[4.3] The Complete Narzissenkreuz Questline Recap & Analysis - Genshin Impact Lore & Theory

I first triggered the quest in anop posis on accident I was just trying to unlock teleport way points to make my life easier when I was kidnapped by this little oceanid I did not expect this little event to spiral into several more interwoven quests and story lines flushing out the last 500 years of Fan's history over three whole patches so I don't think I need to say that there's a lot to cover in this video but there is a lot to cover in this video so here's how this is going to work first we're going to recap everything that happened chronologically starting from the events of over 500 years ago and working up to the events within the quests themselves then we can move on to the analysis and Theory section of the video but this quest line was extremely dense and I'll probably be referencing the information in countless videos to come so I have made the decision to only include analyses and theories that won't find their way into any other videos in the future this includes a closer look at caterpillar Elaine Maryanne the so-called Neo humans and finally a prediction on on how the game might end so you know the drill from here on out time stamps for each section are in the description box as well as related videos citations and links for further readings that you can get a jump start on doing your own research if you want to fact check me on anything notes and Corrections will be in a pinned comment as always and I'll also be leaving links to some of my favorite theories other creators have made on subjects presented in this quest line that I won't be covering like you know uh the Fortuna cabala raria and like the four ssara Cycles so if you're hungry for more lore you know where to go but for now it is time to let this little oceanid named Anne take us all the way back to anap Posas back to a time when it was still known as the NS and cits Institute well actually the story starts farther back than that beneath the court of Fontaine and FL Sandra while the area is now under control of the spad rosula that wasn't the case 500 years ago back then the area was somewhere fontaine's justice system couldn't reach and thus it kind of became a city within a city full of gangs thieves vicious crocodiles former residents of meped and the less fortunate people of Fontaine one Outlaw and Tavern keeper by the name of Eduardo Baker took control of the unders City by force first by beating up a bunch of crocodiles and later by fighting Outlaws and gangs until most of flandre began to follow him the court of Fontaine did not approve of the way that Eduardo ran things so they raided flu Sandra arresting Eduardo and all of his men and eventually exiled them to the deserts of Sumer but while being escorted to their newly assigned home Eduardo's followers freed him regrouped then occupied pant alongside their conspirators and families renal deetor was the mayor of pant at the time and he seemed to cooperate with Eduardo for reasons that are never clearly stated the only evidence that these two were on friendly terms is this group photo that was taken together which we never get to see and also the friendship between the two's Sons Jacob Baker and Renee deetor anyway Eduardo sent a man named Carl Engle to deliver their demands to the court of Fontaine who promptly refused them and laid waste to Pon the city went up in flames in a Siege led by Emanuel Guillotine among the few survivors were Jacob Baker Renee deetor and Carl inold who was rescued by the magician parsifal after the devastating events of the siege of Pon Jacob and Renee were sent to the narsis and CS Institute an orphanage run by an oceanid named Lis and her Vice director basil Elton there they met Maryanne and elain and quickly became close friends playing games about heroes holy swords dragons and princesses together an unknown amount of time passed and cona did the thing where it made a cataclysm and all of the archons were summoned for damage control the hydro archon aeria summoned the oceanids to accompany her and this presumably included Lis Vice director basil who was a former naval officer was also called to the front lines leaving no one to take care of the kids at the orphanage so they asked Carl inold to adopt or at least take care of Renee and Jacob and they asked Emanuel Guillotine to adopt or take care of Elaine and Maryanne basil and her crew fought the fellow dragon elanus and perished alongside it while aeria died fighting the flood of Abyssal monsters in the desert lus was one of the few who survived returning to the empty orphanage and wandering its lonely Halls alone yearning for the times when she would play games with the children in the aftermath of the cataclysm Carl took Renee and Jacob with him on Expeditions around the world most notably to suu which is where we found Rene's investigation notes during the quest with the Pari now Renee was a child prodigy discovering the true nature of the fonan people's half oceanid existence at least in part during that expedition to Samu before he had even lost all of his baby teeth he deduced that his and Jacob's bodies were akin to the structure of the Sacred Lotus left behind by the hydro archon aeria when she died but not at all similar to that of Carl this leads me to believe that Carl was not native to Fontaine and based on his name Carl Engel he might be a reference to this German pilot so perhaps he was from monstad and therefore not a half oceanid man Jacob had always had a rather weak Constitution but he got much worse during this Expedition now it's not confirmed anywhere but I do wonder if Renee started researching his and Jacob's anatomy in an attempt to cure Jacob mostly because that's exactly what he ended up doing I just don't know if that was the initial Catalyst see as Jacob's condition fell into steep Decline and no conventional treatment options were available Renee thought to leverage some of his research into the powers of the Abyss in order to treat Jacob this transformed Jacob's body making it so that he no longer required food and it granted him super strength a fact that they hid from Carl Renee would count this accidental experiment as a success and would follow this line of research for another experiment that we'll cover later on but during this this time Renee also learned of something the conans called the world formula after reading through documents that they left behind in their little research facilities in returning to Fontaine Renee and Jacob also found a library full of ancient raran records containing information on something similar to the world formula but under the name of fortuna instead on an extremely simplistic level this world formula was a method of calculation used to predict the natural cycles of the world like the Cycles by civilizations rise and fall over time and when Renee ran the numbers he came to the conclusion that the current cycle would be the last cycle ending in a final cataclysmic apocalypse with no more civilizations rising from the ashes unless some sort of external variable was introduced ultimately Rene's goal was to create such a variable in order to thwart the apocalypse no matter the cost he also discovered something called the tree of emanation which looks suspiciously like a diagram of the tree of of life from cabala side note cabala is a very complex field of study with a lot of different variations and we do not have time to cover this in this video in fact I'm probably not going to cover it at all because two of my lore buddies Schwan and saber have been painstakingly crafting a cabala world Structure Theory that is so well researched and thorough and mindboggling that I have nothing to add there are two parts to it so far and I will leave links in the description box if you want to know more about this tree of emanation and the implications in genin please check out this Theory it's really good and worth your time anyway moving on Renee and Jacob continued to travel around Fontaine surveying the aftermath of the cataclysm without Carl by the way and eventually they ventured into the body of elanus the fell Dragon Renee noted that while the dragon appeared to be dead its will was still present and its organs were starting to crystallize like they were going to go into some sort of state of hibernation Renee suspected that the dragon's blood could therefore be compatible with Jacob's new half aysl form which could enhance Jacob's physical state even