The Order of the Stick

As a side note, has anyone noticed that the Snarl's dominant color is also purple? Even in the crayon drawings, you can see it quite clearly, as well as in the (possibly more objective) more recent appearances.

I wonder whether this means anything. Is the Dark One perhaps in some fashion an agent of the Snarl, even if an unwitting one? Maybe the Snarl influenced his birth in some way to give him his psionic powers and this is why he has a different hue as a deity?

Edited by Jernaugh on Sep 23rd 2018 at 5:54:37 AM

The Snarl is predominantly purple, but it doesn't have a purple quiddity. It doesn't appear to have a quiddity at all.

And it's not the same shade of purple.

I'm not sure it has any meaning. The Snarl is made from a fusion of Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green quiddities but it's predominantly blue and purple.

Edited by Kostya on Sep 23rd 2018 at 11:29:31 AM

Redcloak is green and has no green in him at all.

Remember, the snarl isn't a god. It's an immensely powerful undying "mortal".

"The Dark One is the Snarl!" or "The Snarl made the Dark One!" are crack theories that are surprisingly common.

A couple of other things I noticed in the strip:

1. I like how much detail is put into the Eastern God depictions, even though we'll probably never see them again. Demeter's trendy half-long-half-buzzed haircut, for example.
2. Our speculation in the wake of the previous strip about the value of mortals was wrong. We thought they were just measures of power or "money" to the gods, not food—but Thor specifically says here that the gods need mortal worship and souls to survive. Not just to gain power, but to continue living. They can't take too long of a break from worldbuilding or try something completely different, because they need to generate more mortals eventually before they run out of soul power.

Which brings up the questions of where the primordial gods came from and how they survived before they started creating worlds and people.

Yes, I was wondering that. The Dark One was explicitly willed into being by his followers with no intervention from the other gods, and he ended up with his own quiddity — perhaps that's what defines whether you get a colour of your own, and the worshippers of Dvalin and the Elven gods were already under the purview of a pantheon when they dreamed up their new gods.

One possibility is to go super-meta and say the primordial gods were willed into being by Rich Burlew...

Another is that they've passed on - or somehow, they themselves have - incorrect information about how the world came to exist. There must have been something before what we've been told was "the Dawn of Time".

At the very least, if their stated family relationships mean anything, there must originally have been fewer of them. What did Odin do to bring Loki and Thor into existence?

Edited by johnnye on Sep 23rd 2018 at 9:18:04 AM

Well, in case of the Dark One and elven gods he has clarified their situations.

Edited by LSBK on Sep 23rd 2018 at 3:32:39 AM

Part of the answer may be found a few strips ago.

Gods Need Prayer Badly because they're made of ideas. People generate ideas. But mortal people are created by the gods (but only when they work together). So who generated the planar cosmology and created the Outer Planes and the gods? Perhaps some Top God or previous generation of deities. Perhaps we could go meta, as you say, and say it was Rich and E. Gary Gygax and other "real world" people, since that's literally true. We're already getting quite self-aware here, so we could go all the way with it.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Sep 23rd 2018 at 5:52:29 AM

Maybe gods predate people, but gods need people to keep existing the way they are now.

Like, ideas condensed into semi-sentient proto-gods, who created sentient beings, and the thoughts of these beings modeled gods around specific identities. Without people, they'd gradually go back to being nebulous, semi-sentient reifications of the concepts they represent.

Just a random theory, I don't think this specific aspect of the cosmology will ever be explained (there's always a "but what happened before that" after all).

Edited by Cozzer on Sep 23rd 2018 at 10:44:50 AM

This is sounding a lot like Gunnerkrigg Court actually. In that comic supernatural beings are retroactively created because people believe in them. It's also a bit similar to American Gods where the deities lose power and slowly disappear if they go for too long without worshipers.

Edited by Kostya on Sep 23rd 2018 at 4:47:13 AM

My personal favourite explanation for the creation of the gods in that kind of cosmology is that the first god was the emergent consciousness of the universe. The universe itself had an "I think, therefore I am" moment, which created a god, who started a more focused and intentional creation process of gods and worlds and mortals. Eventually the primordial god died and/or was recycled for spare parts, and its weaker successors were dependent on mortals to keep believing in them.

Because yeah. "At the Dawn of Time, there were four separate extended families of sentient beings who had an idea to create a world full of mortals, something they were unable to exist without" leaves... a lot of further questions.

It's not like we really get the beginning of our own universe.

Y'know, the gods must have had to figure out at some point that their combined creations were stronger than ones made by only one pantheon. There's no way that working together — even fractiously — was the first thing they tried, not if they're anything like humans.

@Herald Alberich I'm loving all the depictions of the gods, actually. Demeter is great, Ishtar looks badass (or, with the floating crown, REALLY badass), and Odin and Frigg holding hands and smiling are adorable.

(I keep wondering how much meta-knowledge of Odin I'm bringing to my speculations about him, because his appearances in the comic resemble an eccentric old kook. But the paranoia built up around hundreds of years of stories about Odin just make me look at that and see a deep-cover act that would impress Lord Shojo.)

Really interested to find out more about the Western pantheon, actually. Of the priests at their godsmoot we saw three elves, a drow (Lolth?), two lizardmen, a kobold (Tiamat?), eleven humans, and a Winged Humanoid (the unidentified god in the latest strip has similar bird wings).

The trident, crown, and fishtail are more reminiscent of Triton rather than Poseidon.

I'm liking Cozzer's idea, that the gods need prayer in order to stay coherent and active. (It can work with johnnye's that the universe created them after having the idea of itself.) We were thinking that in past worlds, Thor might have appeared differently to his cyberpunk-talking-animal worshipers (Beta-Ray Bill, maybe?) or his movie-snack worshipers as A Form You Are Comfortable With, but what if it was the other way around, and the beliefs of his worshipers changed his form?

Reminds me of The Dresden Files, in which some of the old gods are sustained by modern beliefs and pop culture; it's not exactly worship, but it's good enough. Odin is still Odin, but he runs a security consulting firm. His ravens are human-appearing secretaries. He is also Santa Claus, and in that form is one of the Fae, even though he is also not Faerie most of the time.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Sep 23rd 2018 at 10:13:26 AM

Based off of what Thor said it wasn't. It sounded like there was a lot of frustration to be had at trying to do something, and then one of them getting angry or bored and erasing all of their work.

Working with different Pantheons let them build better things, but also obviously had other risks they weren't aware of at the time...

Though it might not mean much, in Start of Darkness Thor was the god shown trying to destroy the Dark One after he ascended before some of the evil gods intervened.

I should probably reread Start of Darkness, but I don't know where I put the book.

1142: Good to Know

Name's apt. A lot of those statements have very interesting implications that Rich probably won't ever explore himself.

Hmm, I'm already seeing a flaw in this plan. I wonder if Durkon will point that out to Thor. At the very least it leads me to believe that this idea might not work the way they want.

"As long as we kept spot-welding them as they came up, there's no telling how long this world could last" is not a confidence-inspiring long-term plan.

I get the impression from Thor's wording that it's not so much that the Dark One has a new colour because he was unsponsored by other pantheons, but that he only managed to ascend without sponsorship because he harnessed a new quiddity. Which at once both makes more sense, and to my mind lends some small credence to the "purple quiddity is somehow linked to the Snarl" theory — after all, evidently the gods don't understand how it happened.

Edited by johnnye on Sep 29th 2018 at 4:55:47 PM