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whos-the-seme · 4 months ago

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okay but I kinda need read a fic where Shen Yuan is wife plotted (AGAIN) by some random papapa plant (dammit Airplane--) and he basically falls into a floating coma or something. on a hunt for some rare herbs with liu qingge, he's lured by the sound of his Binghe's (his lost little lamb) voice and ends up ensnared.

okay, imagine that he's being held high in the air by these vines, just asleep, and nothing can wake him, even after liu qingge cuts the monster plant down to get him. he's just sleeping, rosy-cheeked, unwakeable.

peak lords panic, and start trying to figure it out what this rare plant is. sqh wracks his brain somewhat and somewhat remembers this plot line.

they come to the conclusion that its the everlasting dreams flower or some shit. basically traps the victim in their dreams while it sucks out their qi until the person dies of dehydration/starvation or qi loss, whichever kills them first (sometimes, its not the latter, and if the person is a cultivator, they can last a while before their qi is fully drained enough that they can no longer practice inedia but also haven't died yet). meanwhile, the person won't even care because their dreams are so sweet, that they don't want to leave.

the only way to cure it? true love's song. someone who truly knows and loves the sleeper needs to sing something from the heart, and if it's pure enough or something, it can pierce through the pleasant dreams of the person and wake them up. yqy and lqg instantly become flustered, but both of them can't help but secretly wonder how it would feel to have Xiao jiu/shen-shixiong wake up at their song.

they confer with the rest of the peak lords a little outside of shen yuan's resting rooms on the Qian Cao peak, and yqy decides to sing a little lullaby he used to sing to Xiao jiu when they were still on the streets. he goes in, his voice is a steady but a bit nervous, but he croons that shit out. airplane can't believe his fucking ears. yqy could honestly be an idol its not fair wtf-- only, sqh knows he can't dance to save his fucking life, so.

when yqy finishes, he waits, but his heart sinks when Xiao jiu doesn't so much as stir. he hurries out of the room but sqh notices how the tips of his ears are red in embarrassment. of course, even when he still had his memory, Xiao jiu wanted nothing to do with him, why did he think it would change now, he just--

lqj goes in next. he murmurs a song that he constantly hears sqq sometimes strumming on his guqin, thinking that means sqq must love the song. he's not sure what else he can do, he doesn't know how to sing from the heart, but the feelings he has for his shixiong... he has to at least try to wake him.

he doesn't wake. lqj walks out in defeat.

airplane who has been wracking his brain all this time because he was trying to think of requirements for awakening so he wasn't paying attention suddenly jumps up. he doesn't mind the startled glances that the other peak lords give him.

he just remembered!

the song didn't have to be a romantic song or anything. the love for the sleeper didn't have to be romantic love, at all! he remembered this plot line that he added about binghe trying to wake one of his wives, but it was one of the wives' sisters that woke her, because she truly loved her sister deeply. causing binghe to realize that his love was becoming shallow, in that it wasn't enough anymore or blah blah blah. he scrapped that plot line and that plant after he got a ton of bad reviews for even suggestion that lbh's love (pillar) wasn't big enough and so he had lbh fix it with papapa, but whatever!

he shivered.

anyway, the story has been so warped over time that its only told that it has to be a romantic lover. but it didn't have to be.

he had an idea. he loved Shen Yuan! despite the rocky start, their shared transmigration and experiences led them to form a closer relationship, and Shen Yuan was his best friend. he knew him wholly, both in his bitchiness of Cucumber-bro of their old lives, and in the snarky-masquerading-as-pretentious SQQ he was in their new lives. He knew him as a whole of Shen Yuan, not as Xiao Jiu, or as the original goods.

and also, both he and Shen Yuan had discovered they both liked some similar songs during one of their weekly private meetings a few weeks ago, while Shen Yuan was there under the guise of planning their eventual escapes, but was actually just drinking up all his wine and ransacking his snacks.

he's got this! (he hopes.) (he would quite not like his bro to die from an unwakeable coma.)

confidently, with incredulous stares following him, he walks into the room and sits at shen yuan's bedside. and proceeded to sing, as smoothly as he could, a vocaloid love song. if nothing else, it might shock Shen Yuan awake to hear a random ass vocaloid song in his dreams. the lyrics are actually pretty sweet and soft, but he can't stop imagining the music behind it, making it funnier than it should be to sing it.

[Shen Yuan, whose dreamscape has become completely synchronized to his current living conditions and so he dreams of the serene bamboo hut: *sitting at his table with binghe pouring him more tea* *sudden hatsune fucking miku disturbing the atmosphere*

Shen Yuan: 👁️👄👁️]

while he tries not to giggle as the song comes to an end, the stares of the other peak lords boring into his back from the doorway (he can just hear them thinking, "yqy and lqg couldn't wake him up but you think you can?" but maybe that's just his imagination. or maybe they think the song is shitty, what does he know--), shen yuan's eyes flutter open.

airplane, who didn't think this would actually actually work (though he hoped), gapes at him. Shen Yuan, eyes half lidded from sleep, gazes back.

"uh..."

"The everlasting dreams flower, really? That was a really good plot line, can't believe you, ah," Shen Yuan yawns, "dropped it in favor of more papapa as always, you shitty author." He can't catch a break. Why did he wake this guy up again?

"he's awake!?" multiple voices cry out.

THUMP. yqy has fainted.

they both have forgotten their audience. liu qingge has goes outside to punch a tree. the other peak lords are in various states of disarray, disbelief, and discomfort. liu minyan has appeared out of nowhere to take notes. mu qingfāng rolls his eyes and comes in to check shen-shenanigans's meridians.

"Can't believed that shit worked, honestly," Shen Yuan says, eyeing one of the older disciples try to drag YQY to a cot. he is starting to rouse. "hatsune miku, really?"

"aw! well now you know how deeply and purely I love you, shixiong!"

THUMP. YQY has fainted again.

more sounds of breaking trees from outside. mu qingfāng warily calls out a warning to avoid his good medicinal trees, thanks.

after a while of conversation, with eyes closing a bit once more, from exhaustion, rather than the plant poison, Shen Yuan gives Shang Qinghua a small smile. As his eyes flutter shut again, he says, "I love you too, bro."

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starcurtain · 2 months ago

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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!

#honkai star rail #mydei #amphoreus #amphoreus spoilers #hsr spoilers #3.2 spoilers #character analysis #honkai star rail meta #Mydei's backstory is only a mess if you try to read it as ONE backstory #when you break it into two #it suddenly all checks out lolol #the funnier thing is trying to figure out how Mydei had this much mess in his background #and never noticed that half of his memories don't even add up #bruh please #let's just go with “Memory magic kept him from thinking about it too hard”#It's all Cyrene's fault #yup yup #lol

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