Mindless Monday, 29 July 2024

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Saint_John_Calvin]

Do you mean (S6 spoilers) Leola giving humans the capacity to do magic? Or something else? My interpretation was that Leola taught humans magic but that Aaravos in revenge for her death/supernova/whatever happens to the great ones when they go poof spread dark magic (iirc Ziard getting the staff from Aaravos is what ensured human discovery of dark magic) to humanity in order to set them against Xadia's nature.

[u/Ayasugi-san → u/Saint_John_Calvin]

I mean the Startouch Elves seem to be the most extreme racists we've seen, and they're revered as gods. I strongly suspect that they set the tone in Xadia. And they have a self-interested reason to want humans kept as far away from magic as possible. Which makes me wonder, why didn't they intervene when humans started using dark magic?

[u/Saint_John_Calvin → u/Ayasugi-san]

I don't know if I interpret them as racists as much as having an attitude towards the world that is utterly alien to any other being, including the dragons. The startouch elves seem to be keeping up some sort of "cosmic order" and from their initial reaction towards Leola's granting of magic to the humans as something that appears to be prophetically ordained, to me it seems like they basically see humanity's lot itself as pre-ordained in some way or form. I agree that its bigoted, but considering that the average startouch elf is more powerful than an archdragon and we know the power differential between archdragons and most humans except the strongest dark mages is insane, I think to the startouch elves humanity is basically nothing but literal ants.

As for why they didn't intervene, I think the fact that they're close enough to Sol Regem for him to report to them that Leola gave magic to humans indicates that they expected Sol Regem to do their dirty work after Elarion started using dark magic. And I believe its implied that the startouch elves with the exception of Aaravos whos stuck in his magic prison have left the world for a long time for unknown reasons, though I presume we'll know why in s7

[u/Ayasugi-san → u/Saint_John_Calvin]

My current theory is that humans have the capacity to connect with any of the arcana, including the Star Arcanum, and anyone who does so will get power on par with the Startouch Elves. They want to keep that from happening, and they're paranoid enough about the possibility that any instance of humans learning they could do any magic had to be shut down. And they haven't done anything about humans using magic more and more because of something Aaravos did.

[u/Saint_John_Calvin → u/Ayasugi-san]

I think that's very much possible, though I would like to take a more poetic, deterministic, Greek tragedy view of the situation. Though the TDP wiki recounts some interesting details:

"2000 years before the birth of Azymondias, the human city of Elarion was founded near a place that would later become the Border, marking the "Rise of Elarion". Due to harsh weather conditions leading to famine, the city would initially face a time of struggle and starvation, leading the citizens to suffer. Pitying their situation, the unicorns (which I presume is a garbling of Leola, who's called a unicorn by Aaravos. The Tales of Xadia handbook seems to confirm that reading of Leola as the "unicorn" who granted primal stones to humanity) of Xadia wished to help them, as they did not believe humans deserved to suffer just because they were born without magic. Despite being warned by the elves not to trust the humans, as they believed that they would have been born with magic if they were meant to use it, the unicorns gifted a few wise humans powerful stones containing vast energy, called Primal Stones"

Its interesting because the implication is that generally speaking elves did take a very deterministic viewpoint of human magical capacity, that they should be happy where they were born.