Honkai Star Rail

Do you think the abundance is just a band aid on all conflict?

We’re still going to agree to disagree but Abundance absolutely could fix fundamental issues people have, even Dan Shu managed to figure out lost secrets of the Abundance that make Mara a non-issue and why she had followers who were still sane or could revert back to being people when intentionally undergoing Mara Struck, since Mara itself is an issue unrelated to the Abundance and affects any species that lives long enough regardless of whether it comes from Permanence, Foxian, etc.

1. Penacony's thematic issue is that humans keep building terrible societies, not physical ailments
2. You're choosing all the the possible answers that make the abundance look the best here. It's very possible that whatever Dan Shu is doing isn't a permanent solution, for instance

It does, mostly because luck is a fundamental factor outside of anyone’s control and it doesn’t matter how powerful or weak you actually are. All it takes is one wrong situation and someone who is considered “Strong” is instantly made “Weak”.

...So what? Sunday's plan is a communistic dictatorship, not a meritocracy

Edited by Hylarn on May 10th 2024 at 4:46:09 AM

No. But it can improve and help people in a lot of ways. That also requires researching and studying it as well. Some issues can be mitigated or outright removed by understanding Abundance and how it works.

The concept of strong and weak is WHY he’s building socialist utopia where everyone can be happy once the Dream engulfs the galaxy. At the cost of himself being forever isolated and alone. The fact that the IPC has committed planetary genocide via WMD because it was easier for trade routes is already a sign of just how much the obsession with wealth cause wide scale issues and suffering.

And no fundamental issues with human biology cause TONS of human suffering and issues in society, in fact people straight up demonized or mistreated in society due to health issues and other failures of human biology that they can’t control.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on May 10th 2024 at 5:39:19 AM

The concept of strong and weak is WHY he’s building socialist utopia where everyone can be happy once the Dream engulfs the galaxy.

Again, I don't think changing his mindset from "there are the strong and the weak" to "there are winners and losers" would change anything about what he wants to do

And no fundamental issues with human biology cause TONS of human suffering and issues in society, in fact people straight up demonized or mistreated in society due to health issues and other failures of human biology.

While true, unless you think that capitalism is one of those issues that failures of human biology causes, I don't think bringing in the abundance is particularly relevant here

It does because you don’t have to be “strong” to be a winner. All you need is the right amount of lucky opportunities to obtain it, which are beyond most peoples abilities to ever realize it, and just having one of the things for that like wealth doesn’t even ensure you’ll be happy, as many of the wealthy patrons of Penacony show in the dream.

Edit: My answer was directly in relation to SUNDAYS motivations. Not about the Abudance. Hell the man he tried to help literally shows how the obsession with winning and capitalism brings nothing but misery.

Editx 2: Also Capitalism does in fact impact health and the ability to get medicines for illnesses so, like, saying that capitalism doesn’t impact that either is wrong. It actively attempts to profit as much as possible off of illnesses.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on May 10th 2024 at 5:15:21 AM

Broadly speaking (I don't think it would necessarily help in this situation) the whole plot line about the Abundance is dumb. Yes, Yaoshi is more akin to Nurgle then a traditional life goddess but that doesn't mean it makes sense to oppose immortality. The story mentions that their resources were being consumed at an unsustainable rate but that's moronic, just use abortion and family planning. Something that's more then doable in our society, much less a futuristic magical one like the Xianzhou.

If I was going to be generous I could say it's a deliberate attempt to add some nuance by making the Xianzhou zealous followers of the Hunt who ignore all the good aspect of Abundance, but that's not what's happening. It's pretty clear Star Rail's writers are pushing a moronic "immortality bad" theme. Which is insufferable but thankfully we're focusing on more sensible themes like "capitalism is bad".

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on May 10th 2024 at 7:14:07 AM

Huh, so the only instance where Robin's Ultimate doesn't override the BGM is, predictably, the latest Echo of War boss.

