[2.6] The Harbingers Are (Un)Dead - A Genshin Impact Theory

[Applause] so this is a gnosis wouldn't be caught dead wearing this ugly thing in public [Music] poor busty misguided senora you were dead the whole time oh wait no i wasn't talking about the whole thing with ryden i mean yeah she got killed there like wham poof vaporized but like here's the funny thing i'm pretty sure she was already dead prior to this like the entire time we've known her at least in a way but this video is not about senora she is merely a catalyst or a gateway into this idea that all of the harbingers all of them are dead don't believe me well stick around a while and let's see if i can convince you but before i try to do that let me just take the moment to remind you all that this is a theory video while i do my best to make sure that the lore my theories are based on is as solid as possible and always cited in the description box mistakes are inevitable so please use those links i provide in the description box to do your own research and draw your own conclusions and make sure to check the pinned comment at the end of this video to see if there are any corrections or additional notes that i may not have been able to include in this video and with this disclaimer out of the way let's jump into the actual meat and potatoes of this video yeah we need to talk about that asterisk now when i say dead i don't mean it in the typical sense of their heart stopped beating because we're in a game where gods and dragons and autonomous magic puppets are a thing so death kind of needs a new definition for the purposes of this video and for the purposes of genjin's world building logic i'm going to base the idea of death in the game entirely on what hutao tells us in her story quest specifically the idea that the dead must return to the ley lines to complete the cycle of life by that logic we can assume that in order to die one must be converted into a form that the ley lines can absorb that form is memory data or energy if something dies but doesn't enter the ley lines they must wander tavat as some sort of ghost and even inside the ley lines they can escape and take a ghost-like form okay so that means death and gention is basically turning into memory data that the ley lines can absorb you with me so far because this distinction is really important for example by normal logic helitures should be living beings and they kind of are however they're not allowed to enter the ley lines because they are not permitted to die you could to a degree liken them to walking solidified memories tiptoeing on the border between life and death this might be the reason why when we kill them in game they disintegrate while actual living beings go poof in a cloud of smoke compare treasure hoarders boars and birds which have the smoke poof when you defeat them to the hilla trolls and elemental enemies like whopper flowers and fatoui elites who literally disintegrate when you wait fatoui elites am i really suggesting that fatoui are similar to hilla trolls and that they're not truly alive well yeah i am one thing hilla trolls and the fatoui have in common is that they both wear masks now i know what you're gonna say the fatoui wear masks cause they're the bad guys and it's for dramatic effect and the harbingers are based in the comedia del arte where all the characters wore masks and blah blah blah yeah yeah listen listen guys i know and that's definitely part of it but hear me out there is a much deeper connection here consider the case of la senora after the shogun strikes her down we get her mask as a souvenir which is clearly labeled as a funerary mask now a funerary mask is a mask that is placed on the face of a deceased person usually as a way to honor the dead and to help the deceased to pass on to the afterlife but senora was wearing this mask before the shogun killed her which means it was a funerary mask long before she fell to the shogun it's a little weird to wear a funerary mask as a living person don't you think worth noting here that in chinese it is actually called a morning mask or a mask of mourning which could either be a reference to senora mourning her losses as it's somewhat implied in the pale flame set or it could be a reference to morning portraits which were casts taken from the deceased in order to make a mask of their likeness after they went away the latter has stranger implications like senora may be having a whole new body reconstructed for her that was like made to look like her original one but i'm gonna go with the funerary mask meaning here because the implications of fake body reconstructions are completely out of scope for this video although it would explain why the two elites are like 12 feet tall and uh oh um sorry anyway senora is wearing a funerary mask and hila trolls are neither living nor dead and they also wear masks so what's the connection [Music] well one thing i pointed out back in a video back in like 1.6 i think was that neither abyss mages nor hilla trolls have any faces beneath their masks in other words they lack their former identities daneslift tells us that hillary's wear masks because they're afraid to look at their own reflections which supports the initial theory that i made back then this is noteworthy because in version 2.6 we got confirmation that both abyss mages and hilla trills are former humans that have been stripped of their former identities and probably their memories to an extent which in turn caused their forms to mutate into something a little less than human looking well guess what senora is also able to transform into something a little less than human-looking and even more interesting is the description of senora's funerary mask which explicitly states that in order to become one of the fatui you have to basically give up your identity so that's yet another thing that senora and the helitrolls have in common oh and there's one more thing they may be denied death but hillary's don't stick around indefinitely their uh half life spans do reach a natural end and when that end comes they simply vanish leaving nothing behind except for their masks now senora also vanished completely when ryden's after leaving only her funerary mask behind that connection feels significant to me but you may be wondering if hilla trolls wear a mask because they're afraid to see that they've lost their identities then why do the fatoui wear masks they're not afraid to see their identities i mean they willingly gave them up and even then they do remove their masks from time to time so remember how i talked about the fatui being required to give up their former identities and adhere to a new one well if you sacrificed your old identity then it would become nothing but a memory or perhaps memory data which is what is absorbed back into the ley lines in genshin's version of death in other words a fatui hopeful must kill their previous self in order to be reborn as someone else that someone else is what is represented by the mask just as one would wear a mask for a theatrical performance to become someone else the fatoui do that too but unlike a normal basis but that loss of identity and those memories are a bit more important than you'd think okay let's talk artifacts for a minute i know it sounds like a weird leap