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Canticles of Harmony Let's Play Genshin World Quests
What's up guys! It's your friendly Hoyoverse overthinker Inotia King. As always before we begin I just want to make sure new readers have checked out my older topics which my newer theories are built upon. So for the Genshin ones you can click here. And for the Honkai related ones you can click here.
Following up from last time today's is more lore-based than reference-based. Which sadly is also much shorter too. Stop cheering! I can hear you from here!
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The "great plains beyond the north wind" huh? I've talked about this before but Fontaine being based on France means its history extends back to the Frankish Kingdom following the fall of Rome. This kingdom was also the birthplace of Germany and these two seemingly different countries in the modern day share an origin story that miHoYo has referenced a few times. The north wind is likely talking about Andrius the King of the North Wind and Mondstadt is located in the plains of the north. The silver tree is then talking about the Frostbearing Tree of Dragonspine seeing how that's the only tree we know of smashed into frozen soil. However that's also east of Remuria not north so if we go off of just that it could mean the icy plains of Russia which could also have its own buried Ley Line tree. While not nearly as connected to France as Germany, Russia also shares a few historical cues. I do think though that if anything Snezhnaya can only be linked with Fontaine and Mondstadt through Scandinavian aka Khaenri'ahn ties. France was invaded several times by the Vikings so much so they eventually gave them a region to call their own and then influenced them to convert to Christianity and learn French. Yes I'm speaking of the French Normans which I thought we'd have gotten a shoutout by now in the new Dainsleif quest. (topic coming soon) These Normans then conquered England which is why we have British characters like Wriothesley and nods to UK mythology like Clervie and (Mount) Esus. But even before that the Scandinavians are themselves Germanic people. Finally they also kickstarted Slavic migrations into Ukraine and eventually Russia, heavily influencing them while they were under their control. It's my belief that these references tie the three nations together similar to how Sumeru, Liyue and Inazuma are tied together through China's massive influence on the ancient world.
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Seriously? A Jesus reference? And the gizmo that did it is related to the guy our Traveler daydreamed. Therefore it's likely once again we're getting a Jesus shoutout about the Traveler.
Side Note: And the first of two actually just in this World Quest. Last time I brought up how the music box has tunes based on Mozart's Requiem and one section of Requiem is the Agnus Dei or Lamb of God.
However I should point out that the Gnostic Christ isn't the same thing as the Jesus we're all more likely familiar with. In Gnosticism he's just another Aeon though he was created through all of the other Aeons not just a dyad. He was meant to become the replacement pair for Sophia after she rejected her original pair thereby creating the abomination Demiurge. Jesus is sent to help her right her wrongs which I have likened to our Fourth Descender completing the mission started by our "Sophia" aka Nicole the Second Who Came. In this way I still maintain that our MC isn't meant to be a true Jesus reference just a stand-in just as our Second Who Came clearly didn't create Phanes.
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See I take issue with that. Not the part where Scylla is just a larger Bathysmal Vishap. It's a really weird mutant of one but I can see the relation if I squint at it. I mean it's not like we saw the original Scylla anyway just a conscious memory of it saved in the Phobos. No the weird part is why no new Hydro Dragon could be born if Egeria wasn't freed. It just felt odd right?
Some of you guys know what's coming lol. It's odd unless you had read my theory and then it just feels like a slip of the tongue for miHoYo. A deliberate one though since you wouldn't really put these pieces together unless you knew about the theory and there's still so much in the air that it confirms practically nothing. Anyway in the theory I proposed that Neuvillette was never going to resurrect at all but Zhongli decided to intervene because he wanted to plan ahead in a very long game of his. To that end, he set up another prophecy, the reincarnation of the Hydro Dragon in human form. He then required Egeria to help nurture a love of humanity into the guy just as Guizhong had done for him. Therefore it would stand to reason that this resurrection couldn't happen until such a time when Egeria could be freed so she could then put the pieces in place.
That's really it for direct lore. The rest of the quest was focused solely on stopping Phobos which while fun, didn't really play a role in understanding the greater lore. I suppose if anything it showed that the theories about music having anything to do with the wider world of Teyvat were incorrect. Yes we learned more about the Loom of Fate in Dainsleif's quest but it expectedly didn't have anything to do with Remus and his Grand Symphony or even music in general. It was just another in the long list of misguided attempts at preserving static eternity.
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Speaking of Egeria, we're all likely familiar with the nymph but did you guys know Egeria is also the name of a Christian pilgrim?
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Originally named Itinerarium Egeriae, this book is an account of Egeria's pilgrimage to Jerusalem back in 381AD which wasn't too long before the final division of East and West Rome. Egeria herself is believed to be from Galicia, Spain but there is another suggestion that she may have come from Gallia Narbonensis which is part of Southern France today. She actually converted to Christianity which is why she has the name Egeria. The name would have been seen as pagan at that time. I wouldn't be surprised that this little tidbit of early Christian history made it into miHoYo's research notes as they were figuring out Fontaine's backstory, inspiring the pilgrimage of the Oceanids to her deathbed which could be likened to their "holy land."
