Ok, so I was in a Discord server at an unreasonable hour, and someone said plantlife shouldn’t be an element. This is an objectively wrong and bad take, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I brought up that, historically, one of the 5 classical elements in Chinese philosophy was “wood,” and the guy said he preferred that as an element over plantlife. He also brought up a hypothetical Rahi element, which has its own problems, but with this I realized two things:
Literal wood is just dead plants.
If wood and plantlife would be distinct element options, that means there is a distinction between living things and dead things for the purposes of designating elements.
So, when considering what can and can’t be an element, something hit me: dead bodies don’t come with the practical trappings of living people or animals. A corpse is made of complex organic structures, much like a plant, and it could be used for different things; if we accept that flora can get a dedicated element, then why not dead fauna, since that circumvents ethics/practical issues with mind control and making/destroying thinking entities?
To help visualize what a Toa of corpses would be, let’s just set some ground rules:
These Toa can create and control dead Rahi or sapient creatures, and only dead ones or parts of a corpse.
Unlike the Tryna, they cannot literally raise the dead; bodies are nothing more than mounds of flesh, and are only controlled in the way a Toa of plantlife controls plants. However, Toa of corpses can also telekinetically control dead flesh and dismantle it as desired.
The moment a body part ceases to be connected to a living creature, or the moment a creature’s body is considered dead, it is now part of this element.
Dead matter stops counting as a corpse when it is soft and disunited enough to be considered part of the surrounding soil, or if it is reduced to indistinguishable particles.
Corpses are considered inanimate matter and not people or creatures. Dead flora do not count as corpses for the purposes of this element.
Just curious what y’all will respond with on this matter. Under the assumption that plantlife can be an element, and assuming it’s not too macabre, does this work as a consistent element? Are there any other practical holes you want to poke in it, or am I not realizing its full potential here?
I could certainly see this working as a side power, but not as a Toa Element.
Aside from the macabre aspect of it, the whole thing just seems too specific.
As you said, the Toa isn’t actually be injecting life into the corpse. So they’re basically just a Toa of Organic And Metallic Protodermis, Except Only If It Used To Be Attached To A Living Being.
To me, this seems comparable to a Toa of Mountains, or a Toa of Rain.
Finally, I’d imagine that “corpse” is a pretty rare and specific material. How many battles do Toa fight where there’d be enough Corpse for them to control? And if they can just create it, then what makes that “corpse” protodermis any different from other protodermis?
And this is all ignoring the fact that Toa would almost certainly consider this an immoral power.
It’s not really useful in the context of bionicle especially since most dead people are warped to the red star, so finding actual dead bodies to control is kinda the rare exception. Since Toa were originally meant to shut down after Mata Nui did his thing, they wouldn’t have been intended to interact with any outside lifeforms either.
And since Toa aren’t really allowed or intended to kill to create more “mass” to control, you can’t really, uh, innovate with it well. Also, a common Toa power is usually to create more of your own element. How is that gonna work?
Don’t get me wrong, having Necromancy as an elemental power is a very interesting concept to explore, but it just doesn’t work in the context of Bionicle.
I don’t know if wood should be seperated from plantlife. Afterall, the innermost layers of bark on a tree are living. Also, without the ability to control wood, how useful would plantife as an element be?
It’d be a giant explosion of body parts and maybe some mostly-coherent bodies.
I was only bringing that up since it came up in the discussion. I was specifically thinking of dead logs and crap. Ofc, even if we exclude dead wood, live plants let you strangle/crush/stab people just fine.
Ok so this power does have more potential than I gave it credit for. The applications may go along the lines of maybe Robins flower-flower fruit in One Piece.
You know how MU inhabitants are only partly organic? That’s not a problem in itself, you could either decide they could only affect one or the other, or both as long as it’s still reasonably a body part. It also means that you could detach someones arm, beat them over the head with it and then reattach it .
There may be one catch left though. Where do we draw the line? Decomposition of organic material is a thing, and the only thing that’s left is nothing more than a chunk of metal.You can still call it an arm or a leg but it really isn’t. So where do we draw the line?
Well, that does help, I guess. I meant in terms of the discussion I was in. The guy I was arguing with said he preferred a straight “wood” element to plantlife.
@Marzipancutter So, like I said in the OP, stuff no longer counts as a corpse once it’s decayed to the point of just looking like sediment.
The only problem comes when we consider what Matoran are literally made of. Is there exoskeleton actually just metal, or is it some sort of compound? Because if it’s just metal, it’d fall under iron, and we’d have to define “corpses” as the fleshy bits alone; if it’s a compound like chitin or bone, then we might include the hard bits under this hypothetical element.
Yeah, you just need to define what exactly Matoran are made of. Although if I’m honest, the idea of dead/decaying matter seems a little too specified or obscure to be an element.
Idea for a Nova Blast would be some sort of aura or wave of decay of organic matter
Not necessarily. They cannot make people instantly die with their power. All they do is control nonliving matter that may freak people out, and which may have originally been part of a person or may have come from thin air–and whether that’s immoral or not will be based largely on cultural values.
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