#anyway i was gonna do smth more elaborate but clearly. i ran out of time LMAOO

[gravitysoda]

if you love him, let him go!

[wiredandrewired]

This got too long and I put it below a cut, screw it.

So I have a whole lot of stuff about Quintessence sitting in files and folders and on sticky notes around my desk.  Both VLD’s use of Quintessence and like...actual alchemical Quintessence (using the exact word and also similar or related terms) and places I semi glued them together.  I just.

I have whole huge SWATHES of this that’s not ever going to get out of my personal notes and whole huge SWATHES of it that is going straight into Project ReVolt when that starts going up.  But the other day I started derailing at @quixotic-quetzalcoatl in the comments for her fun pre-oldadin Altean revolution fic about robotic laws and their universality and also how once a species goes interstellar you have to scale up all their qualifiers for ‘worthy of rights’.  Because as we all know, at least here on Earth, it has always taken TIME for ‘basic rights’ to actually be granted inclusively to everyone.  And we still don’t grant them outside our species because, haha, that’s silly.  Even though we know there are, say, intelligent emotionally complex species on earth like octopi and also that we eat them, because they are delicious and we can’t communicate with them in a meaningful way and they lack a visibly structured society or any kind of culture.  ‘Freedom is the right of all sentient beings’ is cool and all, but it only extends as far as we’re able or willing to parse sentience and I SWEAR TO GOD I am getting back to Quintessence here.

And anyway I have been thinking about this ever since that conversation, and cannot contain it until ReVolt goes up.  And I’m kinda curious where people (especially the Alteans Were Not Inherently Good crowd) stand on it.  But I mean.  Let’s face it, that should be everyone because no culture is ‘Inherently Good’, that’s an oversimplification and a form cultural fetishization Lotor definitely thought of Alteans as Inherently Good Allura definitely thought of Alteans as Inherently Good that is not the basis for a healthy relationship y’all

So.  Quintessence.  I’m not like gonna break down all the rules and laws of it or anything, or get into distillation and the implications thereof, because this thought is not about that.  But the short and simple version is that alchemically speaking, Quintessence--undistilled into form--is like gravity: EVERYTHING has at least a little, and things with more exert force on and can affect things with less.  

A simple living thing (a plant) has a more than a non-living thing of the same mass (a rock), and a complex living thing like with a soul and everything (a human) has a lot more than a simple living thing of the same mass, as they also have that ‘metaphysical mass’ going for them.  So by this token, in Voltron a Balmera--a complex living life form--has a LOT more Quintessence than a similarly sized moon or even planet, even though it might have less actual mass, being hollowed out and all.  We also know that some Alteans (Sacred Alteans) can use the same non-physical communication methods that Balmera do with the smaller lifeforms living on them (meaning it’s a form of nonverbal communication fully compatible with something they already do), and also that those same Sacred Alteans can exchange some of their own ‘life force’ with the Balmera after taking a crystal from them.  They have a whole ritual for it.  I am gonna have fun with this in ReVolt  Sacred Alteans also are the ones who do neat things like healing people when they’re ‘dead’, transferring ‘souls’ (have I mentioned I have THEORIES related to the body/metabody model on why the Rift hits people like it do?), opening wormholes in the fabric of space and time... Other things that, once you sit down with even a basic rule model, obviously have to do with exerting their personal Quintessence Gravity on people and things around them.

What this tells me is that the amount of Quintessence that a Sacred Altean contains, for whatever reason, is HUMUNGOUS for their size.  To be able to exert that kind of ‘gravity’ on the world around them, on complex lifeforms around them.  And there clearly has to be some kind of ability to them to...I guess ‘perceive’ it for lack of a better word?  Because things like the wormholes is really precision work (and it works with MULTIPLE Quitessences is the thing, given the whole ‘scalturite comes from a living thing and therefore has the relative Quintessence appropriate to that’ bit). Things like fishing one soul out of another and carrying it and then fishing it out of entanglement with your own metaphysical non-mass?  Precision work.  It’s balls-out crazy, guys.  They’re like the dudes in FMA using handclaps and finger snaps to perform elaborate alchemical processes that ought to take weeks or months and tons of materials and study but without any of the sacrifice or prep work FMA props use and cranked up to 11.  (Disclaimer I never got deep into FMA).  I mean, clearly they did use SOME tools for this, especially in its most scaled-up forms, but some of it seems to be bare-hands inherent and it’s WILD.  

