#douglitheories

In Ancient Egypt when a human dies they present their Heart/ Ib to Anubis to be weighed on the scales against the feather of Ma’at. If the scales balance you go to Aaru/field of reeds/heaven. (For Cyno if you are judged not a threat you get to go to the Village Aaru.) If your heart is heavier than the feather it is fed to Ammit. You experience the feared second death and no longer exist. All humans and all gods that die have their heart’s weighed on the scales.

Sidenote:

Feather of Ma’at - magic/energy source/goddess of balance in the universe

Ma’at=mana=Magi=Magician=magic

Ma’at is the oldest form of the word magic. Expect Ma’at to be linked to the origin of tevat’s magic, possibly even the origin of visions. Basically if you see a feather in the desert it's probably going to be really F-ing important. (I wrote this part before the trailer dropped. But I was right they'd reference the feather. The trailer feather isn't Ma'at tho.)

Most of Cyno's connections to Anubis come from the god of Judgement aspect of Anubis. (Judicator of Secrets) (Weighing of the Heart - "Good Deeds and Bad. In the end All will be placed on the scales.") (Cyno Teaser - "Save it for Judgement Day.") ("Your Sins weigh upon your Soul") (Attack name - "Secret Rite; Chasmic soulfarer") (Passive name - "featherfall Judgement") (Demo - "Every Soul will be Weighed.") (Demo - "Judgement will come swiftly.")

Even the Giant Claw Arms are a part of this. The more graphic depictions of Anubis describe him ripping or cutting out the person's heart to be weighed on the scales.

But there are references to other parts of Anubis, including his role as god of the mummification process. (Utility Passive name - "The Gift of Silence") is a reference to the "Opening of the mouth" ceremony which was done to disconnect the soul from it's body so the person could move on and not linger as a ghost. The title of his talents being "Sacred Rites" references the multiple rites aka religious steps required to again lay a person to rest.

This last reference is the one I consider the most obscure. "Once he has you in his Sights. He won't stop until he has Hunted you down." Unlike the grim reaper Anubis was not a harbinger of death. His appearance usually didn't mean you were going to die just that he was there to help someone who had died. Even then he wasn't known for coming to the land of the living to hunt down ghosts that refused to come to the scales. No one can avoid their judgement day.

(Again the demo trailer adds more to this. He seems to also be taking aspects of Ammit's roll as executioner of justice. Along with a desire to destroy evil.)

But there is only one Myth where Anubis hunts someone down to enact justice. After Set had Murdered Osiris and stolen the title Pharaoh, Anubis was put in charge of the mummification of Osiris' body. What we already discussed with the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. But once the process was done Osiris' body was laid in a tomb. By the end of the story Osiris has return as Pharaoh of the Duat and overseer of the dead. But Set didn't want this return to happen. So he stole Osiris' body with plans to destroy it and kill Osiris permanently. Anubis learned of this Tombrobbing and hunted Set down. He utterly defeated Set 3 times and supposedly straight up killed the other god the last time Set tried to steal the body. The story was meant as a warning to any who tried to steal from the tombs of the Pharaohs. Anubis and/or his Jackals would hunt you down and kill you for disrespecting the dead.

The story was so convincing its the basis for the curse of king Tut's tomb which is the myth director's later used for the Mummy movies.

So yeah those are the main connections to Anubis we know so far. There are guaranteed to be more references in the Story Quest "King Deshret and the three Magi". Cyno is listed as being affiliated with the Sumeru Akademiya and a Temple of Silence. We know nothing about this secret temple yet other than that Cyno works with them.

Most likely to protect the secrets of the Desert and it's ruins from outsiders. A Judge for the Akademiya and a Guard against Tombrobbers for the Temple of Silence. Covering both sides of Anubis' job as god of the dead. (I now believe the statues in the Demo are part of the Temple of Silence. If so I really hit this one on the head.)

