Honkai: Star Rail – On Acheron, Firefly, and time loops
Please be aware that this article contains story spoilers for the missions included in Honkai: Star Rail 2.0. Make sure to play through the Trailblaze Mission before continuing to read!
Update 2.0 for Honkai: Star Rail came out last week and enchanted players with a storyline that expectedly was not as “positive and wholesome” as certain writers advertised beforehand – we knew what you were up to, Shaoji. Full of mind-bending twists and turns, the Trailblaze Mission also contained a couple of deaths, which took unsuspecting players by surprise. While we can’t be sure about how permanent these deaths are going to be, since everything happened inside a Dreamscape, they certainly did their job by captivating the minds of players and getting them a lot more invested in the lore.
Acheron already seems to know that we're about to experience some tragedies.
HoYoverse
While I took a crack at explaining Honkai: Star Rail 2.0 on a character-by-character basis, many fan theories have popped up ever since the version became playable for the public. Some pose very intriguing explanations for the strange events unfolding before us and are worth discussing in detail, such as HoYoLAB user Suruzu’s time loop theory.
They posit the theory that all events in Penacony are somehow happening in a time loop, which would provide elegant solutions to two puzzles we’ve all been contemplating, namely why Firefly apologized in her dying moment and why Acheron keeps asking us the same strange questions.
When Something Unto Death appears in The Reverie (Dreamscape), it seems to target Firefly specifically. What’s more, Firefly seems to be waiting for the monster to show up, not resisting as it’s coming towards her – unlike when she’s first grabbed by it in A Child’s Dream, where we can see her clenching her fists before Black Swan comes to the rescue. Suruzu believes that Firefly’s death wasn’t an accident – it was her sacrificing herself to somehow help uncover the truth of what’s going on. Her apology is for hurting Trailblazer, who is put through the trauma of losing someone dear to them. Suruzu invokes the title of Robin’s song we hear in the rooftop scene with Firefly – If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking. Firefly is hoping that her apology is enough to do this for us.
Firefly seemed to face her end calmly, shedding tears for Trailblazer more than for herself.
HoYoverse
What brings the possibility of a time loop into play is what we witness during our investigation into Firefly’s last hours. She tries to calm herself down as if having to make a difficult decision that makes her nervous and says “If I could try again…” Perhaps dying at that moment was what Firefly needed to do “try again” and get closer to the heart of the matter next time.
More solid evidence for time somehow being screwed with comes from Acheron. She says she’s got a cracked memory, and I initially put this down as possibly having been arranged by Black Swan, since the two seem to know each other. However, if Acheron experiences time loops and has already seen the entirety of the story play out, then both her memory troubles and the questions she asks Trailblazer after first encountering them make a lot more sense.
Suruzu theorizes that Acheron asks these questions to establish where Trailblazer currently stands in the timeline and what they remember – and questions like “Have we met somewhere before?” are elegantly covered by the fact that many HoYoverse fans will indeed have met Acheron before, either as Raiden Mei in Honkai Impact 3rd or Raiden Shogun in Genshin Impact. It’s phrased to make us think it’s just a reference to those characters.
HoYoverse
Before Acheron slices Trailblazer up to send her back to reality on the Astral Express – or more precisely, perhaps, the start of the time loop (remember that Trailblazer is crying as if they’d just lost someone dear to them; is that what’s waiting at the end of the story?) – she foretells that we’ll live through many tragedies and will see glimpses of red when making choices despite the world becoming monochrome.
Some of Acheron’s text is, of course, displayed in red, while her tears also seem to contain red fluid. An interesting observation players have made is that when you try to refuse Acheron as an escort through The Reverie (Dreamscape) repeatedly, the choice will eventually be taken from you, one of the two answers agreeing to Acheron’s suggestion sporting red text.
HoYoverse isn’t shy about time loop stories – the Sumeru arc in Genshin Impact is a prominent example – and with all of Penacony’s clock imagery being so present everywhere, it would make a lot of sense thematically. Some examples of that would be the Technique of Misha, who can stop time, and the powers ascribed to Clockie, the cartoon character, who can manipulate time as well, according to the lore found in Hanu’s Adventure Books. White Night, the song played during the trailer for update 2.0 and that was described by HoYoverse as the anime opening for the upcoming story arc, features some lyrics that may support this approach: “Tick and Tock, once more you’re hosting, a magic show I cannot escape.”
Misha and Clockie seem closely connected to what's going on. Crucially, both can manipulate time.
HoYoverse
Aventurine poses the idea that Acheron may be an Emanator of The Finality. Terminus, Aeon of The Finality, constantly travels backwards through time, and the same may be true for Acheron. She could know the future, hence her guidance of our decisions, but be ignorant of what we know as the past – hence her real shock about Firefly’s death, but her comment about not having a choice about preventing it (with the creature possibly having a role to play later on).
If Firefly is connected to Sam and the Stellaron Hunters, her sacrifice might have been part of the script provided by their leader, Elio, for this operation – we don’t know much of Destiny’s Slave, but it’s clear that he can see the branches of the future, so he might be related to The Finality as well.
Long story short: We may be in a time loop, being guided towards a predetermined ending by people who’ve already seen the future. Or this is all a dream within a dream within a dream, a concept that has been all over the place in Penacony as well – at the moment, all we can do is interpret the information we got and have fun doing so.
