On Feb. 23, 2023, Hoyoverse shared Dehya’s Character Spotlight, giving a bit of backstory to her character that’s separate from her involvement in the Sumeru storyline. The company also shared more about the new 5-Star Pyro character on Twitter, including confirmation of her ascension materials.
While the story shown off was touching and people are loving Dehya’s personality more and more, it sparked rage among many in the community overnight.
One of the biggest things that upset the community was the way that Hoyoverse seemingly whitewashed Dehya in the Spotlight. People started realizing that Deyha’s coloring changed between the preview trailer, official artwork, and even her in-game design.
This sparked a discussion of Hoyoverse’s past treatment of characters with dark skin tones and its tendency to lighten up their skin for certain promotional things.
While some argued that this spoke more of cultural and societal issues around the developers themselves than Hoyoverse as a whole, people were still shocked and upset to see such significant changes. This led to a lot of re-created artwork where artists went in and changed Dehya’s skin tone to better match her in-game model.
The controversy around Dehya continued to remind (and frustrate) fans of how bad her kit is. Much of the damage in Genshin Impact comes from characters proccing Elemental Reactions, and Dehya is set up to specifically not easily do that for reasons that don’t make sense to players. Many fans have been waiting for her to become available after her massive story presence in Sumeru and were disappointed when her kit was announced/leaked.
She’s also being added to the Standard banner, joining six other characters that are generally considered weaker units compared to their 5-star counterparts that run on limited banners. For many, this was a slap in the face after they’d saved primogems and missed out on actually good characters.
This was already upsetting many in the community so much so that there was a previously established ranting thread on r/Dehyamains – now, players are even more upset after seeing that she’s not getting buffed before release.
Considering Dehya is being released after Alhaitham, arguably one of the most powerful units in the game, there does seem to be something wrong with her place among other characters in the game. As a Pyro DPS unit (although her DPS potential looks lacking), most would assume that she’d immediately be paired with units like Xinyan and Yelan to make the most of Elemental Reactions.
This has been the meta for quite some time, so it’s hard to understand why Hoyoverse has her set up to not do this. However, one important thing to note is that everything currently points to Fontaine being the next region to be released in the game.
Fontaine’s Archon will be Hydro, which could mean interesting things for Dehya’s character in the future in a similar way that Kokomi was generally viewed as a bad 5-star character before the release of Sumeru. Overall, Dehya will probably be a pretty bad unit on release.
While it feels like a bit of a slap in the face considering she’s also coming to the standard banner, Hoyoverse might have something up its sleeve that players don’t know about yet. Dehya will officially hit the game with patch 3.5 on March 1, 2023.
About the author
