Jillian
Trying something new — I open a million Wikipedia tabs every week just to chase down some silly little lore thoughts. I usually don’t have much to show for it, so I thought I’d try making a list of the links I clicked on this week and writing down whatever haphazard thoughts I have about them.
Chess
I spent a lot of time this week reviewing some of my old notes about chess lore stuff — the game shown in A Winter Night’s Lazzo is endlessly interesting to me, and I like trying to figure out what it can tell us. I didn’t really make any breakthroughs this week, but I did open a lot of tabs.
- Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov 1996: Game 1: This is the game shown in A Winter Night’s Lazzo. I’ve spent a lot of time just clicking through the moves to see if there are any clues about what happened in Teyvat before the Traveler woke up, or about what will happen next.
- The Loading Screen Element Order Theory: I was wondering if the order of the elements on the loading screen might match the order of chess pieces on the board to give us a clue about which pieces are for which archon. That theory doesn’t seem to work, though.
- Egeria: I’m pretty sure I opened this page because I wanted hints to confirm which chess piece represents the (original) hydro archon. (Personally, I’m pretty sure the hydro gnosis is the other knight — the one that didn’t capture Signora’s pawn.)
- Rook (chess): I did a lot of digging into the symbolism of the rook piece, because if the hydro gnosis is a knight, then the pyro gnosis must be a rook.
- Rook (surname): This didn’t take me anywhere, but I love checking out the surname pages just in case.
- Rook (bird): There are birds called rooks! This page didn’t have anything interesting on it, but it did lead me to the next page.
- Roc (mythology): A really big mythological bird — I don’t think there’s a real direct line from Roc to rook, but maybe I’ll just keep this one in mind for later.
- Lewis chessmen: This is a group of specially carved chess pieces that I thought was interesting because it depicts some of the rooks (called “warders” in this case) as “berserkers.”
Rosaline
Every once in a while I try to dig a little deeper into Signora. This week, I mostly focused on her original name, Rosalyne.
- Rosaline (disambiguation): Always gotta start with the disambiguation page.
- Rosaline: This page is for the character from Romeo and Juliet — the one that Romeo is in love with before he sees Juliet.
- ”Rosaline thus acts as the impetus to bring the “star-cross’d lovers” to their deaths—she is crucial in shaping their fate (a common theme of the play).”
- Love’s Labour’s Lost: Rosaline is also the name of a character in this play, although I still don’t know much about it, and it seems like she plays a pretty minor role.
- Rosalind (As You Like It): One last Shakespeare play, this time with a slightly different version of the name. This one is pretty interesting to me for a few reasons.
- Orlando (As You Like It): Her lover’s name is Orlando — maybe named after this Orlando, like our very own Hleobranto. (Orlando is Roland, not Rostam. But they knew each other, at least!)
- In the play, she disguises herself as a shephard named Ganymede, who is the son of Callirhoe. We’ve heard that name in Genshin, too.
- This is the play with the “All the world’s a stage” monologue — which Kaeya quoted in his hangout.
- The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rosalynde; or, Euphues’ Golden Legacy: I haven’t read this, and I barely know what it is, but I saw the name “Rosalynde” and opened it. Maybe I’ll get around to it someday.
Folktales
- The Love for Three Oranges: I saw someone mention this as one of the texts to read to understand Childe’s lore, looked it up, and found out that I already looked at this page all the way back in January and forgot about it. I actually don’t remember why I originally looked it up, but I’m guessing it’s because of Tricky Bulle Fruit or something. Or maybe I was just going down a commedia dell’arte rabbit hole.
- The Love for Three Oranges (fairy tale): The original source of the story! Apparently “The Three Oranges” is a whole type on the ATU index. I love folktales.
- The Gypsy Tsaritsa (Serbian folktale): Just about lost my mind reading the synopsis of this story — which also falls under “The Three Oranges” category.
- ”As with The Three Oranges, the tale deals with a prince’s search for a bride that lives inside a fruit, who is replaced by a false bride and goes through a cycle of incarnations, until she regains physical form again.”
- Also featuring: a maiden drowning by looking at her own reflection in a pool of water, eyes getting torn out and locked in a box, and tears turning into pearls.
