alright. i know i said previously that i was working on their general relationship analysis, AND I AM! but all of this has been eating at me the entire time i've been composing it and i've been in a dilemma on whether or not to include it in the analysis or make it a whole separate thing because it's really its own other topic. and!!!! here we are. it's a whole separate thing. phainaxa is kind of crazy #tbh
this post can also be titled 'Anaxa Haunts Phainon & The Entire Narrative', and you'll see why very soon.
this post will be tagged with the proper content warning labels, of course, but please be wary that i briefly talk about anaxa and his suicidal/self-harm tendencies in one part of this.
i'm pumping all of this out BEFORE 3.5, so all information here will be things we already know.
—
Simulation name meanings
first things first, i want to go over their simulation names: neikos496 and skemma720.
starting with phainon's:
what does neikos mean? does 496 represent anything?
neikos is of greek origin, meaning discord or strife. along with that, tying in with empedocles' famous cosmogonic theory of the four elements, he was also the one who proposed the concept of that in which love and destruction would mix together and separate the elements.
and because i mention empedocles' philosophy and his concept of love and strife dividing and bringing together the four elements to maintain balance, i should also mention cyrene's simulation name, PhiLia093; philia, also of greek origin, meaning friendship, and is one of the four types of love in greek language—the others being éros (sexual desire), agapè, (altruism), and storgê (familial).
and we know all the eternal recurrences started with cyrene & phainon—cyrene sacrificing herself so that khaslana would be able to continuously experience the same cycle and collect the coreflames. khaslana kills cyrene during the destruction of aedes elysiae from the black tide so that she'll be able to do what she needs to to keep the cycle going, which is why she says "may this world never have need for a deliverer", because she's been aware this entire time, doing this since her and the original phainon put this plan into motion.
until the four millionth eternal recurrence, it is the original phainon/khaslana experiencing the loops—he had killed each loop phainon until that point. the hero within eventually begins to fail within his body, and in order to keep his plan going, he instead has the loop phainons kill him at the end of every cycle now, so that that phainon will inherit the previous coreflames he's consumed and his memories. and because he knows himself, he knows that each phainon will choose the same path as him and become "khaslana."
the number 496 is a perfect number.
phainon has been constantly praised by aglaea and some of the others as being the "perfect" chrysos heir, one without flaw.
(and he's really, truly not, if that wasn't obvious. this, too, actually ties into anaxa, his ideologies, and how he sees phainon, but that will be in my relationship analysis instead because wow. hey!!! they are kind of insane!!! what the fuck!!!)
moving onto anaxa's:
what does skemma mean? does 720 represent anything?
skhema, of greek origin, means something along the lines of form or figure, which could possibly tie into anaxa being the representation of reason and embodying erudition within the simulation.
however, skemma, of old-icelandic origin, means to (usually permanently) damage, to spoil, or to ruin. i mention this particular origin meaning because of anaxa and destruction's relationship, which i'll discuss soon.
as for if 720 represents anything, i'm not too sure.
i do, however, have one idea in mind, but it's not exactly the most obvious or sound.
in geometry, polyhedra/polyhedrons are 3D figures with all straight edges from all vertices connecting to each other. which goes along with the meaning of skhema, being form/shape/figure. 720° is the sum of all defects of any polyhedron.
and what does defect mean? a fault or flaw.
in geometry, an angular defect is the failure of some/certain angles not being able to add up to 360° or 180°.
fault, flaw, and failure, unlike 496, which is a perfect number.
anaxa who is reason and is the simulation embodiment for erudition, being a failure. whereas phainon, who is worldbearing and is the simulation embodiment for destruction, is perfect. irontomb, being a lord ravager of destruction, meant to eliminate erudition.
—
Anaxa & Destruction
now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's get into the relationship between anaxa and destruction.
starting off with anaxa's past and character stories—all of his character stories are presented to us in a way that tells us that the form of media it was previously was already destroyed, forgotten, or never found.
in character story 1, cerces is flipping through his past memories before being promptly shut out by anaxa. and post 3.2, cerces is dead, having died alongside anaxa when he took the coreflame out of his chest at the very end.
in character story 2, we read the contents of a parapsychology experiment log anaxa had conducted. however, the original copy had already been destroyed.
in character story 3, we are shown a speech anaxa had improvised during a meeting between the sages of the grove. with the grove now destroyed and it being from just a simple meeting out of many, it's already been forgotten.
and finally, in character story 4, an echo in anaxa's memories had been made by him after the grove fell, but no one discovered it, so it vanished.
along with all of that, we really know nothing about anaxa aside from his ideals and personality—his backstory is never explored within the trailblaze quests, his sister is only mentioned in passing, his parents only ONCE, and his mentor, who we did see in a flashback, but has been dead pre-canon timeline. his mentor's name was also empedocles.
his parents, his sister, his mentor, and cerces, who had inhabited his body for that short time—they are all dead.
his previous home before he was able to leave to the grove was never named and was destroyed pre-canon timeline, and we witnessed the aftermath of the grove after it had fallen—both of his homes destroyed.
aside from that, anaxa had a grave that he would regularly clean and take care of, as if he was already anticipating his death.
