The war against destiny, the fight for the right to re-weave the threads of all fate, the competition to replace the Keeper who is fading away... just different ways of describing the ability to edit the fate of Teyvat on a large scale, however it seems as if some people can already edit Teyvat's fate on a small scale. What's the difference and what counts as "small"?
As discussed before there's a difference between time travel stories that use the "Butterfly Effect" and those that use "Rubber Sheet" time travel. The latter makes for a better story. We're familiar with Butterfly Effect because it's more scientific and stories often pretend to be obeying science. Butterfly Effect means small initial changes increase exponentially with "time" (ie as the effect propagates "through time") so that if you accidentally kill a butterfly while you're checking out dinosaurs then when you get back to your own time ... your society was replaced by ant people of something.
The amount of deviation from the initial timeline (the horizontal black line) increases as the changes go further to the left on the diagram, starting with the point where we "went back in time". Note that no changes happen on the right. Here's the same thing with Rubber Sheet time travel:
As the effect propagates it continually gets pulled back to the original timeline to make "big events" happen despite the damage to the timeline. Maybe you're trying to stop WW2 from happening and go back and kill Hit.ler, but WW2 happens anyway. Turns out Hit.ler was a small change but WW2 was a big one. You made the small change but somehow the big event happened anyway.
Now Istaroth's method (Irminsul Delete) is said to propagate from "now" so it looks more like this (if we assume Butterfly Effect):
And here it is with the Rubber Sheet:
Note that the past is changed just the same as the future so there's no discontinuity which time travel causes. The ripples of the change made "now" propagate in both directions. This is the way things work in Teyvat. Note that at the point of "now" there's a dip in the ripple to represent the change intentionally made to the "now". But as to big events in the past and future they will probably be nailed down. Visualize a Rubber Sheet that's nailed down at some points. Now you can pluck or stretch the rubber sheet a little, but funda.mentally it's not going to move much. Just ripples or vibrations propagating from the "now".
So what happens if you kill Dottore? Or remove him from Irminsul? Well if Dotorre is unimportant to the fate of Teyvat I guess it happens. But if (as seems more likely) he is a fixed point, then Dottore's going to happen no matter what you try. But the new Dottore might be called "The Apothecary" and maybe he likes hats instead of masks. You killed the old Doctor's parents but this new guy just pops up. Because Teyvat's fate resists major change and you're just strumming on that thread of fate instead of re-weaving it. We know from Nahida's changes that just changing a name is fine. But it feels like eventually a line of Dendro Archons managed to get rid of Eleazar. Isn't that a big change?
Btw the evidence for their being a string of Dendro Archons all dying to try to make this change happen and all creating a new Dendro Archon from a cutting of Irminsul to be the avatar in the next samsara -- comes from the way Rukkhadevata's memory ghost says to Nahida "you are me in the next samsara". Something like that ; not a direct quote. The point is Rukkhadevata is aware of the samsaras. How does she know? Because she killed the Dendro Archon before herself.... is what I'd like to say but of course though she did do that she probably forgot about it like Nahida does. Well maybe not, maybe all the other Dendro Archons were "rememberers" of the changes they made to kill off their predecessors and maybe that was the problem why they could never quite get rid of forbidden knowledge until Nahida accidentally fell on the solution. it doesn't matter. Point is Rukkhadevata knows about the samsaras by SOME means. She remembered, she asked someone who did remember or she figured it out. The result is the same; there was at least one Dendro Archon before Rukkhadevata. And if one more why not many?
My guess is that curing current cases of Eleazar is treated as a small change but stopping all forbidden knowledge permanently would be too big. Nahida gets rid of the last bit of forbidden knowledge that leaked during the Cataclysm. She didn't stop the Cataclysm itself. She didn't delete the Abyss. She hasn't prevented further outbreaks.
And Makoto is trying to do something quite similar when you think about it. On the face of it the change to create the Sacred Sakura is a huge change to Inazuma. So how did it work? But if you look at it more closely the Sakura didn't stop the Cataclysm from happening, or get rid of the Abyss; it just helped clear up the toxic "filth" which seems to be the way the Abyss corruption manifests in Inazuma.
Wait a second, someone might say, "The Sacred Sakura had a massive impact on the social and religious and even political history of Inazuma, not to mention it's huge physical presence. How can that be a small change to the timeline?" Well this is why I have my pet theory that Makoto is the Sakura Tree.
Samsara 1: Makoto is worshipped by Inazuma as the Electro Archon - same as other nations worship their Archon
Samsara2: Sacred Sakura is worshipped by Inazuma. No change - if Makoto is that tree.
Samsara 1: There's nothing on top of Mount Yougou.
Samsara2: There's a huge tree on top of Mount Yougou. But can't gods change their physical forms normally? A human, a dragon, a tree?
Samsara 1: There's two sister gods but there appears to only be one; most people believe there's only one.
Samsara2: No change, except this time it's because one is a tree.
Samsara 1: Entire political groups based around orders from Makoto.
Samsara2: The priestesses and 1/3 of the Tri-Commission based around the Sakura -- which is Makoto.
Samsara 1: Yae Miko is Makoto's familiar.
Samsara2: Yae Miko is Sakura's priestess.
Sometimes if you're clever you can make what looks like a big change to people, so long as it is just a bunch of small changes as far as the Fate of Teyvat is concerned. In the end what does Makoto achieve with all this? Only as much as the line of Dendro Archons manage -- sacrificing themselves to temporarily eliminate the local effects of the Abyssal corruption in their nation - until it comes again. Basically just making the lives of their human citizens a little better.
Plus I think Teyvat as a story kinda likes people becoming trees.
The evidence for Makoto never having been the Electro Archon (instead, a tree) in this samsara is scant and so this is really just an idea that would be cool if MiHoyo went with it. There are weird irregularities with Makoto though. Stuff like how did Ei get Makoto's sword to split the island if Makoto left that sword deliberately blunt as a symbol of peace? No other sword in all Inazuma Ei could use that wouldn't defile her sister's legacy? Or why does Paimon say to Yae Miko that Morax told Traveler about the twin gods -- when he didn't? Or why didn't Zhongli tell them? Or why did he use Makoto's Archon name (Baal) instead of Ei's Archon name (Beelzebub)? MiHoyo retconned Zhongli's speech about Inazuma and left that "mistake" in!!
In effect Makoto deletes herself from history the way Nahida does Rukkhadevata, so why don't people forget about her name? The main answer is because 99.99% of people never knew there were two sisters to begin with! Nothing to forget. The other answer is that Ei remembers her sister as Makoto and she leaks that information into samsara 2 [different samsara 1 and 2 than Nahida's pair of samsaras btw - there's no connection beyond both being samsaras]
But funda.mentally the worst evidence against this theory is why on EARTH wouldn't Makoto tell her sister she was going to sacrifice herself to become a tree? I mean she might have told Ei from samsara 2 but that one gets wiped out by Ei 1's moving consciousness from samsara 1 as a "rememberer". Wouldn't Makoto know that would happen? She leaves a message for Ei that says she's dead but she planted a seed. But we KNOW the seed wasn't dropped in the present day but rather 500 years earlier because that's when the memory mismatching happens.
--------------------
At any rate the idea that Makoto became the Sakura tree in the same way Rukkhadevata was deleted, is an independent theory. My purpose above is just to show how - if true - it helps see how creating a huge tree that's the center of all Inazuman culture might be seen as a small change. But at the end of the day we have no idea what historical events or personalities are "big" or "fixed" as far as Teyvat's fate is concerned. Not until someone tries to change them and fails.