to take but remember we're talking about the memories of the dead here and guess what artifacts are according to the sanctifying essence the physical manifestation of ideals and memories from the ley lines and they only describe dead people plus the fetus harbingers and jungle but we'll talk about him later anyway of the 40 artifact sets currently in the game 11 either don't confirm the fate of the one who's story it's telling or we just don't know who the set is actually talking about 25 artifact sets then talk about characters we can identify and who we know are deceased while the remaining four artifact sets belong to the harbingers and jungli again just ignore zhang lee for right now so statistically speaking artifacts should be only describing dead things and this is supported by the fact that the artifacts are memories given shape just by definition a memory needs to be in the past tense so things that have already happened not things that are currently happening in light of this there is an interesting pattern with the harbinger sets the pale flame set describes the moment that each of its five mentioned harbingers agreed to become harbingers that would have been the same moment they discarded their former identities that means that their former identities are now memories that can return to the ley lines which is as you remember a type of death the memory of that moment crystallized into the pale flame set and this isn't the only instance of an artifact set marking the moment of death or a discarded identity the crimson witch set describes the moment that the crimson witch of flames gave up her identity as rosalind and i suspect that the husk of opulent dreams is describing the moment that scar moosh is casting aside his identity as well scar moosh which is happening off camera yeah that one sounds a little bit biased coming from me but it makes sense when you remember that his set is basically describing an identity crisis so here's my obligatory this has no bearing on his playability status disclaimer because that feels necessary right now anyway the other harbinger that we know well that doesn't have an artifact set is child and he actually still fits the whole lost identity former self thing it's just not as obvious because back when he was a kid he fell into the abyss and when he came back he was a whole different person the real ajax definitely died back then oddly enough this rule of discarded identity also applies to the remaining non-harbinger artifact holder zhang li or rather rex lapis i mean the old man was supposed to remain an archon indefinitely but he basically just faked his own death in essence he killed off his former identities as morax and rex lapis and kinda like just rebirthed himself as the mortal zhangli for fairness we can compare zhang li's situation to both a and vendi who are also archons but they have not cast aside their previous identities a is still a kagemusha of the puppet that she created with some minor changes in semantics and vendi still introduces himself as barbados when it suits him even though nobody believes him that makes zhong li a unique case among the archons we've met so far so the takeaway here artifacts talk about dead people and since they talk about the harbinger's former identities those identities must be considered dead and speaking of dead things related to the fatoui it's time we talked about delusions now we have very little confirmed information about delusions but one thing we do know is that delusions kill their host most of the time mass manufactured delusions like the ones in inazuma can cause extremely accelerated aging like it did with tepe now my buddy schwann pointed out that memories are our mental evidence of the passage of time which is interesting in this context since tepe had his own time greatly accelerated from the delusion but this side effect doesn't seem to have any effect at all in the harbingers although it does appear to affect the fatui elite somewhat since they all seem a bit mentally unstable what i'm not sure of is whether delusions are literally consuming memories or if delusions simply warp memories the consequences of the latter could easily land you with a skewed perception of time like tepe but it could also make your thoughts a little bit jumbled and unstable like the fetui elites perhaps forsaking your former identity is the only way to protect yourself in case of an emergency like if you warp one identity beyond repair then you still have another that you could switch to by donning another mask i'm not confident in this explanation but it seems like the most likely one i can come up with for now but there does seem to be other types of delusions that produce different effects in the gentian impact comic deluxe father used a delusion without a mask and the power backfired on him ultimately killing him in a manner that was quite different from tepe but that delusion seems to be a bit of an exception rather than the rule it's also strange that his body began to fade away after he died in a manner that's really similar to the way hilotrols disintegrate in game which doesn't make any sense since as a living being he should either just lay on the ground motionless like all the other humans or disappear in a poof of smoke but no just like the fatoui elites deluxe father disintegrates upon death regardless it's worth pointing out that in the same comic kaya and daluk find kola's strange power which was caused by dead god juice that was injected into her to be incredibly similar to the power that delute can wield with his father's delusion those similarities are quite noteworthy when you recall the fact the mass-produced delusions in inazuma were all crafted from the remains of the eternally resentful dead god oribashi now dead gods that are used to create powerful catalysts that kill their users just that seems like a terrible idea but it's also a pattern now a pretty well established pattern and just like the fatoui harbingers who use delusions without any perceived repercussions deluge can also use a delusion without any perceived repercussions he does so in the comic but note that whenever he does he is wearing a mask and he also fits the pattern of a discarded identity because he did cast aside his identity as a knight of favonius a couple years prior to the comic where he starts using the delusion again now listen this is all really out there and i'm reaching in some places i know but i i just can't shake the feeling that there's a pretty weird pattern here that really merits some more investigation but what do you guys think is this theory absolutely crazy or do you think it's possible honestly i'm not sure myself what side of the fence i sit on but i find the idea fascinating and i'd love to hear what you guys think too so let me know down in the comments below thank you guys all so much for watching and remember the next time you farm for artifacts you are probably holding a tiny piece of a dead person in your hands gotta go see you later bye [Music] you

Channel: Ashikai

Views: 144,153

Keywords: game theory, genshin impact theory, genshin impact, mihoyo, theory video, game lore, genshin lore, hoyoverse, fatui, harbingers, delusions

Id: QdRSPQfKFIY

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022