further than it already was but he also considered elanus to be pretty toxic and thus the experiment was too risky but Jacob ate the dragon flesh anyway fortunately he survived but the ordeal spooked Renee so bad it made him realize that if they really wanted to accomplish anything worthwhile at scale they were going to need allies and resources fate must have heard them because immediately after this Elaine Maryanne and their adoptive father Emanuel Guillotine found them nearby and although Renee trusted Maryanne and Elaine he did not trust Emanuel cuz you know he was the one who led the Siege at pant and that's what killed his and Jacob's parents so he kept Jacob's condition a secret from the three of them just to be safe but Elaine told them that he had enrolled in The Institute of natural philosophy to study mechanical engineering and invited Renee and Jacob to enroll as well so they did and they were assigned to Elaine's lab as his research partners and that's where they met Carter Carter was elain's assistant who also grew up in the narsis and cits Institute but not at the same time as our current cast of kids he was from a previous generation he was simple-minded and by no means a prodigy but he was one of the few adults at The Institute for natural philosophy that didn't scorn or resent these child prodigies so they were actually quite fond of him Elaine and Jacob especially Carter was also terminally ill and didn't tell anybody although Renee appeared to have figured it out on his own shortly after an outing to the region of Petra cor because he cited it as a reason why he couldn't continue to indulge in mechanical research with aaine and needed to resume his own research it's unclear how long the kids spent at The Institute but it was long enough to make several impressive discoveries including the very first instance of a controlled Annihilation reaction by mixing Numa and oia energy and long enough to complete the book of revealing by this point Renee and Jacob had also formed a secret society called the naris and crits Ordo and they were using the book of revealing in order to recruit new members by showing them visions of the coming apocalypse as predicted by Rene's World formula but around this time Carter's Health took a very serious downturn leaving him unconscious for long periods of time with no available options for treatment so Jacob suggested something a little unconventional perhaps they could try the same treatment that Renee gave to Jacob the one that turned him into an abyss Ling in the first place Renee did get consent from Carter to perform this treatment and even told him that Carter will end up being a quote second sample that can corroborate the realization of human transcendence proving that the process can be replicated reliably this is a very important goal for Renee because these life forms that I've been calling Abyss Renee calls Neo humans and they appear to have the ability to resist the Apocalypse Now don't worry we're definitely going to cover this in a different section Carter's body did not react to the treatment the same way that Jacobs did instead of turning into an abyss his body mutated into an unrecognizable lump of Flesh his tissue collapsed in places and constantly regenerated in others and he must have been somewhat conscious because his voice could sometimes be heard and it was so horrifying to witness that Renee would try to cut out his vocal cords in order to make it stop only for whatever organs he cut out to be grown back in a couple of days Jacob was devastated when faced with Carter's fate while Renee seemed to have been in a State of Shock panicking to find a way to fix the whole situation but when Elaine finally got wind of what happened he was absolutely Furious and cut all ties with Renee and Jacob Elaine and Maryanne would later leave The Institute of natural philosophy and join the Mason Guardian as maras Hunters regardless of the failure Renee still believed that Carter could be saved and resolved to to make it happen he also recognized that Jacob's condition may have been a fluke and that pursuing Research into Neo humans may prove useless in surviving the apocalypse if it couldn't be replicated reliably so the two of them preserved Carter the best they could and traveled to the ancient raran ruins and Petra cor for further research only to discover an entrance to the primordial sea Renee then realized the whole truth behind the people of fontaine's Origins and formulated a brand new plan if the people of Fontaine were born of oceanids using the power of the primordial sea then perhaps they could revert back to an ocean at form merge together and resist the apocalypse as one elemental being it was theoretically possible but he would need to study a proper oceanid and most of the hydro Elementals in Fontaine were corrupted and full of pollution from the cataclysm which severely limited his options but he and Jacob were eventually able to ReDiscover Lis wandering the empty Halls of the nartis and Crites Institute it would take a long time to convince her to help them long enough to be midway through constructing the Tower of Gestalt the narts and cits Ordo would then go on to rebuild the four orans their intent was to repurpose them to function like some kind of Full Metal Alchemist transmutation circle that would fuse all the people of Fontaine together into one giant oceanid thingy they called Nars androits once he gained control over the primordial seawater the role of Lis in all of this is a little bit confusing she was not only a subject of study for the order but she was also being used to dissolve people and extract their egos which sounds a little bit weird because dissolving people is what we know that the primordial C does and what the order should have been trying to prevent so the Nuance is basically this when a person is dissolved via primordial seawater they lose their memories and identity except in cases where their residual Wills are particularly strong they're kind of like ghosts with unfinished business they're able to linger on long enough to take care of whatever it is they're fixated on and then they move on to the afterlife we can kind of see examples of this with Malo and silver Whose desire to protect Navia even after death was so strong that they were able to maintain their identities long enough to actually protect her and we can also see something similar with the victims of Vash since they had a very powerful lingering grudge against him and once he was gone they faded away too Renee wanted to be able to dissolve people and later reconstitute them with their memories and identities in intact so what lus was actually doing was separating a person's mind from their body I'm not sure how this process worked but it seems as though the order would extract or sever bits of her body and then purify them for study causing lyus to grow even weaker than she already was the order also managed to forge the holy blade of narciss and CS in order to separate these individual identities that lyus dissolved from the collective unconscious within the narciss and CS oceanid once the apocalypse had finally passed so with all the pieces in hand it was finally time for Renee to become naris ands he would discard his Persona part of his identity and then dissolve himself and be reborn through water he also extracted Carter's Persona intending to process him for rebirth afterwards but something went terribly wrong with this procedure and Renee was left unconscious potentially without a body Jacob took Extraordinary Measures to preserve what was left of him noting that it was very different from that last time with Carter Jacob told no one within the order about Rene's failure and his come state but the members did grow more and more suspicious as time passed and no one had seen Renee and although their divinations said that Renee was within the Tower of gastal as he should be it did not quell their feelings of unease Jacob managed to extract Rene's Persona from his current Bess State and stored it in the orans this is what we actually retrieved during the quest itself some of the order order members grew really suspicious and they just up and left the order all together but they didn't get too far Jacob captured them and then used L's Essence to dissolve them into hydro idolon and then he tried to put them into artificial vessels with prosthetic limbs as practice for Rene's restoration after countless failures and a few marginal successes Jacob finally