Ramblings: All about furycrafting

[inimarupta]

Maybe part of our thoughts also shape how our furies appear to us. Maybe a wind fury on its own doesn’t look like anything much at all. But when a crafter meets it and uses it, maybe that crafter, somewhere in his head, believes that it should look like a horse, or an eagle or whatever. So when that fury manifests in a visible form, that’s what it looks like.

I think it's worth going ahead and expanding on what I've said about furycrafting. This is partly to show some of the nuances of how it works, and partly to prevent any confusion due to my comparing furycrafting primarily to Avatar: The Last Airbender, though the author is frequently cited as coming up with the series after being challenged to try creating a good story out of two "lame" ideas: "Lost Roman Legion," and "Pokemon."

Yes, that was the challenge. The execution, however, is a system of what I've mentioned: elemental spirits that a person binds to their mind and controls using will and imagination.

Intangible spirits
Furies are intangible spirits that co-opt the element around them to manifest. From the very start of the series, we see signs of this -- for example, early in the first book it's mentioned that a Calderon Valley steadholder is trying to deal with an earth spirit that has stuck itself into a goddamn rock they've been trying to move. But in First Lord's Fury, the narrative takes a look at learning how furycrafting works from the perspective of the series protagonist. And Tavi shows us that in Carna these spirits are literally everywhere at any given moment, simply not actively occupying and moving around the elements.

Though the air of the cavern did not contain any discrete, manifest furies, such as wind manes or Countess Calderon's fury, Cirrus, it was full to bursting with furies nonetheless. Each individual was a tiny thing, a mite, with scarcely any power whatsoever, but when gathered together by the will and power of a wind crafter, their combined strength was enormous -- a mountain made from grains of sand.

The power varies, of course -- some people bind a number of small furies, while others bind a couple powerful ones, and then there's the Great Furies, which are basically constantly manifest in a large feature of the environment. The mountain Garados, for example, is a Great Fury. Which brings us to. . .

Influence of the mind
In the first book, most Furies really do behave like Pokemon, but we learn that this is because of how the Alerans think of them. As they come of age, they attract and bind the spirits around them to themselves unconsciously, after which they can choose to consciously assimilate more of the spirits, provided they can find any worth the willpower to bind. People are raised with two schools of thought: the paganus belief that the fury is associated with a particular body of the element, or a particular form; or a belief that the form a fury comes in when it manifests in the element is entirely projected onto the spirit by the mind of the user.

Paganus crafters: There's a lot of people whose furies manifest as animals that the human has named and believes has personality quirks. This is primarily a frontier thing, where people aren't getting formally taught theories and so on about the nature of furies and how crafting works. We get crafters like Isana, who initially thinks of her fury as the local river, the Rillwater -- so she claims the river as exclusively hers, and having picked a landmark as the idea of what her fury's form is, we never see it manifest as anything in particular -- but when Isana's performing feats of watercrafting, she does it by imagining it in terms of a river, such as healing Araris Valarian by picturing herself wearing down and washing away infectious agents in his body. And this is an example of how the mind of the crafter determines what they're capable of -- Isana is the most powerful watercrafter alive, but at first she doesn't act like it because she thinks of her fury as the local river. As a result, at first the only great feats she performs are when she's manipulating that specific river. It isn't until she asserts control over water in the sea that she realizes she's been thinking of things all wrong, and then suddenly she's able to exceed the High Lord power level in that element. (She also throws a shark at some pirates, but that's more a Crowning Moment of Awesome that I want to note than anything relevant to my point.)

From an audience perspective, the personality does appear to be projected by the user. Bernard and Kord have each bound a powerful earth fury. Kord is a vicious, murderous man, and his fury behaves the same way. Bernard is a loyal and quiet, but unyielding and powerful man, so it makes sense that his earth fury manifests itself as a slow, powerful stone dog. And though Bernard blames the spirit, when he and love interest Amara are in close proximity she notices that he's using the sexual sensation heightening ability of earthcrafters. He blames it on the spirit taking initiative because it's "quirky," but it's been clearly demonstrated that he's wanted her almost since first seeing her; it seems more likely that he unconsciously willed it. Like Isana, Bernard thinks of his wood fury as the spiritual manifestation of the local forest, so he's able to exert great power over the trees in Calderon Valley, but he stops boasting about it and so on when he's away from that environment.

Amara thinks of her air fury as a charging horse she's named Cirrus, and she's generally all about charging around at top speed. And because of the way she thinks of aircrafting, she's horrible at the elemental uses that involve bending light rather than racing around with the wind. At least, she is until the First Lord coaches her on how to think of it differently.

Or, perhaps the greatest example is Antillar Maximus; with an absent father, dead mother and an abusive step-mother, Max was very lonely. He read Androcles and the Lion, and in his desperation for companionship, he manifested his water fury as a lion and named it Androcles; when he manifests it, he tends to pat it like his own companion feline. His half-brother has always desperately wanted to bond with Max, and as a result of his dere for Max, shapes his water fury in the same way. But none of the rest of their furies manifest in any sort of shaped manner, because their parents yelled and punished and grilled into them that is not how a civilized person furycrafts. Max also demonstrates how the mind imposes its own limits on the person's capabilities; he was flying for the first time when his step-mother made her first attempt to murder him, and ever since he's powerful in all other aspects of aircrafting, but when it comes to flight, the best he can manage is clumsy, Hulk-like leaps.

