Elements of Disharmony · 10:30pm Jul 13th, 2015
Because the purpose of an Element of Disharmony, as borne by an authorized agent of Chaos, is to instill that element in others or use that element in others to stir up disharmony, the Elements all individually grant magical abilities. Elements of Harmony mostly don't; they may have a slight effect in inspiring others to exemplify the element, but Applejack doesn't seem to make anyone but her family members, who were already inclined to honesty, more honest, and Rainbow Dash doesn't seem to inspire loyalty, so I feel as if Elements of Harmony are primarily a key for activating a connection to the Tree of Harmony and channeling its power, so they are incredibly powerful in a group. (Magic is different to a certain extent. It has its own abilities.)
The Elements of Disharmony are different. They are intended to work alone. They do not channel the power of the chaos avatar; they draw from disharmony, which most chaos avatars also do, but so do beings like the Sirens. All seven of them together have the raw magical power of the chaos avatar, but they cannot work together, so there is no way they can combine their force to equal a chaos avatar. (Their creator -- not Discord, a prior avatar -- didn't take chances.) Each one grants abilities, but some of the abilities are specific to being an authorized deputy of Chaos; if the chaos avatar acknowledges your connection, you get extra abilities, and if he doesn't, you get some booby traps. It's designed to make sure disharmony is caused, either way.
All Elements of Disharmony, like Elements of Harmony, must be granted to someone who already has the trait as a large component of their personality.
All Elements of Disharmony have positive uses. Disharmony isn't evil necessarily. It's more likely to be evil than Chaos is, but even negative traits have positive uses. Deception, in particular, enhances artistic ability, and even Hatred can be used positively if the object of Hatred is something that is objectively really, really bad. However, because of the backlash where the trait starts to consume you if you are not a true Bearer, it is ironically much easier to use them for good if you are a true Bearer, recognized by the chaos avatar.
Arrogance:
grants charisma, almost but not quite to the level of mind control
blocks mind control from others, strengthens will
grants user insight into, and ability to manipulate, the arrogance of others; makes the user a more effective manipulator of leaders
If used by a non-bearer: hardens opinion, makes the mind inflexible
Makes the user act like an overbearing jerk, hampering the charisma
Causes the paranoid fear that everyone wants your power; no insight into others with arrogance
Rage:
grants physical strength and speed in proportion to anger
grants clarity of thought in anger, making actions taken in rage much more rational and calculating than they would otherwise be
grants user insight into, and ability to manipulate, the rage of others; can provoke others more easily, can sense what actions an enraged other will take
grants resistance to mind control to calm anger
If used by a non-bearer: increases temper, making rage more likely and frequent
Does not grant insight, does not grant clarity of thought in rage
Greed:
Grants ability to find objects of desire more easily
Grants resistance to mind control that would lead to giving up objects of desire, manipulation of desire
Grants enhanced physical, intellectual or magical abilities when used in acquiring or keeping objects of desire
grants user insight into, and ability to manipulate, greed of others; can sense what others want, influence what they want, influence them into giving up what they want (to the user) or clinging to it harder
If used by a non-bearer: makes greed obsessive, functionally uncontrollable
Causes the paranoid fear that everyone wants your stuff; no insight into others' greed
Deception:
grants enhanced ability to lie, enhancements to magical or mundane illusions such as acting ability, makeup and disguise, casting illusions
improves any type of artistic ability; enhances mind control abilities, any mental attack; enhances the ability to manipulate
grants ability to detect deception, insight into the deceptions of others and the ability to lure others into deception more easily
If used by a non-bearer: makes user a compulsive liar or compelled to enact more grandiose deceptions that may more easily get caught
does not grant insight into deception; causes paranoia and mistrust, belief that everyone is lying
Selfishness:
grants resistance to mind control in general, also resistance to empathy when sympathizing with others would block you getting what you want
grants enhanced intellectual, physical and magical ability in the course of pursuing what you want
grants enhanced intellectual, physical and magical ability in self-defense but not in protecting what you have; that's a primary difference from greed
grants insight into the selfishness of others, ability to provoke the emotion in others, ability to make others more sympathetic and giving to the user only
If used by a non-bearer: makes the user a sociopath, selfish to the point of being unable to comprehend empathy
does not grant insight, does not enhance the ability to manipulate others' emotions
Cruelty:
makes users keenly capable of detecting weak points in sentient beings (physical or emotional)
enhances the user's physical, intellectual or magical abilities when attempting to cause others to suffer
