Medallions weren’t designed with customization in mind, but luckily with practice and a lot of work, some people have been able to alter their human disguises to better represent themselves.
Medallions weren’t designed with customization in mind, but luckily with practice and a lot of work, some people have been able to alter their human disguises to better represent themselves.
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Ah, the difference is a Nokia flip phone that could survive everything short of being tossed into the sun vs a super cool hip iPhone XVI that might explode if you drop it from a short high. Do you want simple, reliable, and long lasting, or something that’s awesome but will have a lot of downtime.
Obviously Hip Cool Dude figured out how to access his Medallion’s Setting to change his ringtone/appearance since that setting is stored in his head.
Tell that to Greg :/
I feel like Greg’s situation actually might apply here! After all, he never had the goat eyes until he became more comfortable with himself (in all his forms) by connecting with Michelle, as shown on page 22 of Homecoming: https://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/homecoming-22-rude-jim/
Which shows that his magical physical appearance is connected to how he views/feels about himself, AND that he doesn’t have control over that.
So I feel like it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that the reason he has the goat ears is not EXCLUSIVELY because he dropped his medallion and cracked it, but ALSO because of the sheer trauma of abruptly becoming a different species, everything you thought you were is a lie, etc. and how that shook his identity and understanding of himself. One could read the crack as the physical manifestation of that trauma.
Of course, the simpler explanation would be that there isn’t any relationship between Greg’s identity and his appearance and it’s just that his magic doodad got a little busted. It’s fun to theorize though!
I’m reading it more like an original Mac versus … well, just about any other desktop back then.
The Macs didn’t have internal upgrade slots, nor the ability to upgrade the RAM. But it was functional and did what it did well. You were also guaranteed that you could just install a program and it’d run immediately, with no fiddling of settings or configuration files.
Intel x86-based machines, though, had expansion slots for plugging any ‘custom’ features, be they MIDI, video, general sound controller, etc. You had to do a bit of fiddling in your bootup to get some of them to work fully, and then play with the settings in the software you installed to take advantage of them, but… conflicts were inevitable at times. Depending on what was in play.
That’s a good analogy as well.
The mention of taking the user’s sex into account for human form makes me wonder about trans folks’ opinions on the matter, and how it affects them.
With the entire series having a lot of transpositive and overall LGBT+ messaging and themes, I would suspect that it will align with what they feel they correctly are when they feel safe to be so openly. As well as allowing someone who is fluid the ability to present in various ways “easier”.
If a medallion can give a mythical person the ability to turn human, could a medallion be made to allow a human to turn mythical?
(Insert Michelle freaking her mom out by having her turn Sphinx-y… or other funny situations with other characters)
I have always wanted to know whether angel like creatures in other religions/myth around the world, such as Norse mythology Valkyries, are the same species, regional variants, or entirely different species?
Alternative question, are there any other “divine” species/beings in this universe aside from those already introduced? Perhaps Psychopomps is another term.
If customized appearance was that easy, there wouldn’t be so many characters who weren’t totally satisfied with how they looked. The takeaway I’ve gotten from a lot of reading here is that most people are relieved that their mysterious medallions work at all. There also doesn’t seem to be any way to fix a malfunctioning one (like Greg’s).
I suspect some things would be immune from “customization” anyway, like Jim’s green hair.
That’s because the only ones who knew how the medallions were made… and maintained… were the Sphynx. Who were believed to be extinct. So, yeah, they’re glad they’re still working because there was no way to get new ones. And nobody wants to play with the magic because they might accidentally destroy the medallion…
I had this rogue thought while at work earlier. Why did JubJub Birds receive medallions? Just because they are relatives of gryphons?
Jubjub birds literally just use griffin medallions from what I remember.
Not sure where you got that idea. Jubjub birds have their own medallions; they aren’t gryphons and wouldn’t be compatible with a gryphon medallion (if a maned gryphon and regular gryphon and reverse gryphon all need unique medallions, I don’t think a Jubjub bird would be able to get away with using a gryphon medallion, either.)
There is a very old Reader Question showing this off but I can’t find it at the moment.
Let us know when you find that old Reader Question. Some of us were unaware that each of the various permutations of Gryphons all needed their own specific Medallion.