Alright, so I finished collecting and reviewing all the notes in the new area, and there’s some interesting stuff here. Let’s go over some of the important details first.
First of all, the records you find are all from a very long time ago, from around the time of the founding of Eridu, according to the factory worker NPCs hanging around. However, I believe that the earliest records begin from before the founding of the city of Eridu. It’s very important and notable that not a single one of these entries refers to Eridu by name, though Waifei Peninsula gets namedropped once.
One of the Miasmic memories talks about how Sunbringer first appeared out of nowhere to one of the camps in the area, taught them about Porcelume, healed a number of near-Corrupted people with revolutionary medicine, and was treated as an honored guest by “the lord” for it, thereafter leading to this Lord and Lady Sunbringer guiding the people to prosperity.
I believe that this Lord is meant to be a Mayflower, and if we’re going schizo enough, possibly the very same man who’s still currently Mayor. Many of the other entries detail how the Lord is overworking and abusing the workers of the factory for the sake of the entire group. Factory 3 in particular is extremely overworked, having their hours ‘’reduced’’ from “xx:00 in the morning to xx:00 in the evening” to 06:00 - 20:00 near the time of rebellion. The Factory 3 workers also suffered from Porcelume asbestos, were “sternly criticized” by this Lord for their falling spirits in the leadup to the rebellion, and were denied being able to take even little trinkets of Porcelume out of the mines. This Lord also has a “Lord’s Command” and multiple guard forces at his disposal. Because of this, I find it extremely doubtful that this is meant to be Joyous, based on what we know of him, and almost certainly the first (current?) Mayor who turned this settlement into Eridu.
Going back to Sunbringer, cross referencing 2 docs shows that she, the “former Technical Director”, had a warrant out for her for engaging in acts of treason, including directing attacks on Factories 1 and 3. This seems extremely dubious since, even though Sunbringer values freedom and humanity, other docs point to the rebellion being entirely started by the workers’ hands and with no involvement from Sunbringer, which suggests the Lord had a reason to get rid of her. After that, we have to go off of what Lockspring said about her fate; a Hollow Disaster occurred that Sunbringer tried to stop (there’s an audio recording of a woman asking why the man she’s talking to didn’t stop Sunbringer from going off to solo the Hollow), Sunbringer failed, and people began to believe that she might have been the cause, hence her statue being defaced.
All of this is very interesting because it seems to go against what we know of history from the lore video. There, it says that Sunbringer annihilated the Hive Lord Hollow. Everything in 2.5 tells us that there was a Hollow disaster she was unable to stop. Additionally, not a single lore piece mentions the term “Void Hunter”. So here we have a mysterious Lord, Lady Sunbringer in a time where the existence of the Void Hunter group doesn’t seem to be known, and no mentions at all of the city of Eridu.
My theory is that the history from the lore video is partly false and fabricated. If this Lord was the Mayor, then the Lord’s Command may be the group that later became known as Void Hunters. The Lord and the clan he made tampered with historical records to make it seem like this group joined forces to found Old Eridu for the sake of propaganda. At some point, Sunbringer fell out with the group, most likely related to a part of the Creator being buried deep under this settlement.
That might be going a bit too far into schizo territory though, so let’s backtrack a bit and address a few more likely things. Sunbringer had an uncanny ability to instantly locate exits to shifting Hollows, and would change the topic with a sad look on her face whenever it was brought up. This seems like an obvious reference to Joyous, who we already knew she had some kind of rapport with (Gilded Carrot item description). This indicates she already knew Joyous at that point (but the people she was talking to didn’t know of him despite that both should be VHs at this point, more credence to the history rewrite idea), and that something happened to separate them.
Another notable thing about Sunbringer that I think might lend credence towards my idea of her being an alien/extradimensional traveler is that she wrote an AI Assistant, “Nite” in “an otherwordly language no one else could understand”. This Nite isn’t the precursor to Intelligent Constructs either, Nite’s document specifies that they’re working on getting her to understand Thiren and Intelligent Construct accents. Meaning that Sunbringer not only gave Porcelume to humanity, but was so advanced for her time that she was able to write code that seemed alien even while Intelligent Constructs already existed. Seems very Promethean or godlike.
That brings us to the final topic, which is Sunbringer’s Messiah-like existence that’s hit upon by a few on-the-nose comments in the story, see pics 3 and 4. Zhao is blackpilled, but the repeated emphasis on Sunbringer in relation to godhood (another audio recording has people wondering whether to fear her as a goddess or demon) is interesting considering how analogous she seems to be to Prometheus from Greek myth (which obviously has heavy themes in ZZZ; see Phaethon). I believe Sunbringer may possibly be literal divinity, perhaps a similar existence to the Creator, especially when factoring in how often Phaethon is compared to the children of gods and the devil. I don’t believe Phaethon are literally Sunbringer’s children of course, I’m pretty sure they’re living Void Hunter Weapons based on Sunbringer using the Creator’s power. Or maybe vice versa depending on the exact relationship between Sunbringer and the Creator - remember that, even though they stated Sarah looked like that because she stole a bit of Sunbringer juice, the eye colors are still swapped, which seems odd.
Anyway, there’s my lore autism for today