Lowest Cosmic Denominator - Television Tropes & Idioms

redirected from Main.TheLowestCosmicDenominator

alt title(s): The Lowest Cosmic Denominator

The basis for the series is that our heroes, representing the forces of Good, are engaged in a constant battle with the forces of Evil. But, since folks are touchy about religion, all the names have been changed to protect propriety.

This also gives us leeway to create cool, modern (or post-modern) sounding names for our Hero. "Slayer" is much easier to sell to the general public than "Templar", and certainly better connotatively than "Inquisitor". "Whitelighters" might be "Angels" or "Saints", but might not. They are much more new-agey, and handy around the house, too. Samantha Stevens nose-twitched away most of the stigma against Witches, so we can go with that, but what say we call the ruler of the Netherworld, our biggest Big Bad "Prime Evil" so as not to offend any Theistic Satanists

. And let's avoid any problems in the Bible Belt by just calling the ultimate good guys the "Powers That Be" rather than naming any "real" gods or angels. This also helps if you want one (or two or three) of the Powers That Be to go Evil.

Of course, this also makes it easier for us to make sure that Our Vampires Are Different, maintain the Balance Between Good And Evil, and come up with a fresh Sorting Algorithm Of Evil. Theology majors and occultists won't be able to complain that we didn't do our homework, because we eliminated all that dry scholarly crap in the interest of making our background accessible to the average viewer.

It's The Theme Park Version of religion, where everybody's Not Using The Zed Word.

Examples

Literature

Harry Potter. Christian hymns are occasionally mentioned in regards to the celebration of Christmas and a church appears in the seventh book, but that's about it. Not that that stopped the Moral Guardians.
- JK Rowling shied away from giving wizards any cosmic beliefs whatsoever, which is a bit of a copout and bizarre as wizards happily celebrate Christmas.. Ferretbrain wrote an article about the influence of poorly-remembered Calvinism.
- Celebrating Christmas in a western society doesn't necessarily make someone Christian, anyway. Same goes for Easter to a lesser extent.
- It's still kind of lame, since magic and ghosts pretty much require some kind of theology to explain them.
  - Be careful what you wish for
In the Old Kingdom trilogy, Garth Nix uses 'Charter Magic' and 'The Charter' to refer to the orderly, set and harmonious schemata of magic that keeps the universe running, while 'Free Magic' refers to the corroding and chaotic magic that The Charter was created from and which is inimical to the natural order of the universe (which interestingly is still used by the Charter's embassy, the Abhorsen.) Worship of the Charter, and the "Seven Bright Shiners" who created it, seems to be the religion in the Old Kingdom, though the most we see of this is in baptisms upon a child's birth.
- While the actual religious practices are not elaborated on in detail, the Bright Shiners become major players in the latter parts of the story. The Eighth Bright Shiner, who refused to take part in creating Charter Magic, turns out to be Mogget — and not a nice guy, should he ever become Unsealed Evil From A Can.
Meljean Brook's Guardians series- the Guardians are pretty much all angels that were born human, they just don't use the a-word.
Parodied in the Thursday Next books with the invention of the GSD Church - Global Standard Deity. Essentially a mishmash of all world religions, in which pretty much anybody can believe anything they want about it.

Comic Books

In The DCU, it's established that -most- pantheons are pretty much one and the same. Sentient entities play similar roles throughout in some cases. So the creators are free to go with some made up Religion or right into Catholicism. Both happen a lot. Similarly, Hell is full of classic mythology and made up characters. Power struggles happen constantly, with various demonic horrors fighting/displacing/killing mythological beings or made up characters. To cap it off, DC comics even had Hell overrunning Heaven. Heaven got better.
- And then there's Vertigo. Among other things, God is replaced by a teenage girl. It's probably best to just not talk about that though.
In The Marvel Universe, the Fantastic Four met the One-Above-All. It was Jack Kirby.

