Talk:Myst canon

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Gavin.collins (talk • contribs) 11:14, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Merge

I've proposed merging D'ni guilds into this article. I suggest we use that page's talk (Talk:D'ni Guilds) for discussion. SFT | Talk 06:56, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Tomahna

The recent edit puts Tomahna on a new age that Atrus wrote. However, as far as I'm aware, Tomahna is in fact on Earth. Can anyone confirm this? --Wolf530 18:11, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Tomahna is a place on Earth, in fact near the Cleft, so that puts it in or near Eddy County, New Mexico, USA. Confirmed not only by Uru but also by RAWA. Jordi·✆ 19:01, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciation and RAWA

I note that this article has a good pronunciation section, but I think it's rather odd that the article says Esher's pronunciation should be disregarded. He is D'ni; doesn't that make his pronunciation the new canon? There are many examples of fictional franchises reported in Wikipedia articles, and in the great majority of cases, when a later offering from the franchise changes something, the new version is considered to be canon. Just go look at the talk pages of some of the Star Trek and Star Wars articles. There are plenty of examples of the franchise doing something that causes embarassment or annoyance for their fans, but that's just the way it works, and the mistake becomes canon.

For instance, the head ridges added to Klingons in the first Star Trek movie caused years of headaches for Star Trek writers in trying to explain; finally they came up with a really hokey explanation that a virus caused Klingons in the original series to have smooth foreheads. Lame!! But that's what has to be done when a franchise's writers don't do their homework. I suspect that the varied pronunciations of D'ni are due to Cyan failing to decide on a pronunciation and communicate this to everyone involved with their franchise. Mistake.

While I have a lot of respect for RAWA, if they didn't want D'ni pronounced Duch-nee', they would have instructed David Ogden-Stiers to pronounce it differently as Esher. I don't even see a source in the article for the RAWA comment, or an explanation of why he is considered a reliable source. (I don't dispute his reliability, but our readers might not know who RAWA is). In fact, we don't even explain the acronym!!

In general, unless we have a concrete statement from Cyan on which pronunciation is canon (and a link to corroborate), we need to assume that the latest chronological offering in the franchise is canon, and therefore Esher's pronunciation must be assumed to be canonical. After all, remember that Atrus and Yeesha were not raised among the D'ni, and their pronunciations, like that of the members of the DRC in Uru, are suspect when compared to an authentic surviving D'ni such as Esher. Kasreyn 19:29, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Read this. In the middle of the page RAWA says that Esher had a speech impediment.--Wizard of Frobozz 21:45, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

RAWA claims that Esher had a speech impediment caused by snake bites which affected only one word and says that stranger things have happened - a tall story if ever there was one.

Further, in the fictional universe of D'ni Rawa is not at all portrayed as an infallible character. RAWA is a 20th/21st century person and Esher an original D'ni who lived before the catastrophy: RAWA is fictionally portrayed as an expert on D'ni culture in an "in-world" fashion, even though Esher is obviously much more related to it. We must realise that modern game developers are toying with the rules of on-line documentation of "canonisation" of elements within their fictional universes. The correct presentation would be that Cyan has portrayed this matter ambigiously and created a quasi-scientific discussion about it. It would be wrong to say that one case was stronger than the other because the same people are responsible for Esher and RAWA. I have tried to get this into the article and also made a comparison to the fictional linguistics of Tolkien. Please edit if you can improve the matter! Sponsianus 18:46, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Appearance

The D'ni physical characteristics (e.g. delicate bone structure, light sensitivity, and life span) should probably be covered somewhere.

I added a short section on "the people". How does it look? (And I've moved this entry to the bottom, to fit the chronology.)Cactus Wren 07:00, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Spoiler Warning! Well, I'm not so sure. What is the source for this? Atrus isn't particularly delicate (though he is only 1/4 D'ni), and lifespans of various Myst franchise characters seem to vary wildly. For instance, Atrus seems to have aged far slower than his own father, despite his father having twice as much D'ni blood - at the end of Myst V, Atrus appears only slightly older than Gehn did in Riven, despite being (from what I calculate) decades, if not a century, older than Gehn was in Riven. Plus his own sons clearly age more slowly than him - and they're only 1/8 D'ni! I'm referring here to Sirrus in Myst IV, who appears in cutscenes both before and after his twenty-year imprisonment, and he doesn't age visibly at all (whereas Atrus has visibly aged since Myst). So if anything can be determined from the games, it is that humans live longer than D'ni - but of course the text canon is the opposite.