I don't think those "for the greater good" decisions are easy solutions. Simple, yes, but it's highly doubtful many would agree with making sacrifices for the greater good.

It's about as simple as saying "you can solve capitalism if wealthy people share their money". Well, yes, but also, they won't.

Since the Luofu is made of ships, not planets, it's likely they have far fewer resources than your average space community. Even with low birthrates, if nobody dies, there will be a problem at some point.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 10th 2024 at 12:17:12 PM

Aventurine should have had a bigger role in refuting Sunday's ideals. What better antithesis to the idea of the strong and the weak than to point out that the first person to get the best of him was a high-powered executive who still has his Slave Brand?

Edited by IniuriaTalis on May 10th 2024 at 3:25:00 AM

Funny enough there’s a theory that Gaiathra Triclops might be Ena herself.

X2 Considering the fact they have an actual ocean and ecosystems inside these planet sized ships, they are more than capable of sustaining an environment and getting resources. But of course the actual issues is down to fundamental human flaws: we produce way more than we need, we don’t give excess to others via supply chains since that requires putting more effort than those who produce want to put in, etc. As a long living species they get to see the ramifications of such actions in real time compared to generations later who weren’t involved having to suffer the consequences alone. Which thus leads to long term issues when that exploitation leads to a lack of resources.

Even Mara-struck, something that exists independent of Abundance immortality since it affects anyone who lives long enough including those who have nothing to do with the Abundance like Foxians and the Permanence, is closer to a mix of Magic Plant Alzheimer's and Cancer.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on May 10th 2024 at 4:16:54 AM

Whether they're easy or not is immaterial, they're eminently doable. If you're an immortal society regulating population growth should be an obvious priority. That it wasn't is a symptom of how badly the writing wants to twist itself to justify the anti-immortal position.

"Should"

If you're a society on a planet with finite resources, preserving said resources should be an obvious priority. And yet that's exactly the opposite of what's happening at the moment.

It's not the most in-depth analysis of the issues of immortality, but it does not make it illogical. If immortality meant absolute wisdom and perfect selflessness, you would just create an entire planet of boring invincible beings, and there would be absolutely nothing to talk about (unless they expand and try to force it on everybody of course...which can metaphorically be seen as what the Abundance is doing with the Mara-struck).

This is not a hypothetical, China under Mao literally implemented the one child policy. There's no reason that an immortal society couldn't do the same. You don't need to be literally perfect or without societal flaws, you just need to be above locusts in intellect.

That the writing depicted them as below that is just dumb, no two ways about it.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on May 10th 2024 at 5:25:09 AM

I get the feeling it's easier to force illiterate farmers into obeying a law that might not favor them but help society as a whole, than to do so with an entire population of immortal beings.

Not to mention that birth control screwed China's age curve and they are going to face the mother of elderly-related issues in the upcoming decades. So it makes sense that a Chinese company would not, in 2024, run around metaphorically saying "Birth control is such an awesomesauce idea!" in a video game.

Plus, like...if your population is immortal, the solution is not birth control, it's forbidding birth. You need eternal stagnation if you want it to work. Or you need to delve into the philosophy of "voluntary suicide" once you have got enough, and considering shows such as The Good Place or Final Fantasy XIV it's not a simple thing to discuss or solve either.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 10th 2024 at 2:45:28 PM

Let's also consider the thesis of the sister game, Genshin in regards to immortality: you can be immortal, but you will inevitably slowly lose those you care about even if they are also immortal. It is inevitable that you will either forget large swathes of your life or go insane, because you just can't have one thousand years of nothing in particular happening before it starts to break you down. You can break away from society in meditation or sleep, but then you're going to find out that the world has moved on without you, and you either can fight or surrender to time.

In the end, we'd all be worshipers of Slaanesh.

Edited by IniuriaTalis on May 10th 2024 at 6:41:29 AM

Yeah this is what the problem is. Everything wrong with their society can be tied back to human nature and how our nature naturally exploited the Abundance, but the story presented it as being just the Abundance as the issue instead.

