With the sheer amount of characters in Genshin Impact and its intricate story, there's little surprise that there are more than a few characters that players will feel sad for, whether they take it in stride or in less pleasant ways.
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Woobies
- The Fatui Ninth Company, who are entirely made up of token good teammates for the Fatui in general. They descended into the Chasm as part of a diplomatic pact with Liyue and genuinely believed they were there to save the people of Liyue from the Ruin Serpent, only to be abandoned by Signora and Childe after their antics broke down all diplomatic ties with Liyue. Their supplies were cut off and the Company began to starve to death. By the time the Traveler finds the six remaining survivors of a party of 64, their leader, Anton, is reduced to begging the Traveler for help on their behalf to find out what happened and is horrified that their mission was apparently a fraud.
- Poor, poor Kusanali. The more you learn, the more you'll want to give her a hug.
- Born following her predecessor Rukkhadevata's disappearance, the first thing Akademiya did when they found her is lock her up in a gilded cage, where she's spent the entirety of the past 500 years, with Sumeru's people never recalling a time when she had ever been out and about in the sun. Though at first celebrated as the new Dendro Archon, Akademiya's obsessive reverence of their fallen god resulted in the neglect, diminishment, and even censorship of their current one. By the present day, all one hears in Sumeru is Rukkhadevata this, Greater Lord that, and if one asks about Kusanali they will likely get some variation of "oh right, she exists". Kusanali's own worshippers meanwhile are a tiny minority in her own country, and Akademiya intentionally makes it hard for them to pay their respects, such as by neglecting venues for her events or barging in and cancelling them altogether. It's possible that the Traveler and Paimon are the first true friends and confidantes she's ever had in her whole life. Compare the various friends and comrades the previous three Archons have been known to have, and even still have today.
- Nahida's very aware of how huge Rukkhadevata's shadow is, and has been suffocating in it; she berates herself as inadequate for being Sumeru's god, notes that Akademiya basically runs the country, and laments her own existence as pointless. On top of this, she's painfully nice, having taught Dunyarzad about the wonderful world that existed outside her room while she was suffering from a fit of Eleazar. While Dunyarzad is grateful and expresses that this changed her life, Nahida herself believes that a "real" god would have been able to cure her outright and curses her weakness. It's obvious how badly she wants to help her people, yet thanks to the Akademiya she has to go to frustratingly roundabout lengths just to accomplish anything, all while berating her own shortcomings instead of resenting the Akademiya. She's made it her mission as Archon to cure Irminsul if it's the last thing she does, and putting the seriousness with which she says that with her low self-esteem gives the impression that it's Not Hyperbole. She's the youngest out of all Archons, has no known friends or support group to speak of save the Traveler and Paimon, and basically hasn't had a chance to live much of a life thanks to Akademiya's control and even abuse, yet she's determined to give her life for that cause if that's what it takes.
- 3.1 sees Il Dottore taking over Sumeru, Scaramouche making his return, and a plot to revive the Scarlet King, which might ignite a new war. Not to mention the apparent onscreen murder of Sumeru's Katheryne whose body Kusanali possesses when necessary. Poor Kusanali literally cannot catch a break.
- Finally, as if the knife couldn't be driven any further down our hearts, her character teaser
multiplies the pain tenfold. She repeats the dream she tells the Traveler three times; the first two interpretations are happy, until the third one shows exactly what happened, which is what the Akademiya sages did once they found her. She wakes up in her prison, wishing herself a happy birthday. Oh, and for that very final knife push? The teaser's name is "Nahida: Happy Birthday" and was released on October 27th, which is the day of her birthday...
