#genshin lore

[cartaglue]

Wesh

[falsehydra101]

Sister of the moon…?

[cookiessncraem]

Barbatos.... or should I call you

ᎥᏕᏖᏗᏒᎧᏖᏂ?

[pastelchaos242]

“Remuria is supposed to represent Rome and Enkanomiya is supposed to represent Ancient Greece-“”

That’s mondstadt, mondstadt is supposed to represent Rome and Ancient Greece

- had a temple where slaves fight to the death

Thats just the colosseum

- a large library that was one day burn to the ground destroying most of the information

That’s just the library of Alexandra

- said library used to be a public bath house

That’s a therma

- are known for their invention and cultivation of wine

Ever heard of vino (that Latin for wine)

- are known for their freedom and fairness

Isn’t that just democracy, something that Ancient Greek was known for

- most people are tutored for general education and high literacy rates

Ever heard of paedagogus, tutors who most people where educated by. Also Ancient Greece and Rome are know for their contributions to literature

- the religion symbol is a cross and is based off of Christianity

Guess who was known to uses crosses as torture devices. Rome. Also guess where Christianity started, Rome.

- has a harsh winter god of the north who goes by name of boreas

Genshin, did you copy the home work of the Greek pantheon? because that is word for word the same as the Greek wind of boreas. Also Rome has a wind god called favonius soooo.

- a very artsy culture that has a special focus on music superficially the lyre

This is a word for word description of Ancient Greece

- started by overthrowing corrupt king

Ancient Greece and the Roman republic founding myth.

- had a period where corruption took over and the people lost their freedom

The start of the Roman Empire

- has festival 15 day long festivals about games and the gods

Ludi romani

- has another festival about wine making

Vinalia

- Has a god that taught humanity how to make wine, loves to drink and sing, helps make the land fertile, very androgynous, has some weird connections to death, And has followers who can and will kill for him

Now dear reader did I just describe venti or Dionysus?

- said wine god is related to phanes

Phanes is ventis grandpa and phanes and Dionysus are distantly related

For crying out loud there god calls himself VENTI, the Latin word for WINDS. And jean’s signature dish is pizza

[razorblade180]

And just like that, we know all the Shades now. INSANE.

[magnanimously-dull]

Bennett’s story in 5.8 is so interesting and sweet, I hope an old ass Archon doesn’t come in and drop lore about the foundation of modern Teyvat and outright admit that they are on a similar enough level to Istaroth that they can fundamentally change fate!

…

He’s behind me, isn’t he?

[kidicaruslover911]

i giggled making this

[yurtgerhz]

Comics about Dottore's memory of Sohreh

TW: a bit of g0 re under the cut

Thanks for reading!

[emilywaters]

Best ripple effects from the genshin 5.6 livestream

KAEBEDO REVIVAL

RAGBRO REVIVAL

Kaeya edit renaissance

Just overall Mondstadt renaissance

Hexenzirkel theories

Our yearly reminder of Alice's international terrorism

This truly was our Genshin Impact 😔✊️✊️

[tignarita]

give me more zhongli and venti lore. what's with zhongli and the moon being in literally everything he does. what's the deal with venti and istaroth. what's with there being no shades in liyue. why is venti such a freak. why are they both so powerful despite their status as archons. was zhongli the geo dragon or a descender. was venti only just a wind sprite or was he more. alexa play sherlock by shinee because oh I'm curious yeah.

[anilyan]

Dahlia is the Nameless Bard reincarnated

My theory is growing... I think Venti got his friend back xD

Just screenshots of my tweets because I'm lazy. Disregard the birthdate tho, apparently in leaks characters always have that date until close to release.

General info:

We can obviously see that he and Venti are close, and very similar in personality and behavior. His leaked party animation even shows Dahlia winking like Venti always does, and that is also associated with having secrets

He holds the book Lost Prayer to the Sacred Winds. That might not mean much since that is basically a book about Barbatos, and he is the Herald... but I have for a long time thought that the unascended version of the book had a picture of the Nameless Bard instead, and called it the Nameless Bard book (people just wouldn't be able to distinguish it from Barbatos through appearance alone). Even seems to have a scarf like the bard, so above I include an old paintover I did about a year ago.

