People who started the Valinor party: 200% of it was all on Varda. Never would have happened without Varda. Aulë, Yavanna, and Vairë did a lot of the logistics and advertising under Varda’s direction. Estë and Vána set stuff up. Manwë was dragged along for the ride rather haplessly.
People who were late to the Valinor party: Ulmo only showed up because Manwë was there. Tulkas crashed it and accidentally got roped into being a legitimate party-goer. Melkor came to check it out because they were making so much noise. Námo, Nienna, and Lórien came together late and unbothered. (They would have had Starbucks if Arda had Starbucks back then.)
People who didn’t get to attend the Valinor party because they hadn’t been born yet: Oromë and Nessa. They didn’t even get to attend the after-party because Mairon ruined that for everyone before they were born, too.
I was drawn into a long comment-dissertation today on the physics of Taintverse/Songs’verse, especially as it pertains to what I call ‘aspects’. Considering how much I apparently have to say about these things, I thought I would synthesize the comments into a tumblr post. So here you are.
To understand aspects in Songs’verse, a basic understanding of ainu metabiology is necessary. ('Metabiology' here used in place of ‘biology’ because they're not actually organic beings.) The simplest explanation of the ainur is that they are living Songs. They're music that is alive and self-perpetuating, and their metabolism is heavily tied up in the continuation of their song -- in fact, song basically is their metabolism.
This is important because Songs'verse physics are not at all like Earth physics. They're more along the lines of elemental-physics, but a lot more complex and detailed than just four elements. A full 'aspect' is kind of a combination of two things -- the Song of the aspect and a collection of 'plain matter' that is subsumed by that Song and thus assumes the form and qualities of the aspect that has been sung into it. Perhaps one could thing of the 'plain matter' as akin to an empty piece of sheet music, and the Song as the ink that adds the necessary means for the manifestation of the music. I have the outlines of the Songs'verse aspect system sketched out -- the two "highest" aspects, or the two huge umbrellas under which every other aspect falls, are 'nothing' and 'something', probably better described as Void and Being respectively. Every aspect has an associated Song, and the way ainur 'work' is that they adopt these songs into themselves as part of their metabolism.
That is the introduction section. Here is a readmore, because this is really fucking long, okay?
Artificial Versus Intrinsic
Aspects are a weird combination of "intrinsic to reality" and "artificially created", and they get more or less one or the other the further down the aspect-pyramid you go. Void-aspect and Being-aspect are pretty much incontrovertibly intrinsic to the existence of things and you can't really touch them or manipulate their Songs to make variant Void or Being aspects. Smaller aspects, for example Water, are considered by ainur physicists/scientists to be “intrinsic” but can be easily changed and manipulated by an ainu to create a new variant of Water, that might act differently than 'normal' Water -- for example you might increase the viscosity. Making the manipulated Song stay manipulated and not fade back into the 'normal' Water-song is a different matter entirely. Making living things is even more hideously complicated and involves not only fiddling with the Songs of multiple aspects, but fiddling with them in such a way that they can be bent together and merged seamlessly into a single new Song that does not involve any discord or tuning problems. The Songs of all living things are considered to be “artificial” and “not intrinsic”.
Physical versus Conceptual
Many of the “intrinsic but changable” aspects are themselves composed of multiple aspects. For example, Heat is an aspect that happens to automatically be included in all Fire-aspects. Fire contains other aspects as well, such as Light and a sub-variant of Corrosion that is tied into the Heat-song (not an exhaustive list). These aspects (Light, Heat, Corrosion) seem much more conceptual than simply Fire, and this intuition is correct. The latter is considered to be a physical aspect, while the former are conceptual aspects. Conceptual aspects can also have variants created for them (depending on the specific conceptual aspect and their relative height on the pyramid), but these variants can usually only be created by altering through other conceptual aspects, not by using physical aspects.
One interesting thing about conceptual aspects like Heat, Light, and Corrosion is that they all act like liquids when they're alone and not incorporated into some other aspect-Song. They flow, and I describe them with water-based imagery in my writing. You can, however, walk right through them without noticing any resistance as one would when walking through water, which is simultaneously cool and dangerous. Dark and Light aspects in particular act like oil and water to one another, which can give you some very interesting lighting effects that wouldn't be found on Earth.
Even though conceptual aspects are some of the most basic building blocks of the universe that one can get in Songs’verse, conceptual aspects are much harder for ainur to metabolize than physical aspects. A lot of this difficulty comes from their non-physicality -- you can’t grab a handful of Corrosion, but you can grab a handful of Rock. Well, okay, if you’re an ainu you might be able to grab a handful of Corrosion, but you don’t normally find puddles of Corrosion lying around the landscape. (As an aside, pure distilled conceptual aspects that aren’t usually found distilled in that ‘usual state of affairs’ can be exceedingly destructive, especially if they’re being weaponized. Imagine a wave of pure Corrosion sweeping across a field.)