came up with a new plan he would use a pocket watch that Elaine had given him as a sort of foundational memory to reconstruct Rene form since the pocket watch represented all the time that he and Renee had shared together this kind of reminds me of Nita's trick where she stored Wanderer story in a book and was able to retrieve all of his Memories by using it as scaffolding Jacob also used a bunch of Carter's remains to form the body of Nars and CS then added the other pieces of Rene's self that he had stored within the orans except for the Persona and Nar androits was finally born Renee in a different form so not actually Renee at all because according to enigmatic page 12 nartis and cits thought of himself and Renee as separate entities I'm saying this because all the enigmatic Pages were written by Renee including 12 but 12 happens after Jacob revives him as Nars and cits and in this form he is all of Rene's memories but still talks about Renee as a separate person and this isn't a one-off either because he does it in the quest when we finally meet him interestingly Jacob intentionally erased the memory of Rene's initial failure from nartis and Cs and Nars and CS was aware of these missing memories and other pieces of himself but thought them kind of inconsequential to his overall goal although there is a line in edig Matic page 10 that suggests that Nars and Crites was a little bothered by the inconsistencies between his memories and the records Renee had left behind but it's impossible to say at this point Jacob then relayed his discoveries and theories to Nar and Cs and the two of them took all of the remaining fused mines and maybe what was left of Carter's remains it's not actually stated and stuffed them inside of a hural and thus caterpillar was born I have a lot to say about this event in particular especially in relation to caterpillar's true identity but let's save it for the analysis just know that caterpillar probably isn't as cartery as we initially thought and that nson CS is truly a mix of Rene's mind and Carter's body which makes the one theory that I had from another recap video about him being a Renee darts reference actually kind of accurate cuz you know he's Renee de petor plus Carter Renee de Petra Carter Renee darts anyway narts and CS would proceed to dissolve and absorb a lot of people especially enemies of the order among them many maras hunters and a champion duelist which is how he learned of the Hunter's plans to destroy the order but it's not like he could allow his plan of mass ocean diffusion to be disrupted by that so he told Jacob to take lus and a ton of Ordo members into elanus as a diversion while he remained in the tower of gestal to complete the ritual what he didn't know is that Maryanne was part of the team of hunters who confronted them inside of elanus the battle between the order members and the hunters resulted in an explosion that seemed to have killed basically everyone except for Jacob and lus lus must have recognized Maryanne and tried to save her by dissolving her Persona within herself before running away to the orphanage bits of the gardex the hunters brought with them pierced the inside of elanus causing his blood to seep out and congeal around these mechanical Parts eventually having them take the shape of the melines the robot dog Seymour had accompanied Maryanne during the confrontation with the order and was one of the few things that was only damaged by the explosion he was later found by the meloine named mam Elaine survived this ordeal because he wasn't in elenis at least not as far as I could tell it seems like he had gone to the Tower of gastal in order to confront Renee directly but what he found there was not Renee but narten CS mid attempt to perform the mass oceanid Fusion ritual the two of them fought and Elaine was Victorious forcing nson CS through a seal and locking him in the depths of the primordial sea and with their leadership gone whatever members of the order that remained were hunted down arrested and put on trial this included caterpillar who was exiled to meped Jacob however was never captured he hid in the shadows for hundreds of years preparing to free narcis and Cs and that's how we met him for the very first time in the meloine village trying to gather up Mam's paints which were really made of the blood of elanus which he planned to use in order to restore Nars androits lus was understandably traumatized after everything that she had been through and Maryanne likely was too together they created their ideal annosus which basically means rest intermission or no movement so we could interpret this situation as their unwillingness or inability to move on from past events but they did long to return to the past the happier times where the kids played games in the orphanage and so they dreamed up the young oceanid an into existence and gave her friends named after Renee Elaine Jacob Carter and Maryanne an then repeated this game on a loop for years until the traveler arrived caterpillar on the other hand would do nothing but study in Mar repat until he met Lenor and was reminded that time was actually a thing that existed and he should pay attention to and that she probably shouldn't be stuck in an underground prison so he worked with the traveler to break her out of jail and returned her to her family afterwards he connected with Seymour and Anne in the narcis and cits Order headquarters with time caterpillar managed to remember some things and armed with his knowledge the group unsealed the four orthants and returned to the headquarters in order to find Jacob The Traveler then restored the holy blade of Nars and cits with the help of Anne and then promptly kicked Jacob's butt as a final plea Jacob begged an to help him survive the apocalypse by absorbing him but she refused and before any other Alternatives could have been explored the Doomsday Clock fell from the ceiling and killed him well supposedly it's not like we found a body so I guess it's slightly open to interpretation so anyway the group traveled to the bottom of the Tower and finally confronted Nars and CS in the primordial you'll see the traveler kicked his butt too so the little purple blob admitted defeat and accompanied everyone back to the orphanage in order to teach an how to break lus Anne out of their anap posis what a little gentleman or a graceful loser one of the two but finally lusanne Seymour naris and CZ and Anne all reunite but naris and CS knew that his life was near its end he rejected Anne and lus an's invitation to travel and passed on quietly behind the cottage after after a brief conversation with caterpillar who kind of just shows up out of nowhere after saying he didn't want to get involved because this wasn't his moment caterpillar also did another weird thing where he would show up later inside of the book of revealing which we're going to talk about in the next section and then finally back at Leno's house where he finished telling her a story before disappearing completely I don't know that we're ever going to see him again as for Elaine he would leave the maras hunters to found the Fontaine Research Institute of kinetic energy and Engineering his accomplishments included the development of the Ary system artificial intelligence and the development of several new gardex some of which he named after his old friends he would eventually retire from the Institute and Disappear Completely from the public eye and Legend says that he got lost in his research and died of old age alone ensuring no one ever found the results of whatever it was he was working on and that my friends is the complete story of the narts and CS quest line but uh I still have more to say so let's Circle back to Caterpillar for a bit okay some of you might get a little thrown for a loop here so just stick with me for a while okay when we first met caterpillar I called him Carter because his name was similar to cater which was caterpillar's nickname and this was also something reflected in the Chinese names as well and since we already knew at this point that Renee and Jacob tried to revive Carter from the dead it seemed reasonable to assume that caterpillar was Carter revived however as far as I know there were no pieces of Carter involved in the creation of caterpillar in fact the only thing we know Carter's remains were used for was Jacob's Recreation of narsen Cs which means narten CS has more Carter in him than caterpillar does now during the recap I mentioned the fact that naris and