so uh, how about that new world quest huh? like i went into it expecting asmoday lore (which we definitely got) but i was not at all expecting the exploration of suicidal ideation from zeitlind and her sister. like the quest starts off like, "oh wow this old man thought there was a ghost at the sanitarium let's go investigate" and then zeitlind shows up and tells us that she came to see her sister's grave and that she "planned to say goodbye." like that caught me completely off guard when i was playing. each place we go to when looking for zeitlind's items from her suitcase, everyone we meet basically is trying to show zeitlind their own passions and their own reasons for living (ignoring the fact that everyone in the temple is technically immortal). honestly the entire quest feels more like it's zeitlind and raumhilda's story and it just so happens that the setting is the temple of a missing deity (this is not a complaint btw, i absolutely loved this quest).
zeitlind and raumhilda's choice to both sacrifice their memories very much feels like an allegory for suicide. one of the themes throughout all of hoyo's games is that the self = memory. your memories make you who you are, so a removal of your memories is the death of the self. for example in arlecchino's story quest she says explicitly says that is her opinion too, so her removing the memories of former house of the hearth members is no different than killing them. something i really liked about the quest was that zeitlind's problems aren't just solved by her time with the traveler. like that feels like a common trope, where someone who's depressed or even suicidal goes on some kind of adventure and that when they're done they're magically okay now. that very clearly doesn't happen with either zeitlind or her sister.
towards the end of the quest zeitlind talks about how saving yourself means you can also save the world.
this reminded me of what sandrone said about rene and alain, how their wish to save the world originally came from their wish to save themselves. it also makes me think that in a weird way, the opportunity to lose all of their memories was the perfect option for zeitlind and raumhilda because they both share similar ideas about having another life so to speak. you can see it with both of their epitaphs, "one lifetime isn't enough" for raumhilda and "to be continued" for zeitlind. like zeitlind's line "i'm not giving that chance to you" feels like she's both talking about the chance to save the world and the chance to "get rid of her melancholy."
tldr; the quest is an exploration of zeitlind's suicidal ideation disguised as asmoday lore
