20 KiB
Request: What 'use' or 'purpose' could fairies/fairyland serve in an intelligently-created multiverse?
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Author: u/Carduus_Benedictus *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7bf6yl/request_what_use_or_purpose_could/
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Score: 9
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Created: 2017-11-07T18:37:01
Post:
Many rational cosmologies incorporate a fairyland, but it's often just an Alice-in-Wonderland sort of world of absurdity. I've seen one rationalization involve fairyland being a sort of 'filter' that lifeforce travels through in order for life to exist. I've seen someone qualify them as 'language elementals', the embodiment of a word or phrase. I've dabbled with making them the embodiment of metaphor and archetypes, like something out of Jung. Can you think of other 'purposes' for fairies that encompass the greatest number of their stereotypical qualities (blue/orange morality, bound to bargains, emotional, etc)?
Comments:
u/DaniScribe [+14] (50 minutes later)
This might be a non-answer, but...
In a rational universe, creation comes first and then place/purpose is derived from their existence. From a storyteller's perspective they need a reason to be included in the narrative, but as far as building an intelligent multiverse having a clear purpose is optional. The only reason an entire species would feel driven by a common purpose was if they were created with intent by a being within the multiverse.
More on topic: When I think of the fae I usually think of forces of nature. Beings that humans can be interacted with, understood to varying degrees, but never completely predicted or controlled. I see the fae as personifications of (multi)universal laws, each bound to act according to their nature because existence demands it.
This naturally leads them to having great power within their own domain. They intuitively understand and interact with the governing laws of the multiverse, but are also bound by them and have little power outside that domain. Thus when they can't do something, they are forced to bargain. Over time, the bargain would become sacred and while they look to gain, fae who don't uphold their word would fast find their power imprisoned.
u/wren42 [+7] (an hour later)
this is a good response.
First consider - "How did they come about?"
THEN you can think about what attributes they might have.
for me, the most likely state for a universe with such beings is one where the physical is not primary, but rather consciousness is. By this I mean the fundamental unit of the world is abstract consciousness, and objective materials and laws form as a consequence of logic or patterns of belief within this web of consciousness. In such a would it would be sensible for magical seeming spirits to exist, that embody or serve certain concepts or laws of nature. If the whole world is basically a big metaphor, then spritely embodiments of "love" or "autumn" make sense.
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+1] (21 hours later)
Why do physics need to be personified? Are they a byproduct, or back office making physics work?
u/DaniScribe [+2] (22 hours later)
I imagine the answer to that is "whatever the Creator designed" given that different world/universebuilding will lead to different things.
For example, I could see a world where the fae are created by melding human abstractions with concrete physical attributes of the multiverse. To use a huge stereotype, emotions associated with cold (ruthlessness, grief, despair) are represented by winter fae and the natural elements associated with that season. Thus, their "morality" would be based around inspiring all of those emotions. If a being wanted to bargain to cause a snowstorm (which requires manipulating natural laws of the universe), they have to be aware of what the fae want.
Of course, that particular implementation creates a natural conflict. If different groups of fae are trying to cause different things, balance is vital. The fae themselves may or may not be sensitive to it, and different types may care more or less about it.
This response brings me back to my original point about purpose. Why (in the circumstance above) do the fae exist? No particular reason, though scholars and philosophers might argue one interpretation or another. I could see spiritual humans believing that the fae are a divinely created middle ground between the abstract and the concrete, intended to help create understanding between the two. I could also see scientific humans looking for a process that explains the process of creating physical beings from human ideas. One, both, or neither could be true, but having groups pushing in multiple directions is the interesting bit.
