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!
(This theory is long because there's a bunch of stuff to explain so I've added a summary at the end.)
Previously I made a very controversial topic about the Archons. It simultaneously got tons of upvotes and so many negative comments lol. But Nahida's Second Character Quest has since given that topic more first party support. On top of that though there seems to be an expansion on the lore so that's what I want to talk about today.
Even before I made my Archon 101 topic I had brought up the idea that Teyvat isn't old enough to accommodate both the world of the Seven Sovereign Dragons and the world of the modern Seven made up of Archons. This was on top of many other reasons why I believe the dragons and Archons are one and the same.
Of course this has been controversial. Because the game (the English localization of it) names them different and seemingly unrelated things most people have generally accepted that they have to be different. But why haven't we seen ruins older than Enkanomiya? Actually why haven't we seen any shred of evidence for anything older than the unified human civilization at all? Ruins are all over the map and Enkanomiya is better preserved than most. You'd expect if there were seven older regions preceding the ones we know had to be established by the Archons that we'd see any clue at all of what they might have been given the amount of clues to the unified civilization that we do get.
And so Nahida gives much more direct insight into this during the quest.
Even the Dendro Dragon of the Seven Sovereigns only ruled over Sumeru. Now does this have to be the modern bounds for Sumeru? No. We know that Liyue wasn't established until 3700 years ago but the people of Liyue previously inhabited the Guili Plains and this state didn't include territories like Sal Terrae or Chenyu Vale even after the creation of the harbor. But Nahida does not suggest at all that Apep's former nation within the modern borders of Sumeru was something entirely different from Sumeru. Therefore it makes sense that just like how early Liyue wasn't even called Liyue and didn't have its modern borders yet is still part of Liyue's history, this older period of Sumeru's history that Apep ruled over was still just early Sumeru.
Ok so that part was to establish that the dragon sovereigns didn't exist in some distant past even older than the age of Archons. The next part is probably even more controversial which is to prove that they're not even different things.
So most of the popular belief comes from Enkanomiya which was the last time we ever heard about them until this Character Quest. According to the researchers of Enkanomiya which again most people have taken to be fact the dragons were pure elemental beings and the Archons aren't. Even the descendants of those pure dragons namely the vishaps can't naturally use the elemental energies of a god because the researchers claim that gods are from the Human Realm while these pure elementals are from the Light Realm.
Well in Nahida's quest she brings out the Fire Seed and states her elemental energies are similar to it. This elemental energy is Apep's and a short while later we see Nahida reviving another elemental creature from Apep's microbiome using her energy because according to her they're compatible. This microbiome would have been separated from the outside world for a long time compared to the vishaps and therefore likely maintained its elemental purity. It's even discussed that it would take time to absorb and adapt to the environment and they took on the form of fungi to be better at it. Finally the fact they can return to being pure energy in the end shows they wouldn't have any impurities which was a major theme of the quest itself.
If that still didn't do it for you guys there's always Nahida's direct statement that she and Apep are essentially the same, both elemental beings.
And the thing is that even from the Byakuyakoku Collection's own text it's possible to understand that the researchers were wrong and it's actually the vishaps that were too impure to accept Orobashi's pure elemental power. Not only is it also stated that the vishaps they were working with weren't pure enough to become the next Water Dragon Sovereign, we know firsthand about the Geo Vishaps and Azhdaha who absorb other forms of elemental energy to adapt. It's even part of their game mechanic.
Bottom line: Dragons are Archons are Slimes are Specters. (are certain adepti TBD) They are all pure elemental beings. And the Dragon Sovereigns aren't a totally separate thing to the Archons.
Even after saying all that that last part there is probably still going to make people angry. So here's something else from the quest:
What do we know about the Archons that fell during the Archon War? Some died like Orobashi, Chi and all those other ones the yaksha had been dealing with and they left behind nothing but their bones. (bones we know are tainted with Tatarigami in the case of Orobashi and more recently Chi) Others fled for instance to the Dark Sea. And even some others accepted the new order much like the Seven themselves have.
