moontheoretist

[moontheoretist]

If you don't mind me adding something from myself:

Story was not only hyping Cerysilens but also Agysilens. (There is seriously a surprising number of Aglaea x Hysilens in the cutscenes we get with young Aglaea and then in As I've Written chapters for Hysilens and Cerydra both and then with Fragment of Recollection with Aglaea's nymph talking to Hysilens one last time to encourage her to literally create the illusion in Styxia when she feels lonely. (Ye the illusion we see in Styxia and interact with via Apollonius quest was created because Aglaea advised Hysilens to do exactly that).

Aglaea with her intact emotions parallels Phainon SO WELL. Their journey through Flamechase is literally 1:1 parallel just like Hysilens killing (? I'm still iffy on details, they both contradict each other) Cerydra also 1:1 parallels doomed Phainon x Mydei from 3.4.

I personally didn't understand Cyrene's words as confirmation of a loop in which Trailblazer took place. I think she meant that she did already get forgotten by someone before or had to sacrifice her life and disappear (like the real Cyrene) hence the weird hunch she has. In my view she is having the hunches because the events with TB are similar to what already happened before but are not necessarily about TB existing all this time in the simulation as it's impossible.

"It makes absolutely no sense, if Lygus could trap Trailblazer in a zone with time flowing a thousand times slower, that he wouldn't have just done that from the start" - To me it makes sense based on what we knew of Lygus and his typical behaviors before. He didn't see us TB and Dan Heng as a threat before so he didn't intervene. He let us run around the sim and finish the cycle for him, but then FR intervened and made us realize that we were duped and we went all the way back in time to fix it and suddenly Lygus realized that this little annoying bug we are was far more dangerous than he initially thought and had to step in. And when he stepped in he first tried to use characters against us as it's his typical modus operandi, but when it failed he decided to go full nuclear on the sim like an angry dad on a kid that doesn't want to listen to him.

"It makes absolutely ZERO sense that the Scepter would ever give control of its Ultimate Protocol to one of its own experiments". - See I also didn't think about the possibility of signals being woven into the simulation so intricately before the special program and then 3.5. I thought they were just inside the sim as some little apps with not ability to influence anything. But signals are not only experiments (as we know that signals were split into 2 entities, Chrysos Heir and a Titan, for the sake of competition and self actualization, and it's the Titan that has the accesses that govern an aspect of the sim - in real world it'd simply mean that Thanatos really governs death, which I doubted before because before we knew Amphoreus was a sim I just thought of the Titans as fake gods that have no actual powers and are just said to govern stuff but don't have any actual impact, but now we are explicitly told that they do hold authority over certain stuff in the sim just like gods if they existed in real world would have).

In the log for Ultimate Protocol it was hinted that one of the previous signals (Nammou320) eliminated other factors and its behavior was the base for Ultimate Protocol. Ultimate Protocol gives me a vibe of a hub that can control who has what type of permissions (I work in IT so it reminds me a lot of a tool called Active Directory which has info about the accounts in the system, what permissions they have, and can also grant and remove permissions, but the person that uses Active Directory has to have permissions to edit stuff as even within this tool any admin has different level of access to it depending on how corporate set your admin account, so I could see Cerydra getting an account by fusing with Law that allowed her to edit Lygus admin permissions and grant admin permissions to others (keep in mind we still don't know exactly what type of law she changed, we only know the effects of it) because Lygus is also limited within the sim, he is not an admin with full permissions to do whatever he wants, he has some level of control but he can't do everything he wants because his admin account doesn't have the sufficient enough permissions to affect everything within the sim or the Scepter as a whole, he is still tho a person with higher level of permissions than anyone else), but as long as signals are not aware of it they can't fully use it (which begs the question: what Cerydra saw in her trial in every of the previous ERs if only in this ER she was able to see the true face of Law) and because Cerydra was made aware what Law is she could finally utilize it properly and use it to edit the permissions within the sim (it may be also reason why other characters are able to edit their own permissions but tbh I think that it's just Lygus doing tech speak rather than any actual permissions being added because even Eurypon was able to "add permissions" to Nikador via Souls Splitting Ceremony and as far as we know Eurypon is just an NPC, not even a signal, we don't even know how he is seen by the sim - this is why you have to take the whole "permissions" talk with a grain of salt too because this is how Lygus writes down the events that occurred in the simulation, he doesn’t say "Anaxa trapped me in the Vortex of Genesis", instead he writes "Anaxa revoked by mobility permissions" so it's not supposed to be taken at face value, which is probably because of Remembrance making Amphoreus not exactly only cold data even tho every action in the sim is supposedly logged as a coded action).

In any case just as I said before it's not only Law, but Worldbearing is in charge of Era Nova initiation, and we can assume that other factors (Strife, Passage, Death, etc.) are also given some level of permissions to affect the simulation due to their god status. Which Lygus apparently deemed as beneficial for the sim as long as they didn't know what those powers could truly do, because they're signals, they don't understand shit. They don't see Amphoreus in the way Lygus does and they can't understand anything tech related without Herta and Screwllum explaining it in layman terms - which would explain why Khaslana had issues with getting admin permissions, he was operating from "inside the game UI", he didn't have access to the dev console. His actions rendered him some additional powers but those were done via his manipulation inside the "game" while Lygus sees everything from the perspective of the dev, he sees the code, not NPC walking around.

"Herta, Screwllum, and Cyrene infected Lygus with a memetic virus based on his dual cognition operating in two timeflows at once--so he couldn't just… temporarily leave one system or limit the dual processing to one channel…? Suddenly helpless out of nowhere?" - The way I understood it was similar to how Ineffa dealt with her curse in the newest Archon Quest in Genshin Impact. They overloaded his processing by looping one memory endlessly. He as an Intellitron is a machine and has limits to how much data he can process, the same way Ineffa's curse couldn't handle all the memories she accumulated over the years and ultimately was buried under them all. He most likely used both processings and both processing were overloaded by the loop.

"LAW IS LITERALLY A VOICE FROM THE BLACK TIDE; HOW IS THIS WORKING!!" - That is something I want to know too! Like they dropped such a bombshell that "Titan voices come from the Black Tide" but then they didn't address it like at all? Unless Phainon and Cyrene just labelled the entire data space that Amphoreus exists within as "Black Tide" because to them black tide looked like some weird corruption / tech thingy, so maybe they just see anything similar to it, even if it's not red, as Black Tide and hence why they would say that sentence? Because then it'd make sense because Titans are part of the simulated data of the world.

"How can you even "trap" Lygus in the Vortex of Genesis? He is a real robot in the real world who should have just been able to immediately go "Oh you trapped my first proxy? Cool, now loading in Lygus 2.0" - I don't know but I remember that the quest directive for that portion of the quest insisted that it was "his real body". I remember being surprised because I was just told that his real body was in Exomyth, and now I'm told something else unless Lygus literally decided to enter Amphoreus with his real body this time instead, which would mean he is an idiot after all. (I can't find it right now and I'm starting to think my brain hallucinated it all, but I do really remember being surprised that the game told me I'm fighting Lygus prime body). Maybe Lygus droid body has to be destroyed so he could jump into another one? No idea.

"Why is Zandar One Kuwabara acting like he personally created the concepts of paths when other aeons existed for thousands of years before Nous?" - At first I thought he was just tad overdramatic, but later I talked to some other lore people and it turns out that Zandar may have been indirectly responsible for ascension of at least 4 Aeons. Nous the Erudition, Mythus (who ascended to counter Nous), Nanook (who ascended as direct result of Rubert's actions) and apparently Lan (we know that Nous visited Lan personally before his ascension to an Aeon - I remember people talking how funny it is that when Lygus enters the sim Anaxa and Mydei start resembling their Aeons even more by Anaxa directly influencing ascension of Mydei into true immortality Gnaeus / Nikador style). But yeah, from what I know of Lygus I can imagine that Zandar / Lygus would be so pompous to think he invented Paths.

"The budget decline for this patch was actually criminal" - This is not really a budget decline sadly. Hoyo always does it with NPCs. They reuse assets a lot. They can't even give avatars of characters different clothes for story parts or make a younger looking model for them hence why we instead had to accept adult Phainon in Deliverer Clothes Made By Aglaea Herself as self-insert for young Phainon in Aedes Elysiae that didn't meet Aglaea yet. It's such a common behavior from Hoyo that it's annoying across all of their games. And the only exceptions seem to be bath scenes, onsen scenes and characters that got a new skin for the newest event. That's it. Otherwise no change of clothes or model allowed. Nikador also has a no-name NPC as his model - he looks like a literal Guard from Okhema, so generic he is, so when I saw Phagousa I was like "Yeah, checks out, typical Hoyo behavior". Same applies to places. We got for example cutscenes from Aidonia in Styxia because why should Hoyo use some of that money they hoard and make temporary Aidonia map for Castorice?

"I loved 3.0's ten-hour-long patch" - How? 3.0 took me 15h. I play in english so I know that people who play in japanese skip dialogues a lot hence why they can shorten the patch, but if someone plays in english just like me then I have no idea how they cut the time by 5h. And tbh I was so tired of such long patches that I either had to dedicate entire week for (I play like 3h per day) or 4 weeks (1 playthrough every week) that I literally welcomed the cut in content they did in 3.3 and 3.4 because now it's reasonably long around 8-9h and is not killing me. Don't take me wrong, I love lore, I love dialogues. But even my brain was at its limit before 3.3. It couldn't process all those dialogues, it got tired and I was dying.

"We experienced retellings of Hysilens and (a tiny bit of) Cerydra's stories". - I agree that Hysilens and Cerydra were not used much, and should have been used much more. It annoyed me so much that Lygus just kept going around with me and narrating the story of Hysilens. I just wanted his stupid ass to shut the fuck up. At least I could kick his ass when the boss fight came and shut him up for good in the simulation. But at the same time I also think this is some kind of weird avoidance by Hoyo of traumatizing the player too much. Khaslana or Cyrene or other characters can suffer through trauma for millions of years, but we the player can only see or participate in a miniscule part of it because we can't be scared off by the excess of trauma and mind boggling amount of failure upon failure upon failure.

BTW the pic you posted is not from Cerydra's lightcone. The screen shows text from Cerydra's character story, not the lightcone.

(This is text from the lightcone: "Epoch Etched in Golden Blood").

"We are given no actual explanation for her motivations". - I hope we will get more of Cerydra and Hysilens, because how much their content was cut off is a crime. Especially after that info from the lightcone that lowkey sounds as if she was a fake princess (?) put in place of the real princess and rigorously trained (abused) to be the "real princess Cerydra".

"We don't know what truly drove her to believe that uniting every nation in Amphoreus under one banner using a iron fist was the right thing to do, or what her goal was at all besides "conquer everything." - Tho at the same time I can see how some people will be unhappy with getting more context, because more context always comes with the inevitable risk of minimising the atrocities the character has done by explaining their thought process and behaviors via providing said context. So I already saw people enjoy Cerydra as "unapologetic tyrant" because they craved a character that just does typical tyrant stuff just because they can. I personally dislike this kind of behavior she showed in the patch. It looked like fascism 101 and I don't need more fascism in my life right now. I was hoping her tyranny was not true, that it was just rumors or people hated her for something and changed the history to paint her as horrible. But no, actually she is a tyrant who can sacrifice anyone for her goals, she does believe fucked up stuff etc. Tho now that I got this I'd rather get some explanation. Not to whitewash her but to at least know why the fuck she is so obsessed with conquest and why does she behave as if she was born in Kremnos.

"Do I really feel like I can say I find her likeable?" - Same. She became so unlikable to me that I'm lowkey debating if I even want to pull for her as I planned before because I seriously don't want an avid "fascism is great" character be in my cast of characters. I don't pull for characters I dislike or disagree with on fundamental level if I really don't need them (I needed Luocha and Ruan Mei, I don't need little Napoleon "let's conquer the world" for my Phainon because I already have Bronya and Tingyun and they're doing just fine without her).

"Deliverer, go save the world," "I can't wait to meet our precious Deliverer," "The Deliverer will definitely come to save us!" Ahhhhhh, make it stoppppp". - As much as I agree with everything you said before this sentence, I have a feeling that this part is supposed to be very on the nose "You literally did nothing" to show us how Phainon actually felt. Because being a Deliverer is literally like that. You have one job - to deliver new dawn - and apart from that you don't really do much, as everyone else is laying their lives in front of your feet, doing all the heavy lifting, so you as the Deliverer could reach the goal safely. But at the same time it fucks up with your psyche so much. You see your comrades and friends and loved ones drop dead around you why you can't stop it and must move forward always. So this passing of the torch feels more like "See? this is what Phainon was feeling all along". And this is also why narrative keeps glazing us while at the same time rendering us virtually helpless. Phainon, the glorified Hero of Okhema who could only do one job and even that was taken away from him. The only difference between Phainon and us is that Herta and Screwllum rewrote Era Nova for us so we can initiate it properly and not destroy the world. While Phainon couldn't even bring that dawn because it would end Amphoreus as a whole.

And now into leak territory: after reading Cerydra's character stories it drives the point home that she is a Queen piece in chess, while the Deliverer is the King piece, which explains limitations of this role. As King also can't move much on the board but ensures checkmate. It also funnily explains why Phainon and Cerydra look visually similar as if they were related but aren't if she is the Queen and he is the King.

I don't know about the Trailblazer/Hysilens. It didn't really feel that strong. And because she is a siren I wasn't surprised at the naked scene. I was far more focused on the fact that during that bath scene she was washing off the blood of that guy that we just saw being angry at the Imperator so my brain was like "we caught the assassin in the act". Also Hysilens already has Aglaea and Cerydra. They don't need a mandatory TB romance :/

Purple Prose being pointed out by us is probably a sign that devs are aware that Lygus is like that and it's also supposed to be on the nose, because he is 100% annoying shit. Not to mention a liar that says one truth two lies. And also can't really shut up. I guess this is who Zandar was when he was alive - an annoying and obnoxious asshole with delusions of grandeur. However the picture you posted is specifically referring to him creating Nous and "trapping" everyone in the "cave of limited possibilities". This is how Zandar sees Nous and he also thinks it's his fault that universe is now "constrained". He misses the times when he could do science without being constrained by the circle of knowledge allowed by Nous. Which is also the thing that Polka keeps protecting by offing any scientist who tries to breach it (she even threatened Herta and keeps sabotaging Herta all the time). But yeah, Herta is the mouthpiece for the audience because Zandar / Lygus is supposed to be that annoying and they know he is that annoying so they acknowledge that via other NPCs.

I don't know what do you mean by "time". (Can you elaborate or give examples so I could see what do you mean maybe?) Actually a lot of stuff they talked about was understandable to me from the science perspective and I'm just a science laywoman.

I also don't get it how Mydei's signal could randomly pick up data abandoned by EpieiKeia but I understood it as him simply being born immortal. (And apparently according to people who code, picking up / accessing data from other data entities is not uncommon behavior for a piece of code – because that’s what signals and this simulation are, code – but it most often ends with corruption and memory errors taking place if that happens – would seriously explain why Mydei is speaking of memories he shouldn’t possibly have). Mixmash of data happened at some moment in time, maybe even at the start of the cycle (because who the fuck knows where the signals are being stored (?) when they're not yet born and we now also know that they're all born according to simulation's needs so the dates of birth from 3.5 are only applicable to 33.550.337 loop but not to any other loop, because Lygus interference affected the births of several characters - so yeah, they must be in some data limbo waiting to be "loaded into the simulation" while at the same time I have no idea how regular people that aren't signals are seen by the simulation because Lygus doesn't care about them enough to write it down) and it just is like that.

