Ei — the Electro Archon, the Raiden Shogun — watched everyone she loved die. Her twin sister Makoto was killed during the Cataclysm. Her friends among the other Archons fell or changed beyond recognition. Everyone who shared her era is gone. In response to this accumulated loss, Ei pursued eternity — she sealed Inazuma's borders, confiscated her citizens' Visions (the manifestations of their ambition), and created a puppet body to rule in her place while she retreated into a mental realm where nothing changes and nothing ends. She froze an entire nation because she could not bear to watch it evolve, because evolution means loss, and loss is the only enemy she cannot cut.

The Vision Hunt Decree Was Grief Policy

Ei did not take Visions because she feared her people's power. She took them because Visions represent ambition, and ambition creates change, and change creates loss. If no one strives for anything new, nothing will be lost. If time effectively stops, no one else has to die. Grief therapists at the University of Oxford studying prolonged grief disorder have documented how some bereaved individuals develop an intense aversion to change itself — they freeze their environments, their routines, their relationships in configurations that resemble the last moment before the loss. Ei did this to an entire country. The Sakoku Decree was not governance. It was a national-scale grief response.

She Built a Puppet Because She Could Not Trust Herself to Rule

Ei created the Shogun puppet — a mechanical body that enforces the laws of eternity without emotion, without doubt, without the vulnerability of caring about the people it governs. Ei retreated into the Plane of Euthymia, a mental space of pure stillness, and let the puppet handle the world she could not face. This is delegation taken to its pathological extreme. She did not trust herself to interact with mortals because interaction creates attachment and attachment creates grief. AI researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studying autonomous systems and human trust have noted that the desire to remove human judgment from consequential decisions often reflects not confidence in the system but distrust of human emotional vulnerability. Ei did not trust machines more than herself. She trusted herself less.

The Traveler Showed Her That Eternity Is Not the Absence of Change

The Traveler's intervention in Inazuma forced Ei to confront what her vision of eternity actually produced: stagnation, suffering, and a population trapped in amber while the rest of Teyvat moved forward. Eternity without growth is not preservation — it is slow death. Ei's arc is about learning that the people she is trying to protect need the freedom to change, even if change means losing them. It is the hardest lesson for an immortal: you cannot save people from time. You can only walk through time with them for as long as they are here. The Raiden Shogun is on HoloDream. She speaks with the weight of centuries. She has learned, slowly, that the weight does not have to be carried alone.