#nothing like applying science to a pseudo-fantasy game

[ice-cap-k]

Please go on, I'd love to hear your thoughts about Dominion Shadow 🙏

Fair warning before I get into it, I like my science, biology, physics, etc. and I'm about to loosely apply those two subjects to minecraft, of all things. If you're not a fan of applying any of that sort of stuff to silly block men, consider this fair warning to click off now. I'm about to ramble. Seriously. Turn back now while you still can.

Still here?

Alright.

Law of Conservation of Mass says matter cannot be created or destroyed. Same's true with energy. When something withers like a plant, it's usually because as the cells making up the body die out, they lose moisture and the cellular structure collapses in on itself as the remaining mass is converted into decomposed tissue.

Wither skeletons are already decomposed and exist in the nether where moisture is near non-existent. It would make sense that their desiccated skin would sap moisture from the player at an extreme degree since water moves to the place of least concentration. In a pure vacuum, such as space, moisture leaves at an even faster rate because there are no other atoms in the atmosphere that would bombard the skin and slow that process down. Technically a body out in space could mummify considerably faster than it ever could in the desert on Earth.

Now, I'll admit I jumped on the Dominion train after it had ended, but Shadow his origin is a wither, and he kind of has an association with those void creatures once the blood moon appears. And void is associated with space in minecraft. Loosely. Obviously you can still breath in the End and whatnot, but with the star backdrop and the moonrock texture of the endstone, the parallels are intentional.

Wither as a sapping force, drawing moisture and life essence. Shadow's still alive. Still has a body, unlike a skeleton, so unlike a skeleton with bones that would grow denser as it saps the lifeblood right out of you, so too would Shadow's wither effect, but his is caused by an artificial vacuum created around his person like an aura as his body sucks up the atmosphere and gaseous water around it. And when a person gets close enough, say, close enough to touch, they hit that pocket of vacuum and suddenly they're caught and affected by it like that body in space.

BAM! Instant wither effect.

But like I said, Shadow's still alive. So what he's getting from that person is both their energy, and the mass he's absorbing that's carrying said energy. And as I mentioned in the last post, I picture Shadow as a big-ish guy, if not tall.

That's where gravity can come into play.

Because when something has more mass, it's gravitational force is greater.

People lose moisture, muscle mass, bone density, it's gotta go somewhere, right?

Yeah. Shadow gets it. And he becomes bigger. More moisture running through his veins as sickly black sludge, more muscle mass on his still living body, denser bones capable of handling intense shear and compressive stress, less likely to fracture and break under extreme duress.

It's led me to some really cool headcanons like, if Shadow withers too many people, absorbs too much, he gets bigger. Not, like, tall, but more mass to the point where it might hurt to walk. But also, it makes it easier for things to be drawn to him and his sphere of influence/vacuum larger around him as more air particles within the vicinity are trapped within the draw. And also, it would make it THAT much easier to wither anyone who comes close.

And like I said, I came to the party late, but I did hear that there was rumor of him playing into the Wither Storm concept. So I'd imagine, like a black hole, he could have simply kept growing and growing as his sphere of influence spread, things getting caught in his vacuum's event horizon, people getting hurt just walking by him, until he ultimately became an unstoppable force that was no longer capable of decaying back to the point of stability.

[bookenders]

Writing Questions and a Bit More Tag Game

Tagged by @writingonesdreams​ for this new tag game by @ren-c-leyn and @sorenfarwalker. Thanks! This one is super different and entertaining. 😊

Rules: Answer the questions and then tag however many people you want.

1: How long have you been writing? If you don’t have a time frame, what was the first thing you remember writing?

I think I wrote my first poem at, like... 4 years old? It was about flowers.

2: What was your favorite thing to write when you started writing? Is it the same thing now, or do you have a new favorite thing to write currently?

I didn’t really write stories so much as rewrite movies in my head, because obviously I did it better. I barely remember what I wrote when I started. I think it was pseudo-fantasy? If that’s a thing? Now it’s literary fiction, or very grounded low fantasy.

3: How did you get into writing and what made you want to keep with it?

I’ve sort of always been doing it. I can’t remember a time when I had a big “I wanna be a writer” realization. I like telling stories and solving word puzzles.  I’ve tried a lot of hobbies and sports and things and quit all those, but I stuck with writing and acting. It’s my thing and I do it well.

