You know I have some strong opinions about what happened in the story. It was just that good. Also it really did a number on a bunch of existing theories didn't it? Let's talk about that!
Now that's a lore bomb. Ok so my old theory which I based off of information Ashikai and her fan cristalmarie found is more or less debunked. I still have a feeling Zhongli did have this plan and it could still be in place but the Vedrfolnir of it all is no longer a part of it, at least I wouldn't think it would be.
Getting back on track, a few of these sinners are related to Odin. In fact Hroptatyr is yet another name for Odin. And Irminsul btw is also related because Irminsul is Saxon for Yggdrasil and Yggdrasil translates to the gallows from which Odin's horse is hung, based on the legend of how Odin created the askr or ash tree of the world. And as I had previously brought up Vedrfolnir is a bird that's perched on an eagle that's perched on Yggdrasil. Previously because Yggdrasil is also known as the Nordic World Tree I related it to the Persian World Tree the Harvisptokm, you know the tree that's growing out of Egeria. The Persian counterpart to Vedrfolnir would be Simurgh the bird composed of the Khvarena that sacrificed itself to become the Pari. More on this a little later. Anyway we already know about Gold (And you better believe I'm cashing in on my persistent theory that she was up to no good. Eat that Rhinedottir fans! j/k) so let's move right along to Surtalogi who is Surtr's sword, Surtr being the guy that is destined to destroy Midgard.
Ok so back to Vedrfolnir and how my theory is still hanging on by a thread. "Rächer of Solnari" Rerir. Interesting how everybody else has just a quick little title, the wise, the foul, gold but here's a dude with a full name and place of birth. Why? Well if you ignore that whole thing and just focus on Rerir my other theory suddenly comes right back into focus. But wait, this theory is calling the Sinner, Siegfried. It's totally debunked right? Wrong. Vedrfolnir (+ pals) are now revealed as the Five Sinners but Rerir points us right back into the direction of Siegfried. In the lore of the Volsung Cycle, Rerir is the father of Volsungr who is the founder of the Volsung clan. Guess who belongs to that clan? Volsungr has a son Sigmund who has a son Siegfried.
Now that seems like a bridge too far right? Rerir himself is one of the Sinners so it has nothing to do with any kids. But what did Dainsleif say about the Sinners? What did they do?
They paved the way for the Vinster King. Now who is the Vinster King? Vinster is Germanic for gloom so pretty much we're talking the Abyssal King. It can also be spelled Finster.
So it was you all along! (Is anybody here even old enough to know who this is?)
Anyway it could be that Siegfried will still have an expy in Genshin as this Vinster King, essentially what we'd all been thinking the Sinner was this whole time. I even titled my original topic about Siegfried the "Sinner King."
Whoa. Pretty sure it goes without saying but "R" is Rhinedottir. Back when the Hexenzirkel was introduced to us in Windblume we found out all of the witches got codename initials like A for Alice and N for Nicole. So in this new venue we have (about time miHoYo!) we can also find a brand new book series The Little Witch and the Undying Fire. If you collect Vol.3 the little description about the book is the picture you see above. Curious huh?
We know from what Dainsleif said that Rhinedottir is one of the Sinners of the Vinster King, powerful individuals infused with the Abyss who are directly responsible for the Cataclysm. For a while, people kept arguing against me about that, defending Rhinedottir like some poor unfortunate soul caught in the crossfire of Celestia's holy war. But besides being a direct cause of the chaos five hundred years ago we actually saw the fallout for the Khaenri'ahns. Chlothar for one was out of his mind. Dainsleif himself has memory lapses. It seems even empowered by the Abyss, Rhinedottir also suffers these effects. This is the first time we're hearing about this though. When Albedo told us about her he made her seem as fit as Alice and when we got the cutscene in Windblume, she sounded very civil in spite of what we already knew about Albedo's "birth." It somewhat weakened my claims about her malevolence. Thankfully that's over and done with.
Back then I had believed that Rhinedottir would be the leader of the Abyss Order. She was the highest power we knew of back then and with our sibling being the prince(ss) it only made sense. However now we know Rhinedottir is also a pawn, one of five Power Rangers Sinners of the Vinster King with the title right there in the name. So it may be that Siegfried/Hermann, the avatar of the Void Realm which should be the equivalent to the Descenders who are avatars of the Light Realm will be the leader of the Abyss Order and not just some overseeing "god" they follow.
It turned out the Loom of Fate wasn't anything special at all. I had believed it was just another way of saying Genesis Pearl. Based on how our sibling used it it was essentially what the Genesis Pearl would have been for but as I'd been bringing up before, even the Loom of Fate turned out to be a misinformed interpretation. If I had to categorize it according to that old theory, I think I'd still go with Void Plan. Based on what we're told they're still disrupting the Ley Lines, the natural order of Teyvat for the purposes of reshaping the world. This is of course the wrong way to go about it. The real Genesis Pearl aka gnosis will empower the people to shape their world themselves. The point is to return the right to control fate back to those actually walking the paths of those fates hence antagonizing the principles and Celestia. Celestia represents control. You can think of it like that classic mind control story. You have a villain brainwash a character. Do the heroes try to get through to this person not knowing how strong the control is or do they take possession of the brainwashing tool and do more brainwashing to counteract the villain's brainwashing? One guess what the right answer is. The Loom of Fate is trying to use the same tactics as Celestia itself, forcing fate to defy the principles. Doesn't really say much for the people caught in between does it? Void Plan.
Now this I'm not really sure about. Why would this even be a thing? You'd think if it could essentially control Irminsul then the least it could do is manipulate the memories of anybody it chooses. I mean if you're capable of changing the entire world what exactly is changing the memories of a single person to you? In fact, we know the opposite is true. When you manipulate Irminsul you not only drastically change the world you also manipulate every last memory dependent on its database.