Live Action TV

Buffy The Vampire Slayer only mentions that Willow is Jewish in passing, and pretty much glosses over religion entirely after that. The bad guys are evil, many are in fact demons (or gods, in the case of Glory), but none of them cite references from the Bible or Qur'an on their resumes. (A few early examples do come from existing Christian tradition, though.)
- However, crosses and holy water are still effective anti-vamp weapons.
- Wicca is treated as a source of power rather than a religion. In fact, only one group treated Wicca like the real, modern day religion, and that was Willow's college coven. They were portrayed as naive fools.
  - To be true, almost any subculture or religious group has hordes of wannabes that are only in because they think it is cool, but don't get it at all what's it really about. That scene more likely made fun of these people than any group of people they claim to belong to this week.
  - Also, it had already been (rather arbitrarily) established that in the Buffyverse, humans developed witchcraft from copying the older demonic races. There the real Wiccan religion would be somewhat out of place and out of touch with its origins. At least the coven wasn't depicted as corrupted or evil.
- It should also be kept in mind that despite the fact Buffy went to heaven, she and a vampire have a conversation and pretty much confirm that god doesn't exist. Makes sense, since the PTB are pretty much allpowerful demony thingies.
  - Actually, it seems more that Buffy went to heaven and yet still has no 'proof', one way or the other, on the existence of God, though Buffy herself seems to be an atheist (thus, in its way, quietly denying Christian doctrine).
  - She is probably more of an agnostic. After all, crosses and holy water still work (as do exorcisms- in Angel we hear about a priest who died performing one; it worked but the demon was too dangerous).
Charmed also creates a fictionalized mythology from whole cloth, with Witches being born to the power, Warlocks wanting to usurp the power, Demons led by the Source, Whitelighters following the orders of the Elders, etc.
Averted thoroughly in the Stargate Verse: the characters certainly do their mythological homework, and gods and godlings from virtually every pantheon, including Judeo-Christian-Islam, are at least name-checked if not completely attributed to Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
Averted in Season 4 of Supernatural. Throughout the series, there had been demons (usually using the names of Biblical demons), but no sign of any angels or any reference to God. Then, suddenly, there's not only Castiel, but the fact that he tells Dean that God himself commanded he be brought back to life. Sure, some of the mythology is changed (66 seals must be broken until Lucifer is unleashed), but the show doesn't shy away from using real world religion.
Obvious aversions: Shows like Reaper or Joan Of Arcadia, which explicitly feature Satan or God (respectively) as major characters and speak openly about Christian lore.

Role Playing Games

The first edition of Advanced Dungeons And Dragons used various polytheistic religions (some from the real world, some made up for the setting) so as not to stomp on any modern religious toes. This ended up backfiring on them, as various groups of Moral Guardians claimed that lack of the Christian God was "proof" of the game's "satanic" nature. (Notably, the game still does use polytheistic religions, since they've become so incorporated into the flavor of the various settings. In particular, the Nordic god Tyr and the Egyptian god Horus appear in the pantheon of the Forgotten Realms setting.)
- Devils and Demons (different competing factions of fiends, one tyrannical, one...let us say "free-spirited") were turned into "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri" for the 2nd edition. That didn't really help, so as of the 3d edition, Demons/Devils and Tanar'ri/Baatezu, respectively are used ~~more or less~~ interchangeably, with "Fiends" being used to refer to all "evil outsiders".
  - Technically, there are non-Baatezu and Tanar'ri demons. They're rare, and most were largely subjected into genocide by the Baatezu and Tanar'ri races, but they're there.
- Interestingly it's completely possible to run a D&D game where the one true faith is Christianity. There are already rules for getting Divine spells from infernal masters, so it's just a matter of taste whether you want to have a pantheon or one true God (possibly including Jesus) and many demonic pretenders.
Averted in Scion. All of the Gods and Titans that show up are given their proper names from mythology.
- Though no monotheistic religions appear. Some still active religions are used however, but since they are Asian (Hindu pantheon, Japanese shintoism, a little traditional Chinese) it's ok.
  - It's heavily implied that the titan Aten is, in fact, the inspiration for the Abrahamic god. His servants even look like angels. Moreover, an ancient conspiracy called The Order of the Divine Glory apparently runs all of the currently existing monotheistic religions from behind the scenes, and are behind the classic Catholic technique of sublimating other religious practices into their religion... all in an attempt to use the power of fatebinding to sublimate all gods, just as they did for the Sumerian storm god they already succeeded in enslaving.

Webcomics

Sluggy Freelance did this with the Dimension of Pain, where hordes of demons are lead by the "Demon King" instead of the Devil, and were opposed by the "Goddess of Goodness" (who the Demon King kept locked in his freezer). Interestingly enough, Satan does exist in the Sluggy Freelance universe, as the father of 18 super-evil kittens. God also made a brief Faceless appearance, just long enough to give Kiki a dire warning and pee on her head. Sluggy Freelance is that sort of series.