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Now my theory for Remus was that he was influenced by the fallen Hydro Dragon who convinced him of his Ichor plan, stripping the souls out of humans and mixing them into the Primordial Sea. In my original predictions for Fontaine, this was the start of it, why Fontaine doesn't have normal humans. Unfortunately as we all saw, miHoYo decided that the Oceanids just happened to want to be humans one day and Egeria just stuffed them full of Primordial Seawater which somehow allowed them to mimic humans in a more believable way than the Hydro Mimics could. I think I pointed out the issues with this already. Sadly miHoYo doubled down on this with the new Artifact Set Fragment of Harmonic Whimsy.
In the Grand Jape piece the story goes that Remus never actually encountered the Hydro Dragon at all but rather Egeria and it was Egeria that gave him the idea to use the Ichor. Now granted I'm usually the first to point out that the older lore starts out with "legend says" which means it never had to be factual. However there are serious implications with this version of events that miHoYo is now committed to. Previously if it was the Hydro Dragon that did this then it fits with what the dragons were trying to accomplish. The dragons under Nibelung hated the Heavenly Principles and as Apep had said, it was Phanes that adored the humans and not the dragons of the old order. In other words a dragon convincing a usurper to screw up the humans is only natural. Remus was a fool for trusting one. However Egeria was supposed to love the humans and especially these humans who she created herself out of her own familiars. For her to have given Remus the idea to essentially kill her humans and then subject them to the torture of the Ichor, lore which is canon as the Sublime Dewdrop mat does not include the words "legends say" in its lore, it hilariously paints her in a very malevolent way lol. This wouldn't be the first time. Neuvillette as I had pointed out before was implicated in creating sick and dying Fontainians because all current Fontainians only started being truly human at the end of the Archon Quest and therefore couldn't have long-standing human illnesses while they were still Oceanids. Even if they had Oceanid illnesses those would have been removed once they were remade into humans. The only way they could have chronic illnesses is if Neuvillette directly gave them those illnesses for some reason. So now miHoYo's essentially vilified a supposedly reformed, human loving dragon and even the kind and loving Fontaine Archon lol
On top of this the new lore still doesn't answer the plothole created by the Archon Quest's explanation. Where are all the non-Oceanid Fontainians?
With the current story, we were told that after the Hydro Dragon fell one of the shining shades created Egeria. Egeria created the Oceanids but one day the Oceanids pined for a human life so she pumped Primordial Seawater into their elemental bodies which somehow allowed them to assume human form. This angered Celestia for some reason and they imprisoned her under the sea and her Fontaine fell to ruin with the combined populations of human and Oceanid human Fontainians forming scattered tribes. Some time later Remus would arrive and conquer the region to create Remuria, continuing the conquest of all the tribes. He was then informed of the prophecy Celestia had cursed Fontaine with and sought Egeria to figure out a solution. For some reason Egeria went maniacal for a second and suggested that he use Primordial Seawater on the Fontainians knowing full well some of them would dissolve. Remus enacts his plan and either somehow the normal humans were also dissolved when Remus did it or they were all already dead by then for some reason. Either way Remus turned most of the Oceanid humans into Ichor and then combined them into the Phobos. In this form they were able to freely inhabit golem bodies. (They also sometimes felt torturous pain of varyingly tolerable degrees? They didn't seem too distraught about it even though Cassiodor did mention it.) Phobos ends up failing because duh and Remuria is destroyed in flood that sends it to the bottom of the sea. Phobos survived and generated a version of Remuria accessed through a painting found in the Faded Castle, the only part of Remuria that survived. The fall of Remuria for some reason convinces Celestia to free Egeria who rebuilds Fontaine with rebels that opposed Remus. Then she sacrifices herself during the Cataclysm, sets in motion Neuvillette's reincarnation and also creates another Oceanid human named Furina to take on her Gnosis in a convoluted plan to fool Celestia and destroy their Hydro Archon Throne. This is to foil that prophecy they had cursed her region with. (but for some reason freed her to continue ruling it instead of you know, Divine Nail go brrrr) By the time of the Archon Quest it is confirmed by the events that there are no more normal humans in Fontaine besides any visitors from other regions. Where did any survivors go? If there weren't any why weren't there any? Was it discrimination and the Oceanid humans genocided them? Were they just unlucky and every catastrophe that occurred happened to kill mostly the normal humans and not the Oceanid ones? Or did miHoYo just forget the part where the original Fontaine under the Hydro Dragon would have consisted of real humans that the Oceanids were envious of? Just like how they likely forgot why Celestia would punish Egeria for creating those humans by sealing her away and cursing all of them but then suddenly decide to release her to rule over that cursed region even though they continued to curse it.
