Relationship between Wu xing and the five elements in Solomon games

Peppermaster

I know Mr. Raptis never thought about relating Wu xing(also means five elements) with the elements in Solomon game(I hardly doubt he ever heard Wu xing before) but I found many coincidental links between those two. My knowledge of Wu xing is very shallow (wu xing is very complex philosophy anyway) but I'll elaborate how the magic in Solomon game can be interpreted in Wu xing for fun and inspirational purposes:

Wu Xing's five elements 

(disclaimer: this simplified explanation of wu xing is not completely accurate description of wu xing.)

Wu xing is an ancient Daoist theory of five elements. It has total five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. Each element. Unlike the four elements in ancient greek philosophy, The five elements have unique properties and representations among each other:

 Wood is a force of creation, expansion, and birth

 Fire is a force of energy, zenith, and passion

 Earth is a force of harmony, unification, and equilibrium

 Metal is a force of determination, suppression, and collection

 Water is a force of nether, conservation, wisdom, and dormant

There are various relationship between each two elements. Despite its importance, I am not going to talk about this because those are unnecessary details that will confuse us all. If any of you guys need some info about wu xing like what season does each element represents, feel free to ask.

What does each element of Solomon game represents in Wu xing?

Fire, Earth, Water(Frost) is pretty obvious but lightning(air) and ether is the tricky ones because they are not metal and wood. The answer of this question is very subjective and not absolute but I would say lightning is equivalent to wood and ether is equivalent to metal. 

There are three reasons I think why lightning is equivalent to wood. First, all living creature requires electric flow to live (think of how our neurons sends signal using electricity). Second, lightning expanse to other objects by chaining. Third, exerting electricity can bring people alive like AED. 

Ether was the most difficult one to find the equivalence but eventually I found the three reasons for it also. First, magic missile shows the characteristic of determination by chasing the enemy down relentlessly. Second, ether drain spell shows the characteristic of collection by pulling everything into the hole. Third, when you weld ether with other elements, the main characteristic of the resultant spell is always a homing missile. 

Does the other three match with the characteristics of wu xing elements? My answer to it is yes. Because frost is a force of nether and dormant, Thorinius, the inventor of frost magic, used frost magic to disturb the children (a force of fire) and made them silent. For Earth we can say that because Earth is a force of unification, you must gather rocks to create a boulder. Of course, fire is just too self explanatory so I will not talk about that.

What would be other spells like Necromancy, Druidism, etc? Considering Necromancy is related to death, which is also an eternal sleep,  necromancy can be considered a close toward water element. Druidism... ...is just simply wood element which is represented as lightning in Solomon universe. Holy element can considered close to Fire because holy is all about zeal, warmth, zenith, and light. Poison is close to metal because poison takes away your health and weakens your strength. Turn Undead spell, unlike most holy related spell, is close to wood(lightning) because it puts energy into the undeads (and some sick and elderly) to make them flee.

Possible ways of Implementation in Solomon game

This wu xing theory can used to describe how the eastern wizards understands the magic. There can be books found in Keep about the theories of magic of Eastern kingdoms or a foreign wizard from the east who talks about the difference between eastern hexology and western hexology. This theory can be elaborated better in the planned Son's of Solomon which will allow us to explore places that we only heard.

Also, it be used for categorizing Samurai skill tree like Hono(Fire in Japanese) as a damage-related attacks, Mizu(Water) as a counter and lifesteal skills, Tetsu(Metal) as a defensive skills, Mok(Wood) as a buff related skills, Daichi(Earth) as a general passive skills like dodge. In fact, you can also apply this wu xing system to other classes as well. For example, Necromancer currently has black magic, curse, and necromancy as skill tree. We can consider black magic as fire (because these spells are very powerful and volatile), Necromancy as wood (you give "birth" to the undead), and curses as metal (suppresses enemy's potentials) and make two more categories related to water (more defensive and utility skills) and earth (utility passive skills that empowers other types of skills). 

For a such a coincidence, there are so many elements of Wu xing within the magics of Solomon universe that I could actually believe that Mr. Raptis planned this whole thing. I hope this helps in forming the Solomon universe in any way.

"Keep" up the good work Mr. Raptis :D

Raptisoft

Hey... I'm bookmarking this to talk to you about it when I actually sit down to work on the Samurai himself. 

Peppermaster

@Raptisoft

Just three quick questions about Samurai

1. Would Samurai skills have japaneese name (Ex. Kamaitachi) or localized name (Ex. slashing wind)?

2. Does non-mage characters like rouge and Samurai have mana?

3. Would Samurai be able to use ninjitsu or daoist rituals or flying swords(don't know how to translate this in English)?

war2k

Will the elements by any chance be following a chart where one is stronger(and vise-versa?) than the other and the merger of two elements form another element? Something like in these charts

Peppermaster

@war2k

Wu xing is not about what is stronger to what thing or not. For example, water normally extinguishes fire but fire can also boil water.

The first picture is completely wrong (gosh darn naruto). First, wind and lightning are not the main elements of Wu xing (well, if you are talking about Japanese Buddism 5 elements, lightning should be void). Second, Wu xing is not about combining two elements to form another. Elements are merely a label of a group which has a certain characteristics. Please don't use naruto or avatar to understand Wu xing. They are terrible representation of wu xing.

Second picture is decent but has some problems too. Earth is not really about movement but more about equilibrium because Earth has characteristic of all four elements. It is technically half right but very misleading. Water is not about emotion because there are emotions for every elements. I understand what the artist was intending for that definition but it is still very misleading. Also, electricity is not related to metal or water (more close to fire and wood).

To make it more clear, think of the elements as categories of characteristics instead of the element itself. For example, wood has a characteristic of birth and life. That is why I used Wu xing to categorize skills on the implementation section.