[image description: a drawing of three characters all based off of flavors of mountain dew. the first is baja blast, who is a lanky woman with visible tan lines around her neck and arms, and she has visible top surgery scars, body hair, and braces. he has messy, curly hair that covers his eyes, and is wearing a white tank top, teal swim shorts, a teal hawaiian shirt, a shell necklace, and socks with sandals. second is major melon, a pale, fat woman with freckles. he has numerous piercings and sharp teeth, with a bright pink and yellow-green mohawk. she is wearing a white shirt with a dogtag necklace with matching camo pants and a jacket. he is holding a knife with a pink handle and has a sucker in his mouth. lastly is pitch black. pitch is a shadowy figure with no visible facial features other than glowing yellow and red eyes. pitch is wearing a dark cool grey down jacket with a matching long skirt and ushanka. pitch is also wearing a bright green mask over pitch's mouth and nose, and pitch's clothes are covered in paint splatters. pitch is also holding a can of spray paint. around each of the characters is various doodles of them, such as baja blast surfing, baja blast with his hair tied back and his beady eyes visible, major melon enjoying a sucker, and a hatless pitch whose curly hair is now visible. end id]
MORE mtn dykes bc im honestly having way too much fun designing them :o]c
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Bear with me I'm about to go insane for a few paragraphs.
Actually scratch that I meant a lot of paragraphs, because this became so much longer than I intended.
A thing that Honkai Star Rail is utterly obsessed with doing is masking the involvement of Aeons in certain events or encounters with their own personal symbolic language. If you read a piece of text and it mentions amber or constructing walls, for example, you can be pretty confident that it's referencing Qilpoth. Similarly, mentions of flapping wings, multicolored material, or things smelling of fruit is likely in reference to Tayzzyronth.
The Swarm Disaster in particular is rife with this shit. You can drive yourself insane reading through Trailblaze Secrets trying to parse through whether this line is meant to refer to something, or if you've been staring for way too long and need to slow down. In particular you can drive yourself insane looking for references to Terminus the Finality.
Terminus in kind of annoying because they don't have an entry in the Data Bank, but they are referenced well enough that we know a decent cursory amount about them. The main facts being that they somehow exist and move backwards in time, they are currently asleep and murmur prophecies, and they have two factions: the Omen Vanguard and the Creed Exequy.
The symbols we can generally look out for when it comes to Finality are concepts of time moving backward, prophecies, and, of course, references to "finality."
And to add more context to what I'm about to say, I have to mention that the Finality is all over the Swarm Disaster (so is HooH the Equilibrium but I don't care about them right now). In one of the Trailblaze Secrets we learn than an Omen Vanguard managed to hear and decode part of the prophecy murmured by Terminus and tried to spread that prophecy to members of the genius Society, but all who learned of it were killed by Polka Kakamond along with the Omen Vanguard. And like, the same part has Finality prophesying Tayzzyronth's death, which maybe implies that this prophecy is what caused the whole Swarm Disaster in the first place. But I'm also not a great theorycrafter so take that with a massive grain of salt.
The point for this post being, Terminus is connected to Tazzyronth in terms of their possible role in the Swarm Disaster.
Why bring all of this up? Because I watched "the "Fables About the Stars" again.
This trailer is unique among the many Hoyo have put out because it's one of the best jumping off points we have to sorting out the different symbols and motifs used by the Aeons featured in it. One of whom is mentioned three separate times without being explicitly shown. And I bet you can guess who.
The final minute of the trailer, after the Harmony, we get a rush of lines and images about the unplayable Aeons that are likely important to HSR's story. The images and titles that flash by are, in order, Aha the Elation, Ouroboros the Voracity, Idrila the Beauty, Tayzzronth the Propagation, Mythus the Enigmata, HooH the Equilibrium, Fuli the Remembrance, and finally, Akivili the Trailblaze.
"But that's weird," you think. "Where are those mentions of the Finality you talked about?" And that, my fellow mentally ill friends, is where this gets fun for me. Because when you turn on closed captions for that video, almost each reference to an Aeon that Black Swan says is accompanied by another phrase in parenthesis. No other Aeon earlier in the video gets this, it's just the Aeons in that last minute.
Now, some of these are in reference to the Aeon that the line in Black Swan's poem is referring to. But others, in my opinion, are referring to one Aeon in particular.
Aha -
Ouroboros -
Tazzyronth -
Mythus -
The first reference to Finality I think appears is right after "the mariner's intemperance" with this line:
"End of All Things" seems pretty Finality-coded to me. Why they are referred to as "the infant" I can't tell you. maybe something to do with how they exist backwards in time. Much like the prophecy given on Tayzzronth, perhaps Finality's existence predates their birth. Another strange aspect of this line is it's transition into Idrila, who doesn't seem to get a reference at all. The glass shattering into their title might imply that they are "the mirror," something suported by the fact that one of The Beauty's factions is called the Mirror Holders, but I don't really know enough to be confident about that. Considering Idrila is one of the missing Aeons, we can maybe take this line as a hint that Finality also had a role in Idrila's disappearance.
The next reference I've already shown. Just after Idrila we have the line introducing the Propagation, and the phrase (as they enter the dream (Consciousness)." If my ramblings about the Swarm Disaster previously were coherent enough, you might have already connected the dots on this one. If Terminus was indeed responsible for Tayzzronth's ascent to Aeonhood, then this line can be ready fairly literally. To put it in less flowery words: "Listen to the Propagation as it spawns into existence."
The third reference is thus:
Now, "the shapeless prince" is a reference to HooH, of that I'm....mostly certain. And what makes me the most certain is the next phrase "Against the Current." The concept of "currents" being another fun little symbolic reference to Terminus.
Reading more into the Swarm Disaster, you can also begin to see that HooH, alongside Ena the Order, is greatly involved in the Propagation's demise. Tayzzronth's appearance disrupted the equilibrium of the universe, and obviously that's HooH's whole shtick. So Terminus (who flows backwards in time) murmurs a prophecy that spawns Tayzzronth into existence, and HooH (Against the Current) participates in Tayzzronth's destruction. You see what I mean?
And that's. Really it. As a closing note, you know what else is fun? Outside of Idrila (maybe, neither I nor the other lore enthusiasts I follow have quite parsed that out), each Aeon mentioned in that last minute of the Fables About the Stars trailer has a role in the Swarm Disaster. Aha, of course, was one of the key players who was brought on by Ena and further recruited Akivili for help. Ouroboros was created because of the Swarm Disaster. Followers of the Enigmata are mentioned creating false histories of the disaster (this one is my personal theory). HooH as previously explained. And Fuli because of this one particular Trailblaze Secret which might have been about Akivili falling into IX and Fuli grabbing their memories before they were consumed, but honestly this post is long enough and I'll explain that one later if people are interested.
But uh, yeah. The Swarm Disaster has made me go a little nuts and so has the Finality.
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