grants resistance to emotional manipulation that would counter cruelty, whether emotional or magical
grants ability to detect sadistic desires in others, provoke and direct them
If used by a non-bearer: makes the user compulsively sadistic
does not grant insight, does not enhance the ability to make others cruel
Hatred:
grants user enhanced physical, magical and intellectual abilities when they are actively experiencing hate
grants ability to detect weaknesses in the object of hate
strengthens hate; provides protection from mind control, particularly from the object of hate
grants ability to inspire hatred in others, provoke and direct it; ability to detect hatred in others and perceive its target
If used by a non-bearer: user becomes obsessively hateful, despising everyone and everything
does not grant insight into others' hatred; does not allow one to manipulate hatred in others
Note: A powerful magic user, when using an Element of Disharmony as a component of a ritual spell, can get around some of the backlash. Specifically, the abilities to inspire, detect or direct the given trait in others can be accessed by a non-bearer tying it into a complex spell. However, there is no way to get around the enhancement of the trait to the point of dysfunctionality if one is not a bearer. So for example, an extremely powerful unicorn (pre-alicorn Twilight, Sombra, Starswirl, Sunset Shimmer, Starlight Glimmer level) could cast a spell to plunge an entire town into uncontrollable rage by tying the Element of Rage into a ritual spell that is connected to a broadcaster (some examples of broadcasters include the Crystal Heart and the Elements of Harmony, but there are ones that are more frequently used to conduct darker emotions as well), but they would not be able to control their own rage.
Basically, the fundamental principle of the Elements of Disharmony and what they do:
-There's a lot of overlap. Anger leads to Hatred leads to Cruelty, in real life; Selfishness leads to Greed; Arrogance and Selfishness go hand in hand and Deception supports them both; and so forth.
- Enhance your abilities when you are displaying the trait, particularly in the course of pursuing the goal of a trait. This includes your intelligence and clarity of thinking, so traits that normally might cloud your thinking like greed or rage are much easier for you to control in such a way that you get what you want. If your temper surging would normally lead you to punch someone, and you carry the Element of Rage, you will be able to control yourself, recognize that now is not a good time to punch them, and develop a plan that will let you punch them later when you won't get caught.
- Grant resistance to mind control and mundane means of influence that would lead you to turn away from the trait. If you carry the Element of Selfishness, your natural empathy and resistance to stepping on others in pursuit of what you want will be weakened, enabling you to pursue your desires more ruthlessly. If you carry the Element of Greed, no one can persuade you to give up what you want unless they offer you something you want more. Calming spells and the influence of the Element of Kindness won't work on the bearers of Rage or Hatred.
- Grant the ability to detect and influence the trait in others, either increasing it, or decreasing it if doing so would support your trait (Selfishness and Greed both have the ability to make others more willing to give their stuff to you, decreasing their selfishness and greed to satisfy yours.)
The backlash always enhances the trait in you to the point where you can no longer be rational about it. Intelligence might still be enhanced but clarity of thought is always decreased by the backlash. And if you are not an authorized Bearer of Disharmony (meaning, chaos didn't give you the mystical connection to the trait, you just found the magic item) and you're not using the item as part of a spell, you don't get the ability to detect and manipulate the trait in others.
Note that for both the Elements of Harmony and Disharmony, there's an ur-connection, an identity level bond to the mystic source of the trait, and there's a physical item. The ur-connection can be used in the absence of the physical item if it is strong enough, and if the physical item is available it will reconstruct in the presence of the Bearer using it (so physical Elements of Harmony cannot actually be destroyed or indefinitely separated from their Bearers as long as the ur-connection is present; this is how Equestria Girls Mane 5 can use their power in conjunction with Twilight, even though she is not in possession of the physical Element of Magic. This is also why Discord hid the Elements in a really obvious place and concentrated on making the Bearers incapable of using them, trying to break the ur-connection, rather than throwing the Elements in a volcano or something.) The avatar grants the ur-connection; the Tree of Harmony must recognize a Bearer of Harmony, the Chaos avatar must recognize a Bearer of Disharmony. (Sometimes the Chaos avatar is not the Disharmony avatar. In that case, both can grant the bond. This has actually created cases where the two were fighting each other via proxies and both made sets of Disharmony Bearers. In such a case, generally the Disharmony Bearers granted by the Disharmony avatar are stronger, but those created by the Chaos avatar can work together, albeit not well. Chaos isn't bound to Disharmony's rules when Chaos isn't bound to Disharmony.)