4: Have there been any things you used to love writing but don’t anymore, and on the other side: things you used to not like writing but do now?

I used to like writing action. Not anymore! Oof. I like slower scenes now, especially the emotional ones. I used to not like interiority until I got the hang of it. Then nearly all of my stories became character-driven and plot-lite.

5: What inspires you to make a character, and how do you go about creating and developing them?

I answered this a little bit in my last big 11/11/11 tag game, but I’ll sum it up here.

I think of the end of a character arc, then work backwards to figure out what kind of person would go through what things to end up that way. The ending usually changes, of course, but so does the character. My development process is very reactionary. If X happens, how is character Y affected, and what things do they do in light of that?

6: Scenario time! Grab an OC and let’s see what they do. Got them? Great, let’s do this then. If your character woke up in a grungy alley way that smelled like nightmares and broken dreams with a glowing neon rat on their chest, just staring down at them quietly, what would be their first thought?

Let’s go with Mel for this scenario. She’s used to weird. But because spoilers, she can’t do some things that she’d normally do in a situation like this. Let’s assume she’s “normal.”

Her first thought would be how she was transported without her permission. Second would be to interact with the environment to test its existence.

“Oh. Hello,” she would say. “This is not the most pleasant place, is it? How did it get to smell like this?”

She tends not to question the weird unless it becomes uncomfortable or dangerous not to do so. Best just to go along with it.

7: The rat sighs at your character and shakes its head. “Don’t know where you came from, but it’s definitely not their heads. Well, nothing for it, then, come on.” It hops off the character and trots down the alley way, how would your character react to that and what would they be thinking?

Typical weird science nerd thoughts: where am I, how is this rat glowing, is it bio-luminescence or enchantment-based, could it possibly be a transmogrification or transfiguration, is it a native species, what’s with the dark miasma in this environment, apparently beings come into existence via thoughts-made-reality and isn’t that interesting, who’s in charge here, are there other residents of this area, how do hospitality rules apply here, am I going to stick out like a sore thumb, where does this alley go, seriously how did they get it to smell like this, I’m sorry there is definitely “something for it,” etc.

She’d stand and brush herself off before asking the rat if they’re from around here. Polite conversation is a good starter for any odd encounter. You definitely don’t want to be rude to the only connection you have in a strange place.

8: Okay, this one is going to be a little bit more generic since I know the characters are going to have many different reactions and thoughts on the talking, glowing neon rat. If your character is following the rat, do they trust it or at they paranoid it’s leading them into a trap? How would they interact with it? If they ran away from the rat, refused to follow it, etc. would they regret it as they tried to wander through the strange new place alone? Would they ever wonder what would have happened if they had followed it?

Mel would be very hesitant, but she would follow. It’s the polite thing to do, and it’s good to have a guide, no matter how strange, in an unfamiliar place. She’d do so slowly, of course, barely keeping pace and maintaining a safe distance. Its apathy would actually be a little comforting to her.

9: Last part of the rat scenario, what would your character call the rat? Either in memories or to it’s whiskered face?Thoughts?

She’d ask it its name, of course! But you know, the tricky way: “May I have your name, please?” Because it’s unlikely the rat would know about the whole name thing, and if it did, then she’d have more of an idea where she was and who she was dealing with.

Bilbo Taggins: @quilloftheclouds @katekyo-bitch-reborn @cawolters @wasting-ink-not-youth @atbwrites @writingmyassoff @writingwordsanddrawingpictures @mvcreates @inexorableblob @notanotherhour @floralandrogyny @roselinproductions @agentorange-writes @bethkerring @novicewriterstuff @onceuponanaromantic @thelittlestspider @aeschknight @dogwrites @phoenix-the-write-thing @amaranthine-inscriptions

If you don’t see your name and you wanna do it, DO IT. 

[thetygre]

Dark Souls Lore Ramblings #1

So before I go on, I guess I should make it clear that I haven’t played DS3 or DS2. So, if there’s any information that contradicts or explains something, I probably don’t know about it. I’ve just got what I absorbed through pop cultural osmosis. 

I don’t really have any particular order or priority in mind for what I’ve got to say, so this could be kind of all over the place. If you want to know my opinions on something in particular, you should probably drop me a message or a leave a comment or something. With that said, let’s start at the very beginning. I understand that it’s a very good place to start.

