mechanimism

Tropes-a-Day: Named Weapons / I Call It Vera

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Named Weapons: Inevitably, since mechanimism is such a pervasive memeplex, where all the custom-designed and customized, personalized, prototype, historically significant, or merely used-by-one-person-in-a-tight-spot-or-for-a-long-time weapons are concerned. Even leaving aside the ones which are run by animating intelligences, who of course have names by virtue of being animating intelligences.

Granted, while many of those are indeed adequately elegant, mythic, threatening, or at least as adequately styled by their crafters as, say, the Engine of Empyrean Enlightenment, many are also codenames (say, CALYX HOLLOW or FATEFUL LIGHTNING) or merely evolved forms of…

I Call It Vera: Mechanimism ensures that this gets played straight, too, especially for anything as inherently personal as a chap’s weapons. And, y’know, if they later become historically or mythopoetically significant, it’s not like you can go around changing its name retroactively. Bad form, that would be.

Trope-a-Day: Genius Loci

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(‘Bout time I got back to these, I think.)

Genius Loci: Quite a lot of them, from the simple usually-non-sophont AIs that run people’s houses and apartments (the “house brains”) to the increasingly sophisticated “city managers” and other AIs that run cities, provinces, transport networks, ports, and so forth, up to the planai and other archai that are responsible for the infrastructure of entire planets and star systems.  And, of course, to a large extent the Transcend can be interpreted as a Genius Loci for the Empire as a whole.

(This, of course, from the local perspective, is merely the realization of ancient thoughts on animism.)

Trope-a-Day: Companion Cube

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Companion Cube: This tendency has only amplified the traditional animist features of eldraeic religion, the more so since there are lots of AI-driven machines exhibiting quirks of personality and intentional behavior around these days.  (In-world, this memeplex is called mechanimism.)  And while everyone understands that mechanimism isn’t literally true, everyone also understands that it is nonetheless fundamentally true.

This is why even the non-sophont drones get medals.