#honkai theory

[candycorncrave]

So. Let's talk about Penacony and birds.

-Spoilers for the 2.1 quest (and possibly some of 2.2 if my theories and findings are correct)

Hey all! I'm not too good at starting these essay type things, so we're just gonna dive right in. Disclaimer, these are all just theories complied from random (not very in depth) research I did, and my own thoughts, so take it all with a grain of salt. I just wanted to put this out here for funsies!

With that out of the way, let's dive in!

From very early on into the Penacony quests, there was something that just kept nagging at me. Robin's name, (mixed with the fact that shes a singer.) The family's crest being a Nightingale. Aventurine's design very clearly representing a peacock. Ratio's owls.

There were just too many bird references for this all to be a coincidence, so I decided to do some research on bird symbolism and meaning.

And here are some very interesting things I found!

Now a lot of this is quite clear cut, so I won't go into alot of explanation, but I do find the "rebirth" part quite interesting, especially since it is hinted during the 2.1 quest that she came back from "death".

Let's start with Robin, since she's one of the more obvious ones: "Above all, the robin red-breast is a symbol of spring song and good fortune. Additionally, it also symbolises passion, a new beginning, and re-birth. Therefore, if the bird flies into your life you will be blessed with happiness and joy. Subsequently, most of the symbolism of robins is centred on their spiritual meaning which is believed to be a symbol of divine sacrifice." In native American culture, Robins also have strong ties with family and "heart centered connections."

Next up are Owls: Now this one is also pretty obvious. Dr Ratio's design has very heavy Greek inspiration, and owls in Greek mythology are very clearly tied with Athena, knowledge, and wisdom.

The thing I found interesting about this was all over Sunday's mansion, there are owls decorating a lot of the furniture. Could this have been foreshadowing for his "betrayal" and assisting Sunday? I'm not sure. In my opinion, that seems like quite a length to go to mislead players- especially since it's such a niche detail that most people probably won't think twice about. Maybe it will have more meaning in 2.2. Guess we'll wait and see!

3rd, Another obvious one, Black Swan: They symbolize the opposite of what the white swan does, naturally, so death, danger, destruction, suffering, chaos, mystery, etc.

Even more than that though, "The black swan theory of events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight."

Another one I don't feel the need to dig that deep into. It all pretty much checks out with what we've seen of her character and the events of the story so far. Black Swan is a scary lady....

4th, Let's talk about Peacocks: Now we all know peacocks are commonly associated with general wealth, pride, and flamboyance. I thought that was all there really was to it being such a big contributor to Aventurine's design. But I decided to dig a little deeper and. Oh boy.

Peacocks can also symbolize both death, and life. Now at face value this is quite contrasting, but when you apply it to Adventurine's character- it makes quite a lot of sense. A single coin flip between life and death that keeps landing face up, and yet, it's a gamble he never hesitates to make. Moreso, peacocks can symbolize the freedom and liberation of the soul. (OUCH)

And Let's finish off the doozy. Nightingales: The symbol of the family and the bird constantly following Sunday around and watching everything the entire quest without a sound.

"Nightingales are symbolic of beauty, melody, creativity, purity, and the expression of oneself freely. They are also symbolic of darkness, mysticism, spiritual awakening, and renewal."

Now I found that the latter is often meant when you see a nightingale in your dreams. It is also mentioned if they do not speak back to you in a dream you will soon be betrayed.

,,,, How intriguing.

Also intriguing, Bloodhounds are very well known to be hunting dogs, and birds are prey for dogs.

And speaking of prey,,, are fish not considered birds' prey? And Sparkle, who we see fish around every time she shows up, was the "victim" in Black Swan's quest.

Anyways. I could be grasping at straws with that last part, but I do feel there is alot of stuff going on here with animal symbolism, especially more to dig into with Gallagher and Sparkle. It's all very intriguing

If you read all this here's a cookie! 🍪 Thanks for your time :) I hope you enjoyed the ramblings of a madman. Please feel free to add anything or comment your thoughts! I'd love to discuss

[herrscherofmagic]

So apparently Thelema is actually a... religion?

