#captainverse

so obvi many of the captainverse events were meant to be less serious and more silly, so I think that stuff like the recurring gag of NEET Water Djinn (the common Captainverse version of HoV) isn't meant to be analyzed too deeply. Water Djinn appears everywhere cause it's funny, that's it.

buuuuuut, if we were to try and analyze her as a character, then there's one thing that's always struck me as a bit odd, which is that she appears so often even in places that she seems totally foreign to. like in Odd Drifter we meet her in a desert despite being a "Water Djinn", or in Seele's dream in the Estival Seaside event. We even see the writers themselves poke fun at this in the 2nd-to-last Captainverse event when we meet a Water Djinn somewhere on Himeko's bubble world and Captain is just like "why r u everywhere, r you mass-produced lol" and she's all like "bro what's your problem, piss off"

however there IS one bubble world where the Water Djinn has a clear origin, where she actually seemed to belong and where there were other characters with a meaningful relationship with her... which was the Honkai Quest bubble world. In that bubble world Water Djinn was one of two spirits, the other being a blue-eyed version of her, and the orange-eyed one corresponded to HoV and the blue-eyed one w/ Kiana. But the two of them weren't identical copies per se; they were sisters. And then we had the forest spirit Bianka to boot, who didn't have an explicit connection back then but now with the revelation of Bianka being the real Kiana it's plausible that she was related to the two water spirits too.

The thing is that older Water Djinn (HoV) didn't "die" in the events of that story- she disappeared. Into a rift. We know how screwy the Sea of Quantum can get, so for someone like Water Djinn to get yoinked out of her world by a Quantum rift wouldn't be unusual at all. Water Djinn was established to be a powerful fighter at that time, and she only got pulled into the rift because she was weakened at that moment. It's possible, though not necessarily plausible, that she was still strong enough to survive after being taken by the rift even if she wasn't strong enough to avoid getting swallowed up by it. And we've seen plenty of times where healthy & powerful characters get yoinked by a rift without their consent, i.e. Misteln semi-accidentally kicking Kira out of the SSHC bubble world.

All that is to say- what if all the random Water Djinns we see in the Captainverse are somehow derived from the original Water Djinn of the Honkai Quest bubble world? I doubt they're all the same individual because of the varying circumstances we find them in, but they're always in a weird limbo where they're out-of-place in the world they're at and they don't seem to have a clear purpose or direction. Just like the Captain's mind apparently split from Kongming's portal shenanigans, maybe the Water Djinns throughout the SoQ are fragments of the original one, or maybe they're echoes of her wandering through the SoQ and the "real" one is still out there.