-you get one crazy story.
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!
There are theories that currently believe the Little Witch and the Undying Fire story is about Signora because people still believe she's the Crimson Witch of Flames for some reason. There are also other theories that the story is about Alice herself. Given that Klee is a Pyro allogene and how this game portrays generations (check out Kaveh's Hangout and how similar Kaveh's father and his group of friends look and act compared to Kaveh's group of friends) it stands to reason Alice herself is also a Pyro allogene.
However I've got another theory I haven't seen anybody come up with yet.
Last time I talked about how this book series elaborated on the members of the Hexenzirkel that wrote it. One writer in particular that interested me was Barbeloth not just because of the content she provided but that she herself seems to be a major clue miHoYo provided to us to decipher the lore. Barbeloth is based on Barbelo the oldest emanation of the true god in Gnosticism and in some versions one of the guides to help humanity attain gnosis. Based on what we've seen of her from the Simulanka summer event that seems to be her role in Genshin as well.
She wrote the second volume of the book where she goes just a little too deep into astrology, in particular the acknowledgement that Teyvat's astrology is more direct than on other worlds because the influence of the universe was greatly weakened on purpose. As she gets off track she brings up a few concepts that aren't actually from Genshin. It was probably information that the devs came across while researching to come up with Genshin's story. However the fact that they have Barbeloth talking about it means they've purposely inserted the raw real world information into Genshin thus making it part of Genshin's lore. That would be the real world astrological concept of the archon and the Seven Archons in particular.
Side Note: When it says that other worlds have more "abstract" astrology to Teyvat's, the word is actually 抽象 which is the Chinese for abstract but confusingly enough is not what abstract means to us in English. When you think abstract it's something that's hard to understand right? I'll get to the why in a second but that's not what 抽象 means. In Chinese this is a concept in philosophy where the philosopher analyzes seemingly disparate items, finds their commonality and creates a unifying consideration to encapsulate all of them. Where the abstract part comes in is that philosophy of course is conceptual rather than tangible and that is the literal definition of abstract. It's hard to understand concepts without a concrete existence. I would say the academic term abstract, or a summary fits 抽象 better, a simplified explanation to bring together the findings of several different points of research. And now knowing this it makes more sense why 抽象 was used here right? Barbeloth said that astrologists outside Teyvat have to consider several different factors when analyzing the skeins of fate.
Barbeloth also referred to planets as "archons" didn't she? And then she goes off and says that these planets number seven so they are called the "Seven Archons." I would have loved to say this is another case of miHoYo being very obvious with us as they've had to do a few times now but this is actually a case of localization fail. Actually what that line should read is that normally on sapient planets archons will descend and they number seven hence being called the "Seven Archons." However it still works here because we obviously have seven Archons in this game right? Wrong. That's also a localization fail. We actually have the "Seven" and Archon is just a synonym for god made up by the English localization team. There is no distinction in Chinese. This is why Decarabian is still called the Anemo Archon despite miHoYo making several revisions to text in the past. (The Dendro Archon's gender pronoun for example.) However there is a concept of seven archons in our real world known as the cosmic archons. They are the children of the Demiurge or the false god. Who set up the Seven in Teyvat? Phanes. This is our Demiurge. In Greek mythology Phanes is the creator of the world but it is the son of Ananke the Primordial Goddess of Fate who I've likened to the Imaginary Tree itself when it comes to the Hoyoverse. That would be the "true god" in this game. The archons are responsible for controlling humanity's fate and keeping them from stepping out of line. We've seen several times now that this is a key theme in Genshin, that Celestia wants to use its fake sky to contain humanity and its ambitions while all of our allies seek to undermine it and allow humanity to break free of the shackles of its Heavenly Principles. Barbeloth is the most recent case as she helped Andersdotter give Durin of all creatures a new fate in the form of Mini-Durin.
The Genshin wiki translated 空想星体 as an hypothetical astronomical object. This would be something like an exomoon, basically something that's likely to exist but we haven't actually seen one yet. (an abstract!) It is a good guess but I think I've got a better one. Going off of what we know about the Hoyoverse, 空想 is much more likely the imaginary as it relates to physics or the concept of "imaginary numbers" which is currently being used to model the universe. 星体 is easy to see then. It literally means celestial bodies and we just went over heaven sent beings called archons. What else do we know of that "descended from the heavens" and can number four? The shining shades maybe? The Seven and the shining shades, both beings employed by Phanes to control the fate of Teyvat.
Barbeloth also suggested that the little witch was on one of the planets with seven archons and shades. She categorizes the shades as a "virtual" but she goes on to say that on the little witch's planet, the "virtual" is the dark sun. Well of course the dark sun refers to the Black Sun Dynasty of Khaenri'ah and they aren't shining shades. What's going on here? Well actually there's a little wordplay trick going on. If A equals B and C equals B then A should equal C but if A is only categorized as B and C can be categorized as B then A and C are only in the same category not necessarily the same thing. (Genshin and Zenless are both mobile games but they aren't the same game.) The shades are made from Phanes and Phanes was created by the Imaginary Tree to prune the universe Teyvat exists in. This is the same as the Cocoon of Finality in Honkai. So that makes Phanes and its creations also part of the Imaginary Tree. However the tree has a rival called the Sea of Quanta. They are equal opposites. The Abyss is a derivation of the sea in Teyvat and the Black Sun Dynasty followed the Abyss religiously therefore what's actually being said is that both the shades and the Abyss are "virtual."
