Untangling the Siphon Merge: Answering the "How Do They Even…?
Question:
So. Question about The Merge. Well, for the girls anyways, so. They’re siphoners. Meaning they siphon, of course, and that means they have no magic of their own and have to take it from someone or something else. If they need magic in order to do the spells. How can they Merge if they don’t have magic? Because. Wouldn’t they just absorb or siphon it from each other, I mean. How do they tell who’s strongest. Even though we already know. I’m just not sure how it works for them. Help? Explain maybe? 😊
Ughhh... well, this is gonna be long.
So, as far as I remember from the show (which I watched a long time ago and there might be some pretty big inaccuracies), the Gemini coven works like this: in each generation, the leaders of the coven must be twins who, at 22 (or 21, but let's take 22), have to perform a ritual called the Merge during a celestial event. The mandatory criterion for this ritual is that they absolutely MUST be twins, and that's it.
As I understood it, at birth (most likely only in this coven, but we haven't met other witch twins) their magic is kinda shared but split between two people, and thanks to this ritual, it gets collected into one, making the winner of this Merge much stronger and their magic more stable. Well, that's exactly how I understood this concept, because it might be different, and it's just two witches whose magic gets collected into one person, like in a harvest, but it's more stable because they're twins, but in the end, the winning witch still becomes much stronger.
So, when this ritual ends, all the lives of the Gemini coven members get tied to the new leader, meaning the winner of the Merge.
In this coven, there's a chance that a special kind of witch might appear who has no magic of their own but can absorb it from external sources. It's very rare, but it happens. It's unknown if siphons can appear outside this coven, but all the siphons we know came from it.
The siphons themselves, as I already said, have no magic of their own but can absorb it from outside their body, meaning from other supernatural beings, magical objects (so, cursed ones), enchanted places, etc. This makes them simultaneously powerful and relatively weak without an energy source (magic).
And what's important is that they have a one hundred percent chance of winning the Merge against a witch opponent because they'll immediately suck out all the magical power from their opponent during the Merge.
But the problems start when two siphons fight in the Merge. This is exactly the headache you gave me (I thought about this damn Merge for several hours) with your question, because all the concepts I laid out (namely, the two most logical ones, and everything else stems from them, and only the craziest Merge theories go down a different path which is totally unclear) say that the Merge for two siphons is completely impossible.
If you say that they just need to pull magic from outside and then start the Merge ritual, I'll wanna break your neck and say that it makes no sense because that's magic they pulled from something else, it's not their opponent's magic, it's foreign.
Or maybe you'll say that they assimilate the energy, and after they've absorbed it, it becomes theirs, but that also makes little sense because even if they assimilate that magic, it doesn't change the fact that it won't become the magic they got at birth
(So, witches in their universe have innate magic in their bodies; it regenerates on its own, it's theirs from birth, and they can increase it through training. In their bodies, there's an overall, let's say, limit (which can increase), and their magic regenerates to this limit during rest, while the magic in siphons is simply absorbed by them; it's just placed in a flask (which, if you think about it, might itself be this same limit, which can also increase if it's constantly subjected to heavy filling) which runs out and gets refilled through using magic and absorbing more. It's not the same as with witches, and the opponent sucking out all their magic shouldn't kill the siphon, just deplete them of all accumulated magic!)
Аnd when it's taken away in the battle of will and magic during the Merge, their flask would just become empty, and it would simply wait to be refilled from another source later, not kill them! And of course, this isn't their innate power that needs to be taken in this ritual! Even if you consider it "their" magic after absorption, it's still like pouring all the liquid out of a flask – the flask remains a flask even without water.
The loser would still survive unless the ritual itself implies the automatic death of one of them (which is sad), and that still wouldn't give the winner ANYTHING, because the magic they both absorbed could have been absorbed by one person alone without losing a twin in the process.
You could just say that this ritual for siphons would increase the volume of how much they could absorb without harming themselves, but that's weird because it's still unclear how exactly the ritual is supposed to work, because my sanest thought about how they could increase the flask's volume is how they exchanged magic with each other during the battle, trying to absorb way beyond their limits since both were almost full to the brim.
And during this battle, their limit itself would increase rapidly (though it would probably be very painful and harmful). Or they could try to absorb some kind of spark that made them siphons, but that's in the realm of crazy thoughts that are unclear how to implement.
We reject the first option because they could do that without this ritual, just maybe without such strong loads on their limit.
Oh, and yes, I already said that the most logical option in this whole situation would be for Lizzie and Josie to just NOT use the Merge ritual.
Because listen up, sweethearts, it's not mandatory. Yeah, I don't know about Legacies season 4, but in The Vampire Diaries, it's clear that the ritual itself is needed to find a new coven leader so you don't die when the previous leader gets old.
And even if you think that the consequences didn't catch up with Jo and Kai because one voluntarily stripped themselves of magic and the other got stuck at one age, that wouldn't be very logical because when Kai got out of the prison, the consequences should have dogged him until he merged with Luke. So that's all a hypothetical situation.
And since the previous coven leader is dead, they don't need a new leader to avoid dying. (Maybe I missed something because I didn't really watch season 4 of Legacies properly, I barely watched it, but whatever happens there should fit into this framework.) So from this, we should understand that the Merge ritual should have either not worked or thrown a system error. And that it most likely could not happen after 22. And most likely, Julie Plec really did mess things up.
(And seems like my obsession with siphons is back.)
(Oh, and yeah, I didn't know how to start this sentence with this parenthesis, so I'm writing with it, but most likely during the Merge, it's not just magic that gets absorbed, but also a part of the magic wielder's essence, which technically doesn't change things that much because it's an addition to the magic which is part of the witch's very core. So if you think about it that way, the magic carries a pretty strong imprint of the one it was in, which is exactly why Kai developed the ability to feel things from Luke.
Hmm... Still, this can be chalked up to precisely that and not to some life force whose traces of gain/loss we don't see.)
So they absolutely cannot perform this ritual in any way without some huge failure. And if it does determine who's stronger, it's only by how much magic they can absorb while resisting the siphoning of what they'd absorbed before.
And that would be a battle of will, like I already said. Also, it's about how much magic they can hold in their flask without bursting, because it would definitely be more than they had before and beyond their limit. Well, like I said before, they could do that without the ritual to practice siphoning (or whatever it's called).
So it's IMPOSSIBLE. And yes, Julie Plec most likely ruined the canon.
Thank you so much for your attention, and I hope you enjoyed what I wrote. ❤️💗❤️