Okay, I've done a lot of thinking over this...
Sorry if this triggers anyone, but I just can't wrap my head around
and
being the opposites of each other. Now I don't mean to insult the creator's original ideas or impose my opinion on everyone here, but for me,
is as far away from being the opposite of
as possible. I just can't see how
represents the concept of "order", and so, for my webnovel, I shall be dividing the elements into my preferred way. (Take note, this considers the elements not as a card game but more of an Avatar the Last Airbender kind of thing, where the person himself has magic powers pertaining to the element)
For the purposes of my story, I shall divide the 12 elements into 6 pairs or "Arcana". These Arcana will contain two elements opposite of each other, mirroring each other like two sides of the same coin, such that in situations where the main element is ineffective, the opposite element can switch. I did this because using only one element may give a person glaring weaknesses. Having two hands, and both left and right hands instead of just two left hands, is definitely enough to give a person balanced flexibility. A person falling under one Arcana receives the two elements categorized under that Arcana, but as with real life, it's up to him if he wants to be right or left-handed.
Now then, for the pairings... These are the Arcana that I've come up with:
The Wave Arcana (
)
The most obvious polar opposites of all, fire and water is a staple in most fantasy stories. They're both a play on the concept of temperature; when things get too hot, fires, radiations or sometimes plasma appears, and when things get too cold, ice/frost takes over. These two elements are often seen cancelling each other out when facing against each other, making them bitter rivals, but they do have enough similarity in that, we can say "someone who is controlling both fire and ice is using a power of temperature change. One adds thermal energy, one removes thermal energy. So it's safe to say that the Wave Arcana allows its user dominion over temperatures.
As with the usual connotation,
is destructive and mainly used for hurting others. It burns people, explodes buildings, etc...
on the other hand is a more well-rounded element which can be used to attack, intercept, protect, or support teammates. I've named it "Wave" because of the way images seem to sway in the hot desert. A 'heat wave' sort of. And of course, the ocean has waves, 'nuff said.
The Moon (or the Eye, haven't really finalized it yet)
Another classic that needs no further introduction. One is basically the absence of the other.
is evil element that nerfs the opponents and steals their vitality.
is the type of magic lone wolves or assasins might use. It would also be a top favorite for thieves.
is the element concerned with righteousness. It can protect others and ward off
and
. The image one has of
would usually be angels or chivalrous knights.
The Nest (
)
I've named this "Nest" because of how birds collect twigs and leaves to create a nest. The twigs are just dead plant materials that have fallen off, but ironically, they are used to house the bird's eggs which sprout new life into the ecosystem. As with before, this is self-explanatory.
uses slow acting poisons and bone magic, while
would basically be a grassbender that can heal.
The Tower (
)
Ah, yes. Our first disagreement. Unlike the classical elements that pairs earth and air, I choose Aether. The reason for this is, one: I believe the contrast to be more vivid this way.
versus
provides an imagery of the world below and the world up.
(lithosphere) has the seas and the islands,
has the clouds and sky (heaven). It works, sure, but wouldn't heaven match better with
? After all,
is concerned with the things that cannot be touched, it's in a spiritual realm that we can only feel with a sixth sense. Isn't the image more fitting to be the opposite of
,
??
But the bigger reason is this:
is opposite of
for the imagery, but everything stops there. In terms of actual combat abilities, the two are really far off from each other.
magic is sending rock spikes toward the enemy, covering your body in diamond armor, and trapping the enemy in a makeshift rock prison. Forgive me for thinking this, but
uses razor winds and tornadoes to attack. Maybe it can deplete oxygen as well and force the opponent to suffocate. These techniques are way unrelated to the solidness
presents. The real opposite of
in this context would be
.
can phase out and render all
attacks meaningless. In this sense,
would be a hard counter to
. But in a way,
can also hold a candle up to
. Part of the skills that fall under
is lightning magic, and in most stories,
is an insulator for electricity. Thus,
and
are at odds with each other, much in the same way
and
are (one is brute force, the other is more flexible). Wouldn't you say these two are the opposites?
