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!
Not to get too into spoiler territory but the new version's now given us a third character whose eyes do something weird so I think there's a pattern to look into.
All the way in the beginning we knew that Phaethon had these contact lenses that let them see and act through Eous while in the Hollows. This made them better Proxies than anybody else since they were essentially able to be in the Hollow while still at their own command center with all their tools and data on hand.
By Chapter 2 though the Sacrifice was somehow able to affect these contacts. Thinking back after this incident, loading up a disc into Eous while they were connected to it led to Fairy uploading herself into the HDD system and speaking to them in their minds. That shouldn't be possible. But without anything else to go on, that's where the mystery stopped back then.
Then we got v1.6 and suddenly there was another character with special vision as a result of being struck by Ether Corruption. Trigger has a unique "aura" sight she calls Ether Vision which lets her know a little more detail about her surrounding when in the Hollow than normal people. She can much more precisely detect Ethereals and she can even see Ether fluctuations in humans and objects. However there wasn't really anything to suggest these two were connected.
Now here in v2.3 we have a third character. Yidhari describes her sight as something that can see images of the past within the Hollows. As we see from the story itself, the only thing she can't detect is the faces of the people she's seeing. However she can perfectly see Phaethon and specifically - as the image at the top shows - their own unique eyes. Previously these "eyes" were just the contacts but in v1.7 we saw that it was more than that. Their eyes were able to neutralize immense Ether Corruption that should have been fatal. By v2.0 we'd learn that the contacts actually limited their Ether tolerance and inhibited them until Mayor Mayflower gave them an upgrade.
So what does that all mean? Well if we couple it together with this idea that Lucia's tribe is connected to the Hollows, I have a feeling these "eyes" essentially make these people chosen by the Sea of Quanta to be something on the order of familiars to it. They aren't quite avatars like Isolde and Sarah who have direct power from it, something like the Emanators of the Aeons in Star Rail but the interesting thing is that thus far, we haven't seen the sea ever do anything like this. It's curious why it would impart any beneficial attributes to humanity.
Even more curious is that these individuals seem to notice these special eyes in each other. Yidhari as seen again in the image recognizes something interesting about Phaethon's eyes but she wasn't the first. Seed who was revealed to also be from Helios Academy instantly noticed something about Phaethon's eyes as well. And again Fairy connected to Phaethon and it's been revealed that it was also partly due to those eyes.
I have an idea as to what's going on but to really dive into it I'll need Lucia's Agent Story so I'll delay that to next week so everybody gets time to check it out for themselves.