#it was about narzissenkreuz all along!

[mtkanna]

in their own ways, each member of the narzissenkreuz institute became 'immortal,' i think. jakob exists as an abyssal creature lived far beyond his original lifespan, while the eidolon in the real annapausis holds all of mary-ann guillotin's memory and thus acts as a living monument to her. alain guillotin produced so many advancements for fontaine's technology that his name was almost canonised—everyone knows his name, now, and what he did for fontaine, even if they don't know much about him as a person. and rene became part of the primordial sea only to return as narzissenkreuz, thus becoming a being that prophesied its own death and infinite rebirth...

[sleepy-aletheas]

I'm t h i s close to losing my mind over Teyvat's history, origin story, and cycles of eras, and it's the fault of the world's architecture and Simulanka's Narration Footnotes quest of all things. Tonight I've been running around for 3 hours just through Mondstadt, Liyue, Underground Chasm, Enkanomiya, Seirai and Tsurumi Island, and already I'm ready to gnaw at a brick.

Genshin never hid the notion that there were different eras of population in places. It's explained away easily enough - time changes, people change, the rise and fall of civilizations is inevitable, especially with the history the characters personally touch upon. But when we got more elaboration through the Narzissenkreuz questline about the cycles Teyvat is going through, it expanded upon the little exclamation point at the back of my silly head, because it made me scrutinize all the places that made me pause with a confused "huh" for a long time now.

(Wolfy is also at fault. Or better said, all the recent quests and events are heavily dropping future points and the lore of the past in very flowery metaphors and allegories that would be easily brushed away if they didn't point it out over and over and ov-)

The thing with the design of the world is, that it's very deliberate. I mean, sure, we could chalk most of it up as reusing assets and retroactively giving them meaning, but the architecture follows a pretty consistent logic that we can map out physically (digitally?) in-game by walking from place to place.

And because of this logic, I've been losing my mind for months now, because I couldn't put my finger on what was really bothering me, cause whenever it sparked in my mind, I never wrote it down and then promptly forgot because something else caught my attention. Now I don't have that problem, cause I write stuff down in a journal, so I can brainrot through all of it to my heart's content (and to the chagrin of my eternal migraine).

Anyway. Teyvat's history timeline is a mess. It makes sense if you skim it or take it at face value in the moment, but the more one tries to think about it, before the Archon War, it's nonexistent, really. Paimon herself was in shock that there was anything before the gods that walk the earth (that was through the conversation with Enjou at the end of Enkanomiya's main quest where we got Before Sun and Moon and found out about the Dragon Sovereigns and Primordial One).

The book was held at a high esteem, because in-game logic dictated for a good while, that the book (or anything from Enkanomiya, really) cannot be tampered with from outside forces, and that because a scribe wrote down what Istaroth herself told him, it must be 100% true. But, because this is Unreliable Narrator: The Video Game, I wanna hold it with a grain of salt for a bit, cause if Sumeru's desert quests have taught me anything, it's that no one is outside the realm of getting things wrong through misunderstandings, assumptions, or outright lies (and that counts for Gods and Sovereigns too btw).

The thing is, the game deliberately tosses clues and leads around across the spectrum from obvious to throwaway lines or visuals. The foreshadowing is being put into place all along, and it's not just "oh, what will happen next patch?" or "this is the new area, right?" specific things either. There are quests and books and characters that are mirroring something that happened once upon a time (or in the present), but a person has to deliberately listen for this to catch, otherwise it just becomes a fun tidbit that maybe connects sooner than later, or it just completely slips the mind and comes back seemingly as new information.

Okay, back to the point of Teyvat's architecture in connection with civilizations and cycles of eras shenanigans.

There is this one specific architecture that keeps popping out across every single nation, you know the one. It has triquetra and intertwined lines (would braided be a better word for it? plaited?), with the stones big and smooth, the edges blunted. It truly is everywhere one tries to look, but it's interesting where it lays and where the region-specific architecture intertwine or avoid each other.

We could assume that that was the United Civilization, the first before it got split apart, laying across Teyvat in unison. That should be the original style. But then we got the Underground Chasm and Enkanomiya, and it throws a wrench into the whole neat fact, it makes one question what is going on.