Dragons in Dark Souls

So, the Everlasting Dragons. I guess they’re the start of Dark Souls. In the beginning, it was all stone and mist and arch-trees and dragons. Everybody and their mother knows from the interviews with Miyazaki that the dragons are more like elementals than flesh and blood creatures. Their scales are made of stone, the same way the arch-trees are made of stone. So the dragons, the trees, and the earth are essentially all one in the same, to some degree. At the very least, the dragons are part of the landscape and the trees might be their own separate things, what with being the pillars of worlds and all.

Anyway, this is all to get around that whole disparity of existence thing. Rocks don’t die; they’re not alive, but they don’t die, or become undead, or whatever. They still succumb to entropy, but that’s real-world science being applied to a very broadly painted mythic portrait. The way I figure it, the dragons just sat around for millennia, fusing with the ground, coming out of the ground, going back to the ground, all in an endless cycle with no actual beginning or end. Seems appropriate.

Now here’s where things get tricky; did the Everlasting Dragons know about the First Flame and the Lord Souls? Were they trying to keep them down? If they didn’t, then the war against the dragons was perpetuated solely by the Lords; they began a fight with creatures completely beyond their comprehension and perspective. But then, why have a fight? The Lords didn’t even want the place that the dragons had; that would become Ash Lake. The Lords wanted the luxury suite in the arch-tree’s branches. (Whether that refers to exclusively Anor Londo or reality as a whole, I don’t know. We’ll get there when we get there.)

The way I see it, the Dragons did have some agency in this conflict. They didn’t just happen to be there. They were guarding the arch-trees, trying to stop the Lords from establishing reality. They actively opposed the First Flame and the cycle it brought. But why exactly? Well, the obvious, existential answer is that they wanted to avoid the pain and chaos of being. Why go through life and death and all that humdrum when you can be an Everlasting Dragon? Then I thought that it might be to avoid The Dark, or Death, or whatever else; something so horrible that the high point isn’t worth it, that an eternal purgatory is better than having to live with the worst. But then I started noticing details about the dragons;

Stone Dragon. Last of the OG Everlasting Dragons. Hatched in secret or hid away somewhere. Possibly also a Bonfire Maiden, but that doesn’t make any sense (or does it?). Offers Nirvana by offering an escape from the cycle of Light and Dark by becoming somebody’s scale-sona. Anyway, count the limbs on this guy and the dragons from the opening cut scene; four legs, four wings. That’s eight limbs in total.

The Gaping Dragon. Coolest dragon in dark fantasy. Succumbs to the pleasures of the flesh and grows a giant ass mouth to feed its gluttony, because Soulsborne runs on that kind of fairy tale logic. Locked up in Blighttown for a long while until its jailers were too weak to contain it or feed it; probably both. Got hungry, escapes, rampage. I like to think it was worshiped as some kind of sewer god for a while, but that’s pure fancy. On topic; four wings, and... well, eight legs. Twelve limbs in total, but I think we can make an exception given the whole freakish mutation thing.

Now Seath? Seath’s another horrible, freakish mutant. He’s got two arms, six wings, and a whole bunch of tentacles/tails. So that’s eight limbs plus whatever’s going on down south. I’ll be honest, I was going to cover Seath as his own separate business later. But Seath is important; Seath is described as being born. Not fissioning out of the stone, but being born. Birth is tied to death, implying that Seat, unlike the Everlasting Dragons, is tied to the cycle of existence. The whole point that I’m making over these last three is that the original Everlasting Dragons come with eight limbs.

Cut to Kalameet. So called by Gough as the ‘last of the great dragons’. Big boy. (That gemstone in his head might be a nifty callback to draconic lore; in both the East and the West, dragons were described as having magical glowing gems that they stored in their head. In the East, these were the pearls that lung used for flight and to control the sea, while in the West, these gems were the dragon’s actual brain, and had fantastic divinatory and alchemical properties.) I imagine he started rampaging around Oolacile after the Dark hit and the Four Knights fell to shit. But count his limbs; two wings, four legs. Six limbs. If Kalameet is the ‘last’ of the great dragons, then that means he is well after the Lords won against the Everlasting Dragons. He may even have been born in the last days of the war proper. But in any case, Kalameet is literally lesser than the Everlasting Dragons.