Tho I don't think Polyxia abandoned the data "how to revive" knowingly but it's just another Lygus tech speak for something that on the storytelling layer would be a situation. I guess it may even be referring to Thanatos being split unnaturally at the start of the cycle due to Polyxia's actions and some bug took place (because it doesn't mean that she knowingly abandoned data to spontaneously revive. Thanatos is a Titan governing Death so her actions most likely resulted in her abandoning data without her knowledge, data that she didn't even know anything about because signals don't perceive the simulation in the same way Lygus does, they don't know when they're "abandoning data" by doing something specific) and that bug affected the electrical signal of Mydei. Why Mydei and nobody else tho? No idea, maybe they're slotted next to each other in the limbo or smth, we don't know and I don't know if we will ever know or if that even matters when half of the logs are written by Lygus in the manner I explained before. He sees a baby learn to walk and instead of writing down "baby learned how to walk" he writes "baby acquired mobility permissions". Hence why those logs can't be taken at face value in a sense that we don't know how to exactly read them because we don't have access to what Lygus sees. And a lot of his logs also is written in specific loops. Like Neikos info is written after -36th loop (which means that currently Phainon is catatonic and only responds to violent stimuli). While some are written in -37th loop and only reference what happened in -37th loop. While others despite being written in -37th loop can be applied to 36th loop too (like Kalos information).

"Mydei the security clearance in the Scepter's system to suddenly promote his own permissions?" - In the same way Nikador became immortal. It's not actually him getting a permission. It's him becoming immortal by already known process that existed in 3.0. Nikador was immortal due to that soul splitting ceremony and the same ceremony was also carried out in previous cycle by Gnaeus. Lygus calling it "permission elevation" means nothing because it only looks like that to him. It doesn't mean that Mydei got access to any dev console and suddenly has more accesses than he should. It's just Lygus being weird and turning everything into meaningless tech speech that confuses players even more.

Some Actual 3.5 Main Story Thoughts

The Good:

Hysilens/Cerydra doomed yuri was considerably less subtext and more just text. Possibly the one truly redeeming feature of the patch. The fact that there was an actual "I love her" written into the patch (even if it was still couched in the idea of loving the "monarch") was wild.

Aglaea with her emotions intact was adorable, 10/10 no complaints.

In the first half of the patch they did manage to establish Lygus as a more legitimate threat than they did in any prior patch... To bad they lost momentum in the second half so that by the time we reached the boss battle it felt completely nothingburger.

I like Cerydra's design a lot. Too bad she was criminally under-utilized in her own debut patch.

Evernight's debut was handled better than I expected. I am a Mythus fan first and a HSR player second, so it was satisfying that they are playing into that aspect (at least on the surface--the Voracity references are also really strong here, getting mixed signals).

Herta and Screwllum are always a treat.

Mydei literally said #NotMyDeliverer even in a world where Phainon didn't exist. Thank you king, I was almost to the point where I couldn't go on.

This patch also gave us Mydei's primum mobile, so I'm willing to forgive it.

We got explicit confirmation that events have occurred involving the Trailblazer but which Trailblazer no longer remembers, suggesting Amphoreus is either overall a stable(-ish) timeloop in which the Trailblazer has already worked with Cyrene to change fate and we (the players) are just now working toward an "end" that has already happened, or that events which have occurred are being deleted from memory, leaving only vague sensations of familiarity and "weird hunches":

More on this in a while. I have a Theory(tm).

The Bad:

Everything else. And I'm only sort of kidding. (Okay, I haven't played the cooking event yet. Save me, Phaidei bait, save me.)

Being more serious, there were four massive offenders in this patch:

So, so many things in the scepter-Lygus-Trailblazer plot happen not because those plot points are logical, reasonable for the pre-established lore, or even likely to happen--they happen because the plot just needs to them happen to get to a specific end point. It makes absolutely no sense, if Lygus could trap Trailblazer in a zone with time flowing a thousand times slower, that he wouldn't have just done that from the start to ensure Trailblazer couldn't go back to the right point in time to sway Cerydra. It makes absolutely ZERO sense that the scepter would ever give control of its Ultimate Protocol to one of its own experiments. This was such a blatant "Don't look too close at this; we need to make sure Cerydra has some way to be plot relevant" that I actually couldn't believe what I was reading. Herta, Screwllum, and Cyrene infected Lygus with a memetic virus based on his dual cognition operating in two timeflows at once--so he couldn't just... temporarily leave one system or limit the dual processing to one channel...? Suddenly helpless out of nowhere? "Law dictated that I can change one rule in the protocol by sacrificing a demigod--" LAW IS LITERALLY A VOICE FROM THE BLACK TIDE; HOW IS THIS WORKING!! How can you even "trap" Lygus in the Vortex of Genesis? He is a real robot in the real world who should have just been able to immediately go "Oh you trapped my first proxy? Cool, now loading in Lygus 2.0," especially since we knew he's already come back from having his head sliced off a boat load of times. Why is Zandar One Kuwabara acting like he personally created the concepts of paths when other aeons existed for thousands of years before Nous? Does he think that "paths" didn't exist before he came up with his imaginary tree theory??? Ugh... Shoulda been called "Patch 3.5: Don't Think Too Hard" because the moment you start thinking about it, it all becomes such a series of embarrassingly badly justified deus ex machinae (in multiple cases, literally) that it's painful.

The budget decline for this patch was actually criminal. Star Rail rakes in between 60 million and 90 million dollars A MONTH, and we're getting stuff like this?

I guess we'll just... use our imaginations...

Phagousa being a completely generic NPC that they didn't even bother to slap a starfish on took me the hell out.

Even inside the one new zone we actually got (lighted Styxia), there are bunch of randomly reused assets--why are there Sky's rainbow bridges in Styxia? T_T

Even the fight with Lygus, which should have been really easy to make into a hype moment, ended up being completely dull. My only real thoughts as I was doing the fight were "Well finally I can hit him" and "Oh good, I think this means the patch is over."

Like, just compare Aquila's boss fight to Lygus's. What happened, man??

While I appreciate that they did add a few more animated cutscenes to this patch compared to the last one, overall there's a strong feeling of neglect. I can only hope that's because they planned to massively invest in either 3.6 or 3.7 to finish strong, but I'm starting to lose a bit of faith here...

3. Second most annoying thing about this patch: Absolutely terrible balance between interactive content and cutscenes. Again, I'm not the kind of person who normally complains about patches having too much dialogue to get through. I clearly, clearly love the story, the lore, all the readables, etc. Hell, I loved 3.0's ten-hour-long patch. But somewhere along the way, I'm starting to worry the devs forgot that there is supposed to be a difference between video games and movies. This patch literally doesn't give us a single puzzle to solve, chest to open, or even a TRASH MOB enemy to defeat until--I timed it--four hours in. There is literally four hours at the beginning of this patch where the only interactive input from you, the player, is clicking the left mouse button to advance the dialogue. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of dialogue! There's nothing wrong with cutscenes! But I'm begging the devs to remember that the players are here because we also like to play the game. If the exploration and puzzles were too much at the beginning of Amphoreus, I get it. But now there's nothing interactive for hours on end. Please... find a balance... Just give us some enemies to kill every few cutscenes. A chest or two to open... A puzzle to solve between dialogues... Please...

4. Finally, the last (and worst) of this patch's cardinal sins in my opinion: We didn't experience Hysilens and Cerydra's stories. We experienced retellings of Hysilens and (a tiny bit of) Cerydra's stories. Now, this isn't out of left-field--Amphoreus's over-arching theme is, and has always been, a clash between fiction and reality, between mythology and truth. Pardon the Hamilton reference but the plot of Amphoreus is essentially just: "You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story." It's not as if it's thematically inappropriate for us to have Lygus and Cyrene as our narrators, recapping events we weren't actually there to experience. But the problem is: A recap can't match the original events for immersion or emotional appeal. It's almost impossible to feel deeply sympathetic for Hysilens' plight with her siren sisters when all we get is two generic NPCs shouting from off-screen "Oh no, the Black Tide is getting me!" as she walks through a normal hallway which is actually supposed to be the abyss of an ocean (that we're just supposed to imagine). It's hard to feel tormented by her lonely millennia-something wait in the depths for the Trailblazer to return because virtually all we're shown of it is Lygus going "Then she went to sleep."

It's even worse with Cerydra, who is essentially denied any interiority by the patch. This is obviously intentional; she's supposed to be a polarizing figure, a character that defies being cleanly labelled as a completely good person or bad. She wields violence excessively and sacrifices the innocent for ambition--but she also has things she holds dear and chooses the side of "right" when given the choice. Yet... We are given no actual explanation for her motivations. We don't learn anything of her story before she came conquering Okhema. We don't know what truly drove her to believe that uniting every nation in Amphoreus under one banner using a iron fist was the right thing to do, or what her goal was at all besides "conquer everything." What was she going to do, when she had it all? We're never given enough insight into her character to tell.

Her lightcone hints at a whole ass tragic backstory we got no hint of in the patch itself:

Perhaps they're saving this for 3.6 or 3.7, but I'm not sure whether I should really get my hopes up. In fact, I left the patch overall with a very ambivalent feeling toward Cerydra. Will I be pulling her for my Phainon? Yeah. Do I really feel like I can say I find her likeable? Not so much.

Because we get both of these characters' stories only through Lygus or Cyrene telling us what happened--without getting solid flashbacks, getting to significantly play them as trial characters while "living" the actual events of their memory, or anything similar that would have fully immersed us in the events of their backstories--there's a layer of emotional distance to everything that occurs. Compare Castorice's past getting a detailed animated short so that we could see her pain over the long years--or even compare Anaxa's section of 3.2 giving us actual flashback images of him with his teacher, or moments of levity with Cerces as he climbed Dawncloud, and it's clear that the devs failed to make the player truly connect with Hysilens and Cerydra in the same way they were able to achieve with the early Chrysos Heirs. I walked away from the patch thinking "They seem like cool characters, but I don't really feel attached to them." Seeing Hysilens being the only one standing with us at the vortex as we were supposedly about to bring things to an "end" actually felt wrong, because it's like... "This isn't my friend? This isn't anyone I journeyed with? It should be someone else standing here with me."

To be honest, I think this anti-immersive "Listen while I tell you what happened" storytelling method is a by-product of the game's sudden insistence that the Trailblazer must be the most important character in Amphoreus's story. Instead of early Amphoreus's long sequences with trial characters, where we get inside the character's heads as well as literally live their lives (either directly or in memory), this patch insists on following the Trailblazer almost entirely, only departing from that in the last few minutes to finally give us a tiny scene of walking Hysilens and Cerydra's models around.

Like, imagine if, instead of getting to walk Mydei through the gates of Castrum Kremnos at the end of his sequence in 3.1, we got Lygus giving us a voiceover going "Then Mydeimos walked the lonely road to Castrum Kremnos" and the patch just instantly moved on. That's literally what they did to Hysilens and Cerdyra. Because the story insists on following the Trailblazer almost exclusively, the devs are obligated to use retellings, voiceovers from Lygus/Cyrene, and 2D image recaps to convey important events like Hysilens' past and the thousand years of the cycle that the Trailblazer missed, leaving us largely emotionally disconnected from those events.

Then, while all that's happening, we're forced to sit through "Deliverer, go save the world," "I can't wait to meet our precious Deliverer," "The Deliverer will definitely come to save us!" Ahhhhhh, make it stoppppp. A whole patch of hyping us up while we contributed the bare minimum to the actual events of the plot? Whyyy? It was Cyrene who swayed Cerydra to our side, Cyrene/Herta/Screwllum who devised the plan to stop Lygus, Evernight who rescued both Cyrene and us, the Chrysos Heirs who carried the fight on their backs for a thousand years while we yapped at Lygus in the Exomyth, Cerydra who sacrificed herself to do... something... to the rules of the scepter, and Hysilens who kept Lygus's form imprisoned for 200+ whatever more years until we could finally arrive to do our one (1) meaningful action of the patch.

I still maintain that passing the torch to the Trailblazer could have worked just fine if the writing handled it well and actually let the Trailblazer make a significant difference in the plot, but this ain't it, dawg. The narrative simultaneously insisting on framing Trailblazer as the narrative center while then assigning all of the meaningful plot actions to the other characters anyway just creates a story completely at odds with itself, resulting in a "tell not show" writing method that leeches its own ability to deeply impact the player or produce the highs of earlier Amphoreus patches.

Then there's just a host of other, smaller complaints:

Contributing yet again to the patch's "contradictory" feeling was the random insistence on Trailblazer/Hysilens bait. Like, I am not normally a person who cares about Trailblaze self-insert baiting--in fact, I am very much a Trailblazer/Firefly truther--but when the patch is simultaneously going out of its way to bait Cerydra/Hysilens, the overall feeling is like a tug-of-war, pulling Hysilens in two directions and leaving both possible ships feeling under-developed. What was the point of this, even?

Normally, I am also not especially against fanservice--it's a gacha game, it literally monetizes fanservice--but something about the Hysilens fanservice in this patch felt so on-the-nose that it turned me off.

It gives off the feeling that the devs weren't confident Hysilens would sell well on her own virtues/character and so they frantically added in Trailblazer bait, like some sort of glaring "PLEASE BUY OUR CHARACTER" sign over Hysilens' head every single time it happened. (Is it just me or does it feel like the writers might have been in a bit of a disagreement over what to do with Hysilens, with some voting for Trailblazer bait and others wanting her to be the yuri ship bait, so they just split the difference and did both??)

We already have both Castorice and Cyrene showing (physical) closeness with the Trailblazer in Amphoreus; like it's OKAY if a couple of the female characters are bait for the yuri fans instead? 😭

2. Purple prose the patch, my lorddddd. You know it's bad when the game gives you a dialogue option to point it out.

Half the stuff Lygus says in his explanations to Herta Co., particularly in the second half of the patch, are effectively "sound and fury" sentences, "signifying nothing," because they're so overly infested with metaphors and vague terms that they could be taken to mean anything you want them to--or anything it's convenient for them to mean at the moment (the word "Time" being the number one offender of this patch, literally being peppered in anywhere the devs don't want to give an actual explanation).

Herta, mouthpiece of the viewers:

3. So, sooooo many things are just being handwaved in this patch. For example, loved finally getting to see Mydei's notes in the As I've Written log but uhhhhhh, how does this even WORK?

Mydei's ability to self-rez comes from being influenced by outside data which was "abandoned" by Castorice and Polyxia. But how does an electrical signal within the system--not knowing it even is an electrical signal at all--"abandon" data at all? And why would Castorice or Polyxia ever abandon the ability to revive when Polyxia literally had to give her entire life just to get Castorice back into the realm of the living? How does this align with the idea of Mydei's weak spot even being a thing? I honestly think this complicates the lore surrounding Mydei's immortality much more than it clarifies it lol. Same with this:

How did the soul-breaking ceremony give Mydei the security clearance in the scepter's system to suddenly promote his own permissions? We know that what is appearing in the logs as "hacking" functions as the magic in Amphoreus (Hysilens' siren songs, Anaxa's alchemy), but since when does Mydei have the power to affect the system?

