I had a theory about the Snarl...

[Ironsmith]

It's pretty late in the game to add a quantum superimposition of toymaker/archers which collapsed in some meaningful way... though interesting, I think it requires too many things to be lies to actually be true.

For one thing, it would require Thor to have a fundamental misunderstanding about how his power and quiddity work. As he puts it, something he made himself would be all yellow, and thus ephemeral. If he made toymakers and another pantheon made archers, both would be existant, shallow, and fake. Nothing metaphysical would happen just because they're both called "elves".

I mean, that *was* the dumbed-three-levels-down version. Thor doesn't have to misunderstand it, the audience just has to misunderstand Thor's explanation of it.

The interesting thing is that, apparently, forceful tussling with the threads still counts as an act of true, collaborative creation.

More importantly, if the Snarl was the natural effect of bad logic... shouldn't it be over? Once the whole first world was consumed and the gods started working together, it should have stopped being a threat and died down, no?

Not really. The gods still created something in conjunction, which could theoretically exist in some form without them. They can avoid making the Snarl worse, but they can't fix it.

If the Snarl isn't a big monster, what killed Mijung?

The same thing that (nearly?) killed Laurin: studying the rift. By trying to seek detail beyond the consensus of the gods, she opened made herself partially dependent on the results of too many uncertainties, some of which would be fatal.