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I think it's best to think of entelechs as Lovecraftian Horrors Out of Time and Space. The idea is basically a trope in fantasy, which Graydon is playing with. What is interesting about them in this world, though, is that pretty well everything else supernatural can be attributed to 100,000 years of super-powerful magicians loving around around. Like it could easily be the modern world, except magic appears and magicians gently caress everything up, creating demons etc in the process. Whereas entelechs seem to be very much Other. (I guess fire elementals too. Although I wonder whether those also might be the result of past magical fuckery. All that said, what the gently caress is a tagmat?
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Dec 22, 2023 05:02
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| # ? May 2, 2024 08:47 |
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Lead out in cuffs posted:All that said, what the gently caress is a tagmat? ”AMOGAS” posted:“I should like to refute you.” Acraisais salts their tea a second time. “Yet we have accepted precedent for tagmat or coercer talents and controlling influences.” Coercers can command the nervous system of others; entelechs can command reality. By extension, we can guess that tagmats can control thoughts/intellect. There’s some extra backing for this assumption in UOB, where Crow tells Eugenia about what the tagmat flavor is for and says “Order’s youth happened in the memory,” Crow says. “In a time when no one trusted that their thoughts were their own thoughts.”
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Dec 22, 2023 05:18
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Right, sort of like how some weeds, demons, and creatures like Eustace have minds but no nervous system. A coercer couldn't affect them, but a tagmat could. I'm kinda curious what it's an abbreviation of, though. It sounds a bit like tagmentation, but I'm sure it's not related to that.
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Dec 22, 2023 08:04
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Right, sort of like how some weeds, demons, and creatures like Eustace have minds but no nervous system. A coercer couldn't affect them, but a tagmat could. Ordinarily I'd figure out what Greek/Old English/French word it was intended to be, but "tagma" is a term for a Byzantine military grouping which wouldn't seem to work. (It also now carries the meaning of "order" in the sense of a military honor, but wasn't historically, so I can't imagine that's how Graydon intended it to be read, despite the obvious connection to Order the independent.) So maybe a corruption of something else?
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Dec 22, 2023 08:39
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i dunno, "ordering"/"arrangement" for thought control kind of makes sense
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Dec 22, 2023 11:11
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I had thought tagmats were akin to reality warpers.
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Dec 22, 2023 15:52
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| # ? May 2, 2024 08:47 |
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Thread has motivated me to start another read through, it's always wild to see what newly makes sense... And what still doesn't. There are turns of phrase in here that leave me scratching my head. A "unique author voice" is the start of the description, but a ways from it's finish.
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Dec 24, 2023 04:19
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