Seriously--"Don't Think Too Hard, the Patch."

4. Fuck whoever wrote this line, for real.

The Ugly:

[moontheoretist]

"Ultimately, it doesn't actually make any sense that being thrown into the Sea of Souls would be what gives Mydei his immortality--and even less sense why the sea would randomly pick the 10th thoracic vertebra to be a weak point." <- This was literally my entire issue! Like it didn't make any sense, but because Mydei was lowkey based on Achilles and Achilles immortality ALSO didn't make sense then I was like "ok I guess it's weird greek mythology logic". But now I know that he is just born with his immortality and it finally fucking makes sense (before I was like considering both because Achilles but also Mydei is lowkey Apep that comes back every time to annoy Ra with his shit).

And the whole log about Mydei getting the data abandoned by the EpieiKeia signal supports this. Because EpieiKeia is the Death signal, it governs death, it abandoned some data and I dunno how but the signal that represents Mydei picked it up and became immortal and then the logs about the ceremony make it sound as if the data that Mydei picked up from Thanatos gave him partial-immortality (hence why he had the weakspot) but then the Soul Splitting Ceremony in 33.550.337th cycle upgraded his ability to full immortality (i.e the unconditional and infinite respawn permissions). So it's not really the Strife assigned signal feature but more "Mydei's signal is weird".

Mydei: I'm just born different lol.

Also it's so funny that Mydei went full Gnaeus on Lygus:

Lygus: I know your weak spot. Mydei: Oh yeah? *takes out Uno Reverse* DOUBLE IMMORTALITY! Lygus: AGH! Narrator: Uno Reverse was super effective.

The funniest part tho is that Mydei is 100% Hunt in his "I'm going to designate Lygus as my enemy forever and keep kicking his ass". He kicked the guy's ass for 200 years and then another 20 years before Lygus somehow made him die, but we don't the fuck know HOW. Which is the question I'm asking. If Mydei did the same as Gnaeus and the same as Eurypon did for Nikador then to kill him Lygus needs to collect the 5 pieces of him and then kill him in battle. BUT from Castorice's letter we know that Mydei didn't appear in the River of Souls or Nether Realm at all, which implies his soul was not pieced together and Lygus found some other way to kill Immortal Mydei.

How? What? When? WTF? Was Mydei eaten by the Black Tide?

Sometimes I see takes on HSR's lore and I just have to wonder if there's not very many people who actually try to approach the lore literally and think it through to its logical conclusions.

For example: It's common to work under the assumption that Mydei is correct and his immortality came from being thrown into the Sea of Souls.

But if this were true... then why wouldn't everyone who heard about this just throw themselves into the Sea of Souls to gain immortality? Why wouldn't Mydei be like "You know how I could keep all my friends from dying? Throw them into the Sea of Souls!" 😂 If dying in the Sea of Souls was all it took to become immortal, wouldn't every fisherman whose boat sank on that dangerous ocean be an immortal too? Even if it were to only apply to Chrysos Heirs, there are quite a few Chrysos Heirs throughout Amphoreus! Why wouldn't Aglaea have scheduled a "Today all of us Chrysos Heirs will throw ourselves into the sea" day? It would be worth a shot, wouldn't it?! lol

Then there's the fact that the "Sea of Souls," is actually not the "River of Souls" where the dead gather--the Sea of Souls is a literal ocean, with regular fish living in it (otherwise, why would it ever have fishermen sailing across it for baby Mydei to rescue, and shrimp for baby Mydei to eat, and sea monsters for baby Mydei to fight?). Certainly the abyssal depths of a normal sea might link to the dark waters of the River of Souls, but the Sea of Souls itself is capable of sustaining life, while the River of Souls explicitly does not, so they are definitely not the exact same body of water.

Ultimately, it doesn't actually make any sense that being thrown into the Sea of Souls would be what gives Mydei his immortality--and even less sense why the sea would randomly pick the 10th thoracic vertebra to be a weak point.

It makes a lot more sense to assume that because Mydei (at this stage) does not know the truth of Amphoreus, he's making assumptions about where his immortality may have come from. He's working with the best information he has, which is that "I went into the Sea of Souls and died and came back, and that ain't normal, so it must have been the Sea of Souls that made me immortal." However, there's already a flaw in this logic: Given that he was never killed as a baby before dying in the Sea of Souls, Mydei actually has no way of confirming that he wasn't just immortal from birth.

More importantly, the truth is that Amphoreus is entirely a simulation, so its laws are completely arbitrary based on what the scepter wants to allow/what variables have been loaded in to the system. If it is "Flame Chase relevant," then the features assigned to the Strife inheritor will always be what the scepter/Lygus need and want them to be. It's entirely possible that "The electrical signal on the Strife path will always be able to respawn but also always have a weakness which can be exploited" was simply a pre-determined trait assigned to every Strife coreflame inheritor across every iteration of the simulation, even before "Mydeimos" ever came into the picture.

If speculation is correct that Strife is supposed to align with the Hunt (since Phainon took Destruction), then the insane perseverance to go on even after death would be one of the most ideal traits to assign such a character, right?

Although we don't have a way to know for sure currently, it seems far, far more likely to me that Mydei's immortality (complete with an easily exploited weakness as a fail-safe) was something the system generated or, at the very least, something that occurred as a result of something in Mydei's inherent programming in the Amphoreus simulation, rather than some sort of unplanned "immortality feature" just magically spawning--for Mydei only--in the data of the Sea of Souls specifically.

Really, it just kind of surprises me that people take some of the characters' statements as automatic truth, even when we know those characters are missing huge amounts of information about their world and their own existences.

Be a little skeptical of the things uninformed characters say, at least? 🥲

[moontheoretist]

HE'S SO LARGE?

[moontheoretist]

[moontheoretist]

a jadzia x lenara comic i drew for @rejoinedzine, exploring an alternate reality in which jadzia dax and lenara kahn chose to give into their attractions for each other - and the potential aftermath.

Still Rejoined was a DS9 zine celebrating the 25th anniversary of Star Trek’s first wlw episode and first gay kiss! participating in this was a great experience, and thank you to the mods for organising :)))

[moontheoretist]

lady from the ocean 🌊🐚

✦ find me on instagram @the.flightless.artist ✦

[moontheoretist]

You really can't stand Sith Code do you? Sith Code didn't even exist before 2003, while Star Wars canon dates back to 1977, it predates the code by 36 years. And as much as Siths in the movies are supposed to evoke Nazis, the extended canon is not following the same principles, because extended canon is not written by a singular white man.

I agree with the OP. Lucas sees Dark Side as cancer, hence why he made the Jedi preach that "Balance means only Light Side prevails". The issue with this idea is that Star Wars grew over the years and we realized how deeply limited the idea of Dark Side as cancer or allegory for fascim is. How simplified and untrue it truly is. Especially when you consider the inspirations for the Force from asian mythos where that 2nd power that keeps the 1st power in balance is not by any principle inherently wrong or evil and both of them MUST exist for balance.

If Lucas actually paid attention to the ideologies he was deriving from he would realize that Dark Side as neutral force makes much more sense and gives far more nuance to his world than simply making it Light Side good, Dark Side bad, i.e. Dark Side must be destroyed.

Lucas in his idea of making Dark Side source of evil and the source of the corruption of the people who use the Force ultimately flattened out the idea of fascism and where the fascism actually comes from. For him if you destroy the DS it will save everybody. It doesn't want to engage with an ugly truth that we are the source of the corruption. That it's our unwillingness to embrace diversity and empathy that is ultimately at fault of creating divisions and how our greed makes us more prone to lie in order to covet land and resources we desire. It doesn't want to address the fact that fascism is born from us and the ugliness in our hearts that we cultivated in all of the societies we have created. No, instead he makes fascism into some idea that simply just exists and is corrupting us pure little angels that could do no wrong...

That is truly naive and limiting view of a very complex thing.

Kill the notion that Star Wars needs to step away from force users. I don’t know about you, but I love to see space wizards fight with glowy swords. The only thing that needs to change is the good/evil dichotomy of the Light and Dark sides of the Force. Give us a show about a Padawan who tries her hardest to be a great Jedi so she buries her emotions so deep within herself that she loses herself and becomes complacent with Jedi/Senate corruption and turns to the dark side to reconnect with herself and rediscover what made her want to be a Jedi in the first place. Give us the story about a child who’s sibling is taken by the Jedi so they ally with a Sith to break into the Jedi Temple and rescue their sibling. Give us a movie about a Dark Lady of the Sith and her apprentice defending their home planet from being absorbed into a sector of the Republic where their historical oppressors would hold their seat in the Senate.

All those stories could feature epic clashes between Force Wielders without contributing to the perceived stagnation of Star Wars shows featuring Jedi and Sith.

[moontheoretist]

"I get that things can be interpreted. And in the end art is subjective. However even with said, its important to acknowledge what the code is actually trying to say, in order for a person to use it meaningfully and not treat as dogma."

Art is 100% subjective, but also someone's ability to convey something can be poor and Gaider's in this context is very poor because I, as a polish woman, who was growing up learning everything about Holocaust, I can tell that he didn't understand Mein Kampf and what was the core message there by simply looking how he wrote the Sith Code. And tbf many people didn't understand the lesson of the Holocaust. I can see it even now in how countries that should know better are showing how they completely missed the point. That "never again" was actually not understood properly. And that we actually never succeeded in removing fascism at all.

"That's the thing though, it states "I obtain power" is saying that your trying to get ahead by any means necessary. And is emphasizing might is right mentality."

"Obtain power" is not inherently a phrase that is associated with being evil. Heroes also do obtain power via for example training. They're often given the power by some magical or supernatural means, yes, but they also often obtain it via various means, so obtaining the power to do something is not inherently bad, despite being more often used for the villains.

"It kind of do's though, it places emphasis on strength and power. Things that is questionable in of itself. Which is in of itself what Mein Kampf is all about, it emphasizes that strength is what people should try to obtain no matter what."

It focuses on strength and power, but like I said before you can't really liberate yourself without having either of those things. And minorities understand this. Bah, every revolution is exactly following this kind of concept in order to liberate themselves. And no, Mein Kampf is inherently about subservience of others and how "other races than Aryan (made up race by the way) are worse than others and need to be eliminated". I know as my own ethnic group was targeted by Hitler during Holocaust because of that principle alone. Gaining strength may have been mentioned in that book but only because it was written when Hitler was still in jail after his failed coup and was having delusions of grandeur. Ofc he was writing about obtaining power when he was in jail with 0 political power. He also knew that to enact something in the world you need power. That idea is sadly true for both the evil and the good. The people who want to rule and step on others, as well as those who want to connect with others and enact change in the world to make it a better place for all of us.

"Even if you want to recontextualize "Power" and "Strength" as "knowledge" it still strength for the sake of strength. And only for one's own personal gain."

It doesn't matter why you obtain power and strength. What matters is how you use it. That's also why I invoked heroes in my reply and why I invoked Han Solo specifically.

"It really isn't. The code is saying "The system is broke that I get to act as selfishly as I want". Which was what Mein Kempf was advertising. The Nazi super solider is someone who obtains strength. Which align with the Sith ideals of breaking chains."

Yes, it is vague. It doesn't say anything about systems and let me quote the code here.

Peace is a lie. There is only Passion. Through Passion, I gain Strength. Through Strength, I gain Power. Through Power, I gain Victory. Through Victory my chains are Broken. The Force shall free me.

I wrote about my interpretation of the code many times before and I saw other marginalized Star Wars fans echo similar thoughts as mine.

Peace is a lie because status quo is a lie when you are a marginalized person living in the society that doesn't care for your wellbeing. It is only serving the majority who has the privileges, not the minorities that have none. Passion is about emotions. Emotions can be out of control but are not inherently a bad thing. Siths seem to focus a lot on the negative emotions because they think they are the strongest and most powerful ones, meanwhile you could also make a case that any positive emotion, like joy, love etc. could be equally as if not more powerful if challened through the Force. Seeing emotions as bad thing is toxic masculinity 101 and actually the source of the entire issue with why Jedi keep falling to the Dark Side - they don't value emotions, they don't cope with emotions well, they think love is an "unhealthy attachment" and forbid marriages to avoid "temptation". It's very Christian Church if you think about it. In any case Jedi are following toxic masculinity ideas and I'm not the only person who has noticed that Jedi Order inherently has issues with their own ideology.

(Jedi are perpetuating emotional instability by denying emotions).

Here is a good video about that:

Anyway, when Passion are emotions then it's obvious transition from emotions and conviction to "I gain strength" because you have to have a very strong convictions to actually become strong and then by proxy to obtain the power - political, mental or otherwise - to win whatever argument or conflict you are tangled in. Victory in this sense could mean stuff like gay marriage legislation for marginalized people. Because fighting for legislative recognition also needs strength, passion and power (political or numerical one) to achieve the passing of said legislature. Then "my chains are broken". Chains, especially breaking the chains, are and always will represent some form of slavery. In case of marginalized people our chains are the stagnant society that doesn't want and is unwilling to move forward so we need to push it forward. And the last line is actually pretty easy "Force shall free me" where Force is the power in Star Wars universe that gives people not only supernatural abilities but clarity and often also enlightement. Jedi Code also has line about the Force at the end, tho they seek ultimate form of afterlife in which everyone are connected and "never actually die" in it (very Christian idea again but it's very sad that they only seek connection in death) while Sith Code empathises more the idea that this power gives you opportunity to free yourself from in this context oppression. Can it be understood differently? Yes. But freedom manifesto is also a valid interpretation, especially if you ever read any freedom manifesto in your life, like for example Marx manifesto of how proletariat has to "take over means of production in order to free themselves from the rich".

"Yes it do's. So much of its phrasing states "I" gain strength "I" gain power, "I" obtain victory, "My" chains are broken. If the text wanted to emphasize connection it would of went "We" obtain strength and "Our" chains are broken. The code is emphasizing an individualist ideal."

Ok, I can be lienient here as I forgot about "I" being used. But as much as I personally don't believe in individualism I don't think writing it this way inherently means that people who read it can't form a community later. Because we are all individuals in the end. In many cases we would have to first free ourselves from the chains in order to free others. Think of "allegory of the cave" and how first the individual prisoners had to be freed to even try to free the others from the shackles of illusion they were in. The tragedy of that allegory tho is that they failed to convince them that the shadows on the walls are not the real world and therefore failed to liberate them. On top on the fact that allegory of the cave all and of itself shows futility of trying to change anything because if people don't want to change they won't which fits very much the society we live in and shows why our efforts seem to not give much fruits and why fascism prevails.

"As a marginalized person myself, and who is also questioning the direction of their government. I want to say that's kind of the point of the code, it grooms victims into becoming monsters. Take for example Count Dooku he believed that the republic became corrupt and in turn fell victim to the sith code. And in real life Mein Kampf did the same thing to Nazi Germany, Hitler exploited the fears of the common citizen who became questioning of weimar republic. And in turn encourage to adhere to the same might is right mentality."

