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mimi_sardiniaSo, I saw a rather interesting post on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
myprettypuppet and got reminded of my unique materia, which in turn got me thinking about how, really, how would materia work?
So, to start of with, how does materia work? The green and red materia are obvious enough, given it's spellcasting going on, but there's a lot of yellow and purple - and some of the blue as well - that are far more difficult to understand outside game mechanics.
Command (yellow) materia is an obvious one because it adds commands to the menu of actions you can have a character do. There are some commands that are very spell-like, such as Sense, Manipulate, Morph, Chocobo Lure and Enemy Skill, but other things, like Deathblow, Double Cut, Slash-All, Steal and Throw all strike me as things a person could already know.
Let me pick on Throw and Steal for a moment:
People usually learn how to throw objects as kids. It's all part of the process of playing games. On the other hand they may not learn how to throw with any great accuracy - I sure as hell can't.
Throw materia has "all the knowledge of the Ancients" (or, put another way, all the knowledge of the Lifestream - or a good crossection of it) about throwing stuff accurately invested in it. A person may have no great skill at throwing stuff but instinctively throw correctly under the influence if the materia. Of course, how accurate they are also depends on how far the materia has grown.
Yuffie I imagine already knows how to steal stuff. She doesn't need a Steal materia to do it because she learnt it on her own (game mechanics notwithstanding). Yuffie is the sort of person whose knowledge of stealing will generate new Steal materia after she dies and returns to the Lifestream.
So materia alter the instincts of people who equip them so they perform actions, or react to things, with extra skill than they normally have without it.
Just thinking about what I read about Nomura saying the team (cloud and his friends) not needing materia anymore, I have this idea that after carrying around materia that alters ones action as I have theorised would train those skills into them so they don't need the materia to be able to do all those things anymore, they are well imprinted into them they do it anyway.
Next time I will actually talk about my materia instead of just how materia in general work.
ETA: The idea of materia teaching it's user skills could carry over to the more spell-like materia. The materia has the knowledge of how to use the Planet's power to do things (spells) - not necessaily carrying the power itself, so that knowledge could also be invested in the materia's user, eventually leading to them being able to call on the Planet's power without the materia.
myprettypuppet and got reminded of my unique materia, which in turn got me thinking about how, really, how would materia work?So, to start of with, how does materia work? The green and red materia are obvious enough, given it's spellcasting going on, but there's a lot of yellow and purple - and some of the blue as well - that are far more difficult to understand outside game mechanics.
Command (yellow) materia is an obvious one because it adds commands to the menu of actions you can have a character do. There are some commands that are very spell-like, such as Sense, Manipulate, Morph, Chocobo Lure and Enemy Skill, but other things, like Deathblow, Double Cut, Slash-All, Steal and Throw all strike me as things a person could already know.
Let me pick on Throw and Steal for a moment:
People usually learn how to throw objects as kids. It's all part of the process of playing games. On the other hand they may not learn how to throw with any great accuracy - I sure as hell can't.
Throw materia has "all the knowledge of the Ancients" (or, put another way, all the knowledge of the Lifestream - or a good crossection of it) about throwing stuff accurately invested in it. A person may have no great skill at throwing stuff but instinctively throw correctly under the influence if the materia. Of course, how accurate they are also depends on how far the materia has grown.
Yuffie I imagine already knows how to steal stuff. She doesn't need a Steal materia to do it because she learnt it on her own (game mechanics notwithstanding). Yuffie is the sort of person whose knowledge of stealing will generate new Steal materia after she dies and returns to the Lifestream.
So materia alter the instincts of people who equip them so they perform actions, or react to things, with extra skill than they normally have without it.
Just thinking about what I read about Nomura saying the team (cloud and his friends) not needing materia anymore, I have this idea that after carrying around materia that alters ones action as I have theorised would train those skills into them so they don't need the materia to be able to do all those things anymore, they are well imprinted into them they do it anyway.
Next time I will actually talk about my materia instead of just how materia in general work.
ETA: The idea of materia teaching it's user skills could carry over to the more spell-like materia. The materia has the knowledge of how to use the Planet's power to do things (spells) - not necessaily carrying the power itself, so that knowledge could also be invested in the materia's user, eventually leading to them being able to call on the Planet's power without the materia.
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no subject
2005-10-28 10:23 (UTC)The brain dictates all knowledge by the way the cells are connected. So, therefore, a materia could temporarily form connections between cells that weren't there before, thus transmitting their information to the user.
....Yes, I have wasted my life. Why do you ask?
no subject
2005-10-28 20:57 (UTC)no subject
2005-10-29 04:29 (UTC)One of the points the game made, at least in my eyes, is, 'Souls and magic just ain't souls and magic anymore if you know exactly what it's made of and how it works'. I rather like that point. After all, in our own world, there were the alchemists, who believed that science and magic went hand in hand and were almost the same thing. Alchemists got accused of witchcraft, they used astological symbols in their works, and were very supersticious. Isaac Newton was actually an alchemist, and he's to blame for the fact that there's seven colours in the rainbow. He did a lot of work on rainbows and decided there was seven colours because he thought seven was a magic number. And that's why you're taught ROYGBIV even though no-one can ACTUALLY see the indigo stripe.