SO, I made a pretty big claim. But I’ve been toying with this theory since before Dragonwatch three came out. I need some reviews before I inform Brand Mull that I’ve cracked his secret and won the game. If this symbol isn’t on the spine of the Journal of Secrets, what is even the point. 

A good symbol does three things: identifies the pieces you are dealing with, helps the viewer reach a new understanding about the pieces, and map onto the cultural understandings of the audience. aka a cross with four quadrants of airplane, mitochondria, love, and toe nails is a terrible symbol. See common memes for usually pretty good symbols and graphs. 

So you got five crowns right? That means you have a pentagon and a five pointed star, and the biggest trick was figuring out where each crown went, and how they related to each other. 

Examine five-part belief systems, see where the crowns match, unifying symbol explains everything, move on. Easy.

NO.

You wanna know why?

BECAUSE FIVE POINTED STARS AS SYMBOLS ARE MORE WORTHLESS THAN AAA BATTERIES FOR WATCHING TELEVISION

Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, obviously they are very useful for things like organizing systems within a single body. Who functions as the head, the shield arm, the pivot foot, etc. But the point of that diagram is that they are equally important and dependent to every other part. Which doesn’t work when the different groups keep trying to break each other’s kneecaps (see b5: fairies v demons).

It also falls apart on the five-piece cultural scale. The most well-known 5-piece cultural scale is obviously the chinese elements: Fire Wood Water Metal Earth.

Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on those at all. But it all broke down on fire, TBH. Were dragons fire? But a large point was that their breath weapons weren’t always fire. Were demons fire? Even the ones covered in sludge. Were demons earth? Was the underking earth? All I got were fairies as water, in the end. If someone wants to give that a go, be my guest. 

I drew so many pentagrams trying to figure it out, and it never worked. No matter the arrangement, it never told me more about the crowns except that there were five of them. I was about to despair. 

But then the muses sang: The Forgotten Crown. 

(That’s the title of my thesis, btw)

Like I said, five pointed stars were trash for this system, but what if I added another crown, one that no one bothers to count, because by their nature, they can’t do anything. That’s right:

The Forgotten Crown of the Fair Folk. 

The symbol slipped into place like sharp pointy things into Warren. And now I can get to the real meta after sharing this image:

Isn’t it beautiful? After I cracked this code, I showed it to my little sister. She smiled contentedly, calling it satisfying. It is so satisfying. It speaks to so many levels of understanding. 

First, I depicted for you, we have the morality and the terrain triangles. 

Morality triangle is the easiest, if you feel uncomfortable labeling drown-happy naiads as good and all demons as evil, congrats, thinking about the nature of good and evil is precisely what Mull was going for. Since I am suddenly one of those people, I’m going to be using the creation/destruction dichotomy, but acknowledge that both of those work. 

Fairies can be most easily understood when Kendra asked the Fairy Queen what she should do with her life. She’s an unlimited fount of the Fairy Queen’s own power, allowed to do whatever she wants, and the Fairy Queen tells her to nurture life. Be fruitful, put good things in the world, help people grow. Their goal is to create, their magic is defensive, beauty is wonderful for its own sake. The better you are at respecting and nurturing life, the stronger your magic is. Dryads are responsible for the whole forest, and throughout the series they are seen as more powerful and serious than fairies, which can make the plants they interact with grow and hamadryads, who are connected only to their tree. Certainly more powerful than the petty, waterbound naiads. 

Ganalus’s speech to Seth about his own nature is where you can understand demons in this world. They like to destroy and torture, they find amusement in things like plague and clipping live beings to their belts and dragging them around. They are driven by the need for more power and control. Their nature is to harm and break apart, and that has its place in this world, but we care about the stuff and people here, so mortals and fairies have got to keep these punks in check.

And of course, the Fair Folk. Here’s where this triangle gets fun. The worst of the worst gets to be Demon King, the best of the best get stronger fairy powers. That means the most neutral of the neutral get to be the leader of the Fair Folk. We’ve heard references to the main city of the Fair Folk: Selona, somewhere in Europe, and a mysterious exert that I’ve seen images of with Lord Dagrel that I’m trying to pin down. I’m posing that their powers come from being neutral. They talk about the terrible consequences of the last time they went to war, what if it the equivalent of their fallen state, when they break their neutrality, and changes them fundamentally. 

