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'm not really sure about the chicken or the egg this time. Right now what it looks like is that my old topic about the order of the Descenders is actually more on the money than I even thought myself. Up to this point I'd always firmly believed that Phanes was first, the Sustainer was second (now screwed up by new dev lore) and then our Traveler twins made up the Third and Fourth Descenders with the sibling attacked and stripped of their body which was then repurposed into the Gnoses thus causing their endless war against destiny out of revenge for this and other trespasses. My old theory though proposed a ridiculous notion that the Abyss itself was a Descender, answering the summon of humanity to fight against the oppression of the First Descender. This then made the Sustainer the Third Descender and the twins being that they are twins shared the role of Fourth Descender which is why the sibling isn't considered a Descender since they fell to Abyssal influence.
Again I thought that was purely fanfiction at the time but it was a fun enough idea to play around with. All the previously established lore pointed to Phanes being first including the very first information we ever got about it, the Byakuyakoku Collection which stated that the primordial one recreated the world for the sake of humanity. This part of the collection predated the Second Throne. Before Phanes the world was originally elemental. Even humans are elemental in nature. And that brings me back to the chicken and the egg dilemma. My fanfiction topic was from over two years ago. We had not gotten any new information that would support that wild theory since and I dismissed it as quickly as I had come up with it. But I have another theory these days about how the new dev team (Genshin's dev team was confirmed to have been changed by miHoYo themselves during the v5.3 livestream) seems to have run out of story ideas and has been using popular fan theories to make up for it. In that case, was the original intention what I theorized in my topic or did the new devs decide to set up the Descenders in this order as a result of topics like mine? (there have been other theories suggesting that Phanes wasn't the first and that the Second Descender defeated the First)
If this is the case then the story dramatically shifts from following the Gnostic belief of needing to ascend beyond the false god into this becoming a foolish idea. Originally the Heavenly Principles was depicted as despotic. It destroyed Sal Vindagnyr and its Ley Line Tree. It disturbed the natural order and separated humanity from the elemental world. It bestowed Visions which are a means of containing humanity's potential and to monitor their activities, recently reinforced by Pierro in the God's Limit teaser. According to Hoyoverse lore, this would have been necessary as humanity always ends up advancing to a point where their technology destroys their own universe. (but this might not actually be the case) Now we've gotten lore about Nibelung and its oppressive state where the humans suffered and then afflicted the world with Abyssal Corruption and Phanes actually came to clean up the mess. I asked this the first time the new devs blundered into this storyline but if this is the new canon why are we even going through this game's story? Trying to undertake the gnostic journey is just going to lead to the world's destruction lol
Hopefully that's addressed if the new devs really mean to use this storyline. In any case that was the first two Descenders. Since the Sustainer can't be the Third Descender anymore we now no longer have any meaningful candidates. Instead the story seems to shift from the First and Second Descenders (Phanes and a brainwashed Sustainer) working together to defeat the Third and use their body for the Gnoses into a situation where a minor character - the Third Descender - willingly worked with the one that came before (Phanes) to construct the Gnoses out of their own body. Finally the twin part of my topic kicks in. The Abyss twin is not considered a Descender because they are one half of the Fourth Descender and ended up failing thus our player twin becomes the only known Fourth Descender.
Side Note: I say there aren't any meaningful candidates but there may still be one. When the Sustainer was changed into just another shining shade despite none of the other three claiming to also be sustainers even though all four of them are sustaining the principles, I proposed that all that needed to happen was that everything about the Sustainer shifted to who I had originally allotted as a shining shade, Paimon. As such if the Sustainer was going to be relegated to Third Descender in this new order, that's now Paimon's role and if Paimon was the Third Descender then it would make sense why nobody knows what she is or where she came from. She's not from Teyvat. It would also explain her diminished state and lack of memories from this period of her life. It could even explain why she's drawn to the Traveler, a fellow Descender and her direct successor. (Of course the issue with this that I brought up back then would still apply. If she was a Descender then Irminsul can't affect her and we've seen that it does. Being a shade would have worked better as she'd have been born of Teyvat so she would be affected by Irminsul while not being affected by the Abyss. That said, Irminsul's lore has been very inconsistent with this new team - see below - so we might be able to ignore this issue.
How much of this will remain consistent is uncertain. The new dev team has already shown several times that they don't always keep their facts straight. The most prominent example of course is the Natlan Archon Quest and Lantern Rite. One key point of the Natlan Archon Quest was the creation of the Ancient Name Tumaini which finally connected the Traveler to Teyvat's Ley Lines. We know for a fact that it was Teyvat's Ley Lines and not just the Night Kingdom because there was specific dialogue stating this. Therefore once Capitano reconnected Natlan's Ley Lines to the rest of Teyvat this must mean the Traveler just like their sibling is now recorded by Irminsul and the Ley Lines. However in Lantern Rite when Lan Yan tried to connect the Traveler to the Ley Lines array, she couldn't because for some reason the Traveler was once again not connected. Lantern Rite was a direct sequel to the Natlan Archon Quest as it was also directly stated to be. This then went on to become the crucial element that allowed the Traveler to safely rescue Hu Tao.
In a more recent issue we can just look at Ineffa's Archon Quest Prologue. Right from the start the group was trying to identify Ineffa's origins. The Traveler and Paimon were asked if they knew anything about humanoid robots to which they responded with Fontaine's meka. However since the game's launch we've known one very human-like robot: Katheryne. At first it was seen as a joke because Katheryne shared the "clone" issue with Pokemon's Nurse Joys and players joked that she might be a series of robots which was then backed by an idle quote from Katheryne, "Error." This was then confirmed in the Sumeru Archon Quest by Nahida. (very confirmed) Fontaine was the previous region and was last visited back in May during the v5.6 event. Meanwhile there is a Katheryne in every region that is visited daily by adventurers like the Traveler. Now compound that with Katheryne's far more human-like appearance compared to any of the clockwork meka in Fontaine and why wasn't Katheryne the first thing to pop into their heads during that cutscene? Perhaps it was only because if she was easily identified as being from Snezhnaya the quest might have been cut short. (as if to point this out themselves the new devs even brought in another very humanoid robot in the form of Sandrone's Fatui Agent late into the quest)
Even more recently in the Nod-Krai story the Traveler was first shown to be immune to Dottore's new Trilune Authority powers since they aren't part of the world which those powers govern and Paimon was suggesting she is. However in the next part of the story suddenly the Traveler was affected....
Anyway for now it seems the new order of the Descenders is Phanes, the Abyss, Unknown Third Descender that could be Paimon and the twin Fourth Descenders.
Topic originally created on April 24th, 2025.