i wanted to share some of my thoughts on cyrene, and why in my view her deal as “flawless ego” is. honestly an illusion created by child cyrene.
i feel like it’s less obvious than the suffering phainon went through, but she also carried a lot of pain, silently. the ‘how’ is interesting though.
spoilers for 3.7 under da cut
okay so for clarity, i will refer to demiurge cyrene/playable cyrene as. well. “demiurge cyrene”/demiurge, and child cyrene/ripples of past reverie as “peach”. the distinction between them is purposefully blurry in the story i think sometimes, but i must make it here
so, in the very first eternal recurrence, phainon kills peach cyrene so she can’t do her trial. it introduced a logic breach that meant era nova couldn’t complete, and they just did this several times over until khaslana went to fight nanook and all that.
once peach died, she was ejected into path space (that part we see where march is talking with peach, who’s basically begging march to not go into amphoreus), but she also ends up going to the ‘great tomb of the nameless titan’ aka the scepters kernel every cycle. she shares her stories of amphoreus with demiurge, and gets quickly deleted.
demiurge started out as what i think is just an ai deep learning thing again. linking concepts it heard and all that. the world it saw at all was shaped by peach’s vision, and so it grew up to be like how peach wished, unintentionally. it starts as a cube, the seed of memory, but eventually turns into a fairy from the membrace maze (mem) and then into an older version of peach cyrene.
quote by demiurge: “the world was kind to me, so i grew up to be kind as well.”
what wasn’t mentioned was the cost of the kindness.
peach always dies young, at the very least before she can complete her part in the flame chase. she didnt get a lot of time at all to see the world unlike the other heirs, with the exception of the first cycle. despite being young, she always makes the same choice of dying to ensure the eternal recurrence will happen, and it’s a noble sacrifice, but she overall has this tendency to be self sacrificial and ends up shouldering her burden silently and completely alone. well, who could she even share it with beyond demiurge? she doesn’t with neither khaslana nor demiurge, though.
unlike phainon, who got his very deserved crashouts, she, however, i think chose to hide this struggle of hers. she ALSO went through 33.550.336 cycles of bullshit, (and got her memories back when she went to the great tomb iirc, ) so…
the one time we see her get close to crying, she did have demiurge cheering her up. but, we see one moment as a representation of 33.550.336. how many times did she cry? break down? feel scared, hopeless? she did it anyway and succeeded, but the thing is she doesn’t get to know she succeeded — she got killed then formatted every time. the other heirs’ past cycle’s memories were thrown to the memortis shore, and they regain it briefly in the last cycle, but she got straight up formatted. the only reason her data is remembered is through demiurge.
demiurge, who sees only the side of her where she’s not crying. “peach == happy”. peach held herself together in front of demiurge, but in the flashbacks of the seed of memory demiurge we really don’t get to see her struggle, unlike how the other heirs’ and phainon’s was something both the scepter and as ive written recorded.
so, demiurge grows up into the version of peach she wishes she was. tall, beautiful, powerful, and full of love — because peach herself was sure she couldn’t feel love. demiurge’s primium mobile, her answer to the question of what moves life forward is literally love.
but the cyrene who laments is left behind.
she tells phainon to cheer up when he’s killing her, and that’s the memory that stays with him, it wouldn’t be any terror or lament she felt.
i think what really solidified this for me is the story that demiurge tells, but peach corrects.
the crystal flower is peach, and the fairy is demiurge. peach corrected demiurge to say that the flower is empty when shattering, it doesn’t have a heart nor understands what love is, just like peach.
for the flower to understand love and let the little fairy in it’s heart, it would have to stop being perfect — if peach lets demiurge know her pains and sorrows as well, the vision left of her would then no longer be perfect.
with the flower shattering, there’s nothing INSIDE the flower that is love, but love is in the reflection of the fairy’s eyes. it’s not in the flower itself, but how it looks to other that see it.
demiurge is initially confused at this rewrite peach makes. i think because demiurge only saw this flawless crystal flower, so to speak, that’s what she became.
i hit image limit but later on, at the time where the universe was time stopped, demiurge said the light of love wasn’t in the fairy’s eyes nor inside the crystal — it was in the worlds reflected by the shattered crystal. love wasn’t in the flower, but in the reflections it brought (as i’ve written), that enabled the flame chase to go from a journey of constant losses to something with meaning. although relevant, this did not come from peach, so i dont think it factors in peach’s view at the time she was still alive.
“for while the end of hatred is a blazing inferno” — phainon’s end before merging with irontomb was literally a raging fire that destroyed several galaxies in it’s way to nanook
“lament can drown out everything in muted silence” — unlike phainon’s end being bright and loud, impossible to miss, her end would come in muted silence, easy to miss. her sorrows werent a shout of pure wrath, it was in the very silence when she wanted to speak up about them.
“only the author knows how much struggle lies beyond the pages” she then says she’s no author, i’ll get to that, but i think it still points to her choice to not write down her own struggle on as i’ve written, on the story passed to the demiurge. because her own retelling of herself is all that will remain of her, this means the parts of herself she doesn’t pass on will be lost.