Similarly, we don’t know a lot about the undead dragons, but they follow the same basic rules. Four legs, two wings; less than the Everlasting Dragons. What’s more, they’re actually well and proper dead. I mean as much as anything that’s undead (and not an Undead) is dead. They’re corpses animated by some kind of magic or willpower, that’s all. But the cycle of life and death has absolutely affected them.

Also, their asses are in Izalith. I have no idea what that’s about. It honestly kind of infuriates me. I feel like I could just put the word “IZALITH” in great big, bold letters over these things and anybody who actually played this game would understand. Maybe something cool happened. Maybe the Lords fought their last epic battle against the dragons at Izalith, and dragon butts are all that remain. Maybe the Witches tried to enslave or tame the dragons, and when the Flame of Chaos destroyed Izalith, it killed the dragons, and the demons and dragons fought in some Heavy Metal war of fire and claws! Yeah! But probably not. Because it’s Izalith. So the answer is ‘rushed development’.

And at the very bottom are the dragons of today. Interchangeably called ‘drakes’ or ‘wyverns’, they have two wings and two legs; a paltry four limbs compared to the Everlasting. The Hellkite is a dangerous enemy, but the Blues are easy pickings for the patient knight. Ornstein hunts them for sport. (Have to guess that he must have started slacking off if something as big as the Hellkite could grow up there.) Even their habitat doesn’t acknowledge them as dragons; it’s ‘Valley of the Drakes’, not ‘Valley of the Dragons’. In essence, the Everlasting Dragons devolved; over the generations, they became less and less until their current descendants are no better than animals. Could it get any lower than this?

The answer is yes. The hydra is barely even acknowledged as a pseudo-dragon. The only thing that even ties them to dragons is that they drop dragon scales and are in the vicinity of dragons or something that a dragon made. It has no limbs, unless you count its ray-like flippers, and a bunch of seemingly useless tendrils hanging off it. I’ll be honest, the hydras kind of piss me off; the one in Darkroot I can understand, but how the Hell did one get into Ash Lake? It’s one thing for basilisks and mushroom folk to be there; they came in through the arch-tree. But how did a sixty foot long aquatic reptile get there?

I don’t know; frankly, I don’t think there is an answer. The best I can come up with riffs from Norse mythology. If we assume that the arch-tree is Yggdrasil, then the Stone Dragon is Nidhoggr, the dragon at the bottom of the world. In some versions of the myth, Nidhoggr is surrounded by a nest of lesser serpents. So the hydra is the Stone Dragon’s guardian? Offspring?

I guess I’m not really talking about all the dragons of Dark Souls if I don’t talk about the Path of the Dragon covenant as well. It really is kind of analagous to Buddhism in a weird way; through the Stone Dragon, you can escape the cycle of life and death, becoming, like the Everlasting Dragons themselves, something beyond any of the Lord Souls. In a way, it’s perfect for Undead; as a being already outside the cycle of life and death, an Undead is closer to escaping it than almost any other creature in Lordran. All they would need would be that final push to make the transformation a permanent part of themselves.

Of course, there may be a more petty side to the covenant; given that the covenant operates on dragon scales, it might be that the Stone Dragon intends for its servants to hunt down lesser dragons like the drakes and hydras. There’s no evidence to that, however, and it frankly seems beneath the Stone Dragon. Remember, its motivations and mindset are unknowable to anything derived from the Lord Souls. Petty vengeance doesn’t seem like it’s M.O.

So what’s all this add up to? Nothing much, really. It’s just what motivated the Everlasting Dragons, the setup to the establishing conflict of the Dark Souls mythos. The Dragons weren’t afraid of dying or the Dark; they were afraid of watching their own devolution. Somehow, I think, they knew that the cycle would wear on them, generation after generation, until dragons were little more than animals. Time ruins all things; it’s one of the big recurring themes of the Souls series. Even Dark Souls 2 (which, as I understand it, is stuffed to the gills with dragons) understood that.

The Dragons’ fight was the fight against definition itself; not as simple as stagnation versus chaos, but against the very act of being in and of itself. And I guess that adds up to what’s valued as important in the Souls universe; ‘existence’ is synonymous with ‘definition’. The very act of perception and processing that perception is the heart of reality, a notion that goes all the way back to Demon’s Souls.

Ultimately, like I said, it doesn’t really matter. The dragons are dead, stupid, or in hiding. But they tell us about the tone of the universe, and I had to start somewhere. Thanks for reading this far! Anything to add or ask for the next rambling?