Edit for clarity: It isn't about anything requiring personification. More like...these things are personified because that's how things are and different perspectives are going to assign different "purposes" to the fae based on point of view.
u/Flashbunny [+7] (6 hours later)
Perhaps a testing ground for designing the rest of the universe? So the place is full of random, seemingly nonsensical mashups because they're purely design practice for the creator, like an artist sketching a bunch of different parts next to one another on a practice page. Similarly the fae don't entirely make sense or fit together for the same reason - their races/animals are essentially beta versions for "real world" races and creatures.
u/MultipartiteMind [+8] (8 hours later)
Idle thought: If you have a reincarnation cycle (of 'souls' or amnesiac-perceptions-from-outside-a-Matrix or some other recyclable aspect), with generation and/or destruction/removal of reincarnatable individuals, you could have Fairyland as a sort of dustbin or recycle bin for those which have gradually gotten damaged/(gone insane) to the point that they would be a major threat to the normal functioning of things if they were all to be reincarnated normally, again and again. Hm, I note I'm influenced here by ideas in the 'The Death Mage Who Doesn't Want A Fourth Time'. The primary reason for that partitioning could be 'damage' in a sense of bugs, breaking of the normal rules, deemed-inappropriate inherent ability to display magical power, with mental instability being a side-effect exacerbation-of-the-issue symptom rather than the primary cause of partitioning. The difficulty-leaving, bound-to-bargains etc. restrictions could be external restraints (applied while classed as 'fairies') to hold them back from wreaking havoc on more-normally-functioning aspects of the multiverse. Not destroying them outright could be out of humane pity (as an asylum, pretty much, rather than destoying them outright), or as rehabilitation (certain qualities that make damage less likely, allowing gradual self-repair or gradual mastery of own powers to the point that inherent 'damage' is overcome, fixed, and the mind can be safely reincarnated as a mage with normally-developing power? self-fixing could also take the form of having power-removal as an inevitable result), but I somehow particularly like the image of Fairyland as a humane-pitying place where the broken reincarnated are thrown, everyone twisting the place into a crazy Hell of its own making of sorts, not immediately doomful to travelers to enter only because of the many restrictions present, in which minds cycle through reincarnation within Fairyland over again until they're eventually expected to break completely and cease to exist, while some of the more stable ones perhaps set up and maintain their own kingdoms for amusement/pleasure, optionally shoring up their own stability/lifespan through temporary measures which worsen/sacrifice others'. One could hypothetically have a story about a fairly-insane-but-quite-sympathisable (and rationally-thinking in parts?) Fairy/sprite who wants to understand more about what's going on, learns more about the external restrictions, and ends up bucking the trend and becoming more stable/powerful/(less externally-restrained) to the surprise of all. Come to think of it, there are a lot of stories which have fairies or demons working within the bound-by-bargains infrastructure, but it feels as though there aren't that many which show what it's like to subjectively experience that, and maybe want to understand and get out from under the entire system (like Durandal/an 'Anger'-Rampant AI in Marathon). More generally, I find it fun to think about and imagine 'bound' situations (this case, or AI boxes, or a certain recent paperclipper game) where the narrator/protagonist (has to trick others)/(gets to trick others) within the tight chains of a bargain/contract, rather than being a normal human-like mind being wary of having to try and sufficiently bind a bindable mind. (--Hmm, a little reminded now of 'The World As It Appears To Be' recently, some niceness about 'how to get out of the box'.) Posting comment now, I'll continue to daydream about a fairy who can feel those external restrictions and wants a bone to pick with the System enforcing(/which implemented) them!
Edit: (...Eesh, that looks like an unpleasant wall of text once actually posted. Hm. Having written it, presently I lack sufficient motivation to put in time to break it into paragraphs, but breaking it into paragraphs in future is not impossible.)
u/ThatDarnSJDoubleW [+4] (46 minutes later)
If you've got a multiverse where every universe has access to fairyland, maybe they're remnants of wanderers who ended up in the fairyland and couldn't leave. Over millions of years, they've created their own society, and their own strange rules.
Maybe they're something like limbs of a narrative-based being, where each fairy is a pawn to make sure that the narrative(s) the being is bound to reoccur.