[kxslana]

i am a firm believer in that so many hoyoverse characters look alike because kiana kaslana is subconsciously feeding the imaginary tree names and faces from her memories. (kinda like how every person you’ve seen in a dream, you’ve seen in real life thing)

this can also explain why certain things are destined to happen in every (or almost every) universe, like himeko’s death. the imaginary tree is using kiana to create events for each and every one of its branches and leaves that exist based on her actual experiences before embracing finality.

[iloveyanderes]

Guys you might be sad to hear this but I've ditched genshin(had to say goodbye to my heizou) and jumped to honkai star rail.

Before anyone says anything just know I too am mourning the loss of the jump button.

Well anyway I want to talk about a theory I have.

When you start the game your immediately bombarded with the hottie known as kafka, I honestly had no idea what was happening and I still don't.

It's known that Kafka is technically the MC's(us) mom, I've rewatched the scenes a couple times again and noticed a lot of things.

When she talks to us one on one(except that time with silver wolf) she just sounds so concerned for us. I might be overthinking it but I feel as though she genuinely cares for us.

The first cutscene where the Mc and Kafka meet I instantly notice that Kafka seems to have known us for a very long time, while she does kind of feel like a mother if you watch it more closely you get a different feeling, it feels like were her long lost friend or something.

I've also watched a lot of tik toks about this and found out that it wasn't just Kafka that made the Mc but a bunch of other stelleron hunters helped too.

This is a pretty far stretch but I have a theory that the Mc is meant to be a clone of someone, I'd call this person og mc.

The og Mc was probably a member of the stelleron hunts, probably a very well liked member judging by how Kafka treats us when were alone, I actually haven't got to the part where the Mc meets blade so I don't know how he treats us, I think silver wolf treats us pretty well because it seems she has a habit of messing with people and she hasn't really done that to us(I think). We haven't met any of the other stelleron hunters but my instinct tells me that there going to treated well if we were ever one on one with them.

Back to the main theory, the og Mc was in the stelleron hunters, I predict that the og Mc died a very a painful death and didn't have the greatest life. The reason why I think that is because of a guy named Elio(pls let me know if I spelt it wrong).

When Kafka and silver wolf talk about Elio, they talk like what he's going to happen is absolute, Kafka told the Mc what elio said our future was gonna be like and damn it was pretty good, he said that people will like us and we'll get family, then at the end of our journey we will feel peace and our worries will wash away.

Since they are notorious criminals it feels unusual for this guy to give us such a good future. Now that I've added all my points I'll put my theory into one sentence.

The Mc is a clone of the og Mc who was a stelleron hunter and very well liked by the group, especially kafka. Then they died a very horrible death. Many years later Elio decided to create a clone of the og Mc known as our Mc, perhaps Elio had a deep bond with the og Mc so he wanted to give the clone a much better life, Kafka was on board with this but still couldn't help but feel the need to be closer to the Mc (hence why she shows up so much)

While this theory has a lot of loup holes, such as it doesn't explain why the Mc has a stelleron placed inside them by the stelleron hunters, it's technically a ticking timebomb that could kill them at any moment, it's all so confusing because of the future Elio said the Mc will have. Also why did Kafka act so concerned for the Mc when she was the one who put the ticking bomb inside of them.

Its very confusing and hoyoverse is doing a good job at keeping me confused.

Pls let me know your theories and I hope you enjoyed mine.

Have a good day

[kiyrian]

From the Myriad Celestia Trailer

The Destruction

At the universe's core lies a flame

It burns ever so intensely

Till entire galaxies are incinerated

For the sole purpose of embracing a splendid destruction

At the end of all reality

The Hunt

In the first 10 000 years the hunters struggle for survival

In the second 10 000 years the hunters fight out of anger

The third 10 000 years the hunt becomes a purpose of itself

The Erudition

If the truth of the universe is cruel and stale

Would you still yearn for the answer?