For an ainu to metabolize Corrosion, considering that this particular aspect is not found in isolation except in highly exceptional circumstances, the ainu has to at least have passing familiarity with, if not outright metabolization of, all the possible physical Songs that incorporate Corrosion. And that is difficult. For this reason, only older, more powerful ainur tend to be able to claim to have metabolized a conceptual aspect. Metabolizing a conceptual aspect is nevertheless highly desirable, because it makes it easier to ‘hack’ physical aspect Songs -- an automatic boost to your godlike reality-warping powers.
To use an example of an ainu with conceptual aspects metabolized, we’ll use Melkor. Melkor is slightly fucking terrifying by fact of having metabolized enough things to have a whole conceptual-aspect complex -- namely that of Temperature, not to mention a number of other conceptual aspects (such as Darkness for one), and those on top of a whole host of physical aspects. (For more information on aspect-complexes see next section.) Melkor is furthermore one of the only ainur to have successfully metabolized aspects that hailed from both the Fire-complex and the Water-complex aspect systems. Part of all this is because ey’s older than everyone else, but another part of it is just sheer tenacity. Long story short -- why the fuck would you mess with Melkor.
Aspect Complexes
The existence of variant aspects contributes to the phenomenon of aspect-complexes. Having an aspect of simply “Water” is more specifically having an aspect composed of “all the variants of basic Water plus basic Water”. This is why it's called a complex. To use Mairon as an example, ey has a Fire-complex as eir 'main' aspect, plus a couple of other side-aspects related to eir life experiences. (These include a couple of types of lava, part of the molten-metals-complex, and ashes, cinders, sparks, and other Fire-residue.) Most ainu wind up with aspect-complexes by the time they reach a certain age, because it's easier to learn to sing (and to subsequently incorporate into yourself) a Song that has a lot in common with aspects you already have than it is to learn a completely unrelated Song.
Aspect complexes can themselves be sub-aspects of a 'larger' complex umbrella, and so on and so forth, all the way up to Being. Void has no other aspects underlying it, unless one wants to group Plain and Unsung Matter under Void, and Plain Matter has no song but silence, so.
Some aspect-complexes can prohibit the learning of any of the minor aspects of another aspect-complex because of the way the Songs combine. Mairon, being so heavily reliant on Fire-related aspects for eir metabolism, cannot tolerate contact with Water-complex aspects or ey sustains actual injury. Actually learning to Sing Water-song is pretty much an impossibility for em as ey currently is, and attempting to do so would also cause injury. While it might eventually be possible for Mairon to learn Water-song, this event could only occur after ey has internalized the Songs of a vast number of other aspects, to the point where the majority of eir metabolism is no longer reliant on Fire-song. Considering further that Water and Fire aspects are notoriously difficult Songs to combine (successful combination basically hasn’t been recorded yet, or at least not stably and not for all variants of either aspect, with a few exceptions: see Melkor), it’s going to take even longer to potentially happen. This is not to speak of Mairon’s own well-developed aversion to water, meaning ey may choose not to metabolize that particular set of aspects no matter how capable of it ey becomes.
I’m finally caught up on my daily prompts, and Stray Melodies has two new chapters: Fruit [x] and Miss [x]. Please leave reviews if you click through, they fuel more writing!
I swear I just wanted to figure out Elrond’s likely skin color in taintverse. But now I’m stuck in a never-ending labyrinth of genealogies and who is 3/4 Vanyarin and who’s not and which House each human is from and why.
A bunch of updates today! The third chapter of The Slightest Slip, On the Great East Road, has been posted to AO3 [x]. Further, I’m catching up with my updates of my daily prompts, and Stray Melodies has two new chapters: Green [x] and Unexpected [x].
So here I am trying to outline a bunch of Taintverse worldbuilding in order to start making and queuing some textual infodumps, but none of the outline-aids for worldbuilding that I have accumulated are good for storylines that span over 200 or so years. I hadn’t quite realized this before now, but now I’m wondering why I haven’t -- because everything I write seems to span huge time gaps.
Have some of Taintverse’s elvish ethnicities. Variations present in skin tone, hair quality, hair color, nose shape, face shape, eye shape, and ear shape if you care to spot them.
Transcribed text in case people can’t read my handwriting: “Vanyar : hair varies from super-curly to just wavy -- Noldor : painfully straight hair -- Teleri/Sindar : can also have silver hair -- Avari : actually a single specific ethnicity of Avari -- there’s like. Tons. This the relevant one for our purposes. Can also have red hair -- Nerdanel hails from this ethnicity.”
Why does Nerdanel hail from an Avari ethnicity??? (Clan, tribe, whatever they were called in canon -- I think clans.) Well, for one thing, no canon conclusion means I can do what I want -- for another, Nerdanel’s “line”, which I’m taking to mean her nuclear family, are the only elves in Valinor with red hair. It’s why they’re weird. We actually get pretty detailed descriptions of what the hair colors of the other ethnicities of Valinor are, except then random redheads. So I decided that they were a single family of our relevant Avari ethnicity who wound up not being so unwilling after all.
And yes friends, this means Legolas has black hair in Taintverse. The “blonde” thing has always seriously bothered me (like really, only the Vanyar are supposed to be blond, hOW would he get that hair color, I ask you) -- so I fixed it.