cits does not identify himself as Renee despite Jacob intending for him to be Renee reborn he never accepted Rene as his name although he didn't correct Lis Anne when she called him that and he always referred to himself as nson Cs and acted as if Renee was a completely different person clearly nson CS has the will and memories of Renee but he's apparently not Renee not completely he seems to be missing something but don't get it twisted he's certainly not Carter either nor is he any individual that he dissolved and absorbed the same can be said for Caterpillar too since he was created from the people that Jacob dissolved that were left over from his Renee Resurrection experiments and then inside a hillal caterpillar even supports the idea that he's made up of a collection of people when he says his identity is inconsistent he then goes on to say that his identity is a lie built out of the stories of others somehow the minds or memories within him remain somewhat distinct coming together to form a whole new identity altogether and there's also this bizarre instance where we ask caterpillar to tell us more about himself and he immediately quotes a line that Renee said right before he dissolved himself for the first time at which point Carter was already dead and being processed for rebirth and then caterpillar doesn't elaborate like that quote was just somehow supposed to explain everything and at another point in time he also said that sometimes he is a bloom guard and sometimes he is a dragon which is a really weird thing to say because Bloom guards were something that only Renee studied as far as this quest line goes I think I could be wrong correct me if I am and if you've read the nymph stream artifact set you'll probably remember its description of the battle between Elaine and nsen cits wherein nson crits is referred to as the dragon Renee even refers to himself as Nars and CS the Fel Dragon metaphorically at the very least because when they were kids they used to play you know swords and evil dragons and he thought he became the evil dragon and then he actually did in the fell dragons monocle and okay sure I get that NS and CS was caterpillar's master and he taught him everything he knows and could have theoretically told him all about the Pari and stuff but like this still feels so odd to me like why the direct quotes from Renee and not from narts and CS would narts and CS have even cared enough about all of this kind of stuff to teach caterpillar about them or are they part of the memories of somebody else cuz you know caterpillar is made up of a whole bunch of different people stuffed in a hill aural so I had to ask myself the question what if one of those pieces that was inside of caterpillar belonged to Renee which is not to say that he is Renee mind you just that one of the distinct Minds that caterpillar senses within him might have belonged to Renee it's not a complete Consciousness but like a facet of it it's possible at least since we know that Rene's initial transformation experienced some technical difficulties and Jacob had to split his Consciousness into parts and we also know that just before Rene's failed attempt he had done the same kind of thing for Carter to prepare him for his rebirth so the question is what if the two got a little mixed up while they were liquefied like it's pretty hard to separate two completely separate water-based liquids once they've made contact like they kind of bleed into each other you know I think this idea this Theory works really well thematically because the quest has a theme of doppelgangers and shifting forms just look at maranne who's also lus but also isn't either lus or marann but instead a third other thing who dreamed an into existence while also giving an the memories and personality of the original Maryanne which is still possessed by this new found Lis an so you end up with a lus an and an an who share the personality traits of the original Maran to such an extent that Seymour listens to both of them and yet they're both very different people so what's stopping us from having a second more subtle doppelganger story well nothing because this is the point of the whole Quest the quest is about identity what makes you you are you your memories your persona your soul your body or are you something more gestal unified something greater than the sum of your parts and are you still you if a piece of you is missing and how much of you can be missing before you're someone or something other than you and I don't think I'm reading too heavily into this because NS and CS actually quotes the line I am become NST and crits directly from a piece of Hindu scripture called the Bhagavad Gita which is also known for posing questions surrounding identity of the self self-discovery and finding one's place in the world now in light of this caterpillar is an interesting code name for our companion character since his character in Allison Wonderland which is heavily referenced throughout the quest line is probably best known for his line who are you and the caterpillar's Arc involves him experiencing metamorphosis and transcending his previous form to become a butterfly something that caterpillar cannot do and yet this type of life form represents Renee perfectly since his name just straight up means rebirth and that's what caterpillars do they go through the metamorphosis they go through rebirth where they dissolve and become something new on the other hand Carter means traveler and if I really want to stretch the metaphor here I could interpret his name to mean the one who moves on because I think Carter's Soul moved on even if bits of his body and possibly his memories were used in the creation of either or both nartis and Cs and caterpillar we'll come back to this but this theory that caterpillar may be partly Renee also fits the narrative theme for two additional reasons firstly it explains why caterpillar showed up in the book of revealing and secondly it explains that weird story he tells Lenor there are are two parts to caterpillar's Story the first part he tells at the end of Unfinished comedy after he takes Lenor home and the second is at the end of happy birthday which is at the very end of the entire quest line now there are a lot of ways to interpret this story and we're probably never going to know the truth so just consider this my personal interpretation okay the first part of caterpillar's story features on a little fish that asks a M's Apprentice to help him leave and find his family out in the sea but The Apprentice refuses because the Mage has forbidden the Apprentice to leave then one day the fish just disappeared from the silver Basin that it had been kept in and The Apprentice never knows what happened to it the Mage here is most likely Jacob as we know that he conducted experiments using a silver Basin Jacob was also very fond of Carter who is also described as being very dimwitted but also capable and trustworthy so you'd think that the Apprentice here would be Carter but it's most likely caterpillar since Jacob and narten crits were the ones to teach caterpillar magic and to Grant him intelligence since in his early years he apparently lacked intelligence because he was adjusting to his new hilal body as for the fish at this point in the story I don't actually think caterpillar knows who the fish is so when the fish disappears he desperately wants to find it now personally I think the fish is supposed to be something very important that caterpillar has forgotten you'll understand why in a minute after you meet and defeat Nars and crits you can start the quest line for Pursuit which takes place in the book of revealing a book created by Renee mostly made up of his memories can Atilla is kind of expected to be there because you know we we accidentally lost her inside of the book but caterpillar is completely unexpected he's not supposed to be there so why is he there his memory is all jumbled up inside the book and he seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once like some kind of ghost until we finally Corner him mid conversation with the puppy now this puppy actually is Carter or rather he's Renee and Jacob's memory of Carter the puppy even says as much which means that caterpillar went into this Abyss likee realm and eventually found this puppy and that sounds a lot like the second half of the story that caterpillar tells Lenor in the second half of the story The Apprentice finally finds the courage to leave the Mage and search the world