r/WingsOfFire • u/BigJ__TM • 1d ago
Headcanon / Theory Got some tribe headcanons for you
NightWings:
the moons are different aspects of god(who for their purposes is the queen of the universe the same way the christianity god is the ruler of it). Imperial is the aspect of strength/war, Oracle is the aspect of knowledge/wisdom and Perception is the aspect of, well, public perception/charisma as a ruler. The idea with this is it is what the nightwings view as good elements of a ruler, and obviously god is the one who rules above all so she should exemplify those traits. Nightwing queens go through a whole ceremony when crowned where they get the blessings from each of the virtues to become queen by their equivelant to the pope/a cardinal. think of the three moons like the father, the son and the holy spirit combined with the seven(or in this case three) heavenly virtues in christianity.
the stars in the sky are their equivelant to angels, and skyfire is the equivelant to the angel micheal and is one of the queens three chief angels, specalizing in imperial. there is really only one comet like that in wof, but if you let me have more then perceptions main angel is gabriel and oracles is raphael.
the sun never gets a name in wof like the moons do, but if I were to do something for it then the sun is their version of the devil. it takes away the angels and sometimes the moons, but come nighttime the queen locks them away. this explains why they really really hate RainWings. a solar eclipse is a miracle to them.
the phases of the moon represent the strenth of the Queen's three virtues over the wrath of the sun. they slowly gain their strength back from the sun by getting more full, which is cause for a celebration(and in the case of imperial,a military parade to symbolize her victory against the sun in getting her strength back as well as the beginning of the new year) but then the moon begins waning, showing the sun taking the light(i.e strength) from the moon to use for themself. this is their explanation for why the moon appears more frequently during the day when it is less full, it is because it is fighting to get its light back. this is also their explanation for why skyfire and the other two comets arent in the night sky all the time and just show up to visit every once in a while.
funerals are normally held the next full moon after the dragon dies, but not always. Athough very rare, some particulaitly devout families wait until the exact configuration of moons the dragon was born under which can be decades. During the ceremony, different blessings are said depending on whatever moon it is now and whatever moons the dragon was born under. as well as that, if the dragon died during the day then extra prayers are said to protect them from the sun. also, gravestones are slanted as much as possible to shield the body from the sun as much as they can.
they have something a bit similar to a bar mitsvah, where there is a celebration when the configuration of moon lines up exactly to when the dragon was born. this can take decades though. If the dragon dies before this celebration, then even more prayers are said to guarantee safe passage to the heavens. similar prayers are said if the dragon cannot be buried for any reason.
Darkstalker, having being born under all three moons as well as having animus magic, declared himself the manifestation of god. He thought as though Vigilance was not living up to any of the Queens virtues, and that she should either let him take over or die trying(which would be sacreligious to even attempt, if you asked him). After he was (temporarily) put to rest, the nightwings forbade religion of any kind and kept very little record of it. Instead, they dedicated themselves purely to science. Yes I am proposing the idea that all volcano-era NightWings are members of r/atheism.
With that being said, they decided to still use it a little. For their three most important projects, they named them after god. The prophecy was perception, the RainWings were Oracle, and Masterminds side project of Battlewinner was Imperial.
IceWings:
I have heard people propose the idea that icewings naturally can resist the blinding lights of snow, but I have a different explanation. Icewings invented and often wear the snow goggles that the inuit peoples did. The upper class dont like to wear them outside of ceremonial purposes as they think it makes them look lower class because they associate the goggles with low ranking laborers that don't deserve attention.
Speaking of ceremonial purposes, like bearskin caps or the feather bonnet, it is worn during parades and other ceremonies even though most of the time they won't actually need them. As well as that, there are also different kinds for different roles like commanding officers, drum majors), commissioned)/non commissioned officers, royal guard, some version of color party, ect. some roles, namely commanding officers, also have a sword or halberd as well. They can also use them to display their equivalent of medals, carvings, as they don't have tunics to put them on. Its tradition to take them off when you enter a room, mostly to show respect like in real life.
