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*queues your art*

@hidden671254839 / hidden671254839.tumblr.com

ohh my god a teenager online posted something that reveals a less than perfectly developed understanding of the world around them? should we tell everyone? should we screenshot it and share it everywhere so we can pat ourselves on the back for being so much wiser than Kids These Days? should we invite a boomer comic artist

you will never convince me that a middle schooler with no rights who gets flustered talking about sex is the heart of the global rise in reactionary sentiment we're dealing with right now and not senator john segregation who drafts 300 anti trans laws a day and wants that middle schooler to die in childbirth

An underappreciated part of the mind flayers' backstory is that they're technically refugees from a future where they'd already won and taken over the entire multiverse only for their empire to fall due to their hubris, and because D&D never defines its rules of time travel we can't know whether this means that they're going to inevitably going to take over and have their empire fall again OR whether they've learned from their past mistakes and will actually pull it off sans hubris this time

We can't even say for certain whether this is their first time pressing the reset button and going back to give world domination another go,

Maybe the last time was just the first time they got to the endgame and if they pull it off again it's bad ending for the entire multiverse?

Also where did the first mind flayers come from!? Is there going to be a point in the future where someone independently figures out cerebromorphosis and that's the beginning of the mind flayer species, or does the species exist as a living paradox that exists simply because they traveled back from the future where they already existed'll?!

So, okay:

The mind flayers weren't part of the original D&D rules. They only first appeared in the Strategic Review magazine and were later added into the game in the Eldritch Wizardry supplement in 1976. The githyanki and githzerai were not yet part of the canon, in spite of future editions establishing a firm connection between them and the illithid

1981 sees the official introduction of the gith to AD&D in the 1e Fiend Folio.

Don't you see!? Each edition is a different cycle of the D&D timeline!!! Between the first release of the game and Eldritch Wizardry they first came into being and conquered the multiverse, only for their empire to fall, and as they escaped from the future they were followed by the gith!!! With each cycle they become more knowledgeable due to their ancestral memory, who knows how many more cycles it will take for them to finally take over the multiverse for good!!!

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In 8e, the Races section of the PHB is replaced by the Illithid Traits section. No other races are playable.

The Illithids are actually humans though! They came from humans warped by the Far Realms over time. The Gith are also from humans, warped by the powers of the Illithids to the point of becoming immune to their psychic powers and gaining a few of their own.

In some of the Forgotten Realms material you can change the timeline and whatever "the future" is isn't inevitable. But also the Far Realms are themselves non-linear in time.

ALSO! Here's a fun fact, the leaders of Githyanki, not Githzerai, society want to first destroy the Mind Flayers but when that's done they want to, get this, conquer the cosmos. This is the reason the Githzerai split from them actually.

Anyway, here's my theory: The Githyanki do become the Illithid as they also have psychic powers, want to conquer the cosmos, and were originally human.

I remember reading somewhere that mind flayers are the only thing Aboleths fear because it's the only thing they don't remember the origin of.

Yup, that tracks with my knowledge as well! Aboleths apparently have a genetic memory that goes all the way to the beginning of time and they remember every other species coming into existence, but mind flayers just appeared one day and it's making the aboleths very anxious

So I’ve actually done a lot of thinking on this topic, and while it may not be canon, my thoughts:

We all know The Far Realms are not based on linear time, and things sprout randomly from them. (Or perhaps not randomly, but due to an order no one can comprehend.) My thought is that either an Elder Brain or a Mind Flayer was originally conjured sometime, somewhere. It’s very possible that their origin is as simple as that. Then they do the whole future empire thing after spreading. 

Empire falls, cue travel back in time. But what if they don’t travel back in their OWN timeline, but instead, create a branching timeline, a concept most sci-fi folks are familiar with.

Now you have a bunch of Mind Flayers that only knew the life of an empire, frantically trying to build an empire. Perhaps they succeed, and perhaps they don’t. However, by the time they DO get to build an empire, they’ve either forgotten, or in their hubris, overlooked (or thought they could overcome) the weakness of their past empire. 

Empire falls, cue travel back in time.

IMO? Mind flayers are stuck, racially, in a loop that can be tracked through multiple timelines. 

the aboleths who predate the gods having no clue what the mindflayers are talking about is gold

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downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because

followed by

is such a funny sequence

i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE

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I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd

No, y'all don't even understand.

There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.

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That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop

Yall don't know how much I adore all of this