The knowledge seeker is impassive

For their core has been cold and unwavering since its birth

As cold as the end of the Path they seek

The Abundance

She feels sad

For eternal life did not let her accumulate infinite wisdom

Instead, those she had once cherished

Faded into obscurity over time, never to return

The Nihility

All progress forward the void

All resist the void

All will become the void...

The Preservation

The philosophers gaze up at the sky

Contemplating civilization's ultimate goal: "Build a wall"

The resounding echo rings within their heads "Build a wall"

The Harmony

Behold! A perfect home

No sorrows, no disobedience

No longings unfulfilled, no memories of agony

How enviable

[quantumfiddlesticks]

has anyone else noticed that the stellaron holder on belobog, simulated universe machine, and front of the master control zone on herta’s space station are all approx. the same three-leaved shape?

we already have the triquetra as a significant symbol in genshin impact, but I hesitate to draw any similarities between the two games or attribute any of genshin’s happenings to stellarons or aeons.

do any honkai 3rd players out there know if the same sort of triangular three-lobed shape appears in HI3? and if so what that means

[glurgh]

The Honkai impact/star rail lore makes me brain hurt like bitch wtf is a sea of quanta and imaginary tree??? Do ur damn dailies!!!

[jesuistrefatugie]

Sudden thought:

What if the song Eden sang as the Final Herrscher ended her Era was Lyin(See you in the next world)

[notgreenenuff]

this post pushed me to make a tumblr account. i think if they don't confirm this theory in the next update i will go on a serial rampage in my local area.

COULD VERITAS RATIO BE A WORM?

the answer 😏 may surprise you

ok listen to me. a long time ago aha made a worm really smart and tried to get it into the genius society. but even though that worm was smart as hell, nous did not give a fuck about it.

you know who else is smart as hell but nous doesnt give a fuck about?

heh. yeah. thats right. despite many people (including himself) feeling like nous should have recognized him a loooong time ago, that computer just doesn’t care.

now, we are left to wonder… why does nous refuse to acknowledge this man..?

i think it’s quite obvious.

my theory is that aha made a second worm really smart. and Then they made the worm into a sexy guy.

and now they’re outside nous’s window, giggling, as everyone in the universe ponders why veritas ratio is not permitted into the genius society.

“what’s wrong, nous? he’s a genius, isn’t he? let him in,” aha goads.

nous is glitching in frustration. “it’s the worm again. i know it’s the worm again.”

[hitokiri-izou]

I'm sorry but ena the order is NOT beating the gaiathra triclops allegations

[cantobear]

doodles from the past week

[herrscherofmagic]

i think i've just had another HoV revelation, this time about Captainverse HoV

paging @sacron1143, i feel like you'd like to see this and you might know enough about the captainverse to add any supporting or disproving evidence to this theory of mine!

so obvi many of the captainverse events were meant to be less serious and more silly, so I think that stuff like the recurring gag of NEET Water Djinn (the common Captainverse version of HoV) isn't meant to be analyzed too deeply. Water Djinn appears everywhere cause it's funny, that's it.

buuuuuut, if we were to try and analyze her as a character, then there's one thing that's always struck me as a bit odd, which is that she appears so often even in places that she seems totally foreign to. like in Odd Drifter we meet her in a desert despite being a "Water Djinn", or in Seele's dream in the Estival Seaside event. We even see the writers themselves poke fun at this in the 2nd-to-last Captainverse event when we meet a Water Djinn somewhere on Himeko's bubble world and Captain is just like "why r u everywhere, r you mass-produced lol" and she's all like "bro what's your problem, piss off"

however there IS one bubble world where the Water Djinn has a clear origin, where she actually seemed to belong and where there were other characters with a meaningful relationship with her... which was the Honkai Quest bubble world. In that bubble world Water Djinn was one of two spirits, the other being a blue-eyed version of her, and the orange-eyed one corresponded to HoV and the blue-eyed one w/ Kiana. But the two of them weren't identical copies per se; they were sisters. And then we had the forest spirit Bianka to boot, who didn't have an explicit connection back then but now with the revelation of Bianka being the real Kiana it's plausible that she was related to the two water spirits too.

