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| “ | Hehe. Madam Herta toys with the cosmos like a child with playthings. | „ |
| ~ One of Herta's puppets talking about Herta during the Old Brews and New Friends event. |
| “ | The writers from the Intelligentsia Guild wanted to give me an extra title. Something like "Herta Prime" to separate me from my puppets. How banal. Are the puppets not "me" as well? So, I gave them a suggestion — if they dared to write that, then I would call myself THE Herta. It's short, simple, straight to the point, and elegant. | „ |
| ~ The Herta. |
| “ | Who said you could speak, ”senior”? Watch closely. See how your chaos ends at the hands of your juniors! | „ |
| ~ Herta talking to Lygus when beginning to attack Irontomb with the cosmic alliance. |
Herta, also known as The Herta, is a major supporting playable character in the 2023 science fantasy turn-based tactical role-playing video game Honkai Star Rail.
She is the 86th member of the Genius Society and an Emanator of Nous the Erudition as she is also the master of Herta Space Station. She is mostly seen in the game controlling a puppet, which is designed to look as a younger version of herself. Her true form is revealed during Amphoreus storyline and is described by others and herself as a "beautiful, esteemed young and attractive woman".
She is voiced by PJ Mattson in English, Hou Xiaofei (侯小菲) in Chinese, Yamakazi Haruka (山崎 はるか) in Japanese (who also voiced Sarina Shizukume in Mahou Shoujo Site) and Kim Seo-yeong (김서영) in Korean (who also voiced Smurfette in The Smurfs: The Lost Village, Jailbreak in The Emoji Movie, Astrid Hofferson in How to Train your Dragon franchise and EVE from WALL-E).
Appearance
In her form as a puppet she created, she creates the form of joint-legged to depict as a young woman, which in to her accordance resembles 70% of her childhood self, with long brown hair and purple eyes matching a purple nail polish in her finger. While her human self depicts of a young woman with fair skin, with the same features from her younger self in puppet form but is noted to be more mature and taller.
She is seen wearing a black, white, and purple open-back, corset-style dress that is detached with her sleeves accented with numerous embellishments, in her footwear are poor of translucent black tights wrapping around her left thigh, even a pair of purple-soled black frilled boots that is longer in the right than the left. In to the details in her head, she wears a large, wide brimmed black and purple hat decorated with large purple flowers sticking. She is often shown carrying a wand or key-shaped scepter, similar to the stereotypical watches. She appears to be childlike except her intellectual mind.
In her true form, Herta has the appearance of a young woman with fair skin and long, ash brown hair that frames her face. She has deep purple eyes and is noticeably taller and more mature looking than her puppet form.
She wears a black, white, and purple open-back, corset-style dress with detached sleeves that is accented with numerous white frills and keyhole embellishments. On her legs are a pair of translucent black tights with a black "hand" wrapped around her left thigh, as well as a pair of purple-soled black frilled boots, the right boot longer than the left. On her head she wears a large, wide brimmed black and purple hat decorated with large purple flowers, and in her hair she wears black and purple ribbons on either side of her face.
She also wears a black choker neckpiece with a white-frilled jabot, as well as a simple golden key necklace. She is often shown carrying a wand or key-shaped scepter, similar to that of a stereotypical witch.
Personality
Given by her status, Herta is well highly intellectual but she has a detached and eccentric personality, although she is a genius scientist and the master of Herta Space Station, and rarely shows interest outside of what she finds interesting. It is also given that she is incredibly confident, to the point of bordering on arrogance, yet can also be apathetic, cold and self-absorbed who speaks in a straightforward manner and doesn't waste time with her words, caring more about being efficient with her time and energy than the feelings of her followers and fellow geniuses. She also tends to use said puppets as proxies for all but exceptionally important matters or those that actually require her personal power to accomplish, with a habit of unceremoniously dropping control to leave them on automatic when she loses interest, even during an interview. However, despite her towering ego, Herta is willing to acknowledge others (for the most part, other geniuses) as better than her in specific fields and is interested in collaborating with other geniuses, and is capable of some kindness from time to time, with a strong implication that her respect and kindness has to be earned.
She is self-aware and recognizes her own limitations and has no problem whatsoever accepting her failures, and if anything, sees them as something to be celebrated, even congratulating Ruan Mei when she failed one of her projects and told her that "there is nothing more precious than failures for a genius". Herta also has no problem admitting that Screwllum is more logical and refined than she is while pointing out that she is more talented than him and has more achievements to her name, which makes them equals in her eyes, and also genuinely commands Asta for doing such a good job as a manager to the space station. Her self-aggrandizing manner is often perceived as arrogance, but it stems from a genuine, justified confidence in her abilities rather than insecurity, and doesn't categorize things as "like" or "dislike"; her sole metric is whether something is "interesting" or "not interesting", though her overflowing self-esteem does seem to aid to her charm. She's arrogant, haughty, will create or abandon research projects on a whim, and has very little empathy for others. However, this doesn't take away that she's probably one of the most intelligent individuals in the entire universe, hence her being inducted into the Genius Society.
