tl;dr light and dark as paralelism of life/order and death/chaos are universal human mind concepts, not religious
Light and dark are used by religion, but are not religious concepts.
attuned to the light cycle. Night is when the body decays and rests (unless you break the natural cycle through bad habits pretty common pre30s).
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What you could argue as semireligious is the paralelism between light and order, and night and chaos. But once again its more spiritual and conceptual rather than purely religious.
Religious or not, you do not accept a pure creature in very dark colors, your subconscious tells you there is something wrong or hidden behind.
Hmm, most of your points seems logical, yet, if it is true that darkness is often associated with death, while Hollywood has publicised a conception that indeed exist not only in Hollywood movies of darkness corresponding to evil and chaos, you should also remember that darkness is also associated with rest (and effectively, death is also called the ethernal rest, and there are expressions like requiescat in pace, rest in peace).
The cyrcadian reference would be correct, if it was not also wrong.
The disruption of the light/activity-dark/sleep cycle does have negative consequences, as well as insufficient light for long periods, however, it is not the absence of light in absolute, it is the disruption of the cycle and the imbalance (too much light, or even normal light, for too long, also has a negative impact).
"Decays" is a very wrong term, "rest" is much better, effectively, night and sleep is when the body actually does the opposite of "decaying", it recovers energies and heals, as well as (between others) fix memories.
It is true that if you were to rest for too long (long coma style), the muscles would lose tone and become weak, but again, it is a matter of balance, not of absolutes (without darkness and sleep, you muscles will not be able to recover from efforts and thus will not reap the benefits of exercise).
You should remember life would not exist without chaos (if you prefer, entropy) - we like to pretend life is absolute order because we are built on a culture of control
, but without some chaos, we would not exist, and life on Earth as we know it would not exist.
So, seeing them as opposite extremes is a cultural construct and an habit.
But the real reason most people are fearful of the dark is much simpler than anything you wrote and even than what I indicated above
.
We have other senses, but we evolved to mostly use our eyes, we are visual. But in the dark of a forest and of night, our ancestors, similar to us (though maybe less) could not see well, and certainly less than many potential predators
.
Our brain still have some parts that clearly carry over from animals, including that aspect.
The way Zorlun used darkness is actually perfectly valid, as in Myriam wants to rest in peace, and by doing so, she fades away to death.
The light is life, but to experience the beauty of life, she also has to accept to deal with the negative of it, and her demons (well, her Antho-demo
) are there to remind her going back to life will mean be still able of embracing her dear ones, but also having to deal with those aspects.
My bet is that Zorlun did not ponder about it too much before doing the scene the way he did it, but I think that makes it somehow even better, because it was spontaneous