Sorry for that tl;dr review of the lore. It's become a fun pastime to summarize with all the plotholes on full display lol
While the plotholes are fabulously left unresolved this new information does reconcile one thing. Focalors' Divinity said that she spent so much time underwater contemplating how to resolve the prophecy that she was growing barnacles. She wouldn't have had enough time for that if she was just promoted to Archon following Egeria's death because immediately after her ascension she set up Furina as Egeria's successor. But as Egeria, she would have been imprisoned by Celestia underwater for a very long time with nothing better to do than figure out how to bypass their prophecy. She likely would have grown barnacles and those barnacles would have grown barnacles in that time. So that at least is resolved though because it confirms that "Focalors' Divinity" must refer to Egeria herself. The Focalors that's supposed to be a separate Oceanid being that Egeria selected and ascended to Archon didn't exist long enough to have done what she said she did. Furina existed for exactly five hundred years as shown by the Archon Quest itself and Egeria died in the Cataclysm that happened five hundred years ago.
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There's one more thing that Petrichor gave us. We actually heard about Mecantre and Babisse a long long time ago back in the very first Evermotion Mechanical Painting event in v2.8. I had picked it out then that they were supposedly working on space travel. Since miHoYo had been promoting Star Rail stuff recently, even derailing the Archon Quest's story with space related stuff it made sense they would progress this little footnote from long ago. And especially with the addition of Bossuet now this research might actually go somewhere. At least the companion World Quests seem to suggest as much. Honestly back then I was intrigued that space travel would be a thing in Genshin's medieval and early industrial age but I really hope they don't just use it to push Star Rail onto us.
Side Note: Fingers crossed because anachronistic tech is hardly new to Genshin. Mondstadt's developing sonar and rifled mortar rounds while Snezhnaya's Katheryne models are far more advanced than even the robots we have today!
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Finally when everything's said and done you have the Daydream World Quest where you catch up with Garcia and the aforementioned Mercantre and Babisse. This is where we get what I think is the best version of the Hive Mind plot in fiction. I brought up the versions I didn't like back when Sumeru was new and we had just gotten Alhaitham's quest. I already brought up how Boethius in this World Quest was following in the footsteps of Deshret, Remus and Rene right? The thing all of them had in common was the idea to pool everybody's consciousnesses together and preserve it in that state for all eternity. One of the prerequisites for all of these plans was to remove individuality. That was also the problem with the Akasha and then later on with both Nahida's and Alhaitham's quests when some yo-yos decided to continue the work of the Akasha with the term hivemind even coming up directly in the latter. These are bad interpretations of the hivemind. It shows the weaknesses of having a connected intelligence network without intelligent users. The Akasha suppressed the awareness of Sumerans so the sages could keep them under control. Beynuni preyed on people's desires and escapist tendencies and Siraj made the network only work towards his goals both of them keeping the rest of the hive under their control.
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So now we finally get the good version. In the quest we find that a previously self-serving investor Grundeland has seen the error of his ways. The reason he did was because of having been connected to the Phobos network, experiencing life from the eyes of a devoted Remurian. As a result he was able to re-evaluate his own life and wanted to repent.
I tend to compare hivemind stories to StarCraft because of the Protoss. If you read up on the Protoss backstory you know there was an event called the Aeon of Strife following the Xel'Naga abandoning them. During this long period the Protoss fell into constant civil war. That is until Khas found the Khaydarin Crystals and connected to the Protoss psionic network, their hivemind. After that he set out to connect all the surviving Protoss and this hivemind allowed all of them to feel empathy, to see each other's thoughts and feelings. This ended their civil war. It's practically the same thing that happened to Grundeland. (StarCraft didn't end this hivemind plot well though lol)
Anyway the point is that a hivemind can be so much more than a way for some dictator to suppress the people and control thought. Even when the Akasha was first introduced I saw the potential for a good plot though I knew they were going for the bad one lol. On its own the Akasha is what I'd like to think our own internet could evolve into, a repository for all knowledge available that can be accessed and "learned" instantaneously. And the thing is all of these hivemind stories could go this way with just a simple fix in the narrative. Instead of trying to rid individuality with this thing and force desirable thoughts onto people, it just needs to be that repository. When users access it they can choose what information they want to know. That's it. Instead of becoming humanity soup in literal or data form or having some corrupt leadership force thoughts and commands onto users all a good hivemind can ever do is be a more advanced internet. It's up to the users what they choose to believe from that and then all it takes is a proper education for them to be able to suss out the facts from the rest of the garbage on the internet. Hopefully we'll get a story like that from miHoYo in the future. After all that might just be the endgame for our own Traveler.