Now that we established we are both marginalized and live in shitty societies I can say more here: I disagree with this conclusion. If Sith code was trying to use fear then sure I'd agree. As the usage of fear is a common tactic of regimes to redirect people's valid concerns from actual issues to some group they can blame for said issues rather than point them at actual solutions or causes. The regime is doing that, not an individual, even if regimes are often lead by an individual. Criticising Republic by Dooku is not inherently wrong and in the end he was right. The entire Prequel trilogy shows how right he was because it was a huge manipulative fest of Palpatine. Even the Separatist War was completely fabricated by Palpatine in order to slowly tip Republic into the Dark Side but it wouldn't be possible if the seeds of corruption weren't already there, if people themselves were not already aligning that way or susceptible to listen to it. Ofc I disagree with Dooku's idea how to fix it. If he really wanted to fix anything, he would kill Palpatine the moment he realized he was behind everything and even tho it wouldn't fix the issues that the Republic had, it would at least remove the biggest manipulative force from the board. Also I'd refrain from using words like "grooming" because it insinuates that people with valid concerns and grievances are all bunch of little kids who are groomed by an adult to believe bad stuff. Are people very uneducated in politics and naive? Yes. But grooming is not the correct word because it implies that you need someone to exploit something and will make you do what you would otherwise never do. Meanwhile a lot of those people with those valid grievances would often naturally turn against others even without being prompted by anyone. As much as I want to believe in goodness in people I also know that we were raised in society that encourages ganging up on people who are different and society that doesn't encourage self-reflection or analitical thinking about the cause and effect of various situations hence why it's easy for fascists to stear them like sheep (because people are already prone to blame others rather than seek the complicated answers as people inherently prefer easy explanation over the truth). But the ideas were already there. Hitler didn't invent fascism or antisemitism. It was already there. And it didn't just stop existing after his fall either. People often forget that Holocaust wasn't born in a vacuum and that people already held harmful beliefs beforehand and that Hitler and other fascist leaders were / are just a convenient excuse to act on those beliefs (Hitler was after all democratically elected which shows how many people are unwilling to actually think). There are ofc people who are undecided and get swept in brainwashing, but they are often swept by those who already held those beliefs and managed to manipulate them to believe that if they eliminate this or that group all their very complex and complicated issues (that are born from completely different source than this group of people) will be fixed with their deaths.

""I" gain strength, not "We" gain strength. "My" chains are broken, not "Our" chains are broken. And further this point what "Chains" are you focused it, the text isn't stating the chains of oppression but rather the chains of connection, and places emphasis on the self. Its saying I am free from other people and "I" get to become the strongest person out there."

People don't interpret "chains" as connection symbol and I also don't in this context. Even tho it could be interpreted that way due to how chain is made, chains have more often than not the connotation to slavery, hence why Shacklebolt is such an offensive surname to give to a black character by JKR. In any case I can see how you see it but I don't see it that way. To me it doesn't say I'm free from other people. Especially when I take female independence and emancipation into account. An individual striving for those often later forms communities that help others pursue the same. The very idea that by using "I" it disproves or discourages "we" is riddiculous to me. I also don't subscribe to ideas such as "the best" meaning "the only one". So the strongest doesn't mean to me "only one strongest" the same as "best friend" doesn't mean "you can only have one best friend" to me.

"Another example of "My chains are broken" the people you are referring to decided to disregard other people decide to obtain strength for themselves."

No, they didn't decide to gain strength. They decided to weaken us all. Because fracturing the community is aiming for making us less powerful. They are deluded by the idea that they will be spared the same fate as us if they kiss the asses well enough. They don't gain any strength, only subservience from this. (I don't see how kissing asses of your oppressors gives you any type of individual strength when it's 100% reliant on the mood and behaviors of the person whose ass is kissed). And even then it won't save them at all.

"That's the thing the Sith code pretends to be a freedom manifesto it pretends to act like its offering liberation. However all its offering it libertarian dogma, a "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality. And that isn't far off from what Main Kampf is trying to emphasize."

You see it that way, I don't. And there is many others marginalized people, especially non white marginalized people, that will read this code and see a manifesto of the slaves. Which funnily fits the timeline of Legends because Siths as a race were enslaved by Dark Jedi.

I agree however that Sith Code can be used by someone to promise false liberation and manipulate them, but I don't agree that text itself is inherently trying to propose that kind of reading above other readings, even with usage of "I" rather then "We".

"To truly liberate one's self they must be willing to build connection. Something that the Sith code doesn't offer, it offer a single individual a means to carve their own path. All of which isn't different then to how Mein Kampf presents itself. It says that only the strong deserve to rule, the strong deserve to rule."

I won't deny that it encourages a person to "carve their own path". But I disagree that this idea of carving your own path means that you are inherently dicouraged from forming the connections with people around you. Even Jedi Code despite mentioning "harmony" doesn't encourage community seeking and is more about self-actualization even without the usage of "I" in the text (it refrains from pronouns usage). And self-actualization is not something inherently wrong and can be followed by an individual in ways they want. In my view Sith Code is far more dangerous when it's seen via Sith Empire teachings and culture lens than as a standalone text. Because Sith Empire as a culture provides the violent and murderous context to the text itself. But when you remove the Sith Code from the culture, especially in movie era where the culture no longer exists, then the text is freed from many meanings imposed on it by the Sith society.

"This is how fascism is born, its an manifesto that appeals to emotion and states clearly an individualist outlook, in where the strong conquer all."

Every revolution is born from emotions. The only difference is how they're directed and for what purpose they're used. Fascist rulers will use fear and anger of the people and direct them at innocents, never actually addressing the issues that people have, telling them a pretty lie that "this group is causing your issues" and using the people to remove those they don't want to exist. Revolutionary leaders will take anger and frustration of the people and direct it at the source of that anger and frustration - the system, sometimes addressing the source of the issues, sometimes not as it depends on the revolutionary leader and if he truly cares about the people or not. System is flaved and systemic oppression is a thing. You can't really change the system from within, no matter how much you try and albeit the idea is noble it's also sadly very naive (and I also used to hold it but now I know it's meaningless in the world that won't listen). The only way is to destroy it and build a better one. It is the most visible for America which system is build on exploitation and slavery. That idea is part of it's foundation and also the reason why black people and other people of color like indigenous people etc. will never be actually equal in this society, no matter how many changes within the system they enact. Because the ideas on which the system stands are inherently flawed and need to be replaces with the new ones. Need to be replaced with ideas of equity, community and diversity (diversity is also individual in nature, it's the ultimate acceptance of how we are all different and that's beautiful hence why I can't see individuality as inherently a bad concept because in diversity it finds its usage for good) in order to actually achieve any meaningful and not superficial change there.

On the closing note:

I find Sith Code fun to interpret in a positive way because it also does echo the idea of reclaiming. Sith Code was written with intention to be about something bad, but if you choose not to see it that way and spin it positively, it's like taking away the weapon from their hands.

TBH I can see already I won't convince you and you won't convince me. So I'll just leave it at that and I'd rather not be bothered again.

Regarding Gaider's "Modern Elves are Partly to blame for their own oppression"

In a conversation with Christina Gonzalez and a few other people on twitter, David Gaider, the former headwriter of Dragon Age, mocked fans of the Dalish. I took issue with his statement and pointed out why people are critical of how he and the other writers handled the Dalish in Dragon Age (while Allan Schumacher of Epic Games had nothing of substance to say in response). The Dalish are nomadic as a consequence of Andrastian societies violently attacking them if they stay too long in one area. The Andrastian Chantry outlawed their religion, making them criminals as a consequence of their faith. Andrastians will threaten the Dalish with violence in an attempt to force conversion to the Andrastian faith. Templars will hunt down the Dalish, and will even torture children. Andrastian elves also suffer from Andrastian oppression as Andrastian humans can massacre all of them, down to the children in an orphanage.

Gaider postulates that one could discuss how the ancient elves were "partly to blame" for their enslavement (let's keep in mind that being slaves is what he's talking about, even though he's careful not to put that into his tweet) or how "modern elves are partly to blame for their own oppression" which is essentially what we are told throughout the whole of Inquisition and the DLCs that accompanied the game (even JoH tries to romanticize the genocidal tyrant Drakon and place all of the blame on the Dales for the elves not trusting the tyrant who was invading their neighbors, forcing conversion, and massacring the people who would not convert - like the peaceful pacifists known as the Daughters of Song).

Inquisition even rectonned previously established lore on the Dalish in order to have characters like Iron Bull denigrate the Dalish. It's a game that will side-step Celene burning thousands of elves alive in Halamshiral while it will demonize the Dalish for wanting to maintain their autonomy from what's essentially a group of colonizers who want to rule over them and force them to convert, and the white Canadian writers (who are from Canada, a place known for its long history of horrific treatment towards Indigenous people) are firmly on the side of those who think that the Dalish (who, as Gaider himself once said at the Dragon Central forums before the release of Origins, were modeled after "Northern Native Americans") are wrong not to subjugate themselves to white Andrastian rulers.

Andrastian elves similarly face hardships because of Andrastian rule. In Ferelden even the efforts of the Night Elves fighting to free the nation from Orlesian rule didn't the elves any greater freedoms once Maric came to power. The Boon of the City Elf faces a number of dire consequences unless the Warden assumes control themselves as the new Bann. Inquisition ignores the plight of the elves of the Dales entirely to focus on a white human noble as the focus of the storyline in the Dales, and you can potentially help chevalier Michel de Chevin (a white man with blonde hair who is part of the chevaliers, a group who murder innocent elves as part of their initiation rite, although this isn't properly addressed in-game) while Briala's role is marginalized in-game despite being the leader of an elven rebellion across Orlais (and she strangely became white despite her in-book description making it clear she's a woman of color, which accompanying artwork confirmed).

Whether you're talking about the slavery of ancient elves or the 'modern' oppression of Andrastian elves and Dalish elves, I don't see how you can blame either the victims of slavery or the victims of racial (and in the case of the Dalish religious) persecution for the oppression they face. And Gaider doesn't seem to understand that at all, which explains the inherent problems with how the plight of the elves is framed within Dragon Age.

[moontheoretist]

Visions are newer version of Moon Wheels so to speak.

And that IS IMPORTANT. I will now go through some of my earlier points and use the video above to comment upon them (but I have time only for the stuff I was actually right about so sorry about that).

I. "And I really cannot imagine that Raiden Shogun or Tsaritsa would “choose” someone from another nation to have their elemental Vision, if it was not partly a random process affected by the person who gets the Vision in the first place."

Yes, the person is affecting the process as Vision is granted via their soul and their wish.

II. "I am going with the assumption that they are manifestations of something natural (like a natural phenomenon) in Teyvat and people need to fulfill some requirements of the “system” to make one manifest and lock onto their conviction indefinitely, even after the person’s death."

Yes, they're manifestation of something natural i.e. the moon fragments in people's hearts.

III. "I concluded from that, that Conviction is obviously one of the requirements, the most important one maybe even."

Yes, the wish is what constitutes conviction.

IV. "Visions resonated with the Irminsul Fuits that contained the memories, dreams and desires of the people that died a long time ago, which made me convinced even more that conviction and Irminsul and Visions are all connected."

Yes, most likely due to the fact that if Irminsul is the Wheel and Gnosis are the spokes of the Wheel, then Visions are the power that spins the wheel just like Ashikai said.

V. "why they do not disappear or more like why they keep existing even after the original person who triggered their manifestation dies."

Because they need to fulfill their purpose. That may be "harvesting the power" and possibly "re-creating the moons from harvested moon fragments".

VI. "And if we assume souls are elemental energy because they store memories, then it further drives home the idea that Visions are not instruments that give you the ability to use the element. It just amplifies the ability that existed but was so weak that was virtually unusable without an amplifier to provide the assistance in utilizing soul’s energy."

Considering Ashikai's video this sentence was correct. I just didn't know at the time that the "ability" was "fragments of the moons in form of dust" and that Vision amplifies it but is also directly related to it because Visions are manifestations of soul and will (wish).

VII. "From what Venti said we could also conclude that Visions are crude in comparison to powers that Gods wield."

Visions being "crude" to Venti also makes sense now, because Heavenly Principles and Moons governed over fate. Then moons got shattered and the fate power coalesced in human hearts which by proxy "ruined HP's functions" taking away the fate power from HP. Then HP created Gnosis as a backup plan to shield the world and distributed them to the Archons and possibly tasked them with sharing parts of their Authority in form of Visions (which are more a version of the Moon Wheels) in order to possibly "harvest the moon fragments". But Venti as an Archon is himself a fragment of the Thousand Winds - Istaroth who is one of the shades - Shade of Time. His power is not the same as Istaroth's but to him Visions are probably a child's play in comparison to powers of the Shades and people related to them like himself which means that Archons such as Venti don't really need Gnosis to use their powers and at best Gnosis is either only an amplifier or a symbol of their status, while Vision is a more rudimentary version of such amplifier too.

The Chinese name for Delusions, 邪眼 Xié Yǎn, “Evil Eye”, is a nod to their name for Visions, Visions (Chinese: 神之眼 Shén Zhī Yǎn, “Eye of God”).

Similarly, in English, the term “vision” can be used for both the literal ability to see, as well as the experience of a divine or otherwise supernatural appearance. A “delusion,” meanwhile, is a false belief that is propagated even in the face of facts, or the state of being deluded.

But is this how the Delusion actually works?

We don’t know their power source, but we know they come from an Archon and that their powers are related to “Archon residue”, which means that Delusions are tied to Celestia through the Archon powers as they derive from there.

We know that Tsaritsa gives Delusions to her chosen ones and that their power is far superior to the power of a Vision granted by other Archons.

Considering the context of Tsaritsa’s “war with the divine” and what we currently know about Celestia itself (meaning that it is SUS and some Gods from that place* destroyed a whole country, because they saw it as a threat and cursed their people to be unable to ever become the threat of such scale to them again, taking their human bodies and their wisdom and taking the ability to gain them again from them), we could say that the power of Delusion is not the power of what you delude yourself with, but the power of what you WERE DELUDED BY. Meaning the promises and loyalties of the divine which in the end turned to be false.

*It’s never actually stated in the Archon Quest if “the Gods” mentioned referred to Archons or OTHER Gods. It is certainly implied by Dansleif’s dislike of the Archons on principle, but his dislike may also come from a different place, like them not attacking, but actually standing by and doing nothing to help.

Bonus:

[Transcript: “Even so, for an ordinary mortal like me, a Delusion is far more practical than a Vision, which one can only get by the grace of the gods”. Maybe because everybody has delusions, not only about Gods themselves, so it’s far easier to get a Delusion than a Vision?]

The mechanic of giving them away tho is the same. In both cases the people who have them are Chosen Ones of the Archons, not just any ordinary person.

Edit: Ok, new trailer for Inazuma dropped, and now we know that Vision = Ambition, but it doesn’t make me any closer to learn what Delusion is.

[moontheoretist]

That's your interpretation not mine. I don't deny that idea of liberation may be co-opted for evil deeds. But Sith Code doesn't do that.

