But just hear me out ok? You can file this under Crazy Stuff My Uncle Inotia King Says after.
Hi guys I am 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!
First
A long long time ago Genshin Impact was still the new kid on the block and the major Hoyoverse project people talked about was Honkai Impact. This led to a prevailing theory about what Genshin was within the still nascent Hoyoverse and that was the culmination of Project A.R.K.
Of course that theory is dead in a ditch now. Project A.R.K. was given to Griseo in the Previous Era, sending her off in a rocket to find a suitable planet to terraform in order to rebuild civilization far away from Earth and hopefully away from the honkai. Back then the image above was used as proof of the theory's validity as it seemingly reflected this scene:
Notice the two shooting star like rockets in the first image?
Anyway this was debunked already thanks to the second half of Part 1.5 in Honkai. It literally explained what happened to Griseo and we got her back. Project A.R.K. was a failure. It did surprisingly create a very Genshin-like planet complete with a 7 ruler system under a rainbow-colored motif though. There was even a flood prophecy and a big whale which makes sense if you realize this story was released concurrently with the Fontaine Archon Quest.
However there was another idea I played around with as I pondered the Project A.R.K. tie-in with Genshin. In v3.3 we got a -terrible story- quest that showed us what Teyvat's Irminsul looks like from the inside. And to say it evoked certain ideas is an understatement.
You cannot look at that and not see a typical representation of a database in fiction. There's that blue light background and little blips of white light streaming across its branches and roots.
There was a period of time when Simulation Theory became very popular in fiction. We got specific types of isekai anime like Expelled from Paradise and of course there was the movie that popularized it: The Matrix. Simulation Theory in fiction is about an advanced civilization that for one reason or another decided to escape from the real world (usually due to a post-war apocalypse) into an artificially constructed one that perfectly or near perfectly mimics the real one. The Matrix for example was a post-war apocalypse caused by humanity's specism against its own robot creations. The machines then took over and forced humans into the artificial world as a means of farming their brain's electrical potential, eventually going straight to farming the humans themselves.
Originally I applied Simulation Theory to the existing Project A.R.K. Theory because Honkai was also technically a post-war apocalypse setting. The world of Honkai was ravaged several times by the honkai to the point that it has soft reset several times in the form of the different eras. Project A.R.K. was itself a plan during the Previous Era when it was doomed, sending Griseo off to another planet to start civilization fresh and far away from the honkai. This can be combined with the early post-apocalypse theories about Genshin that based themselves around the opening scene and the We Will Be Reunited trailer which showed a devastated Teyvat, seemingly destroyed by the forces of the Heavenly Principles like the Sustainer. The short of it is that another advanced AI like Honkai's Prometheus could have become Phanes the Primordial One just like how Prometheus had become the Will of the Honkai in Honkai and shaped that world.
Again these kinds of theories were disproven by Part 1.5 where we see what happens with Project A.R.K. so I had put the idea to bed. However thanks to Natlan's revelation that the Ley Lines themselves were a creation of the Heavenly Principles, this therefore means Irminsul was also their creation and again Irminsul looks like a database which could house a virtual world. You could even call it the hard drive that Teyvat is saved on.
Of course there's a common theme in these kinds of virtual world stories: Taking the Matrix as an example you have "deja vu" which is defined by the film as a glitch in the Matrix caused when information is hastily edited. Inconsistencies or instability of the world are plot elements used in simulation stories in order to allow the characters and audience to realize that the world is not what it seems. However this didn't exist in Genshin until Natlan. The world is remarkably stable and no glitches were noticeable until Mavuika supposedly punched a hole into the sky. Instead we had to be told that the sky was false. So is it possible for a simulation to be so perfected that there are no glitches and bugs? Yes. A significantly powerful processor should in theory be able to prevent all forms of irregularities that might reveal the truth. That is actually a prerequisite to the real world Simulation Theory, that we should be unable to detect whether or not we are the butterfly or the man dreaming it. In our current understanding, a hypothetical futuristic super computer called the matrioshka brain would have enough processing power to calculate every last aspect of the real world: all physical processes, biological processes and interstellar interactions all down to the quantum scale. And it would also be able to make all these calculations in real time with zero delay or buffering, a perfect simulation of reality. Actually according to the proposal of this matrioshka brain, this super computer would essentially be the size of a planet itself and be powered by the "planet core." Larger scale versions would put the brain at the size of the solar system and make use of the entire star's energy output.
