[3.8] Fontaine's Real World Inspirations - Genshin Impact Lore

gentian impact version 4.0 is just around the corner and I cannot wait for it to finally arrive because the devs have been drip feeding us little crumbs of the Fontaine storyline since basically the start of the game and I am very tired of crumbs just please give me the whole baguette please I'm I'm starving over here like all the way back in version 1.0 which was like back in 2020 we learned that Mona writes articles for the Fontaine newspaper the steam bird and that title alone alludes to fontaine's SteamPunk aesthetic then over in Lila during the 1.4 Wishful drops event we met the ocean is rodea and Endora who gave us insight into fontaine's potential themes of Purity and political Intrigue and also there's countless NPCs in all corners of Tibet who talk about fontaine's unique technological advancements bureaucracy cultural entertainment energy crises and of course economic turbulence now I've already done a video covering most of these topics plus some small related theories but after mulling things over for a bit I realized that there was still so much left to discover because hidden between the lines is a much more detailed picture of what we can expect in Fontaine so if you're ready to take a deep dive into the historical and inspirational Waters of Fontaine with me then take a deep breath and we're gonna Jump Right In in three two one okay so essentially every NPC we've met so far from Fontaine has had some kind of Advanced Machinery or device associated with them whether it's the evermotion mechanical paintings the robo toy making machine the mikage furnace and Inazuma or the film camera which was introduced all the way back in Lua during version 1.2 now basically all of these machines have that Clockwork craftsmanship which matches the steampunk aesthetic of the latest Fontaine teaser we saw now in genshin the Clockwork style mechanisms were invented by a guy named Alan Guillotine who founded the Fontaine Research Institute some 500 years ago now this was around the same time the former Hydro archon died but slightly afterwards and that suggests that most if not all of fontaine's technological advancements probably came after the arrival of the new archon fosolors now a period of technological and economic development is often referred to as an industrial revolution and France experienced one that lasted from the mid-1700s into the early 1900s and this is the time I'm period I think we're looking at for the last 500 years or so of fontaine's History during this time period life for the average person changed drastically more than any other point in human history in 1776 for example James Watt invented a very efficient form of the steam engine which not only made trains ships and other modes of transportation a reality but it also introduced agrarian families to mechanized farming which meant that there was less need for human labor on farms now this sparked a massive migration of people from the countrysides into cities which was serendipitous because the steam engine also made energy hungry and expensive facilities like large-scale factories possible and even with all of its mechanizations these factories required a lot of human labor at an extremely low cost of course these Factory workers were usually people who had no other employment options like women who were discouraged from working most jobs and of course orphaned children the working conditions were obviously her horrific the hours were long and grueling and the pay was laughably low which kept workers in a state of Perpetual poverty this of course led to the creation of two very different social and economic classes of people those who owned the factories the Bourgeois and those who worked in the factories the proletariat and this disparity between the classes was exacerbated by extreme population growth in the cities from migration mostly which created slums with again horrible living conditions riddled with disease and a lack of fresh water given that the time period overlaps with the invention of the James Watt steam engine and since Fontaine is the nation of water steam power is most likely its primary source of energy and also its source of its steampunk aesthetic but uh obviously steam comes from water and when you mix water and Industrial practices and poor living conditions well it's pretty easy to see how you'd get bitter or polluted water and why some of the oceans would want to part ways with fossilors and eventually leave Fontaine altogether and I don't think they parted on good terms remember how I mentioned that there was a severe division of classes in this time period in France that may extend not just to the people but to the oceanids as well the seat we learned way back in version 1.4's Wishful drops event that most of the oceanids were not on good terms with the current archon something to do with the water getting bitter and Fontaine and ocean is thrive in pure Waters so bitter waters are obviously unacceptable but after seeing the 3.8 special program teaser I think it might be that the oceanids are a faction divided as you can see most of the city we were shown looked as though the waters were clean and pure but shots of the sewers suggest that the cleanliness of the surface might be more of a facade as some oceanids may live in these pure City Waters and therefore take no issue with their new archon While others may have found the living conditions in the affluence areas to be rather intolerable and when postalores didn't address the issue they instead migrated to places like leewa and monstad following that train of thought notice how whenever you fight rodea she questions whether or not you are an assassin from her Homeland this implies that fontaine's justice system extends Beyond humans and applies to the oceanids as well this sets up those lores as being a bit ruthless in her approach to governance I mean it's being implied that fossil or would assassinate her oceanids which to me kind of feels like if morax would assassinate his yaksha and that's just kind of a distressing thought but this actually lines up pretty well with the type of governance issues that France experienced during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s at this point in time France was just exiting a long period of Napoleonic Wars coupled with the famine that was due to bad Harvest caused by bad weather alongside growing industry which put a lot of farmers and Artisans out of work that forced them into the cities which then ballooned in population and were talking 20x growth over the century here and the new government that was in place at the time was not equipped at all to handle the challenges of this