- Jeht may be a sidequest character, but she definitely gets it rough. First, she has to deal with the fact that her mother died when she was young. Then at the end of the sidequest set she debuts in, her father sacrifices his life for her as well, prompting her to seek out the Tanit tribe which she has heritage of. However, the tragedy doesn't stop there. After arriving, Babel turns Jeht into a killing machine, forcing her to off other leaders of the Tanit until she has full power and using her to further her goals. Not only that, but Jeht finds herself betrayed by other Tanit members whom she trusted. It is when she is tricked into believing the Traveler betrayed her that she realizes she had been used and marked for death by Babel. While she does get revenge against Babel, it turns out that Babel had sent out messengers to other Eremite tribes about Jeht being a traitor, meaning she has nowhere to go where she will be welcomed, the Traveler and Paimon being her only true friends.
- Collei's story is tragic all in all. As shown in the webcomic, she was struck with Eleazar at a young age and sent to the Fatui, who supposedly had the cure, on the condition she would be cured of her affliction; instead, she is experimented on by Il Dottore using the remnants of dead gods, leaving her with severe trauma. After escaping Snezhnaya and arriving to Mondstadt in search of a cure, she causes the Black Fire Incident to slip in to the city... but upon arriving, she is befriended by Amber, who supports her even after the truth about the incident comes to light. When Kaeya steps in to kill her, she swiftly accepts her death since she had nothing left to lose, shocking everyone else. Fortunately, she is rescued by Cyno, cleared from the dead god remnants, and taken in by Tighnari who treats her from Eleazar under his care, but despite her improved well-being, the trauma she suffered during experimentation on her still manifests in the form of disliking physical interaction, as Paimon and the Traveler find out in the Archon Quest. But after all of this, she finally gets the breather she sorely deserved after the events of the Archon Quest, where she is fully cured from Eleazar.
- Paimon: Ughhh! That's it! Paimon won't forget this! It's time for some Paimonial wrath! (she floats toward Collei to tickle her as payback)
Collei: NO! DON'T TOUCH ME!!!
- Navia. The poor girl seems to find herself losing loved ones left and right; when she was a child, her father was framed for a murder and then killed in a duel he agreed to in order to spare Navia from seeing him die of an illness and protect her from the real killer; the loss of her father drove her to resent Clorinde, her Childhood Friend, for a while. If losing her father wasn't enough, after a quake causes Primordial Seawater to flood Spina Di Rosula, her two assistants whom she was very close with, Melus and Silver, are among the casualties. Even worse, she is grief stricken as unlike her father, whom she was able to make a grave for, she is unable to do such for Melus and Silver due to their bodies having dissolved, and that is a detail she is most saddened about. Their spirits even eventually come back as Oceanids to protect Navia from death by Primordial Seawater, and after a heartfelt reunion while she's in a state of purgatory, she's unwilling to let them go and unable to properly say goodbye to them when she wakes up. One has to wonder how Navia managed to overcome all of this on her own after the end of the Archon Quest.
Jerkass Woobie
- The Raiden Shogun, or in reality Raiden Ei, who created the Raiden Shogun puppet to rule in her stead while she went into isolation, is the tyrannical ruler of Inazuma, enforcing the confiscation of her citizens Visions and closing off the country from the rest of Teyvat in her efforts to create an "unchanging eternity", and she's perfectly willing to resort to deadly force if either of these are defied. And while this is revealed to be not entirely on Ei, with both decrees being started by her puppet being manipulated by the Fatui and parts of the Tri-Commission while being intentionally kept in the dark about the fallout, that doesn't change how this is also the fault of Ei's negligence and unwillingness to take an active part in ruling her nation. Additionally, she's an Unwitting Instigator of Doom with her creation and subsequent abandonment of one of her first prototype puppets, who went on to become Scaramouche and proceed to cause problems within her own nation, such as the fall of the Raiden Gokuden and numerous associated clans. However, it's made clear by the end of the Archon Quest that this is the result of Ei being extremely traumatised, with her losing multiple friends and loved ones, one of which she had to kill in self-defense, that culminated in her sister dying in her earms during the Khaenri'ah disaster as she bequeathed the Musou Isshin and title of Electro Archon to her. Naturally, the trauma and the sudden weight of an entire country on her shoulders caused Ei to create the Shogun Puppet in a misguided attempt to give their nation a proper ruler while she entered a self-imposed isolation, not wanting to suffer the pain of losing anyone else.