i do not think i've ever talked about this in other posts, but i think that anaxa was definitely suicidal but not ready to actually take action to kill himself properly, instead resorting to harming himself repeatedly during his experiments, to the point where empedocles had told him to stop and never again harm himself once he had found out. anaxa had promised him he wouldn't anymore, but after empedocles had passed, that promise was soon broken.
anaxa is self-destructive and self-sacrificial—his body is littered with spells and markings from experiments. not only that, but when he had conducted his experiment to be able to see his sister one last time, we know that he carved his own left eye out as a sacrifice for the process. he also carved out his own heart as a sacrifice to make the stone tablet that would be able to guide castorice on her journey to find thanatos.
cerces themself even asks him at one point in 3.2, "why are you always trying to find ways to die? isn't it good to be alive?"
anaxa dies in Every Single eternal recurrence. not once does he survive, unlike the others who have all survived various times across multiple eternal recurrences.
not only that, but his body is eerily similar to flame reaver/khaslana's—both are void-like, cracked, and on the brink of destruction.
and he haunts the narrative without fail. he is brought up continuously in 3.4 by khaslana AND lygus. he seems to always be the last one shown when we're peering into khaslana's memories of past recurrences. his teachings still hold dear to hyacine and phainon both, even though he's been gone.
he is the only one we really know nothing about, and yet he hangs over everything like a looming shadow.
and the way anaxa not only haunts the entire narrative, but literally khaslana himself as well—looming over him, inside his thoughts and actions, consuming him. not to mention, every time worldbearing is somewhere, of course, reason is not too far behind, even in the game mechanics. same with destruction and erudition when it comes to amphoreus.
anaxa's golden boons within the divergent universe primarily have to do with Destructible Curios. which really makes me crazy, because again, he who is reason & erudition, seems to always be destroyed in one way or another, except by the one who is meant to be molded into something that destroys, and that is khaslana.
anaxa's as i've written/divergent universe art is of him depicted upside down and hanging, referencing odin in norse mythology and the hanged man tarot card (since tarot cards are cyrene's thing, especially with her connections to oronyx and time.) he is the hanged man tarot card in cyrene's deck.
what's important about that?
the story of odin in norse mythology is that he hung himself upside down from yggdrasil for nine days and nights to obtain knowledge of other worlds and to understand the runes.
before doing that, odin had sacrificed his eye into mimir's well and then pierced himself with gungnir, his spear. all of this was considered something of a ritualistic suicide.
as for what the tarot card symbolizes; the hanged man in tarot readings means ultimate sacrifice and surrender. shifting your perspective to give in to time so that things may unfold naturally—a pause in action.
and all of this fits quite well with anaxa.
his as i've written log also explains that his survival priority approaches zero. (which. what the hell. cmon anaxa stay alive for once)
because he is the first individual to uncover the truth of amphoreus, his evolution rate is stated to be extremely unreplicable. along with that, his behavior demonstrated the possible self-destructive inclinations of erudition.
—
Phainon & Erudition
moving on, with phainon & erudition, it's not as blatantly laid out like anaxa & destruction—much of phainon's connections with erudition are sourced through anaxa himself, because anaxa is Reason.
phainon's dream, before being roped into a hero because of the prophecy and destruction of aedes elysiae, was to be a scholar.
when aglaea had sent him to the grove to study, originally, he applied for a different school but admittedly got reassigned to anaxa's nousporism.
anaxa and phainon's relationship is important for a multitude of reasons, but for now, let's focus on one particular aspect of their dynamic while phainon was in the grove—anaxa and peace to phainon.
like i had just stated, phainon's dream was to be a scholar. when studying in the grove, he was able to do just that. but it's VERY important to know this while also remembering the fact that anaxa is the only one who sees him for Phainon and not the prophesied Deliverer.
anaxa is constantly addressing him as only Phainon or Phainon Of Aedes Elysiae, never hero, or worldbearer, or deliverer, etc... phainon struggles with seeing himself past the role he was forced to be and continuously thinks everyone around him really only sees him as such as well, so he doesn't try to think otherwise because he assumes this is all he is meant to be.
him being able to live his dream of being a scholar, paired with the fact that anaxa views him for Him, instilling his sense of self once more, is what gave phainon peace.
the average student takes about 4 years to complete their studies and graduate the grove, but phainon took much longer than that—up to 5 to 10 years instead.
and phainon isn't stupid by any means—he is one of, if not the most, exceptional student anaxa has ever had, stated by anaxa himself. he is extremely good at debating, has earned consecutive wreaths for it, and is a fast learner.
him taking 5 to 10 years instead of the normal 4 could very well likely be due to the fact that he did not want to leave the peace he felt while in the grove and with anaxa—he was free of weights there, able to be himself, rather than the Worldbearer.
and anaxa never did anything about it either; it's never stated that he tried to get phainon to leave back to okhema after the 4 year mark, and that is something anaxa would never do anyway.