Side Note: On top of this though there's the poetry theory. We can actually see that the Phobos began rejecting Remus when he changed his mind about the Grand Symphony just like the Shogun attacked Ei when she started to question eternity.
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Ok this last section is just things I thought were amusing in the quest. Feel free to skip.
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Why do I feel personally attacked miHoYo lol. Hey it was pretty nice worldbuilding Aether!
I'm about to rant about my version of the Fontaine Archon Quest so avert your eyes all ye weary. The plotholes I mentioned before would have all been resolved using my version of the Archon Quest. That's because I kept an eye on the implications. The Fontainians weren't normal humans so you can't apply normal human stories to them. On top of that calling Act V the "Masquerade of the Guilty" should involve somebody that's guilty right? In the actual quest nobody's really guilty of anything. Egeria was guilty for creating the Oceanid humans only because Celestia didn't like it and punished her for it. They thought she was guilty but it's just a matter of opinion. Furina wasn't guilty because she was following the directive given to her by a literal god. Focalors' Divinity as a separate entity from Egeria would still be innocent because her only action was setting up the plan to undermine the Heavenly Principles. Neuvillette is no longer involved in the Remus story and even if he was Egeria was moved to running Fontaine both before and after him and set up the Oceanid humans before Remus even got there meaning even he's innocent. He was honestly trying to stop the prophecy that had nothing to do with him. Compared to that, my version has a guilty Furina because she had willingly played the part of a bad Archon that led her region to ruin as it was a necessary evil to get her in place for the long game. Neuvillette is guilty for his part in Remus killing all the Fontainians of his Remuria. Arlecchino is guilty for her role in the Fatui plot. Of course Pulcinella and Dottore are guilty for their roles too. And even the Fontainians themselves are culpable in creating class divides that provided the opening for the Fatui in the first place. More importantly, each guilty party is allowed a chance at redemption. Furina fulfills her role in defeating the prophecy which now no longer is a strange irrational anger by Celestia. She sacrifices her final connection to her Egeria half by depowering the Gnosis. Neuvillette then permanently sacrifices his old form as Dragon Sovereign in order to undo the damage he caused when he fooled Remus into dissolving the Fontainians. Arlecchino redeemed herself by betraying Pulcinella in the trial and also being dissolved by the Primordial Sea until Neuvillette remakes her as a real human. (back then we thought she was a Fontainian) Even Childe who is given agency in my version redeems himself for his actions back in Liyue by opposing Pulcinella and also providing the whale, the former body of Neuvillette which he needed to sacrifice. And finally the Fontainians themselves are sacrificed but once they are given their second chance at life, they begin working towards a better Fontaine. This is a real masquerade (a ballroom dance of people hiding their true identities) of the guilty.
Ok that was heavy. Let's got with something lighter like
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What is he on and can I get some?
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And with that Petrichor becomes a distant memory as we look ahead toward Natlan! Let's review:

• Fontaine and Mondstadt are connected through their real world histories that miHoYo has referenced a few times. Snezhnaya is also related though more distantly through Khaenri'ah. This is also reflected by the connected history of Sumeru, Liyue and Inazuma as based on their real world counterparts Persia, China and Japan.
• We've been getting more Jesus references in this game. The truth though is more likely that the Gnostic version of the Jesus story heavily hints at our MC's character arc in the game rather than a direct tie-in to it.
• Neuvillette requiring Egeria to be freed in order to resurrect doesn't really seem to make sense unless perhaps my theory ends up true. In my theory, Egeria is needed to nurture a love of humanity into Neuvillette when he revives in order to recruit him for the endgame of Genshin. However, outside of that theory there really isn't any reason why Egeria was needed for that.
• Egeria might have partly been inspired by the Itinerarium Egeriae a pilgrimage by a Roman woman.
• The lore from the Grand Jape Artifact both persists a plothole of the Fontaine story while hilariously creating a new one. Egeria is now culpable in the destruction of Remuria and its people. And it still doesn't answer why Fontaine is devoid of those humans the Oceanids longed to become.
• However it does reinforce another part of the lore. Focalors' Divinity is just Egeria, the lingering traces of Egeria within the Gnosis. Egeria, having been imprisoned by Celestia underwater would have had all the time in the world to "grow barnacles" while she contemplated how to solve the prophecy. Conversely Focalors' Divinity would have only been Archon for a short intermission while setting up Furina as the false Archon.
• Mercantre and Babisse were previously introduced as one of the first easter eggs about anachronistic technology in Teyvat. While it started out as practically a footnote, the new World Quest makes it feel more tangible.
• A good hivemind story allows people to gain empathy and understanding of other or spreads knowledge to everyone. A bad hivemind story turns this technology on its head and forces the narrative that it necessarily becomes a method of control and repression. The Daydream World Quest is finally an example of the former.