The Order of the Stick

Ah, fuck. Knew I should have looked that up first. Sorry. Still, it only emphasizes my point.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

General rule of thumb is North is Norse/germanic, South is the Asian Zodiac, West is Ancient Mesopotamian, and Former East is Greek.

Tiamat, being a mesopotamian chaos monster whose death heralds/parallels civilization conquering the desert and establishing the first cities, comes from the Western Pantheon.

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

Wait a minute. Why would the East be associated with the Greek pantheon when the Greek gods were all wiped out way before this world ever existed and thus directions had any meaning?

Because in the first world, the pantheons were the same (Plus or minus any gods who may have died or been created over the eons). Seems likely that as a sign of respect for their lost kin, the gods continue to call themselves the pantheons of the north, west and south, so they never forget that a quarter of them were slaughtered in the first world they created.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 29th 2024 at 9:47:38 AM

Or it could simply be how the worshippers defined them on the first world, and they've never bothered to try to change it, despite the lack of an Eastern pantheon. Complacency again.

The gods of Stickworld are collectively a rather conservative bunch. They've done what works billions of times and haven't seen any need to innovate.

They innovate every new world they create to try to make the prison a little bit more solid each time. Every world lasts longer than the last. They also give each world a new theme to make it more interesting.

Over billions of iterations, there's only so many ideas you can have.

Nonetheless, they've made it a point to honor every lost world with a marker in a hidden graveyard. It seems needlessly pessimistic to assume that they don't care about the loss of the Eastern pantheon.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 29th 2024 at 10:11:15 AM

They've been conservative for lack of any better options. If they let enough worlds (and all the souls therein, most importantly) get eaten by the Snarl, they all starve to death and there will be no more worlds.

It is only the emergence of a genuinely new quiddity that allows them the hope of breaking free from the cycle. It's understandable that they'd be a little skeptical.

Mortal minds aren't really equipped to handle this level of morality. Yeah, it sucks for goblins that they get exploited for XP, but there's a slightly bigger problem.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The rules they put in place to protect against the creation of a new Snarl also force the gods to be conservative.

Fenris can create goblins over and over again on billions of worlds and never get what he wants out of them (which is to Zerg Rush to a win), and none of the other gods can stop him from doing it because that would break the rules.

"One god tries the same thing over and over" =/= "The gods don't try to innovate".

But "all of them trying much the same thing" does show that they don't innovate much. A new theme for each world does nothing to solve the basic problem that the Snarl always breaks free and destroys them. Thor says that over billions of tries they've gotten better at lengthening the time before the Snarl breaks out, but that again is more "refinement" than "innovation".

The Snarl existing is not a "basic problem". It's an underlying reality of the Stickverse. The Snarl exists, will always exist, will never stop existing. Nothing the gods do will make the Snarl go away and it is impossible for them to interact with it.

They've only ever tried to create prisons. I wonder what they'd be able to do if they instead, made, IDK, a weapon?

Cutting the Knot, as it were

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

They can't because it's more real than them. They need The Dark One for that, and The Dark One won't talk to them.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

They get into the issue of there being no way for them to use the weapon, as the Snarl can kill any of them nigh instantly. They lack the quiddity to affect the Snarl in any meaningful way.

Three is enough to contain. Four can imprison it permanently. They would probably need a fifth to actually kill it.

That's the point - they found what they think is a "good enough" solution and have used it billions of times. The only progress they've made is refining how long they can keep the Snarl imprisoned.

As far as we know they've never tried fighting the Snarl and have never tried to communicate with it in any way. They've never even tried to see if it's doing anything while imprisoned. They just assume the imperfect solution they have used billions of time will continue to work into eternity.

The existence of a world in the rift came as a complete surprise to Thor. Are the gods investigating this now? Possibly, but it seems more likely they're just arguing about whether they should investigate, if Thor told them about it in the first place.

Part of the problem is, as Thor points out, they can't agree on anything. That is of course what created the Snarl in the first place.

EDIT: As far as we know they didn't make any attempts to create a new quiddity either. Maybe they did try and concluded it was impossible, but I think it's more likely they have never really tried.

Edited by Bense on Apr 29th 2024 at 11:00:57 AM

There is a great deal of foreshadowing suggesting that the true nature of the Snarl is different than what we've been told so far, and likely even different than what the gods themselves are aware of. From a Doylist perspective (here we go again) it would be absurd to set all that up and then not pay it off somehow.

A part of me wonders how this specific setup for the universe's cosmology came to be in the first place. Does the Astral Plane spontaneously generate gods who then instinctively create worlds? Is there a higher-order power setting all this in motion? It may not be germane to the story but I can't help but speculate.

Absent some metaphysical causation along those lines, the current situation is entirely the gods' fault, and it is on them to fix it. As we have established, however, the structures they've set up to prevent another Snarl are exactly what is keeping them from being able to take advantage of this new opportunity. It is not fair that they have to rely on mortals, whom they created and put in this position, to fix their problems, but that is the situation we find ourselves in now.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Have you missed the part where the Snarl murders them instantly? Where it's fully capable of destroying an entire pantheons in seconds? To even take the risk of observing it might very well be a death sentence and it's not like they can pop into the world to look through the rifts (which could very well end with them getting murdered in a split second if the Snarl reaches out at the moment).