Hence, if one falls under the Tower Arcana, he shall have access to the hard-hitting powers of rock manipulation, as well as the many tricks of
if that is not an option. As a final note, I named this The Tower in reference to the lightning-truck tower card in tarot. It has an element of solidness and aether-ness to it. It's also what inspired me to name these pairs Arcana
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7uRPAOkoUThe Cloud (
)
Why didn't I put
with
? Because the way I interpreted it, Air's main advantage over other magics is its ability to fly. In the elements cardgame, the main similarity between
creatures is not that they are made up of air, or that they can turn into air... no, it's that they can fly. Wind magic is more importantly flight magic, and this is where
really starts to become a fearsome weapon. Humans that fly are harder to target than humans on ground, they have so much more chances to escape, and they can launch a kamikaze ambush right from above. If this were an MMORPG, these
users would be like those annoying speedsters that you just can't break free of.
would also have access to other indirect attacks as well, such as sound magic or control of noble gases.
If you've watched Naruto, wind chakra there is interpreted as "cutting" chakra that acts like an invisible blade. If you watch other anime, you may have also encountered the term "Kamaitachi", which is the ability to cut someone a hundred meters away from you without any body contact. It's based off a whirlwind yokai or devil in Japanese folktales. If this long-range, no body contact skill is used with
's flying abilities, then what element would be able to counter that?
Enter
. Gravity bending is as straight-forward as it gets: you push things, you pull things, that's it. This magic can allow all oncoming attacks to repel away from you, can cause one of your attacks to chase after a moving target, and can increase gravity everywhere you're not standing so that enemies are semi-paralyzed. Magic that removes all momentum from a heavy moving object would also belong here, and bouncing it off into a collision course with your enemies. And of course, a full penetration armor break.
What's interesting here is that, going by Naruto physics again, you can create a sucking blackhole not necessarily beside you but somewhere far, far away. It's not like
that you shoot out of your body and has to take time to travel towards your enemy, and that the enemy can dodge with enough reaction time; you can create a blackhole at any point in space already right next to your target, which would then suck him and everything else it can towards it. Maybe you can even do it with an outburst pushing blackhole as well. This would provide the perfect counter to the flying abilities of
.
Unlike if you shoot fireballs that the
user can dodge,
covers enough area to render
flying abilities ineffective. It has no problems dealing with
in a long-range stand-off, because
does not need to aim for its attacks to reach. You can Shinra Tensei any moving object, and increase gravity so that all flying enemies fall down. Hence, a match-up with
and
would be like a shogi match where pieces can suddenly appear anywhere on the board.
and
will hit everything regardless of distance, and so, reaching the Cloud Arcana will give the user a wide variety of AoE/crowd control spells. Or maybe area control is the more appropriate term here.
This is why I did not pair up
with
, because making things heavy and repelling objects just doesn't ring the word "order" to me in any way. Gravity is gravity, it does what it does (with mechanical energy), nothing more...
Also, I named it the Cloud because clouds are made up of particles that are still being weighed down by gravity, but light and dust-like enough that it can just float around. When it does get heavy, that's when we get rain and snow. I initially named it the Feather or the Falling Leaf, but decided otherwise.
The (???)
Finally, the biggest controversy of all. Entropy.
Why, oh why is
not paired with
omg Zanzarino is going to kill me
(
First off: what do we mean by Entropy, as a concept, as the card element, and as a combat magic style? In the elements start page, it defines
as the thing that makes glass unfixable once shattered. True enough... When you crumple a piece of paper, or bend/twist a wire, it's so much harder to return it to its original state.
is the chaotic configuration that all matter tends to lapse into when left to itself. Instead of trying to fruitlessly fix the glass, it's faster and easier to just make a new one. Something that's broken prefers to stay broken.
