OOTS #1139 - The Discussion Thread

[Rrmcklin]

What Loki was saying was that the danger wasn't so imminent that they couldn't delay the deed. In your analogy, they have a few minutes to press the easily accessible button that closes down the zoo if the cage, which is looking weak but is still closed, finally happens to open. Also, your analogy needs negative consequences for not waiting and seeing.

(That's assuming Loki is right about that window, of course, but the latest comic hasn't really changed anything in that regard)

I guess in this analogy the negative consequences are closing down the zoo when the bear hasn't escaped yet and thus ending everyone's trips to the zoo? So "having to leave zoo early" = "world is destroyed by gods, souls go to afterlives" and "bear killing people" = "Snarl destroys world and devours people's souls"? (Of course, dying young is a much more serious matter than having to end your zoo trip early, so waiting to see if the cage breaks may not be the best choice if this situation was IRL, even if the convenient button existed, but you get my point.)

In Loki's analogy he was advocating waiting right until the Snarl is out ("like, 15 minutes"), while also admitting it would cost them nothing to start over. It should not be hard to see why that would not be particularly convincing. Although, I doubt anyone was convinced by Heimdall, either. Everyone who was there already knew how they were voting.

[Angel Bob]

Oh... oh my god.

Transcribed from the words of Angel Bob while scrolling through the last panel of OOTS #1139. This moment has been noted by historians of his life (of which there is only one, and it is Angel Bob) as the most audible reaction he has given upon reading a webcomic. (Disclaimer: This record does not include silently crying while watching characters die during an emotionally vulnerable mood.)

[sotanaht]

I suspect that the Snarl is not directly in the world in the rift. I think that world is the previous world the gods made and then wiped out themselves before the seals could all be broken. The snarl is buried under a huge recursive stack of such worlds.

[ManuelSacha]

Just when you expected this comic to finish its last couple of chapters with no more surprises, except maybe at the very end... WHAM! This bus hits you.
I have lost count of how many times this story has left me speechless.

[HappyElf]

Wow

If each of those represented a single life, that would be an absolutely overwhelming level of loss, a terrible monument to the consequences of the god's greatest mistake.

With each of those representing an entire world of lives and history and people, snuffed out forever?

I'm chiming in to agree with "one of the most overwhelming reveals I've seen in media". Kudos, Rich.

[Grey Watcher]

....

OK then. Dark One, I hope that Control the Gates Ritual of yours is ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS. Seriously, if multiple pantheons working together have this much trouble merely containing the thing, I really, really, *REALLY* don't think trying to point it like a firehose is going to end well for anyone.

Also... how many pantheons do you think the Snarl has eaten? Was Vishnu a victim of the Snarl? Oya? Inti?

Just... the implications are staggering.

[blunk]

Can Thor teach Durkon the Ritual?

[Wysper]

That was sobering.

I guess that puts the lore of the Sapphire Guard in context now. They believe the gods had to choose between starting anew to make a prison the Snarl couldn't escape from, or going with the Gates thing even though they knew that wouldn't fix the problem forever. Clearly, that's not the case, because any remade prison is liable to become unstable and fail after all. It's pretty obvious why the Twelve would keep that particular detail hidden from their followers, though.

At some point, maybe the gods should have given up on populating their worlds, out of a sense of moral responsibility. But I imagine they simply can't - that creative impulse must be part of their natures. And hey, maybe they figured out early on how to do a controlled demolition of the world and save everyone's souls, so that only the first few cases resulted in everybody being eaten by the Snarl, in which case maybe they could argue that it was still worth it.

In fact, that not all the gods have become blasé about the whole thing yet is a testament to how much more Good than they're usually given credit for at least some of the gods are. And similarly, it explains why many of the gods can appear to be uncaring, even those who aren't necessarily Evil.

It seems fairly clear that the Gods need Souls. And they need worshipers. To the point where the Dark One elevated to being a God by having enough worshipers.

[Rrmcklin]

....

OK then. Dark One, I hope that Control the Gates Ritual of yours is ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS. Seriously, if multiple pantheons working together have this much trouble merely containing the thing, I really, really, *REALLY* don't think trying to point it like a firehose is going to end well for anyone.

Also... how many pantheons do you think the Snarl has eaten? Was Vishnu a victim of the Snarl? Oya? Inti?

Just... the implications are staggering.

I mean, that's the entire point. Controlling the gate and controlling the Snarl are very different things. The only one who conflates the two are Xykon, and even he has his suspicions.

This doesn't imply anything about other pantheons being eaten.

[gatemansgc]

Looks like the gods can't solve the problem. Probably related to the very nature of their divine energy and how the Snarl reacts to it.

i like this idea. i mean, it could be a reason he's telling durkon about this.

[HalfTangible]

I don't think this is the case, based on Hel's own retelling of the bet #1083.

Hel didn't expect Thor to use the honor loophole to its maximum: She didn't make the bet expecting power in the next world; she made it thinking it would give her power in this one.

Ah, but she also had "winnings" to collect when the next world began. The bet was to see who would gain the most power in the new world, but you can only tally up those points at the end. IE, the bet only concludes WHEN THE WORLD DIES.

[Shining Wrath]

Hypothesis #1: the gods are aware of what Blackwing saw in the rift. There's multiple rifts, even if there's some reason a god dare not approach the rift they have servants they can command to look. Odin in particular would have ways of taking a look.
Hypothesis #2: the gods have to be able to survive each iteration of "world ends, wait for Snarl to not be paying attention, build new world to restrain it" with only the souls on the Outer Planes to sustain them. They may not actually need to create mortals with each world; if a world is only going to last 4 years, but the souls they already have can sustain them for 100, they can create a lifeless world and see how that works.
Tentative corollary to #2: if mortals frequently release the Snarl as we see happening in this world iteration, the gods might only create mortals when they need to eat.