for the little fish he has to know what happened to that little fish and when he does finally find him the little fish is happy with his family somewhere in the ocean The Apprentice then begs the fish for forgiveness for not helping him find his family and the fish does forgive him and caterpillar then says the two go on to be the very best of friends and this is why I actually think that caterpillar is at least partly Renee because the fish should be Carter someone The Apprentice caterpillar failed in the past then sought forgiveness from if Carter's mind or memory or Soul or whatever could be likened to a fish swimming in the vast sea of the collective unconscious then what's left of Renee must be trying to find that one fish that one mind within an endless abyss of Minds it's like how caterpillar goes through the book of revealing which is a collection of Rene's memories and stumbles upon the one memory that matters Rene's memory of Carter at the end of happy birthday caterpillar also says that the story has to end with the fish and The Apprentice reuniting because that's the only way to get a happy ending if the story goes on too long then the heroes become dragons just like how Renee became nordsten cits the metaphorical evil dragon what's also interesting here is that canilla describes a lot of golden butterflies in the book of revealing butterflies represent the human soul in many cultures around the world so if caterpillar couldn't go through his metamorphosis to become a butterfly something he and Jacob both comment on then it's possible he lacks a soul a critical piece of his self remember how the orans were dedicated to different parts of the self well the quest where we got the soul piece was called Cupid's lover and Cupid's lover in Greek mythology was psyche a woman usually depicted with butterfly wings and the word psyche literally means life but it was also used in place of the words for soul or ghost in Psychology however psyche is considered the totality of the human mind or Consciousness note the use of the word totality that implies no missing pieces so if caterpillar is unable to transform into a butterfly it means he's missing something he's incomplete ironically this might imply that there are only three parts to the self but you need all three in order to form the fourth the soul right it's more of that whole thematic it's three but actually Four stuff you know when Pon talks about the whole it's a rule of three but it's actually Four it feels like that to me but anyway it's possible that caterpillar was drawn to the book of revealing because of these butterflies these symbols of the soul that he may have been missing and instead of finding a soul he just found Rene's memory of Carter it's fascinating that caterpillar then remembers the name of the puppy in the end he remembers Carter but doesn't identify himself as Carter so if caterpillar is partly Renee and emphasis on the partly then I think this makes for a rather poetic tragic ending to both of their stories the boy with a savior complex grew up to be something like a well-intentioned doctor who was never able to save anyone but who hurt a lot of people in the process and in the end he fell apart and his mangled pieces were mixed together with the parts of the people he hurt leaving him lost confused and missing a critical piece of his identity that he can probably never get back and he has to live with that now there is no way to prove any of this this is just the interpretation that makes the most sense to me personally as it provides a sufficient explanation to caterpillar's appearance in the book of revealing the cryptic lines of the puppy in the book and the story that he tells Lenor it also parallels this whole doppelganger theme that we saw with Maryann and Lis so it's kind of what I'm rolling with here but speaking of Maryann I haven't really talked about her much or her brothers so uh why don't we do that now the moment Jacob's pocket watch was opened and people saw the photo of the kids inside everyone noticed that Mary n looked just like syndrome whose code name is Mary an ET that was definitely intentional this has led many people to speculate saying that marionette must be marann but there's a few problems with this Theory notably the fact that Maryanne is now an oceanid fused with lyus who's been in self-isolation for 400 years it is unlikely if not impossible for her to be marionette so why the similarities then well in my opinion it's because marionette or or rather sand drone is the big robot holding the doll and not the doll itself someone who cared a lot about Maryanne someone very familiar with Clockwork mechanisms Conan machinery and Robotics someone like Elaine Guillotine and okay okay okay yeah I know this theory is not new I've pitched it at least twice before but stick with me because I want to expand on the idea and connect it to a few other things so I'm sorry for rehashing the same Theory three times like Renee Elaine was a person of unparalleled genius but he wasn't really keen on the esoteric and occult interests that Renee had his skills were more in robotics engineering and he had a very hyper analytical mind it wasn't enough to theorize about things he couldn't dismantle piece by piece with his own hands he had to understand exactly how they worked I would argue that Elaine is Rene's foil Renee was particularly empathetic desperate to help people but only causing harm when he did while Elaine had no particular interest in helping people but ended up helping them as a side effect Renee was kind of like a hero who became a villain while Elaine was more of a villain who became a hero in fact on enigmatic page 4 Renee explicitly says Elaine only likes things he can figure out completely If This Were a novel he might be the type of villain who becomes a crazed serial killer just to figure out how the human body works but he doesn't seem even remotely phased about such statements on the contrary he spoke to us about the similarities and differences between humans and machines and between artificial int elligence and personality and uh-oh this is bad at this rate he might really turn into a villain like that I've kind of interpreted this as Elaine not really vibing with his emotional or empathetic side but he does care very deeply for his sister Maryanne and he eventually comes to care a lot about Carter so when Renee and Jacob cause Carter's death he flies off the rails vowing to never involve himself with anything that cannot be understood by human intellect and committing himself to the world of Machinery including the development of AR artificial intelligence as a replacement for the human Persona what's most interesting about this is that Elaine is almost certainly a reference to Alan Turing the widely recognized father of modern Computing his list of accomplishments is incredibly long but two of them worth noting for this video are the Turing test which is a test to see if a machine can exhibit recognizably intelligent behavior and is often equated with a method by which artificial intelligence's sentience is measured and the universal turing machine which he invented to prove the in shiding problem challenge Now Elaine was the inventor of artificial intelligence in genjin which is more than enough to relate him to Turing via the Turing test but Elaine also seems to have liked naming his robots after things or people he wanted to remember notably he named one Mecca after Carter and another one after a fellow researcher who presented Robo Carter to the public this guy was named Mr Bletchley who is literally only mentioned once in the entire game so we know nothing about him except for his name but lley Park was part of the mi6's codebreaking operations during World War II and also where Turing developed the method of decrypting the Germans Enigma machine thereby shortening the war by several years so Mr Bletchley was probably important to him in some way that we just don't know about now I actually think the en shiding problem was also referenced in game in the form of the quest with talo Shard and curve see the en shiding problem posed the following question is there an algorithm that takes a statement as input and returns a yes or no answer that is always is correct Turing as well as a man named Alonzo church both provided proofs for this challenge the former in the form of a machine and the latter in the form of Lambda calculus these proofs are referred to together as the church Turing thesis so the gamech