As for any potential argument about size or draconic shape I refer to Orobashi's remains and how they take up a large part of Yashiori or Osial and his wife Beisht who were too big to reasonably fight directly. And of course one of Zhongli's forms was a literal dragon. (though that actually doesn't even have to be his true dragon form either as you'll read below)
Now with all that said there was something that came up in the quest that I hadn't considered and it expands on it very well.
At a point in the quest Nahida needed to change into a fungus to blend in and find the next elemental being. Apparently it's not something the Archons can just do which is what we'd been led to believe previously because of the many forms Zhongli's known to have taken on. But in this quest Nahida struggles to change into a fungus despite having assistance from a being that had already changed into one.
It's explained and emphasized that time is required to accumulate the elemental energy that provides "growth" for an elemental being to change form. Nahida having only been alive for five hundred years is still too young. Zhongli on the other hand being over six thousand can easily change.
Side Note: Honestly the whole segment plays out like a PSA on the role time plays in evolution lol
Previously I had only focused on the Constellations to differentiate between the Archons. I had categorized them as the directly dragon-related and natural born "Sovereign Archons" and the Celestia-made "Sage Archons." Venti for example is a Sage Archon because he was created from a wind spirit by one of the shining shades Istaroth. Venti has also never changed his form since using his Gnosis to adopt the form of the nameless bard. (He has created the illusion of being Stanley when he met with Hans Archibald though.)
What this new information potentially suggests is that Archon, dragon, slime and specter are all just labels. Pure elemental beings are just that and being called a dragon or an Archon is human and by extension the Heavenly Principles designed by Phanes to accommodate its human world. In that case all it really comes down to is age that determines what one of these guys can do.
Side Note: Actually that also seems to be one of the important takeaways Nahida's quest kept drilling into our heads lol
On the other hand the Constellations that specify king like Zhongli's Rex Lapis (Chinese Constellation) signifies his sovereign status among the elemental beings. In the time of the Archon War all of these elemental beings fought until Seven were able to consolidate power in an area and protect it. That wasn't set in stone and usurpations happened all the time. Decarabian to Venti, Apep to Deshret to Rukkhadevata and (controversial again) Yae Miko to Raiden Ei.
While some of these usurpations happened naturally like in the case of Havria and all of the Archons Zhongli killed/sealed away, some were planned like Istaroth's intervention through Venti to depose Decarabian and also end the feud between Decarabian and Andrius. Now why would Istaroth do that? Well because of
We've been hinted that not only did these elemental beings naturally occur and in any number of forms but that they had any number of elemental types too. And there could easily be blending of these elements as well which is why Andrius is capable of both Anemo and Cryo. What stopped this was the Heavenly Principles which desired elemental purity. Therefore it forced the elements into seven neat categories and desired for its Seven to uphold this ideal. It may have even paved the way for only desirable Archons to win their seats while forcing undesirables to die like it did with Orobashi. (albeit for other reasons in its case)
This last thing is more thematic to the game than specific to the Archons and elemental beings themselves. Because of Gnosticism it's been shown several times that memories and their accuracy are very important. In terms of the old religion it is memories and experiences that pave the way towards achieving gnosis or in Buddhist terms the enlightenment of nirvana. I've talked about this several times. I believe it's the end game of the story as a whole.
But in Nahida's quest the elemental beings we accompany actually sacrifice their memories to return to Apep and heal it with their own energy. According to them it's more important to be "home" in other words a part of Apep again. This process eliminates all of their experiences which Apep is perfectly fine with and even considers to be natural.
