#mad ramblings of a feral tiktok psychic theorist

[travellereon]

Someone probably got to this before me, but I haven't seen it yet, so I'm making my own sassy lil rant post about it!

We know that Hoyoverse is extremely lore conscious. I mean, take a look at the intense rewrites they do for Rukkhadevata's erasure! All of the Sumeru quests come with two versions of any line that mentions her, and they're played depending on whether you have or have not completed the Archon Quest. In all 4 languages, the team built in a hidden trigger that swaps out dialogue, changes voicelines, alters item descriptions, and even renamed a basic inventory item purely for the sake of lore consistency. They didn't have to rename the mushroom! Nobody needed to know the mushroom was named after a deity who didn't exist anymore! The Genshin team did that just for the sake of their world building and lore.

So why are Lumine's flowers still in the opening cutscene?

Lesson time kids

The flowers in Lumine's hair are the Inteyvat, the national flower of Khaenri'ah. That has been established since the main quest chapter 'Memories of Inteyvat.' Both Aether and Lumine will remark on that fact when they encounter the flower in the quest, saying that she's had the flowers since they woke up.

Since they woke up!

Hoyoverse polishes the daylights out of this game to ensure lore remains consistent. Could this really be a mistake on their part? It's such a major moment in the game when your character realizes the significance of the flower itself that I have a hard time believing this is a simple mistake.

The flowers certainly don't appear to change between the opening and the start of the game, not from where I'm standing. If someone can prove me wrong about the flowers being the same, I welcome it. But they really do look exactly the way they do in game from where I'm sitting.

It would be tedious, but they could edit the flower out if they really needed to. Hell, if they still have the full files for the original video, they could remove the flowers from the model in that set and re-render it for an update. They hid an entire trigger to swap out a massive amount of voice lines, written dialogue, lore, and even a useable item's name just to trip it based on where you stand in the Archon Quest. Hoyoverse clearly have the manpower and dedication to change this detail if it doesn't fit with their lore.

Lore and characters are the two big things that separate Genshin from other gacha games. If this truly is a continuity error, a video made before they decided the significance of the flowers in Lumine's hair, why would they not change it?

I'll tell you why!

Because it ISN'T a continuity error!

There's more than the 500 year slumber that we've missed. The siblings were in this world before they were separated. It could be insignificant, but from what we know of Hoyoverse, I'm betting it's not completely so. It might just be an emotional memory that will pop up towards the climax of the story, but it could be even more! It could be days of their time in Teyvat that have a great impact on why the Lost Sibling ended up in Khaenri'ah, and why they view the Archons with such disdain despite knowing Celestia probably forced them to participate in the Cataclysm.

This could be a major lore detail hidden in plain sight.

Now watch Hoyoverse erase the flower in the 4.0 update because that's always my luck