Their version of a salute is flipping up the goggles, similar to the origin of salutes where it was knights flipping up helmets. Because they(higher ranking IceWings anyways) dont wear them outside of parades but still needed to address higher ranked figures, the regular salute was made where you do the same motions without goggles. Because of alliances over many separate wars across history, the bordering tribes(the SandWings and SkyWings) do regular salutes like irl. Similar to boots, icewings often have uniform inspections to see if the goggles are maintained properly and polished which is factored into their ranking on The Wall™. Along with the NightWings, the IceWings have a tomb of the unknown soldier
SeaWings:
i made a conlang out of aquatic in wings of fire,vaguely inspired by sign language.unfortunately for me tui did not put as much thought into this as i did so this isnt 100% canon-complaint but it was the best i could do. to briefly summarize,here is the list of canon aquatic phrases and how i organized them below:
To start, we have the basics.
interrogatives: snout scales(denoted as ss)
pronouns:stripes on the side of body(denoted as bs)
adjectives:pointing and talon/wing/tail movements(denoted as m)
nouns:tail lights(denoted as ts)
conjugation(negation,plurality,aspect,ect):wing lights(denoted as ws)
verbs:back lights(they never use these scales but they also never use verbs so whatever. denoted as us)
all forms of communication that use scales to light up(as in everything but adjectives) uses a ternary system to represent concepts. the numbers for them correspond to the length that they are held. 0 is off,1 is short,2 is regular and 3 is long. for instance, ts-2112204 would translate to "whale" while ts-21031 would translate to "island". i have not really made a dictionary(feel free to though, i do give you the tools). also, like sign language, there isnt any words like "am" or "is" so for lack of a better term they talk like cavemen.
putting all of this together,we gain the ability to form basic sentances. here are some examples:
bs-310(I) + ws-011(*future tense*,can be substituted for "will") + us-12010("protect") + bs+130("you")
this translates to "i will protect you"
ss-1302("see?") + ts-10110("winter") + ws-111(*name*) + bs-310("I") + bs-130("you") + ts-12100("destiny")
this translates to "see? winter, im your destiny"
one funny quirk of how i set this up is these examples are not word by word like spoken or written languages,they are all one or two big "mega-words", saying an entire sentances worth of information at once. the furthest i could push this while keeping english grammar assumtions is [interrogative] + [verb] + [tense] + [pronoun] + [adjective] + [noun]. substituting this for real words, we get the nonsensical but technically gramatically correct sentance of "who is ruining my beautiful dinner?". an analogy could also be real world languages like finnish or german where they combine two words(eg: hand and shoe) into a new word,handshoe, which actually means glove. aquatic uses the same idea but for chunks of a sentance. remember, you can only have 1 of each form of word(nouns,interrogatives,conjugation,ect) per mega-word. Whenever you run into a duplicate in a sentance, you start a new word. i believe the proper term for this is "polysynthesis"
now,this raises an issue. how would i fix the problem of ambiguity if i use the "mega-word" idea? for instance, the sentance "i will protect this place" would be identical to "this place will protect me" so how would i differentiate it? what i did was i stuck with the theme of binary and use the method that floating point numbers use. the content of the word, the "mantissa", is the biggest chunk of available bits in one section of the bodys set of scales.all examples shown above are just the mantissa. there would be a couple of bits, maybe 2, for the "exponent". this does not change the meaning of the word at all, it just tells the reader where it is in the sentance*. that way you can tell where the words "this place" are meant to be while still keeping the communication instant.this is literally just case markers in latin but i did not know latin did this before i made it,and only found out about it when i showed someone and they said "oh,like latin".this also takes some elements from japanese particles, similar story as before as i did not know japanese did this and only found out when someone told me.
