sun
2yr ago
Well, your objection only makes sense if you believe the original concept of Christianity matters more than what currently living people make of it.
sun
2yr ago
By volume, quite a lot was "garbage reactionary mottezens make largely predictable and frankly boring replies to leftist commenter".
sun
2yr ago
And your objection is that it's not a good story because they don't ban anything outright, or what? If so, I'm afraid the flexibility has been built into the setting from the beginning. As Blake put it, everything is theater.
sun
2yr ago
No, she doesn't quite have enough desire or similarity for that. But I found it a funny set of minor parallels.
sun
2yr ago
It does have more weight than buying a house, as for the ease of negotiation, that's a matter of opinion. Even actual Familiar rituals have wiggle room. You can even stretch them enough to have Familiar-Implements, Familiar-Demesnes and the rest of the permutations. If that's allowed, I see no reason why practitioners have to go along with Christian marriage vows word-for-word.
Work too hard to contort your setting into supporting your ideology and I will get annoyed, whatever the ideology.
That works both ways, I'll get annoyed when someone works too hard to dismantle a setting based on their dislike of the ideology it's built with.
The premise and the conflict of the story is that it's hard to break pattern and stereotype - but not impossible. Indeed there wouldn't be much of a story if everyone had to go along with the weight of thousands of years of tradition.
sun
2yr ago
Like a certain deity evoking imagery of nails, blood and three-fingered gestures?
sun
2yr ago
I'm saying that what humans call tradition is only a fraction of patterns in reality. The existence of deviations from traditions is just as much a pattern. And Others, aside from those who explicitly represent human tradition, represent deviation.
So yes, spirits do care about tradition, but not exclusively like a human ultra-conservative would.
sun
2yr ago
It's not like some famous female warrior or even a god will ever convince the spirits that "sword means female".
Enough female warriors will. If anything, the fact that it's a bias and not a mandatory requirement even after thousands of years of precedent and symbolism speaks against it being "total". Your "penis means male" example is much more inflexible.
sun
2yr ago
Yes, assuming he existed seems much safer than any other assumption, given all the other gods.
Why? The big God is clearly categorically different from pagan-tier gods, as his followers insist. Omnipotent, omnipresent etc. I can assume the Canaanite war god Yahweh existed, but assuming the monotheistic God existed (at least in the way Christianity describes him) is a bigger stretch.
Now that it's around, either it has an actual basis, or there's a market opening for a god to come in and impersonate God.
Many Others, even those who are not actual demons, apparently abuse devilish aesthetics. Presumably there are impersonators. It would take some enormous feet to fill God's boots, though, so I'm not surprised that none of them are bigger than small sect patrons.
I don't blame Wildbow for neglecting delving into Christian representation, because I don't find it interesting. Western culture is already suffused with Christianity enough.
sun
2yr ago
The Others don't come up with the rules though, it's the spirits (mostly) that do that.
That's... pretty much just isn't true. The spirits don't come up with the rules, they observe patterns and do their part in passing them along.
sun
2yr ago
The universe itself should enforce marriage as its own Ritual, like a familiar ritual, aside from any explicit promises you make as part of it.
Why? It's primarily Innocent business. Whatever connotations it had before Solomon, it's been thoroughly mundane'd since. It doesn't have to be "like a Familiar ritual" any more than buying a house as a practitioner "has to be like a Demesnes ritual".
sun
2yr ago
Whoever is coming up with this morality (whether spirits or Others) I think it's silly for them to be totally inflexible on swords being male, but totally flexible on whether a person is male or female. These spirits should be totally racist as well, trying to stick people into well-defined roles based on the type of magic their practitioner ancestors did.
First, there is absolutely an effect on how Others see you based on who your ancestors were. Second, you're making a mistake of assuming the spirits are 100% on "sword means dick, no arguments" based on the Implementum book, which is written by Practitioner society who love their rigid categories. Having a bias towards "sword is male" does not mean "totally inflexible".
sun
2yr ago
for instance are the Greek and Roman versions of a god two separate entities?
Seems so. There are apparently numerous apocryphal offshoots of someone like Prometheus, one of which is Ulysse's patron.
in-universe if this were much of a threat then the one true God would have shut it down rather than risk being fractured or having his power diluted.
That's assuming he existed.
why are people Christians at all if there's no god behind it? That's an enormous open market for plenty of other gods who can easily work small miracles to get people to worship them instead.
Whatever Others facilitate the existence of Christianity as a religion among the Innocent, it doesn't have to be one Other and it doesn't have to be a god.
sun
2yr ago
That's if you assume the universe sees being an iron-fist patriarch as a duty and not a right of the head of the family. When it's the latter, the patriarch would just as well get extra good karma for allowing liberties to his charges.