Enkanomiya was thrown away from surface Teyvat, cut off from any connection to any divinity or other people, stuck with vishaps in the dark. And yet it's the same architecture as the Chasm, they even have the same glowing stones inside their square pillars, their walls have wavy lines carved out, it's all very angular and the stone also is more white than grey. And then there is Clymene (a shade in Enkanomiya, the ward of the Sunchildren) that says something along the lines of "I haven't seen someone dressed like you in a long time" which raises so many questions, and we never got back to it (shaking my fist at the sky, this lives in my head for years now). And on a lesser note, both reside underground, where you can see the cave arch high above and reaching deep beneath the areas. (And on another sidenote, it's interesting how similar Enkanomiya, Chasm, and Remuria have their architecture, lots of massive white stone and gold)

Old Mondstadt had actually a wider reach than expected. It wasn't limited only to the hollowed place that is now Stormterror Lair with high cliffs all around, but we can see the ruin leftovers stretching to Cecilia's Garden and all the way to Dawn Winery. Old Mondstadt had a combination of rose stems with thorns, moline crosses (or that's the closest I could compare it to), what looks like lily of the valley, domed roofs, and again the big smoothed out stones. The biggest mystery that stand out to me are the two smooth pillars in by Cecilia's garden that don't fit anywhere (it doesn't even fit the ones around the Thousand Winds Temple, where they're carved again with wavy criss-crossing lines).

Speaking of Thousand Winds Temple, that one's also coming up around in different places across the places I looked at. It's obviously across the east of Mondstadt, the secret forgotten island where the other sundial rests (and there are interesting symbols too, like the stylized infinity swirling around, the pedestal before the sundial reminiscent of the light realm sigil associated with Tokoyo Ookami, and a knot in the middle). If anything, there are other symbols that resemble the triquetra close enough to be chalked up as the same thing, but they're differently depicted that I can't unsee. Then there is the pavement, and oh my god, that haunts me. Because it can be found on the forgotten island, Thousand Winds Temple, but it's also in the underground ruins on Seirai Island (Amakumo Peak, where you first have to solve puzzles to drain the water levels), and around Tsurumi Island in general (the buried architecture reminds me of Vinagnir, I wonder if they're from the same time or not, the wall drawings would fit on their own). Istaroth had to have a direct hand in many places, because she just keeps popping up.

And Liyue has a pretty clear distinction between what Morax ruled and where he laid Guili Plains (pretty square structures with distinct symbols) and what was probably before. Bishui Plain pretty much is connected through the large grey stones, triquetra, and wavy lines, with a distinct detail of a lattice symbolism in the salt carrying pillars in Sal Terrae, or the dragon statues situated across Wuwang Hill and Qingce Village. In Jueyun Karst, where we have to drain the water to reach Tiashan Mansion, there is a similar mechanism as in Old Mondstadt (just a fun detail). It's also a fun thing to note, that in Guyun Stone Forest, the space where the geo hypostasis rests, the ground has again a resemblance to the light realm sigil, so that's fun to look around for later. All that to say, it makes me personally curious when did Morax and Guizhong become allies, because it had to be during the Archon War to make any lick of sense.

All of this to say: I completely lost the plot. I'm so sleepy, I stayed up the whole night again. I digress.

It's obvious that there is some time shenanigans going on, where there are crashes of architecture and history. The conflicting ideas of who came first - dragon or human (probably both, cause everything most likely is a dream (which i get is annoying for many people, but i think the game is trying to not use it as a copout to drop all meaning out the window once it's over like all the bad dream based stories did; they're really hammering in that even if something is just a dream or a fantasy, it's still an experience lived through and its meaning has equal value as reality)), and what the changes of cycles look like or work like. Like we know they exist, and technically one can go from one cycle into the next one (like golden bee Sybila (later known as Phobos)), but otherwise we don't know what happens at the end of one, or how the transition works or looks.

Next time I have any grain of energy left, I need to crawl through the rest of Teyvat to sate this need to know stuff. But that's for later.

