Volume 18 Page 16
Sep05
on September 5, 2014
at 3:06 am
Yigs have greater phenotypic variation than humans, which is a common feature of relatively new races. Most yigs aren’t the human-like creatures we’ve seen from the inn, but bent little “goblins”–the result of Tamantha causing a slow diminishing of each subsequent race’s baseline potency, from the immortal and near-indestructible chuni (Lyca isn’t anything special; she was just some college student working the equivalent of the Peace Corps when she got tangled up in events) down to the wyrds and Ulenites, then the humans (and a few contemporaneous races), and finally the yigs and the very newest races.
Vish has a chart of all this somewhere, probably.
…Oh Guharl, how did you get away with these shenanigans.
I bet cultivation is basically Tamantha giving back the base-line potency to humanity, which is why they’re perma-screwed insofar as racial science-They can’t fulfill their destiny thing they are supposed to do and everything…
I like to imagine them basically becoming the ‘baby’ of the gods, with basically ‘extra credit’ insofar as being priests&sorcerors because of Guharl’s screwing of them all.
A wandering mind asks the question of where the common meme/trope comes from. This “older things are greater things” concept.
I have two theories, one is simply the power of being raised by parents who were always wiser and more powerful during your most formative years. The other is the medieval and renaissance’ effects on history, when The ancient wisdom of Rome became a lofty height folk were desperate to return to.
I suppose the boring and simple answer is that modern Western civilization grew up in the ruins of a technologically and culturally more sophisticated world–Rome–coupled with old people’s natural tendency to remember the past fondly because they weren’t old in the past. But I hit upon using the idea in the Water Phoenix King when I learned of an antiquated theory of planetary formation called “solar fission,” that proposed that planets gradually emerged from the sun, making Mercury the newest planet and Mars one step older than Earth. This, of course, fit nicely with the last days of rampant speculation regarding the existence of an older, more advanced civilization on Mars. While the WPK universe is geocentric and new planets aren’t “spit out,” there’s a gradual migration of intelligent creatures from the world below to the moon and the floating worlds (the Ulenites and wyrds), out to the outer planets, and then to the far periphery of the cosmos close to the Stars of Death and Sleep.
Is there an explanation for why the Maklaks were hanging around on the homeworld (and thus slaughter-able), instead of out on the periphery with the Chuni?