I’m very interested in the linguistic implications of the connection between Aoidos, Aion, and Aionios. All of the names come from very different places: Aoidos is the name of the university Klaus came from and the body of power in charge of finding the Conduit, Aion is the name of the most powerful Artifice ever made, and Aionios is obviously the botched world created by Origin. But I think these different definitions actually help carry the themes of the Xenoblade Trilogy very well.
Beginning with Aoidos and Aion. Given that Aion was created by The Trinity Processor, which were under the watchful eye of researchers from Aoidos like Klaus, it makes sense that Aion would have a close-sounding name to Aoidos. It’s a branding thing. This reinforces what was going on with that university at the time: their research into The Conduit became less of a search for knowledge and more of the creation of weapons of mass destruction. This aligns with what happened later with the Blades in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The Architect originally meant for them to gather knowledge about the beings of the new world he created, but became weapons of mass destruction, particularly the Aegis’.
Hmm. Starting out as a way of exchanging/obtaining knowledge but becoming a recipe for perpetual war. Sound familiar?
Aionios is the end result of that line of thinking. What was once a desire to reunite the worlds torn asunder by The Experiment, became a never-ending battleground of two nations put together by Moebius. Not only that, but Aionios and its systems have thematic and functional overlap with both Aoidos and Aion.
Aion: The Artifices themselves are not your typical robots. They have what is called a “Slave Generator” as detailed in the Siren Model Kit. This is a replacement for an internal engine, where they receive energy from the Conduit directly to function, hence why they have Conduit-shaped crystals on their middles. They even have some level of implied sentience/AI as part of their systems, as they can function on multiple occasions without direct orders and are even sometimes treated as sentient beings by the Aegis’. The soldiers of Aionios are continuations of this original idea: beings created to be weapons, beholden to their creators, and marked by symbols tied to their origins. The evolution is that while the Artifices were made explicitly into weapons of war, the Soldiers were clones of the original people downloaded into Origin and turned into weapons of war. War was the purpose of the Artifices from the get-go, while the soldiers were corrupted from their original purpose. (EDIT: it cannot be a coincidence that Artifices all have a gold halo in their designs, and Moebius Form/Interlinks all have rings/halos incorporated in their designs as well).
Aoidos: Instead of the Artifices' original purpose infecting what should’ve never been so, Aoidos’ original meaning itself became perverted. Aoidos was originally meant as a research institute, a place for learning and knowledge gathering for the betterment of mankind. Due to the Moebius takeover of Origin and the botched merge of the two worlds, all knowledge of history before the merge was wiped out. Locations lie forgotten with no information of their origin, and entire family trees go unknown outside the City. This gets more messed up when we hear from Noah in the opening that Aionios in-universe means, “Eternity”. An institute of knowledge is meant to keep information alive throughout time, for “eternity”. Instead, the Eternity has become one of lost knowledge and only warfare.