phainon is just as important to anaxa as anaxa is to phainon. phainon is one of the few people anaxa allowed himself to be close to, and i won't dive into this too much since i think it would be a better fit for their general relationship analysis, but phainon was constantly trying to break down the barrier between them of teacher/student, whilst also trying to respect anaxa as a person he admires.
in the original cn text, phainon uses informal terms towards anaxa, and anaxa doesn't make any effort to correct him—this is because despite phainon trying so hard, he never really had to in the first place.
compared to others, when phainon addresses anaxa as Anaxa and not anaxagoras, rarely, if not ever, are there instances where anaxa corrects him, instead, letting it slide.
phainon has never had to try as hard as he thinks because anaxa was already letting him in.
he keeps anaxa's teachings dear to him, remembering them even if he graduated so long ago.
khaslana, while experiencing the loops before having to change his methods of obtaining the coreflames, never had to worry about anaxa being one he would fight with or have to kill. anaxa was willing to help him regardless, despite not being able to fully believe his words and what he would tell him.
and what's more is that, before the four millionth eternal recurrence, khaslana always killed the loop version of himself when he had to kill cyrene—anaxa, of all those loops, had never meant the phainon in any of the other loops.
but khaslana had told him that he was once his pupil, and anaxa let him in regardless. he helped him despite it all.
and we know, in the 134th loop, anaxa confronted him on his methods as well, being Reason and trying to get khaslana to turn back, because not only was he hurting the humanity he swore to protect and love, he was hurting himself too.
again, anaxa had never met phainon. but he still did all of this. and not once had khaslana try to destroy him—not even during 3.1 when they were all fighting against him. he attempted to go for the coreflame in anaxa's chest, had tried to, for once, harm anaxa because it was the only way, and yet, when anaxa instead took the coreflame of time from him, he only tried to yank back the ceremonial blade instead of killing him then and there.
and khaslana has never truly lost himself because of Reason—anaxa has always haunted him.
one who is destruction finds peace within the thing he is born to destroy.
along with all of this, phainon's BP lightcone, A Dream Scented in Wheat, is an erudition lightcone.
wheat being the symbol of aedes elysiae, his home, and it being an erudition lightcone amongst all else—yet again, the peace phainon desires.
—
Conclusion
dude i'm gonna be honest. i actually have no idea how to finish this off, but do you see it all now. how fucking crazy they are. how utterly intertwined they are.
they're quite literally programmed to go together in one way or another—within amphoreus, destruction & erudition are always hand in hand some way, somehow, like worldbearing & reason.
and them also having SO MANY references and callbacks to kevin & su. a bit crazy!
considering phainon, cyrene, & anaxa are the only ones amongst the heirs that have multiple callbacks to kevin, elysia, and su, respectively, it was bound to be this complex.
i'd really like to talk about phainon being the sun, cyrene the moon, and anaxa being the stars, along with the anaxa-march connections but. again, i feel like that's a whole new topic for a separate post (<- guy who says this and she's going to take 6000 years to finish it), and i still haven't even finished my phainaxa relationship analysis.
OKAY..... ANYWAYS. THANK YOU FOR READING THIS FAR.... IF YOU DID..... #PHAINAXA4EVER
alright. i know i said previously that i was working on their general relationship analysis, AND I AM! but all of this has been eating at me the entire time i've been composing it and i've been in a dilemma on whether or not to include it in the analysis or make it a whole separate thing because it's really its own other topic. and!!!! here we are. it's a whole separate thing. phainaxa is kind of crazy #tbh
this post can also be titled 'Anaxa Haunts Phainon & The Entire Narrative', and you'll see why very soon.
this post will be tagged with the proper content warning labels, of course, but please be wary that i briefly talk about anaxa and his suicidal/self-harm tendencies in one part of this.
i'm pumping all of this out BEFORE 3.5, so all information here will be things we already know.
—
Simulation name meanings
first things first, i want to go over their simulation names: neikos496 and skemma720.
starting with phainon's:
what does neikos mean? does 496 represent anything?
neikos is of greek origin, meaning discord or strife. along with that, tying in with empedocles' famous cosmogonic theory of the four elements, he was also the one who proposed the concept of that in which love and destruction would mix together and separate the elements.
and because i mention empedocles' philosophy and his concept of love and strife dividing and bringing together the four elements to maintain balance, i should also mention cyrene's simulation name, PhiLia093; philia, also of greek origin, meaning friendship, and is one of the four types of love in greek language—the others being éros (sexual desire), agapè, (altruism), and storgê (familial).
and we know all the eternal recurrences started with cyrene & phainon—cyrene sacrificing herself so that khaslana would be able to continuously experience the same cycle and collect the coreflames. khaslana kills cyrene during the destruction of aedes elysiae from the black tide so that she'll be able to do what she needs to to keep the cycle going, which is why she says "may this world never have need for a deliverer", because she's been aware this entire time, doing this since her and the original phainon put this plan into motion.
until the four millionth eternal recurrence, it is the original phainon/khaslana experiencing the loops—he had killed each loop phainon until that point. the hero within eventually begins to fail within his body, and in order to keep his plan going, he instead has the loop phainons kill him at the end of every cycle now, so that that phainon will inherit the previous coreflames he's consumed and his memories. and because he knows himself, he knows that each phainon will choose the same path as him and become "khaslana."
the number 496 is a perfect number.
phainon has been constantly praised by aglaea and some of the others as being the "perfect" chrysos heir, one without flaw.