curve was kind of similar to a turing machine because his job was to be able to take someone's statement as input and determine whether it was a lie 100% of the time this question Quest itself is actually about the philosophy of whether or not something like this should even be used in the first place and the resounding answer from the end of the quest was no which is ironically also the answer to the end shadings problem no you cannot create an algorithm that takes a statement as input and returns a yes or no answer that is always correct 100% of the time and nor should you be able to now I mentioned this because at the end of this Quest we discover that a fatou Harbinger had struck a deal with Jen if Jen could find mos lombroso's inheritance and he was the creator of curve the harbinger would help Jen take over the steam bird but in the process of all this Jen incidentally destroyed curve so the harbinger kind of hog tied him mind broke him and cut out his tongue the only harbingers who would care this much about the work of an engineer are dor and syndrome but this punishment out of like Revenge isn't really dor style so it must be syn drone Maryanne was never really interested in Machinery or nor was she very good good with it so it makes no sense for her to be syn drone but Elaine he makes perfect sense here especially in light of Rene's villain comments in addition to this after he retired from the Institute there was evidence that he had been working on something but no one ever found what that something was and if you go to this one Workshop you can find this note left behind by a weird old man who was considered a genius with Machinery who was working on some Clockwork Mecca and had some connections to the Fontaine Research Institute and I don't know about you but that kind of sounds like a lane to me and it starts to sound more like a lane if you read the rest of the notes these notes describe a project involving Clockwork Mecca being inserted with neural networks capable of mimicking human behavior and speech and there's another note that supports this one one line even says they are all dead now because that's how it ends for beings made of Flesh and then it proceeds to talk a lot about the future of humanity the eradication of pain and weakness and the technological singularities which implies the writer who I think is Elaine wants to make robotic humans to transcend Humanity through Robotics and I think he not only put himself into the giant robot but I also think he tried to make a clone of maranne his perfect marionette and this note also goes on to talk about a network that crosses the entire world with commands being sent across thousands of miles in an instant and I don't know about you but that certainly sounds like the Catherine to me and we know that the Catherine are robotic puppets from scha and they sure do have a lot of visual similarities with marionette now considering the Turing and AI connections here I'm going to assume that for now marionette is literally a puppet with no free will of her own and I think that over time she'll develop her own will and push back against elain's Plans convincing him to I don't know not be a foule anymore probably and then I think she'll become our playable Maryanne who isn't actually Maryanne alaine's story will then be about recognizing that she is not his dead sister but she is still really important to him and her story will be about establishing her own identity which is very very fitting for the aftermath of the Nars and crits quest line given all of the themes of wills and self that we find in there and not to make too abrupt of a shift but uh I was thinking about this potential plot line and the Thematic parallel when I realized that marionette has a lot in common with the doll from bloodborne so a spoilers for a 10-year-old game I guess but hear me out okay the teal are of this thing is that she's the replica of a dead woman created by a former Hunter who cared deeply about her she also comes to terms with the reality of her existence by the end of the game kind of well marionette is a doll and Elaine was a maras hunter and technically maranne was also a hunter and so was the woman that the doll was based off of the former Hunter named Gman was also a weapon designer and so was Elaine and if I put Gman and the big robot side by side they they do have some Core Design similar ities which yeah they could just be a coincidence that's not completely off the table but um I'm a little weirded out especially because this doll is based on a hunter named lady Maria who died and got her soul pulled into the nightmare realm of an eldrich monster and now she's the guardian of a tower full of mutated human victims of experiments performed by a powerful organization that wanted to inject them with eldrich monster flesh in order for them to transcend Humanity which honestly sounds a lot like what we did with Jacob and Carter but I digress I just thought that the doll fit really well as an allegory for Maryann because the doll only comes to life in the eldrich monster's dream much like how Maryann can only live inside of lus while still being connected to but not actually the same person as her original form as lady Maria or as the real marann it's just a thematic Banger okay I think if this isn't intentional I'm going to be shocked but listen I don't want to bang on this cracked drum for too long because I think if you try hard hard enough you can kind of Link any two series together via loose threads like this however inside of the research Hall lady Maria presides over in the nightmare realm you can find this uh Garden full of lumen flowers and this instantly clicked in my head as the spot where the sun flowers are on the nightmarish realm inside the Book of Revelations and in bloodborne this is where you will fight the living failures enemy which are exactly what they sound like living but failed human experiments ironically this is also where we find caterpillar who is both living and also a failure of an experiment because he never went through metamorphosis and this is kind of what brings me to arlino and dor and I I promise this makes sense I know this feels like I just took you for a weird Loop a while back I made a theory about arlino proposing that she was literally Lis but stuffed into a hilal body kind of which would make her kind of similar to Caterpillar thus explaining her shared pale hair lightless eyes and blackened limbs now obviously arlino is not literally Lis cuz lus fused with Maryann and is now off traveling the world somewhere but I still think the rest of the theory holds water mostly the love connections and the hillol stuff caterpillar was one of the first successes of putting human Minds into hillal but he was far from perfect Jacob implies many times that caterpillar was always intended to evolve into a butterfly but what that meant was never actually expanded upon back when we were talking about caterpillar we speculated that the butterfly stuff had to do with obtaining a soul which is one of the pieces of the self so I was like kind of unrelatedly looking around for butterfly symbols and stumbled upon this butterfly the heliconius melamine which is named after the mountain where the Greek Muses lived and ironically also the location of the Greek myth of Narcissus and it struck me then that arleo's brooch might actually be a very loose reference to these butterflies and if that was the case and she was a similar type of entity to caterpillar then wouldn't she be the butterfly form like one who possesses a psyche and possibly a Persona too because Thalia and melamine is also the name of the oran Quest where we got the Persona piece and then there's also this one line from Jacob where he wonders if they're wrong about the apocalypse if future Generations will find their work and continue it and I think that is exactly what happened see if a lane Guillotine is really syndrome then the likelihood of DOR gaining access to Renee and Jacob's research materials just went way up because Dori has a track record of recruiting new fouille this means that this Theory I made on dor where I suggested that he might be Renee or have absorbed Renee or whatever had the same issue that my arino video did it was too literal the parallels between him and Renee are real and valid it's just that dor is likely building on Rene's research instead of having absorbed him and now you probably understand why I called Renee a doctor who couldn't save anyone because he