- Pentamerone: This is a fairy tale collection that features a version of the “The Three Oranges” story. This page led me to a bunch of other pages that I briefly checked out, but I don’t have much else to say about them.
- The Three Spinners
- The Seven Ravens
- Brother and Sister
- Sun, Moon, and Talia
- The Golden Root
- Peruonto
- At the Pike’s Behest
- Frame story — a term I hadn’t heard before!
- The Lute Player — I think I just opened this because one version of the title has the word “Tsaritsa” in it
- Hansel and Gretel — I mean, okay. Brother and sister leaving themselves a breadcrumb trail so they can find their way home after outsmarting a witch who wants to eat them. I can see how that’s kind of relevant to Genshin.
Dreams & stuff
I was thinking about Alice troubleshooting the borders of Teyvat, and how her little summer experiments probably have a lot to do with that. Every year, she tests the limits of creating little dream worlds for us to explore — and that’s probably what Teyvat is! So if she can keep perfecting the tiny worlds she sends us to, maybe she can fix Teyvat.
Maybe at the end of all this we’re going to find out that Teyvat is the dream world of the Traveler, or Paimon. Aaaand that’s the thought that carried me through all these tabs.
- Red pill and blue pill: Don’t laugh.
- Morpheus (The Matrix): I said don’t laugh!!!
- Morpheus: Okay now that we’re getting into less cringe territory — it’s clear that dreams are a big theme in this game, as is the idea of “waking up” or “going home.” Plus, I really don’t think the whole Penacony arc in HSR is too detached from what’s going on in Genshin.
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: I come back here all the time. There was Alice in Wonderland stuff happening all over Fontaine, but I don’t think we’re done with it yet. I mean, Alice is named Alice. Paimon continues to be kinda weird about eating a lot of food that can apparently tether you to the Night Kingdom. The Traveler is just falling further and further down the rabbit hole.
- All in the golden afternoon: This poem, the preface to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is about the afternoon that Lewis Carroll came up with the story. It always just makes me think of “golden slumber” and “golden hour.”
Helios
It’s kind of hard not to be constantly thinking about sun god stuff with these Hoyoverse games. This week’s spiral started with me being like, “Why is Elio named that?” I was thinking more about HSR and ZZZ than Genshin when I clicked on most of these links, but it’s all relevant anyway. Everything blends together.
- Elio: The name “Elio” comes from “Helios.” Checks out.
- Helios: This topic is almost too big to even think about. He’s the sun. He’s the ultimate witness to everything. He shines like gold. Etc.
- Phaethon: Been thinking about this guy more lately because of ZZZ. Makes me really curious about Belle and Wise’s parents.
- Eos: More ZZZ stuff. I love thinking about Bangboo Eos as “the rosy-fingered dawn that greets the day.”
- Selene: My main interest in Selene is her chariot — she and Helios both have one. We’ve heard of both sun and moon chariots in Genshin. (Are they real? I don’t care. They’re in the story.) And because everything comes back to chess for me: rooks were originally chariots. (This makes Zhongli’s gnosis being a rook extra cool to me, but it does throw a wrench in my theory that the other rook is the pyro gnosis, since the pyro archon doesn’t exactly scream “moon goddess” to me.)
- Ajax the Great: Gotta be one of my most visited Wikipedia pages. I ended up here because he’s mentioned on the Helios page — before Ajax killed himself, he asked Helios to “stop his golden reins” in Salamis to tell his parents the news. Mostly interesting because it supports the idea that Helios is the witness to everything.
Misc
- Bison: I’ve been trying to figure out what the Tatankasaurs in Natlan might look like, and what their special skills could be. All I know about them is their name, which comes from a Native American word for “bison.”
- Gurren Lagann: I just ended up here because the Genshin Wiki claims that the name of this achievement is referencing it.
- Genshin birthdays: I open this page a lot because I always think there’s gonna be a sneaky little clue hidden in someone’s birth date. I can’t even remember why I was looking at it this time.
- Parzival: Imagine if I ever stopped thinking about this guy. Again, can’t even remember why I opened this. Just a regular week.
- Blazin’ Trails: I had the urge to revisit this quest — especially the parts with the pyro & cryo flowers that help Xinyan go deeper into the domain. I just read through all the dialogue quickly, but at some point I want to give it some more thought, because there’s some cool stuff in here that I think people kinda forgot about.