I don’t think that follows. The other gods have cut him out, hence he feels the need to extort them. He thinks they won’t give him any say without the threat. Maybe there have been 1000 new worlds where he was given no say.
I have the impression that the races keep playing the same part in each of the worlds from now on – the gods don’t re-litigate what a human, elf, dwarf, etc will be for each new world. So while the elves also created minor deities through their faith and traditions, those elven gods don’t have any reason to cause a fuss because the elves don’t have it any worse than the other major races. But goblinoids are forever slotted as experience point fodder for the other races and thus the Dark One is trying to permanently change that and this is (perhaps) the first world to have the Snarl locked behind Gates that can be moved and weaponized.
Hmmmm, maaaaaybe, but the Evil Gods, after some brief discussion as to whether this was a good thing to do, decided to let The Dark One in on the story of the Snarl.
I think this one confused me. I don’t know if it makes sense but I probably need more of the narrative.
It did explain why so many gods were willing to end it all at the Godsmoot. They know they can start over and maybe change things. (Although, really? At this point, really? This time, it will be different?)
Does this mean that every time, mortals ruined the gates (what gates?) and released the snarl? Have there actually been any differences? Or is this the difference that mortals created the gates? Otherwise, there were just these portals that allowed the snarl out?
I think, at this point, I do want to know why, if at all, this is different than all of those others. And how does this tie back to Eugene’s oath to get Xykon?
Good discussion! Thanks!
Yes, it seems likely that this is the first time there actually WERE gates. Since it apparently requires possibly multiple epic (divine & arcane) casters working together, and (most?) earlier iterations did not last as long or possibly didn’t have as much exp fodder, these rift-sealing Gates may be a new thing. Otherwise, the Snarl would make or find a breach, escape, and destroy everything shortly after.
Narratively, if one of the earlier worlds had gates and heroes to stop the Snarl, we’d be reading a story about them instead of the OotS.
I’m assuming that while the Gods might survive the destruction of the universe by hiding from the Snarl, all the souls in the afterlife are unable to hide and are destroyed along with everything living.
There’s too much exchange of information between the afterlife and the living world for it to be otherwise. If all of the souls from those previous universes were still around, the souls who died in this universe would have encountered them (according to this strip, souls from previous universes would make up the vast majority of the population of the afterlife) and passed the information back to the living world.
Whether they exist as “souls” or exist as some sort of raw material for making more souls (she calls them “resources”), the whole point of Hel’s plan was for the dwarves to die without valor and have claim over their souls, thus making herself queen of the Northern Pantheon for the next world.
This sounds more foreboding if you think we’re headed towards World #3 than towards World Umpteen-Bajillion-Plus-Three.
Assuming Shojo’s story accurately describes this iteration of the world, then this seems to be correct. It mentions the Elves and the Goblins crated their own gods. And, while the Elves have many, the only Goblin god seems to be The Dark One.
Of course, it already gets the number of worlds wrong, assuming that this is only the second world–the one immediately created after the first one was unraveled. It’s hard to know if the story is describing the current world and glossing over those before it, or if it’s describing the some other world.
We know from Hel’s plan that, if the gods deliberately unmake the World, the dead souls from this world carry on to the next. We don’t know if that’s true for an uncontrolled Snarl containment breach. It might be that, when deliberately recycling a world, the gods can build the new one “on top of” the old one as it’s being deconstructed, enabling the prison to remain intact during the process, but if the Snarl does the unmaking, it then proceeds to run rampant through the Multiverse until it’s re-contained.
We’ve also got to account for the world inside the snarl. There are some assumptions here by the gods that may not be true.
Bad for artificially creating high stakes, good for world-building.
For example, Snarl might be protecting his own world against hostile invasion. At other times he might be striking out at those who imprison him. And in the beginning, he might have simply been, “A god-murdering creature born of deific foolishness”.
We also don’t know how long each of these worlds lasted, including Stick-world. Except for the early ones: #2 lasted 4 years.
Given the setup, I’m guessing that some of the Snarl issues will be resolved by the end of this strip by Oots and that it will involve not securing the gates against Red-Eye’s meddling but visiting Snarl-world. This strip seems to like to place Big Bads behind Big Bads: first the Xykon blood oath, then securing the gates, and now dealing with Snarl itself is the main challenge.
But if she is Queen of the North on world x+1, then it seems likely that she’ll remain queen going forward, supplanting Odin - at least until he or someone else comes up with a clever plan to swing the power balance back.
