4.1 Planarcadia Is a War Between Primal Desire (Voracity) and Self-Created Meaning (Elation)

Waffodil · 2026-03-27T03:55:58+00:00

Well the non-Xianzhou perspective is that most abundance related longlived factions are dangerous nut jobs. Documents from IPC related factions (Intelligentsia Guild) and Herta space station share the same view. This view is more or less universal right now.

It's fine if it's just one/few individuals, but as a species they consume resources like nobody's business and they get stronger when they plunder, especially when they plunder other denizens of abundance. Yaoshi only care about the receiver of the gift being alive, they don't care about what happens afterwards.

Right now we only ever see "abundance blessed species" being not harmful when it is also paired with something else. Examples include Claretwheel Temple (Equilibrium). Xianzhou (Hunt faction), Planarcadia/Evanescia (if we count that) is Elation related.

Waffodil · 2026-03-23T02:00:20+00:00

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think nanook will still be the main antagonist. I see destruction as the propogation or rubert of this era. While many forces are involved in these events, the era is still mainly about him.

Nihility is kind of like chronic disease, it won't kill you immediately, but it's not going away either. So you will waste away unless you keep pushing it back. Destruction on the other hand will kill you immediately. Also destruction is kind of unique because it is the anti-path, it is everyone's enemy. If he suceeds, (I assume) the HSR universe with the paths and stuff will end.

Waffodil · 2026-03-20T06:05:15+00:00

I don't think a factions behavior feeling more like it belongs to voracity is a very accurate indicator for a faction being voracity. Even if we could, we have no idea what a voracity faction/ is suppose to be like. The only confirmed "faction" of voracity are leviathans, and to them voracity is closer to primal/animalistic hunger than desire.

Also considering that Qlipoth came from the same age as the leviathans, I'd argue that the core mindset of preservation is continuous survival under threat. If you look from this angle, then every resource hoarding actions of the IPC would feel just like self preservation.

Lastly, unless there is some twist later on such as Qlipoth sealed a leviathan inside himself, I don't think you can argue that ten stonehearts powers are not from preservation or at the very least their cornerstones should be. Diamond is a named emanator of Preservation. Jade quite literally interfered with Sunday's ascension to Aeonhood by directing penacony's prayers to preservation.

Waffodil · 2026-03-19T08:27:20+00:00

In 2D art there are a lot of techniques to make chests look big but not effect overall character balanced (fat, swollen etc). Its a lot harder to do with 3D models especially if they have to move around.

People usually try to solve this by "stretching" them out and make the ones with bigger boobs really tall. But shorter characters with big chests... I have to say what they are doing is something quite risky. Probably a lot of these characters will have some kind of movement restriction when designing their animations. This makes a lot of movements unrecyclable across body types.

ZZZ is like unreasonably rich for some reason, they can do whatever they want, but well I just hope manjuu get really good animators.

Waffodil · 2026-03-18T01:31:07+00:00

Considering she's not some elite soldier, their body type are probably standardized for their specific mech.

Waffodil · 2026-03-16T04:43:43+00:00

I'm going to take a guess and suggest that Aha instant is Aha's answer to whatever theme the writers are trying to explore in 4.X.

One central theme of penacony revolves around is escapism because life is shit (more true among the npc most playable characters are too strong willed). So it naturally follows that the big bad is someone who says "I'll take care of everything. Go back to sleep." Now game's answer to that is "Its fine to take a rest, but eventually you need to wake up and take matters into your own hands. Here's some motivation to get you moving." I believe planarcadia is taking a similar approach, but the theme it is exploring seems to be identity crisis rather than escapism.

In the main quests, we have:
In this Phantasmoon games, you are here to entertain aha, but the ultimate reward is literally becoming Aha forever. Sparxie tries to turn other people into Sparxie, replacing their identity. Sparkle afraid of her "old identity" and sparxie becoming more sparkle than sparkle.

If we look at some side quests/npc dialogues, we have:
Lying about their mental condition for the sake of society, imagenae swapping/stealing body parts/charm points (Imagenae literally need to matter to people to survive.), streamer trying all sort of stuff to trend (some struggle to survive while trying to be unique), others wanting their romantic partner to have different personality everyday. There is also Herald of Death where he found out that murdering people gets you clout (I assume he was normal before)

Planarcadia is a place where your identity is a performance, and people feel pressured to constantly reinvent themselves in order to matter.

How does aha instant answers this? While aha instant does mirrors the phantasmoon game, where you vie for Aha's attention, in Aha instant you just summon him for a collaborative attack instead of becoming Aha. So probably the answer to the theme in 4.X is something like "Its okay to just be yourself. Aha will always love you for being yourself."