The lines from that book also sound a lot as if they were written by someone who expected to die - which might still apply to Barbatos. I'm not saying that the book was written by the bard - after all, it also mentions the oppression from the Aristocracy, and an Anemo Archon, which didn't exist while the bard was alive. But there are suspicious things there...

Dahlia's constellation is a symbol that is exclusively (I think) depicted in Decarabian's ruins. The closest alternative is Klee's clover.

Disregard the birthdate, we don't know that yet actually. I learned too late that leaks only update it close to the character release.

About Windblumes, the rebellion and flowers:

Other interesting stuff about Dahlia:

[windcarvedlyre]

While I'm at it, have a compilation of depictions of Barbatos. We know Mondstadt's are inaccurate:

but it really takes the piss.

For reference, here's his canon stripper archon outfit as seen in the webtoon and a TCG card:

I'll assume the missing ring things in the last image are an error. And that the TCG looks different for actual Teyvat residents; it would leak sensitive information about gods otherwise. The only difference I can see in the TCG depiction is the wings look more like... actual wings, but gold-rimmed fabric is still either fused with or draped over them.

With that in mind:

Statues of the Seven

Robes cover everything but his arms and face

No adornments on his wings or chest

No fusion of wings and fabric; instead they float a small distance from his back, attached to nothing

No cecilia

'Gateway to Celestia' statue

Outfit shows his figure more, especially his legs

Drapey sash thing over one arm and spiraling around him

Chest adornment but no wing adornments

Wings attached to back; unclear if they're meant to be attached to the fabric there or go through it

No cecilia

Wind, Courage and Wings depiction 1

(aka the fairytale Amber gives us in the prologue)

Outfit halfway between the above statue's and the stripper one

Chest adornment (simplified), no wing adornments

Gold-trimmed fabric over his shoulders extends into points instead of fusing into his wings

Simplified version of right leg sock thing

Left leg bare, no teal marking

May also have the booty shorts

Right arm bare, left maybe sleeved all the way to torso

Body wrapped in sash, maybe more loosely than the main statue

Lower part of sash maybe draped around both wrists

Something (maybe the sash) trails off, green/teal and semi-transparent

Wings have teal tint

Cecilia with green leaves

Wind, Courage and Wings depiction 2

You know. The same book.

Sash gone

Almost his stripper outfit except:

Wings still teal and unadorned, now also transparent

Other inaccuracies from depiction 1 present (no gold trims or teal lights on most of the outfit, though the crop top thing has one now)

No 'tail'

Cecilia leaves still green

Dvalin's story

This is a visual accompanying an account from Venti himself; unsurprisingly it's much more accurate. Some of the discrepancies could be intentional simplifications for the cutscene, but maybe the fact the finer details still don't match has implications about the story's accuracy.

Still lacks many gold trims and teal lights

Teal markings not present

Wings look like inorganic extensions of his outfit's fabric again, albeit with a subtle teal gradient and strange zigzags

Wing adornments finally there but lack spikes for some reason

Bonus: 2021 birthday art

From the official twitter. Faithful to the webtoon design except:

Thin gold trims along borders that previously lacked them

Pattern inside hood

New notches in crop top thing

I'm unsure if this is an overly detailed version of him for fun or if we should consider this his true canon design. The TCG card doesn't really clarify except the neck might have a gold trim:

So maybe?

In conclusion, Mondstadt doesn't know what Barbatos looks like and we might not either. At best some sort of transition from dressing more like his previous form, which happens to have detached 'wings' like his Statues of the Seven:

to the way he dresses now could explain some but not all of the discrepancies. But it's very possible (and maybe aligns better with his character story) that he's been using his current outfit for god business the entire time and all of his depictions are wrong.

