@kuali said in Bookworm Fanbook 2 Discussion!:
@alicecheshire Actually, I stated (in the bit you quoted, even) that 'high capacity' and 'many colors' tend to coincide with one another at birth. Which is, in your wording, the inherent base mana capacity.
And then we see them diverge - in the case of RMCM users, especially - as the person's (current base) mana capacity grows, and their colors (as far as we know) do not. (Even with the speculation that it is possible to gain them one way or another, the standard expectation in the nobility is that the colors you have at baptism are your colors. No-one ever goes to get retested...) If you can grow one but not the other, then the two can't be inherently linked.
If the two were actually linked, then you would see one of a few possible odd effects in the RMCM users:
They would 'spontaneously' gain colors as their mana capacity rose
They would hit a capacity plateau they couldn't grow beyond without gaining more colors
The children of, say, a hypothetical Philine/Damuel marriage would randomly gain colors their parents lacked to suit the 'tier' they were the effective strength of
Philine and Damuel wouldn't be able to have a child above Laynoble strength no matter how strong they, themselves, were at the time (because they doesn't have enough colors to pass down).
...Admittedly, one or more of those could still turn out to be true later.
I don't think gaining colors would be spontaneous. There would probably be some kind of nebulous requirements to gain new colors, similar to how someone like Angelica can have a wind affinity but fail to get the corresponding blessing.
You would also need an explanation for how ultra-strong single-color feybeasts and feyplants (like the Lord of Winter, Riesefalke, Ruelle and Rarein) could happen at all. If the rules are different for humans than for everything else with mana, there needs to be a reason why humans get special rules.
I would say that more colors is correlated with more mana but there would be exceptions due to things like mana compression. You could have a person or feybeast with a ridiculous amount of one kind of mana but that's going to be a lot rarer than a person or feybeast with 3-4 colors who has less in any given color but more in total.
My personal theory, based on what we know of noble reproduction and mana colors, is that any baby with any detectable amount of mana picks up the color of their birth season. They have a starting mana capacity determined by the amount of mana their mother managed to give them, and a random selection of extra colors from the set their parents had (assuming either parent had extra colors for them to inherit, and they poured in enough mana to dye the child that many colors). There is a (currently little- or un- known) method for a noble to gain additional colors, which can then be passed on to their offspring, and a well known method (compression during the growth period) for gaining additional mana, which can also be passed on to their offspring.
I believe that gaining the affinity of their birth season is more or less confirmed in-story already. They haven't outright stated it but it'd be pretty difficult to resolve that not being the case with what's been said. It also makes sense that they would gain an affinity according to their birth season as well. We already know that the holy knights of the main five (or four? I'm not sure how Ewigliebe works here and the story hasn't addressed this detail yet) result in greater ambient mana of that color in the atmosphere. This is actually one of the things that has convinced me that there's, at least to a degree, a matter of mana exposure to gaining a given affinity. The more mana of a given type that you're exposed to at a young age, the more likely you are to have an affinity for that type of mana. I would guess, though, that your mana capacity at the time may play some role however. It seems like the greater your base capacity, the more likely you are to gain more affinities, at least to some degree. It's just that that doesn't seem to be the single deciding factor on it.
Essentially, the 'link' between (starting) mana capacity and (starting) mana colors is that both are (for the most part) capped by the amount of mana the mother donates during gestation. Except in cases (like RMCM laynobles, or Ruelle trees) where the 'parent(s)' lack enough colors to pass down, in which case you'd get something with a lot of mana, but few colors (like the jureve ingredients, or baby Samuel-with-an-S-note-spelling).
I would hazard a guess that having more mana and fewer affinities might actually be something that has potentially already happened in-story. We don't know what Rozemary's affinities are, we also don't know what Bezewanst's were as an example in the opposite direction. If we had that information, it could help clarify things quite a bit.
@alicecheshire said in Bookworm Fanbook 2 Discussion!:
And you can also explain variance within the same class of noble (if we're talking about having identical elements, for example) by a combination of differences in their compression methods and elemental affinity likely not being a simple binary on/off switch but more of an analog value. So instead of affinity being a simple 0/1, it could instead be 0.0-1.0 with any value in between those two being valid and having an affinity above a certain value would be considered having an affinity for that element. Admittedly, this last part is actually speculation on my part but it seems to line up with what we've seen in the story.
No, that part you're completely correct on. Rozemyne has all 7 colors, but her overall color is pale yellow/gold. Her wind and/or light are stronger than her other colors. That's all the evidence we need to confirm that there are multiple strengths that count as having a color.
I'd actually go as far as claiming that Bookworm's magic system is complex in what feels like a fairly realistic way. It seems like it's actually quite complex and many factors go into every facet of it. Probably why it's so fun to speculate about how it works, lol.
