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!
The scene depicted above reminded me of the ongoing belief about the Traveler. I forget when it was first brought up but the one clearest in my mind is when Yae Miko also called them "little one" and unlike Sigewinne it can't be mistaken for her talking to Paimon. Anyway the way I've heard it play out, you'll have players say that it's silly to call them "little" when they are old enough to have "seen the birth and death of stars" which is assumed to mean they're millions to billions of years old given the age stars can reach.
The quote comes from this promotional launch item from way back:
"In your long journey, you have seen the birth and death of stars as they passed you by scattering the darkness briefly before being consumed once more."
Now before I get into what my personal thoughts are let's just debunk this real quick. See the thing is the language here is pretty vague. Even in the Chinese it doesn't specify that they've seen the birth and death of the same star. So here:
This is a picture from September 16th, 2023. The James Webb Space Telescope captured the birth of a star. Congrats. You've now all seen the birth of a star. Actually each year about six new stars are born in just our Milky Way alone. So anybody can see stars being born.
What about star deaths?
This is the supernova GW170817. A supernova is the death of a star but wait. This specific supernova is actually the explosive merger of two neutron stars which causes so much mass to collect into a single place that they both effectively die because their mass becomes a black hole in the aftermath. So there. We've now all seen the death wholesale of two stars.
But that doesn't make us Descenders like the Traveler. No it's just that being a witness to the births and deaths of stars isn't something beyond humans. What is on the other hand is having been around five hundred years ago but given that's their earliest appearance in Teyvat Yae wouldn't necessarily be wrong. (Sigewinne would though. At the earliest she's only about 400 years old.)
Ok but the Traveler being ancient was never something I doubted. I just didn't appreciate the "proof" that they have to be old because of the star thing. But as I continued to think about this I wondered just how old they might actually be.
They have clear memories of their past traveling to different worlds. And Nicole told them to trust their memories over everything else that might happen to them in Teyvat after Irminsul was shown to be malleable.
But how reliable are their memories really? Going back to this game's basis in Gnosticism it's likely Phanes is based on the Gnostic being the Demiurge. It's never classified as such but based on its creation the Demiurge should be an Aeon which by extension means the other Descenders should also be Aeons. Besides that Aeons are meant to be created in opposing pairs. You know like fraternal twins fighting on opposite sides of a global conflict.
Now why bring that up? The thing about the Aeons is that while they are the definition of ancient they also exist as emanations from a whole, as pieces of the true god. Bringing it to Genshin that could translate to being created directly by the Imaginary Tree. As such what if the memories any Descender has before making landfall in a world is just the collective memories of them all, what's called the Pleroma in Gnosticism? What if "traveling to different worlds" is actually just how the tree uses its Descenders across the Hoyoverse and isn't actually the specific memories of any specific Descender? What if the only personal memories the Traveler has start from the meteor and waking up in Khaenri'ah?
There's not much more to substantiate this idea. I wouldn't even really call it a theory yet. But if it is true we might have a cool story to look forward to towards the end of this game. We know we'll be going to Khaenri'ah after the Seven Nations but I think it's generally accepted that our true endgame will be confronting Celestia itself and that would pit Descender against Descender. Now if their memories are shared that could throw in a kind of foil plotline where Phanes behaved no differently than our MC would have given the same circumstances. It may also call back to the conclusion of the plot with the MC's sibling and they might have learned from that experience to prepare them for their opposition of Phanes. If my other theory is right then our MC needs to reach the enlightenment of gnosis to resolve the central conflict of Teyvat and understanding Celestia's motivations and then doing better should be a stepping stone towards it.
Anyway what do you guys think?
Topic originally created on October 7th, 2023.