The thing is that older Water Djinn (HoV) didn't "die" in the events of that story- she disappeared. Into a rift. We know how screwy the Sea of Quantum can get, so for someone like Water Djinn to get yoinked out of her world by a Quantum rift wouldn't be unusual at all. Water Djinn was established to be a powerful fighter at that time, and she only got pulled into the rift because she was weakened at that moment. It's possible, though not necessarily plausible, that she was still strong enough to survive after being taken by the rift even if she wasn't strong enough to avoid getting swallowed up by it. And we've seen plenty of times where healthy & powerful characters get yoinked by a rift without their consent, i.e. Misteln semi-accidentally kicking Kira out of the SSHC bubble world.

All that is to say- what if all the random Water Djinns we see in the Captainverse are somehow derived from the original Water Djinn of the Honkai Quest bubble world? I doubt they're all the same individual because of the varying circumstances we find them in, but they're always in a weird limbo where they're out-of-place in the world they're at and they don't seem to have a clear purpose or direction. Just like the Captain's mind apparently split from Kongming's portal shenanigans, maybe the Water Djinns throughout the SoQ are fragments of the original one, or maybe they're echoes of her wandering through the SoQ and the "real" one is still out there.

of course we'll never know because the Captainverse is over now, but i hope there's still an alive-and-well Water Djinn out there looking for a chance to be reunited with her younger sister, the younger sister who so desperately searched for even the smallest trace of her bigger sister after she disappeared from the world.

[herrscherofmagic]

okay I love this because I do feel like they actually kinda touched on this, but in a different way. I do wish they hadn't dropped the Grey Serpent plot line so quickly, but if we expand it beyond just Grey Serpent and instead address the whole idea of "artificial life", it actually continues through the whole arc.

I've had these ideas mulling about in the back of my head for a while now so pardon me for the wall of text I'm about to throw at you! i'm not trying to be like "oh you're wrong" cause I 100% agree that it would've been nice to see more of Grey Serpent's particular storyline, but I just want to share some other related thoughts because I loved the SSHC arc so much and there's a kinda surprising amount of depth to it, lol

We start with Grey Serpent, who is clearly an artificial lifeform, and we're presented with this question of "what makes this being so different from any other human?" It's pretty obvious that he's not "human" because he has such a strange appearance, and he's a primarily cybernetic being; hence why he seeks to replace his mechanics with flesh so that he has a chance at properly fitting into society, since he feels outcasted by his unusual nature. This was very clearly demonstrated to us in that first chapter and it was the central focus of the opening to the SSHC arc as a whole.

But then look at the rest of the cast:

Humans: Blue Seele, Susannah, Kira

Stigmata: Red Seele, Misteln, Abnormal Stigmata 0013, 0014, and 0015 ("Chen", Sage, and creepy "Seele")

AI/Android: Prometheus

Herrscher: Senti

Clone: Vita

If we include some other minor characters then we also have Charter (AI), Dr. Marrah (human trapped as a digital consciousness and put into a monstrous form), Dr. Norton & Dr. Tyler (also humans trapped as digital consciousnesses, but rapidly deteriorating), and Niggurath & Elder Konpeito (aliens).

Of all these characters in the SSHC, THREE are "proper humans" that had genetic parents and were directly born of another human being and which still possess an outwardly-human body. Everyone else is some form of artificial lifeform that came into being through supernatural or man-made means. Some were constructed & programmed, others were humans who were transformed and stripped of their freedom and bodily autonomy, some are extraterrestrials, and others still are entirely unique existences that don't "belong" to the real world.