The calendar in the current Stickworld puts the year number at a little over a thousand. It’s reasonable to assume that that’s counting from the Creation. If nothing else, the gods have gotten a lot better at prison-building (though maybe not as much better as you’d expect, given all that practice).
If I’m understanding things correctly, the Gods are worried about humans or some other living beings unleashing the Snarl by accident. If that happens, the Snarl will destroy everything, including all the souls in the afterlife. The only exception will be the Gods if they go into hiding.
The Gods are considering preventing this possibility by destroying the world themselves. This will send every living being to the afterlife but it won’t release the Snarl. So they can build a new world, rebind the Snarl, and restart new living races. This method will not result in all of the souls being destroyed; they just stay safe in the afterlife.
That’s why Hel voted for destroying the world. She wants to receive all of the souls of the dwarves who will be killed when the world ends. And she’ll get to keep them if the Snarl remains contained and the afterlife is preserved.
In the e-book version of DStP, we find out that the northern calendar was set by King Monarch IV of That Kingdom to start at the founding of that kingdom, 53 years earlier. So definitely not at Creation. We have no idea how long after Creation that was; it may have been anywhere from the next year to centuries later. My guess would be within the first century.
It’s not so much that someone will accidently release the Snarl, but rather that they expect the Snarl to get out anyway. They’ve made billions of worlds and that’s happened every single time. The gates delay this, and it’s likely that many previous worlds have had gates built too. In those cases, the gods can just keep track of the status of the gates. When they’re down to a single gate, they know the time of release is likely close, hence the Godsmoot to decide whether to preemptively destroy the world.
When there are no gates built, they may have developed some other way of keeping track of the progress of the rifts and have some protocol for timing of the preemptive destruction. Or maybe they’re always surprised by the Snarl getting out in those worlds.
I’m not sure if destroying the world will not release the Snarl, but rather do it in a somewhat controlled manner. That is, it’s released, but has no souls to gobble up and destroy. However, the planet seen by Blackwing in the Azure City rift may have something to do with this. Perhaps the gods have a way of building the next world before the current one is destroyed, and that’s it. It’s not populated yet and won’t be until the current world is destroyed. But since it’s there, it will contain the Snarl when it goes online, so to speak. That’s just speculation, though; we have no idea where that other world came from.
Right. And because of that, we can be fairly sure that the Bet is something new and different to this world. It’s not an ongoing thing (it was made when this world was created), but if they’d also done the Bet in a previous world, she’s likely to have already become the chief god of the Northern Pantheon, which of course, she is not.
So my take is that the gods try to do something different in every world to see if they can’t break the cycle of the world being destroyed every time. The Bet is what they did differently this time.
I had thought that the Northern and Southern calendars used (mostly) the same year number, just with different New Year’s Days. Which could still be consistent with it being an act of King Monarch IV, if That Kingdom were founded in the first year, and he was just setting the start of the calendar to be whatever date of the year the kingdom were officially founded.
Do you suppose The Dark One got a vote at the Godsmoot? Probably not, right, because his High Priest, Redcloak, is at the North Pole?
Each pantheon had their own moot and, in each moot, it appears that the minor gods cast together as a single vote. I don’t think that it has to be your high priest as your chosen representative (Durkon tossed leadership to the one random cleric so it obviously doesn’t need to be your senior/highest level cleric). So the Dark One may have voted as part of the minor deities for his corner of the world.
Redcloak obviously has other things the Dark One needs him doing than tending to other goblins’ spiritual needs. I suspect that, in so much as there’s a Dark One church hierarchy, Redcloak may be a singular individual outside of the bureaucracy.
As far as we know, the Dark One is not a god, demi or full, in any of the three pantheons. So I doubt he was given a vote, even if he had some other cleric as designated high priest. He’s pretty much an outcast among gods. He has some allies among the pantheons, but probably only one or two from each. While those allies told him about the Snarl (in SoD), they don’t seem to have told him about the billions of previous worlds.
The elvish gods are minor created deities and are part of the Western pantheon. It’s possible that the Dark One is one of the collected minor deities of the Southern pantheon. The voting scene only shows the priests of the Twelve major gods, but they don’t show any of the minor deity priests and we know from the Northern Godsmoot that no one bothers asking for their vote unless you need to break a tie.
Obviously we don’t know for sure because it hasn’t been spelled out but Rat, Tiamat and Loki said that the Dark One deserves a divine place since they allowed the Elven pantheon to form without conflict. And it makes more sense (to me) that the Gods who distrust the Dark One would rather have him in a pantheon where someone is keeping an eye on him than just running solo, outside the system. So the Southern pantheon makes the most sense.