(and he's really, truly not, if that wasn't obvious. this, too, actually ties into anaxa, his ideologies, and how he sees phainon, but that will be in my relationship analysis instead because wow. hey!!! they are kind of insane!!! what the fuck!!!)
moving onto anaxa's:
what does skemma mean? does 720 represent anything?
skhema, of greek origin, means something along the lines of form or figure, which could possibly tie into anaxa being the representation of reason and embodying erudition within the simulation.
however, skemma, of old-icelandic origin, means to (usually permanently) damage, to spoil, or to ruin. i mention this particular origin meaning because of anaxa and destruction's relationship, which i'll discuss soon.
as for if 720 represents anything, i'm not too sure.
i do, however, have one idea in mind, but it's not exactly the most obvious or sound.
in geometry, polyhedra/polyhedrons are 3D figures with all straight edges from all vertices connecting to each other. which goes along with the meaning of skhema, being form/shape/figure. 720° is the sum of all defects of any polyhedron.
and what does defect mean? a fault or flaw.
in geometry, an angular defect is the failure of some/certain angles not being able to add up to 360° or 180°.
fault, flaw, and failure, unlike 496, which is a perfect number.
anaxa who is reason and is the simulation embodiment for erudition, being a failure. whereas phainon, who is worldbearing and is the simulation embodiment for destruction, is perfect. irontomb, being a lord ravager of destruction, meant to eliminate erudition.
—
Anaxa & Destruction
now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's get into the relationship between anaxa and destruction.
starting off with anaxa's past and character stories—all of his character stories are presented to us in a way that tells us that the form of media it was previously was already destroyed, forgotten, or never found.
in character story 1, cerces is flipping through his past memories before being promptly shut out by anaxa. and post 3.2, cerces is dead, having died alongside anaxa when he took the coreflame out of his chest at the very end.
in character story 2, we read the contents of a parapsychology experiment log anaxa had conducted. however, the original copy had already been destroyed.
in character story 3, we are shown a speech anaxa had improvised during a meeting between the sages of the grove. with the grove now destroyed and it being from just a simple meeting out of many, it's already been forgotten.
and finally, in character story 4, an echo in anaxa's memories had been made by him after the grove fell, but no one discovered it, so it vanished.
along with all of that, we really know nothing about anaxa aside from his ideals and personality—his backstory is never explored within the trailblaze quests, his sister is only mentioned in passing, his parents only ONCE, and his mentor, who we did see in a flashback, but has been dead pre-canon timeline. his mentor's name was also empedocles.
his parents, his sister, his mentor, and cerces, who had inhabited his body for that short time—they are all dead.
his previous home before he was able to leave to the grove was never named and was destroyed pre-canon timeline, and we witnessed the aftermath of the grove after it had fallen—both of his homes destroyed.
aside from that, anaxa had a grave that he would regularly clean and take care of, as if he was already anticipating his death.
i do not think i've ever talked about this in other posts, but i think that anaxa was definitely suicidal but not ready to actually take action to kill himself properly, instead resorting to harming himself repeatedly during his experiments, to the point where empedocles had told him to stop and never again harm himself once he had found out. anaxa had promised him he wouldn't anymore, but after empedocles had passed, that promise was soon broken.
anaxa is self-destructive and self-sacrificial—his body is littered with spells and markings from experiments. not only that, but when he had conducted his experiment to be able to see his sister one last time, we know that he carved his own left eye out as a sacrifice for the process. he also carved out his own heart as a sacrifice to make the stone tablet that would be able to guide castorice on her journey to find thanatos.
cerces themself even asks him at one point in 3.2, "why are you always trying to find ways to die? isn't it good to be alive?"
anaxa dies in Every Single eternal recurrence. not once does he survive, unlike the others who have all survived various times across multiple eternal recurrences.
not only that, but his body is eerily similar to flame reaver/khaslana's—both are void-like, cracked, and on the brink of destruction.
and he haunts the narrative without fail. he is brought up continuously in 3.4 by khaslana AND lygus. he seems to always be the last one shown when we're peering into khaslana's memories of past recurrences. his teachings still hold dear to hyacine and phainon both, even though he's been gone.
he is the only one we really know nothing about, and yet he hangs over everything like a looming shadow.
and the way anaxa not only haunts the entire narrative, but literally khaslana himself as well—looming over him, inside his thoughts and actions, consuming him. not to mention, every time worldbearing is somewhere, of course, reason is not too far behind, even in the game mechanics. same with destruction and erudition when it comes to amphoreus.
anaxa's golden boons within the divergent universe primarily have to do with Destructible Curios. which really makes me crazy, because again, he who is reason & erudition, seems to always be destroyed in one way or another, except by the one who is meant to be molded into something that destroys, and that is khaslana.
anaxa's as i've written/divergent universe art is of him depicted upside down and hanging, referencing odin in norse mythology and the hanged man tarot card (since tarot cards are cyrene's thing, especially with her connections to oronyx and time.) he is the hanged man tarot card in cyrene's deck.