Mihoyo has not yet made a public statement about all of this. But any change to the international unity tos would not affect them. They are partnered with Unity China which is it's own separate company. Unity China would have to adopt the change for it to affect Mihoyo. Which they have not made any statement implying they would.

The reason Unity China is a separate company is because of China's strict foreign company laws. But convincing the Chinese government to allow even an off shoot of a foreign company to set up shop is hard. Nintendo is still fighting to get their foot in the door. The only reason Unity C got in was because Mihoyo backed them. Unity C owes Mihoyo it's very existence. They are in no position to make demands by changing the current contracts without warning.

There were a few rumors about Mihoyo hiring people to develop their own game engine and that is false. Mihoyo did post 5 or so job listings for folks specialized in game engine coding. But it was clearly for code optimization of their current engine Unity. If Mihoyo decided to start building their own engine from scratch it would require the hiring of at least 100 coders focusing solely on the new engine.

Genshin and Honkai will stay on the Unity Engine. When the 2024 engine comes out Mihoyo might upgrade to it. But they would have a customized contract with Unity China and it would not include the current fee plan.

What about all the other Live Service Mobile Games?

In theory their creators could keep using 2023 and not have to worry about the fees. But as I mentioned I can't see Unity keeping the 2023 version usable past 2025. All of these games will easily pass the download threshold as they are free to download and they will pass the profit cap too.

Pokemon Go, Pokemon Unite, Duel Links, Master Duel, Hearthstone, Fates, League of Legends Wild Rift, and Marvel Snap are all still getting updates and won't be closing anytime soon. I don't know how important updating to the newest version of Unity is for these development teams. But in theory all their parent companies can afford the increased fees, they just won't like it.

With Mihoyo off the table Pokemon GO is the big fish Unity execs are aiming for. It gets a couple million new downloads every year and goes well past the profits cap and definitely isn't made using Unity Personal nor is Nintendo/GameFreak allowing Unity ads to play on their mobile game (those are all ways to lower the bill). Pokemon Go can't be moved to a new engine and has too many current users for Nintendo to risk dropping the app entirely to start over with pokemon go 2 on a new engine.

Nintendo has not yet made a comment, but if they do cave and pay the fees. Then there's no way the middle tier games devs can argue against it. even if the couple 1,000s in fees hurts the indie dev more. Unity can point to the couple million Nintendo is forking over for all their mobile games and say "if they can do it why can't you?"

So keep an eye out for what Nintendo does because of all this.

What about Demos, Charity bundles, or game subscription downloads?

The Updated version described in the open letter mentions the game devs being responsible for recording the number of downloads. Most likely because there isn't a legal way for Unity to truly monitor it and so their numbers would never have been trustworthy. If devs are reporting the numbers it's very easy to say downloads before a certain date are only the demos or keep track of how many charity bundles are sold and not count those downloads towards their total.

For Subscription Services, Unity has started to intentionally keep the answer vague. The first time they said developers would pay it like the legacy downloads. In an interview before the correction letter above the Unity President said the subscription hosts would pay the fee. After the correction letter he clarified that he "misspoke". AKA Microsoft and Playstation said "hell no!" that's super illegal to charge us in a contract we never signed we'll sue you to oblivion if you do that. But Unity is being unclear on if that means developers are back to footing the bill for Game Pass downloads. X

To understand exactly how vague they are being. A Reddit FAQ says developers will not be responsible for the fee of game downloads from subscription services. While the site FAQ section answers the question "Are Downloads from Subscription Services required to pay the download fee?" with "Yes" and Nothing more.

TOS Changes and How bad it really is

So the reason we don't know who is paying in some of these situations is because the final version of the 2024 licensing contract is not yet finalized. All Unity did was announce this new fee would be in the 2024 contract. That is why they were able to so quickly go back on what they said. It's just back spacing on a google doc it's not redacting and adjusting an actual legal document yet.

That means this might not be the only change they put in the new contract. This is just the only one they bothered to mention. most likely to convince shareholders they were going to be boosting profits in 2024 even if 23's Q4 is really low.