Heck everything that went wrong with Dan Feng backstory is basic human grief that attempted to find a way to undo death and used any cheat, whether it was using the Permanence or Abundance, to do it.

x2 Forbidding births in its entirety wasn’t going to happen, but being immortal means they could have children and invest in only having one child. Heck even two children isn’t unfeasible since there are still threats in the cosmos and so on it’s own having one or two children wasnt implausible.

Honestly from what I’ve seen those willing to go down the Slaanesh route would have done so of their own if they had things they desire, and those desires are why some come to find the secrets of immortality to begin with. Not all of them start out as a Dan Shu who get radicalized when The Hunt targets a non combatant zone far away from the battlefield.

In fact according to the characters Long life species tend to not feel emotions as strongly, even if the story doesn’t really support this as well. Though different forms of immortality do result in unique situations like that one Vidyardha NPC who eternally envies his past selves who managed to swoon the same woman they keep falling in love with, and she’s done it so many times with him she’s finally worn out.

Edit: Id also say that acting like the human brain would function the same as it already did is itself a sign of how much they don’t really think things through what a species that is actually immortal is like. Which can be everywhere from they still age but slowly over thousands of years, or a species who remembers events from 1000 years ago so vividly it’s like it happened yesterday.

In general this is one of my problems with people when writing about immortality since it’s always from our perspective, and then we act like it’s creepy when another species lives that long. To the point it attributes basic things that are human nature to immortality when we make those same mistakes and dont even live as fraction as long to see the disasters from said outcomes.

That’s why the way they handled Abundance was so baffling, since it ignored that they built their culture around the obsession of taking immortality for themselves long before they ever got it, and what resulted was the fallout of that greed. Rather than learn from it they still exploit it for themselves, while blaming all their woes on Abundance.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on May 10th 2024 at 6:58:48 AM

That just reminds me of Tolkein elves, who have perfect memory and therefore can only fall in love once because they will never be able to forget that first-love high. Naturally, they almost all die when their soulmates do, because how can you possibly live forever knowing that you will never be as happy again? Any one of them who feels too strongly for a mortal is considered doomed and might just die on the spot, as is any who is tortured or raped and will never truly move past the moment of trauma.

In Genshin, every immortal player character has at least one major loss or trauma to their name, except the child zombie with a memory of only a few moments at best. I think that's the sort of vibe they were going for with Honkai.

I'd like to add that in search of immortality, the mortal ancestor of the Xianzhou Alliance had advanced enough to the point they could construct worldships that run on magical space compression to leave their home planet, so maybe their population could be more educated overall compared to Mao's China when they first gained immortality, which would make something similar to one-child policy even harder to implement than it was in reality.

Also about RL China's issues as a result of the one-child policy, it screwed their gender proportion as well since people traditionally favored boys more. Thus, to fit the quota with an "ideal" child, some took measures like killing girls when they were born, resulting in there not being enough women for men to marry in a reasonable amount now. Furthermore, Mihoyo may be under more scrutiny by the government ever since the Bunny Girl Incident in HI3 and we know how strict they can get with certain views, so they have to be extra careful.

Lastly, I think it's worth noting Xianzhou does lose population from slaying those who become Mara-struck or euthanizing elderly immortals who start to show signs of transformation before preserving their minds in a kind of a digital graveyard, though maybe limiting the birth number to maintain a stable population could have worked in theory.

Edit: It's tangential, but since we're bringing up issues with the Luofu and Penacony storylines, are there any issues with the Herta Space Station and Jarilo-VI storylines (including Continuance Missions) I don't know of, aside from Ruan Mei's unethical actions and how she gets off lightly for that?

Edited by Billy5545 on May 10th 2024 at 9:07:26 PM

Well, the infamous snag is the sheer amount that Pela's age retcons everything about the Belobog timeline.

