I was saving for Alhaitham at the time, but--look, you can't just turn a character blue and give them the ability to fly and write them one of the most compelling story quests in the entire game and not expect me to pull.

After proudly insisting I didn't care about him for two years, I was tsundere about it for weeks.

The shenanigans didn't stop there, however.

After getting me on the redesign/kit and barging his way through my Primogem savings, he just had to troll me one last time.

I ended up giving him everything I had and lucked my way into C2 on his debut banner.

I also ended up hating Alhaitham's personality as soon as we got to know Kaveh better, too, so that was a lucky skip after all. (Don't tell Wanderer that, though.)

As someone who follows Genshin leaks, I thankfully found out that we'd get to name him ourselves way ahead of time, so I was able to work on the indecision paralysis early. With my kanji knowledge almost non-existent, I used Jisho to look up kanji/radicals I liked, then cross-referenced names into Namegen and its corresponding common pronounciation engine to come up with relatively realistic names.

This went on several weeks. I really wanted to pick something meaningful.

In the end, I ended up reverse-engineering a name that sparked joy (Haru) into kanji (葉瑠). 葉 is the kanji for leaf / blade of grass and is the same character used in Kazuha's name, which I thought was poetic because of how important Kazuha's ancestor was to him. 瑠 is used for my favourite shade of blue, but it's also the character used for both Ruu from the Inazuma story quest (阿瑠 in Hanzi) and the name of the Scara boss fight domain (淨琉璃工房 in kanji), the latter which in itself is a reference to 浄瑠璃 (Joururi = classic japanese theater music that typically accompanies a puppet theater show).

Then I got to the naming screen and panicked over the decision because I worried I didn't research it enough to make sure it didn't look/sound weird as a name.

Then I imagined him making fun of me for overthinking it and telling me that he's not doing 26 brush strokes every time he needs to sign his name and if he could just use the katakana instead for readability's sake.

So then I chose ハル, which is just Haru in katakana.

I anthropormophized this entire roller coaster of an experience (Traveler just being a self-insert with a Genshin account) so much, a very good friend of mine and I ended up writing fic about it.

Also, I made him a shrine, I guess???

I definitely don't simp for him, though.

That's crazy talk.