There being more unmentioned changes is a bad thing because they removed the github extension that updated you on changes made to the TOS. They argue it was because "traffic" was too low. There reasoning for removing an archive of Legal documents was click through rate being too low. They also argued that the TOS was available the entire time on their website. But please understand that is only their current TOS. So being able to compare changes from past TOS's wouldn't be possible on that page. X

The Possibility of this all being a Stunt

One of the theories going around is that they knew this would go over badly to some extent. Not this bad, but still drop the stock value a bit. Enough that the company would look cheap enough for a buy out from another company. The possible buyer being Apple's Mobile Gaming division. So far Apple has not shown interest in buying them and no solid evidence of this happening on the back end has shown up.

But it is pretty well known that the CEO sold stocks the week before this news came out. Which is called insider trading and super illegal. Unfortunately it looks like he might get away with it, with the argument that the sale of those stocks was scheduled months before this announcement was planned.

But that doesn't change the fact that he's sold over 50,000 shares this year alone. Two other officials have sold 37,000 and 68,000 of their shares this year. It's very clear they see the writing on the wall and are trying to offload stocks before the final numbers for the year reach the shareholders and the value of shares plummets. X

If they truly believed in the chance of a buy out they wouldn't be offloading so much of their stock. Because when they are bought Apple would have to pay them based on the number of shares they have at the time of the buy out. So they don't believe they'll be bought any time soon but they do believe the value of Unity stocks are only going to continue to go down.

Even without this stunt the end of Q4 report would have shown losses and caused the stock value to drop. This was most likely their last ditch attempt to show their shareholders something that implied the possibility of future profits.

That's the important thing to remember. They didn't care about how the devs reacted. They knew there were going to be complaints but they didn't care because they saw how much money they could milk if they charged every game to ever use unity for every download of that game. And they knew that would show profitability and increase the value of the company. They only back peddled when it became clear the news was affecting the stock more than anticipated.

Even then the .20 per download was never removed they just pushed back the cap and the downloads counted in hopes that would shut protests down enough for the stock value to go back up. as of Sep 29 their stock value has still not recovered.

Conclusion

Don't trust Unity. Anything they say now is just PR to try in get the stock value to go back up. They did pull back on some of the worst parts of the original agreement and older and most indie games are now safe. But Mobile F2P games and Game subscription games are still at risk of getting hit with the bill. They have also kept things vague enough to allow them to change things in the future once the dust has settled.

So I would heavily encourage those in the early stages of their games development to look for a new engine. If you have any Unity Stocks and haven't already sold them for whatever reason I'd find the time to start selling them. Unity might recover for a bit but they are not going to last long with business decisions like this and even the board members know that.

Oh wow this got so long I am so sorry. But It's all important information and I tried to link to actual articles as much as I could. As of the end of September this information is as accurate as it can be. Nothing major should come up until Unity announces the finalized TOS rewrite or Nintendo comments on the Pokemon Go fees.

So that's the basics from Egyptian Mythology but how much did Mihoyo actually transfer over? Quite a bit actually.

Enemy of the gods

"Both of you have only existed for a fraction of what you know as time," Apep quote

As Dendro Apep says it's older than the Archons aka current pantheon of gods. Ra is consider the first god with all the others coming after him. So Egyptian Apep is also older than the more well known pantheon of Egyptian Gods since he existed when Ra came into existence.

Apep is also the Immortal enemy of the Egyptian Gods. Being made of chaos he was destined to fight against order and balance brought about by Ma'at. The Gods were made to enforce the balance of Ma'at in both the living world and the duat (spirit world). The enforcer of heavenly principles is Ma'at in Teyvat and Archons were appointed to enforce those principles too.

Appearance

Apep is depicted as a serpent or snake in ancient Egyptian texts. He isn't labeled a dragon until the Greeks and modern historians interpret the text. The Greek word Drakon is where we get our modern word for Dragon. But even Greek Drakon's were serpents that sprayed acid/venom. So Dendro Apep's first appearance as a giant serpent and then later him not being a fire dragon but a more poisoned dendro dragon is actually extremely accurate for a dragon as ancient as him.

