Hi guys I am Inotia King a youtuber, redditor and gamer who likes theorizing about the story. I actually cobbled together a list of some of my more important theories with respect to the game Genshin Impact and Star Rail that I have been basing all of my newer theories on. I'll be putting more of those up on Hive along with new stuff but if you're impatient I also archived all my theories here. I hope some of you guys are game theorists too. Let's try to figure out these great games together!
Version 3.6 had so much new information it's awesome! During the livestream we knew we'd finally be getting a pet that has its own special mechanics. We'd been asking for stuff like that ever since the treasure finding mini-Seelies. Liloupar was a step in the right direction with its abilities in the desert but she was still just a little trinket like any of our other gadgets. This one's got its own gameplay mode!
More important to a theorist like me though is all the new lore! First the terms. We've got a name for that new pet: Sorush. We got its species: Pari. And Sorush called itself: Simurgh. Also we had the name of the quest itself: Khvarena of Good and Evil.
The basic definitions first.
Khvarena or Hvar-nah breaks down into Persian to mean the shining. No not the movie. It's more divine and it symbolizes as you do the holiness of light with god. It's also used in an interesting way with respect to Persian leadership which I'll get to later.
A Pari is a literal winged creature that is similar to the jinn and the daeva as in they are bad. But while jinn and daeva stay bad the pari gain their wings and can be saved by agreeing to a divine task.
That's where we get Simurgh another winged creature and also how my title for this topic will make sense. It's a legendary bird in Persian mythology who is purely good and often depicted like a multi-tailed chimeric bird of prey and because of how it sometimes looks in art other cultures likened it to the phoenix. But actually the Persians adapted the phoenix into a different mythological bird the Homa and the Simurgh doesn't share any of your classic traits with a phoenix.
It does however lead us into the deeper lore section. So I've brought this up a few times but Sumeru's lore and folklore have taken inspiration from an old Persian story the Shahnameh. Gurabad is from it, the story of Shiruyeh and Shirin comes from it (though they are also real people and Genshin took both accounts) and the fictional version also gives us Liloupar and her whole backstory.
Anyway the Simurgh appears in this story too. She saves a boy after he was abandoned by his father. Eventually he returned to humanity and his son is a guy by the name of Rostam. Yes our Rostam comes from this story too. Beyond the story though there's a mention that Simurgh roosts on the Haoma aka the Zoroastrian version of the Tree of Life. So Irminsul for us. And its purpose is to purify the land. I'm not through the whole quest yet but that seems to be what our Sorush is here to do considering her Pari mission is in the part of the desert messed up by the Abyss.
Side Note: There was also an interesting thing I found about haoma and how it relates to the fungi in Sumeru. It was definitely not a big deal for me back then but ever since Sumeru's debut we got many quests and events related to them. Curious.
The last piece of this puzzle is Sorush herself. While the Simurgh are definitely female and that works out for Sorush her name isn't feminine. It's the new Persian form of Sraosha an emissary of Ahura Mazda (pretty much Nahida based on her Constellation) who acts pretty much in the way Hermes did for the Greek gods, a messenger between the gods and humans. Sraosha means hearing and symbolizes man's devotion to hearing god's word. And in some stories Sraosha is the twin brother of Spenta Mainyu and will fight and defeat all of evil aka Angra Mainyu at the end of days. I've brought up Spenta Mainyu before and its role seems to be embodied by Nahida's story. (Spenta Mainyu is essentially the Zoroastrian version of the Holy Ghost)
Ok now how do these guys intersect with each other? So in the Shahnameh the first human is warned by Sorush about Angra Mainyu and helps him devise a plan to defend against it. In this story Sorush takes on the form of a pari. This first man becomes the first shah of Persia mythically speaking. As a leader his rule must be blessed by Ahura Mazda in the form of the shining, Khvarena. And the creature that delivers it is a Simurgh.
Side Note: So Khvarena. On this side of the world we're used to things like Divine Right to Rule right? That means a ruler was given the right by god and therefore is above the law. He only answers to god. Genshin is a Chinese game and in China they had this thing called the Mandate of Heaven. Oftentimes it gets translated to mean the same thing but it isn't. The key difference is that god only allows the rule when the ruler does a good job. It's easy enough to lose the mandate by slacking off. This doesn't happen with the Divine Right because there's no right way to rule a kingdom in terms of god and the only way you can do it wrong is when the church thinks you didn't uphold the standards of god. I think I brought that up with my Khaenri'ah topic a while ago. It's pretty funny. Anyway Khvarena works in the same way as the mandate as far as I can tell. A ruler only has the blessing of Ahura Mazda if he's doing a good job and if he isn't he'll lose it and a new ruler can replace him.
And yes all of this is the surface stuff I got from a cursory look at the World Quest. There was going to be more stuff to look at deeper into the quest. But more on that once everybody has had a chance to check it all out.
Topic originally created on April 13th, 2023.
