#gnoses and gestalts

[canonical-transformation]

I still headcanon the main conceit of Archons as Vibe Checks — that the criteria for Vision elements are "mindless" AI pattern matching based on how Archons make sense of the world.

(see also Seven Prayers to Seven Archons, a vignette collection all about Visions 😇)

And now for something completely different (click for pt 2)

[canonical-transformation]

surely how one gets a vision contributes to which element they get?

Oooh so don't forget the Traveller's Vision story:

"Is it wise to allow a moment's ambition to dominate one's entire life?"

Mostly that's saying the same thing as Chongyun's — the fact that there's multiple goals that a Vision might arrive in response to. But the line also really makes it seem like everything about the Vision—its power, its element—is determined by that exact instant when the Vision appears.

So, strong agree.

I sort of wonder if vision theory is meant to be deceptively simple? Like I remember trying to analyze music videos once and I remember the more I talked the more I realized I was searching too hard for an answer and that the obvious one might be the right one. So maybe it’s the same deal with visions.

Also not sure what the general consensus is on electro visions but I’ve always thought it had something to do with isolation/alienation 🤔 not sure tho, what are your thoughts on it?

i think it’s interesting how you say that, since nahida has a similar voiceline about how complex truths of the world may all just lead to a simple truth (or something along those lines) so you could be right about that 👀

and i definitely agree with you about the isolation thing, most if not all electro characters are outcasts or loners in some way (and often are very misunderstood as well i think)

i guess it’s the vision stories which confuse me the most… i mean surely how one gets a vision contributes to which element they get? right? but the electro vision stories don’t really line up, at least from what i’ve noticed… i can’t really find a common theme or motive tbh

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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.

[canonical-transformation]

Gnoses and Gestalts: Archons as Vibe Checks

(CW: unsubstantiated theory)

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are Celestia, the Second Throne of the Heavens. You have usurped the throne from the Primordial One, laid waste to the civilisation of the Seelies, and now hold dominion over the mortal realm of Teyvat.

Say, too, that you are in the process of carving the world into seven nations, implementing a system of Gnoses wielded by seven Archons, in order to (error: speculation out of scope for this post).

And suppose—to run with the voxel-pixel motifs associated with you, Celestia—that your mind(s) are inhuman, that your neurology and biology are alien to this world, that you look at mortals and terrestrial "gods" alike and see only the mysterious cognition of jellyfish and ant colonies (metaphorically).

Allogenes are, in part, a mechanism for getting 'better' Archons. You intend to allocate Visions to those with the potential to achieve Godhood (presumably Archonhood).

You don't have a grasp on mortal (or demigod or god or etc.) psychology, not nearly enough to run a job interview for a farmhand, let alone an Archon.

How do you do it?

(N.B. For simplicity, I'll be treating Celestia as a singular entity with consistent goals: maybe a hive mind, maybe a collection of seraphim all aligned on the same purpose, whatever. Also let's drop the second-person hypothetical now that we're below the cut.)

Well, the groundwork had been laid: the Archon War was a pretty good start. A vicious free-for-all between all terrestrial powers, resulting in seven clear winners? The War was a well-optimised mechanism for selecting something. (Whatever Celestia's goal was in having seven Archons+Gnoses, we can assume that the War's selection process comports with that goal.)

Now, recall, we're assuming that the hearts and minds of Teyvat are like black boxes. It's easy to comprehend the actions of nations in aggregate, but to inspect, say, Mao Xiangling and conclude that she has the potential to achieve Godhood, that she's worth allocating one of their bounded(?) supply of Visions towards? How do you do that without understanding human desire (or yokai desire or wind-spirit desire, etc.)?

Can a brainwave scan tell you that? Can analysis of the neurochemical mix in a little vertebrate alien's brain tell you, at any given moment, that this person is a candidate for Godhood?

Well, the convenient thing is, you're not analysing vertebrate alien brains from scratch.

You have access to seven entire brains of Archon War winners.