What I think this was meant to mean is that because it is now empowered to manipulate the Ley Lines directly, the Abyss Order will overlook the memories of individuals thereby freeing Caribert and those he had targeted. However once whatever the target of the operation is affected, all those memories will be changed by default.
Ok this is another thing I had brought up. Thank you miHoYo for once again having my back. I know I'm beating a dead horse here but I did point out that "Focalors' Divinity's" plan was pointless. We knew a year ago that Celestia was dormant. Nahida flat out told us as much. So this whole dramatic scheme to fool Celestia and destroy one of its precious thrones was drama for drama's sake. You could have just destroyed it outright and nothing would have happened. In fact, you left a freaking dragon to reign over your region. If Celestia was still active, can you say Cataclysm Round II? That Archon Quest man. Plotholes galore. But I digress. Thank you again miHoYo writers for pointing this out in full. I have no idea what the execs were thinking.
Why? See this is another thing I didn't understand about the Loom of Fate. Just like how if its true power was to manipulate the Ley Lines themselves aka Irminsul then manipulating individual memories would be child's play, why would Descenders be affected by it at all? We'd already seen that Irminsul's changes don't affect the Traveler so why would memories created within a consciousness space be? I hope the writers have something up their sleeves about this. The implication right now is that even Descender memories can be changed which is very bad. Think about it from the perspective of Zhongli, Yae and Neuvillette. Here they thought they found a perfect record, someone that can hold the truth of Teyvat under all circumstances. And then you bring in a hodge-podge doohickey like the Loom of Fate and suddenly even that record can be altered? Not good. So I'm hoping it has something to do with our sibling being there. Perhaps by using the direct powers of the Void Realm they can facilitate the memory altering abilities of the Loom of Fate to even affect Descenders. Of course that in and of itself is scary right? What if our sibling can use it to affect Celestia's memories? What if they made Celestia forget who they are? Again I think this is a Void Plan so I think what would happen is a berserk Celestia, something with powers over reality and no mind to discipline it. That could be an endgame, a creator god gone mad.
Side Note: I just wanted to fit it somewhere. It doesn't really go along with any section and doesn't warrant its own. I had made a topic the Dainsleif Loophole about how this quest would play out. Yeah it was wrong. Well wrong for Bedtime Stories but perhaps not for a future quest. The reason I had believed in the theory was that up until this point all Dainsleif Quests had something to do with Liyue and then a neighboring region. We had We Will Be Reunited which started out in Liyue before going back to Mondstadt, Requiem of Echoing Depths which took place in the Chasm and brought out much discussion about the Upside-down City's relation to ancient regions of Teyvat like Enkanomiya and then finally Caribert which took place in Sumeru but went back to the Chasm again. Therefore I thought we'd be getting a quest starting out in the new Chenyu Vale before heading to Remuria, the real Remuria to divulge details about Nibelung's war against Celestia as part of miHoYo's reference to Normandy for Fontaine. Now of course Fontaine's story has been all over the place so that could be a reason but I have a thought. Did anybody else feel like this current Dainsleif Quest played out like an interlude of an interlude? The quest themselves are already interludes to the overall story of the game but I felt like all we were really getting this time was Caribert Part II. Anyway if this is the case then the next Dainsleif Quest could still be what my theory was about especially now that we already know the Sinner isn't anybody that impressive and that there's actually five of these guys. However there's so far only one Vinster King and if it's "Siegfried" the guy who corrupted Nibelung (slaying him in a way a la Siegfried the Dragonslayer) then Dainsleif will want to know more about that ancient history, history far older than he is. Actually waiting a year for that might even be for the best. What we could get is a fully developed Natlan story which I had already predicted would tell us about this old conflict followed by further details through Dainsleif. They could even include that appearance by Skirk and Surtalogi that I had pegged for it back when I diminished Skirk's appearance in the Archon Quest to a cameo. By then we'd have a very interesting confrontation. We now know Dainsleif hates these people so if we're in real Remuria trying to find out the truth and of the ill-fate that the Void pushed Khaenri'ah towards, the stakes would be so high. Any fight down there could destroy records and set us back far. Surtalogi might just want that to happen and so it would be a desperate struggle to prevent them from winning. As the fight progresses, I'd imagine Dainsleif would grow more and more desperate. It is definitely a story I'd love to play.
On the other side of things I'm still surprised by how many people thought he actually became the Loom of Fate. Now back then the loom was even further out of reach at least in my theory about what it was but for all intents and purposes, if Caribert had become the Loom of Fate then there wouldn't be a Loom of Fate operation in the present. Our sibling was right there when this all went down so there's no reason for a Loom of Fate operation unless they didn't get a Loom of Fate.
But I have to admit I choked up when I found out he just died and then his consciousness was trapped in purgatory like that. He was eight years old. He was already traumatized by Celestia.
See this is why I've stated before that there are far worse fates in Genshin than in typical games. Just living forever isn't as bad compared to what else Genshin's characters can be put through.
I'm just glad this kid had the maturity to make the most of his situation. Even being turned into a monster for no reason and then trapped in limbo for five hundred years by his own misguided father he only thought about others. Yeah sure he was "selfish" and made fake memories to attempt a normal life. Ultimately he gave some measure of hope to an entire cursed civilization. And while it might take a little consideration, he gave Vimara Village fond memories they might not have had if not for these fake memories he implanted in them. I think they're better for it.
And his final action was to give his "friends" the closure they needed.
Ok so what did we learn from the Bedtime Stories?
O don't you dare end this quest like-
I'm not crying! You're crying!