This breaks down the most, but they are the Forgotten Crown for a reason. They hold themselves apart from issues of the other crowns. No one even remembers that they have a crown, because as Seth and Celebrant have shown, who cares? They aren’t going to do anything about it. Everyone collectively forgot/don’t care about them. But their abilities are equal in strength to the others, but different in use, and less valued by those who have battles to fight. Their neutrality puts them exactly between good and evil, creation and destruction. They take the choice not to act, and there is power there too. 

Next is the Terrain Creatures. 

Sky giants control the sky, obviously. Thronis and his ability to control the weather, their height, while their feet are on the ground, far as we know, everything important happens in the sky. 

Underking gets under the ground, again, obvious. Different from the other two points of the terrain triangle in that there is a lot of creature classifactions in their domain, but think of how big the surface of the earth is, underneath it, all theirs. 

Dragons, they dwell in the sky and below the surface, putting them in both. Water dragons and Dromadus both primarily function beneath the surface, and their wings let them be in the sky. while not stronger necessarily than the other terrain crowns in their own domains, they are top of the food chain for the creatures living on the ground, and could probably take out the undead that venture near the surface, and I have high hopes for seeing a Sky Giant v Dragon in the next book. 

Cool, we got our organization of information. We learn something about them based on their placements within the triangles. But is that our symbol? No! Symbols are different than graphs, we should be able to squeeze ridiculous amounts of meaning from them, and we aren’t done yet. The two triangles map really, really well together.

What does the placement of the two triangles together tell us about the individual components?

a WHOLE TON. This is what makes this symbol the most satisfying, the triangles create two separate categorizations of their powers and abilities, but they inform each other. The morality of the terrain beings, and the domains of morality beings. 

Dragons run the whole spectrum from creation to destruction. We see a lot more of the destruction dragons, because our kids are in a war, but Raxtus hits really close to the Fairies and can heal and grow with his breath weapon. We also have wizards, who chose mortality for the ability to use magic to create. All the way to effing Navarog, honorary demon. They run every shade of the creation/destruction spectrum. We also see dragons that don’t depend on destruction because we know that there are some that agreed to behave if it meant they weren’t shoved into sanctuaries. 

Sky giants, the group we know the least about, are good enough that their queen was deemed able to be the caretaker of a dragon sanctuary, so no inherent thirst for destruction and chaos. But they run the neutral side of creation, they weren’t going to step in to stop the demons, they like magic and creating from what we know of thronis, but they fit right here. 

Underking - fall between neutral destruction. The underking wasn’t orchestrating the opening of the demon prison. They crave life, its a food source, but more than that, they want to endure. They might fall closer to demons in their taste for extinguishing life, but they need their wanting of life to continue existing. They might have individual prizes and desires for life, but because they depend on wanting life for their own continued existence, they will never organize themselves into taking over the world. Congrats, you’re only half as destructive as demons.

The morality on the terrain is much easier to see blatantly. Fairies have wings, but in no way do they control the sky, and they live on the ground. Demons...I’m sure some of them fly, but they tend to prefer caves like Granulas and pits like Jubaya and Kurisok. Prefer the night, though the light doesn’t harm them. Fittingly, the Fair Folk do not have the ability to fly on their own, and they live on the ground, not under it. 

sO SATISFying how those fit together. Are you weeping yet? This is harmony on the organizational level. 

But I claimed this was the perfect symbol, the ultimate. There is one more layer describing how every piece relates to every other piece, per the best symbols. 

Opposites

This is the least defined level of interaction, and each line is unique, while still being opposite its counterpart. We’ll start with the ones we have the least information about and go from there. 

Demon/sky giant: We know nothing, at the moment. They have never commented on each other, and have never interacted. Why didn’t sky giants show up to the Zzyzx party? Who knows! So I’m going to speculate here, and propose that they just really can’t stand each other’s presence. Demons stay away from sky giants, because giants are way bigger than them, and it is hard to feel powerful when you only come up to their knee, and sky giants don’t like demons because...eww, demons. 