Apocalypse

But that's not where the similarities stop Apep was destined to swallow the sun at the end of time and what does Dendro Apep do?

He swallows Amun Al-Ahmar aka King Deshret. It's important to note that Apep doesn't call him Deshret but Amun. Because Deshret and Amun are 2 different Egyptian gods. Deshret is the red king/crown representing Lower Egypt during the time of 2 kingdoms. Amun is short for Amun-Ra one of Ra's many names. So when Apep says he swallowed Amun he's actually saying he swallowed Ra aka the sun.

The sentient Fungi say they were fleeing the Apocalypse. An Apocalypse that started when Apep got corrupted by forbidden knowledge. The apocalypse started when Apep swallowed the sun (Amun).

And so Teyvat's Egyptian Apocalypse has already happened. Leading to the end of the golden age of the Sumeru Desert civilization and the start of the Human Kings era. Which is actually an Old Testament reference. Israel was originally guided directly by G*d through the Prophets until they begged for a Human King. At which point G*d took a more hands off approach and Israel was never as strong as it was during the times of the Prophets up until King Solomon (3rd king then everything's down hill).

Fungi

As far as I can tell the whole thing with the sentient Fungi coming from Apep is a Mihoyo original. Apep isn't credited with creating anything even though he's been around since the beginning of the world. The closest I could find is he's said to have an army of Demons he uses to spread chaos on earth? But that might be a more Christianized addition and not so much from the original text (similar to some Norse alterations). Regardless the Fungi weren't demons or evil in anyway.

Conclusion

So yeah that's all the big similarities between Egyptian Apep and Genshin's Apep. I really enjoyed seeing the original infinity serpent and I hope that means the other Dragons are based on ancient dragons from myth. Fontaine Leviathan anyone?

If I missed something feel free to mention it in a comment! Are you surprised at how much Mihoyo actually stuck to the source material? Or is there something from the myth they left out that you wish they included?

While Zhongli is making a big thing of this being the First time he's met the Great Adeptus Alatus. A name he should NOT Know. Aether and Xiao just share a silent look with each other. Is it a look of surprise? Excitement? Xiao knew Aether would be here. So he shouldn't be surprised. Regardless the first person Xiao locks eyes with is Aether before being dragged into introductions with Zhongli and the others.

Of course we then get Hu Tao being the ultimate wingwoman and not only suggesting Xiao sit beside us. But sit beside us because we are "pretty close". Which of course Aether agrees with but adds they are also old friends at this point.

Zhongli being onto Xiao's crush on Aether kills me. In trying to figure out how Hu Tao convinces Xiao to come to the meal. Zhongli is quick to shoot down the idea that it was just because Hu Tao annoyed Xiao until he agreed. Again we later learn the only one's Xiao expected at this meal was Zhongli and Aether. And you could argue Zhongli tried to invite Xiao when stopping by to collect ingredients. But Xiao didn't agree to come then. It's not until Hu Tao mentions also inviting traveler that he agrees. (Hu Tao words it as no one present will be harmed by his karmatic debt. Xiao reads it as the other guest will be Aether).

The others start messing around and Aether takes that as a moment to quietly check in with Xiao. He continues to check in with Xiao throughout the rest of the dinner. Which is really sweet.

After being told Xiao is still good Aether then offers another thing. well you can ask about the secret friend who is Venti or you can offer to have Paimon eat the food Xiao can't finish. The other side of the table is arguing about Xingqiu's uneaten carrots. So this is Aether offering Xiao a quiet out so he doesn't feel forced to eat more than he can. Xiao has a lot of mental trauma linked to food and sometimes just can't stomach eating at all. So it's really sweet that Aether is not only checking in about the socializing but also the food related anxieties.

Of course after Zhongli and Venti take turns poking jabs at each other Aether reads it as an opening to leave for some fresh air. Xiao doesn't speak much during the interaction but Aether seems to read him reaching his limit at some point. The twist is telling Paimon to stay inside. Leading to Actual alone time with Xiao.