what's important about that?
the story of odin in norse mythology is that he hung himself upside down from yggdrasil for nine days and nights to obtain knowledge of other worlds and to understand the runes.
before doing that, odin had sacrificed his eye into mimir's well and then pierced himself with gungnir, his spear. all of this was considered something of a ritualistic suicide.
as for what the tarot card symbolizes; the hanged man in tarot readings means ultimate sacrifice and surrender. shifting your perspective to give in to time so that things may unfold naturally—a pause in action.
and all of this fits quite well with anaxa.
his as i've written log also explains that his survival priority approaches zero. (which. what the hell. cmon anaxa stay alive for once)
because he is the first individual to uncover the truth of amphoreus, his evolution rate is stated to be extremely unreplicable. along with that, his behavior demonstrated the possible self-destructive inclinations of erudition.
—
Phainon & Erudition
moving on, with phainon & erudition, it's not as blatantly laid out like anaxa & destruction—much of phainon's connections with erudition are sourced through anaxa himself, because anaxa is Reason.
phainon's dream, before being roped into a hero because of the prophecy and destruction of aedes elysiae, was to be a scholar.
when aglaea had sent him to the grove to study, originally, he applied for a different school but admittedly got reassigned to anaxa's nousporism.
anaxa and phainon's relationship is important for a multitude of reasons, but for now, let's focus on one particular aspect of their dynamic while phainon was in the grove—anaxa and peace to phainon.
like i had just stated, phainon's dream was to be a scholar. when studying in the grove, he was able to do just that. but it's VERY important to know this while also remembering the fact that anaxa is the only one who sees him for Phainon and not the prophesied Deliverer.
anaxa is constantly addressing him as only Phainon or Phainon Of Aedes Elysiae, never hero, or worldbearer, or deliverer, etc... phainon struggles with seeing himself past the role he was forced to be and continuously thinks everyone around him really only sees him as such as well, so he doesn't try to think otherwise because he assumes this is all he is meant to be.
him being able to live his dream of being a scholar, paired with the fact that anaxa views him for Him, instilling his sense of self once more, is what gave phainon peace.
the average student takes about 4 years to complete their studies and graduate the grove, but phainon took much longer than that—up to 5 to 10 years instead.
and phainon isn't stupid by any means—he is one of, if not the most, exceptional student anaxa has ever had, stated by anaxa himself. he is extremely good at debating, has earned consecutive wreaths for it, and is a fast learner.
him taking 5 to 10 years instead of the normal 4 could very well likely be due to the fact that he did not want to leave the peace he felt while in the grove and with anaxa—he was free of weights there, able to be himself, rather than the Worldbearer.
and anaxa never did anything about it either; it's never stated that he tried to get phainon to leave back to okhema after the 4 year mark, and that is something anaxa would never do anyway.
phainon is just as important to anaxa as anaxa is to phainon. phainon is one of the few people anaxa allowed himself to be close to, and i won't dive into this too much since i think it would be a better fit for their general relationship analysis, but phainon was constantly trying to break down the barrier between them of teacher/student, whilst also trying to respect anaxa as a person he admires.
in the original cn text, phainon uses informal terms towards anaxa, and anaxa doesn't make any effort to correct him—this is because despite phainon trying so hard, he never really had to in the first place.
compared to others, when phainon addresses anaxa as Anaxa and not anaxagoras, rarely, if not ever, are there instances where anaxa corrects him, instead, letting it slide.
phainon has never had to try as hard as he thinks because anaxa was already letting him in.
he keeps anaxa's teachings dear to him, remembering them even if he graduated so long ago.
khaslana, while experiencing the loops before having to change his methods of obtaining the coreflames, never had to worry about anaxa being one he would fight with or have to kill. anaxa was willing to help him regardless, despite not being able to fully believe his words and what he would tell him.
and what's more is that, before the four millionth eternal recurrence, khaslana always killed the loop version of himself when he had to kill cyrene—anaxa, of all those loops, had never meant the phainon in any of the other loops.
but khaslana had told him that he was once his pupil, and anaxa let him in regardless. he helped him despite it all.
and we know, in the 134th loop, anaxa confronted him on his methods as well, being Reason and trying to get khaslana to turn back, because not only was he hurting the humanity he swore to protect and love, he was hurting himself too.
again, anaxa had never met phainon. but he still did all of this. and not once had khaslana try to destroy him—not even during 3.1 when they were all fighting against him. he attempted to go for the coreflame in anaxa's chest, had tried to, for once, harm anaxa because it was the only way, and yet, when anaxa instead took the coreflame of time from him, he only tried to yank back the ceremonial blade instead of killing him then and there.
and khaslana has never truly lost himself because of Reason—anaxa has always haunted him.
one who is destruction finds peace within the thing he is born to destroy.
along with all of this, phainon's BP lightcone, A Dream Scented in Wheat, is an erudition lightcone.
wheat being the symbol of aedes elysiae, his home, and it being an erudition lightcone amongst all else—yet again, the peace phainon desires.