The whole Salt Snow Holy City arc more or less touched on this concept of (in)humanity and what makes a being more or less human. Even after Grey Serpent was removed from the picture, we had the scene with Misteln & Prometheus discussing the meaning of life, plus we had the discussion between HoRB Seele and Vita after their fight.

Then we can even look at how all the inhabitants of the SSHC are technically "virtual beings" of the Sea of Quanta, and their counterparts in the Country of Iron and Sand are even less "human" because they're more like shadows of these shadows. Plus we're even told at the end that because their worlds are now stable, all the people in the Country of Iron and Sand are slowly going to disappear.

Again, I still wish we got to explore more about Grey Serpent, and it's kinda disappointing that we didn't continue that particular plot-line. But I still think it fulfilled its role in the story and led as a strong thematic build-up to the ideas we'd see later on. Almost none of these characters are "actually" human, after all.

What makes Red Seele more human than Grey Serpent? The fact that she looks like she has normal skin, and that she has a pretty face?

And what about the residents of the Country of Iron and Sand, who have no physical form yet have false memories of the lives of their real counterparts in the Salt Snow Holy City? Do they deserve to be treated as more human than Grey Serpent?

Or what about the abnormal stigmata, like 0013 which would spontaneously shift between appearing like a normal human and then appearing as a quantum monster?

Or 0006, which was a seemingly monstrous entity that assimilated other lifeforms from the bubble world it landed in and had to be euthanized by Misteln?

Speaking of Misteln, does she get to be "more human" because she's a more stable Form that can perpetually exist, or is she one and the same?

What about Red Seele, a Stigma that now has a physical body and could pass for human in the real world without anyone ever realizing her true origins? Formerly an intangible being in a stigma space, only limited to interacting with the world through the body of her host; now that she owns her own body, does that make her "human"?

Is Dr. Marrah still considered human after losing her original body, being placed in an animal form and denigrated by the OG Vita, and then placed into a twisted monstrous form and losing almost all autonomy?

And what of Dr. Norton & Dr. Tyler, who have lost almost all their mental faculties, one of which was placed in the form of a simple guard mech and the other placed in a god-damn jukebox?

And what of Vita, who is a clone (much like K-423!) and who had to follow orders from a higher being with almost no room to actually think or act for herself?

Is she more human than Grey Serpent, a being with a less appealing outside form yet complete individual autonomy?

None of these questions are asked explicitly, but I feel like the implication is there. Of all the story arcs in HI3rd I think this one really had some of the most insightful themes about humanity & our biases on how we perceive other beings, how we judge them based on their behavior or their external form.

Of course, I do still want to learn more about the plight of the remaining Grey Serpents on Earth, and I'd love to meet more of them in the future too!

the start of salt snow arc is still unbelievably funny to me because you have this setup for a story about how humanity rebuilds their own home after transcending finality for the first time in history and also about the grey serpents, what it means for them to be a collective vs an individual and what is the cost of independence. but then a wild misteln appears and the arc takes a sharp turn into a completely different direction. the grey serpent storyline is never touched on again

[laatteheart]

they're all freaks, your honour

[kiyrian]

It's kind of a pity that Welt is so good at compartmentalization. Like i would gladly see him going on a tangent about how (honkai 3d stuff ahead):

A. he used to be a teacher of the his universe Himeki

B. He used to be a Hersherr (which if we go into the Will of the Honkai is an Eaon and the Hersherrs are supposed to follow its purpose well we get an interesting conclusion)

C. He is a dad of a clone of a guy he admired

D. He though his universe's Bronya (i would love to see him interacting with Star rail Bronya and maybe acting like they've known each other for the last decade only to realize that's not the same person. That can also happen with Himeko. I need some good angst)

E. Talking about the guy he actually got stranded in space with. The guy that took the form of H3D villain but is actually a being created based on Honkai core. You know the guy we see in his splash art. The guy who was supposedly the inestimable enemy for humanity

F. Oh and they got saved by space dust bunnies that used to help Himeko's dad before he killed one of them

[aitadraws]

Curtains up, the stage is yours.