Fair Folk/Dragon: We know that there are Fair Folk at all seven dragon sanctuaries. We know that the Fair Folk were there long before the sanctuaries were created. Fair Folk neutrality let both parties trust the dragons to part of their watch. It also seems that Dragons have a very difficult time staying neutral. We’ve seen a lot of flavors of dragon, but the one flavor we haven’t seen, possibly by its nature, is a neutral dragon. The closest we came was Dromadus, who was an abstaining pacifist for two books, but kept lending help to the innocent and those aligned with the innocent. His neutrality broke literally the week someone asked him to break it.

 Fascinatingly, the talents of the Fair Folk are actually the closest analog to the breath weapons of the dragons. One unique ability, can be augmented by training, can do something unique to the characteristics of the user. This is enough to make their uses of magic foils for each other in ways that they can’t be with the other races. In fact, they take human shape, their wizards act a lot like the talents of the Fair Folk.

Their final opposite string: physical appearance. Fair Folk are attractive (symetrical) humans. Dragons are hulking reptiles of scale and claw meant to let everyone who can see them know who is the top predator around. Fair folk are disarmingly beautiful. 

Fairy/Underking: The dichotomy that we know the most about because it’s the one the protagonists find themselves on opposite side of. I could double the length of this post talking about these opposite foils, but this is already ridiculously long, so I’ll keep it brief. Consult upcoming thesis for full analysis.

Most obvious aspect of this line? They literally cannot co-exist, one must overpower the other. Nova Songs are consumed by darkness, while crown-fueled Kendra literally turns the undead into bones and dust. The darkness and light can’t balance like the demon cursed area + Fairy shrine stone did in Shadow Plague, there is no middle ground.

While fairies and demons make the creation-destruction spectrum, Fairy and Underking make the Life-death line. Unicorns, who have so much life and youth that lectoblixes overdose to death on them, and the undead that give up the joys light and live to continue. Because Death lasts as long as life. 

And finally my favorite line of opposites, their crowns functions in exactly the opposite ways. The under-crown does not share power. It accumulates, you become one of consciousness of the crown. They swallow you up, and you will never take power from them. They will continue. Meanwhile the Fairy crown has had several owners, as identified by Risenmay in dw2. And the Fairy Crown shares magic in a way that the other crowns don’t. The fairy Queen shared her magic with Kendra, yes, but she also shared it with her husband. All the male fairies fell with the Fairy King, turning permanently into imps. Unless the Fairy Queen isn’t being honest about how that happened, that meant that the male half of the kingdom was under the authority of her husband when he fell. Which makes sense for this crown. One person can’t make a new person on their own, they have to have a male and a female genetic coding. For the crown that is all about creating and preserving life, that power isn’t meant to be wielded alone. The Fairy crown can share, can give, while the Undercrown can consume and take. They are complete opposites in this.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading through this preliminary thesis. Counterpoints, additions, and commentary are welcome. I want to flesh this out a little more before sending my transcendent, beautiful, unifying symbol to Mull and have him announce that I have officially cracked the code. Really tho, the fact that I can pull this together into a unifying symbol is pretty cool in terms of Mull’s worldbuilding. 

Photo by Mark Palframan via BoardGameGeek

I first played Five Crowns at a family reunion almost a decade ago, when we had like almost 10 players (iirc). The five suits are certainly above what I'm used to, but don't let that intimidate you. As you switch out cards in your hand, you goal is to make a matching set, with straights, flushes, 3 or more of a kind and other ways to avoid adding to your score. It can help with a wild card that changes each round or the Joker. You might find yourself catching a lucky break to get out and save yourself from points you really don't want.

Be warned, though, things get more daunting as the game progresses to 13-card hands and Kings as the wild card. Definitely have the reference guide handy and have someone good with numbers keep track of everyone's scores. But it's great fun, and we play this at least once a year when our elder sister visits!

Photo by Wouter Debisschop via BoardGameGeek

This one I played only a few months ago to ring in the new year with some friends. But man was it a blast to play! Made by the same folks behind Exploding Kittens (which I have yet to play), this chaotic game of aquarium-based strategy is unlike anything I'd ever played before. Build up your tank of mantis shrimp, then chose to add another one from the deck or attempt to steal ones of the same colour you drew from another player's tank. The colour you could get is shown on the back of the deck, and it really makes you consider risking it all or playing it safe to make that magic number.