—
Conclusion
dude i'm gonna be honest. i actually have no idea how to finish this off, but do you see it all now. how fucking crazy they are. how utterly intertwined they are.
they're quite literally programmed to go together in one way or another—within amphoreus, destruction & erudition are always hand in hand some way, somehow, like worldbearing & reason.
and them also having SO MANY references and callbacks to kevin & su. a bit crazy!
considering phainon, cyrene, & anaxa are the only ones amongst the heirs that have multiple callbacks to kevin, elysia, and su, respectively, it was bound to be this complex.
i'd really like to talk about phainon being the sun, cyrene the moon, and anaxa being the stars, along with the anaxa-march connections but. again, i feel like that's a whole new topic for a separate post (<- guy who says this and she's going to take 6000 years to finish it), and i still haven't even finished my phainaxa relationship analysis.
OKAY..... ANYWAYS. THANK YOU FOR READING THIS FAR.... IF YOU DID..... #PHAINAXA4EVER
My last post, casting doubt on 3.2's revelation that Mydei's immortality is deliberate on his part, led to some interesting discussion in the comments that definitely reinforced my earlier thoughts that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are too numerous to be accidental. Star Rail is not known for its flawless continuity (Robin and Sunday's backstory, I'm looking at you lol), but usually the inconsistencies are not so overt, and repeated so many times, that they become central to the entire plot of a character.
So I wanted to refine my earlier theory a bit: I'm cautiously optimistic that there are enough signs that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are deliberate, and that the Mydei of the current cycle in Amphoreus is actively experiencing an entanglement between two different timelines, without (yet) consciously recognizing the incompatibility of his own "memories."
When we work from the standpoint that the events of Mydei's backstory can be separated into two distinct timelines, the inconsistencies vanish:
The "Sea of Souls" Timeline
This is the most prominent timeline, and the one that appears most accurate for "our" Mydei. In this timeline, Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as a tiny infant and spent the first nine years of his life there. This is confirmed both in the flashback we're provided early in 3.1, as well as in Mydei's voicelines and character stories.
After nine years, he crawled out of the sea (possibly motivated by witnessing Tribbie's "star" in the sky). On the same day (or very near it), he met with a band of Kremnoan exiles.
Whether this was a larger group already, constituting a small "detachment" army of exiles, or just started with the five exiled friends and Mydei then grew into a small army by picking up other exiles over time, is still unclear. However, at this point, Mydei makes no mention of returning to Kremnos and instead goes straight from "leaving the sea" to "living ten years in exile:"
This is the key point of inconsistency between the two "halves" of Mydei's story--either he lived in Kremnos or he didn't. We can handwave here and say "Yes, he returned to Kremnos with his friends and they just hid their identities, leaving Kremnos years later in a self-imposed exile," but the story gives us absolutely no indication that this realistically could have happened. Mydei never once mentions hiding his identity, changing his appearance, or living a double life in the city, and never explains how he would have had access to the inner city of Kremnos ("as befitting a crown prince") and the royal library, yet still go totally unnoticed by his father or anyone loyal to Eurypon, including Krateros. (There's also no explanation at all for why he would have wanted to return to a city ruled by someone who tried to murder him and where he would have had to live life under a fake identity just to get by, but you know...)
Instead, the game does give us several pieces of information indicating that the five Kremnoan exiles did not return to Kremnos after meeting Mydei:
First, Mydei's character stories confirm that Mydei deliberately hid his name while traveling in exile across Amphoreus, indicating that he knew he would be recognized by Eurypon/Eurypon's loyalists if he didn't hide his identity. This awareness suggests it is extremely unlikely that Mydei could have returned to Kremnos without being identified:
This also suggests that, at this point in this timeline, no one in Castrum Kremnos knew for sure that Mydeimos had survived being thrown into the Sea of Souls and returned. This is further confirmed by a memory fragment where Krateros says there has been a "rumor" that the leader of the exiled Kremnoan army is one who "defied death." Krateros alone makes the assumption that this could be Mydei and decides to defect to aid him:
This memory suggests two things clearly: Mydei was not living in Kremnos at the time Krateros defected, and the exile of all of Mydei's friends must have taken place before they met Mydei, years in the past, as there is no way an entire small army could have been exiled from Kremnos, with Mydei in toe, and not at all attract Krateros's attention until after they were gone.
The idea that Mydei never returned to Kremnos is further enforced by Eurypon, who did not recognize Mydei when he confronted him, to the point that he didn't believe Mydei was even Kremnoan. This suggests that Eurypon not only didn't know Mydei's true identity--he'd never seen him before at all, making it extremely unlikely that Mydei was walking around Castrum Kremnos, talking to Chryseus Leo, and reading in the royal library all under some false identity for years. Eurypon certainly wouldn't have been capable of exiling someone he'd never seen before from Kremnos, in any case!
Therefore, we can assume the series of events in this timeline is pretty straightforward: Mydei entered the Sea of Souls as a baby, came out nine years later, went straight into a life of exile with his five friends, amassed power and support for ten years, and then returned to seek vengeance on his father.
