Why is light/Dark considered an element?

>>51450524
Something something fear of the unknown, light of truth, religious influences on fiction becoming passed down through memetic transfer and inspiration. Same reason with the typical fire/ice/air/earth combo being from Ancient Greek elemental inspiration, if I had to take a guess, some western mythologies or histories have just stuck, like latin being considered a gothic or 'holy' language.

>>51450524
For gameplay purposes.

>>51450524
Mostly because people look at the elements in pretty narrow terms and find things that don't easily fit into the classic four under such a limited scope. So light and darkness help to round out the apparent gaps.

>>51450524
It's because lightning doesn't fit nicely as fire, and certainly isn't made of water. So, light became the element of lightning.

Darkness is an element to give a "type" to the demons and other creatures lurking in shadows.

Neither of them have any real basis, except maybe a conflation of light with aether.

The more relevant question is, what effect does light/dark impart?

>>51450820
>It's because lightning doesn't fit nicely as fire, and certainly isn't made of water. So, light became the element of lightning.
I have literally never heard of lightning as associated with light over other elements. I've often seen it associated with air, occasionally as fire, even as earth now and then, and sometimes as its own element. But never light.

Why is Lux so cute?

>>51450922
Dark Souls is the first thing that comes to my head but I'm sure there are older examples.

japanese vidya

>>51450977
Because she's designed to be cute so that people will pay for skins.

>>51450977
>Blonde
>Intelligent
>Cheerful
>Moderately athletic physique
>Well-proportioned
Amoung other things.

>>51450922
Chrono Trigger's main character casts Lightning spells with Light/Heavens magic.

>>51450524
Because it's cool.

>>51450994
I've seen it since disgaea. It hasn't come up much, outside of japan first products.

That said, I've also only seen "dark" attacks be either gravity oriented (for certain final fantasy spin-offs, where proportional damage had immunities) or a separate damage class entirely, akin to the "chaos" damage from Warcraft III.

>>51451137
Huh, apparently it wasn't called that in the SNES version.

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>>51450524
Primal elements are represented by fire, water, air and earth to make the idea of the natural phases of elements which are: plasma, liquid, gas and solid.
We know water could go from liquid to solid being freezed and becoming ice, so you can find water in two phases, that makes this idea very archaic but well fashioned in fantasy settings.

But is a cultural thing, there are other ways to consider an element, the chinesse have the Wu Xing: a system of five phases used for describing interactions and relationships between phenomena which are Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal. They also had the Bagua that have the same five elements named before plus Heaven, Lake and Thunder.

>>51451241
>SNES version.
Which was released in Nintendo of America's "don't reference religion" period which turned Holy into Pearl in FF3.

At least in fantasy, it is to give an extra dimension to the arcane.

Light and darkness, while observable, have none of the physical characteristics of the elements. You can see light, but you can't touch it or weight it or interact beyond a secondary effect like you could with classical elements.

It covers the gaps that (if you'll let me use DnD) come from 'divine' type magic. It transcends this world and is a great cover for 'the Powers Above' that can't fit into Earthly or Arcane Magic.

>>51451468
>Primal elements are represented by fire, water, air and earth to make the idea of the natural phases of elements which are: plasma, liquid, gas and solid.
This notion is easy to read back into it from a modern retrospective, but if you actually look at how the ancients used the four elements, it really is a lot more like the Wu Xing than simply an archaic rendition of the phases of matter.

For instance, Aristotle characterized the elements in terms of combinations of hot/cold and wet/dry, with each of these being more conceptual principles than merely the tangible qualities the words usually describe. For example, Fire is primary-Hot/secondary-Dry, which in Aristotle's terms means it has the power to associate like substances with like (Hot; a principle which Aristotle considers equivalent with power to DISsociate, since he views dissociation as a sort of purgative process in which foreign subtances are removed from a mix), and of defined limits, not readily malleable (Dry).

Aristotle also held that the elements, in strict sense, are not in fact identical with the ordinary things typically referred to by the same names. For example, he described flame not as simply the Fire element pure and simple, but rather the generation of Fire by burning smoke -- that is, by combination of Air and Earth, taking the former's Hot and the latter's Dry to make Hot-Dry Fire.

The more conceptual level of the Greek elemental theory is also evident in humoural theory, which describes temperament and health in terms of the balance of body fluids believed to be characterized by particular elements. Hence, for instance, bile -- though obviously a liquid -- is associated with Fire, not Water, and this association is reflected in that an excess of bile induces a choleric temperament: Aggressive and irritable.

Frankly the whole concept of elementalism is pretty boring to me at this point. I wish fewer settings would have it.

>>51450524
It's not.

Bye

I always figured Light/Dark is an elemental split in the same way that Fire/Ice are.

That is, they're both literally the same thing used differently.

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>>51451126
And a pure love for her brother, right?

>>51450524
>"How about the opposite!"
>"What do you mean?"
>"Not dark and not light!"
Problem solved.

>>51450524
The Elements are supposed to be the foundations of the universe, that everything is built from. Light and Darkness seem just as much a part of that as the others.


Now what gets weird is when you include Water and Ice as separate things.

>>51454438
I'm ashamed to say that for a moment I thought the one with angel wings was Sanguinius.

>>51450994
Holy and lightning damage were different in dark souls. All the lighting spells (including sunlight spear) did lightning damage.

In my setting, every element really stands for an abstract philosophical concept, and the associated type of matter is just its most direct expression in the physical universe. For instance, air is really change/fluidity, earth - stability/persistence, fire - analysis/destruction, water - synthesis/creation. In this system, light stands for energy/action, while darkness embodies void/passiveness.