- With the reveal of his backstory, it is hard not to see Scaramouche as this. Sure, he’s an unrepentant sociopath who has made at least one attempt on the Traveler’s life and helps Dottore take over Sumeru and overthrow Kusanali. But after a lifetime of being abandoned - first by Raiden, who he explicitly refers to as his mother, then by the blacksmith who took him in, and finally indirectly by his third friend, a child, who died, he willingly chose to close off his heart and become this way so he would Never Be Hurt Again, developing a deep hatred of gods and humans. And then you learn that the second instance was him being deceived by Dottore, who murdered the blacksmith, ripped out his heart, and had the then Kabukimono use it to solve Mikage Furnace incident before claiming his friend murdered a servant for the heart before running off, all because he saw him as a potential test subject.
Iron Woobie
- Furina/Focalors manages to rival Lesser Lord Kusanali as one of the most tragic characters in the game.
- Furina was created as a human vessel by the real Focalors, who gave her the mission to impersonate her while Focalors gathers up Indemnitium for her plan to avert an apocalyptic prophecy that Celestia had cursed the nation with and would doom Fontaine. And she can't vent or confide this to anyone else, lest the Heavenly Principles find out. Sure, Furina is a bratty, flighty and oftentimes loose-lipped person who lives for the dramatic and grandiose, but this was all a facade she created in order to deflect any suspicion of her not being the Archon, because this is what she thought a god acts like. With only immortality as her tool for this role, she does this consistently for 500 years straight, never stopping for even a second lest she end up causing the prophecy to happen. Unsurprisingly, this causes Furina horrible mental and emotional anguish to the point of breaking down crying in front of her subjects but passing it off as her "power taking shape", and at one point she even questions if it will be another century of her role, and when will it end. She's also suddenly put on trial by the Traveler in front of all the people of Fontaine, accusing her of being a fraud who was never the Archon to begin with. She becomes extremely desperate to save face in an attempt to salvage her efforts all these years, going so far as to dip her hand in Primordial Seawater, knowing full well it might melt her hand, but the people start to turn away from her as her facade is exposed. By the end of it all, she is left a completely broken and tearful wreck who doesn't even react to the verdict of a death sentence. Though her titanic work eventually bears fruit in the salvation of Fontaine, it's still a Bittersweet Ending since people refuse to forgive her, and following the death of the real Focalors at the end of the Archon Quest, she is left a normal human who is stripped down of her authority, living in a small apartment at the Court of Fontaine with a much more modest lifestyle. Thankfully, with all said and done, after accepting her new life, things start to look drastically better for her after receiving none other than a Hydro Vision, no doubt it being the result of enduring all the pain the wringer puts her through. Her former people eventually accept her again in her Story Quest, she successfully directs an award-winning film in the "Roses and Muskets" flagship event, and she uses her new-found freedom to visit Chenyu Vale during 2024's Lantern Rite.
- The real Focalors is no better, despite being a chessmaster of biblical proportions; while she did ask Furina to pose as the Hydro Archon for several centuries, the woman's true reason to accrue Indemnitium is simple: to arrange her death. The woman didn't choose her destiny, and knew very well that the prophecy would fulfill itself no matter what, so she set up the Oratrice so that, when the time came, it would sentence not Furina, or Focalors, but "the Hydro Archon" to the death penalty; not just a regular death penalty, mind you, but one that it would make it impossible to replace the throne of the Hydro Archon. This technically ends up fulfilling the prophecy... and allows the heroes to avert it at the cost of her life, one that she was unable to live for herself after giving what was left of her essence to Furina. Even she admits that the prospect of death leaves her a little afraid, but she smiles about it up to the very end. Blue-and-Orange Morality or not, Focalors' heart for her people was genuine, allowing fans to give her some well-deserved sympathy. If it ever was possible she could be given a hug, but Sweet Mother of Celestia, is it too late for that...