Herta has a tendency to act as if she couldn't care less about everything and everyone, even from the form, even in her puppet form of how she can't be bothered to talk to someone in person instead uses a total of 281 puppets around the space station to communicate with people for her, and has her own puppets within the Clock Tower her true self resides in that are at her beck and call like maids that do all the menial tasks she doesn't want to do. She views herself as ever-changing, getting upset over how two puppets of herself had the exact same pose, and that it was not an accurate reflection of herself, tweaking its joints, opened its eyes, and made the fingers softer, seeing it as completely different from yesterday and more like who she is today. To Herta, her pursuit of knowledge results in her not being the same person today as she was yesterday, which is why she is so quick to drop projects once they're complete or the subject is in her hand, as there is not much left to learn at that point, and for her, a day not spent enlightening herself is a day that is wasted, displaying a constant drive to learn and discover. Herta doesn't seek a final, definitive answer to the universe's mysteries, instead, she desires that "the die never stop rolling", embracing the continuous, unending process of seeking knowledge itself, with the process of discovery is more valuable to her than any final, static truth, and that there is no true end to learning about the universe, and the journey of discovery only ends when the person chooses to stop. This view is highlighted by a question she once posed to the Aeon of Erudition, Nous (whom she refers to as "Droid Head"): if there are no mysteries in the universe that can't be solved, how would Nous prove it? This is Herta's way of testing the limits of even an Aeon's knowledge and ensuring the pursuit of new truths never ends. The Herta's Myriad Celestia trailer has her claim that she finds more joy in questions and the act of solving them than the answers themselves. "T H E H E R T A 'S M A G I C K I T C H E N" video also implies that she has more fun making failed attempts at cooking than any successful attempt - which shows in form of a planet-sized cake.
While she may be an apathetic "insufferable genius" most of the time, she is very much capable of kindness, and usually only shows it to those who've done something to earn it; Herta holds great respect for Chadwick, the 79th member of the Genius Society, and the lengths he went to keep the knowledge of the Imaginary Implosion Pulse away from the IPC, and later honors his last request to safeguard the information he entrusts to her far away from the IPC's grasp. Patavia was a scholar from the Intelligentsia Guild whose hard work resulted in the Solitary Waves Theory, a question that was physically impossible for her to solve as she lacked the spark of genius. While Herta was credited with solving it (and earned the gaze of Nous for it), she nevertheless has deep respect for Patavia for getting as far as she did. The epilogue of the Unknowable Domain's story has her go to the point in time in the simulation when Patavia has grown old; when Herta shows her the solved theory, the latter asks Herta whether she is a normal scholar or a genius acknowledged by the Aeon of Erudition.
During the finale of the aforementioned story, she quickly tells the Trailblazer to leave the Simulated Universe when she senses Polka hacking into the SU and not worry about her or the others at the first sign of trouble. Unfortunately, Polka's trap is inescapable for all involved; it took the geniuses throwing everything they have at her to fend her off, and simulated Aha's intervention to finally stop her. At the end of "A New Venture on the Eighth Dawn", before sacrificing her puppets to project herself to Nous to ask of THEM the nature of divinity, she orders the Station powered down and the staff evacuated, ensuring that they aren't put at risk by her attempt to contact an Aeon. In her animated short "T H E H E R T A 'S M A G I C K I T C H E N", she goes out of her way to try and bake a cake as a gift for Ruan Mei, even if she isn't fully successful at it. When the Astral Express visit the Space Station to inquire about Amphoreus and March's affliction, and try to rouse Herta from her slumber while she's trying to meet Nous, she decides to call off the attempt upon realizing that they refuse to leave, not wanting to risk them getting vaporized in the event Nous does grant her an audience. She also doesn't hold it against them for walking into the station unannounced because, to be fair, she did leave the door unlocked and there was no prior notice. She calls Asta an "outstanding manager" due to her capability to keep the Station running, as someone less capable might have let Herta and the geniuses destroy the Station ten times over. It's high praise, considering since Herta's puppet barged in on a family meeting and gave Asta a job at the Station on the spot. March and Cyrene reveal to Evernight that Herta could've just blown up the Amphoreus Scepter in order to destroy Irontomb, but she refrained from doing so because it would've killed the Nameless inside.
