Bip110 blocks branch with lower difficulty.. are they valid?

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Question regarding Bitcoin mechanics: let's imagine bip110 miners have 10% of the hashrate.. and in August there is a chain split (but no hard fork). Bip110 blocks come in much slower so it takes 10x more for a full difficulty period to pass. At the same time Core has only a 10% longer difficulty period. But eventually bip110 will pass its first difficulty period and the difficulty will clearly go down from their perspective. All this time Core did save the separate branch of bip110 blocks because the blocks were valid, but once the difficulty went down on bip110 chain would Core still accept the new lower dif bip110 blocks? Wouldn't Core reject those blocks effectively creating a hardfork?