[2.3 HSR] Aeons Come in Pairs - A Honkai Star Rail Theory

Star Rail's Aeons have their roots in Gnosticism, but Gnostic Aeons tend to come in pairs... so why don't Star Rail's Aeons come in pairs? Or DO they come in pairs and we've just never noticed?

**TIMESTAMPS**

00:00 Introduction
03:10 Overview
05:10 Matchmaker
06:52 Predator and Prey
07:45 Known and Unknown
08:20 Consumption and Production
09:32 Optimism and Pessimism
11:20 Material and Immaterial
13:14 Order and Chaos
14:30 Conservation and Waste
20:15 Train Time

**SPOILER WARNINGS**
- Penacony Finale

**CITATIONS & ATTRIBUTIONS**

[Ashikai]

**NOTES & CORRECTIONS**
I'm amazed I missed this in my initial search, so I thought I'd share this. We had a similar idea, but completely different arguments/pairings which I think is really cool!

[CuriusGorg]

Harmony: "Everything sucks, how can we improve it"
Elation: "Everything sucks, we might as well have fun making it worse"

[salasy]

It could be argued that the path of the trailblaze is the journey while finality is the destination

[OzCyphara]

Fun fact, when attempting to access an event in Star Rail without clearing the pre-requisite story quests (such as Apocalyptic Shadow, ) the game warns you that, roughly, "to gain knowledge of the future rejects the Path of the Trailblaze and is the domain of Finality."
I wish I'd taken a screenshot of the message in full the one time I read it, because I cannot find anyone else online who shared it.

[kip]

i personally view elation as the pursuit of ones own joy and entertainment above all else. we know that the masked fools can and do betray each other to get what they want, but not all of them have a desire to sow chaos, they just want to have fun how they each individually want. rather than harmony vs elation being "harmony vs discord", i think a better way to describe it is "happiness for all vs happiness for oneself"

[SeventhDisaster]

The last pairing makes a lot of sense, especially when you take into consideration that a "Terminus" is the exact definition of a station at the very end of a railway line.
Only there do trains end their journey

[nataloserlover]

The Nihility and Beauty pairing hits me emotionally when you realize Kiana (from HI3) has a mission of "protecting all Beauty in the world" and Raiden Mei responded to this with "my world means Nothing without you"

[kattishadow]

Wait the Beauty/ Nihility as counterparts thing is genius Argenti and Acheron are my HSR mains so I’ve been reading a lot of the in game text about their paths. The idea of the Beauty being a path where one sees the purpose in all things vs the Nihility’s pointlessness in all things has definitely occurred to me, but I hadn’t been thinking about it in terms of Equilibrium. One things that also strikes me is that for Knights of Beauty, those who fall off the path of Beauty and gain a narrow view of the world/ have their sense of purpose distorted lose their sense of self and become monsters, which strikes me as kind of similar to what happens to Self Annihilators, also losing their sense of self and returning to Nihility

[bootay]

When Acheron and the Galaxy Ranger are talking about her resisting the nihility he says she has a bit of the color red in her, Argenti entire pallet is gold silver and bright red...
and both have flower motifs

[Biohacker]

The pairing between Permanence and Rememberance reminds me a lot of Raiden makoto and ei, Long achieve eternity through reincarnation while Fulli makes worlds memories eternal, makoto see eternity in peoples everchanging dreams while ei see eternity in literal sense. Basically dynamic vs static, change vs stagnant, fluidity vs solidified

[wheattins]

A few things:

• I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed that the path of Erudition and Enigmata clashed as opposites to each other.

• I also agree that Elation does feel mislabeled since Aha loves to create chaos where he goes.

• 19:02 This actually further explains why the Annihilation Gang hasn’t received Nanook’s blessing, because they don’t fundamentally understand the Destruction’s will to bring about entropy. The Annihilation Gang have personal motives/desires for their acts of destruction which is seen an impure, as stated in the Data Bank.

[raphniamagna]

ngl, Idrila's path seeing the beauty in everything explains why the faction that seeks to revive THEM is called the "Mirror Holders". If your philosophy is to see the beauty in everything, that would also mean seeing the beauty in yourself in the mirror.

[alexmcfly]

13:40 When you realize the theory assumes Elation to be opposite of Order and *Sparkle's enemies in her trailer are literally Sunday's Order machines*

[Braxophone]

at this point im convinced hi3, genshin, and star rail have the same plot

[vernicimo]

8:20 This could explain why Ouroboros disappeared after the swarm, with the "deactivation" of the propagation, the voracity also went into stasis to balance things out

[doggo]

i like how you have the elation paired with order/harmony as something like order and chaos, but i feel like another great duality for the pairing is more like the self vs the whole.

personally, i think something that describes aha's and the masked fool's actions is more like hedonism. they create chaos yes, but only because it amuses them. it serves as their own entertainment. they act on whatever makes them the most happy, even things at others' expense.

on the flip side, there's harmony, which is all about connecting with others. harmonic characters care for everyone, even making self sacrifices to uphold everyone else. they act for the good of everyone, not just themselves.

i don't think that the mirroring themes are limited to just something like individualism vs collectivism, but i do think it adds to how these two paths are great mirrors of each other! not only is it the self vs the whole, but also chaos vs order and discord vs harmony.

[JohnDoe-flov]

Thank you for mentioning the gnosticism themes of the aeons, It amazes me how little gnosticism theories exist in the hoyoverse fandom, considering both genshin and star rail take a lot of inspiration of gnosticism such as; the aeons, archons, gnosis etc.

[LeaksHater]

I think *Trailblaze* vs *Finality* is a lot simpler.
It's the *journey* vs *destination.*
It's the *search for experience* vs *already knowing how it all ends.*
It's the going *forward in time* vs going *backwards in time.*

2.3 Literally calls out that Finality is the opposite of Trailblaze too.

[zainei]

Finality Aeon is called Terminus and name is derived from Terminal or Terminal station.

WOW this analogy makes so much sense. Your explanation of Trailblaze and Finality explain so much of my confusion 😲 regarding the relationship between the Astral express and Stellaron hunter.

[whystaroth]

I absolutely LOVE the contrasts of Nihility and Beauty. To think about how Acheron rejects the Nihility and blooms with RED flowers when she uses her "burst" when red is a color that has so many associations with life-generating energy and is also the same color that is all over Argenti... She's fighting her fate so hard. Not to mention that thinking about beauty as seeing the meaning in all things makes me love Argenti even more.