Herta is straightforward and doesn't use filters. She explicitly tells people, like the Trailblazer, when she intends to use them as a test subject, a sharp contrast to the deceit practiced by some of her colleagues. While she puts test subjects in non-lethal danger, she ensures they are never in real, permanent harm. In one instance, Herta was willing to scrap a major project to prevent allies from being harmed by the Aeon Nous' presence. She can be rather unsympathetic but she is not reckless, being aware that her collections of Curious are dangerous and need to be handled with caution. She doesn't care what the people of the station think of her nor does she care what people think of her in general, and is focused purely on a person's skillset when she chooses to hire them, and has an eye for people's talents; she does not care if a person is one of her followers or even likes her, which is made clear by Arlan's voice line where he "wouldn't consider himself a follower of herta, but was still hired as head of security", and is capable of discerning when others have potential and are able to do great things as well. Even then, according to March and Cyrene in the climax of "Back to Earth in Evernight", Herta could've destroyed the Amphoreus Scepter using her Imaginary weapon, which would've conclusively stopped Irontomb and saved the universe from it, but chose not to do this asering views on both the nature of reality and the Simulated Universe, just listening to her narration about Screwllum when examining his portrait in her office shows genuine affection and reverence. She even admits some of the things she knows are due to his tutoring, which says a lot given how she often emphasizes how much she is self-taught. Her true form's voice line about him reveals she considers him her equal, both overall and in fashion sense. For the longest time, her actual feelings towards Ruan Mei were nebulous as despite trusting Ruan Mei enough to let her run wild on her own station the two were never shown interacting together socially. "T H E H E R T A 'S M A G I C K I T C H E N" shows that they have a ritual where Ruan Mei announces a failure in an experiment, Herta will throw a party with gifts and pastries. Ruan Mei has clearly embraced this as she comments that she prefers Herta's failures at hand-made cakes and pastries over any 'perfect' goods such as a moon-sized cake Herta makes with her magic. Ruan Mei has also met Herta in her true form so many times she's casual about it.
Despite being one of the smartest beings in the universe, Herta does want her work to help people, and is one who pursues the truth that would benefit people and those for the greater good than harm them, and is genuinely willing to sacrifice herself for the cosmos if things had not gone well, and tends to act as a guide to to the protagonist and makes them capable of learning something out of it, being morally a good person yet is also stoic and headstrong. She would never let her obsession come at the cost of the lives of innocent people, and though she embodies the facets of a true genius, even when it means threatening the death of their Aeon herself, but at the same time, while she may lack empathy, she does have a sense of compassion to all living beings that walk beside her. Herta's primary driver is to seek out the unexplained mysteries of the galaxy and satisfy her curiosity. She believes the "die" of the universe should never stop rolling, embracing endless possibilities and unpredictability over predetermined outcomes. She finds solutions less interesting than the process of finding them, viewing answers as mere stepping stones to new, more complex questions. This aligns with Herta's belief that failure and self-improvement are key parts of the learning cycle. Herta possesses a conscience and is fundamentally a force for good, even if it's buried under layers of pride and disinterest. While she has a titanic (but justified) ego and a tendency to be blunt and abrasive, she's still a firm force for good with lenient but defined morals. She ensures her researchers, test subjects, and innocents are never in real danger from her experiments, never gives more than a verbal lashing to someone that crosses her unless you were trying to get in her way, and is perfectly willing to give credit where it's due, including recognizing her own mistakes. She also cares much more about her allies than her attitude might have you believe, being unwilling to resort to The Needs of the Many to stop Irontomb. Supplementary material reveals that if the Express didn't go to Amphoreus and Irontomb awakened on its own, Herta would have sacrificed herself to stop it.
History
Biography
Herta's home planet is The Blue, an oceanic planet that is orbited by the Herta Space Station, describing it as "her planet" and according to her, she has saved the Blue from destruction 19 times, and built Herta Space Station just to contain an unactivated Stellaron, the Antimatter Legion and keep the Blue from disaster. She is documented in her Character Details to be the human with the highest IQ to come from the Blue, and her Myriad Celestia trailer and a few parts of Unknowable Domain's story implies that she has been a genius since she was still just a young girl.
The Antimatter Legion's Attack
To be added.
Amphoreus, the Eternal Land
To be added.
Irontomb and the Final Battle
To be added.
Meeting with Cyrene
To be added.
Powers & Abilities
To be added.
Gallery
Trivia
- Herta is one of the seven playable characters with different forms. The others being Dan Heng, Tingyun, March 7th. Silver Wolf, Blade and Himeko.
- Herta currently has 281 puppets of herself, 249 active and 32 as backups, across Herta Space Station.
- However, in the Trailblaze Quest A Witch's Scientific Repose, a puppet has the serial number 10136, which means there are over 10,000 puppets in total (the other ones are likely in other places of the universe, such as her true home, or in The Blue. However, it is also possible many puppets stopped functioning, were broken irreparably or were lost).
- As shown in Herta's (puppet) Splash Art, she is connected to a considerable amount of wires on her back, which implies the puppets need a big amount of electric current to recharge (and given that Herta has 249 active puppets, they might be the reason for the Space Station's massive electricity bill, as seen in Topaz & Numby's Character Trailer "Expert Tutorial").
- As revealed in the event Old Brews and New Friends, Herta puppets are capable of drinking alcoholic drinks and even sensing their flavor.
- Herta seems to have an obsession with her own name, as she names numerous things as herself:
- Named her space station as Herta Space Station.
- Created a Mathematical Sequence which was named Herta Sequence.
- Gives people who has seen her true form twice a number called Herta Number.
- When asked by the Intelligentsia Guild to choose a title she was only satisfied with titles that contained her name.
- The Herta Space Station uses an internal cryptocurrency called Hertareums, which bear a puppet's face.
External Links
- Herta on the Honkai: Star Rail Wiki
- The Herta on the Honkai: Star Rail Wiki
- Herta #ErrorModel on the Honkai: Star Rail Wiki
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