#also the leaks are saying the archon will be more spainard-adjacent? which- fucking hilarious if so

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

Archon war anon

On Xiao being from Sumeru/Ashikai's video on the Yaksha - I actually came to the conclusion on the possible connection between Xiao and Sumeru on my own, before I saw anyone else talk about it because I've only really started looking for more theory stuff as opposed to just fic recently. It was pretty validating to see other people drawing the same conclusions! I actually originally drew a connection based on remembering the Aranara and their thing with dreams, and it was when I went back to check my sources that I remembered that all three of the Sumeru gods we know about had something to do with dreams. Even if Xiao is connected to Sumeru though, I don't think he's from Sumeru because Sumeru doesn't really seem to have the framework for the kind of beings that adepti are?

Also, as someone who's studies real life Indian religions, Sumeru really does have a lot of non-Indian influence, and even some of the parts where there are more explicit references to Indian stuff honestly feel kind of off?

yeah, even if there's interesting connections there, whenever i've considered the xiao-sumeru link it's always ended up in my mind as "maybe xiao's master originally came from sumeru" rather than "xiao is from sumeru", for mostly the same reason as you mentioned, yeah,,,

i'm not knowledgeable enough on india's culture or religion to really comment on the sumeru things, but even i can see that the desert is mostly egyptian, and i've seen people pointing out the different inspirations for some things, so like- it did always seem to me like sumeru was the hodgepodge of arabian/arabian adjacent stuff, fontaine and mondstadt were a bit more of a focused-still-kinda-hodgepodge of certain european countries, and then like. japan and china all on their own lmao