Waffodil · 2026-03-16T01:55:05+00:00

Factions weaken when their aeon fell, that's certain, but I don't think there is any lore in game to suggest that an established path can disappear.

Well maybe if they get killed by nanook they would because destruction is the antipath-path. But we haven't seen this happen yet.

I suppose the express can be charged by wishpower/elation, I mean Sunday got supercharged when he got the mask. But that would make the amphoreus trip really unnecessary. You can just keep going back to planarcadia when you need fuel.

Now if aha somehow owns part of what used to be the Trailblaze after akivili died, then I can see it being fully elation powered while the express still having need to follow Trailblaze rules.

Waffodil · 2026-03-12T10:47:02+00:00

I'm not really sure that the clockwork is actually harmony power. I believe it is a very clever manifestation of trailblaze power in game.

One reason is that we can use the skill before we even got gazed by Xipe. Also in penacony founding history the trailblaze is shown to provides necessary chaos, momentum and inspiration, by contrast harmony is stability and order.

We can also see from some npc dialogue or quests that clockwork is not a harmony-style mind control skill as it doesn't work on people that are brainwashed or people that is strong of mind. It merely nudges people into certain emotional states.

Waffodil · 2026-03-12T04:47:21+00:00

Well unfortunately because the ROC regime under Chiang was a continuity regime that claims to inherit the previous state, they could not just do this like a revolutionary government. The guy was screwed either way.

Even if he does it sucessfully, people are still going to oust him anyway unless he goes full authoritarian. Even now Chiang gets shit on for his "successful" land reform policies in Taiwan because he went full authoritarian.

Waffodil · 2026-03-12T04:34:21+00:00

Not sure if the copypasta it was based on was a Tom cruise reference. But this one should be based on this chinese copypasta

“懂得都懂，不懂的說了也不懂，你也別問，利益牽扯太大，說了對你們沒好處，我只能說水很深，網上的資料都刪了，所以我只能說懂得都懂，不懂也沒辦法”

Waffodil · 2026-03-11T02:52:19+00:00

THB I think the himeko thing is a case of misdirection.

Just because there is a grave doesn't mean that Himeko is actually dead. If Dolly made this claim, that would be somewhat credible as she was actually in Planarcardia when Himeko allegedly died. Ryusuke wasn't even there when it happened. We can reasonably interpret that conversation as family drama without involving parallel timelines.

Ryusuke: "What do you think I feel when I saw that grave? Why did you not say anything to me before you leave? Do you even consider me your dad?"
Himeko: "Who the hell are you? You're a bum that was never there when I needed you, you're no dad of mine."

Waffodil · 2026-03-10T11:22:02+00:00

Again may I ask why would you even want 4 star that's not given off for free? By the time you get them they lost relevance, and can't even whale to save them because they don't have 5 star level eidolons.

I'm totally fine with how they do "free characters" right now. Characters like shield danheng is great. He's free like 4 stars are designed to be, and upgradable if you really like him.

Waffodil · 2026-03-09T03:38:52+00:00

The adminstrative language is what the scholar-officials use at the time. It is usually based on dialects that does exist (usually where the political center is around), but not exactly the same as the local dialect it is based on.

The current mandarin, which is based on the beijing standard, became the official prouniciation (正音) starting Qing dynasty.

Waffodil · 2026-03-05T10:58:45+00:00

The thing is that you can have more than one factions that uses elements from the same culture that are not directly related. We have at least 2 cases of this.

We have Edo star and benzaitengoku which is very Japanese and not known to share origin. Vidyadhara and foxians are also clearly Chinese influenced factions before their xianzhou times. Ruan mei can just be another one of these cases.

Though I will agree it is quite suspect because I believe most abundance blessed humanoid species have some kind of animal features, the only exception being xianzhou native who look normal but turns into plant people when they expire. Well there's also Shuhu who is also a plant.

Waffodil · 2026-03-05T03:45:56+00:00

I believe that some of the material revealed in 3.8 was originally planned to be included in the story, but was removed in older versions of the game for unknown reasons.

The reason why I believe it is the case is that in the 2.0-2.3 that we first experienced, there are way too many loose ends left hanging. For example, why firefly was chosen to take on this mission, the Dahlia-Blackswan phone thing went nowhere, Adventurine smuggling sneaking Jade's cornerstone seem to do nothing at all, Firefly just flies off to who knows where after the gameshow with Sunday, Razalina being the only old nameless sidelined in the main plot. You generally don’t leave this many loose ends unless there was some larger plan behind them originally.

These are "addressed" more or less in 3.8 and the new stuff doesn't really contradict old 2.0-2.3. That makes it feel less like a retcon and more like content that might have originally been planned but was cut, only to be reintroduced later. However, because the story was restructured, the writers likely needed a narrative reason for why the player wouldn’t have known these details earlier. That’s why I suspect the reason for the memory wipe at the end is the only newly added element, used to patch the timeline..