Sith Code never mentions how people are supposed to interpret the "strength" or "power". Because it's a code. This code just like a poem doesn't provide the interpretation, it let's you interpret it as you wish. And Sith as a society were often steeped in conquest and fighting even before Dark Jedi conquered them and literally enslaved them and stole their Dark Side powers so it was easy for many Siths to insert meanings that weren't actually there into the text based on their own biased understanding of what "strength" and "power" mean. At the same time, others may have read the same code and be like "wait a second, there is nothing about carnage and murder or that others need to be subservient to you there" and interpret the text completely differently because - wait for it - someone can understand strength and power as knowledge. Or any other concept unrelated to the ideas of domination or oppression of how you put it "selfishness". Though I personally have an issue with demonizing selfishness. My issue is that it's demonized also when someone is justly selfish in order to protect themselves from others by setting boundaries. There's no distinction made between when being selfish is good and when it's bad. No, people see selfishness as inherently wrong when it isn't so simple. (Han Solo is a type of character that only does good for selfish reasons and we don't give him issues for that because he does good deeds).

[SWTOR actually explores it well with it's Darth Imperius / Darth Nox system. You can be a Sith that follows the Light Side but also still uphold the Sith Code - then you are named Darth Imperius because the good of the Empire and its people is more important to you than your personal goals, meanwhile Darth Nox is the Sith following Dark Side who cares more about their own goals rather than the Empire and its people's well-being. Both could be forms of selfishness as even LS Sith could do good purely for selfish reasons and goals. Selfishness is not inherently a concept of evilness people think it is is my point. And neither are ideas of strength and power as we do see them as noble and good when they're given to heroes who save the world.]

My critique of Gaider is that he wrote the code wrong.

If he wanted it to be actually about the oppressive ideas then he did a piss poor job in expressing it in the text of the code. The text is too vague and broad thanks to what anyone can take away anything they want from it, even spin it into a very positive liberating message. If he truly wanted it to be like the Mein Kempf he should have made it less vague and use words like "conquer" and "oppress" and "subdue" and other words that we would associate with fascist regime ideologies.

Meanwhile code never states if it's about an individual or a group. You can read it however you want because it's just THAT vague. And to me and some other marginalized people who live in oppressive countries it reads as a liberating manifesto rather than the "one seizing power from others in order to probe himself the ultimate ruler". There is not even a single word in the Sith Code about that. Yes, Gaider is a gay man, he is marginalized like we are too, but he is a cis white gay man, he enjoys privileges many of us queer people don't, and if you look at the state of the world right now you will see there is a group of gays and lesbians trying to chop everyone else of us off as if we were some disease. They got drunk on their own privileges and don't understand many things. And this is exactly the same type of issue that made Gaider NOT see that he wrote Sith Code as freedom manifesto rather than oppressive ideaology he wanted it to sound as. You can't after all liberate yourself from an oppresive system without strength of will and power to do it. Mein Kampf is very clear in its messaging and Sith Code to be an actual bad people code should have been very clear in the message too. But it's very much not. It's very neutral in fact.

I'm not saying Siths are good. I'm saying code was written wrong and in its current version has potential to span an entire faction of LS Siths who interpret the code in vastly different ways than the other Siths.

And that issue stems from David Gaider's racism and lack of understanding of racial oppression and how fascism is born.

Regarding Gaider's "Modern Elves are Partly to blame for their own oppression"

In a conversation with Christina Gonzalez and a few other people on twitter, David Gaider, the former headwriter of Dragon Age, mocked fans of the Dalish. I took issue with his statement and pointed out why people are critical of how he and the other writers handled the Dalish in Dragon Age (while Allan Schumacher of Epic Games had nothing of substance to say in response). The Dalish are nomadic as a consequence of Andrastian societies violently attacking them if they stay too long in one area. The Andrastian Chantry outlawed their religion, making them criminals as a consequence of their faith. Andrastians will threaten the Dalish with violence in an attempt to force conversion to the Andrastian faith. Templars will hunt down the Dalish, and will even torture children. Andrastian elves also suffer from Andrastian oppression as Andrastian humans can massacre all of them, down to the children in an orphanage.

Gaider postulates that one could discuss how the ancient elves were "partly to blame" for their enslavement (let's keep in mind that being slaves is what he's talking about, even though he's careful not to put that into his tweet) or how "modern elves are partly to blame for their own oppression" which is essentially what we are told throughout the whole of Inquisition and the DLCs that accompanied the game (even JoH tries to romanticize the genocidal tyrant Drakon and place all of the blame on the Dales for the elves not trusting the tyrant who was invading their neighbors, forcing conversion, and massacring the people who would not convert - like the peaceful pacifists known as the Daughters of Song).

Inquisition even rectonned previously established lore on the Dalish in order to have characters like Iron Bull denigrate the Dalish. It's a game that will side-step Celene burning thousands of elves alive in Halamshiral while it will demonize the Dalish for wanting to maintain their autonomy from what's essentially a group of colonizers who want to rule over them and force them to convert, and the white Canadian writers (who are from Canada, a place known for its long history of horrific treatment towards Indigenous people) are firmly on the side of those who think that the Dalish (who, as Gaider himself once said at the Dragon Central forums before the release of Origins, were modeled after "Northern Native Americans") are wrong not to subjugate themselves to white Andrastian rulers.

Andrastian elves similarly face hardships because of Andrastian rule. In Ferelden even the efforts of the Night Elves fighting to free the nation from Orlesian rule didn't the elves any greater freedoms once Maric came to power. The Boon of the City Elf faces a number of dire consequences unless the Warden assumes control themselves as the new Bann. Inquisition ignores the plight of the elves of the Dales entirely to focus on a white human noble as the focus of the storyline in the Dales, and you can potentially help chevalier Michel de Chevin (a white man with blonde hair who is part of the chevaliers, a group who murder innocent elves as part of their initiation rite, although this isn't properly addressed in-game) while Briala's role is marginalized in-game despite being the leader of an elven rebellion across Orlais (and she strangely became white despite her in-book description making it clear she's a woman of color, which accompanying artwork confirmed).

Whether you're talking about the slavery of ancient elves or the 'modern' oppression of Andrastian elves and Dalish elves, I don't see how you can blame either the victims of slavery or the victims of racial (and in the case of the Dalish religious) persecution for the oppression they face. And Gaider doesn't seem to understand that at all, which explains the inherent problems with how the plight of the elves is framed within Dragon Age.

[moontheoretist]

As a short adult with baby face who is often confused with literal kids I simply took her voiceline as hyperbole and her sitting on the books in the livestream I took as reference to very common thinking that for example Napoleon was short and that's why he wore such a huge hat.

It's honestly weird to me that people can accept eternally young 17yo vampire hottie (yes I'm referring to Twilight and Edward Cullen or Dio from JJBA who is eternally 19yo) and have no issue but when a girl is stuck in a young body due to some magical shenanigans they right away start losing their minds and saying it's "doomed ship". I also take it as personal dig against me as a short baby faced adult and also against little people, because apparently when you "look" like a child, despite being actual adult, to some people you "don't deserve love" because your looks alone make it "pedophilia". And it's really dangling on the precipice of racism because for example asian people often are young very long and are also short. I remember last year or two years ago people losing their minds over some random asian woman and her boyfriend because "she looked like a child next to him" despite both of them being adults of the same age. People called her a "pedo bait" and tbh I'm tired of all those people who see pedophilia everywhere in the fandom spaces and ships except where it actually happens - real life.

In any case I feel represented by Cerydra. And it seriously drives me up the wall when people keep losing their minds over that voiceline.

Reserving judgment for the moment on the voiceline they released for Cerydra, because that character model is not and has never been how Hoyo indicates infancy, but I'm kind of losing my mind over people on twitter thinking that Cerydra is somehow referring to Mydei--a person who won't even be born for another near-1000 years after Cerydra's time. Or that "to trade burning pain for a crown" makes sense as a reference to the person who... very specifically rejected his crown... 🤔 (Not to mention the whole "The son of Gorgo will be crowned in blood" isn't even about the Strife coreflame and certainly wasn't Mydei's "curse" or his "payment" for taking said coreflame...?)

Even Tribbie is a stretch, as Tribbie's curse was very much not "eternal infancy" and was instead about "withering away to nothing," with each fragment of herself ultimately expending their energy until there's literally nothing of her left.

Isn't it just more likely that Cerydra's character archetype is "highly dramatic" with archaic and/or lofty speech, and that what she actually means is just that she took the coreflame and ended up not aging anymore, exaggerating her own appearance to be that of a child because it bothers her that she's short? Couldn't she honestly just be saying "If getting a titan's power means I gotta be baby forever, idgaf," with the "baby" being very obvious hyperbole because she's called impressive titles like "Imperator" while being tiny? (This seems in keeping for a character that rules entire nations while having to carry a stool around to reach heights...?) Or, if the curse really is some form of "infancy," that it could be meant figuratively, as in "You must maintain the innocence of childhood in order to be the judge of others"?

Personally, it seems unrealistic to me that Hoyo would tank two yuri ships in the same patch cycle with "actually a child while the other is an adult" (unless there's some new dev with a really gross fetish or something...), so I am indeed puzzled by the wording of the voiceline, but seeing people make a mockery of the game's actual lore while going "God, why does everyone else's reading comprehension suck so bad" is absolutely sendingggg me. 😂

[moontheoretist]

Becautiful, absolutely stunning. 1000/10 I have seriously nothing more to add, because everything was already said better than I could.

Well maybe one addition xD

"I don't think he hates being their crown prince at all. I think he would never give up the position unless he was 110% confident that his people were ready to lead themselves or that someone else could truly and completely rule them better than he could."

I read this sentence and immediately thought about the trial of Strife when Mydei offloads the trial onto Phainon because he fears he will succumb to the madness just like Nikador, but at the same time due to th coreflame of Strife being inherently related to rulership of the Kremnos, he in metaphorical way also offloads the duty of King onto Phainon. Only for Phainon to fail and Mydei having to confront the idea of kingship once more and rejecting it alltogether (which I was hoping he will do the entire patch, people trying to make him king against his wishes was seriously so annoying). Hence why it's so sad that after that he is forced to literally go to war and be a sun devoured by the darkness and separated from everyone. Lonely gazing in the direction of Okhema where he actually wants to be - with his friends.

Mydei: Legend, Reality, Agency

A while back on Twitter, I saw an excellent thread going around about how so many in-game sources of information on Mydei tell his story as if recounting an ancient myth, an unreal epic tale of a fictional hero, rather than a "real," existing being. (Thank you to @ruby019x for finding the link to the thread!)

Reiterating the point of that original Twitter thread: Unlike the other Chrysos Heirs, whose stories get treated as contemporary "real" events or whose tales are told through their own perspectives, almost everything we know about Mydei is framed through the filter of third party observers, resulting in a character that feels less like a person than a myth made flesh. Mydei's story doesn't come across as the coherent timeline of someone telling us true events--it feels like a jumbled, highly exaggerated account that might spread as rumors through word-of-mouth, or, more accurately:

It feels like storytelling.

The way Mydei's backstory and all of the sources of information we have on Mydei in-game unfurl in contradictory and overwrought manners has the ring of a legend passed down through generations, losing and gaining details over time, being misremembered, aggrandized, and taken out of context, until the heroic figure at the core of the story no longer has a human identity but has transcended to become a mythological figure, real history fading into romanticized narrative.

Mydei isn't a living, breathing "person," he's the untouchable "king of kings," the "greatest conqueror, the mightiest protector."

Overall, this storytelling effect is very apparent, in virtually every source of information we have about Mydei throughout the game:

Mydei's character stories are all third party accounts of his actions and past:

Phrases such as "legends state," "rumors swirl," "the author boldly speculates" etc. abound in Mydei's character stories, making it clear that all of the information contained in them is suspect at best--these are others' perceptions of him and the events of his life, not his own perspectives on what occurred.

Unlike virtually every other character in the game, instead of Mydei's character stories being a chance for players to get to understand Mydei's inner world, to see him from his own perspective, we're given this strange distance, these observations from "outsiders" who clearly fail to grasp who Mydeimos is as a person or real his motivations. In one character story, Mydei's own advisors struggle with their complete lack of understanding, questioning his decisions and rewriting his actions as being "bewitched" by Aglaea and the Flame-Chase Journey, instead of genuinely committed to the cause:

There's even confusion and speculation among fans about who wrote the handwritten notes at the end of each of Mydei's character stories. Are these Mydei's notes, answering the accusations, setting the records straight, and adding his own personal perspectives at last?

While I'm still somewhat inclined to say these are Mydei's notes, the fact that these notes are supposedly from books "in the archive of the Library of Garbaniphoro"--a library this lifetime's Mydei shouldn't actually have had any access to--definitely complicates that reading, not to mention that Mydei doesn't seem to demonstrate the level of self-interest that would drive him to look up and read a bunch of books about himself in the first place...

The fact that we fans can't even fully tell whether these notes were actually written by Mydei or by someone else--such as Khaslana, seeking accounts and histories of the person he cared for, trying to set the record straight even in timelines where his blade would eventually spell the end of Mydei's life--is just another hallmark of the confusion surrounding Mydei's life. In practically every moment, we're still not sure if Mydei is speaking for himself or not.

Mydei's chapters in "As I've Written" continue this exact same trend, giving accounts of his life through third party observations, rumors, and questions:

"They say," "others guessed," "rumors rife," a "wild tale," and literally "the protagonist"--this isn't a first person account of Mydei's backstory, his own thoughts on his situation, or his true life's timeline. It's a dramatized retelling of events through the lens of outsiders looking in, turning a "person" into a "protagonist," making him a fictional character in his own life (this is very meta, by the way).

The mission and journal text throughout Amphoreus's plot, even all the way from 3.1, also echo this, with second person point of view instead of first person, emphasizing Mydei's title as if that were more important than his personhood, and dictating his feelings as if they're "absurd," not earned or valid, while mission text in 3.4 paints Mydei as a completely overblown figure, a larger-than-life myth:

Even NPCs, particularly the Kremnoans, often speak of Mydei in this way, as if he was not a person but a figurehead, a symbol they are rallying behind, rather than a human being with challenges, hesitations, and thoughts of his own:

The end result of all of this together is that Mydei comes across much more like a fictitious character than nearly any of the other Chrysos Heirs. Is he a lingering hero of the Chrysos War one thousand years in the past? Is he the re-embodiment of the spirit of Kremnos itself, son of both "Queen Gorgo" and "Gorgo, the Founder of Kremnos," as the game so likes to conflate? Is he a conquering tyrant, the king of kings, an embodiment of the sea, the Guardian of Amphoreus, the beloved crown prince of his country or the patricidal traitor?

Even in the meta sense, we players struggle to separate fact from fiction, leading to the sensation that all along, Mydei's single "story" has actually been multiple stories, at least two different timelines interweaving into a jumbled, incoherent past full of made-up events that couldn't have occurred, contradictions, and out-of-context plot points coloring even the player's perceptions of Mydei and his past.

And all of this, I think, is very intentional.

If you were to ask me "What's is Mydei's real role in Amphoreus's story?" I think the best answer to that question is: Mydei's role in the story is a commentary on the nature of storytelling itself.

