#there is no concrete evidence i'm just tossing stuff at the wall to see what sticks

[herrscherofmagic]

a random thought just occured to me, about honkai star rail

so the aeons are kinda sus because they're supposedly super-duper powerful but we don't even know hold old they are, and some of them seem very young. we don't know when the earliest Aeons were born or how many there are (at least afaik), and yet they have such a big impact on the universe.

and yet Honkai is ancient. like, unbelievably ancient. billions of years ancient.

so what if the entire concept of Aeons and the "system" of Paths was the creation of a civilization that tried to tap into the power of the Imaginary Tree to overcome the Cocoon of Finality?

The Cocoon is already established as its own thing likely separate from Aeons and Paths, and GGZ implies it came from beyond the Imaginary Tree. Meanwhile the Aeons and Paths seem to be tied directly to the Imaginary Tree.

However, there's nothing that suggests any sort of concrete structure or system or consciousness in the Tree- normal worlds grow organically and in order while bubble worlds grow chaotically and erratically.

But... if a civilization (perhaps even a post-Finality civilization like Earth, except much more advanced) tapped into the power of the Imaginary Tree to try and unite worlds to overthrow the "rule" of the Cocoon (for lack of a better term) then that could explain the existence of Aeons. perhaps the earliest Aeons were products of this system and with time the system grew out of control of its founders, becoming an independent entity that now governs "Paths" and leads to the creation of Aeons.

This is complete and utter guesswork without any solid basis in lore, of course. but I do think it'd neatly explain why Aeons are so young compared to the rest of the universe, but also why they're so inexplicably powerful. The civilizations we encounter measure time in hundreds and thousands of years, not millions and billions of years, after all. Furthermore, if Aeons can be "killed" and if we might even have to kill one or more Aeons in the future, it'd be a lot easier to believe that we mortals could achieve such a thing if Aeons were the products of other mortals instead of being fundamentally connected to reality itself.

I think this is plausible especially because some of the acts we've seen Humanity do with the power of Honkai in HI3rd seem to rival what Emanators and arguably even Aeons can do. Like Otto making an entire new branch of the Imaginary Tree, which effectively duplicated planet Earth and created a new worldline branching off of the from the one he's from. Or Project Stigma trying to unite the consciousnesses of billions of people, or the Stigmata which store memories in Imaginary Space and grant power to the Stigma Awakened, storing thousands of years of memories in immortal beings that exist outside of reality itself.

This is insane stuff, and that's from a civilization that's only 6,000 years old along with some inherited gifts from another 6,000-year-old civilization (that ended 50,000 years ago). Humanity alone couldn't achieve these things, but with the power of Honkai they could. So who's to say a larger, more developed civilization with 100s or 1000s of years of experience in a post-Finality world couldn't develop a system that tries to establish governing principles upon the Imaginary Tree itself?

just sayin'