Disharmony Bearers naturally feud with each other, usually to the point of not even being able to have a civil conversation, but they have no such repulsion from the avatar; the Chaos/Disharmony avatar can get along just fine with the Disharmony Bearers, individually.
Note that the Elements of Disharmony are not the opposing components of the Elements of Opposition, but there are a lot of similarities. Corrupted Laughter is the only Element of Opposition that has no direct counterpart among the Elements of Disharmony; Corrupted Kindness has many of the same abilities as Cruelty, Corrupted Honesty has similar abilities to Deception, Corrupted Generosity bears many of the powers of Greed, and Corrupted Loyalty has resemblances to Selfishness. (Magic also has no counterpart because Magic was Corrupted by Order, not Chaos.)
Ah, elementalism. Always fun. And I've probably said this before, but I do love how there's a prime number of Elements of Disharmony. No chance for even factions or subcliques. It's every Bearer for him-, her-, or itself.
... Sudden idea. What if the key to defeating Anon isn't getting the elements of disharmony into the hands of their bearers, but getting one, several, or all of them, onto HIM, and disrupting how his childish mind works?
Interesting, I've been wondering about them. A few questions:
1) The combined Elements of Disharmony can't summon a chaos avatar, can they do anything at all as a group? (I think Discord once implied they could, but he couldn't remember what it was and it had never actually been pulled off). Even if they can't if Anon finds out about them, I could see his powers actually forcing the Elements of Disharmony to somehow work together for some kind of grand final-boss effect to give him the ultimate showdown that he subconsciously craves.
2) What about Whinny? Discord was sure he wasn't the official Bearer of Greed, but then he said that Whinny had somehow activated the full powers of the Element, just as if he was an official bearer. Was Discord mistaken, or can an un-authorized bearer actually unlock the Element with a sufficient amount of time (probably many centuries) of living the ideal?
3) Wait, there is an avatar of Disharmony seperate from Chaos? What the frick? I thought there were 3 forces, Chaos, Harmony, and Order, how does Disharmony generate its own avatars? (This is probably something you would answer in a future blog post, if at all).
i just remembered that in jewish numerology, 7 is the number of God meaning perfection. While 6, unable to reach 7, is imperfection (reason for 666 to be the number of the beast).
Just thinking is ironic how harmony is 6 while disharmony is 7.
BTW whats that about an avatar of disharmony? Is that foreshadowing for things to come in Not The Hero?
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I did that on purpose. Since six was established to be the harmony number, I set seven as the disharmony number precisely because it's an inversion of Judeo-Christian lore, because subverting the dominant paradigm is fun. :-)
Mostly the disharmony avatar stuff was just me thinking things out; I don't intend to actually separate Discord from disharmony, ever, but I like the idea that Chaos and Disharmony are not the same thing, just complementary. (To be completely honest, though, the newest Not the Hero chapter is going to feature Discord having a bit of a crisis of faith about disharmony. I don't plan to resolve said crisis by having him give it up, though.)
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Winnie wasn't a true Bearer and had suffered the backlash -- he was entirely non-rational about his greed -- but he was able to push back against Discord's magic directly through the Element. Normally, while the Element would provide a non-Bearer resistance to a lot of things, resisting Discord would be out of bounds for someone who isn't officially a Bearer.
"Chaos and Disharmony" are two separate things; technically speaking there has always been a Disharmony avatar to oppose the Tree directly, as the Chaos and Order avatars oppose each other directly, but the Disharmony avatar is almost always also the Chaos avatar, and if the Chaos avatar chooses to leave aside Disharmony, the force that chooses the Chaos avatar will sometimes set up a separate Disharmony avatar. I have some suspicions about when that might have happened in the past, but nothing concrete yet. Disharmony isn't really a separate force like Order, Chaos and Harmony are, which is why it's more of an afterthought.