As for "entering the workplace", honestly this seems such a petty issue in the face of the larger corpus of worldwide tradition.
Obviously this is all a matter of how you approach interpretation. You appear to be aiming to dismantle the Watsonian explanations, while I'm aiming to create them.
sun
2yr ago
Solomon divided the Other and the Innocent worlds, like, several thousand years before Christianity appeared and spread (mostly among the Innocent).
sun
2yr ago
So maybe practitioners don't make the same vows?
I'm pretty sure it's either implied or said planily that practitioners don't make the same vows. Also, there's the "EULA argument", as follows: if no one actually reads the EULA when agreeing to it, then no one is actually held to it.
People should get forsworn for cheating on each other all the time.
I assume practitioners are selected for being slightly more able to keep the promises they made. But no doubt there are ones who got forsworn for cheating.
How about responsibility to your family? This should be just as important but the universe seems to care very little for it, not penalizing parents for mistreating their children or children for rebelling against their parents.
The universe appears to subscribe to the patriarchal model of the family where the patriarch rules and calls the shots and the children rebelling is his problem. That's traditional enough if you ask me.
sun
2yr ago
Was it mentioned in Pact/Pale at all that gods need belief? Sounds like they gain power from acts of worship, particularly ones that sacrifice something or give them claim over something (a mark on the body, for example).
Based on the knowledge on Pactverse gods and the divine practices shared in the story, I'm led to believe that the vastness of Abrahamic religions works against their God(s). "I am what I am", what kind of definition is that? Here on this forum, when that kind of definition is applied to the concept of a woman, people laugh it out of the room.
The universe in general seems perfectly fine with sexual progressivism where I would expect it to be extremely strict. For instance, the universe is quite traditional in interpreting a sword as "masculine" and a chalice as "feminine" and will partially define your role in the universe according to which of these you choose, and the corresponding gender, but then has no issue with anything else you'd expect. A universe so rooted in tradition would have little patience for female breadwinners, let alone something like transgenderism.
I'd say this is consistent with other established themes. Do you expect the group of entities literally named "Others" to care about tradition and fitting in in the way human society and human establishment does? Being -phobic is the bread-and-butter of the old Practitioner families. Don't confuse sticking to tradition and sticking to symbolism.
What I dislike about Pale is that the way Wildbow explicitly minds the audience diminishes 2/3 of the protagonists' personal struggles in my eyes. Verona's pet issue is her detachment and lack of trust between her and adulthood. Lucy's is being a racial minority. Avery's is being a sexual orientation minority. All of those are hammered over the reader's head quite a bit.
But while Verona's issues are repeatedly and blatantly justified, Lucy and Avery mostly have to resort to wondering and imagining if their issues are even real. The worst Avery actually got about her being a lesbian is her Finder family ally (briefly) flipping out on her because she kinda sorta led them to believe they have a chance of arranged marriage. I don't recall Lucy actually encountering an explicit racism moment. I'm quite confident that given Wildbow's current main audience, and perhaps his own shifts in political opinion, he will not choose to write the word "nigger" again even inside the head of the most racist character in the novel.
I do not have to see the word nigger in a novel to like it. But I do wish Wildbow was writing for a wider audience than people who "don't want the story to be about that" (referring to explicit examples of minority struggles and -isms as opposed to vague Institutional -Isms).
sun
2yr ago
There's an entire team of kids from a Christian school, as well as I think a Witch Hunter who scolded someone for taking the name of God in vain. I suppose you'd be correct if you meant "no identifiably hardline Christians".
sun
2yr ago
The relationship Jeremy Meath has with Dionysus, where you don't know exactly how much Relationship Points you've got with your patron and how much would be demanded for the next miracle you ask for (and of course a shrewd god would not give specific promises easily) - that's something closer to belief than to knowledge in my books.
The problem with representing monotheistic religions is that they're, well, by default not quite true in a universe where there are gods, plural. Also, you can argue that a God that encompasses everything is so bound by that definition that he might as well not be defined. When everything is super God, nothing is.
That's why we have Architects/Angels latching on the Judeo-Christian aesthetic, but no big G.
Also, normal people don't get magic in Pactverse, that's established. Sometimes normal people go through weird and/or intense shit and walk the line between mundane and Other, but that's it. Not something every small town pastor is going to get. Melissa had to suffer a grievous injury that detached her from mundane life to an extent in order for her repeated attempts at replicating the spellcards to have any effect.
That still leaves "garbage reactionary mottezens make largely predictable and frankly boring replies to each other", which is even more tiresome. Leftist trolls bring some novelty.
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