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+2] (21 hours later)
Ooh, that could be fun. Your 'limbs' comment made me think of Star Control II's Orz and their 'fingers'.
u/ViceroyChobani [+4] Reserve Pigeon Army (3 hours later)
I wonder how much the mindset of this community with regards to the fey is influenced by APGtE. This is not me providing an answer to the posted question, but an observation based on what I perceive to be a trend the current answers have taken.
u/None [+3] (3 hours later)
[deleted]
u/ViceroyChobani [+4] Reserve Pigeon Army (4 hours later)
It's a webserial that posts in this subreddit on Mondays and Wednesdays, pretty consistently for the past long period of time. It's far in on book III right now.
I personally enjoy it immensely, and am fairly certain that others in this community view it with equal positivity.
u/LordGoldenroot [+4] (4 hours later)
A Practical Guide to Evil
u/vaegrim [+3] (4 hours later)
In turn, I felt like those fey were strongly influenced by Exalted's Fair Folk.
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+1] (a day later)
Can you suggest some chapters that feature the fey? Their wiki is less than helpful.
u/None [+3] (12 hours later)
I the dresden files spoilers cold days
That seems like a designed system to me, it's not exactly a rational story but it has tons of cool fantasy ideas that make internal sense.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+1] Father of Learning (3 days later)
Wait, why would we want to limit winter's influence if they're fighting off Cthulu?
u/MrCogmor [+2] (3 days later)
Winter is sadistic and basically incapable of sympathy. (Presumably because the Outsiders would take advantage of them if they weren't). Both courts have to be kept balanced in opposition with one another in order to keep Earth hospitable to life. If Summer gets too much of an edge then disease runs rampant, global warming increases and eventually the Earth becomes a desert. If Winter gets too much of an edge then monsters roam the Earth and the planet gets frozen.
u/panchoadrenalina [+5] (a day later)
I got caugh up in a wild case of world building.
I can imagine a very powerful but not perfect god using Fairy land as:
The Creator's dumpster.
There He threw the remanents of the creation, the wacky magic, the freak accidents made during the molding of the world etc. He sealed them in a universe sized tin can paralel to the normal world. As all dumpsters do, it leaked and the normal reality was at risk of being overun. To stop them from finishing mankind he gave the humans an refuge.
He bind all the Fairy creatures with The Rules they had to respect the thresholds, they had to keep their bargains, but the fairies are subtle and wild and even that was not enough. He gave mankind a weapon and Fairies a weakness. Iron with the weapon mankind was able to corner the fairies to the corners of the world, to the swamps, the hollows of trees and the bottom of the oceans. And there they remain to this day waiting and plotting.
i rather like this version, i may use it for some short stories,
u/CCC_037 [+3] (4 hours later)
There's one webcomic which posits fae as a slave race to a now-extinct race of Precursors. As a slave race, they are explicitly unable to break their own (often obscure) rules; though they remain powerful, and some of them (the Unseleighe) take explicit pleasure in finding ways to twist those rules in order to deal as much pain, suffering, and destruction as possible.
u/Trips-Over-Tail [+3] Death of Crabs (9 hours later)
Depending on the rules, fairyland might have applications for extradimensional FTL travel, a la hyperspace or the warp.
u/clawclawbite [+2] (3 hours later)
If you have a magical energy, then you might have a magical ecology to go with it. A system to filter and buffer magical energy, and seperate out impurities would be handy. Such a place may have apparently illogical activities due this energy discharge or power level changes. In short, a fairlyland.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (5 hours later)
A takes from the occasionally interestingly constructed world of darkness (specifically exalted, which runs on rule of cool more than sanity, but has some internal consistency): if you go with cosmology where creation is bounded by chaos fairies are something that evolve at the boundary between chaos as emotion eaters, if you have access to the books it might be worth skimming to see if it gives you any thoughts.