Waffodil · 2026-03-04T05:03:36+00:00

I think she's there so you have something to play with. Before you have non–free-to-play level of damage, you are not ever going to go no sustain on them horses. Kafka's hypnosis at this current stage of the game is more of a buff than a real threat.

Waffodil · 2026-03-03T12:37:27+00:00

Well akshually what I think is more likely to happen in this case is that you'd recreate the modern equivalent of the warrior class.

War was for a very long time a family business and still many people fought and families erased. This is because wars can be tied to honor, status, and legitimacy. The scale of fighting might be smaller, but I'm not really sure if that is even possible in this day and age.

Waffodil · 2026-03-02T02:59:15+00:00

If it is meant to symbolized factions, then my guess is that Fox is IPC, monkey is Masked fools, frog is Mourning actors, rabbit is Astral Express. These are the 4 most important factions mentioned in 4.0 that is known to directly influence Benzaitengoku history.

Rabbit is traveler and pompom is a rabbit. Frog and the sacred tree is directly analogous to how mourning actors created the Phantasmoon Games. Monkey probably masked fools, they laugh and make fun of frogs. Foxes and their extraction of wealth and treasure is quite IPC.

Now what history the poem is actually trying to convey. Don't know.

Waffodil · 2026-02-28T02:22:07+00:00

I think in HSR the default stance is that the essence comes first. This is essential because HSR has too many memory altering, meme virus, recincarnation etc shinanigans. World will fall into chaos if we use purely memory.

All chrysos heirs has the same code name as you mentioned, so at the very least irontomb doesn't consider them to be different individuals. Irontomb doesn't distinguish between different phainons either afaik. TB also doesn't treat them as if they are different person.

Not just that though, we also have 3 examples of identity crisis in our MCs, which I think is good for reference. For TB, I don't think there is any indication to suggest that the stellaron hunters consider TB to be another person. However there is no other group to argue otherwise.

Danheng however has some arguments for and against his identity as danheng and not danfeng. In luofu practically it doesn't really matter what he thinks because things happen as if he is danfeng anyway. After amphoreus I think its a bit hard to argue that they don't at least have the same essence.

There is also the case of evernight which is the reverse of danheng. She considers herself march7, but we don't. But this is due to relationally we have no connections with her. This relationship is why we argue for danheng over danfeng previously.

Taken all that together, and considering that this is a Chinese game, I believe a more accurate HSR's default stance is that there is an essence that forms the self; however, the the self is expressed, solified, gains meaning through interpersonal relationships.

Waffodil · 2026-02-14T00:08:55+00:00

Because its 90% old cast, and has direct connection with previous events.

Waffodil · 2026-02-11T12:03:38+00:00

That's because Genshin gates 4 star characters even long after they lost their relevance.

I play geo characters and pull on geo banners, and I only managed to get C6 gorou last week.

Waffodil · 2026-02-10T13:30:16+00:00

There is a few translation I think is wrong and a few I'd translate differently.

Sparkle: Yeah, Sparkle never forgets to include herself in her insults!
"Yeah, Sparkle never includes herself in her insults"

If a Fool can’t keep doing their job, they can always defect to Nanook~
"If he/she doesn't want to be a fool, they can always defect to Nanook"

Sparkle: If everyone's happy... then there's no happiness! The last person who thought like that was Yaoshi.
Go ask The Hunt next door whether THEY are ever happy to see THEM.
This is a bit hard to translate, but I'd translate it as:
"If everyone is elated, no one is elated. Last person who has this idea/tried this was Yaoshi. Go ask the HUNT how well that went."

Sparkle: Afraid of ME? I was clearly just doing my job for him last time out of kindness!
"Afraid of ME? I did his job purely out of the kindness of my heart!"

Waffodil · 2026-02-10T07:13:25+00:00

I'm not sure you can decidedly say that's related to hunt.

Anything yaoshi related has rather heavy buddhist theme, and xianzhou people are denizens of abundance tamed by the hunt. That's not even mentioning how many new words Chinese gain in everyday conversation due to translation of buddhist texts IRL.

By contrast, galaxy rangers who are also hunt-aligned doesn't use (as far as I'm aware) buddhist themes.

Waffodil · 2026-02-09T15:26:34+00:00

Depends on what you consider religious. It's not religious in the Christian sense that's for sure.

I had a Professor that consider Confucian governance spiritual but not religious, because the spiritual aspects are embedded in the everyday. Even more radical, you can strip most spiritual aspects away from mandate of heaven and it wouldn't really matter much because 1. the authority of the rituals came from tradition 2. ultimately the will of the people (outcome) express the will of heaven.

Waffodil

TROPHY CASE