Wouldn't Corrupted Laughter's opposite be rage? I mean, if laughter is basically joy then wouldn't rage be its opposite?
Interesting that of all those, the only one Discord objects to using is Hatred (though he finds the people who use Cruelty slightly unpalatable). Just from reading the descriptions, Cruelty jumps out as being the one custom-tailored to lead to horrible, morally objectionable situations. I guess you could use Hatred to raise a torches-and-pitchforks army, but that hardly seems like the only way to use it. I bet there's an interesting story behind his not liking that one Element.
Also, Arrogance strikes me as the least dangerous one for a non-bearer to use; it's slightly self-defeating against the main draw of the Element, but being made stubborn, inflexible and paranoid is way better than losing all concept of empathy or compulsive lying. It's at least possible to be effective that way if you started yourself off moving in a good direction. That or Greed, since it just forces you to turn up behaviors you were probably already doing to eleven. Most dragons and a handful of normal ponies have it just as bad without magical help.
3235900 That's very interesting. This may not be relevant in your current stories, but over the long term, if Discord stays fully reformed, I wonder if his Disharmony avatar status will be repealed, and it will go to a siren somewhere?
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Wait, so if Discord had accepted the tree's deal ages ago to give up disharmony for an element, he could have still become the avatar of chaos?
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It was when Discord corrupted Pinkie, the Bearer of Laughter. But in Elements of Opposition, when the alternate Discord corrupted the Element of Laughter directly in the other universe, the end result was not that laughter was transformed into rage, but that laughter was repurposed to serve Disharmony. The alternate Pinkie thinks that killing and eating ponies is funny.
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Cruelty usually ends up being really bad on a personal level -- it produces the Marquis de Sade, if he actually did all the crap he wrote about. But Hatred produces genocides. The previous Chaos avatar, Mayhem, corrupted Yggsdrasil with it and brought about the second Fimbulwinter (aka, the coming of the windigos), which wiped out or depopulated many species, including Mayhem and Discord's own. Admittedly, that was via an authorized user -- as a Chaos avatar, Mayhem was free to deputize a Hatred Bearer to corrupt Yggsdrasil -- but unauthorized users have been known to become demagogues, or to turn to dark magic and become fully corrupted.
And yeah, Arrogance and Greed aren't always going to destroy your life. If it hadn't been for Discord wanting his Element back, Winaypaqori could probably have lived as a holder of Greed for many centuries more. Being an authorized bearer of any of these is likely to be overall more beneficial to the user than not being so, but yeah, for unauthorized bearers it'd be better to have Arrogance or Greed than most of the others. (The enhancement to creativity might be worth becoming a pathological liar, for some artists, so mileage regarding Deception varies depending on what you plan to use it for.)
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Quite possibly. It looks like the Tree was pulling a really ambitious stunt -- normally, Elements are handed out one to a customer. By choosing the destined sun bearer, the destined moon bearer, and the destined chaos avatar as Bearers for all six, it looks like the Tree was basically trying to become the most powerful entity on the planet by co-opting one of its two sources of opposition and making the strongest magic users in the world into its Bearers. (Celestia and Luna weren't alicorns yet, but they had the potential, just as Discord had the potential to be the chaos avatar but hadn't taken it on yet.)
Of course it backfired horribly -- Discord had subconsciously already chosen Disharmony, and the Tree's power by nature opposes Chaos, so Discord felt the Tree's nature as dangerous to him even if the Tree did not actually intend him any harm. So one of the first things Discord did as the chaos avatar was to box the Tree in by creating the Everfree, cutting it off from other Harmony trees and from Matrisse. Most of the world's Harmony trees were killed when Yggsdrasil was corrupted; the Tree in Equestria is a new sprout that grew up from the Fires of Friendship, and the few other trees that were left were weakened by the loss of the strongest uncorrupted Tree, allowing Discord to destroy them. And Discord probably wouldn't have done any of that if the Tree hadn't shown itself to him when he was a child; he didn't do anything to Matrisse until Matrisse went insane, after all. He'd have left the Tree alone if he wasn't terrified of it.
