Mystery... yes.
So, time to bounce a couple of ideas around about SNR. Is this a non-sequitur? No, no it is not.
Here it is in its current iteration.
Now, as Ling Qi has noted here:
Starlight Night's Reflection doesn't feel quite right to her. That's fine, perfectly acceptable for a new clan to struggle in getting their arts set up and working right. Some never do it. I think we can though. It'll just take... a bit of tweaking.
The first issue I see is the keyword "Stillness" which seems to create the Antithesis keyword "Motion." This has some problems with it, given that Ling Qi likes motion, it is one of our possible conceptual projects after all, and we don't particularly like stillness. Certainly not an insurmountable problem, in fact, I want to overcome it, but a problem nonetheless. But how do we go about doing that? Well, that depends on if this system has ways to modify and expand arts after completing them, which given Yrs previous comments on the thread (which I can't find, unfortunately) about Ling Qi working on expanding existing arts instead of getting more arts, seems likely.
Now, changing SNR has been bounced around by a lot of people. I think that the current iteration I am advocating for was first proposed by Abeo, but I'm not sure. Either way, here it is.
Work on making SNR more about the endless, mysterious forests of the Emerald Sea rather than the bottomless lakes of the Thousand Lakes. To do this, I would replace the "Stillness" keyword with the "Mystery" keyword, the "Reflections" keyword with "Growth" (or something else, haven't really worked on what to replace Reflections with) and replace the Lake element with the Wood element.
The goal with these changes would be to reflect a contemplation of the Emerald Sea's endless forests, that when you strike into the darkness you never know if you hit anything or if your actions had any impact on the forest itself. The changes seek to provide the answer to the quandary "if a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to hear, did it make a sound" by answering "No." It would seek to tell the attacker that if they are not sure their attack had an impact on Ling Qi, then it did not. This type of change would move away from the serenity and tranquility of SNR's contemplation and more towards the sheer vastness of the forest and how no single action can make a meaningful impact on it.
These changes, I feel, would remove many of the problematic and troublesome aspects of SNR that don't quite fit into where Ling Qi is going and refurbish it with interesting new means of providing armor that feel more in line with Ling Qi herself. This is why I am extremely excited that "Mystery" has been added to our domain as a possible concept to explore. A very cool addition to SNR in my opinion!