Maybe the real archon outfit was the friends we made along the way.

The one constant is they always look like Nameless Bard.

[blood-orange-juice]

So. Remember Dainsleif saying this about ruin guards?

We now know that Khaenri'ahns could create devices that could host the souls of the dead. I think I know how exactly they "resonated".

We've also seen Dottore making a ruinguardesque thing out of his assistant in the manga.

I think it's possible to make an educated guess about what ruin guards are.

[canonical-transformation]

What is genshin lore even about 😭

(CW: unhelpful tongue in cheek. My best attempt at "accurate" but it depends which in game lore you trust.)

Firstly, Teyvat has its own "laws", so write that down.

Among the greatest of these laws is Fate, which the god of wisdom calls "the ultimate knowledge" because we... we don't know the future? Fate cannot be changed; also, Fate can be changed, and subverted, and superceded, if you try hard enough. Fate is inscribed wrITTEN in the sTaRS of the (false?) sky, which seems to be where the Shades live.

Fate is also the Ley Lines, which are memory, which is artifacts; memory is also Ararakalari, which is good for defeating Big Iron Chunks. If you don't have Ley Lines, use a dying angel and a cursed immortal soldier to make your own. If you don't have these, an Alberich will do, too.

Another law of Teyvat is stop trying to make gestalt consciousnesses. It didn't work for King Remus, it didn't work for Rene de Petrichor and his Narzissekreuz Ordo, it didn't work for King Deshret— or did it? Historians disagree on the exact manner of his demise—so no, you may not hire postdocs for your rebranded sentience slurry. For all we know Gosoythoth is a gestalt consciousness. Gosoythoth is of the Abyss. Haborym tells us the Abyss has no innate intelligence, though perhaps it's more accurate to call it a non-sentient animalistic intelligence. There's also the Abyss Order, which doesn't appear to be affiliated with the Five Sinners, but is affiliated with the former royalty of Khaenri'ah, a nation which I am not going to mention again due to commitment to the bit.

Teyvat, everyone agrees, is a continent of seven nations. (Well, seven nations plus an autonomous Snezhnayan protectorate(?) that's really well known for using moon magic or something. But that's a retconned protectorate so despite it probably being the grave of one or more moon sisters, good luck finding any mention of Nod-Krai outside of limited-time events. As Haborym once said: "Oh, them?, yeah, they seem cool. I guess go check them out in version six? There's plot stuff there, and yeah it's a detour that the pre-1.0 roadmap never mentioned but the journey is what matters.") The seven nations are were administered by seven Archons, who each sit on one of the Seven Thrones and each have their own Gnosis an average of one Gnosis. The Gnoses are the bones of the Third Descender. Who was that, you ask? Anyway, the Thrones and Gnoses correspond to the Seven Elements. The fact that there are seven Elements appears to be a historical contingency, based on the political division of the powers of Light back in Nibelung's reign, when he and his seven Dragon Sovereigns once ruled the world.

This was long before the days when the divine envoys walked among humanity.

If the phrase "divine envoys" made you jump in your seat, you have issues. You know who else had issues, eventually? The unified civilisation that once spanned Teyvat: a seeming federation of city states that predated the Seven Archons, containing a mix of humans and divine envoys (angels?). They were created by the Primordial One, who #descended upon Nibelung's dragon civilisation declaring terra nullius and won the ensuing war. TL;DR, they got colonised. (...though "colony" implies an imperial core, whereas the Primordial One was seemingly acting alone. Sometimes eldritch entities just show up in Teyvat from the implied void between worlds, like a cosmic whale seeking magic water. Actual example btw.)

The Primordial One may have been Phanes. (Who? Great question.) Phanes(?) had four shades, including Ronova, who controls death (not to be confused with the Big Dipper star "Beidou"), and Istaroth, who was the moment, who was every moment. (Tellingly, she was Kairos — details on subtleties here.) Phanes(?) and its shades also created the so-called Human Realm, with the subjugated Dragon Vishaps mostly confined to their native Light Realm. There was also the Void Realm, likely the aforementioned void between worlds, some of which is likely the so-called Abyss. Anyway Phanes(?) had a plan for the humanity it had created. It loved them dearly. Luckily the path to temptation had already been sealed, whatever that means.