Side Note: And actually virtual isn't the correct translation either. The word is 余 which usually means excess so the shades and the Abyss are extra or maybe she's trying to say unnecessary to Teyvat since neither is native to the world.
So with all that in mind what exactly is my theory about this story then? Well the story itself has nothing to do with Signora of course. The Little Witch may have started out as a self-insert of Alice since she wrote the first volume but the story itself is nonsense. It was just a fun project Alice came up with for the gang and the only real takeaway from that part of it is that there was a falling out in the middle of them writing it as seen in Volume 5 and 6's blurbs. The major lore from it is Barbeloth's volume which further elaborates the purpose of our Traveler in this game, to break through the fake sky of the Heavenly Principles and return all of the myriad variables of humanity's fates back to them. The Hexenzirkel are all on board with this though some are misguided like Rhinedottir and so we may see a future conflict between the members, foreshadowed by that previous conflict shown by Volume's 5 and 6. (O and as for the Undying Fire, that's not Signora's uncontrollable fire powers nor the Crimson Witch's powers. At the end of Volume 7 it's pretty clearly meant to be the "power of friendship" and the old witch that the little witch gets the fire from likely represents Andersdotter.)
Side Note: I want to backtrack to the English localization error that made it seem like Barbeloth claimed the Seven Archons were planets. While this is an error we do have this comparison elsewhere in the lore so I wanted to get into that:
We all know what the Sabbath is right? "And God rested on the seventh day." Through researching Sumeru last year it became very apparent that the region was likely chosen by miHoYo because of the heavy influence Zoroastrianism had on not only Gnosticism but also Judaism. One of those influences was the Babylonian Classical Seven Planets that they used to name the seven days. According to some experts the word shabbas might have come from an amalgamation of shab or rest and sebut the seventh day, named after Shamash the sun god. (yes this is where we got Sunday from too) In Hebrew seven is sheba so you can see the relation.
Now in Hebrew the word oath is shebu'ah which literally means to "seven" yourself, usually translated these days to the sevenfold oath. We might assume this is swearing the oath seven times to god to make it that much more binding but as it turns out there's far more to it than that. Going back to the Seven Planets we have the Zoroastrian concept of the Amesha Spenta, aspects of their true god Ahura Mazda. You might be more familiar with the Genshin version of this name. Does Sapientia Oromasdis ring a bell? How about King Ormazd? Yes miHoYo went deep with this. In fact, you already know six out of the seven Amesha Spenta. Vahumana, Amurta, Spantamad, Kshahrewar, Haravatat, Rtawahist? Yes in the English version they're known as the Six "Darshan" but these names are the names of the Amesha Spenta and the missing one Spenta Mainyu is the Holy Ghost aspect of Ahura Mazda so, yes that would be Sapientia Oromasdis or our cute dook-dook expelling Dendro Archon. According to the theologian William Brede Kristensen, the sevenfold oath of Judaism was originally intended to swear oath to these seven aspects of god. Why? Well by conflating both the seven Amesha Spenta together with the Seven Classical Planets it was believed that swearing this oath would bring man into harmony with the universe because they've aligned themselves with the literal cosmic seven, the seven planets.
In Gnosticism and in astrology this concept is the seven archons bridging that connection for Genshin. We can connect our Archons with the planets as they are gods just like the Amesha Spenta that were conflated with them. But also these planets had god representatives in the original Babylonian as well, again Shamash representing the "planet" of the Sun. Actually Venus or Ishtar is also one of these planets and she is represented by Istaroth. Yes Phanes and the shining shades also relate to this concept with caveats. For example in Greek mythology Zeus sometimes absorbs Phanes into himself thus this merges two of the planets, Jupiter for Zeus and the Sun for Phanes. There's also the concept of the five archons that when combined become Satan. That may explain why we were originally told that only two of the original Seven survived. There are many layers to this one. miHoYo's playing a very intricate game.
Ok so what did this pet project by Alice tell us?
- The book's story is just for fun. It's the underlying details that add to the lore.
- Therefore it's not about Alice or "Octavia" or any witch in particular and it definitely has nothing to do with Signora.
- The most important volume is Vol.2 written by Barbeloth.
- She explains further what we already knew since Unreconciled Stars, that the sky is fake and is being used by Celestia to control fate.
- Barbeloth brings up the role Phanes had for the Archons and why it only chose seven of them while eliminating the rest with the Archon War.
- She also brings up the shining shades and implies through them the connection between the Imaginary Tree and Sea of Quanta.
- To her both the interference from the Imaginary Tree in the form of Celestia and the presence of the Sea of Quanta in the form of the Abyss are unnecessary to Teyvat.
- The "Undying Fire" is just the fire of the friendship between the witches and the old witch that finally gives the little witch this fire is likely a representation of Andersdotter.