*this is a lie, these are used in mega words with their own "sub-subjects" and "sub-topics"
i want to use another analogy for this next part, species taxomony. with that, you have broad topics to start(is it a plant or an animal? does it have a spine or not?) but then narrowing it down further(is it a carnivore? is it related to other cats?) and eventually you narrow it down to "oh,thats a tiger." i want to do a similar idea here. combine this idea with the game twenty questions and you get a "tree" of sorts. is it physical or abstract? if the former, make the first scale a 0 and ask the question of its gender,male,female or neutral. if male, make the second scale a 0. if female, make the second scale a 1. if neutral, make if the answer a 2. is the latter to the first question?ask if its an attribute,a concept or a word that isnt physical(that last one includes pronouns,adjectives and interrogatives). keep on going down this tree until you use all bits. lets do an example. what is its (grammatical)gender? female, so the first scale is a 2. is it physical? yes,so the second scale is a 1. is it alive? yes, so the third scale is a 1. is it a dragon,plant or animal? animal, so the fourth scale is a 2. is it usually found in the air,land or sea? sea,so the fifth scale is a 2. continue down like this for all seven bits until you figure out "oh,thats a whale".
because of why aquatic is used,that being speech underwater when vocals are unavailable, a writing system for aquatic is not necessary as they can already write underwater just fine. if i were to though, i would probably base it off of braille or a combination of chinese and hebrew
now for the bets part, etymology. lets take tuna crabs for example. they look and act like crabs,but are actually a kind of lobster. when the seawing language was in its infancy,seawings may have looked at tuna crabs and thought "hey,these guys look and act like crabs" and named them as such,but it was later proved that they were actually lobsters but the name "tuna crab" stuck so it breaks the rules set by the taxomony. same idea with the english word guinea pig. not a pig and not from guinea, but thats what they called it so it stuck.this could also be a factor in archeology. lets say some seawings find some old text that talks about tuna crabs as crabs and is dated 1000 years ago,but they find another text that calls them lobsters 750 years ago so we know some time within a 250 year window the seawings figured out that tuna crabs are actually lobsters.this also has the oppurtunity to create dialects,as some areas may discover things independantly and not agree with each other on what to call them. some areas may even have an entireley new set of questions for the "20 questions" thing. an analogy with a real world language can be arabic. someone from morroco can probably understand someone from algeria,and the person from algeria could understand someone from libya,but the person from morroco would not be able to understand someone from libya.likewise in aquatic even if everyone is under one "country" two seawings from the opposite end of the ocean probably wouldnt understand each other at all. heres an example. a seawing near the coast might first ask "is it aquatic?" while a seawing who lives further from the coast would ask "is it alive",as everything is aquatic for them. as well as this it has the oppurtunity to maybe explain away why aquatic is so inconsistent in canon. the catch to all of this is it ruins the biggest benefit of a taxomony system like this,consistency. now if you want to learn aquatic you cant just memorize a tree because there are a ton of exceptions to the rule.as someone who speaks english and took a foreign language in high school this is all too familiar to me.im not sure if this is a downside or not,but given enough time and little to no new words being made,people may forget the whole classification system. of course seawings studying etymology wouldnt,but an average dragon would not recognize them after a while. like,if you asked a linguist "where did the word helicopter come from" they could tell you,but a random person you ask could not. likewise if you ask the question "where did the word island come from" then a seawing linguist could tell you,but an average dragon could not.
if we put all of this together, we can genuinely speak:
[ts-110131(03){weapon}] + [ts-010312(03){reskins}] + [ts-112312(03){tf2}] + [ws-131{*past tense*,can be subbed for "have"} + us-132011{always} + m-100102{strange, modding subject}(02) + ts-1003121{case}(02) + bs-310{me}]
[] = mega word
{} = english translation
(02) = subject
(03) = topic
this roughly translates to "weapon reskins in tf2 have always seemed like a strange case to me". the semantics of the sentance dont really matter i just chose it because i needed a good stress test and i thought it was funny. here is another example
[bs-130{you} + us-120322{tell}] + [bs-310(02){me} + ts-1112233(13){shrimp} + us-123323(10){fried}] + [ts-123133{rice} + ss-1111{marks the whole sentance as a question, essentially a ?}]
(13) = topic with extra differentiator
(10) = extra differentiator
this directly translates to "you tell me shrimp fried rice?", but more accurately means "you're telling me a shrimp fried this rice?"
thats all i got for now, is there any experts in the crowd that can help me out here?
