Genshin Impact players have a new common enemy: an extremely racist talking lamp

A new quest in Genshin Impact has done the impossible and gotten the game's entire community to agree on something: Liloupar the Jinni, an extremely racist talking lamp, just plain sucks.

Spoilers for Sumeru's Dirge of Bilqis quest chain ahead. 

The big world quest for Genshin Impact update 3.4 is the Dirge of Bilqis, which picks up after the end of the Golden Slumber quest from a previous patch. It's mostly about Jeht, an Eremite girl who's become one of the most lovable characters in Genshin. Liloupar, perhaps now the most hated character in the game, is also key to several events. And, boy, is Liloupar absolutely awful to Jeht.  

Genshin Impact has seen in-game narratives and community-wide discussions about race before – some Sumeru characters continue to spark complaints of whitewashing, for example – but Liloupar is easily the loudest and most obvious case of a racist to date. For some context, Liloupar is an ancient spirit bound to a lantern-like vessel, and she's also the key to a legendary desert oasis which Jeht is pursuing, both to find closure after the death of her father and to aid her tribe. 

When you first meet Liloupar, she instantly assumes that Jeht must be a slave in service to you, picturing you as Jeht's blond-haired, fair-skinned master. "Speak not out of turn before your liege, sand-licking lackey," Liloupar says when Jeht speaks up. She routinely treats Jeht like a pet, and later expresses shock that "the desert people have learned to use books." Likewise, Liloupar belittles the leader of Jeht's tribe as one of "these coarse folk" undeserving of her attention. The most damning line in the entire quest chain may be, "The only loyal desert-dweller is one whose shoulders have been pierced by iron loops," which was apparently "an old saying" back in Liloupar's day of systematic slavery. Liloupar's personality and views are explained later in the quest, but there's no redeeming them. 

The thing is, Jeht and her tribe desperately need Liloupar's help, so while they're shocked and disappointed by the kind of person she is, instead of telling her off they weather the jinni's venom with grit and grace. It's abundantly clear that Liloupar is vile – and not just for her bigoted views, as future quests also reveal – and that the audience is meant to sympathize with Jeht, but I would've liked more opportunities to shut down Liloupar's rhetoric and incorrect assumptions. 

The whole situation is unfair to Jeht – and this is not the first time she's experienced this kind of prejudice – and the largely passive role of the player character, the Traveler, basically leaves dialogue up to Paimon, who's already shown herself to be pretty ignorant and at most meets Liloupar's blatant racism with something to the tune of  'stop being mean.' That said, if the goal here was to make players despise Liloupar, I'd say Genshin's knocked it out of the park. She's probably the most hateable character since Dottore, and that's saying something. 

Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse has opened sign-ups for the final closed beta for Honkai Star Rail, an upcoming turn-based RPG.