I should stop talking, nothing is making sense to me anyway and I'm not rereading any of this (will i still toss this out here? apparently yes. there is no restraint when i can barely keep my eyes open, and i choose to not care).

[gold-rhine]

fontaine SPOILERS for like, everything released so far and speculations. I have a couple of theories on who Arlecchino might be. So, we know she's from Fontaine and she's old, she was making fun of childe for being a baby. She wants to stop the prophesy of fontaine ppl dissolving into water. She runs an orphanage, where kids later are recruited into fatui

this all, but esp orphanage and dissolving theme, I think v strongly connects her to Narzissenkreuz Institute from 500 years ago. It was an orphanage, from where all major players connected to dissolution in primordial waters came from. I think there is 2 options for who she might be:

1.Mary-Ann Guillotin. She was a sister of Alain Guillotin and an orphan herself. She was described as acting as older sister of the group in orphanage despite her being the youngest. She was recruited into Marechaussee Hunter along with her brother when she grew up, which is basically fontaine's secret service, which i think is very fitting. She ended up hunting her former friends from the Institute, Rene and Jakob, who at this time created a secret organization Narzissenkreuz Ordo and were planning to save fontaine by dissolving ppl into hivemind in primordial water. Same shit Arlecchino wants to stop. She presumably died in confrontation with them, after a huge explosion.

BUT it happened inside of Elynas, an abyssal dragon, and Elynas works basically by bloodborne gods rules. From contact with him any wild shit can happen. Like, as the result of same explosion the race of Melusines were created from Elynas' wounds, seemingly for no reason. He has dream dimension inside. He died, but his consciousness can still talk and act. There are portals into abyss all over him. So, there are countless ways she could've been teleported somewhere, warped, corrupted, etc.

Like, despite her being dead, both of fontaine world quests (the baby oceanid and the mechanical dog ones) end on strong message of "finding Mary-Ann." in fact, they converge together into this, and its basically spelled out they will be continued.

Also, in Marechaussee Hunter set we have this from Karl Ingold, adopted father of Jakob and Rene, reminiscing about past "And afterwards, the cries, sounds of fracturing and metallic clashes that sounded faintly from beyond the stone floor. And as he recalled the girl who used a "trick" to forcibly shift herself into a dark, safe cavern. Only then did the regret of not having recorded her final battle engulf his vision." - ok so, Elynas says there were many metallic animals in that fateful confrontation, so both "cavern" (Elynas is full of caverns and fight was inside of him) and "metallic clashes" AND "her final battle" point that it's about that explosion in which Mary Ann supposedly died. But he also says that "girl" used "trick" to hide in a cavern! Like who else it could be about if not Mary Ann. She fits 100% to the descriptions, we don't have other fontaine girls fighting their final battles in caverns, and with metallic clashes around. So she escaped, hid in "safe" cavern, but again, its a cavern inside of eldritch abyssal god monster. It could v easily warp her into whatever the fuck is wrong with her rn and make her immortal (Jakob who consumed Elynas' flesh is immortal, so that's provably smth connection to Elynas can do.)

2.My second option is Basil Elton, Vice Director of Narzissenkreuz Istitute. She was a former naval commander who retired and helped run the orphanage, but then during cataclysm left to fight monsters and presumably died in a fight that killed Elynas. BUT Basil Elton was H.P. Lovecraft's character, a captain of the ship who could visit Dreamlands. So, she might not be dead, but like teleported to abyss.

I think Mary-Ann is a better option, bc its more narratively satisfying to have a fight between former close friends (Mary Ann and Jakob, abyss Baptist who is still around doing some Schemes), and also like their confrontation would rhyme with a battle in Elynas where she presumably died, her stopping his plot of dissolution after so many years. but idk, we'll see

[sleepy-aletheas]

Casually losing my mind over Celestia

This is me tossing my free train of thoughts with no edits or double-checking, cause it buzzes in my brain so loudly, I need it out.

It's a mess.

Simulanka = same story cycles with each ending its own

Phanes = 4 forms of names/roles = 4 tries of “cycles” = Paimon is 5th??? 4.5???