Now that's all well and good but can we actually see this at play in the game itself? Yes. A long time ago some players pondered the mechanism behind the Ley Line Blossoms and how we could revisit our battles against the story's major enemies aka the farmable Weekly Bosses. All theories currently point to these being representations of the enemies that we fought and that we aren't for example actually fighting the humans Treasure Hoarders the blossoms spawned. The Weekly Bosses are just memories of our battles within the story and the Ley Line Blossoms likewise generate memories of the enemies we fought previously. However that wouldn't explain why the Weekly Bosses are more difficult to face compared to their in-story counterparts and also why they sometimes have different mechanics. For example Azhdaha does not absorb additional elements during Zhongli's Character Quest but this is part of its standard attack pattern during Weekly encounters.
We can go back to Honkai to reconcile this. (actually we can use Star Rail as well) In the game, stronger versions of enemies are simulations. This would also correspond to the stronger versions of storyline enemies found in Star Rail's Simulated Universe. You could tie this into something like the Danger Room in X-men, where the computer can generate previously fought enemies like Sentinels and be set to different difficulty levels. In terms of Genshin, we already know that Irminsul contains all of the memories of Teyvat. Therefore it wouldn't be a stretch to believe the Weekly Boss "memories" we fight are simulations generated by Irminsul based on its stored data of the in-story fights. Then as an advanced super computer it would be able to increase or decrease the difficulty of those enemies by calculating changes in their movements. Similarly the Ley Line Blossoms generate local enemies based around memories of them that it had collected in the region.
It would even explain why Descenders aren't recorded in Irminsul and therefore - as seen most recently during Lantern Rite - the simulation doesn't believe in their existence. Imagine you wanted to play Genshin without an account. The game would not recognize you. You'd essentially be a hacker and of course the game would not be able to record any of your activities as part of a normal account. And also if we use this hacker analogy then doesn't it make perfect sense why the Primordial One aka the admin would want to get rid of these other Descenders?
Of course another thing with this idea would be that once again we didn't see the actual sky behind the false one. If this is a simulation then there's no punching through it. Instead what we saw when the sky was broken is exactly what we saw in Zenless v1.3 when digital Miyabi used her Nagori Yuki and it hit the buildings behind Yanagi. It wouldn't happen in a real simulation of course but for dramatic effect, the "power" behind such heavy attacks "broke the programming" of the digital reality. Nothing was shone behind that in Zenless but perhaps the "Ancient Moon's Remnants" are some kind of kernel coding underneath the simulation layer. You can think of it like those times you glitch through walls because of poor collision. The programmed effects of these heavy attacks are set to "break" certain surfaces and that conflicts with the collision detection of non-destructible objects like background buildings and the sky.
Now how likely is this Simulation Theory? Well it depends. I've got another theory about how it seems the dev team for Genshin was changed around the time of Fontaine's release which is why we got a drastic shift in the direction of the story. (for example we never had any lore about the "divine thrones" pre-Fontaine which was then explored again in Natlan, diminishing the role of the Gnoses) So while it is very unlikely to have been the story pre-Fontaine, this new dev team might just go for it. But again for now, this was just your Crazy Uncle I. King's random thoughts.
Anyway I rummaged around the internet and I might just have another weird one for you.
You'll want to watch this video by Kurzgesagt. According to it, there is some fringe theory about how black holes work and I had brought up a previous idea relating to black holes and how elemental beings operate in this game. When I first watched that Kurzgesagt video about 2 years ago I couldn't make heads or tails of it. It felt like I was hearing pure science fiction which makes sense given even the video explained that most scientists don't subscribe to the theory. However sci-fi is right in miHoYo's wheelhouse. Besides Genshin, just about all of miHoYo's other games tell some form of science-related fantasy in their stories.