The theme of storytelling is essential to Amphoreus's plot, with the "As I've Written" text being treated as the core model for each character's memory-identity that the Trailblazer is inscribing and bringing with them into the past (and therefore also the future) of Amphoreus. The idea of storytelling and narrative is so central to Amphoreus that the entire plot effectively revolves around it: The Flame-Chase Journey, and therefore the entire core reveal of Amphoreus being a simulation instead of a real world, is tied to Plato's allegory of the cave, itself a story about people who believe facsimile (their shadows cast by flame on the cave wall) is reality--in other words, a moral about mistaking narrative for truth.

It is only by rejecting the false reality--breaking free of Irontomb's simulation--that Amphoreus's people can become "real," escaping the digital unreality to enter the actual universe. In essence:

It is only by escaping "fiction" that one can embrace "true" existence.

But there's a second layer of the moral quandary: If the fiction is more beautiful, more entertaining, and more glorious than reality, would it be better to stay in the story, to turn your back on reality and just be the heroic protagonist of a fairy tale epic?

The game itself asks us to confront this idea:

"Do you care how true a memory is?"

Mydei is a walking, talking manifestation of this exact theme. Are we actually supposed to care how accurate his backstory is?

If Mydei is just meant to be a narrative symbol of kingship, of guardianship, of Strife, then does it really matter if things about his past do not add up?

If Mydei is a pure stand-in for the concept of "the mythological hero," do we really need his timeline to make sense?

Is an aggrandized, dramatized recounting of his past and deeds not perfectly in keeping with the way every mythological hero's past is told?

Consider our real world heroes of yore--Beowulf, Odysseus, Gilgamesh--do any of them feel "real"? Do we think of them as actual historical figures who lived and died like we do, or are they larger-than-life heroes whose actions are all so fictionalized and exaggerated that they never could have happened in real life? Do we understand our heroes as sentient, three-dimensional existences? Do we know their thoughts, their feelings, their struggles outside the narrow confines of their legends?

Or do they exist just to be morals, role models, symbols?

In fact, there is evidence suggesting that many mythological figures like Gilgamesh and Beowulf were real kings who actually lived in our real world--but we will never know the true stories of those men, because their truth has been entirely consumed by narrative.

Fiction eclipses fact.

We take the shadows on the wall to be "truth," and never see the real world beyond the cave.

Mydei's story is a microcosm for what is happening in Amphoreus's plot as a whole, a concentrated example of what occurs when memory becomes "blurry or gets idealized."

It's a pointed commentary on the nature of storytelling, because you never tell the exact same story twice. Over time, as you recall the tale, it changes, minute details being washed away in favor of remembered generalizations, hyperbole, and shifting interests. Every person who retells the story, every new perspective on the original material, brings their own agenda to the table, further altering the original until it barely resembles what really occurred.

As Trailblazer and Co. struggle with the question of how to make Amphoreus real from the memories we have gathered--and whether we want to recreate the world accurately or pen a different, much happier ending--we see that same struggle play out in miniature through Mydei, whose true life and true voice are being subsumed in before our very eyes by myth, by legend, by others turning him into a convenient symbol or source for their own speculation.

Through Mydei, we see the dangers of what can happen when memory becomes "beautified," capturing fiction rather than truth.

But more than its reflection on his overall role in the story, I think there's a fascinating side effect of choosing the concept of "storytelling" as Mydei's central theme: Writing him as a character whose real thoughts and feelings are eclipsed by other people's perspectives puts Mydei in a position normally occupied by female characters in media--the position of having to fight for agency.

(Before I go any further with this point, because the Star Rail fandom has literacy issues, let me doubly clarify: I am not talking about the experiences of actual real world women here [although they do often reflect fictional women's experiences]--I am talking strictly about the roles and struggles stereotypically assigned to female characters in media. If you can't keep that context in mind, stop reading here, because I don't want to deal with pancakes-and-waffles people who think saying "Media frames X as a feminine trait" is equivalent to saying "Real people can't be feminine if they don't experience X." PLEASE.)

Okay, with that out of the way, what I mean is this:

One of the most common experiences of female characters in media, especially in media written primarily by men, is being unable to speak for themselves. The stories of female characters are often told almost exclusively through the lens of their male protagonist counterparts, and female characters are often given less interiority. Even in cases where female characters are able to express their own individual thoughts and feelings, those thoughts and feelings are often dismissed in favor of others' interpretations. ("Oh, so you actually mean ____" or "You don't really feel that way.")

Because Mydei is a character whose role in the story is defined by his truth being eclipsed under mythology (his actual thoughts and feelings hidden behind the game sharing only the perspectives of outsiders), he also effectively becomes a character who does not speak for himself, willingly or not.

Obviously Mydei's character stories are perfect proof of this, locking us out of his own inner world by giving us almost entirely the views of others, one of whom even rejects the very notion that Mydei could be exactly who he is, saying "There's no way such a person could exist," no way this would be real behavior, no way Mydei could be an altruistic and kind person:

The "As I've Written" chapters double-down on this notion, stating multiple times that Mydei is "a man of few words" who rarely conveys his thoughts on any matter. He is repeatedly described as "going silent." Worse, even when he does convey his thoughts, others find his words to be "absurd" and abandon him:

Hell, even Mydei's marketing materials get in on this impression:

But this trend towards silence happens outside of Mydei's written materials too. Over and over again, the game puts Mydei into positions where other people tell him how he should be thinking or feeling. It isn't that other people are always wrong about Mydei's feelings, but that the game consistently frames Mydei's emotions through other characters, rarely letting him be the one to express himself.

It happens with Krateros numerous times, but most clearly in the memory fragment after Mydei kills his father, where Krateros literally tries to tell Mydei what he's supposed to be feeling and how he should react to what just happened:

It occurs with the Chrysos Heirs several times, such as Tribbie telling Mydei how he should feel after Phainon's failed trial (no, I'm not blaming Tribbie here; she didn't do this maliciously):

We even see this happen with Phainon, who ends up interpreting Mydei's feelings on Mydei's behalf:

There's actually a running joke throughout 3.0, 3.1, and Mydei's "As I've Written" about other people (read as: Phainon) acting as historian in Mydei's stead, to speak about his past on Mydei's behalf, instead of Mydei sharing his own perspective on Kremnos's culture:

In 3.1, we get to see a Mydei who struggles to articulate his own thoughts and find the "right' words, and a Mydei who is keenly aware of the many times his thoughts fall of deaf ears, when his words fail to move the people he truly needs to persuade:

And nowhere do I think this futility in speaking for himself is clearer than in Mydei's highly symbolic relationship with language itself. It's no accident that Mydei "rarely speaks his native tongue" and the Kremnoan dictionary is jokingly referred to as "blank":

Since Mydei is synonymous with Kremnos, we can say that the game's refusal to let him speak much Kremnoan--and the game's refusal to let the Kremnoan language speak for itself--is equivalent to Mydei's inability to express his "true" self on his own terms. The emptiness of the Kremnoan language, though played as a joke, also effectively mirrors Mydei's silence as a character. Just as Mydei does not embrace his native language, he's not comfortably able to express the things he wants to say as a whole.

But how are we actually supposed to interpret this silence?

Is Mydei being spoken over or is he just choosing not to speak? Is this solely a case of Mydei making the mature decision not to respond to others' provocations, not to lower himself to deny false accusations? Does he just want to keep all his feelings hidden deep down?

I think you could easily interpret Mydei's constant returns to silence, interpret the game's decision to have all of his story told through others, as an example of classic "manly" stoicism, a male character simply refusing to be vulnerable or speak his true thoughts or feelings out loud. Maybe we could argue that Mydei simply doesn't see the point in telling the truth about himself, because he knows people will invent their own stories anyway.

But... to be honest, I think the framing is a little different with Mydei. He's not actually that stoic or detached from his feelings. In fact, he's frequently rather candid about his emotions, significantly more so than Amphoreus's other primary male characters, Phainon and Anaxa. Although he rarely speaks his own inner thoughts, Mydei readily tells others (namely Phainon) to stop trying to hide their emotions, and in 3.1, he does actually try repeatedly to share his personal concerns, frustrated by the irony that his own language supposedly doesn't even have words for the things he's feeling.

While he is certainly reserved, Mydei does not seem to ascribe to the toxic idea that men should never express their feelings, and he doesn't aggressively hold his cards close to his chest. I don't get the impression that Mydei wants his life to be eclipsed by rumors and others' distorted, biased perspectives--I don't think he really wants to be silent.

In fact, in several moments across 3.0 and 3.1, Mydei tries quite hard to articulate his true wishes and thoughts... only for others to talk over and dismiss what he is saying.

We see this happen even all the way back when Mydei was a child, trying to express his dreams:

As a joke, this happens during 3.0 with Phainon, who "translates" Mydei's lofty way of speaking for the Trailblazer into different (inaccurate) words during their journey through Kremnos, even at one point going "Yeah, to be honest I have no idea what Mydei's trying to say either. Let's just move on."

We see it happen in 3.1 with Aglaea, who (for her own valid reasons) refuses to acknowledge Mydei's feelings about the coreflame of Strife, writing his reservations and fears off as "foolhardiness and indecision."

We see this happen even with Chartonus, who questions why someone like Mydei would be "terrified" of fulfilling his destiny, only for Mydei to struggle to explain the depths of his fear of losing himself to Strife.

"Why wouldn't I be terrified?" he says in 3.1, only for literally everyone to ignore him.

We see this happen with Krateros and the Kremnoan elders, who both explicitly scold Mydei for acting like a submissive (read as: stereotypical impression of femininity) prey animal instead of an dominant (read as: stereotypical impression of masculinity) predator.

I've written about this elsewhere, but this is the direct rhetoric that feeds into Mydei's "As I've Written" story based on the proverb "Until the lion has its own historian, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." This proverb directly targets the duplicitous nature of storytelling, where one side of the story often gets told and the other is forgotten--clearly intertwined with Mydei's case, where the truth of his story goes untold in favor of the other side's perspective, where predator and prey are switched, and the lion becomes the victim, not the victor.

In fact, Mydei taking this supposedly "prey" role (serving another's cause, where his wishes are a distant second to the wishes of others), becomes one of Eurypon's foremost complaints when Mydei is confronted by his father's ghost: Mydei is the kind of person to quietly support others (a role stereotypically given to female characters), which flies directly in the face of Eurypon's near constant attempts to project himself and his own violent, "kingly" emotions onto Mydei.

So, all together: A character whose actual feelings are dismissed, downplayed as too emotional and not befitting his station, who finds his words falling on deaf ears, who is perpetually projected upon by the men in his life, and is constantly having his thoughts interpreted by others on his behalf instead of getting to be his own "voice"?

It's literally the quintessential fight of female characters across centuries of storytelling, and Hoyo deciding to assign this conflict to what initially appears to be one of their most stereotypically masculine figures in the entire game is fascinating, because it changes what is otherwise a cut-and-dry story of the prodigal son refusing to carry on his father's legacy into a significantly more complex, gendered reading: What if the son is not intuitively an aggressive, commanding man, but someone who struggles to articulate himself, who despite being able to carry the banner of leadership whenever he must, actually seeks the quiet, supportive role for himself when given the freedom to do so?

When people say that they were pleasantly surprised by Mydei's charcter because he wasn't the macho brute they were expecting him to be, I think what they are actually perceiving is this, the incredible dichotomy of taking the most classic masculine story of all time--son surpassing his father, prince becoming king--and assigning it to a character whose central emotional conflict is, historically, feminine. This is cool! This is really, really unique and cool!

But if all that isn't enough to convince you that Hoyo is doing crazy interesting (and surprisingly gender-nonconforming) things with Mydei's role in Amphoreus's story, then that's fine, because I haven't even actually gotten to the wildest part:

Setting aside entirely whether Mydei is able to speak for himself, the game deliberately and constantly goes out of its way to put Mydei into situations where he has no say in the things that are happening to him, once again assigning Mydei a conflict typically given to female characters across centuries of storytelling: the quest to gain agency.

Despite the game initially framing Mydei as powerful leader and strong decision-maker who could never be swayed by others, a warrior who would fight against fate with his very life on the line, drilling down into his story reveals a character who has effectively had no control over the course of his life at any given point in time, both in a conscious sense and in the meta sense of being a simulation in Irontomb's loops.

From the time of his birth, a prophecy dictated the entire course of Mydei's early life, setting his path in stone in a way that he seemingly couldn't have avoided even if he wanted to. He's thrown into the sea, left with no choice but to fight every day for survival--but even inside the sea, despite actively saving fishermen, Mydei never saves himself, simply staying in the ocean he supposedly despises until... what? He achieves a level of power sufficient to fulfill his future prophecy? 🤔 Later, Mydei will go on to describe his destined clash with his father as merely an "obligation to be carried out"--not something that ultimately made him happy or felt like a choice he was making of his own free will, but a moral duty to avenge his mother, done in the service of her honor.

Even serving as Kremnos's crown prince isn't actually portrayed as something Mydei was ever excited about, something he truly wanted for himself. In his memories, it's his closest friends and Krateros constantly urging him to take up the throne, and it's of course the Kremnoan people as a whole endlessly begging him to guide them in their pursuit of Strife and glory...

Outside of just his thoughts and words, the game constantly shows us scenes of Mydei being told, as the crown prince, how he should act, what he must do:

Essentially, Mydei escaped from the sea and in very short order was thrust into the role of stewardship with little (to no) chance to choose a fate separate from Kremnos. This happens despite the fact that Mydei is personally and repeatedly framed as "the least Kremnoan of them all," a boy who seemingly never grasped the faith of his fellow Strife worshippers. In his flashback with his mother, Mydei's very first question is "Why do we have to learn to fight at all?"--not something a "normal" crown prince of Kremnos would ever be asking.

Yes, yes, before you get up in arms: Of course Mydei loves the Kremnoans and has enormous pride for his people, don't get me wrong. I don't think he hates being their crown prince at all. I think he would never give up the position unless he was 110% confident that his people were ready to lead themselves or that someone else could truly and completely rule them better than he could. All I'm saying is that it's also abundantly clear that Mydei never actually had any say in whether he would become the Kremnoans' leader; that the role was something put onto him from the moment he was born, with fate once again dictating the course of his life.

Before going into the events that take place during the game's actual plot, I also think there's one other major aspect of Mydei's overall character that should be read as a denial of his agency, and that's Mydei's "curse of immortality." 3.2 tried to reframe Mydei's immortality in a weird way that frankly makes no sense (claiming that it was Mydei's choice all along, and that he was the one deciding not to die), but literally everywhere else in the game, it's made pretty clear that Mydei's immortality is indeed a curse, one that he can't be rid of unless he is stabbed in his tenth vertebra, and thus even the circumstances of the end of his life are largely outside his control. Phainon remarks on exactly this when Mydei describes losing all his friends, sympathizing with how Mydei was prevented even from joining his loved ones in death no matter how many times life was taken from him, no matter how many times he sacrificed himself on the altar. (This is why Khaslana's parting words to Mydei in the cycles are so meaningful, because Khaslana is actively choosing to view his violence against Mydei as a way of setting Mydei free.)

Okay, now the more recent stuff: The first time we see Mydei seemingly exercise any form of agency is in making the decision to bring the Kremnoans to Okhema, but from the players' perspective, we ultimately know this is no real agency either: The simulation demands that Mydei join the Flame-Chase--"fate" was always going to guide him to Aglaea in some shape or form. Furthermore, the decision to join Aglaea is framed by literally everyone else in the story as Mydei "submitting" to her authority, Mydei giving up his power to a "usurper," and Mydei being "bewitched," all phrases once again implying an inability to make his own decisions.