Imposed theorists: For a variety of reasons, they don't believe that furies come with personality quirks, don't believe they manifest in a particular form, etc. And guess what? Then they don't. Generally, these people only horse around with furies in animalistic forms when they want a manifest being -- Attis manifests animalistic furies and pretends to be holding them at bay when he wants Invidia to think he's under attack.

For a direct comparison, Aria and Count Gram think of their fire furies as birds (Gram in particular associates fire with his first wife, so his fury manifests as a lovely-but-deadly hummingbird) and anytime we see them exerting control over fire, they're basically guiding around fireballs in the form of their birds. Invidia, on the other hand, doesn't associate her furies with any particular animal, and when she does the exact same firecrafting as Aria or Gram, it's literally just a ball of flame she makes in her hand then guides through each of her enemies. Same effect, accomplished through different mental processes. Compare.

Lady Aquitaine:

Lady Aquitaine strode to stand in front of the doorway, the guardsmen falling back as she did so. She faced the room, frowned, and raised her left hand, palm up. There was a sullen flash of red light, then a sphere of fire the size of a large grape swelled into life there.

“Your Grace!” the guardsman protested. “A firecrafting could be dangerous for those below.”

“A large fire would,” Lady Aquitaine replied, and then she hurled the sphere of fire through the doorway.

From where he was standing, Fidelias couldn’t see precisely what happened next, but there was a thunderous sound, and wildly dancing light spilled from the room. He saw the sphere flash past the doorway several times, moving in a swift blur and rebounding off every surface within. Lady Aquitaine stood staring at the room for perhaps a minute, then nodded once, decisively. “The room is clear. Gentlemen, to the First Lord at once!”

Count Gram:

Gram stepped forward, lifted his hand, and casually held it out, palm up. Fire kindled in his cupped fingers, until a moment later a tiny form hovered there, just above the surface of his hand -- a little feathered figure, its wings blurred into invisibility with their speed. The hot wind washing from them stirred Amara’s hair. Gram whispered something to the little fire fury, and flicked his wrist. The fiery hummingbird shot off into the night, gathering speed and brightening in intensity as it flew.

It swept over the battlefield, a globe of white daylight several hundred yards across. It zipped over countless mantis warriors, and at one point blew entirely through the torso of a vordknight that had flown down to intercept it, not even slowing down.

“Bad idea,” Gram said, shaking his head, “getting in Phyllis’s way like that.”

“Phyllis?” Bernard asked.

“Keep those teeth together, Calderon,” Gram said testily. “Named her for my first wife. Hotter than any torch, couldn’t sit still, and you didn’t want to get in her way, either.”

The effect of the user's mindset is also apparent in Invidia's aircrafting: she knows she's powerful and doesn't have much trouble doing whatever she needs with the element, but it's telling that she thinks of aircrafting forcing the element to move to her will, as one might expect from a confident woman who would do whatever it takes to usurp the throne:

Lady Aquitaine made a clucking sound and waved a hand in airy dismissal. “All you need do is guide me to the disturbance, then depart,” she said. She winced, and touched a hand to her forehead.

“Are you well?” Fidelias asked.

“Windcrafting sometimes gives me headaches,” she replied. “I had to draw that air all the way from the river and up through the Deeps to lift us. It was extremely heavy.”

“Air?” Fidelias asked. “Heavy?”

“When you’re trying to move enough it is, dear spy, believe me.” She lowered her hand and looked around, frowning.

Feral furies
There are furies that manifest without a human, but I think it's telling that only one has a personality, and that one was artificially bound into a specific form that dissipates after the binding is destroyed -- in other words, its form and personality were, once again, imposed by a human. It's also noted that said fury was a fluke that couldn't be duplicated.

Furies that aren't bound to a human mind don't evolve much beyond "force of nature." In other words, they basically have no personality. The most that we can say is that people imagine they have a personality the way we project personality on our cats (see Grumpy Cat). Fire furies often get bound inside of lamps in place of candles or street lights, and if set free they just burn whatever's next to them because they are an unconfined fire, yet people perceive and talk about them like fiery imps or sprites. Garados is a powerful fury that's stuck itself into a mountain and just sits there until something prods it, at which point it moves and gosh there's an earthquake, the paganus frontiersmen decide it's angry. Kalarus has a powerful fury bound underneath his city and he's periodically prodding it with his will to make it react and build up power until his will is the only thing keeping it from blowing up his city, the idea being no one would dare kill him and let the fury free to release the pent-up power; Sextus releases it, the city gets blown up, and that's all that happens. And when Alerans manifest their furies but die, you end up with furies that have been put into a shape but are no longer being directed, so they revert to being just a force of nature running around doing what its element does. It might be herded the way the Vord do in attacking Riva, but they're still just forces of nature being prodded along by a powerful mind.

Conclusion
In-universe, there is an ongoing philosophical argument about it with intellectual points and facts that make perfect sense to the characters, but OOC, let's be frank: you can have people project forms and personalities onto what are normally just intangible and personality-less spirits that they've assimilated, but you can't have it the other way around. (And if we look at the things the author likes to do, he likes magic systems and spirits that are defined by each individual's own imagination; see the "Dresden Files," in which Harry's magic shields are imagined as deflective surfaces while Ramirez's are imagined as an energy field that breaks down whatever enters it into a fine dust -- or the spirit Harry dubbed Bob, whose personality and identity are defined by who possesses it at the moment.) People who think of the spirits they've bound up in their heads as Pokemon? Are going to treat them and use them as though they are Pokemon. People who don't...well, it's just an effort of will and imagination, and you've got Roman Avatar.