wasn't a doctor he was a scholar but that's also what the deal with dor is he's not a medical doctor he's either someone with a doctorate degree or a plague doctor and neither are real doctors and this actually puts a little bit of a new spin on the Phantom of the Opera motifs it's just that Dori wasn't actually the Phantom he's the unnamed Persian that saved the Phantom In the novel when the Phantom who should be Renee I guess in this case meets a very sad end then the unnamed Persian is the one who tells his story afterwards and if you translate this into genin speak it's a bit like dor taking what was left of Rene's story his research and using it to further his own goals taking it for himself it also explains why some of his manga lines are just so very Renee core like you know that one note where an ordo member talks about how Master Renee believed receiving a vision wasn't a good idea and should be avoided at all costs well I don't know about you but I just feel like that has the same Vibes as these comic panels so then I got to thinking assuming my initial dor theory was somewhat right and dor found a way to dissolve himself then segment out his mind and plac those segments into artificial vessels which he based off of conry and puppet technology he took from Wanderer well that was only half of Rene's research the real question is did he do anything with the other half of Rene's research like the neohuman abyss stuff well I think he did see it's been theorized before that Dori is making super soldiers within the fouille and it's easy to see why that theory gets passed around when several of the grunts are completely covered in bandages and he's got access to a whole orphanage The House of the Hearth which is full of kids from every nation in tat there's also the elazar notes from the hospital where a guy who is most likely dor hypothesized about being able to quote control the elemental content of a person person's body without relying on elemental power there is potential for weaponization the same note then goes on to say humans have unlimited potential it may be foolish for me as a researcher to write this but with enough input I might be able to reach the level of a God or so some people might call it it is therefore not unreasonable to assume that the original purpose of the House of the Hearth was to provide suitable test subjects as well as raise elite soldiers and if this is true Lino may have been one of them which would give her ample motivation to get rid of the previous head of the orphanage and seize the position of Guardian which you know that actually makes her kind of similar to lady Maria from bloodborne since they have some visual similarities this masculine presentation uh they've got positioned as a guardian over orphans and victims of human experimentation a penchant for fire-based combat techniques and okay okay okay stop it ow no more bloodborne stuff I'll stop jeez now I don't think Dori had any interest in creating in Neo humans like Renee did because I don't really think his goal is to survive an apocalypse however when helping me proof read this script Roosevelt pointed out that dor did have an interest in transcending the limits of the human mind according to his ragged records he was looking into the arinara and the concept of a controllable dream that could Elevate human intelligence to an entirely new level now this isn't quite the same thing as transcending one's physical limitations like Renee wanted but they are still related this could explain why we have a caterpillar-like entity in arlino and a non-transforming Jacob like entity in col in fact the more I think about it the more I think delusions may have been part of this research as well see Renee hated Visions as I mentioned earlier because he thought they bound you to the fate of the world but delusions can grant the same strength and power as Visions without binding you to the same fate and it is very worth noting that delusions at least the one ones that we've seen so far are made of the bone marrow of a dead God and the bone marrow makes blood pause for a second because this bone marrow or Crystal marrow is apparently the same material as the Bony shells of the consecrated beasts and consecrated beasts were once normal animals that ate the Flesh of gods this forced them to evolve and mutate while also gaining elemental powers which frankly sounds a lot like what happened to Jacob plus both Transformations are also described as being incredibly painful and we know that not all beasts who ate the Flesh of gods survived the process this was something that we also saw in the case of Jacob and Carter so it seems like consuming the flesh or blood of a God is all that's needed to force Evolution and transcend into another form now I think the additional layer of Abyss juice which elanus likes to call Cosmic Darkness may just be a way to add compatibility or increase surviv ability Renee kind of makes a comment about this whole shared underlying principle on enigmatic page 2 now I point out this whole same principle thing because Orosi was not an Abyssal entity nor was he a primordial dragon or even a Rin daughter special so there's no way to know if he had any Cosmic Darkness inside of him the way that elanus and Jacob did however we do know that vops are kind of like pre primordial dragons like a little baby form that can evolve into them and we know that or bash's body was somewhat compatible with these Bishops via skin grafting hence the whole same principle thing we could hypothesize that Abyss juice might have been used to increase the success rate of this procedure and this is why I keep bringing up bloodborne since the game was all about consuming the blood of the old ones in order to transcend humanity and hoyo loves referencing this kind of look I know I said I wouldn't make any more bloodborne references but if you've played the game and you know anything about the lore you really can't blame me for this one this also got me thinking about Remis and rura again because Remis was also keen on avoiding the apocalypse and he in order to do this mixed his golden ior with the primordial seawat and placed that into the Golems made of immortal Black Stone and for the record Remis was described as a golden god and ier was literally something that means god blood in mythology so he put his golden god blood into Blackstone bodies with some primordial seawater and made something that probably looked like the abyss Lings in order to survive the apocalypse which didn't work but that's beside the point so a pattern has started to emerge right and all of this means that the forms that the abyss order takes they're not unique at all I mean we kind of knew that but we didn't really understand why exactly so I'm looking at the abyss order now thinking that clar probably just went out and found the blood of some sort of dragon or deceased deity and then got got a bunch of disgruntled Conan survivors to just drink it it also means that the Heralds guarding the center may have also been humans who drank a different Gods blood or maybe the sinner's blood if it is a God we we don't know and it makes me wonder if the black serpent kns weren't just exposed to another kind of God blood and if there are other types of beings like them out there cuz you know this is starting to become a trend and if all of these Abyss preach about the end times and both Renee and thought them capable of surviving an apocalypse then that might give us a little insight into the foreshadowing of the endgame of genin personally I don't think it's an enough to simply survive the apocalypse so I don't think turning everyone into aisling is a very good solution but what's most interesting to me about all of this is that Renee attempted to do something that previously only Gods had attempted now I already pointed towards Remis and his Golems but Rene's Nationwide Fusion event is actually quite similar to des's Golden Slumber and both of those have Crossover with dori's controlled dream we saw something similar happen with AEP and her little eplings that were trying to survive the apocalypse inside her so there's another Trend there what really brought all of this into Focus for me though was a line from Net's character stories where it says could it be that King neong had been wrong and that the black void could only be opposed if all life were to ban together as one and this this is what I think the narts and CS quest line was actually foreshadowing nalong knew of a black