This ultimately proves true not long later, when, throughout the first portion of patch 3.1, we actively watch Mydei be manipulated, against his explicit wishes, into taking the coreflame of Strife.

Even though he says he doesn't condemn Aglaea and Tribbie for their manipulations, it doesn't change the fact that Mydei was being manipulated, pushed into a corner by Aglaea choosing to use the safety of the person he cared for as a weapon against him. It also doesn't change the fact that Mydei spends the entire first half of 3.1 admitting to multiple people that he's terrified of becoming the demigod of Strife and having that fear continually dismissed by people who basically tell him to just deal with it, because that's his role in the prophecy and his fears that taking on Strife will ultimately lead his people into meaningless death are really not that important in the grand scheme of things.

3.1 was literally "Watch the entire cast strip Mydei of his agency," the patch.

And then the craziest of them all: Finding out that it isn't just Cycle 33,550,336 Mydei who was struggling with a lack of autonomy but seemingly every Mydei, all the way back to Cycle 0, where he's once again put into a situation where he functionally has no choice but to comply:

In Cycle 0, we're told that Mydei brought the Kremnoans to Okhema and then went before the Okheman Council of Elders to sue for civil rights--literally all he asked for was equal rights for his people.

In return, Aglaea pulled the strings on the situation so that Mydei would lose this duel and she could make her demand of him: Join my emo band Flame-Chase Journey. (Again, nothing against Aglaea, she was doing what she thought she had to do, but damn what a cutthroat way to do it.)

Effectively, in 3.4 we get to once again watch Mydei trade himself to ensure the happiness of others, giving away his own freedom so that the Kremnoans could just have basic equal rights. What the fuck, Hoyo?

This was extortion in real time, right before our eyes.

Hell, Mydei not getting to make his own decisions happens even the game's silliest joke media!

Can't even sleep unmolested, constantly getting dragged around by Phainon? Just shaking my head, for real for real. LET MY BOY BE! 😂

Okay, back to being serious: Overall, Mydei's lack of agency is so consistent and so clear-cut, that even Mydei himself seems to be fully aware he has very little freedom amidst the crippling demands put upon him by his station and his prophecy:

This is why Mydei's decision in 3.1, to dissolve the Kremnoan dynasty, is framed so intensely as "taking back agency for himself," as choosing to make a decision that wasn't aimed at trying to make everyone else happy:

Making a decision that isn't to please others? Oh Mydei, you are so "single female protag finding her independence" coded.

This is framed as Mydei finally getting to make HIS OWN decision, his way to make a better future for his people. We're supposed to perceive this as Mydei casting off the shackles of others' perceptions of him to take the brave step forward and do what he believes is truly right. It's not about making others' happy, but about securing the only real way forward to a future, and the game tells us that Mydei only feels comfortable with his own fate after he's able to make this choice on behalf of his people--not with their permission, but by the virtue of finally finding his own voice.

Except thatttt... the moment you actually think about what is happening here, the illusion of Mydei having free will falls apart, and Amphoreus's cruel irony sets in.

Early in 3.1, Krateros says that Mydei is a headstrong person who always does what he wants:

But as we delve deeper into Mydei's story, it becomes clear that even Mydei's most headstrong decisions (such as bringing the Kremnoans to Okhema) aren't done in his own self-interest or simply whatever Mydei "pleases"--all of his decisions, every single one we're shown in the game, are done in the service of others, doing what Mydei feels compelled to do to fulfill his duty to protect the people he loves. He didn't bring the Kremnoans to Okhema just because he personally wanted to--he brought them there because he believed that was the only way to save them. He didn't join the Flame-Chase Journey of his own free will--it was just the only path to secure any future for his people at all.

As I've written before, even this decision in 3.1 (to dissolve the Kremnoan dynasty, take up the coreflame of Strife, and go home alone to fight the Black Tide) wasn't actually for Mydei himself.

In fact, it flat out runs contrary to Mydei's most deeply held personal wishes. Mydei didn't want to become Strife. Mydei didn't want to return to Kremnos's ways and spend every remaining moment of his life at war. Mydei was seeking a home to call his own--a land to finally belong in--and then had to give away all the peace and happiness he'd found in Okhema as his final gift to his people:

The decision in 3.1 doesn't actually represent Mydei gaining complete agency over his own decision-making or finally getting the freedom to pursue his own personal dreams--it's once again a decision he was obligated to make by his own unyielding sense of honor and his (admittedly noble) sense of responsibility for his people.

The fact that Mydei's decision to become the demigod of Strife still doesn't represent agency becomes doubly true with the reveal in 3.4 that all of Amphoreus is a pre-determined simulation, running on rails, with Mydei himself being a programmed figure unable to deviate from his assigned path. Every major decision simply leads down the same exact road that was decided eons ago: Mydei was always going to become the demigod of Strife. He was always going to leave Okhema. He was always going to die to Flame Reaver's blade.

The decision to return to Kremnos and take up Nikador's role is presented initially as Mydei's free will--but all along it was nothing more than playing into the "prophecy," playing on the side of the Black Tide and Lygus's goals. Mydei's character arc in 3.1 revolves soooo intensely around exercising agency, only for us to learn in 3.4 that he never stood a chance in the first place. (If this sounds familiar to Phainon's arc, that's because Mydei's arc is literally Phainon's arc, by the by.)

Ultimately, having the benefit of multiple patches of story now, we can look back over Mydei's current contributions to the plot and see the truly fascinating dichotomy of his character.

On the one hand, Mydei is a hyper-masculine character with a design that unquestionably insists on his identity as a man. A surface-level examination of his character presents a quintessentially masculine archetype: the wayward son, rejecting his father's shadow, growing into a role of stoic, solemn leadership, suppressing his own grief and loss to unwaveringly fulfill his duty as Chrysos Heir, prince, and king.

The obscured, hyperbolic retellings of his past paint him as a "hero of eld," an unmistakably male mythological figure akin to Achilles, Odysseus, or Gilgamesh.

Mydei refuses to be or even see himself as a victim, returning time and time again from death, stronger and more full of the wrath needed to survive in an apocalyptic world. Even when he has no freedom to actually make his own decisions, he does keep trying. He keeps fighting, endlessly, to make himself heard and to try to break the shackles of his fate, situating him firmly in the (traditionally) masculine figure of the "warrior."

But despite all of this exterior masculine trapping, Mydei's core inner conflicts are surprisingly feminine (that is, they're struggles more typically given to female characters in media):

Over and over and over again, we watch others speak for Mydei, rather than Mydei truly getting the chance to speak for himself. We're denied access to his inner world by the "they say"s and the "rumors rife," every single person getting their chance to weigh in on Mydei's story but Mydei.

In real time, we watch other characters dismiss his fears and hesitation as "foolishness," and interpret his feelings through their own lenses, without Mydei stepping up to correct them. We get to see Mydei struggle to articulate himself and make others take him seriously. People constantly tell him what he should do, what he shouldn't do, how he should act and how he shouldn't... His central conflict is explicitly centered on his fears of being unable to please everyone, and his ultimate role in the story is one of sacrifice, giving and giving and giving of himself to aid others.

One of the most common complaints about the roles assigned to female characters in media and one of the core litmus tests used to determine whether female characters have agency is the question "Does the plot happen to this character or do they drive the plot?"

The truth is that, for all his raging against the dying of the light, Mydei is a character who has things happen to him, rather than actually getting the chance to freely exercise self-determination in Amphoreus's plot.

So, so, so much of Mydei's character revolves around seizing back agency in a world that seeks to control every aspect of your existence--and this a story that has been told, time and again, with female characters. That's not to say that it's never been done with male characters before, of course it has, but that there is something incredibly interesting about making "finding your voice in a world that dismisses your feelings" the plot for a (supposedly) hyper-masculine character in a gacha game with a primarily male target audience.

Mydei, by all rights, should be one of the characters with the most power and most agency in all of Amphoreus. He's an extremely strong warrior, a kingslayer, a god. He's ripped, he's got a wicked heavy metal gore-filled trailer... On paper, he's "Man" with a capital M.

But Hoyo chose to do something more complicated with his character. They chose to do some truly interesting play on the question of autonomy, placing a Hero (also capital H) into the stereotypically restricted, silenced role where female protagonists have so often been relegated in the past, then left us players with the disconnect and discomfort of watching a male character be so bound by the expectations of others that even his greatest moment of defiance and free will turns out to just be playing into the hands of yet another person oppressing him.

Like so many female characters have in the past, Mydei doesn't get to be a "real" person with fully examined interiority. The game denies us this by insisting on his story being told almost entirely through the perceptions of others, by obscuring the truth of his past in a fog of confusion, by Mydei making the choices he is compelled to by duty and loyalty, not those that truly match his own inner wishes and dreams.

Mydei almost never gets the chance freely express his thoughts, have his feelings validated, or reclaim his freedom of choice from the systems exerting pressure on his life. The lion doesn't have its own historian, and we only get the truth of Mydei from Mydei himself in brief and barest flickers.

At the heart of Mydei's story lies a fascinating conundrum that creates a truly intriguing and layered character--all-powerful and yet powerless, hyper-masculine and yet voiceless, a myth more than a man.

Say whatever you want about Amphoreus's plot, pacing, etc., but geez, Mydei is a cool character.

[moontheoretist]

I want to jump in so I will definitely stretch this post further haha.

So to answer some of @kyogre-blue's stuff:

I. I'm happy that I'm not the only one who is losing their mind over the fact that potentialy Khaslana was trying to hack his friends on top on trying to hack Irontomb. I lowkey considered that it could have be yet another potential reason why Mydei's backstory is so fucked up lol.

II. Yes, 12 factors mean that there are always 12 signals that become the demigods and turn into Titans in the next cycle. BUT it's not true that it's always the same signal. Mydei's signal name is most likely Polemos600 (Phainon's character story lists it) and he is assigned as Strife's demigod by the system. BUT Gnaeus of the previous cycle was not Polemos600. He was Leoreia300. The same is true for Anaxa who is SkeMma720, while Calypso was Minphia14. The signals are always connected because Gnaeus is the Titan and Mydei is the demigod and the signals were split into corresponding factors that need to compete and take over each other. They're NOT the same, but represent the identical factor of Strife / Romance / Reason etc.

Archive 03: In the 7,091,231st cycle, emulating the concept of Paths, electric signals were split into two entities. Signal data was preserved as gods for the next cycle, and a competitive relationship was set up against its identical factor, thus achieving evolution and iteration.

III. Castorice according to logs is the instance of a signal duplicating itself. Polyxia and Castorice were not supposed to exist. But they did. Either both being EpieiKeia216, or Castorice being EpieiKeia216 while Polyxia has a different codename (in this case we don't know the codename). The reason for why it's weird is because Polyxia DID deviate from the simulated path she should have taken, she rejected the idea of Castorice dying, and when the new cycle happened and she became Pollux the Dragon of Death i.e. Thanatos she REVIVED the signal that SHOULDN'T exist in this cycle and that signal was instantly assigned Death factor by the Simulation (latching onto it early, I guess simulation was like "why should I make new when this works too"). It also ended with Pollux bringing Castorice to the world of living, dying and literally screwing the idea of death in the entire simulation (which is the actual confusing part because game can't pick if Amphoreans are immortal, age and die or not, I'm still confused if they only die from being killed by Titankin and Black Tide monsters, what type of immortality they had (i.e. ancient Greek gods could be killed as their type of immortality was like "I live, never age, but can be killed if you know how or have a weapon that can kill me" - which usually meant "can be killed by fellow god or demigod or an artifact) and what the fact "there was no death in this world before the Black Tide descended" means when literally the entire Styxia is overflowing with water from Nether Realm and souls of the dead because Pollus while dying literally fell and blocked the only way into the Nether Realm, while at the same time being killed by the Black Tide meant losing your soul / memories and never going to Nether Realm in the first place i.e. not being able to reincarnate... make it make sense).

In the later stages of iteration, the Death Titan, as a single entity, split into symmetrical selves, becoming two factors. In this cycle, however, the two factors experienced profound identity divergence. The threshold of Equilibrium was breached and tipped toward Destruction.

[Reddit even has a venn diagram.]

IV. Polyxia and Castorice were definitely not trading, because like I said above there were many Era Novas before the one in which we meet Castorice, and each had different set of signals undergoing the whole Flame Chase journey and we know the idea of Era Nova existed since cycle 19,110,218, but supposedly Chrysos Heirs never achieved autonomous Era Nova (i.e. without any external help, which I assume would be Lygus) for the next 10 million cycles because the first occurence of the autonomous completion of Era Nova happens in cycle 28,371,272. The Phase 2 of the experiment ends and then Phase 3 starts at cycle 28,371,274. We know several cycles were archived and the last one that we know the number of was 28,371,292. We don't know how many cycles passed since that cycle till Phainon and Cyrene's cycle. We only know that we are past 28 million cycles of the actual simulation when Phainon and Cyrene's "last" cycle happens. Theirs was supposed to be the end of the experiment so I guess phase 3 would last a bit too before signals were perfected in the way Lygus wanted as even tho they're always different signals and different people, some transfer of data occurs making every new batch of signals better than the last. (Think of it like signals having babies without actually procreating xD) But then Cyrene goes "fuck you Lygus", does Uno Reverse and on top on those 28 million cycles, she and Phainon (using power of Fuli's Remembrance - this is how they reset the loops (and I insist on calling them loops because calling everything "cycle" gets confusing very quickly) of Eternal Reccurence using power of Remembrance that Cyrene borrows from Fuli every time Phainon uses "power of destruction" to destroy Time upon which "Fuli records the story of Amphoreus" - which is confusing because it suggests that every new Cyrene of every new ER is also already the Time itself despite the fact that only the ER0 Cyrene became the demigod of Time). So there were millions of Chrysos Heirs fullfilling the roles of 12 demigods by this point, not 2 batches constantly swapping places.

3.5 trailer addition:

(And this doesn't even address how Evernight is ALSO Time. And how there seems to be 13 coreflames and Cyrene may have the 13th one).

V. With Phainon being in 2 places at the same time for ERs tho it's always the same signal Neikos496. It's just it's always Khaslana ERx and Phainon ERx+1 so they're the same signal but also different version of the same signal because it comes from different ER loop. It wouldn't be possible for actual cycles I think because simulation wouldn't be able to have 2 Neikos496. One of them would always turn another signal codename or simulation would turn them into twins as well and either give them the same codename and avoid the glitch by yeeting one into new cycle or assign a new codename (which would be then the exact same issue as Castorice and Polyxia). In any case even in ERs they "merge" at some point so there is always only one Neikos496 by the end of every ER loop.

VI. I have no idea what Phainon / Khaslana is doing but I think that his interference changes things significantly. So even if we assume he wouldn't be ever able to stop signals of Mydei and Hyacine to be born, his interference still means that simulation is not running as it should and is experiencing glitches, to the point that nymphs are being born and literally fuck with us. (I can't every time they become kaomoji and throw some wild breaking the 4th wall sentence).