3238220 I love how you make the Tree a fallible actor with motivations and plans, and not just a shiny deus ex machina like the show. It drives me nuts how all the talking characters on the show, including all the Princesses, seem to unquestionably take orders from a glowing hunk of crystal, and that is shown in the show to be the right thing.
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Yeah. I have a scene planned in one of the fics I'm working on where the Tree makes a suggestion for Twilight to do something that is from a practical perspective the right thing to do, which will save an innocent person from an unpleasant fate and set up the potential for a positive outcome for many people. But it's a horrible thing to do to Discord... if he finds out about it, but he's unconscious and might never find out that it happened. Because the Tree is compassionate, but compassion only goes so far when dealing with the being who killed your siblings and imprisoned you; the Tree would never seek revenge on Discord, but it's not going to weigh his psychological well-being highly against the potential of harm to an innocent. (Some ponies who should also know better think the plan is a good idea for their own personal psychological reasons, too, but the disturbing thing is that it's the Tree that suggests it.)
The Tree and Discord have a complex relationship, in my fics; they are opponents and partners, entities whose job it is to maintain and preserve the same system, but to do so by fighting each other. Kind of like opposing representatives in a Parliament, where they work toward the same overall goal -- the benefit of those they govern -- via completely opposite philosophies, and sometimes they have to work together against their third-party partner, (As far as I know Matrisse and the Chaos Avatar never ganged up on the Harmony Avatar, but Harmony has frequently worked with Matrisse against Chaos or with Chaos, in fact Discord specifically, against Matrisse.) They have done each other enormous harm -- Discord killed the Tree's sister-selves (which is less problematic than killing actual separate entities and more so than cutting off your finger), and trapped it in the Everfree in a blanket of chaos that makes it very hard for it to do its job; the Tree imprisoned Discord in stone for more than a thousand years -- but the Tree is entirely sincere about wanting a state of detente with Discord, and so long as Discord is connected via friendship to its Bearers, it will do what it can to avoid harming him. Discord has sincerely held beliefs about the Tree and what it wants that no longer apply, but were in fact true at one point, at least for the Harmony Avatar if not this specific Tree (the Tree is much more tightly connected to other Trees than chaos avatars are to each other, but each Tree is much more of an independent entity than, say, the separated pieces of Matrisse are. This particular Tree isn't much older than Discord, and came into existence at the founding of Equestria.)
I don't like anything being an infallible god; even if its intentions are good, even if it's part of a well-designed system and performing a needed function and is benevolent, it still isn't all-knowing, and not being all-knowing means it can make stupid mistakes. The Tree's motives weren't selfish when it tried to co-opt Chaos -- Mayhem had killed Yggsdrasil, the primary Harmony Tree. Chaos had proven itself an enormous potential threat to Harmony, but the avatar-designate had traits that could allow him to serve Harmony as well, and was friends with two potential Bearers. Co-opting Chaos would have allowed Harmony to recover from the incredible damage Mayhem did to the world. But it was still a mistake, it was still an overreach, and the best of intentions still paved the road to Tartarus (literally, as the Everfree also contains Tartarus.)
3240624 So current conflicts are driven primarily by the fallible and reasonable reactions of entities who are ideologically opposed to each other, each seeing the other as the one overreacting? So basically the way history actually works then. Very cool, I would love to have been a fly on the wall of Matrisse and the harmony avatar plotting against the chaos avatar.
You know, in Not the Hero, Discord might benefit from using the Element of Hatred himself.
I mean, he hates Anon plenty, and that one grants resistance to mind-control, particularly from the target of the bearer's hatred. Unless there's some meta-rule to the laws of magic and disharmony that keeps Discord from bearing one of his own elements (which would make a ton of sense, really).
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I like the idea. Not sure if it would happen though, we don't know enough about what's actually happening, which makes stories great. Though that could be explored.
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We don't know for sure. Also remember parallel timeliness exist.
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Yeah regrettably when I posted that I had missed a very important thing about the Elements of Disharmony. Namely that Discord can't use them himself because they cause a dangerous power feedback loop (each imparts a portion of his power upon the wielder, ergo if he takes one he's imparting his own power into himself).