#scholarofthefirstsin

Dark Souls II’s quest is a long an arduous path spanning multiple fallen kingdoms built upon fallen kingdoms. Each has had its own glory and downfall. Each plagued by its own sins. Each ruled by a person, or people, with their own faults.

Drangleic itself once belonged to another people, much like the United States. These people were killed, or perhaps driven underground (if you believe they are the dwarf-like gyrm people). Its king, Vendrick, was beloved by his people, and brought prosperity to the land, but also went overseas to conquer the land of the giants, which would follow him home to lay waste to the kingdom. You find undead soldiers still beating the corpses of giants, in what to me feels like a symbol for PTSD. The war never ended in their minds.

There is a land called Aldin where a ruler tried to contain a plague that drives people mad. The prisoners instanity makes them incredibly dangerous, going as far as blowing themselves up. The most dangerous prisoners were kept in matryoshka-style cages, just big enough for a single person. The ruler grew paranoid as the weight of their sins increased, and began sentencing anyone that might oppose them to the prison as well. Ultimately, they went mad with the very condition they sought to contain, and locked themselves away. The rest of the prisoners were simply left in their cells.

There was a queen who was rejected by the man she loved. In pursuit of beauty, she put her people to work, constructing a factory to produce chemicals that she felt improved her appearance. The toxic chemicals swept across the land, spoiling its crops, and transforming the people into monsters. The queen remained alone in her tower, tearing the faces off her personal guards so as to remain unseen.

There was a king who discovered a new way of forging iron. Proud of this technology, he had his castle cast in iron, but the castle’s weight caused it to sink slowly into the earth, flooded by magma. The king and his loyal knights, patriotic to the end, went down with their castle.

There was a lord whose people struck gold. While his citizens fought over the earth’s bounty, the lord sequestered himself in his private study, reading books, and caring for his exotic pet, a giant spider. The spider gave birth to millions of giant spiders, which overtook the land, and its people. Bereft of hope and leadership, the people fell into the hands of a cult, as their friends and neighbors died off one by one. Many still sought riches, despite everything. The lord just watched in amusement.

There was a king who worshipped a dragon. His people worked tirelessly to create a magnificent ziggurat to house the sleeping dragon. Another king saw the dragon’s blood as a path to enlightenment. The two nations fought, fueled by their religious fervor, but in the end, the dragon’s poisonous breath killed them all.

There was a good king, who inherited a great evil. Beneath his home burned the fires of an ancient evil. He and his bravest knights gave all they could to bury the sins of the past. The found themselves locked in an eternal struggle, unable to fully pacify it, and unable to look away. The knights souls fight on to this day. The queen, alone in her castle, prays their souls may one day find peace.

In the gutter, the rats feast on corpses and things discarded by humanity. Even they have their king. They defend what little they can from man, deep in the places nobody cares to look.

You travel the world as a nobody, seeking to end the curse afflicting yourself, and the people of Drangleic. Some people you meet on your travels suggest that life itself is the curse, and thag death is the only cure. Some cling to the religious stories of old, unsure of their original meaning or authenticity. Still others simply live life as normally as they can, selling trinkets and fighting monsters. Others spread malice and evil across the land, presenting no reason in particular.

Your quest leads you to seek the true throne of Drangleic, and become a “true monarch”. You put the souls of old kings and lords to rest, bearing witness to their follies. Eventually, everyone more powerful than you is dead. It’s just you, and the trone awaiting you, across a bridge made from the bodies of the last king’s slaves.

What will you do? Take the trone, or abandon it?

Will you accept the burden of history, or bury that history? Will you inherit a legacy of darkness, steering its future toward the light, or leave humanity to its own devices, uncontrolled, for better or worse?

I love this choice, because unlike Dark Souls’ choice of “set yourself on fire for the greater good” or “become very evil”, Dark Souls II leaves it up to the player to imagine their character’s true goal. By making the choice about the means, rather than the end, Dark Souls II presents a really nuanced moral question about how we chose to relate to our own troubled history, with regards to our families (there is a lot of family stuff in this game too, two demons born from the same great darkness, both very troubled, one good and one evil, there’s also an estranged father/daughter in your hub town), our culture, and our society as well. In that sense, it’s a bit of a coming of age story. After all, when we reach adulthood, everyone has to decide what traditional wisdom to follow, and what to ignore. Which memories to treasure, and which to move on from. What to do with one’s life, knowing there’s only so much any one person change, but that people really do change the world every day?

I particularly love the Emerald Herald’s monologue if you take the throne, stating that there’s no reason you have to do things the way they’ve been done before, just because you’ve inherited the throne. You can do new things using the traditional channels!

