linkhyrule5 said:
On a side note, am I the only one a little bugged by the super-physical Elements?
I'm doing this intentionally -- the Players are being more literal-minded and genuinely less
magical than members of the Mage Association. (Shirou to some extent has been infected with that).
I'm saving the really bonkers Conceptual stuff for when members of the MA show up.
Lab_Accident said:
A Incarnation is defined by Type-moon as a Person having their Element and Origin matching (i.e. Shirou).
Point of order, "Incarnation" is a fandom term, it doesn't actually show up anywhere in the official Lore -- not even in an interview, as far as I know.
More generally, I don't like the term, and later down the road Kayaba's going to be introducing his own terminology to Kirito. (I am cognizant of the irony in introducing new fanon in the same place as fanon I don't like).
Actually I don't know if I brought this up yet?
Anyway, the idea is that Kayaba can literally measure the divergence or angle between someone's Origin and their element(s) and express that in, like, degrees of arc.
Taking someone with one element as the simplest case: an Origin and one element.
If they don't have anything to do with each other than they're perpendicular, their "Spiritual Angle" is ninety degrees.
The more they point in the same direction, the smaller they get -- someone with the Fire element and the Origin, of, like, "purification" would have a "Spiritual Angle" of thirty degrees of whatever.
Origin and Element that contradict each other are greater than ninety -- so if Araya Souyen, whose Origin is "Stillness", had the "Fire" element, then his Spiritual Angle would be like, a hundred-and-twenty degrees, because fires change things.
So Shirou has a Spiritual Angle of zero degrees, that's how Kayaba would express his specialness.
For someone with multiple elements:
The angles are independent, so you could draw, like, a 3-D cone by plotting their Angles on different planes, and describing them with a conic section like that.
Also there's a certain amount of personal subjectivity to it, two different people with the same traits (matching Origins, the same elements) could have different angles depending on their abilities.