void and considered it a great threat to all life according to nalet it seems that he believed that the black void could only be opposed by an even stronger power that a pep described as forbidden knowledge but that obviously didn't work or else neong would still be around so I guess you can't fight void with void I imagine that thanks to the goddess of flowers desit at least knew of the void-based apocalypse and came to the same conclusions as Renee let all Minds merge into one but then he went the way of neong and ended up full of forbidden knowledge instead and uh then AEP consumed his dead body which caused the apocalypse inside of her so it's uh it's it's funny how that works but anyway I think nalette Renee and desit were right life does need to band together as one in order to defeat the void in in the game so far there are a few instances where the wills of the people do converge together into one Collective will but whenever that happens those Wills Converge on the traveler who's a descender which suggests that a descender possesses the ability to act as a conduit for the collective will of the world which is probably why they are called one who is equal to a world now what's funny is that Rene says he once dreamed of becoming one just like the traveler implying that his intent all along was to make himself an artificial descender he even made his own blade of Will and if you read the description for the blade of Will and the Traveler's iconic dull blade you'll notice that they are the same except that the blade of Will has a couple of extra lines added to the end implying that it's at a further level of Ascension and honestly this is probably the real reason why the traveler wields a dull blade it's not that the blade is special and it's not like they lost their sword from the beginning of the game it's just that their sword has lost its meaning and like Caterpillar says the blade of will can be any sword or anything really even a person so long as it has meaning so whenever the Traveler's sword glows golden it has for a few moments regained its meaning what's also interesting about Renee attempting to make himself into an artificial descender is that he likely got the concept from cona I recently made a video about Nicole of the hex Circle where I propose that the universitas magrum mentioned in both the nartis and Crites Quest and in the Orbit's name card was a type of University similar to sumaru Academia and she was one of the magisters who was studying there and there are a few comments from Jacob that seem to support this so my theory was that Nicole was an astronomer who tracked and ultimately summoned the twins into Tat's orbit hence Scar's line the heavens responded to the summoning plus the Orbit's name card description Nicole is never mentioned in this Quest by name but Jacob and Renee do Nam drop Ry daughter a few times although they never really talk about her specific projects outside of her just doing Alchemy and Doing It Wrong by their definition but Alchemy and more specifically Chia doesn't really seem to be too relevant to what the order does nor does Rin daughter's work in creating dragons however thanks to Shadows Amit snowstorms we know that Ryan daughter was working on something called the the primordial human project which also sounds kind of irrelevant but my friend saber set out in her cabala Theory to prove that this primordial human project was supposed to create something called Adam cadon which is also called the primordial human hence the name of the project now this probably isn't the atom you're familiar with like Adam and Eve instead Adam cadmon is something more of like an entity who is equal to a world which sounds an awful lot like a sender doesn't it I'll let saber explain all the details of how this works in her cabala Theory because it's quite involved and I don't feel like I can do it justice and there's no way I'm going to try and steal her Spotlight there but I'm mentioning this not just to tease you and try and trick you into reading this Theory which is really good and so you should go read it but also because the implications of this makes it possible that Ry daughter was trying to create a synthetic descender the same way Nicole was trying to locate and summon one from beyond the stars which means that Rin daughter's work may have been relevant to Renee and Jacob because Renee was trying to make himself a synthetic descender and this also means that it's quite possible that there were many people or magisters at the universitas magistr room who were tasked with investigating a method by which an apocalypse could be avoided an apocalypse calculated by con's World formula which could also explain a lot of things like why they had the big Mecca and all that kind of stuff you know maybe they were preparing for an apocalypse just in dozens of different ways who knows how many projects there could have been in fact I'm also reminded of ka's Grandfather who found a sword that fell from heaven which he used to defeat many terrifying monsters but eventually had to hide away because so many desired its power I was also thinking about how the twins descended or maybe fell from the sky and how Renee talks about how important the sword of reason is for a descender but that it also doesn't need to be a sword at all although there is symbolic meaning in it taking the form of a sword and Jacob even says that the sword could take the shape of something like I don't know a golden-haired traveler maybe and that really made me wonder where the traveler was for 500 years after the cataclysm while their twin was freely wandering the world doesn't it make you wonder if they're this so-called sword that ka's grandfather hid well who's to say really so in light of all this I think it's possible that near the end of the game the firmament shatters and we're faced with an endless void that threatens to swallow the entire world and it's kind of like a black hole and only the traveler by gaining reason and meaning throughout their Journey will be able to act as a conduit through which all the willes of the world are united forming a golden blade that can cut through any Darkness and with the power of those Wills well the traveler will have the ability to reshape the world and redesign it however they choose and thus they will Ascend to the seat of God as stated in the traveler introduction cards because yes I think hoo is the kind of company who would put the spoilers for the end of the game into some sort of really obscure thing that most people won't read well I am extremely tired and my brain is also very dead I know this video was also incred long but this is the uh streamlined version there's about 40 pages of cut content that I'll probably find a use for in you know some video in the future I don't I don't know where I'm going to put it yet but I've got it I guess in the meantime though I do have a bunch of theories for you to check out from other creators which may uh fill in the blanks of some other stuff that this Quest have BL up that I didn't cover I mentioned that my friends saber and Schwan have been working on a very complete kabala World building of genin theory that they're releasing in Parts they have just released the second part at the time of recording so guys just please go read it it's so good it's so worth your time I promise but if you're not in the mood to read Rosevelt released a very cool video Theory and analysis on the subject of fortuna and if you want more information on raria Clemen time just released a guide on that as well I'm going to add more into the description box as I find them and as I think they are relevant so that you guys can uh you know make good use of those so don't forget to check that out even if I haven't added a shout out in the actual audio like uh the links will still be there and finally I would like to thank my channel members so much for their support and patience I know this video took forever but I I had a bit of a hard time okay so thanks for sticking with me guys I think I've at least earned a nap from all this so you know what take care of yourselves guys thank you so much for watching and go play some bloodborne what why are you looking at me like that I'm serious go play it I know it's 10 years old I don't care go play [Music] it he

Channel: Ashikai

Views: 138,536

Keywords: genshin impact, fontaine, narzissenkreuz, genshin lore

Id: 3022fhGGJLc

Length: 67min 1sec (4021 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024