[2.1] What is the Purpose of the Heavenly Principles | LToT | Genshin Impact Lore

this may be the most important topic in genji impact because by understanding this every other question will be informed by its answer concerning the broader lore of this game i've found that after having any conversation regarding this topic on discord and reddit i always come out of it thinking like nothing was ever achieved and that the contributors just went around in circles discussing our small gated opinions so today i want to do a very concise look into the topic because it always seems to come down to asking the right question today we're not discussing a little thing in tevat on the contrary today is the biggest thing of all let us divine on the heavenly principles [Music] [Music] i will begin this deep dive with a disclaimer that much of this theory involves correlation which is finding two data points within the game and coming up with a way to connect them as more information is revealed we will have a better understanding but until then let us see what clues we can find within the game at present first things first we need to establish a baseline of what we know and thankfully there isn't much at face value the heavenly principles appear to be a set of rules that celestia has deemed important for the continued prosperity of tavat they even have an enforcement unit in place to rectify any offenders who would attempt to subvert these principles obviously they are incredibly important to the gods in respect to tevat and that's pretty much all we know for certain the rest is going to be inference from what other characters have told us so let's see what the characters whom we've met that are closest to celestia think about the heavenly principles the archons we'll start with the most recent and go backwards okay you all with me excellent then let us divine the ryden shogun is known for this saying seven ideals for seven gods and of these eternity is nearest unto the heavenly principles this is what zhang li informs us of and bal also mentions this in her trailer video only through eternity are you closest to the heavenly principles what confuses me about this is why the ryden shogun is so obsessed with eternity which is closest to the heavenly principles and yet she decided to cut herself off from celestia long ago so why is she trying to get as close to celestia as possible without actually acknowledging them it could be and it makes the most sense that baal understands the principles and what they were meant to accomplish but does not believe in the way in which the gods of celestia are using them for baal's entire story as much as people think it's derivative is all about eliminating war because that was where all of her friends were lost put simply if humans were not ambitious they would not fight each other and thus war would cease hence her agreeing to the vision hunt decree when the fatoui suggested to her zhang li or rex lapis presumably descends from his own realm similarly to how the adept eye all have their own realms and how we have a teapot and provides the people with decrees on how to live each year these decrees according to zhang li are in accordance with the heavenly principles so zhang li as venti puts it administrates his entire region personally controlling the events that occur quite strictly through these decrees that the people have come to follow almost religiously in order to prosper which has made leo the richest nation in tavat but then during the events of the game zhang li gives up his post and fakes his death he explains that he no longer sees it necessary for him to govern and that the people of liue alongside the qi singh need to be able to govern on their own he sees his role as arkhan as a burden after having served for three thousand seven hundred years so in a strange way by giving up his gnosis through a contract with the fatoui zhang li has successfully betrayed celestia but through an acceptable means likely in my opinion to not attract the attention of celestia and the unknown god unlike a certain cryoarchon seems to be doing and then there's venti this guy literally gets uncomfortable when celestia is even brought up in conversation and is a master at changing the subject it's not until we corner him at the end of our quest in monsted that he finally opens up a bit and explains how allergens work but never really tells us about celestia and the gods he switches the conversation to the fatoui or the archons and keeps his dialogue directed at events transpiring within tabat venti is also in charge of a nation where he has relinquished all control over his nation monstat pretty much has the liberty to do whatever they want and venti doesn't really lift a finger at least not until the traveler gets him involved so in essence he has abandoned the heavenly principles too just like jean-lee has in a subtle way as not to incur the wrath of celestia and finally at the very start of the game we get a few lines from the unknown god notice that i'm not calling her the sustainer of heavenly principles because i think i may have stumbled upon something significant let's take a look at what she says outlanders your journey ends here [Music] who are you the sustainer of heavenly principles the irrigation of mankind ends now all right let's go through these points one at a time look closely at the subtitle the sustainer of heavenly principles do you notice anything yeah this title if it even is one is not capitalized you may be thinking this this is just a translation error because she's clearly answering lumen's question right well she is but not in the way that we may think i took the liberty of going through the rest of the game's dialogue to check how consistent capitalizations are and i discovered something very very interesting if one focuses on the word archon and how it is used one will recognize that when archon is used in the general sense it is not capitalized but the moment we are talking about an actual specific archon it's capitalized like cryo archon or animoarcon so capitalization is actually very important and the unknown god's answer to lumeen is not capitalized this means that she is not the end-all-be-all sustainer of heavenly principles but rather a sustainer of heavenly principles she answers lu mean in a general sense probably to not give away her identity perhaps