Treasury Worldbuilding Info

[Shoal]

i think happiness is a require for cherishing. you can't cherish something you don't like.

i don't really cherish things much either. i am wary of them when they're new and then I get used to them and learn to enjoy them while i have them and i don't mind so much when they go. i definitely have things that might look like cherished things from the outside looking in: for example why would i have kept my childhood teddy bear if i didn't have some attachment to it? but i don't really, it's just a familiar object that i've had no cause to discard.

Actually trying to thinking back to things that I lost and was sad about: there have been some articles of clothing that meant something to me one way or another, two sweaters, one because I happened to be wearing it during various important plot events and the plot events rubbed off on it (literally in some cases), until I was demolished by another plot event. but the other was wool and fluffy and soft and i loved it and there were no plot events attached just that it was warm and cosy and i usually did the laundry for the family but one time my mother did the laundry and she shrunk it and after that it wouldn't have fit a doll.

actually, when I was a child I was very careful to play with all my toys equally and to appear to cherish items that i did not, so that when the adults wanted to take something from me, they wouldn't take my favourite things but would take the things i didn't care about so much.

[Kappa]

I can't believe I forgot my childhood teddy bear in enumerating my cherished things! That teddy bear is bound to have gotten the most cumulative love out of anything I've ever owned. It used to be bright pink, I'm told, but it's been a shade off from white for as long as I can remember.

[Tamien]

I don't think happiness is required for an item to be treasured. I have several items which I attach very strong emotions to and treasure in a way such that I would be (and have been) sad if I lost them or if they were destroyed, but which I don't precisely cherish or associate with happiness. I purposefully omitted items of strong emotional attachment that I no longer possess when I made my list of possible artifacts, but if some of those were still in my possession they would have definitely made the list despite having distinctly bittersweet or upsetting associations with them. Not to mention some items which I did leave on the list and do not have happy associations with but which I nevertheless treasure.

The way my attachment to objects works is basically like any object which I owned during a given period of my life can acquire personal symbolism and become sort of a totemic representation of myself, my experiences, and my emotions at that time. This happens especially for objects which I find symbolic of my relationship with a particular person (myself included). So, anything I was attached to during a particularly emotional time in my life acquires a particular significance to me. The ones I picked for the list are the ones that I've actively had as personal symbols for the longest and during the most turbulent periods of my life, and which have thus picked up more emotional weight than my typical trinkets. There are several items which would beat out the ones on that list if I still owned them (a silver ring with an amber cabochon, a braided leather anklet, a pair of earrings that look like a fork and a spoon, a small hexagonal box decorated with mirrors, etc) and also a few items of clothing that I might have chosen to include, except they have typically gotten lost or worn out, and some other knick knacks that were edge cases for various reasons. I have a few childhood animals that could maybe count (Pooky and Soft Ears are both teddy bears; Amaranth is a red panda) because I still have them and have had a lot of cumulative affection for them over the years, but I never really had the strong emotional attachment to my stuffed animals that some kids have, and they're not really symbolic of particularly emotional or memorable parts of my life or of anyone I feel strongly about, so I didn't count them on my list.

[PlainDealingVillain]

That might be treasured, but I don't think it's cherished.

[Tamien]

I don't know. To me, my objects are physical representations of my memories and my self, and while I may not like everything they represent - I still hold them dear because they are a part of me. Even the ones with the worst associations also represent the happy moments during those times, and my coping with the the awful things, and my surviving through them. They may be painful and sad, but that doesn't make me love them any less. But, whether they'd count for artifacts? We're still waiting for Word of God on what sort of relationship a person must have to their object for it to count as "very cherished". Like, if Bells worked more like me, then Annie's journals would definitely count as cherished, but Alicorn says that Annie does not cherish any individual object enough for it to become an artifact, so obviously my standards for "cherished object" are not the same as the ones that determine whether something can be an artifact. (Although maybe that's a matter of pluralness and if they all got merged into the same object like Cam's magic notebook it would count?) So maybe a cherished item can only be something that makes you happy, or that doesn't have negative associations, or something like that in order to become an artifact, but naively, just from the way that I relate to objects, I don't see why something would have to be a happy thing to be cherished.

[Alicorn]

The notebooks are not cherished because there are too many of them and because she doesn't spend very long being attached to any specific one, but a compendium journal (like Grace, or even a non-talking version like Eve's Infinity Notebook) would easily qualify. You do have to like the thing, though.

[Lambda]

Grace would be disqualified for being a person, right?

[Bluelantern]

Grace would be disqualified for being a person, right?

Alicorn said that the hardware that houses a computer AI could become an artifact but not the AI itself... so maybe Gracenote could, at least before becoming a Daemon?

[Tamien]

Alicorn said that the hardware that houses a computer AI could become an artifact but not the AI itself... so maybe Gracenote could, at least before becoming a Daemon?

Something about that particular phrasing implies to me that human bodies could then become artifacts, just not the people themselves. Which is creepy. I hope that is not the case. Also the idea of the sort of person who treasures a body as though it were an object they possess enough to make it qualify for artifact-hood is disturbing (except maybe their own, I could see their own, okay that is less creepy, phew). But if it could be your own body, presumably there would be human body artifacts all over the place, there's got to be tons of people who cherish their own bodies. So there's got to be some distinction to draw. Maybe something to do with the fact that an AI is not necessarily specific to a singular unique piece of hardware the way that humans are, so the "person-ness" of the hardware of an AI is more extricable from the person than the "person-ness" of the hardware of a human?

[Alicorn]

No living things. Gracenote's notebook substrate, before she became a daemon/bird, could have been an artifact. You've got it right with the person-ness of AIs being extricable. (I think I actually want to reverse myself on the artifactability of Devices. No artifact Devices.)