pillaroforder wrote:
Well we did construct them through selective breeding, so we assembled them from different parents (and their DNA), but they are still more than just things, they just aren't so 'natural' anymore. The best way of putting it would be 'we shaped them' and I think this more or less goes for familiars too, they're just shaped by magic as much as selective breeding.
Except nothing indicates that the tsuirakushitii took parts of the DNA of two or more cats and constructed Ellis's DNA. Which is on of the few ways the word "assemble" would make any sense here. Even then you'd have a hard time arguing for Ellis being a construct, rather than just genetically engineered where his DNA is 'constructed'.
There is of course ways in which you can argue that absolutely anything in the world is a construct, but that dilutes the term to a degree where it becomes useless. Let's take f.ex. the word 'magic'. In this forum we use that word in a very strict manner.
"IMO, Jon's guns are magic. Same goes for that cat-ball-gag he bought. Tsuirakushiti levitates through magic, but the greatest magic lies in its distribution of tentacle manga to the world."
When it comes to living things, we already have a pretty firmly ingrained set of vocabulary for describing attributes. A construction by definition requires several parts of something being put together and breeding is used to describe... Breeding, where you modify the condition in the hopes that things will move in the direction you wish.
The organism reproduces by its own violation, and even though the cells construct the body as it grows, those are internal processes. I guess the important part of this is _who_ is doing the construction. When a golem is constructed, it is done by a mage. Who constructs the cat that is bred?