In general, it appears that the aging issue was thoroughly botched over the course of the Myst franchise, in terms of continuity. I don't know if we should include it. Kasreyn 00:31, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

There's no specific canonical testimony toward the lifespans of Sirrus, Achenar, or Gehn. We know thanks to Myst V that Yeesha and Atrus are fairly long-lived, in the bicentennial area at least. In the Book of Ti'ana, a D'ni man in his third century is considered very old, and in Uru, as mentioned in the article, it's noted that one less than 25 is considered immature. If the gene(s) responsible for the long D'ni lifespan are dominant, that trait will breed true and we can expect that anyone with D'ni heritage, no matter how thin, will enjoy a similar lifespan. If some of the genes are recessive, then part D'ni would have varying lifespans. Other D'ni traits, like the delicate bones and light sensitivity, could be recessive, which would explain why Atrus appears less frail than his father (note, it's an appearance; D'ni are probably not physically weaker than humans) and why Atrus' children don't need to wear goggles in bright conditions like he does. All of this is, of course, conjectural, but my point is that having the characters age at different rates doesn't necessarily defy logic.

It may also be necessary to remember that the fourth generation -- Achenar, Sirrus, and Yeesha -- are all half Rivenese as well. How long the Rivenese live isn't known, but they seem to be longer-lived than surface dwellers: Katran gave birth, apparently without complications, when she was at least in her mid-fifties. In the Book of D'ni there's a mention that she is aging "the tiniest bit faster" than Atrus, and a suggestion that he expects to outlive her. But I think it's possible to regard this last item, at least, as a Wingrovism (Atrus, to his and our knowledge the only surviving person of mixed surface and D'ni heritage, cannot have known at that point what his lifespan might be: as the article on him points out, in his journal of the writing of Releeshahn he calls himself "an old fool" although he was only in his fifties). Cactus Wren 07:57, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

One explanation for the disparage might be that a D'ni year does not equal our year. I don't have any sources to confirm this but I seem to remember reading somewhere that the two measurements of time are different accounting for their 300+ D'ni year life spans and over 10,000 year history in the cavern. This could also be explained because of their life in the cavern (not seeing the sun) and their organization of time around the light cycles of the organisms in the lake being on a non 24hr period.

Indeed, but many events in the Myst timeline have specific dates in our calendar attached to them. It's known, for instance, that Anna was born in 1694 CE, Gehn in 1736, and Atrus in 1755. It's known that the Stranger found the Myst book in 1806, and that Yeesha was born ten years after that, when Atrus was sixty-one. And in End of Ages we learn that Atrus and Yeesha were still alive in 2005. Cactus Wren 04:45, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

In the (I think it was the offical, it was bundled with the 1st game) stratergy guide, the Stranger was described as having a polaroid camera. This sort of suggests that the age wasn't 1806. I suspect that the guide stuffed up it's timelines, but it does make the arguments abuot relative ages of characters confusing. Perhaps a note should be made? I've reread all of these Myst related articles and I still cant tell if the yr 1806 is refering to our modern calander or one linked to a particular game world.Morgrim (talk) 07:30, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

D'ni's location

From what I understand of the article, the d'ni cavern (with the City Proper, the islands, and all of that) has been around for several millenia in what is now New Mexico? If not, the article should be changed to talk more about where the cavern is. Is it its own age? Is it the largest / oldest age to exist? I don't quite understand where the d'ni is located, or about the origins of d'ni (I'm more concerned about the former; I don't know if the series even lets on to the origins of d'ni). --Eptin (talk) 04:55, 27 January 2008 (UTC)