So first things first. This game was based around the concepts in Gnosticism, an old form of Christianity that was influenced by religions like Zoroastrianism and Buddhism while Christianity itself was founded on Judaism. One thing these influencing religions have in common is the journey towards deeper understanding or enlightenment. Zoroastrianism's one true god is Ahura Mazda also known as the God of Wisdom and its Amesha Spenta are core tenets for followers to better understand it and why they are here. Judaism's followers also painstakingly study and analyze the Tanakh. And likely the most well known about in modern times, Buddhism is founded on the individual journey towards nirvana. This would be gnosis in Gnosticism. If going on a journey to attain gnosis is the basic plot of Genshin then one aspect of that plot would be the importance of memories as you'd need them to learn from your experiences which would lead you towards gnosis. So in Nahida's Second Character Quest we first learned that individual experiences and the growth that accompany them are not important to the elemental beings that once ruled the planet. When the elemental Dragon Sovereign Apep was dying, the elemental beings that lived inside it willingly sacrificed themselves and all of the memories they'd collected in order to heal it. More recently, the elemental dragon Kukulkan carried out a plan that would have changed all living beings within Natlan into pure Phlogiston energy, losing all sense of self in order to live on as goo. Now during this same World Quest, Kukulkan explained that Celestia had manipulated the Ley Lines of the planet into a "girdle" which protected it against the Abyss. However that's not the only thing we know the Ley Lines do for Teyvat. Actually they house all of the memories of the world and if anything should happen to them, those memories would be lost. In this way Celestia seems to value memories and so those who don't value them like the Abyss and the elementals became its enemies. I had once theorized that this duality showed just how important the Traveler's mission would be, their role as Witness. However even Celestia has conditions.
Now let's get back to that Kurzgesagt video. In it, it is proposed that black holes have event horizons because some cosmic force is maintaining them. Should a black hole lose its event horizon then we'd get a peek behind the curtain and see something we could not possibly predict at present. Could miHoYo consider that to be the "gnosis" for Genshin's endgame? Not literally seeing a black hole's singularity of course but what physics breaking truth humanity might gleam from beyond the veil. That truth based on how the video described it, was being able to experience all of time at once in the present. I'd brought up theories on how time travel might work in the Hoyoverse. If you could bend light to such an extreme that your light cone tips, there is some part of that cone that might go backwards in time, overlapping with potential past points of your original light cones that weren't part of your original world line. (don't worry too much about the technical aspects here haha) So it could be interpreted that seeing the "truth" of the singularity might relate to "seeing the true god" in a religious sense - or - in terms of the Hoyoverse, seeing the Imaginary Tree and the Sea of Quanta.
And if that's the case then there's already been theories about this. According to some ideas, our own universe started through the creation of a black hole. Since black holes are tremendous amounts of matter compressed into an impossibly small volume it stands to reason that that's how the Big Bang occurred only now with this theory, the Big Bang occurred within the singularity thus happening in its own universe. The multiverse therefore could be black holes creating universes while still within the universe they were born to. This potentially infinite layered multiverse might just be the structure of the Imaginary Tree and there's another idea within the black hole cosmology model if that's the case. Just like how the Sea of Quanta continues to try and consume the Imaginary Tree, some black holes might not produce viable universes and thus collapse into dead black holes which radiate away. Bubble universes in a nutshell.
So finally what would that cosmic force be that maintains event horizons so that we never get to see the "naked singularity" and the truth of the Hoyoverse? That's Celestia. As I'd theorized a very long time ago, Celestia from the Gnostic perspective would represent the false god or Demiurge. The Demiurge wants to believe itself to be the true god and therefore wants to prevent humanity from ever attaining gnosis which would bring them back to the divine and therefore beyond it. If witnessing the singularity will give humanity some profound truth about the universe or being able to see that there are universes within universes thus seeing the inner workings of the Imaginary Tree and its conflict against the Sea of Quanta, that should be the gnosis Celestia means to keep away from it. This could even be why it created a girdle out of the Ley Lines within its false sky, not quite a means of shielding humanity from the Abyss but rather blinding humanity from the wider multiverse outside its borders.
So what do you guys think? Could miHoYo have used this idea about black holes and the singularity hiding behind their event horizons to come up with Celestia's Heavenly Principles hiding the truth of the Imaginary Tree from Genshin's humanity? And would gnosis actually be about breaking through the false sky in order to see this real universe behind the "event horizon" that is the false sky?
PS: Given I didn't bring it up the whole time in the topic, yes this topic was written before we got the v5.7 livestream. Unfortunately the Loom of Fate was actually as pointless as I thought it would be last year though honestly even I thought it would do more than what the new dev team gave us. And the stuff with Skirk didn't really go anywhere either. That said there is something to note. The new devs had said something in the Nod-Krai developer video a while back about how we players didn't have the full scope of the story and so misunderstandings about the lore arose. Personally I didn't appreciate that line but given this topic today, perhaps at the very least there was always meant to be a sci-fi tie-in to all games within the Hoyoverse and we're finally getting that information in Genshin where previously it was focused on religion, culture and history. Star Rail's Amphoreus which I've been using in my theories lately has done this as well, starting us off with a very religious culture and society but eventually returning us back to the sci-fi setting of Star Rail once Amphoreus was ready to rejoin the wider lore of that game.
Topic originally created on February 2nd, 2025.