You can't be sure what goes on in the Archons' minds either, but they're structurally far more similar to the mortals' minds than to your own.

So what if you just... compared them?

Imagine "what makes somebody a suitable Archon?" as a question, and these seven Archons are all different but seemingly good answers. Celestia can look at the Archons' minds. How do these minds work? How do the Archons think?

(a pilgrimage[...]; a battle ¶ is the noblest and most eminent in ¶ someday, they will blow towards a brighter future ¶ a very, very long dream[...] the dancing circle ¶ you shoulder the grievances of the world ¶ this is the trust[...] betray it, and you have tainted ¶ my ideals have no stains)

...and once Celestia understood the shape that Archons contort their minds into at the height of their power, it's not too hard an exercise to look out for mortals doing the same.

Moments of self-certain unchangeability. Moments of resistance and defiance. Moments of unwavering idealism. And so on.

And really, how else could Celestia find Vision wielders, if not by searching for people who, for just a moment in time, resemble an Archon?

(❤️❤️ with thanks to @eujean for their recent Visions theory posts, which inspired me to write this up. There's more to say but I think this gives the general idea of this maybe-not-crack headcanon)

Side note: I titled this post "Archons as Vibe Checks" following Peli Grietzer's fascinating account (link) of computational models coincidentally encoding vibes, or aesthetics, or the impression that a gestalt leaves (where a gestalt, approximately, is a collection of things which collectively have more 'meaning' than the sum of its parts).

Side side note: a quick self-plug for Seven Prayers to Seven Archons, which builds upon this theory with 45 standalone Vision stories.

[canonical-transformation]

@ragingcitrustree an (imprecise, underdetermined) eldritch-gods-as-optimisation-process reading of Vision-element assignment

Gnoses and Gestalts: Archons as Vibe Checks

(CW: unsubstantiated theory)

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are Celestia, the Second Throne of the Heavens. You have usurped the throne from the Primordial One, laid waste to the civilisation of the Seelies, and now hold dominion over the mortal realm of Teyvat.

Say, too, that you are in the process of carving the world into seven nations, implementing a system of Gnoses wielded by seven Archons, in order to (error: speculation out of scope for this post).

And suppose—to run with the voxel-pixel motifs associated with you, Celestia—that your mind(s) are inhuman, that your neurology and biology are alien to this world, that you look at mortals and terrestrial "gods" alike and see only the mysterious cognition of jellyfish and ant colonies (metaphorically).

Allogenes are, in part, a mechanism for getting 'better' Archons. You intend to allocate Visions to those with the potential to achieve Godhood (presumably Archonhood).

You don't have a grasp on mortal (or demigod or god or etc.) psychology, not nearly enough to run a job interview for a farmhand, let alone an Archon.

How do you do it?

(N.B. For simplicity, I'll be treating Celestia as a singular entity with consistent goals: maybe a hive mind, maybe a collection of seraphim all aligned on the same purpose, whatever. Also let's drop the second-person hypothetical now that we're below the cut.)

Well, the groundwork had been laid: the Archon War was a pretty good start. A vicious free-for-all between all terrestrial powers, resulting in seven clear winners? The War was a well-optimised mechanism for selecting something. (Whatever Celestia's goal was in having seven Archons+Gnoses, we can assume that the War's selection process comports with that goal.)

Now, recall, we're assuming that the hearts and minds of Teyvat are like black boxes. It's easy to comprehend the actions of nations in aggregate, but to inspect, say, Mao Xiangling and conclude that she has the potential to achieve Godhood, that she's worth allocating one of their bounded(?) supply of Visions towards? How do you do that without understanding human desire (or yokai desire or wind-spirit desire, etc.)?

Can a brainwave scan tell you that? Can analysis of the neurochemical mix in a little vertebrate alien's brain tell you, at any given moment, that this person is a candidate for Godhood?

Well, the convenient thing is, you're not analysing vertebrate alien brains from scratch.

You have access to seven entire brains of Archon War winners.

