I replayed Xiangling’s story quest recently, and there were a bunch of interesting tidbits that still feel really relevant, even all these years later. So here’s a semi-structured brain dump while I have it on my mind.
Hunting
Xiangling tries to hunt boars in Springvale, but Allan stops her.
Allan: “This is the boars’ natural habitat, you can’t hunt them here! You’ll send them all running. We hunters know better than to kill the chicken to get at the egg.”
Xiangling: “Oh! I get it. The freshest, best-quality meat comes from free-range boars that grow up in the environment nature intended for them!”
Cooking
Xiangling has a particular philosophy about cooking — she’s not interested in sticking to the same established, conventional recipes. She wants to experiment and make new dishes out of ingredients that have never been used before.
Xiangling: There’s no such thing as “normal” ingredients to me! You can turn anything into a delicacy if you cook it in the right way. I will not stand for having my creativity shackled by what ingredients I can and can’t use! Food cooked like that is destined to be boring, period!
She also likes an “element of surprise” in her cooking:
Xiangling: That’s just my style. If I decided in advance exactly how I was goings to cook something, there’d be no element of surprise to the dish. In the same way, if I knew what I was looking for before I found it, it wouldn’t be a surprise.
Olaf
While looking for ingredients, Xiangling and the Traveler come across a shivering man from Springvale named Olaf. He says he was hunting a boar and got trapped with a cryo regisvine in some underground ruins while chasing it.
Later, we find out that the boar he was chasing went extinct 300 years ago — and was accidentally cryopreserved along with Olaf all this time. It also turns out that Draff, the current lead hunter of Springvale, is a descendent of Olaf.
Jillian
Even though it’s mentioned that this type of boar went extinct 300 years ago, that doesn’t mean Olaf was born 300 years ago — he could have gotten lost even earlier. Draff mentions not remembering exactly what generation of his family Olaf is from.
This is probably just a coincidence, but I do find it pretty interesting that Olaf shares a name with Olaf the Black, a guy who had a very tumultuous relationship with his half-brother named “Rognvaldr.”
The extinct boar
After tasting Xiangling’s dish cooked with the boar meat, Olaf gets sad that he’ll never get to taste the food of his era again — but Xiangling reassures him:
Xiangling: Cheer up, if you like the taste I can always make you some more!
Olaf: Really? But the boar…it’s extinct…
Xiangling: The boar may be, but the taste isn’t! I can simply recreate it using different ingredients.
This is the most important part of the quest to me. It reminds me so much of Emilie’s story quest and how she was able to recreate a perfume that was once made with a now-”extinct” flower by combining the scents of other flowers using modern perfume-making techniques. The difference here is that the extinct boar was (as far as we know) a naturally-occurring breed that went extinct due to over-hunting — whereas the extinct flower was artificially created using the mutative powers of a delusion.
The cooking competition
The premise of most of the quest is that Xiangling is in a cooking competition with the head chef of Springvale, Brook, because they have different cooking philosophies. I think it would be easy to write this off as just a cut little thing that doesn’t mean anything other than to establish Xiangling as a famous chef — but when I think about it in comparison with Chiori’s story quest, I can’t help but feel like there’s something more there.
There’s a bigger theme here that has something to do with recipes and the difference between creating something truly new vs. creating a copy of something that already exists, I think. We see it in Chiori’s story quest, we see it in Emilie’s story quest, we see it with Rhinedottir’s creations, we see it with the Abyss mimic monsters, etc.
Why would two higher powers in Teyvat be competing to see who can make the best dish instead of working together? Beats me, but it sure is interesting that the winner used extinct boar meat and then was like, “it’s fine, I can recreate the taste with normal stuff too!”
Misc
- When Xiangling meets Paimon, she says “What an exotic creature, is it edible?” Upon learning that Paimon is the Traveler’s friend, she follows up with “What a bummer. Can’t eat it if it’s your friend.” Then, she talks about her own friend, who she named Guoba after her favorite childhood snack.
- Comparing Paimon to Guoba is obviously interesting since we know that one of them is a former god who sacrificed his power to save his nation and shrunk down to a much smaller size as a result (very similar to Rukkhadevata, too)
- Also lol classic emergency food gag
- When the Traveler expresses interest in trying food made with slime condensate, Paimon says. “Yay! Traveler has finally come around to my food preferences.”
- Xiangling’s secret ingredient (aside from the extinct boar meat) in the winning dish comes from the cryo regisvine — Paimon says “Can we really eat a tree that’s that aggressive?”