You don’t need a revolution to make a difference!

You can be successful in the traditional sense, but what you do with that success is up to you!

Most importantly, you don’t need to embrace any political, religious, or cultural standard to attain that success. You can reject patriotism, bigotry, greed, superficiality, any religious or non-religious creed, and even your own upbringing, and still be a kind, strong, successful person.

Or you can reject the throne entirely, and forge your own path, as a lucky few manage to.

do you think heaven's version of MGSV has Kingdom of the Flies in it

THIS HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PREUZIEN BUT I SAID I’D DO IT SO LET’S GET STARTED.

The most difficult thing about making Ground moves supereffective against Flying is the fact that I headcanon that Type immunities are based on Aura. All attacks contain within them a certain Typed Aura (a concept my friend @alchemiicalioness basically came up with)--Earthquake would have Ground Aura, Feint Attack would have Dark Aura, etc. I also stole a hc from RWBY about Aura coming from the soul: Pokémon Typings come from the Typed Aura that dominates in their soul, and it is the Typed Aura in their soul that forms the basis for weaknesses, resistances and immunities. The reason this would make it so hard to overcome the Flying immunity to Ground is because even if a Ground move like HP Ground or Mud Bomb can fly through the air and hit a Flying-type, they may get physically hit, but they will feel no effect from the Ground Aura.

Now, the easiest way is to just spirit hack the Flying Pokémon like I mentioned here about spirit hacking Fairies. However, I won’t stick to this method for two reasons:

One, spirit hacking will only work on Flying Pokémon that are of a spiritual nature--aka Dark/Flying, Ghost/Flying and Fairy/Flying; spirit hacking doesn’t work with nonspirit Pokémon because their Auras are too “solid,” and spirits are defined by the fluidity of their Auras. By fluidity, I mean the ability for the Pokémon’s Soul Aura to change Type, temporarily or permanently, or combine with another Type. As Pokémon age, their Auras become more fluid. But that’s a discussion topic for another time.

And two, I want to come up with a new method that I haven’t used before.

So here we go.

First, let me give you my definition of supereffective: A supereffective move is one that inflicts severe physical or Aural damage. Note how I didn’t say “by virtue of the move’s Typing,” although that certainly is a factor. What does this mean? It means that by far the easiest way to do this is simply hit a Flying-type in weak spots like the chest, throat, head, etc. with “airborne” Ground moves such as Mud Bomb. The move will not do Aural damage, but it will do severe physical damage. This is how many Pokémon “cheat” the type advantage system when they have a disadvantage—they use physical movements such as punching, kicking and grabbing to get the advantage. (I think there was that one time when Ash’s Swellow was grabbed by a Hariyama and thrown to the ground—that’s an example of it.) Small digressing sidenote: This doesn’t work with Normal and Fighting moves against Ghost Pokémon because Ghost-types can just disappear around a punch or kick, so only Aural damage can affect them—and Ghost-types are immune to Normal and Fighting Aura.

But that’s not the most effective way to get damage done, because physical damage is easier to dodge than Aural damage. And, as I just mentioned, a Ghost/Flying Pokémon won’t be affected by physical damage since it can just disappear around any physical movement (unless Foresight is used); other Flying Pokémon with sufficiently fluid Auras can also evade physical damage in the same way. In order to truly break the Flying-type immunity to Ground, I must do it on the Aural level.

To start, let me lay out the true natures of these two Auras. Ground Aura is the Aura of the earth. Flying Aura is the Aura of the heavens. I believe that when Nintendo made Flying (Heaven) immune to Ground (Earth), they made the assumption that the Earth cannot touch the Heavens. But if you look at photographs in which the sky and earth meet on the horizon, the mere fact that air particles are probably touching the ground as I write, and even the universal truth that saintly (heavenly) and devilish (hellish/earthly) traits coexisting in the same person, Heaven and Earth can meet.

The solution to the Ground-Flying problem is to Aurally close the gap.

If Ground and Flying Aura repel each other by “not touching,” one can visualize it as two magnets with their like sides refusing to touch. Though magnetism is not the best metaphor on the scientific level because the opposites of Heaven and Earth are repelling instead of attracting, the visual of two magnets repelling each other most accurately depicts what is going on with one Type that is immune to another.

Now, let’s say immunities happen when one Aura bounces off (repulsion-based immunity) or is nullified by (cancelation-based immunity) the other, and simply can’t connect in a way that does damage.

If we make that assumption, the Ground-Flying immunity is a repulsion-based immunity, which means Ground and Flying act like two magnets that can’t touch each other.

And how do you cause two repelling magnets to stick? Turn one magnet around.

