brutal consumption to fuel further reproduction and mass death-- and their response was to create the Iron Cavalry, premier bug hunters of the galaxy.
What is most interesting to me is that the Republic of Glammoth needed a ruse to recruit this army of immensely powerful supersoldiers, despite having the technology to create and outfit them. They created a Queen who in turn not only controlled the Iron Cavalry but controlled the fantasy within which they lived. They were gallant, knightly warriors of a grand interstellar Empire, and it was their sworn duty to protect the Empire from the Swarm. This ultranationalist fantasy of answering to a single authority upon the land while fending off a mindless external threat-- it's a bit more attractive than becoming the suicidal shield of a corrupt democracy, isn't it? It's a problem that our modern democracies in our real world have with recruitment: it's impossible to hide the venal and pathetic spectacle that is every day in the highest halls of democracy, but it's so aesthetically neat to fight for queen and country.
However, Glammoth was nonetheless ultimately destroyed. The population of ordinary humans on Glammoth--who saw the Iron Cavalries as dangerous, inhuman living weapons--dwindled through years of war, and the debris of the war blotted out their skies. It is ambiguous whether Glammoth actually faced the complete Swarm or a remnant of the Swarm Disaster, but I choose to believe it is the latter because it is kind of a neat bow on the whole thing. The knightly duty to protect the Land and Queen versus a divine will to kill and fuck and kill again imbued into the flesh by a God-- ultimately just bit parts in the desperate thrashing of a failing state in a universe that came to them pre-fucked. One minor tendril of catastrophe erases them.
Firefly, however, would survive Glammoth. Recovered by a group of extremely charismatic wanted criminals, mysteriously carrying out an agenda that might lead to the destruction of, ironically, the God of Destruction-- Firefly would become SAM, the initials of her mecha (Strategic Assault Mech, SAM), a large, muscular looking "male robot" to the world, as she carried out missions for the Stellaron Hunters. However, Firefly survived the death of Glammoth with a wish-- for identity, individuality, which she knew of, grasped at, during the war in Glammoth, but was unable to attain-- duty and survival came first, came above all other concerns. Now, she was free-- with the wide universe in front of her, and supportive allies. Without Queen or Country to defend.
To eventually dispose of the Iron Cavalry, Glammoth programmed their biologies with a disease or syndrome that would eventually kill them. Inside their mecha, they can manage the symptoms, but apart from it, they are slowly dying. As long as Firefly is "SAM" she is able to endure on, one of the last of her kind. But to strip herself of the armor and show the pretty girl buried in the steel, is always a risk to herself, not just in opsec, but a literal bodily risk. As such, when Firefly is tasked with a mission in the planet Penacony, which has fantasy technology that allows its inhabitants to enter a vast, cartoonish dream world where real logic doesn't always apply-- Firefly has an ulterior motive of living as herself. Of being Firefly, not SAM, without consequences.
In Penacony, she can wander around, eat food, play games, look at gaudy 20's Americana inspired locales, and most importantly, flirt with and go on dates with the protagonist of the game, whose gender you can select. Obviously if you are playing as Stelle, the female character, everything is tinged with immense homoeroticism-- the story is not written differently for each protagonist, it is not written so that Stelle reifies heteronormativity and shies away from Firefly and only Caelus, the male protagonist, can embrace her. Games used to do this! Games with selectable gender protagonists used to carefully program away any possibility of homoerotic interaction or aesthetic. Gacha games do not care-- that is effort they do not expend. It is because of efficiencies in development, much moreso than the changing nature of the times, but it is not *not* the latter too. This is one of those magic things that just don't happen in 70 dollar games. Across the Penacony patch cycles, we essentially got a designated girlfriend-- nobody but Firefly fawns as much or has the kind of girlish crush interactions with the protagonist.
The story even culminates in Firefly seemingly sacrificing herself to save the protagonist from a bomb threat, donning her armor in front of her and flying away-- only for everyone to discover that the bomb is actually a gigantic fireworks and magic show, designed *specifically* to give Firefly the opportunity to fly through the dream-world sky of Penacony with the protagonist in her arms. Not as the hulking, masculine figure of the Strategic Assault Mech, which peels away during the explosion, but as Firefly, as herself. The entire patch cycle ends with a gender euphoria moment. They do other things with this attachment you develop to the character too-- Firefly is "murdered" in a previous patch and you have to sit for a month with losing those moments of adorable connection with her, a viable threat from publisher and developer Mihoyo as they have permanently killed major, important, playable story characters in their previous gacha games. However, if you were a deep lore knower who pored through the metaphysics of the world of Penacony, available to you from the start, you may have figured out the ruse.
I didn't-- I'm not a particularly deep lore diver in these games. Rather, I like having the anticipation between patch cycles to jog my imagination. Honkai Star Rail is a vast game with numerous aesthetics, each planet having entirely different settings, from a war-torn, frozen Russian wasteland, to a high-tech Wuxia setting, to the nightmare roaring 20s theme park ride of Penacony. When Firefly "died," I thought of where the story would go. When she "returned" it was with the threat that she might die again-- and her final "death" on-screen is perhaps the whimsical "death" of the cover identity of SAM, and the birth of the woman Firefly has always *wanted* to be able to be. It's a transgender narrative. She's transgender to me. She's a trans woman.
Anyway.
This isn't an ad for Honkai Star Rail, which is a gacha game that preys on my addictive qualities and those of its vast playerbase to rake in billions of dollars to continue putting out these lovely high gloss stories about girls. I know what good and bad things are and despite the words of a very wise man, I also know the difference between them. Rather this is my answer to the question of 'what do you find compelling about Honkai Star Rail, that you ignore its deleterious qualities.' This is not a straightforward retelling of the story of the Penacony patches, other shit happens-- there is a siscon man with bird wings on his head, and the story likes him WAY too much. A little jester woman in a sexy little dress is insanely racist to a guy, from the planet "Sigonia." (I love the sexy twintails joker woman, nevertheless.) This is not flawless art. Rather, this is an experience of what kept me playing-- what I found compelling enough to think, dream, write fanfiction outlines I'm not gonna publish, and to seek out metric fucktons of lesbian porn of this character. Her aesthetic and story.
This is an experience that you might tell me I can *easily* have with some other game, that is more acceptable to your moral consumption, perhaps with some concessions, like it being a visual novel or untranslated in Japanese or something-- but also, we are all capable of living in the woods as our ancestors did. Forging tools from the land and devouring its bounty, being found naked and filthy by park rangers and restrained, our natural lifestyles silenced, and obviously blaming the scourge of wokeness and DEI somehow for this damnable fate-- but I don't want to do any of those things.
By the way, I've been lying, for the sake of CLICKBAIT-- my favorite gacha character ever is actually Bronya from Honkai Impact 3rd.
But that's a story for another day.