the travelers have already encountered her identity before but have never seen her so she is holding back this information on purpose this distinction is actually quite significant and here's why now that we've established that the unknown god is not the only sustainer of heavenly principles then this so-called title is referring to anyone that tries to sustain or maintain the principles at some point in the past all of the archons could be called sustainers of the heavenly principles because they were actively upholding these principles through the governing of their lands heck technically any human could be called that too since the only prerequisite is to maintain the principles in some way so where am i going with this you may be asking we need to recognize that the unknown god is a sustainer of heavenly principles and that that collection of words may not solely be relegated to her and her alone all of the gods celestia are probably sustainers of the heavenly principles as well because it is these principles that safeguard their reign over tevat it seems like they are a system of control that keeps the humans from doing something i bring this up because we need to know this in order to properly ask two related questions what are the heavenly principles meant to do and to whom are the heavenly principles made to service [Music] unfortunately i won't be able to straight up tell you what the principles are exactly in this video because as a version 2.2 we just don't have the information necessary to list them out however what we can do is take from what we know and instead of ascertaining what the principles themselves are we can focus on the purpose of the principles on what they were meant to accomplish because you don't just make rules just for the sake of making rules you make them for a specific purpose especially if those rules are divine in chinese the heavenly principles are roughly translated to mean natural order but this idea of natural can be subjective the world of tavat is arranged in such a way that there are many clues that point to the world itself having a very specific purpose to which these natural orders or heavenly principles are meant to promote i have four purposes that i could come up with for the heavenly principles so let's just go through each one briefly and then we'll talk about them all together and remember this is my own speculation so i would love to hear what you think in the comments below the first one is that the heavenly principles appear to go directly against human curiosity and the advancement of human technology both of the nations that we know about that have been destroyed by celestia were done so because their nations had reached a point where if celestia had not intervened the principles would have been threatened and both of these nations are accredited as highly advanced civilizations the second purpose is that the heavenly principles are safeguarding the world of tavat not necessarily the people within it this isn't to say that the humans aren't important at all though but it does mean that celestia is concerned with the sum of tavat's parts and not the parts themselves the third purpose is that the heavenly principles are guiding the people of tavat towards something that the gods need this is important because we still don't have a reason for why the gods don't just kill all the humans as they always seem to have a propensity to advance their civilizations past a threshold that threatens the heavenly principles there must be a fundamental purpose for humans in the eyes of the gods for them to care about their insignificant existence in relation to the gods it's important to note that when paimon questions venti on why he needs humans venti like usual evades the question perhaps the answer is something that actually threatens all the mortals and finally the fourth purpose in no particular order is that the heavenly principles are designed to stop something from happening should the principles be breached this something would likely affect the gods directly rather than the humans since the principles are being used by the gods to achieve their purposes i highly doubt that the gods are just so benevolent that they would sacrifice their lives for the humans that's just not how gods with absolute power work in these kinds of stories there are two ways to combine all four of these purposes together to which they all work to achieve a singular goal one of these explanations involves hankai impact and the other one keeps things contained with ingention impact although in my opinion the hankai connection actually makes a little bit more sense but that's for you to decide let's start with the explanation that takes honkai into account first and get it out of the way because i really don't want to be talking about hong kong impact too much as it's an incredibly confusing story to explain and i'm pretty sure that you would need to read an entire encyclopedia on it in order to even begin to comprehend any semblance of fullness in its plot to put it astronomically simple hong hankai is the name for corruption collapse or decay hankai impact third takes place in the third hankai event where hankai attacks humanity the hongkai's power seems to have a one-to-one ratio with humanity's technological advancement there have been two major hong kong events that have caused the near extinction of humanity in the past and this is the third one hence the name hong kai impact third so the heavenly principles of gentian impact may be attempting to contain humanity's curiosity to a point where the civilization's advancement levels would make the hankai events less catastrophic as the magnitude of a hankai event appears to be contingent on a civilization's technology there's been a theory floating around that gentian impact is just a simulation of project arc from the hongkai impact but the description from project arc does not really fit genshin's story as well as people might like it to from what we know about hongkai impact the ark project does not make sense in terms of genjin impact because if hong kai is attracted to advanced civilizations then would it matter where the humans settled eventually they would advance and attract the hongkai and the project would fail however if the purpose of arc was to study ways of ensuring that the hankai threat is controlled maybe by