The only remaining question in this timeline becomes "When did Mydei join up with Okhema?"
I think, in this timeline, it makes the most sense for Mydei to have only joined up with Okhema after killing his father. In 3.1, Mydei confirms to Phainon that all his friends died before he was able to kill his father, and that none of them ever made it to Okhema:
Therefore, the final order of events for the more prominent timeline is:
Dumped into the sea as an infant, nine years in the Sea of Souls
Ten years in exile with his friends amassing strength and support
Returns to Kremnos, kills his father, and the last of his friends dies that day
Then he defects to Okhema, leading any of the Kremnoans willing to follow him there.
By itself, this story makes perfect sense. If this was all the information we'd been given, there wouldn't have been any gaps.
Unfortunately, we also have a whole other set of information that massively conflicts with these events, which can only really be explained two ways: Either Hoyo messed up (again) and really dropped the consistency ball when it comes to writing Mydei's backstory... Or there's an entire separate timeline going on. Personally, I'm leaning toward the latter, because there are just too many seemingly deliberate fingers in the story pointing toward the inconsistencies for them to feel entirely unintentional to me.
Therefore, I propose that Mydei's memories are actually getting infiltrated by a second, entirely different timeline:
The "Gorgo Lives" Timeline
From 3.0 all the way to 3.2, we're given numerous pieces of information that point to a wholly different order to the events of Mydei's life, contrasting the story that Mydei tells Phainon in the Garden. At first, these events seem scattered and nonsensical, contradicting the "main" timeline in too many ways to be anything but errors... But when taken as a whole, we can build a second coherent timeline out of these events if we make one assumption: There is a timeline where Gorgo lived longer.
In the second timeline which is intruding on Mydei's memories, there appears to be one key point of divergence: Gorgo did not die dueling Eurypon. Either she never challenged him to the duel, or (more likely) she was never successfully poisoned, and therefore it's possible she won the duel, allowing her to rescue Mydei from the sea.
Working from that possibility, a second complete timeline emerges:
Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as an infant but did not drift there for nine years. Instead, he was rescued and brought back to Kremnos, where he was allowed to grow up in the inner city, with access to both Chryseus Leo, who served as his teacher, and access to the royal library, which he is proud enough of to call "his" library. He is able to lead Phainon and the Trailblazer around Castrum Kremnos even in its ruined state because he grew up there, spending enough time there to know the city like the back of his hand:
This is where we can slot in the inconsistent memories Mydei has of Gorgo:
(By the way, although Mydei writes this scene off as a dream, you can actually hear Oronyx's whisper play in the black screen seconds before this "dream" occurs...)
But okay, let's say this is just a wishful dream. Maybe this scene never happened. If all we got of Gorgo supposedly raising Mydei was this moment in 3.1, I might agree that it was just a dream (other than there being no reason to play Oronyx's sound effect there, but you know). However, in 3.2 they then hit us with this:
That's multiple moments now pointing to a timeline where Gorgo raised Mydei. Once is handwave-able--twice? That's deliberate.
In this secondary timeline, Mydei appears to have grown up as Kremnos's beloved crown prince, being warmly embraced by his people (at least until Kremnos fell into calamity). Apparently his days consisted of eating pomegranates, training for combat, playing with Kremnos's kids, and hanging out with his five friends. We see snippets of this idyllic life (along with his five friends appearing to be roughly the same age as him--something that likely wouldn't be true in the "main" timeline, by the way) on Mydei's long march back into Castrum Kremnos:
I know some people took this to be Mydei hallucinating or just wishfully imagining a life where he was able to be happy with his friends, possibly even some metaphorical "encountering the souls of the departed in a paradise," but I don't think this is true. Every single time Mydei phases in and out of this "hallucination," the visual effect and the sound effect of Oronyx are distinctly played--the exact same sound and visuals that play when Trailblazer activates Oronyx's prayer to jump between timelines.
Mydei himself doesn't seem to quite understand what is happening to him in this moment, as you can hear him stumble and pant as he repeatedly goes through flashes of Oronyx's power. You can listen to comparison video clips on the prior post I made about Mydei's backstory.
Furthermore, if we work from the assumption that these moments actually represent a rupture between timelines, then the rest of the inconsistencies can finally be cleared up:
In 3.0, Mydei says that his choice to leave Castrum Kremnos was not a forced exile but a "self-imposed" one:
And this aligns with what he stated in the Garden of Life to Phainon, that he and his friends "left Castrum Kremnos" to go into this self-imposed exile, rather than having never returned to Kremnos from the sea:
Furthermore, this also aligns with the angry NPCs in the past version of Castrum Kremnos that Trailblazer and Castorice travel back to:
Remember that this version of Castrum Kremnos was supposed to be occurring while Eurypon was still alive, so there is absolutely no way this line makes sense in the same universe where Eurypon didn't even know Mydei had survived. There isn't any way, in "our" timeline, that Mydei could have been both the "crown prince" of Kremnos for these NPCs and completely unknown to his father, the king.