Xiao's first thought is to check in on Aether which is really sweet because Aether has been checking in all night with Xiao. Aether tosses the question back showing they are both concerned about how the other is handling dinner.

Xiao mentions envying Venti's ability to bond with humans and of course Aether say's Xiao's perfect the way he is. That he doesn't have to change himself to be more out going.

One he thinks about our conversations often. Two he finds them different but in a good way. It's different talking to Aether than other people, but not a bad different. Xiao then admits to coming because he knew Aether would be there. That Aether being there would make the dinner easier to handle. That without telling Aether before hand he could trust Aether to help him handle the meal without question.

Xiao mentions being surprised at who the other guests turn out to be. But goes on to say he shouldn't worry about it. Instead focus on the present that he's enjoying. The present of being outside alone with Aether.

Xiangling comes out seemingly ruining the moment. But instead makes it better by offering Xiao's comfort food Almond Tofu. Both of them get a plate but Xiao saves some of his for later.

Aether makes a joke about Xiao just teleporting on them. But it slightly misses? Because Xiao takes it seriously asking why he would do that. Xiao's enjoying himself and feels like there's no reason for him to leave. And so in his own way affirms that he doesn't want to leave yet.

Xiao tries to tell Xiangling she really didn't have to make the tofu. But it only takes one huff without words to communicate with Aether and realize he should just take the gift. I'm a firm believer of the selectively mute traveler and the reason Paimon talks so much is so Aether doesn't have too. So leaving Paimon shows how much he trusts Xiao and trusts the idea that he won't need the communication aid with Xiao. A thought that is proven correct when Aether doesn't have to say anything for Xiao to still understand what he means. Something Aether really only has with Paimon.

This is the end of their private conversation. So I'd like to once again point out how big a deal these private interactions are. Mihoyo decided to pause the entire epilogue to have Traveler go have a private conversation with one character. They could have picked any character in the room. Hell we don't even get a private conversation with Venti. Instead they decided the closest character to traveler, other than Paimon, was Xiao. Said conversation was just the both of them checking how the other was feeling about the seemingly stressful dinner. Showing concern for the other the entire time. Something you could argue we didn't need to see. We didn't gain any large information about the world or the characters in it. It was just a quiet conversation between to friends discussing how stressful family dinners can be.

They come back to the dinner seeming more relaxed. But continue sharing silent glances together as Venti rambles on about Zhongli. Xiao looking over to Aether for input and Aether's answer just being a shake of his head. Like you really don't want to bother stepping in. (god i wish i knew how to make gifs)

They play hot potato about who should light the incense. Xiao of course is the person to pick traveler. Stating he's the most distinguished guest, as everyone there knows him. Of course we see Aether's internal monologue as he puts together Xiao's about to point to him. Which is the cutest thing.

Eventually Aether picks Paimon to which everyone agrees. With Xiao's only comment being that he trusts the traveler's judgement. No surprise there Xiao.

After the dinner wraps up Zhongli once again points out Aether's unique bond with Xiao. That most people struggle to approach Xiao. But Aether has over come this and become his friend regardless.

Xiao ends up turning down the offer to explore the city. But unlike the first lantern rite where we only got him to the bridge or Xiangling's cook off where he stayed by the docks. Xiao did manage a few hours in the city which is a huge step up. But he's also able to tell where his limit is and steps back before he gets overwhelmed. Xiao of course thanks Aether for his help with that. And Aether insists Xiao doesn't have to thank him every time. Which Xiao excepts along with agreeing to a "next time". Whether that's a meal in the city or a large social gathering Xiao at least agreed to do it again with Aether.

And finally after it all. Xiao offers to eat the extra Tofu with us while listening to stories about the mortal world. Implying that no it doesn't have to be a special occasion or an emergency. Aether can hang out with Xiao when ever and talk about the most mundane things. And Xiao will be there to listen.