In mythology Apep is actually a God of Chaos which is meant to eat Ra leading to the end of the world. I think we can agree it's less dramatic here since Apep doesn't really share any other characteristics with Apep besides being a long snake and eating Ra, in this case the Amun-Ra version. (Well I suppose they did call the aftermath of her doing that "the apocalypse" lol) In Genshin's case though I think miHoYo wanted to show even more so how difficult gnosis is to achieve. Even the old natural order doesn't accommodate it nevermind the Heavenly Principles. While the original Seven have been shown to favor the development of humanity and preservation of their accumulated knowledge and experiences, this objective seems to just be their hope. Even newer Archons like Ei, Furina and the Tsaritsa are more focused on their own relations to Celestia often at the cost of the humans in their care. (Ei's Vision Hunt Decree for example stripped ambitious memories from its victims)
Anyway there's another aspect of this which is that memories are related to elemental energy. At the climax of the quest the Fire Seed shatters and because she's so similar and compatible to Apep Nahida intends to use her elemental energy in place of the Fire Seed. The cost of doing that is that Nahida would revert back into the twig Rukkhadevata planted and all of her memories would be lost.
This feels like the notion of data in energy. There's a theory that blackholes can rewrite data back into blank energy which destroys any information previously recorded by it. It's called the Black Hole Information Paradox. In our world it's highly theoretical. The idea is that anything that has ever existed still exists in the atoms of the matter that once made it up. It's like when people suggest you might be made up of a star that supernova'd only it goes on to say that if we took those pieces of the star out of you and out of anything else its atoms now exist in and then place them all back in the right spots we could actually reconstruct the star because those atoms have the data of that star recorded in them.
In the more magical world of Teyvat data is actually stored in elemental energy but once it's transferred from one being to another the data is lost as the energy becomes part of something else. So like the black hole the energy now becomes part of it and even if it was possible to recover the energy the data in that energy is lost. Btw it wouldn't be the first time miHoYo threw quantum mechanics into their games. I previously talked about their version of the many worlds theory in the form of the Imaginary Tree and Sea of Quanta.
Previously the only concern we had came from Zhongli and the idea that nothing lasts forever. Even if he etched all the information of Teyvat onto stone the stones would eventually erode and the data destroyed. So he has the Traveler experience as much of Teyvat as possible to preserve it for longer. Then we learned that Irminsul could be manipulated into changing history which can rewrite whole existences. As such it became even more important for the Traveler to remember. Now we've learned that even the loss of elemental energy in pure elemental beings like the Archons will result in the loss of memories. Erosion likely plays a role in this as well.
So ultimately the fragility of memory is going to make our task in this game even more significant. For example right now our MC is the last trace of information about Rukkhadevata in existence.
This next section is more miscellaneous. They are part of the Nahida quest but aren't very significant yet.
I previously established that while the Heavenly Principles is an antagonistic entity in the game it wasn't meant to be. I honestly think Phanes means well which I'll discuss further in another topic. From the screen above though it's shown that Apep also believes that Celestia values life and means to have it thrive.
This quote from Apep should look familiar right? I've actually seen this mentioned before so I know I'm not the only one that noticed. Dainsleif says we'll learn about what this means from the Pyro Archon but if Apep is saying relatively the same thing now it's likely another fundamental trait of Teyvat. Also notice how in Apep's version the winners shape the world.
The rest of these are just jabs at the quest for fun. You can skip these if you'd like but it might be a good way to wind down after that info dump you just read through lol
You can if you've got a line to higher powers. Need to amass that elemental energy but just don't have the time to wait? Istaroth's got you covered. Satisfaction guaranteed. Just ask Makoto.
So much for being erased. Irminsul being lax on the job again. If Rukkhadevata was honestly erased these memories should either no longer exist or be altered to fit Nahida instead. Having this redacted text is like in anime when gods and demons try erasing identities. Your sentimentality will not be spared by my cold uncaring logic miHoYo lol
Speaking of. This doesn't make any sense. Removing forbidden knowledge isn't the same as pulling out a splinter. To remove it we had to erase an existence that was affected by it and then have Irminsul rewrite Teyvat's history to replace her with someone else to maintain continuity. Imagine it like if you felt the residual pain and discomfort of having that splinter except you never actually had a splinter.
Topic originally created on May 7th, 2023. (based on even older theories including my previous theory on this subject)