Another take I've seen (occasionally in DMFA ) is fairy is the place between multiple worlds, which makes most fairy things fit really well, if it's a simulation universe, and they are fairly static software-agents in a hypervizer between various universe sandboxes.
u/entropizer [+2] (9 hours later)
Maybe you could think about fairies and magic as a higher level programming language for reality, which is the assembly code, in a magic oriented universe that runs with emotions and raw concept as its primitives. Not sure if this idea makes sense or if it's just a bad idea my brain enthusiastically spit out on seeing your post.
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+2] (18 hours later)
Nah, it makes sense to compare the letter-of-the-agreement stuff and amorality to dumb computer code. ;)
u/Kinoite [+2] (11 hours later)
NPCs. Fey provide magic. They can do things. But they're bound by relatively simple, explicable rules.
If you want a stabilizing force in your universe, add a fey kingdom.
u/Dragrath [+2] (3 days later)
Hmm it doesn't quite meet all the criteria of the Fae are looking for but I figure there is some merit in explaining my WIP approach as a world building addict towards approaching fairies from a biological perspective as an intelligent yet not sentient(on an individual level) Eusocial insect based species. I wanted a species that was different in the orange blue morality system so to speak without sticking to rigid or anthropocentric rules where possible (nothing like bound contracts or bargains exists in universe nor are their anything that could definitively be called an elemental etc. those are assumed concepts born from human culture and imposed by their beliefs and imaginations onto other beings much the way as they have in the real world but in the context where things that are supernatural to use have been biologically evolved) The best fit to start this process for me was the order Hymenoptera where eusocial species have independently evolved multiple times. In particular I have been interested how simple relatively rigid rules on the individual level build into highly complex behavior but wanted to see if I could make something fairy like out of it.
Eventually I came to an approach somewhat inspired by the genetic incorporation abilities of Tyranid/Zerg based entities but without the concept of some overarching hive mind driving things. Instead the results are far more chance based focused around a drive to incorporate and experiment with anything interesting that might prove advantageous to their hive. In this context the hives are more or less the closest approximation to "individuals" that one could get to the hive.
Fae would have genetic memory but no more than what was needed for their tasks assigned as a larvae. Moreover they are instinctual acting for the best of the hive not themselves as they have no "self" to begin with. The hives as a whole may be sentient but the pieces though quiet complex are not as they are born with information and can not learn or adapt as individuals. Instead the fae adapt by planting new collected information and experiences into the next generation as deemed necessary by the hive.
With time and distance differing the fae in various environments have come to take different qualities that could be attributed to faeries (particularity the ideas of courts that embody a concept in a far loser manner) Most of these pressures have been driven by an ancient ongoing conflict between the Fae and the Wyrm race (led their "ascended" arcane lords the dragons)
That aside the result is they can be viewed through an external lens as innately alien in their interactions with others such as humans who like us have the tendency to project our emotions and preconceptions onto others not recognizing that they might not be universal. Humans see the Fae perform what could be deemed complex interactions efficiently with superb control comparable if not greater than their own that they automatically assume the fae they encounter must also be like them. Thus they are caught unaware and surprised when things go differently than they intended as the plans based on the assumption of their foes as individuals was flawed (Some fae my flee but only because the cost of making them is sufficient that fleeing rather than fighting
In short I like playing with what is fantasy and what is real in my fictional worlds rather than treating myths as absolutes it seems far easier and interesting if what the people and their scholars take to be true is unreliable. By not taking rules other than the physics of your world(which includes how magic spirits and other existent supernatural forces/entities work and interact)
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+1] (6 days later)
See, I love the idea, I just personally wouldn't use that for Fae. If you have an awesome idea like this, give it its own space. But your mileage may vary.
u/LesserWrong [+2] (14 days later)
Some worlds have immense amounts of magic. Others have very little.
Magic potential is a natural born ability/potential.
Our world has very little magic.
"Faerie" worlds are worlds that are saturated with immense amounts of magic. Rulers and beings who are selfish, amoral, and powerful are common and to be expected.