holding humanity back from advancing too far in order to do that we would need rules like heavenly principles to keep people's curiosity from sparking too brightly maybe if we categorize their desires and elements to more easily identify threats that could attract hongkai the world of tevat could be a simulation of tevats being played out over and over again to see how effective certain rules would be on the human race the heavenly principles could be the hypothesis for at least controlling human advancement and thus controlling the hankai threat as all other avenues of attack have failed who knows maybe the travelers are going from one that simulation to the next looking for an answer to the hongkai problem maybe even they are not aware of this purpose but they were simply tasked with traveling and looking for something specific which they have obviously yet defined what if lumeen discovered this truth that tavat was just one big experiment would that be enough to sway her to joining the abyss and if she told ether this would he believe her or would he have to experience the truth himself in order to truly accept it as the truth all great questions and unfortunately all questions that cannot be answered here okay let's move away from hong kai because just thinking about that game's plot makes my head spin right paimon [Music] juice again the gentian impact explanation for these purposes for me is still major speculation so be forewarned that this is not proven at all just me seeing a bunch of data points and drawing lines where there may not be any connections of course let me know down below if you agree or disagree with this because i would love to revise this theory again for the millionth time simply put if humans become too powerful in their technology then the world would be destroyed this is actually evidenced by the unknown god's opening lines she mentions the irrigation of mankind which i translate to mankind has acquired power that they do not fully understand and still use indiscriminately because it benefits them so how did i come to this conclusion well it comes from learning about the art of kemia from albedo it is interesting to note that it does not seem to be the art of kemia itself that seems to have forced celestia's hand but the alchemist gold's activities specifically delving into the dark more abyssal areas of the art of chemia possibly even creating human life creating a homunculi like maybe albedo these darker abyssal acts caused a chain reaction and introduced the world of tavat to monsters the gods seemed perfectly fine with the underground kingdom of conriya using the art of chemia to produce plants and food for the people even without an archon to guide them this action was acceptable but when humans passed a threshold they incurred the wrath of the gods this story is similar to the story of the greek god icarus who wanted to fly so badly that he made himself wings and flew too close to the sun only to get severely burned unfortunately humans left to their own devices might always lead to their own destruction one possible reason for why celestia cannot allow the humans to burn everything down in their vanity is that celestia requires the humans to propagate the land of the gods maybe what the hell does that mean you may ask i think that the gods cannot be created they can only be formed from the ascended wills or ambitions of lower creatures so the whole concept of an allergen ascending to celestia is simply the god's way of creating more gods i believe the memories of these individuals are extracted and added to the firmament layer that make up the fall sky creating new constellations for other humans to develop the ryden shogun does suggest that the archons do not actually physically hand out visions but rather they are a medium by which visions can be developed into people under their reign as we've heard visions seem to just appear before people who are deemed worthy like with fishel and when i say deemed worthy i don't mean that someone is micromanaging this worthiness but that the heavenly principles themselves or the natural order of things of tavat precipitate visions for people who meet a certain criteria there is also the issue of erosion revealed in zhang lee's quest to quell his old friend azdaha as well as the lingering hate from deceased gods that has continued to plague many lands in tavat and is even being harvested to create delusions this i believe could possibly be one of the original purposes of the heavenly principles as this erosion appears to be incredibly detrimental to the gods causing them to descend into a mindless state but we'll have to go into that topic in another video in the recent moon chase festival madame ping mentions how gods can pass and then return insinuating some kind of resurrective capability it is unclear if the stove god experienced erosion before passing but it seems unlikely as the stove god returned to celestia due to him sacrificing his energy to restore the land of leaway erosion appears to occur kind of like old age does until we understand it more with more content perhaps gods who die while in a state of erosion cannot return to celestia like the stove god did so i want to send you all off with a question that i think is being overlooked on account of another question that seems to be the flavor of the year we all seem to be asking what the heavenly principles are but what we should be asking is what would have happened to conriya or to tavat for that matter had celestia not intervened what would have happened if the heavenly principles had been completely violated that my fellow travelers is the right question but do you agree with this theory are the heavenly principles being manipulated by the gods to serve their purposes and what could the original purpose of the principles be that maybe lumine is trying to restore let us know in the comments below thank you so much for watching and i'll see you all again when you're bored between patches keeper out [Music] you

Channel: Keeper

Views: 6,667

Keywords: Genshin, Impact, GI, Lore, Theory, Narrative, Retelling, Voice, Keeper, Gacha, Video, Learning, Learn, Little, Things, Teyvat, Traveler, Story, Voicekeeper, World, Monstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, Heavenly, Principles, of

Id: QvuBHiE9Zag

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021