These NPCs, furthermore, directly accuse Mydei of "deserting Kremnos," suggesting that Mydei was living in Castrum Kremnos as their prince, and then abandoned them to join Aglaea in Okhema, getting himself and everyone who went with him labelled as "traitors to Kremnos" in the process. None of this makes sense in the context of a timeline where no one in Kremnos knew he had even survived.
Instead, all of these elements point to a different sequence of events:
Gorgo lived, likely winning her duel and thereby (likely) giving her the right to save Mydei from the Sea of Souls and bring him back to Kremnos. He was raised by his mother as the beloved crown prince of Kremnos. Then, years later, as his father and Nikador both descended into full madness, Mydei and the Kremnoan detachment defected.
But what would have triggered this sudden need to defect after years of leading Kremnos as a well-liked prince?
The flashback between Mydei and Eurypon actually suggests a possible reason:
Apparently, at some point, in some timeline, Mydei knew about Eurypon's plan to break Nikador's divinity into separate parts and seal him away, harnessing the power of their titan for himself.
Yet the Mydei of 3.0 seems to have no idea about any of this, never able to give any explanation for how Nikador has degraded so much nor why Nikador is seemingly unkillable. Castorice, Mem, and the Trailblazer have to come up with the idea to go back in time to the past Kremnos by themselves, because Mydei never makes any mention of there ever having been a plot to break up and seal away Nikador's divinity, even when they walk past the very blades that did the sealing.
Finally, there's one last piece of conflicting information: While talking to Phainon in the Garden of Life, Mydei states that all of his friends died before the detachment could ever join up with Okhema and that all of their deaths occurred by the time he went to kill his father. But this conflicts with the NPCs above, who state that Mydei had already defected to Okhema and joined the Flame Chase Journey as a Chrysos Heir while his father was still alive.
This inconsistency is further reinforced by a memory fragment with Krateros, who confirms that Mydei had joined up with Okhema already before killing his father:
Putting all of this together, the complete series of events for this second timeline becomes:
Infant Mydei is quickly rescued from the Sea of Souls, is instead raised by his mother, and grows up as the crown prince of Castrum Kremnos with his five friends.
At some point, years later, he discovers Eurypon's plot to break up and imprison Nikador's divinity, and he and his friends and supporters defect from Kremnos as a result.
Either they go straight to Okhema (I'm inclined to say that "ten years of wandering" doesn't fit, chronologically speaking, into this secondary timeline) or they do wander a bit, but ultimately, Mydei reaches Okhema and aligns with Aglaea before killing his father.
After aligning the Kremnoan Detachment with Okhema, Mydei returns to Castrum Kremnos to kill his father, possibly to halt Eurypon's evil plan to harness Nikador's power.
At some point in this timeline, presumably before Mydei returns to kill his father, Gorgo likely still dies (possibly killed by Eurypon and/or Nikador), which explains why the Gorgo in the Sea of Souls seems to be the one convinced that she raised Mydei.
And this is just pure personal speculation, because there isn't enough evidence to really confirm it, but I almost feel like we can even pinpoint how/when the whole decision to defect to Okhema took place. At the end of Mydei's flashbacks to the "peaceful" Kremnos, Peucesta says that Mydei has been away from Kremnos for a while.
Leonnius assumes that Mydei was away on some apparently extended training trip, but this moment specifically ends with Gorgo welcoming Mydei home and asking him one very important question:
Obviously these lines are doing double duty, symbolically welcoming the present Mydei back to the ruins of Castrum Kremnos and asking him whether he's finally ready to take on his role as the "Guardian of Amphoreus." But as the wiki notes, this takes place in a flashback to the past, and for the "Mydei of the past" (aka the Mydei of the alternate timeline), this could very well have been Mydei disappearing from Kremnos to make contact with Aglaea in Okhema, and Gorgo questioning him about his decision to commit himself to the Flame Chase Journey, leading up to an ultimate and permanent defection from Kremnos. (This is just speculation though, trying to tie the last few loose ends together.)
Anyway, when taken from this perspective, that there are two separate backstories here, one from a world where Gorgo lived and the more prominent one where she died, we can sort all the seeming inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory into two surprisingly tidy and complete timelines.
I haven't yet found anything in any Mydei scene that doesn't fit one of these two scenarios, so I'm starting to definitely feel optimistic here that this writing was intentional, and that the "contradictory" backstory we're seeing for Mydei isn't "the worst continuity Star Rail has served up to date," but instead an actual deliberate choice to present us with a character whose memories are a hodge-podge of two divergent timelines, snippets of one timeline constantly erupting and "filling in the blanks" of the other.
I think this would be a fascinating way to lead up to the idea that Amphoreus's world isn't real, that it's a cobbled together story or set of memories that someone is barely holding together, and that it's constantly cyclical in nature, with events repeating with slight variations across times. The idea that Mydei is actually experiencing two different sets of memories crushed together into a tangled jumble and that he's only just now starting to become aware of the discrepancies would be such an excellent way to reinforce the "unreality" of Amphoreus's plot as a whole.
I really hope this is the direction that they take the story... Or at least that I won't one day be looking at all my Mydei posts and sadly thinking to myself that I put a lot more thought into the character's backstory than his own writers did, RIPPPPP. 😂😂😂
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