The gods' priority right now is whether to destroy the world or take a chance and let the mortals rebuild the gates, with some of them being dedicated to try to get the Dark One to help them out. Investigating the planet inside the rift is something that Thor discovered mere days ago and in all likelihood may not even have had time to relay to his own Pantheon, let alone the others. It is a very secondary concern.

How would they have known? Every mortal that ever rose to godhood/demigodhood during the billions of iterations only ever did so with the sponsorship of the existing pantheons. How could they have possibly known that it was possible for a mortal to rise to godhood on their own, on the sheer weight of the belief of an existing race? It's not like the goblins are unique in their world creation. As you mentionned yourself, Fenrir makes a goblin-like race in just about every world iteration and inevitably gets bored of them, so a goblin-like quiddity could have arised from a previous world like this one.

The most logical explanation for why it happened now must be because the gods have managed to make their worlds last long enough for the circumstances necessary for the creation of a new quiddity to arise.

Yeah, I'm unsure as to how exactly they could make a new quiddity when The Dark One only became a god with his own quiddity as a result of the goblinoids killing so many in his name that he was able to become the only god in his pantheon, since he rose without any of the other pantheons sponsoring him.

As Fighteer pointed out, the gods must have come from somewhere. If they know how they were created in the first place they could possibly use that as a jumping off point for trying to create a new quiddity. As far as we can tell they didn't try. Thor says some of the other gods don't even believe The Dark One is a new quiddity.

As for how to attempt to communicate with the Snarl, how about picking a loyal mortal servant, ascending them to divine status, and sending them into a rift to see if they can talk to the Snarl? Thor didn't mention any communication attempts.

Resileafs mentioned that the gods can't pop into the world and look through a rift to see what's there, but that seems to be pretty much what the Dark One was doing in Start of Darkness after he first became aware of the Rifts. He doesn't seem to have seen a world at the time, but of course what's in Start of Darkness is what The Dark One told Redcloak went down and what Redcloak was willing to tell Xykon, not necessarily what really happened.

I don't doubt that the Snarl can and will destroy any souls that it snatches, nor that it can and will still murder gods. That's not really in doubt. I have a personal opinion that it may be turning all the "threads" that it devours into some semblance of a new reality, possibly a world that is stable enough not to need replacement every few thousand years.

The fact that they can't (or won't) communicate with it is the actual problem, one that may get resolved through an as-yet unrevealed mechanism.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The Gods are ideas that have grown so powerful that they gained sentience. As he explains to Minrah during the trip in the Astral Plane, everything outside of creation itself is just thoughts and ideas, the Outer Planes are groupings of thoughts that are powerful enough to have substance, so to speak, and the gods are the thoughts and ideas that are more powerful than anything else, which is why they are very malleable and can be changed by the beliefs of their own worshippers. Ascended mortals are the same, their mortal body dies, but the ideas and thoughts that inhabits their souls become powerful enough to reach apotheosis. When they do, they generally get sponsored by the existing pantheons because they usually worshipped those pantheons in life.

As for why some gods don't believe that the Dark One is a new quiddity, that's because they received the news from Tiamat.

For one, that mortal is still weaker than the Snarl and will get killed very fast. For two, that mortal will have the power to kill the gods with ease and they're hardly going to create the tools of their own destruction.

That explanation feels facile, though. It runs into the ol' chicken-and-egg problem, or worse, turtles all the way down. Who generated the ideas that became powerful enough to form gods in the first place?

Whence came the cosmology that birthed them? The answer may not matter for this story, of course.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Rich Burlew.

Oh, you meant in-universe. Honestly, it might still be Rich Burlew.

According to the crayon backstory that Shojo told the Order, the threads of reality came first as formless chaos, and the gods arrived afterwards. I would hazard a guess that the ideas that formed the outer planes and the gods were just radiating from that formless chaos and the gods gave those threads form and created the material plane in doing so.

The exact mechanics are probably not important to Rich because it would distract from the plot of the story.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 29th 2024 at 2:21:35 PM

You assume the Snarl doesn't want to communicate or won't accept any attempt to talk, but will just immediately kill any god that comes too close. I don't think anyone knows how the Snarl would react to such an attempt. The Snarl killed the Eastern Pantheon a very long time ago, and there's no sign it has killed any other gods since. Each time it destroys a world they've just stayed out of its way until it calmed down enough that they could imprison it again without danger to themselves.

I meant one mortal ascended by one deity, not a mortal ascended by a whole pantheon or all three pantheons, if that is even possible. The idea would be that newly-minted divine would be essentially expendable, not that they would be able to survive a Snarl attack because they would have the combined power of their patrons. Though that is another possible idea the gods haven't tried, especially if the gods were attempting to fight it instead of communicate.