The specific problems I would point to with each of the major story arcs:

• Asta's Space Station: Just kind of rough around the edges. The companion missions aren't very interesting, and Arlan never really got a proper introduction
• Jarilo-VI: The whole thing with the robots is largely irrelevant to the overall plot, Bronya and Seele's relationship progresses really fast, and much of what happens in the finale is... vague. Oh, and the continuation is pretty bad, if we're lumping those in with the original story
• Xianzhou Luofu: ...Well, I think the biggest single issue is that it relies on the player caring about Jing Yuan, and he's the single least interesting character in the game, maybe barring a few NPCs. Then you've got the broader issue of Dan Heng's storyline being Not Good in all sorts of ways— Disconnected from the main plot, generally lacking clear stakes or intrigue, heavily reliant on telling rather than showing, etc. And the Antimatter Legion hijacking the plot at the last minute sucked, obviously
• Penacony: Too wordy. Would have benefited from putting more playable characters in secondary roles rather than trying to give everyone their own story, too

Absolutely none of this makes the plot line any less stupid. If they were culturally unable to comment on it in an intelligent manner then they shouldn't have talked about immortality in the first place. You're just proposing an explanation for why they wrote the stupidity they wrote instead of an actual justification.

Not to mention that even if we accept your assumption that it's inherently unworkable for an immortal society to regulate births (it absolutely is not) that just means the society itself is immature, not that it makes sense for the narrative to whinge about how bad immortality is and how right the Xianzhou are to suppress it. The writing fundamentally misidentifies the problem, which is another way that it fails at its job.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on May 11th 2024 at 5:54:28 AM

Every system has a carrying capacity. Once you reach that carrying capacity, every excess birth will cause the resources to deplete. In nature it is solved by a temporary increase in the death rate due to the aforementioned lack of resources. Which is not an option when everybody is immortal.

So, no, you cannot regulate births in an immortal society, unless you either have some Aztec-like culling system in place (to go back below carrying capacity) or if you keep expanding to conquer new territories (to increase carrying capacity). Neither option looks very much on the side of peace and morality to me.

I am not even talking in hypotheticals here: this is how biology works. A population of immortals who reproduce will always keep growing. No ifs, no buts, even if it reproduces slowly, it will grow. It's just math.

And considering that, in-universe, the Abundance is strongly aligned with healing powers, then you can't say that birth control will just compensate for those who suffer unpredictable deaths, because those accidents will be excessively rare if the whole society adopted the philosophy.

Edited by Bexlerfu on May 11th 2024 at 3:10:34 PM

Except as has been mentioned they can still be killed and threats exist that can threaten them. So their population isn’t growing endlessly.

The Vidyarha are themselves an example of this in how their Born-Again Immortality comes at the price of zero increase in population and in the long term results in their numbers dwindling if so much as any of them dies in combat and aren’t reborn by returning to their underwater hatchery.

The Destruction, Propagation, etc. There are numerous threats that already show how there’s no way to have such a massive growth in population unless, as has been stated, their Greed lead to that situation. The very same Greed that made them seek Immortality for themselves in the first place and built a culture obsessed with making it their own.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on May 11th 2024 at 7:33:53 AM

It's a bit of a conundrum though. They are extremely hard to kill (you have to do it twice for the most common mara-struck mook), and they are hunted because their philosophy is seen as dangerous.

But if their philosophy was seen as inoffensive, then they would grow in numbers. The reason they do not grow in numbers is because they are seen as a threat.

"Hoping" for believers in Propagation or Destruction to barge in to lower their numbers is basically no different from regular cullings or human sacrifices, except they rely on outside forces instead of emanating from within the society. So it is much more random.

You're dramatically missing my point. Regulating births includes not having any! Zero population growth is a form of regulation.

But all of this isn't even relevant to my main point. Instead of examining the struggles and challenges of running an immortal society the game instead opted to go for the vacuous "immortality bad" plotline. The problems it discusses are solvable but the game pretends otherwise and paints a ridiculously slanted perspective. It's bad writing and frankly boring, it was the worst part of an already flawed story arc.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on May 11th 2024 at 9:09:44 AM