Now what is
fighting style? When I was first starting out elements, back in 2011, (back when I had friends...), I remember the guy that introduced it to me mentioning that
is a "combo breaker". It's not a hard-hitter; rather, it's a style that intercepts the opponent's setup before he can complete it. If someone has a deck that will one-turn K.O. me in five turns,
, instead of blocking or healing, will simply render the combo impossible. It messes up the opponent's Quanta, it messes up his rhythm. If the opponent lays out his dragon, you mutate it or snipe it with Paradox, and if it accidentally mutated into a 12|12 Crimson Dragon with Lobotomize, you just Anti-matter it and you're good to go.
has layers and layers of intercepts that, if not stops the opponent's attack, will use it against him.
Because of this, the way I've always seen
's luck-based play style is an interceptor. If the opponent is a defensive type, then
does not have much use; it can't use the opponent's force against him if the force is too weak. But the stronger the opponent's attack is, the more effective
becomes. That is my interpretation of the card element.
So when I imagine an
bender, I imagine things that are unpredictable but have an excellent chance of nullifying enemy attacks. It could be anything, as
is not really one specific object. For example, a sword that is about to hit you melts into liquid upon contact. Or maybe once the sword slashes through your bones, the attacker immediately suffers damage equal to yours. Maybe
's phase through effect luckily triggers (in which case,
would be more like a rainbow of all other magics). In all these circumstances,
is meant to counter a strong attack. That's what I imagine the
bender's style is: things that nerf, things that dissipate, things that reflect...
So then, why
? Let's remember our concept of
.
It's the way things go random. If we have a box of air molecules, put it into an empty chamber and then let all the air out, the air molecules would spread and scatter into the chamber via Brownian motion. Their motions would go haywire and as time goes by, entropy might increase, but it would never decrease. The air molecules aren't just going to cleanly align themselves into the shape of the starting box, that just doesn't happen. They're chaotic, they're disorganized, and they can only get more disorganized, not backwards. This is known as entropy and the arrow of time. It states that, yes, if you leave a system out by itself, its entropy can only increase, never decrease.
Now, Zanzarino suggested that Entropy can be lowered in this case, via the introduction of Gravity. If we push and converge all the air molecules into a single spot, then the chaos would decrease. They would be back to their original state. Right?
Well, the thing is, you exerted energy into this system just to keep the entropy of the molecules small. One of the things about entropy is that whenever you use energy to do something, some of that energy gets wasted as thermal energy. Everytime you convert energy from one form to another, you waste a percentage of it, and this heat goes into the surroundings making more entropy. Is there a way we can revert the molecules back to low entropy without exerting any energy? Is there a way to uncrumple the paper and straighten the wire without exerting ten times the energy we did twisting it??
Yes! In theory atleast. If all the moving molecules in the chamber could reverse their directions, retrace their steps as it were, like we were playing a video backwards, then all the molecules would at some point end up in their starting shape. If you look at a chess position on move 43 and retrace all the moves made, you would end up at the starting position. If you retrace all the steps that made a rubix cube unmatched, then you would end up with a solved cube. If we wind back the clock of our universe, we would end up with the beginning of the big bang.
Thus, in a way, a method for reverting entropy back into its organized state is time reversal. Reverse Time is like a hard factory reset that returns an object to its original state no matter the damage done. With this, I can definitely say that the counter to disorder is time reversal.
can make full use of this. It can speed up the user, freeze enemies, and slow things down. If it can predict the future accurately, it can even render the chance-based property of
obsolete.
is the element for order, guys. Anything you break, you can fix with
.
also stabilizes your 60-card deck and makes it more consistent, so if you want order, there really is no other element for it. Interesting to note is this similarity between
and
in that they seem to blend all the other elements together. I don't know what to call this Arcana yet, (I'm thinking The Sand), but anyone who falls under this would not be an offensive bender at all. The
side would counter strong attacks, while the
side would also counter attacks (but in a completely different way). Super speed may give
offensive chances, but even then, it will have to rely on the user's own physical skills.
So there you have it. My 6 Arcana that I will use in my webnovel. Quite different from Zanzarino's original pairings, but I hope I've justified it enough to be a valid configuration. Will post character design when I finish it.
Thank you for reading!!!