new era this public discontent came to a head in 1848 during the French February Revolution making it one of the most important years in European history because the activities in France set off a chain reaction of revolutions all over Europe and some of Europe's colonies for that matter ironically this was also the year The Communist Manifesto was published feels pretty fitting honestly in any case France's Revolution was arguably successful and so began the era of the French second Republic anyway there was some movement to improve employment options for men and later women through government programs at this time but those were eventually shut down by the French National Assembly who then formed a new National Police Force this new government would undergo a lot of changes over time eventually landing on creating a standardized legal code headed by appointed judges who were then backed by the police force and that really sounds like how Fontaine may be structured right now but all of this just meant that the class divide remained unaddressed as France entered a new period known as the bell Epoch basically the Golden Age of French culture Art and Science those in the underclass were numerous the slums were still terrible places and crime rates were still exceptionally high within them now based on dialogue from NPCs like Julian Anatoly and Javier this sounds like something that could easily be happening in Fontaine right now as well and Julian for example talks about how despite his appearance his living quarters are extremely humble the rest bemoan their endlessly fluctuating legal system as well as the severe difficulty in obtaining and their Reliance upon government financing at least I'm assuming that the Fontaine Research Institute is a government organization I will be very surprised if it's not now all of this said I kind of want to talk about Lenny and Lynette now when they were initially teased in travail I thought they were circus performers and then later on when I looked closer at the background I realized that they were atop a really tall building making the spotlight more of a search light instead so then I thought they might be some kind of phantom thieves now we know for sure that they're magicians but a pair that seems to work for arlaquino a topic that we will explore at length in its own video but I do wonder if there's a little more historical context to be had here well yeah of of course there is late 1800s France had this new type of Tavern erupt with popularity it was called The Cabaret and what set it apart from normal taverns was the inclusion of live entertainment hosted by a Master of Ceremonies who'd provide satirical commentary on the political and social vices of the upper class many of them became hubs for underground political movements which is really fitting because a lot of them were in basements so they were literally underground the first modern Cabaret was the shet Noir which opened in 1881 and it set the stage for all of the cabarets that would open afterwards now with this in mind take another look at the twins outfits they have the right length the right flare the right bows in the right place is to suit the cabaret's style far more than the fashion of France in the 19th century I think a lot of you can see where I'm going with this now but let me spell it out anyway with all the in-game evidence supported by historical context I believe that Fontaine is a nation nearing the end of its Industrial Revolution suffering incredible growing pains in the form of slums that are filled with disease poverty and crime which then created a huge divide in the social classes this essentially creates a nation with two sides to it a light side and a dark side or if you prefer an Overworld and an underworld personally I believe that the underworld is the current home to Lainey and Lynette and it's very possible that their base of operations is a cabaret perhaps one cleverly named after the very first French Cabaret leche Noir since you know Lynette has cat ears and legit Noir translates into black cat in fact anyone participating in the Performing Arts may be affiliated with this faction Navia the Blondie from the teaser for example seems to be kind of an idol with how Charlotte is trying to capture her from a dramatic angle and she also has a very Cabaret inspired outfit so who knows but of course all of this implies that we will be getting mixed up in some kind of government overhaul but that's also pretty standard for the traveler at this point because they've basically done that for every nation thus far and in every nation thus far the fatoui were generally involved so our lakino being here as also a potential reference to the franco-russian alliance of the late 1800s is pretty fitting again we'll talk more about the fatoui movements and motivations in another video now okay I know we touched a little bit on fontaine's technology but it deserves a second closer look because I suspect it will become another plot Point perhaps an even more important one despite the steampunk aesthetic there is reason to believe that Fontaine has moved on from Steam recently to something else that Fontaine is experiencing a unique energy crisis that involves the water lines now in my speculations video I suggested that the water lines might refer to a system of water pipes but water line can also refer to water levels in Renee's investigation notes there's talk of multiple floods within Fontaine which caused a lot of problems the floods obviously mean fluctuating water levels and it's easy to see how that could totally screw up a delicate steam engine system furthermore steam engines required a lot of heat in order to get the Steam and that meant they required a lot of fuel like coal in order to run this also contributed to pollution and terrible working conditions within coal mines which often use child labor as well funnily enough there are actually mining tunnels beneath Paris although they weren't used for coal mining but Limestone and gypsum the most famous stretch of these mines was used as like some kind of graveyard in the late 1700s and you probably know about these as like the catacombs of Paris but here's the thing if you're trying to mine coal in areas that keep flooding that's going to make it really difficult to keep the steam engines running so this whole energy and water line crisis might actually be about that instead of pipes and the research institute may be trying to find a new power source for their steam engine okay so during the vibro crystal event version 3.5 we got to meet Anatoly who was the one to tell us about all of this and funnily enough he's probably a reference to Anatoli diatlov a deputy chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant he was imprisoned after being blamed for not following safety protocols in the events that led up to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. this suggests that Fontaine might be going from coal to nuclear which is funny because both of them can be steam powered number trond the Fontaine toy maker that we met flat out says that Fontaine is researching alternate Energy Solutions and then goes on to talk about a massive explosion at The Institute that called archaeum which could be fontaine's uranium more on this in a little bit now I say uranium because the guy in charge of these experiments is named Edwin eastinghouse and he is a reference to Westinghouse electric corporation which was founded in Pennsylvania in 1886. Westinghouse quite famously experienced a partial core meltdown in 1960 with their tr2 pressurized water nuclear reactor and I think that lines up with the institute's explosion the only awkward thing about all of this is that Renee's investigation notes explicitly mentioned speaking with Alan who is most likely Alan Guillotine the inventor of the kinetic cores and Clockwork mechanisms that are likely at the heart and soul of fontaine's technology and this is on top of him founding the Fontaine Research Institute itself but remember Guillotine did all of this 500 years ago which means that Renee's notes are from 500 years ago post cataclysm though we know this because they met with the order of Skeptics and they wouldn't have been around until after the cataclysm happened it's really important to realize that Renee's investigation notes were found inside of one of konria's power plants supposedly they were researching conria's power source that we know of as azocite and azocite is basically just pure Elemental energy condensed into a crystalline form which seems pretty convenient if you're looking for some sort of new power source to solve your energy crisis right now Renee compares the azocite to another type of energy source that's censored out but they claim that azocite itself has no will because it's just Elemental energy in its purest form they continue then to talk about a process of refinement through which a will could be extracted and then they go on to say that they believe that they can use this power to prevent another disaster are like the two floods they mentioned earlier in the notes and these are the floods that I was referring to when we were talking about the water line crisis basically what this means is that it's very possible Fontaine is leveraging some of conria's technology and altering it in ways that are problematic you see Conrail was likely of interest to fontaine's researchers because their goal as a nation was to be able to build a Perpetual machine and in order to do that they had to find ways of diverging from the rules of tavat because the otherwise out would you have a perpetual energy source it would go against the rules of nature right now Elemental energy that has been condensed into azocite cores was stable and efficient but it was still subject to tavat's laws but if you go and read some of the Lost notes that you're found around samudra Coast you'll realize that Abyssal energy quote can distort and pollute the elements and thus it can be said to hold a higher order position in terms of rules when compared to Elemental energy in other words they are not totally subject to to that's laws these notes then go on to suggest that one could use the azocite smelting process on the caverna which is divine energy that was left behind by the goddess of flowers and then mix that with the abyss energy to produce some kind of reaction and that this process here could finally produce the perpetual energy source envisioned by the conrians a perpetual energy source that poses a serious risk of pollution certainly sounds like exactly what Fontaine is after which means that the unknown energy type that was censored in Renee's investigation notes might actually be Abyssal energy and just to drive things home a little bit the name arkium in Chinese refers to the Greek philosophical principle Archie and Archie is known as the origin material likened to the chaos matter from which all things formed the beginning of time in Greek Mythos in orphic mythology this is the same stuff that the cosmic egg was made out of and I don't think I need to remind you guys of before sun and Moon's references to orphic mythology but there you go now most likely this Archy could be likened to the abyss and the abyss is a material opposite of Elemental energy and as a site was a crystal core that was made by condensing Elemental energy so by that logic archaeum is possibly the Abyssal version of azocite which has its own mess of implications that I don't think I need to spell out for you I know that on the surface Fontaine might feel a little detached from the rest of tavat but when you look just a little bit closer you'll realize that that is not the case at all just like real countries these nations directly interact with each other sometimes in obvious ways through NPCs traveling outside of their homelands and sometimes in not so obvious ways like how Ed gonamiya and Inazuma has the same ancient architecture as leeway's Chasm Fontaine is going to be no different in this respect I have no doubts of that but in terms of story we have to remember that hoyo has planned out the entire plot of the game from start to finish a long long time ago and every nation up until this point has built upon the foundations lessons and Mysteries of all of the Nations that have come beforehand sumero gave us a lot of answers but it also left us with a lot of really important questions and it will be fontaine's turn very soon to take those questions and expand upon them there are so many possibilities here and I cannot wait to jump right into them but I think that just about does it for this historical context video now I had a blast researching all of this in preparation for Fontaine and I am more than ready to learn even more historically mythologically and just in-game lore wise but unfortunately we're gonna have to wait until the 4.0 special program for that so ah you're still waiting but alrighty guys I hope you learned something and I hope you're as excited as I am because 4.0 is literally just around the corner thank you as always to all of my channel members for supporting me and what I do and thank you very much for watching this video I cannot wait to see you all in the Kingdom of water so take care and I will see you there [Music] thank you

Channel: Ashikai

Views: 140,751

Keywords: genshin impact, fontaine, hoyoverse

Id: G0o0ba4-bUI

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023