This also suggests some actual logic to how the heck people are ‘chosen’ to get the Mark of the Chosen and go into Oriande; it’s literally a matter of metaphysical gravity, it has nothing to do with worthiness, that’s the whole reason there are trials once you get there. 

Someone, please imagine with me the kind of impact and implications this has for them in a non-vacuum.  Both within the Altean culture itself, but also, outside of it.  Why do some of them have so much more ‘mass’ than others?  Is this something Lotor was trying to recreate in his colony/at his facility?  What effect did one’s personal ‘mass’ have on ones’ place in society?�� We know those with more would have been valued, it’s baked right into their tech, but what about those with normal or even below normal levels?  Because it’s baked into so much of the tech that we see, would they have difficulty operating things on a day-to-day basis, or did this literally only effect one very small group?  Like Lotor says some Alteans are ‘less magical’, but how far does that go?  And then there’s space...man.  Okay.   Once they got off their own planet, you would have a class of people who could perceive the ‘gravity’ of other races they encountered.  They literally would have a built-in metric by which to determine whether or not something was viewed as a ‘lifeform’, and if so what kind: people, or non-people.  And this is very different than looking at a thing and simply saying ‘we can’t communicate with it in a meaningful way, it must not be sentient’ or ‘it doesn’t seem to have a culture it must not be sentient’ or even ‘this is not a lifeform that evolved in a way or from an element we’re familiar with life having, it must not be alive’.  This is literally having a universal metric, a Law of Metaphysics if you will, that you can apply to determine if something is alive regardless of whether that life seems significant or obvious.  A Balmera is not ‘obviously alive’ and is definitely not alive in a familiar way, but clearly Alteans had an at least semi-symbiotic arrangement with them, and at no point are implied to have disregarded the native Balmerans claims that their planet was a living being that spoke to them as primitive or superstitious.  Interestingly their arrangement with Weblums seems slightly more parasitic, or hunter-gatherer at best, unless those Altean Nightmare Terraformers we see on Naxela sometimes are used to kill off planets, but all this means is that from a mass perspective, it has the ‘gravity’ of a less complex lifeform.  This suggests that at least some of that might have been value-based, which okay, you have to expect.

But what if the Alteans--who aside from the Sacreds are VERY LIKELY to have a very high baseline compared to their mass all things considered--ran into a species with a lower baseline level?  Like, a fully complex, fully developed species, thoughts, feelings, culture, etc, lower than they had reason to expect?  Here on earth, we’re always running into new things that challenge our ideas about the way things work.  Did Alteans have a baseline below which a species might not have even been considered ‘alive’ by them, based on what they had experienced and studied?  Or at least alive in a meaningful way?  Alfor sure didn’t seem to take the Arusian natives into account as people when he plonked their reasonably-should-have-been-pursued castle down there in the middle of a war.  Galra show signs--a LOT of signs--of being very rapidly and very strongly affected by Quintessence around them, which would suggest that they have relatively low levels for their mass and complexity, and possibly even having a hard time repairing their own Quintessence (which is A Thing that complex lifeforms are supposed to be able to do).  Oh my god yes it’s replenishable listen Alteans in jars would be weirdly hyperefficient if they did it in shifts?  As a volunteer thing it wouldn’t have been vile Lotor smh  Catch me plugging Sacreds into stasis tubes *SLAPS TUBE* THIS BABY CAN POWER SO MANY COLONIES

And I’m REALLY curious about what people think about that, and just the implications of the whole mess, and I want to hear theories and this has gone on forever, and I haven’t eaten in like twelve hours and I’m late for my meds, and I’m gonna go get food because my brain has shorted out but like someone please tell me I’m overthinking this or scream with me about it or smth.