#good luck with that fic that sounds like a huge headache and massive undertaking

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

I'm currently writing out the Archon War in a fic, and it got me thinking - who exactly would Morax be going to war against in Cyanide Narwhal's original timeline? It seems like he's got pretty much most of Liyue already except Havria's land which we know he didn't fight for. And like, sure Osial's being a thorn in his side, but like, that's one god. And you had Chi coming back again later as undead, which is two gods.

it's a good question but i'm afraid the thing about cyanide is that i had no answer for that originally, and when i began writing it i didn't want to add even more conflict and complicated political schemes than i already knew there'd be? (if you can call them that?) so i sort of... ignored the big issue.

the big issue being that, before the archon war, it's likely morax would've had control of only the guili assembly and maybe jueyun karst. it's actually a complicated point of contention when it comes to pre-war liyue theorycrafting. the rest of liyue would've been populated with other settlements led by other gods. either that, or liyue was a sort of big alliance of multiple leaders, and when the war broke, everyone started fighting each other.

kinda how china itself had a tendency to unify, split, unify, split, unify, and split throughout history. i imagine Liyue could've had something like that happen at some point. you could even argue that morax had control over all of Liyue bar Chenyu Vale, and when the war broke out, all his subordinates in charge of looking over all the other settlements decided they might as well fight both each other and their emperor.

so like- please keep in mind that cyanide sort of waves away that major problem in figuring out pre-war liyue lore.

as for the original timeline, i think i sort of also toned down the amount of gods morax originally fought. not only the two you mentioned, of course, but there would've been at least four immortals in chenyu vale, more than just osial and haishan in the sea, and probably a handful of gods from the south of lisha, a region not availiable in-game that i'm simply assuming is part of liyue.

so yeah,, my excuse was a sort of "just because they're not mentioned doesn't mean they're not there" for all the gods that would've popped up to fight in the war had childe not fucked up the timeline.

edit: i completely forgot about xiao's master. so uh- yeah that one also.