VII. I agree they changed their mind on FR presentation because he keeps popping randomly, doing nothing for extended periods of time, then randomly swapping how well he talks from first talking semi-ok, then not ok, then semi-ok again to evetually go back to broken in 3.4, which lowkey excludes ever-progressing corruption and seriously I need someone to fix it.

VIII. I agree with @starcurtain that Khaslana after a certain cycle just chose to be a nuisance for the sake of the plot and that is very in character for Kevin Kaslana expy not gonna lie lol. Phainon is always lowkey following Kiana Kaslana's fate, while Khaslana / FR is always following Kevin Kaslana's fate (which may mean that we will get our puppy Phainon back in next patches but Khaslana will just die).

Detangling Mydei's Backstories Backstory?

My last post, casting doubt on 3.2's revelation that Mydei's immortality is deliberate on his part, led to some interesting discussion in the comments that definitely reinforced my earlier thoughts that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are too numerous to be accidental. Star Rail is not known for its flawless continuity (Robin and Sunday's backstory, I'm looking at you lol), but usually the inconsistencies are not so overt, and repeated so many times, that they become central to the entire plot of a character.

So I wanted to refine my earlier theory a bit: I'm cautiously optimistic that there are enough signs that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are deliberate, and that the Mydei of the current cycle in Amphoreus is actively experiencing an entanglement between two different timelines, without (yet) consciously recognizing the incompatibility of his own "memories."

When we work from the standpoint that the events of Mydei's backstory can be separated into two distinct timelines, the inconsistencies vanish:

The "Sea of Souls" Timeline

This is the most prominent timeline, and the one that appears most accurate for "our" Mydei. In this timeline, Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as a tiny infant and spent the first nine years of his life there. This is confirmed both in the flashback we're provided early in 3.1, as well as in Mydei's voicelines and character stories.

After nine years, he crawled out of the sea (possibly motivated by witnessing Tribbie's "star" in the sky). On the same day (or very near it), he met with a band of Kremnoan exiles.

Whether this was a larger group already, constituting a small "detachment" army of exiles, or just started with the five exiled friends and Mydei then grew into a small army by picking up other exiles over time, is still unclear. However, at this point, Mydei makes no mention of returning to Kremnos and instead goes straight from "leaving the sea" to "living ten years in exile:"

This is the key point of inconsistency between the two "halves" of Mydei's story--either he lived in Kremnos or he didn't. We can handwave here and say "Yes, he returned to Kremnos with his friends and they just hid their identities, leaving Kremnos years later in a self-imposed exile," but the story gives us absolutely no indication that this realistically could have happened. Mydei never once mentions hiding his identity, changing his appearance, or living a double life in the city, and never explains how he would have had access to the inner city of Kremnos ("as befitting a crown prince") and the royal library, yet still go totally unnoticed by his father or anyone loyal to Eurypon, including Krateros. (There's also no explanation at all for why he would have wanted to return to a city ruled by someone who tried to murder him and where he would have had to live life under a fake identity just to get by, but you know...)

Instead, the game does give us several pieces of information indicating that the five Kremnoan exiles did not return to Kremnos after meeting Mydei:

First, Mydei's character stories confirm that Mydei deliberately hid his name while traveling in exile across Amphoreus, indicating that he knew he would be recognized by Eurypon/Eurypon's loyalists if he didn't hide his identity. This awareness suggests it is extremely unlikely that Mydei could have returned to Kremnos without being identified:

This also suggests that, at this point in this timeline, no one in Castrum Kremnos knew for sure that Mydeimos had survived being thrown into the Sea of Souls and returned. This is further confirmed by a memory fragment where Krateros says there has been a "rumor" that the leader of the exiled Kremnoan army is one who "defied death." Krateros alone makes the assumption that this could be Mydei and decides to defect to aid him:

This memory suggests two things clearly: Mydei was not living in Kremnos at the time Krateros defected, and the exile of all of Mydei's friends must have taken place before they met Mydei, years in the past, as there is no way an entire small army could have been exiled from Kremnos, with Mydei in toe, and not at all attract Krateros's attention until after they were gone.

The idea that Mydei never returned to Kremnos is further enforced by Eurypon, who did not recognize Mydei when he confronted him, to the point that he didn't believe Mydei was even Kremnoan. This suggests that Eurypon not only didn't know Mydei's true identity--he'd never seen him before at all, making it extremely unlikely that Mydei was walking around Castrum Kremnos, talking to Chryseus Leo, and reading in the royal library all under some false identity for years. Eurypon certainly wouldn't have been capable of exiling someone he'd never seen before from Kremnos, in any case!

Therefore, we can assume the series of events in this timeline is pretty straightforward: Mydei entered the Sea of Souls as a baby, came out nine years later, went straight into a life of exile with his five friends, amassed power and support for ten years, and then returned to seek vengeance on his father.

The only remaining question in this timeline becomes "When did Mydei join up with Okhema?"

I think, in this timeline, it makes the most sense for Mydei to have only joined up with Okhema after killing his father. In 3.1, Mydei confirms to Phainon that all his friends died before he was able to kill his father, and that none of them ever made it to Okhema:

Therefore, the final order of events for the more prominent timeline is:

Dumped into the sea as an infant, nine years in the Sea of Souls

Ten years in exile with his friends amassing strength and support

Returns to Kremnos, kills his father, and the last of his friends dies that day

Then he defects to Okhema, leading any of the Kremnoans willing to follow him there.

By itself, this story makes perfect sense. If this was all the information we'd been given, there wouldn't have been any gaps.

Unfortunately, we also have a whole other set of information that massively conflicts with these events, which can only really be explained two ways: Either Hoyo messed up (again) and really dropped the consistency ball when it comes to writing Mydei's backstory... Or there's an entire separate timeline going on. Personally, I'm leaning toward the latter, because there are just too many seemingly deliberate fingers in the story pointing toward the inconsistencies for them to feel entirely unintentional to me.

Therefore, I propose that Mydei's memories are actually getting infiltrated by a second, entirely different timeline:

The "Gorgo Lives" Timeline

From 3.0 all the way to 3.2, we're given numerous pieces of information that point to a wholly different order to the events of Mydei's life, contrasting the story that Mydei tells Phainon in the Garden. At first, these events seem scattered and nonsensical, contradicting the "main" timeline in too many ways to be anything but errors... But when taken as a whole, we can build a second coherent timeline out of these events if we make one assumption: There is a timeline where Gorgo lived longer.

In the second timeline which is intruding on Mydei's memories, there appears to be one key point of divergence: Gorgo did not die dueling Eurypon. Either she never challenged him to the duel, or (more likely) she was never successfully poisoned, and therefore it's possible she won the duel, allowing her to rescue Mydei from the sea.

Working from that possibility, a second complete timeline emerges:

Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as an infant but did not drift there for nine years. Instead, he was rescued and brought back to Kremnos, where he was allowed to grow up in the inner city, with access to both Chryseus Leo, who served as his teacher, and access to the royal library, which he is proud enough of to call "his" library. He is able to lead Phainon and the Trailblazer around Castrum Kremnos even in its ruined state because he grew up there, spending enough time there to know the city like the back of his hand:

This is where we can slot in the inconsistent memories Mydei has of Gorgo:

(By the way, although Mydei writes this scene off as a dream, you can actually hear Oronyx's whisper play in the black screen seconds before this "dream" occurs...)

But okay, let's say this is just a wishful dream. Maybe this scene never happened. If all we got of Gorgo supposedly raising Mydei was this moment in 3.1, I might agree that it was just a dream (other than there being no reason to play Oronyx's sound effect there, but you know). However, in 3.2 they then hit us with this:

That's multiple moments now pointing to a timeline where Gorgo raised Mydei. Once is handwave-able--twice? That's deliberate.

In this secondary timeline, Mydei appears to have grown up as Kremnos's beloved crown prince, being warmly embraced by his people (at least until Kremnos fell into calamity). Apparently his days consisted of eating pomegranates, training for combat, playing with Kremnos's kids, and hanging out with his five friends. We see snippets of this idyllic life (along with his five friends appearing to be roughly the same age as him--something that likely wouldn't be true in the "main" timeline, by the way) on Mydei's long march back into Castrum Kremnos:

I know some people took this to be Mydei hallucinating or just wishfully imagining a life where he was able to be happy with his friends, possibly even some metaphorical "encountering the souls of the departed in a paradise," but I don't think this is true. Every single time Mydei phases in and out of this "hallucination," the visual effect and the sound effect of Oronyx are distinctly played--the exact same sound and visuals that play when Trailblazer activates Oronyx's prayer to jump between timelines.

Mydei himself doesn't seem to quite understand what is happening to him in this moment, as you can hear him stumble and pant as he repeatedly goes through flashes of Oronyx's power. You can listen to comparison video clips on the prior post I made about Mydei's backstory.

Furthermore, if we work from the assumption that these moments actually represent a rupture between timelines, then the rest of the inconsistencies can finally be cleared up:

In 3.0, Mydei says that his choice to leave Castrum Kremnos was not a forced exile but a "self-imposed" one:

And this aligns with what he stated in the Garden of Life to Phainon, that he and his friends "left Castrum Kremnos" to go into this self-imposed exile, rather than having never returned to Kremnos from the sea:

Furthermore, this also aligns with the angry NPCs in the past version of Castrum Kremnos that Trailblazer and Castorice travel back to:

Remember that this version of Castrum Kremnos was supposed to be occurring while Eurypon was still alive, so there is absolutely no way this line makes sense in the same universe where Eurypon didn't even know Mydei had survived. There isn't any way, in "our" timeline, that Mydei could have been both the "crown prince" of Kremnos for these NPCs and completely unknown to his father, the king.

These NPCs, furthermore, directly accuse Mydei of "deserting Kremnos," suggesting that Mydei was living in Castrum Kremnos as their prince, and then abandoned them to join Aglaea in Okhema, getting himself and everyone who went with him labelled as "traitors to Kremnos" in the process. None of this makes sense in the context of a timeline where no one in Kremnos knew he had even survived.

Instead, all of these elements point to a different sequence of events:

Gorgo lived, likely winning her duel and thereby (likely) giving her the right to save Mydei from the Sea of Souls and bring him back to Kremnos. He was raised by his mother as the beloved crown prince of Kremnos. Then, years later, as his father and Nikador both descended into full madness, Mydei and the Kremnoan detachment defected.

But what would have triggered this sudden need to defect after years of leading Kremnos as a well-liked prince?

The flashback between Mydei and Eurypon actually suggests a possible reason:

Apparently, at some point, in some timeline, Mydei knew about Eurypon's plan to break Nikador's divinity into separate parts and seal him away, harnessing the power of their titan for himself.

Yet the Mydei of 3.0 seems to have no idea about any of this, never able to give any explanation for how Nikador has degraded so much nor why Nikador is seemingly unkillable. Castorice, Mem, and the Trailblazer have to come up with the idea to go back in time to the past Kremnos by themselves, because Mydei never makes any mention of there ever having been a plot to break up and seal away Nikador's divinity, even when they walk past the very blades that did the sealing.

Finally, there's one last piece of conflicting information: While talking to Phainon in the Garden of Life, Mydei states that all of his friends died before the detachment could ever join up with Okhema and that all of their deaths occurred by the time he went to kill his father. But this conflicts with the NPCs above, who state that Mydei had already defected to Okhema and joined the Flame Chase Journey as a Chrysos Heir while his father was still alive.

This inconsistency is further reinforced by a memory fragment with Krateros, who confirms that Mydei had joined up with Okhema already before killing his father:

Putting all of this together, the complete series of events for this second timeline becomes:

Infant Mydei is quickly rescued from the Sea of Souls, is instead raised by his mother, and grows up as the crown prince of Castrum Kremnos with his five friends.

At some point, years later, he discovers Eurypon's plot to break up and imprison Nikador's divinity, and he and his friends and supporters defect from Kremnos as a result.

Either they go straight to Okhema (I'm inclined to say that "ten years of wandering" doesn't fit, chronologically speaking, into this secondary timeline) or they do wander a bit, but ultimately, Mydei reaches Okhema and aligns with Aglaea before killing his father.

After aligning the Kremnoan Detachment with Okhema, Mydei returns to Castrum Kremnos to kill his father, possibly to halt Eurypon's evil plan to harness Nikador's power.

At some point in this timeline, presumably before Mydei returns to kill his father, Gorgo likely still dies (possibly killed by Eurypon and/or Nikador), which explains why the Gorgo in the Sea of Souls seems to be the one convinced that she raised Mydei.

And this is just pure personal speculation, because there isn't enough evidence to really confirm it, but I almost feel like we can even pinpoint how/when the whole decision to defect to Okhema took place. At the end of Mydei's flashbacks to the "peaceful" Kremnos, Peucesta says that Mydei has been away from Kremnos for a while.

Leonnius assumes that Mydei was away on some apparently extended training trip, but this moment specifically ends with Gorgo welcoming Mydei home and asking him one very important question:

Obviously these lines are doing double duty, symbolically welcoming the present Mydei back to the ruins of Castrum Kremnos and asking him whether he's finally ready to take on his role as the "Guardian of Amphoreus." But as the wiki notes, this takes place in a flashback to the past, and for the "Mydei of the past" (aka the Mydei of the alternate timeline), this could very well have been Mydei disappearing from Kremnos to make contact with Aglaea in Okhema, and Gorgo questioning him about his decision to commit himself to the Flame Chase Journey, leading up to an ultimate and permanent defection from Kremnos. (This is just speculation though, trying to tie the last few loose ends together.)

Anyway, when taken from this perspective, that there are two separate backstories here, one from a world where Gorgo lived and the more prominent one where she died, we can sort all the seeming inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory into two surprisingly tidy and complete timelines.

I haven't yet found anything in any Mydei scene that doesn't fit one of these two scenarios, so I'm starting to definitely feel optimistic here that this writing was intentional, and that the "contradictory" backstory we're seeing for Mydei isn't "the worst continuity Star Rail has served up to date," but instead an actual deliberate choice to present us with a character whose memories are a hodge-podge of two divergent timelines, snippets of one timeline constantly erupting and "filling in the blanks" of the other.

I think this would be a fascinating way to lead up to the idea that Amphoreus's world isn't real, that it's a cobbled together story or set of memories that someone is barely holding together, and that it's constantly cyclical in nature, with events repeating with slight variations across times. The idea that Mydei is actually experiencing two different sets of memories crushed together into a tangled jumble and that he's only just now starting to become aware of the discrepancies would be such an excellent way to reinforce the "unreality" of Amphoreus's plot as a whole.

I really hope this is the direction that they take the story... Or at least that I won't one day be looking at all my Mydei posts and sadly thinking to myself that I put a lot more thought into the character's backstory than his own writers did, RIPPPPP. 😂😂😂

Cope with me, people!

[moontheoretist]

my thoughts during the 3.0 quest

also phaidei nation where you at???? did not expect to ship these two so hard but they're giving me so much brainrot we love our dumb jock rival boyfriends

[moontheoretist]

Comparing Aventurine's "Keeping Up With Star Rail" to Mydei's is so funny because

Ratio: 🥺👉👈 D-Does he like me?

Meanwhile...

Phainon: I would like to confirm, for the public record, that Mydei and I fuck.

[moontheoretist]

the funniest thing about phaidei for me

[moontheoretist]

Feixiao! 🔥 commission for HSR