Primordial One (it/its) = Istaroth/Tokoyo Ookami/King’s Priest = King (incarnation* of the Primordial One) = ? = ?

*incarnation is such a messy word, because it means something along the lines of divinity made flesh; so like, a divine power assumes the body of a human or animal. In Christianity it’s in relationship with Jesus, but apparently it was a hot topic for debate for centuries, cause no one actually ever agreed on one interpretation, where some made Jesus to be the Creator and not the created, or he was God but also Man at the same time…

Since the four shades are split off of PO, it either could mean that they’re all split at the same time into different (but 50% same?) individuals, or the splits came one after another, for each samsara Teyvat went through.

On that note, the Narzissenkreuz split the samsara cycles into Hyperborea, Natlantean, Remuria, Khraun-Arya, in which AT THE TIME THE ORDO WROTE THIS DOWN they were still in the first half of the 4th cycle (since the ordo established after the Cataclysm, but they were children during it, it must be written down 400+ years ago present time). Those names were just taken from ancient texts, and that the samsara (and these names) are in relation to the spiritual evolution. (also there might be some more details in the Akademiya, with how they worded it to not step on toes…hmm)

What if Celestia is empty, because in a last “trial” (a last hail mary) the Primordial One left Celestia to try and mend this corruption that just keeps seeping through the Abyss…and that last trial character, the last role, the last form…is Paimon?

Hell, maybe the Sustainer is another split from Paimon (or Paimon is the little split, connected with a rainbow string up to the Heavens…) who’s job now is not slapping the wrists of Archons for abandoning their gnosis/jobs, or slamming more nails down, or punishing people for committing cardinal sins (we don’t talk enough about those, really), but instead they're keeping the sky from breaking, and stop anyone trying to leave Teyvat (for some reason).

On a side note, the Primordial One is making my brain turn to mush, because what is the deal with it???? Born of an egg with wings and a crown and androgynous, but for the world to be created, the shell of the egg had to be broken, and yet “Phanes” (quotation marks, cause ‘maybe’ feels like a weird thing to put in the sentiment of calling something from the recounting directly from Istaroth…) used the eggshell to separate the “universe” from the “microcosm of the world”. So either the egg never cracked and Teyvat is a dreamworld because we have to wake up Phanes to become real (and if Paimon is Phanes, her continuous dislike and skepticism of dreams and fantasies and absolute refusal of accepting such things for some reason when others are fine with it…is weird, especially when she’s chill with so many other things. Is it because of some weird dream-logic where the dreamer has build in defenses from realizing they dream to not wake up?? I genuinely don’t know, I have lucid dreams, I’m not sure how it usually works), or the egg cracked in some of the samsara (or in each one a little more, in different places) or because of the Second Who Came, and that’s why the abyss (the universe) is seeping into the dream, into Teyvat, and it’s corrupting it with nightmares and corrosion.

In the quest with the Pari, we found out in a document that the Khvarena and abyssal powers work the same way, using the same sort of energy, but have different results (paraphrasing from the back of my mind). And since the Khvarena is music (and so is the Aranara’s Sourcesong, and Remuria with their Phobos/Symphony), we could see Teyvat’s natural power that shapes it as lullabies, and the abyss is the nightmares that seep in from the outside, tarnishing everything it touches.

If Simulanka is the reflection of Teyvat, with its stars representing the people of “the real world”, then Teyvat is a reflection of reality, and the vision bearers (the prominent stars with specific roles and destinies) are a reflection of reality of someone else. The tracks that is destiny to keep the people of Metropolis safe was meant to protect until the people there grew strong enough to let go of it, returning the tracks back to the stars and live their lives on their own. And even if not everyone is ready, they’re not alone, and have to teamwork their way through life.

Maybe Teyvat’s constellations act the same way. Some people gain constellations to fulfill certain roles, and their vision are the training wheels to help them achieve these ambitions. But eventually they don’t need them. And so they go back to the sky. And some destinies can change, because stories follow rules, unfolding in cyclical patterns, but each should follow its own course...

…..

I lost my train of thought. Stormy weather truly messes with me.