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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3230398" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have no problem with anthropomorphism, but if we make even the alien anthropomorphic then we are painting with a pretty narrow palette.  Are things that are inhuman so uninteresting that we must banish them from existence?  I suppose one could argue that by incarnating an abstraction in any form we are anthropomorphicizing it, but I see no need to carry that trend any further than that.  I find it stretches the mind more to hold alien ideas at as great of distance from our common experience as our imagination allows.I hear this argument all the time.  I find in unconvincing.  A fire elemental does not have to know what fire is to be firey.  I fire elemental is fire incarnate by definition.  It can't get any more firey than that.  It is firey.  If it doesn't know what fire is, then fire itself doesn't know what it is.  That's like having a rock not know its shape.  If a rock does not know its shape, how does it hold itself with such rigidity, and if it does not need to know its shape to intrinsicly be it's shape, then neither does a fire elemental have to know fire in order to be firey.Likewise, we would never say, "How does a sailor know the sea, unless he has lived in the desert.  Experience with dryness is not necessary for the understanding of wetness.   Conversely, a desert nomad does not have to see the ocean in order to understand the sand.  A person who has lived always in light without ever seeing darkness does not need to see darkness to know all thier is to know about light, and a person living for ever in darkness does not need to know the light to know the darkness.  Experiencing the phenomenom of light doesn't provide any more information about the darkness than was present without.  It educates about the light, not about its absence.   I reject the notion that we must experience the absense of the thing to know, understand or even appreciate it.  Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but absense is not necessary to develop fondness.   For example, quite a few people have a great appreciation for food, even though they've never really known hunger.In which case, it will cease to be an elemental.  Why do singularities seem so abhorent to you?I'm not.  But don't think that you can separate them by a great difference, especially in the D&D cosmology.  If good is not related to the positive element in some fashion, then you are going to have a hard time explaining why the negative element is so often linked to absolute evil.I didn't say it was.  I said that it was always additive, which isn't the same thing at all.  Of course additive processes aren't always beneficial, especially to beings of such a mixed corpus as ourselves, but the natural way to look at parasitic processes is that they are subtractive (blood drinking, for example).   We need a new word since in our enthropy bound universe of finite energy, you don't find creatures giving away more than they take.  Cancerous comes close, because it carries the idea of run away growth, but it is still growth which is parasitic in a way that a positive elemental creature should not be.Sure, but this is still an additive process.</blockquote>

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