“but i am no author. i am a girl who will never get to grow up.” okay so— this is either calling to lament the fact the author is not faceless, but is will never grow up… or, it’s because she passed the actual position of author to the demiurge, who was also writing the story with her(just like the crystal flower one). i confess it confuses me a bit. however, i think it comes back to:
the demiurge is a version of peach that she wishes she could have been. the version that Could bring the world victory, and wipe away her own tears. the demiurge was the alternative answer to irontomb’s hatred, and quite literally is shown to cheer up peach sometimes as i showed.
so, demiurge takes on the name cyrene, and goes on to do as peach wishes she would have, but knew never could.
but it fucks me up so bad that it doesn’t stop there— because of all this, demiurge is “flawless”, and also doesn’t show anguish. it worked, but it does mean there is a flame chaser who never gets solace after all her struggles. the author, who never wrote her inner turmoil in the pages of as i’ve written, the same way she wrote the other heirs’.
like, check out her annoyances.
girl, nothing? not even IRONTOMB?
ironically, the entity born only to love and have the consciousness that the original lament girl couldnt, is also further away from humanity because she does not feel the lament.
it’s not a “hoyo wrote a mary sue without knowing because they’re dumb shitty writers who love elysia” situation, it’s quite literally “peach wrote herself as a flawless solution full of love, filling in a gap in amphoreus using herself as a building block” type of thing. it was on purpose.
that’s why she is flawless ego. it’s not that peach was flawless, she wrote demiurge down as a flawless self, precisely because she had an incorrigible flaw — did not understand and couldn’t love as somebody without a consciousness.
(it’s also likely got to do with the fact both demiurge and peach are the same cyrene, despite not being of the same origin)
AND SPEAKING OF FILLING GAPS USING YOURSELF.
lord. the final section is complicated to explain. to put it as simply as i can, the eternal recurrences have cause and effect as an important thing. if there were gaps in the cause, the effect (how things played out) could change… and since the victory over the recurrences was so fragile, it could lead to irontomb being born again.
so, demiurge uses the remembrance to come back in time and fill every “gap in causality”, filling some oddities on the way.
from then on, PhiLia093’s odd actions are because it’s based on the mind of the demiurge, the hero within fits well with trailblazer/motivated phainon and cyrene cause it’s based on demiurge’s memory of the trailblazer, fuli glancing at peach is the demiurge looking back as she walked back in time, shit like that.
at the end of it she became the very first peach cyrene. so… the one in that first eternal recurrence.
from cyrene’s perspective, she’s stuck in an endless loop of being born, suffering with amphoreus, dying for amphoreus + the demiurge, demiurge taking on this role, saving amphoreus, and then start over again. she doesn’t get a single fucking break
the other heirs arent dead theyre in as ive written. even phainon, who got out of the sim and died when we went to kill irontomb, lives on in as ive written with all his memories thanks to the remembrance. however, there’s a certain demigod of origin missing from the eternal page. even though demiurge was also a living being and survived the irontomb fight, she then fucking went back in time.
despite saying this and the two cyrenes being the direct cause for it, SHES THE ONLY ONE WHO DOESNT GET TO LIVE FOR THE TOMORROW
cyrene succeeded at the end of the day, but i feel bad for her still. don’t get me wrong, she didn’t fail at her goal of bringing amphoreus love, but i do mourn the fact that she doesn’t exactly get it back.
how did astarion fall for thanatos That mf crazy as hell
lowkey it started as one of those situations where “wow ok you’re kinda hot” evolves into Crush and that made him get scared and pull back. when he developed feelings. but then thanatos used his crazy to protect astarion soche was like yeah maybe this is fine actually.
feelings wise it really was just random. like when you get a crush on an idiot and youre watching it happen like shiiiiiiit nnnooooooooooooooooooooo. but you cant stop yourself.
if its gamma he can do gymnastics on it unlike anything youve seen in teyvat. siren xi however cant. hes too busy being pathetic on the floor because he loves dottie too much to actually finish the routine
downloaded a mod that lets me play as an illithid or as the emperor, and it. every frame of my game now feels like:
likeim crying hes just. there. hes in here
its obv insanely immersion breaking but honestly the acute blorboitis has infected me too hard. i dont care. it makes me happy to look at lowkey. hesjust in there.
address me.
besides, it’s pretty nice for oc pictures
too bad im too sleepy to mess around with photo mode more today. eh. tomorrow. mhm.
mod highlighted in question is illithid fashion in nexus mods btw i feel like i should add
shout out to empy getting upset when i mentioned this to ulder ravengard. like no its ok i get it man you prefer being a squid i just think its kind of a HUGELY IMPORTANT REVEAL?? (one that went largely unaddressed im guessing because its a later act 3 event) sob emoji sob emoji
although maybe im brainrotted but the way he views being illithid kinda reminds me of being queer (specifically trans). like ok sure some people will never see you the same because of their preconceived notions but you can live in a way you feel is better. yeah. awesome. well uh minus the brain-eating-aberration thing. like dont get me wrong. trans people dont usually eat brains. yea i am super brainrotted i think whayever they did to durge’s brain they did to mine
shout out to me going on a side quest and accidentally losing several hours of bg3 saves(including my thanatos one)
i mean sure well ok at least im not like horribly upset because i did finish the game on it right. i lost 50+ hours of content on it and am back in act 2…. its fine i guess. but it does make me a little teary eyes
tried joining a bg3 server and either got banned and blocked within 30 minutes or the entire server got deleted. im frustrated
feels like i dont really have anywhere to talk in depth about some parts of the game, because my friends either dont play it or havent gotten to certain parts, like emperor’s or durge’s past, or the entirety of like karlach lore
maybe its just me ig. i still feel scared of posting on tumblr so ugh
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