Hi guys! I am Inotia King a youtuber, redditor and gamer who likes theorizing about the story. I actually cobbled together a list of some of my more important theories with respect to the game Genshin Impact and Star Rail that I have been basing all of my newer theories on. I'll be putting more of those up on Hive along with new stuff but if you're impatient I also archived all my theories here. I hope some of you guys are game theorists too. Let's try to figure out these great games together!
I had already concluded my Amphoreus Theory. Then the old devs used v3.4 to explain an alternate reality the Genshin universe could have found itself in if the Fourth Descender was never sent. It was a bleak timeline. I thought we'd be headed back towards Star Rail lore and v3.5 is definitely building towards it however it looks like there was still more the old dev team wanted to say before they moved on. Let's talk about that.
Given how direct they were when they were using Phainon's story, it seems the Furina storyline the new devs came up with for Fontaine was a sore spot for the old guard. Therefore v3.5 seems to have been used once again to pick a fight. In the current version we were introduced to two characters, Cerydra and Hysilens. The design of Cerydra herself screams Furina.
It's enough that the community have been calling Cerydra a Furina expy. And I mean how on the nose do you have to be that Cerydra is the Chrysos Heir of Law and Furina was the God of Justice? But then you get into personality and story and they are still similar. Cerydra is loud and arrogant. She commands her empire as she sees fit and has no problem sending people to their deaths. It would turn out that Furina didn't know what she was doing and her arrogance was faked but it still didn't stop her from trying to have people arrested and sent to the gulag. And in the end both of them would be revealed to just be pawns of someone else's grander scheme.
Hysilens is the other side of it. She is stoic and uncompromising. Her purple color scheme is reminiscent of another stoic and uncompromising bodyguard, Clorinde who watched over Furina. However Hysilens shares her background and development with Neuvillette instead, also a character close to Furina. Both of them are related to whales with Hysilens literally attacking with one while Neuvillette's Constellation is Leviathan Judicator.
Side Note: And if my theory about him was right for the original devs, the "All-Devouring Narwhal" was originally meant to be Neuvillette's true Dragon Sovereign form, rebuilt as a corruption by the Abyss and thus an even closer connection.
Now we get into the actual finger pointing. Just like with Phainon, the story in v3.5 developed in a way to show how unremarkable Furina's story was in the Fontaine Archon Quest. As v3.4 had shown, Phainon had to endure millions of years of suffering just on the slim chance of salvation which was far and away worse than the five hundred years Furina "endured" as she lived in luxury pretending to be a goddess. Furina was one of Egeria's Oceanid familiars turned human. Meanwhile Hysilens was not just one of Phagousa's "Oceanids" but the last surviving one when war ravaged and destroyed her home and forced her to live on land. Over the course of hundreds of years she would violently lose everyone else she came to know in a desperate attempt to hold back the mad automaton Lygus. There is just no comparison between that and Furina's psychological isolation due to simply outliving everyone she came to know. Worse? In a final bid to delay Lygus from taking the Worldbearing Coreflame, Hysilens trapped them both inside of an illusory world where everyone she lost was alive again, playing out their lives through the memories she had of them. All the while she knew they weren't real. That is real isolation and it was also self-imposed compared to Furina who wasn't aware of anything that was happening. So let's talk about that next.
I had pointed out within the context of Genshin itself how banal Furina's plight really was but the original devs went above and beyond. And then we get into Cerydra's side of it. Unlike Phainon and Hysilens, Cerydra didn't endure any kind of anguish to elicit sympathy. Instead her development pointed out another issue I had taken with how the new devs played out Furina's story. She lacked agency. All of the trauma she was put through was done so without any input from her. And this was unfortunately by design. As explained by Focalors' Divinity, she wanted Furina to be kept in the dark and simply pretend to be Archon. It was a curse to keep her powerless and immortal to muddle through the next 500 years without any hope of changing her fate. What ended up happening was that she would be abused. In the beginning, she tried to be honest with the people of Fontaine only for them to turn on her and see her as a fraud. Therefore she needed to create an outspoken facade and behave outlandishly to fool them. By the end, it was this same facade and reckless behavior that offered her no sympathies when our group deceived her and put her on trial. She had been told to never let anyone know she wasn't the Archon or else Fontaine would be doomed but this was a lie because she had to become exposed in order for the solution to be possible. Thus it put unnecessary stress onto an already uninformed girl for the purposes of drawing pity from the players. Not only is this bad storytelling, it's also manipulative. You're meant to feel sorry for her.
The original devs therefore used Cerydra to tell a version of Furina's story where she would have agency and still gain an emotional response from players. Cerydra was also a pawn of a much larger scheme. She was meant to follow the Path of Destruction as a despotic conqueror and she did. However it would turn out that all of her heinous actions were done so that she could be portrayed as the villain that united Amphoreus against her, a common enemy. Her fall was celebrated and she intended for it to be celebrated but because it would spark the actions needed to bring Amphoreus its salvation, which it did. In my rewrite for Fontaine, I also had Furina acting as a poor leader that created divisions in Fontaine. That too was done in service of ultimately revealing the underlying issues of her nation so they could be addressed and the nation united against a greater threat, in my case the Fatui. What this resulted in for v3.5 was a powerful scene during Cerydra's death where she showed no regrets for her path in life and that she believed her legacy would endure as a result. Rather than cheap pity, players are made to feel respect for their Imperator.
Side Note: Funny enough, both of our ideas led to the death/sacrifice of that character and in similar ways too. Cerydra was killed by Hysilens by her own design. For me, I had Furina and Egeria (the two Seele personalities of Focalors) plan for Neuvillette to reabsorb the Gnosis including the last piece of Egeria since the rest of her had been turned into the Amrita. This effectively killed her.
Nitpick: Technically Cerydra being a girl would make her the Imperatrix as Latin has gender forms. We actually have an existing example of an Imperatrix. Raiden Ei's Constellation is Imperatrix Umbrosa.
I was wrong that the old Genshin devs had put the Genshin side of things to bed with v3.4. They still had an axe to grind in v3.5 but I'm going on a limb again to say I think there won't be anything more to say in v3.6 and we'll be all in on Star Rail lore only. (I was wrong lol)
Topic originally created on September 14th, 2025.