I think the Corrupting Heart thing has more to do with how clunky their handling of it was more than the actual concept of it, I see a lot of really inspired art and comics with great reception that play with the What If Corrupting Heart scenario and context.
By clunky, I mean how the Corrupting Heart was released as the limited for Under Tides, an event in which it technically doesn’t appear, but where Skadi does in fact wear the same outfit, but they are different entities and the Corrupting Heart is a what if worst scenario apocalypse situation, but Arknights players don’t read, so they hear her voice lines about how All Ended And Everyone Died and go Wait WHAT and then they get yelled at by people who did read, and then everyone gets confused and half of the people have no clue what the actual pulse on the Corrupting Heart is, and even people that might read the events, might not read character Files, so they are like Why Is Skadi Acting Like This???? after they read Under Tides and not Corrupting Heart’s Files. Vice versa, you’ll have people thinking the apocalypse did happen after they read the Files and not the event, and now you have a billion people VERY confused about what just happened.
I love the Corrupting Heart but I think they were a bit loose in handling her playable release in a way that didn’t make people go a bit insane.
Really started to wonder if the Corrupted Heart timeline is really an "AU" and not. Just where we're heading.
It wouldn't surprise me if they grabbed parts of IS3 and made those canon, but wholesale, I find it very improbable. The Corrupting Heart timeline is, the way I see it, something they really wanted to explore but can't really do it in any feasible way without putting the kibosh on practically every other storyline the setting has, because it's an actual apocalypse scenario.
Now, Terra isn't short of apocalypse scenarios, we know this, but the Seaborn are, in my opinion, the single most dangerous and possibly the most pressing we know of for... Reasons that are Stultifera Navis spoilers. That isn't to undercut the Sui threat or the hinterland Demons on the southern and northern edges of Terra, but the thing about those is that there is some sort of purpose or will involved in those: With the Demons, we don't really know what they want, or if they want anything, but we do know there's been countermeasures against them for a long, long time, a frontier where battle against them has raged for several lifetimes and that not many people know of, and with the Sui, the Complete Sui God does in fact have a will and desires, and while his full resurrection is decidedly Very Bad News, it isn't the end of the world per se.
But the Seaborn? The Seaborn have nothing but instinct, and that's what makes them so very dangerous: To assimilate, absorb, evolve, and reproduce extremely rapidly is just the way of natural life for them, which makes all other life around them incompatible to survive in the same environment unless extreme measures are taken. And such measures WERE taken, with the Abyssal Hunters winning a decisive battle against them, at the cost of all known Hunters except a couple. A very, very costly war. It didn't eradicate the Seaborn, but it did knock them down from "EXTREMELY PRESSING APOCALYPSE SCENARIO" to "this isn't a problem in the foreseeable future, unless ONE thing happens, in which case, we're mega fucked and this is a top priority Terra-ending concern once again, but if that ONE thing doesn't happen, we're good".
So, going back to whether or not we're heading there: I'd Say Not, because, again, you more or less make the whole setting ABOUT the Seaborn at that point, and that's not the story Arknights is trying to tell in its main scenario. I'd say they could make a few things of that possible timeline canon in the main timeline but the apex of it all is likely to remain just AU.
Under the Read More, and with a spoiler warning, I'll very briefly, very laconically explain what that ONE thing is, regarding the Seaborn, for anyone curious.
Basically, Ishar-mla ISN'T Skadi's actual name. If you recall, "Ishar-mla" is what The First To Speak referred to Skadi as. The First isn't speaking to Skadi, it is speaking to the Seaborn God that Skadi "killed". Ishar-mla was defeated by Skadi and the other Hunters, with Skadi landing the killing blow, but instead of dying, it went inside of Skadi, and now she literally houses it.
"The ONE thing" is Skadi losing control and being assimilated from within by the Seaborn God, turning into a Seaborn. As long as that doesn't happen, the Seaborn are more or less just another lifeform on Terra (that still merits concern, of course, but not nearly as big a threat as other more pressing matters), but if Skadi does in fact get overtaken from within, then that's an apocalypse scenario since that's the full strength of the Seaborn God amplified by all the Gamer Juice that makes Abyssal Hunters supersoldiers, basically skipping a LOT of the evolutionary ladder and becoming an actual world-ending being, The Corrupting Heart.