Everything changed when the Second Who Came arrived. This Second Descender may have been the [artifact leaks] who intended to [artifact leaks] [artifact leaks] but instead [artifact leaks]. Either way, this Descender brought forbidden knowledge: likely just the kind censored by the Shades, but maaaybe the Abyssal kind that killed two gods millennia later.

War was rekindled. Phanes's(?) faction, the eventual victors, quashed heresy with a rain of Divine Nails: a mix between kinetic bombardment and AoE terraforming!curses. Humanity's world got flip-turned upside down. In the case of one Liyue city, literally upside down...... or was it everyone else who got flipped? #specialrelativity Tsurumi got shrouded in a fog of menace., seemingly unrelated to the time loop some millennia later. Sal Vindagnyr got a permawinter, and the princess could not complete her mural even as the priest made his pilgrimage. Byakuyakoku fell beneath the sea, where they invented Greece and child scapegoats. Sumeru's original forests turned to desert. (Speculative: Fontaine got FRIKEE'd, a technical term for getting displaced several nautical miles into the air and not coming back down.) Mondstadt doesn't appear to have been directly nailed but it's also developmentally centuries behind all its peers, as if someone took an industrial revolution setting and then added the blandest medieval fantasy elements to it because BotW comparisons sell.

The ruins of the unified civilisation litter Teyvat and their architecture can be found everywhere — they loved their Celtic knots. For the low cost of some petrified Moon resin that apparently only Descenders secrete, you can poke at their old Irminsul shrines (their Leylines now infested with monsters) for access to the memories within the Leylines.

According to Wolfy, who is a fictional character and also real, the Envoys were cursed in various ways, largely being turned into Seelies: shadows of themselves forever guiding lost travellers home. (According to Fischl, who is also a fictional character and also also real, the kingdom of eternal darkness that is shrouded from the heavens shall eventually re-emerge and punish the wicked usurpers: this is foretold by Fate.) There are various exceptions: Nabu Malikata; Yohualtechutin. The one mentioned by Wolfy is Nicole Reeyn, who is the second-most Seelie coded character in the game because she likes being a good guide.

Seemingly later there was the Gnoses and the Archon War (at least in Liyue and Inazuma) and then there was nobody left who shared the memories of osmanthus wine so dear to Morax, besides the several dozen illuminated beast vassals, in his employ, and also Marchosias, who got Rukkhadevata'd, a term that is the opposite of getting Arama'd. (Arama was an Aranara but then they had to be a worldtree. Rukkhadevata was

More recently, there was the Siege of Poisson. Parsifal was there [citation needed][disputed]. Possibly because of this, Tenoch and Bosacius died soon after, and a whole lot of Hilichurls got made. Stars fell from the skies, and according to the promotional Xbox wings one of them was once the scion of a glorious kingdom.

[murderous-bones]

THIS BOUNTY??? HELLO????

[anotjcal]

how is it that all the kaeya theories we thought we could safely move off the table, that were unlikely to be true anymore, just got put BACK on the table in the past month alone

pierro could be kaeya’s father/related to kaeya?

oh look most recent lore drop shows them having almost the exact same eyes, whereas before we had never seen any eyes that looked like kaeyas!

kaeya could be a time traveller?

not only did the most recent archon quest show that time travel exists in Teyvat, but now he could be from the FUTURE too! (there’s a lot more evidence for that theory besides the latest archon quest, but i recommend other people’s deep dives)

kaeya could be a pureblood?

before, a LOT of evidence felt like it was pointing towards the halfblood theory, but now genshin decided bring up kaeya in a moment that really felt out of left field, almost as if to draw attention to kaeya possibly being a pure blood