You can't be sure what goes on in the Archons' minds either, but they're structurally far more similar to the mortals' minds than to your own.

So what if you just... compared them?

Imagine "what makes somebody a suitable Archon?" as a question, and these seven Archons are all different but seemingly good answers. Celestia can look at the Archons' minds. How do these minds work? How do the Archons think?

(a pilgrimage[...]; a battle ¶ is the noblest and most eminent in ¶ someday, they will blow towards a brighter future ¶ a very, very long dream[...] the dancing circle ¶ you shoulder the grievances of the world ¶ this is the trust[...] betray it, and you have tainted ¶ my ideals have no stains)

...and once Celestia understood the shape that Archons contort their minds into at the height of their power, it's not too hard an exercise to look out for mortals doing the same.

Moments of self-certain unchangeability. Moments of resistance and defiance. Moments of unwavering idealism. And so on.

And really, how else could Celestia find Vision wielders, if not by searching for people who, for just a moment in time, resemble an Archon?

(❤️❤️ with thanks to @eujean for their recent Visions theory posts, which inspired me to write this up. There's more to say but I think this gives the general idea of this maybe-not-crack headcanon)

Side note: I titled this post "Archons as Vibe Checks" following Peli Grietzer's fascinating account (link) of computational models coincidentally encoding vibes, or aesthetics, or the impression that a gestalt leaves (where a gestalt, approximately, is a collection of things which collectively have more 'meaning' than the sum of its parts).

Side side note: a quick self-plug for Seven Prayers to Seven Archons, which builds upon this theory with 45 standalone Vision stories.

[canonical-transformation]

it's 🥁 ...

halfbaked Visions theory #855

Hydro and Geo is when deontology. Electro and Cryo is when virtue ethics.

I still headcanon the main conceit of Archons as Vibe Checks — that the criteria for Vision elements are "mindless" AI pattern matching based on how Archons make sense of the world.

(see also Seven Prayers to Seven Archons, a vignette collection all about Visions 😇👉👈)

And now for something completely different:

[canonical-transformation]

I like this a lot, but take Very Great Umbrage at "Dendro is when Neoplatonism".

(CW: no positive alternative proposed)

I see it in how Alhaitham and Kaveh move through the world (what is Kaveh if not someone trying to drag Ideal Forms kicking and screaming into reality 😭), and in Alhaitham and Tighnari's Vision stories.

But the other 8 out of 11 Dendro Vision holders we know of don't have much to do with Idealism (ontological/metaphysical) imo.

Looking at characterisation and Vision stories, we see a pursuit of one's craft for Baizhu and Emilie, though not the pursuit of wisdom for its own sake. Emilie and Rana and Kirara and Collei all have arcs about connecting with others (and that seems to be Yaoyao's whole deal).

And then there's Nahida and the take on "wisdom" she embodies. In short, it's not centred on armchair wisdom..We could look to Philosophies of Praxis for a glib quote—

Praxes bring forth the fruit of wisdom. Practice grants itself meaning, and it is only by treading a path that unites action, speech, and thought that the wise may reach perfection.

—but more directly, I think her comment during Inversion of Genesis echoes this:

Nahida: This is why wisdom alone cannot answer all our questions. We look, we see, and we comprehend, but the question still troubles us.

Nahida: So the answer is not everything. People yearn to find the truth and then conquer the troubles they face.

Nahida: When you give someone the truth, you give them a chance to choose their own destiny.

And then of course the pivotal moments in her arc emphasise finding a place in a greater whole, self-determination (...self-sacrifice), agency, etc.

I think one could make a case for connection + synthesis + symbiosis as major themes in Dendro, and I don't think it maps to Neoplatonism all that nicely.

(also Pyro is when genki so write that down)

I still headcanon the main conceit of Archons as Vibe Checks — that the criteria for Vision elements are "mindless" AI pattern matching based on how Archons make sense of the world.

(see also Seven Prayers to Seven Archons, a vignette collection all about Visions 😇👉👈)

And now for something completely different: