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Distilled Box of Is

@randompassingninja / randompassingninja.tumblr.com

Be aware: That having sprung, kinda-formed from the brow of creator, this tumblr shall sit here, and, like the noble but extinct giant turtle, slowly amble from place to place. And occasionally reblog stuff.
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dduane
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prokopetz
twowordsnumber asked:

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

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prokopetz answered:

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

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noah-luck-easterly

Discussion thread on reddit

Origins of the "gods strength comes from their worshipers" trope?
I always liked the depiction of gods and worshipers as a sort of symbiotic relationship. Especially the idea of older gods whos power has waned because they are all but forgotten. It is something that has almost become the default relationship in modern fantasy.
Is this a modern phenomenon though, or does it have roots in older mythologies? I'm no scholar, but I don't recall much about Greek or Norse gods being particularly dependent on worshipers for instance. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can enlighten me!

My favorite example from there is Tinkerbell, but it also points to “Gods Need Prayer Badly” on TVTropes

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prokopetz

Most of the responses in that Reddit thread are talking about the idea of gods deriving physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their honour, rather than the modern literary trope of gods gaining their miraculous powers from the strength of their worshippers' faith; the former is, of course, an ancient notion, but uncritically conflating it with the latter may result in misleading conclusions.

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jadagul

I had been thinking that in response to the original prompt, because it's an interesting difference, right? Modern religions often focus on orthodoxy, believing the right things; but ancient polytheisms didn't care about that. They cared about orthopraxy, which is doing the right things.

Ancient polytheistic religions were fairly functional and transactional. They didn't spend much if any time thinking about "belief"; at least in the Mediterranean, atheism basically didn't exist, and the closest you got was believing the gods didn't care about you. (Bret Devereaux writes about this, and other differences between D&D religion and real historical polytheisms, here.)

Cultures do ritual sacrifice because "it works". (Yes, it doesn't "work" in reality, but it "works" in the sense that the cultures are performing these sacrifices and surviving, therefore the sacrifices are at least compatible with surviving as a culture.) And that comes before the theory, honestly; but the purpose of ritual is to make things happen. They're tools. And "just as a hammer and a wrench do not very much care if you think the ‘right things’ about hammers and wrenches, so the ritual does not care if you ‘believe’ in it, or have the ‘correct’ doctrine of it, so long as – like the wrench and the hammer – you use the tool properly."

And then the sacrifice is an exchange.

Do ut des is Latin and it means, “I give, so that you might give.”  ... The key here is the concept of exchange. The core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.

So then we can ask, what was the theory for why this stuff worked? And that varied.

Now, why do the gods want these things? That differs, religion to religion. In some polytheistic systems, it is made clear that the gods require sacrifice and might be diminished, or even perish, without it. That seems to have been true of Aztec religion, particularly sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl; it is also suggested for Mesopotamian religion in the Atrahasis where the gods become hungry and diminished when they wipe out most of humans and thus most of the sacrifices taking place. Unlike Mesopotamian gods, who can be killed, Greek and Roman gods are truly immortal – no more capable of dying than I am able to spontaneously become a potted plant – but the implication instead is that they enjoy sacrifices, possibly the taste or even simply the honor it brings them (e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 310-315).

Now you can see how e.g. the Aztec take relates to the "gods need belief" thing, but it's also very different, because the Aztec gods needed sacrifices. They don't care about the belief, they care about the stuff and the actions.

So the "gods need belief" thing is sort of a weird fusion of ancient polytheisms, which posited gods who needed or wanted sacrifice, with modern religions, with their focus on belief and orthodoxy. So it can basically only happen in a modern-invented pagan or polytheistic religion—which is, presumably, why we see them popping up in mid-century sword and sorcery stuff. It's a vague recreation of the shape of ancient polytheisms, but filtered through a very modern take on what religion is and how it works.

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gothiccharmschool
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loish

She is brightness, she is luminance. She will hypnotize you and drag you into her world. Her name...

... is Light Mode. 

This drawing turned out a little more serious than I had originally intended. I get so many comments about using light mode for my computer and phone that it became the inspiration for some new artwork!

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ciceqi
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runawaymarbles

There should be a fanfic writing game called the showrunners challenge where someone writes a story and partway through someone else can play things like "actor leaves after 4000 more words" or "topic now too politically sensitive due to unforeseen world events" or "lost rights to that reference"

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copperbadge

I need this to be a real game right the hell now

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randompassingninja

Those who know.

#Eclipsemas#Shindig Machine
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gothiccharmschool
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powerburial

correlation is not causation, ghosts are drawn to poison and weakened minds

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awkwardlyvanilla
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falloutgayaf
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autonomousbees

So X-Men 97 is pretty much the best. X-Men was my first fandom and I have been LIVING for this show and the response to it.

BUT I have noticed a certain trend in the commentary that I've been seeing where people assume that things that were put into the show are some kind of new revolutionary additions on the part of the show-runners. And I am delighted to inform all of your that so far NOTHING in this show has been a complete invention of this talented team in 2024. It is ALL CANON bitches.

Magneto's stunning body suit with opera gloves that is serving cunt? CANON. Gambit's slutty gay little outfits? CANON

Gambit being completely cucked by Magneto and Rogue? ALSO CANON. Multiple times possibly? My memory is not 100% on that.

My biggest complaint about comic book media is when it doesn't seem informed by or doesn't seem to respect the canon. Changes are great, we love new stuff, but I want to know that the people making the show know and love the original material as much as I do. And this show has executed this flawlessly. The people making this show KNOW the original animated series and they know the comic canon and they also know the subtext in that original material that never would have gotten past the censors. I'm so psyched for what is going to happen next.

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