You might say that just because you can hit a Pokémon this way, doesn’t mean the hit becomes supereffective. But the mere fact that Ground and Flying are repulsing opposites will cause an explosive reaction from the Aura that was supposed to be immune, explosive enough to render damage from the repulsing opposite supereffective. This is because repulsing Auras are structured such that one Aura never ‘has to’ touch another (in contrast with canceling Auras, which do touch and one is canceled out). It’s like having a thick shell of armor around you, but once that armor is broken, the inside is extremely weak. (This doesn’t work for cancellation-based resistances and immunities because the resisting Aura is naturally primed to cancel out the resisted Aura, and receives no such explosive reaction.)

I can think of two ways to do this.

#1: Get a Gliscor, a Ground Pokémon with Hidden Power Flying, or a Flying Pokémon with Hidden Power Ground.

In this method, the Ground-Flying dialectic is pre-synthesized. The repelling magnets have already been put together in the Pokémon itself, and so can be used against another Pokémon in certain ways. A Gliscor naturally produces Ground Aura that can reconcile itself with Flying Aura, because the Ground and Flying Auras coexist inside it so well that they can combine in the biological Type-combining mechanism known as synthesis—the Type Auras actually combine instead of simply being held in separate parts of the body. (All Pokémon of more than one typing have a Type synthesis in them, but those with one Type weak to or immune to the other have stronger Syntheses than others. If they didn’t, their bodies would either explode from the repelling Auras or implode from the canceling Auras.) Side note: This would make Gliscor an excellent predator of other Flying-types, so that’s what I’ll make it.

So all the Gliscor has to do is infuse its natural Ground Aura into any Flying attack, which will do the trick. The Flying Pokémon with HP Ground will also combine HP Ground with a Flying attack, and the Ground Pokémon with HP Flying will combine HP Flying with a Ground attack.

Now imagine a synthesized Ground/Flying Aura hitting a Flying Pokémon, whose biological system was designed to keep those two things separate, but is forced to take the hit.

Ouch, am I right?

Note, however, that using a Gliscor is the easier path because it is fully typed Ground and Flying, whereas Hidden Power does not affect the Pokémon’s main typing and doesn’t add STAB. In order to use the Hidden Power method effectively, you have to train with it for a long ass time until your Ground Pokémon is Quasityped (aka receives 1.25x STAB from moves of the corresponding Quasitype) Flying or your Flying Pokémon is Quasityped Ground. And this is a path that many people choose not to go down because although Quasityping gives you the STAB bonus and 1.25x resistance any Type that the Quasitype resists, it also makes you 1.25x weaker to any Type that the Quasitype is weaker to—which is an irreversible risk that not everyone wants to take.

#2: Use Gravity or Smack Down and then any Ground move, preferably Earth Power.

This one is a lot more straightforward. Gravity and Smack Down could be said to directly target the biological repulsion mechanism in the Flying-type Aura, not just by bringing them physically to the ground without removing their Flying type like Roost (surprise surprise, this is canon) but also by weakening the Flying Aura itself. By “weakening,” I mean activating the Repulsion-based immunity and smashing it on an Aural level. Smack Down is the only Rock-type move that can do this because it is the only Rock move with an Aura that targets the repulsion mechanism and dismantles it. Gravity can do this by being a Psychic-type move because it makes the body lose the “will” to maintain the repulsion mechanism, turning off the immunity almost like a toxin that blocks bodily functions. Once the Flying Aura is weakened to a certain point, Ground moves will become supereffective against it. Smack Down is particularly good at doing this and will get you there in an instant, but it is quite easily dodged by an agile flier, and does not completely remove the immunity mechanism. Gravity will take up to a minute before it sufficiently weakens the Flying Aura and can be blocked by Taunt, but it is undodgeable and completely removes the immunity mechanism. Choose wisely.

Also, why Earth Power instead of other moves? Because Earth Power is the Ground-type attack that contains the most Ground Aura in its purest form. Canonically Earthquake has a power of 100 whereas Earth Power has a power of only 90, but since I see Earth Power as channeling the actual power of the earth rather than channeling your own power to move it, it has the potential to be stronger than Earthquake. And since you’re channeling the power of the actual ground and not just little old you, Earth Power has the best chance of breaking down whatever immunity that the Flying-type has left after Smack Down, and hits for the most devastating damage once Gravity completely destroys the immunity.

Extra worldbuilding tidbit: Ground-type specialists who hit Flying-type Pokémon supereffectively would call these horizon techniques, because the horizon is where the sky meets the earth.

you ship mizuki with like 20 people

i will place a copy of new vegas at your grave, so you can play in heaven