Honkai: Star Rail’s main character is chaotic, endearing, and quite popular

destructoid.com:

Honkai: Star Rail has been out for just about a week now, and already, fans have started to create things around it. Art and memes have already been flooding social channels. And in a turn that surprised me a bit, the Trailblazer—the main character chosen by the player—is getting quite a bit of attention.

In Honkai: Star Rail, you assemble a party of adventurers and explorers to travel across the stars, dealing with the ever-present Stellaron threat. As you travel between worlds, you meet an ever-expanding cast of characters, though it remains centered on the Astral Express crew and your chosen Trailblazer. Though referred to by a chosen name or their pseudonym, fans often refer to the male version as Caelus and female as Stelle.

I’ve played a handful of gacha games in the past. Usually, the main character is an off-screen person, sometimes even intended to be the player themselves. In games like Fire Emblem Heroes, for example, the player character was a mostly unseen conduit, until later updates introduced them as a physical in-game character.

HoYoVerse’s Genshin Impact is a little different. There, you make a choice about which version of the Traveler—the main character—you want to play, once again divided between male and female options. This character becomes the protagonist of your story, the lens through which you view all events. Your avatar, basically, but also an individual character, like Shepard in Mass Effect. Honkai: Star Rail does something similar with Caelus and Stelle.

That distinction is important because it lets the Traveler and Trailblazer take on a life of their own. And the latter has some life to them.

Because these characters are allowed to exist as role-playing characters that interact with