Unanswered question: where do souls come from? Is this a zero-sum game, where the creation of a new soul depletes the cosmic energy and the final absorption into the destination plane restores it? I do not think there's a canonical D&D answer. We know the devils covet souls, and that the barghest destroys them, but not too much about where they come from.

If it's a zero-sum game, the Snarl devouring souls reduces the total energy available to the gods. At some point they'll run out and die, and only the Snarl will be left. Maybe it'll die then, too. Since the Astral Plane is timeless, it's possible the gods could retreat to the Astral Plane, let the Snarl die of starvation, and then emerge to build a new world in a Snarl-free cosmos. Maybe they'd emerge powerless since all their worshipers had passed away, and not be able to create anything.
If it's not a zero-sum game, then it's possible that the gods can, by building a long-lasting world with lots of souls that make it to the Outer Planes, gain power and possibly become mighty enough to defeat the Snarl.
A third possibility is that the game is zero-sum but the Snarl somehow leaks soul energy back into the universe.
A fourth possibility is that the gods are vulnerable / visible to the Snarl in a way that mortals are not, and that the gods are hoping that eventually an even mightier Order of the Scribble will emerge and actually defeat the Snarl, rather than contain it.

I really hope we learn soon if souls are created by the gods, created by the Universe, or what.

[Valsheen]

A couple comics behind on this, but it occurred to me the other day based on Thor's reaction to the "secrecy" rule in comic 1137 that Durkon could make a very smart move if he thinks of it. Specifically, he could ask whether Thor would appreciate it if he, knowing the secret of the Snarl but not being bound by the gods agreements, were to reveal that secret to Thor's high priest, and maybe the high priests of some of the other good gods that Thor's on good terms with. These good priests would then be free to pass on the secrets to their own successors, and the good gods would then be forever free to communicate with their heads of clergy (now that they're already in on the secret) about the threat posed by the Snarl and any steps they'd like them to take to help keep the world safe from it. All of that is assuming both that the world survives the current threat and that Thor would want to weaken the secret of the Snarl to this degree, but it would still be worth asking, especially because the secrecy rule could have a clause forbidding gods from commanding their followers who are already "in the know" from sharing the knowledge with others, so Durkon would have to think of the possibility himself, then ask Thor, possibly in a circumspect manner, whether he'd agree with that approach.

[ackmondual]

Heh... True or false... this comic has more worlds than strips, or even panels?

I would've gotten that question wrong by a longshot!

P.S. Did anybody actually count them? Or at least ballpark that figure?

[Grey Watcher]

I mean, that's the entire point. Controlling the gate and controlling the Snarl are very different things. The only one who conflates the two are Xykon, and even he has his suspicions.

This doesn't imply anything about other pantheons being eaten.

A bit speculative on my part, true, but with so many mistakes, but who knows at this point? The version of the story given to mortals only mentions a single world and one pantheon dying. If they were willing to lie about the number of worlds the Snarl destroyed, they could just as easily be lying about the nvery of gods. The gods make sure to keep the world (and therefore the Snarl) very far away from themselves. How many times did it take them to suss out just how far away they had to stay?

I don't know, my point is just... like I said, if our sense of the scale in this one aspect of the story is so far off... As the kids say (used to say?) I can't even.

i like this idea. i mean, it could be a reason he's telling durkon about this.

I wonder if there's not something in the underlying tension that helps sustain the Snarl. Each god would like nothing more than to just be able to say "Shut up, all of you! We're doing it my way!" The actions are kept on check by The Rules, but who knows what effects the mere thoughts and feelings can have when things like the Astral Plane are involved.

[Laserlight]

/goggles
Oh.
Oh my.

We...might have a problem here.

[TheTinyMan]

Whoa. That's a lot more than 2 worlds. You would think that these gods would have gone insane, over the potentially MILLIONS of years that they've been battling the snarl.

And thus, the Chaotic alignment was born! Initially, all the gods were Lawful, as it should be!


So as a few people have mentioned, this leads to some additional wonder about the world inside the Snarl. Here's my theory. If OOTS is consistent with D&D 3.x fluff on wizards, wizards 'memorize' spells by pre-casting them during their "prepare spells" phase, and when they cast them to produce the spell effects, they're just completing them. I wonder if the gods have "pre-cast" their next prison, and that's why Loki is confident that it will take only 10-15 minutes to construct? They've done it so many times it's basically just a Level 300 Epic spell that requires a bunch of casters to combine their power? (Yes, I know that Epic spells don't have levels, but I don't remember enough about how they do work to remember if they are pre-cast, I don't think they are? So allow me to mix my metaphors here.)

It may also be possible that the Snarl world is...all of those other worlds, put together? Or, who knows, just another plane that now contains them all?

[rbetieh]

Is the Snarl really divine anger and resentment, or is that just Thors opinion?

[JustinKase]

I am wondering how that will work in the printed book - as the impact on scrolling down was quite a shock.....

just stunning ...

[Snails]

A bit speculative on my part, true, but with so many mistakes, but who knows at this point? The version of the story given to mortals only mentions a single world and one pantheon dying. If they were willing to lie about the number of worlds the Snarl destroyed, they could just as easily be lying about the nvery of gods.

I protest! There is no evidence that the gods lied. Nor is there any evidence that the Scribble Tale lies.

That Scribble Tale is incomplete in places was always obvious. That we, the Readers, might be drawing incorrect conclusions based on an incomplete picture was always obvious.

[Insertmeme]

So why isn't hel is the most powerfull goddess already, if that many worlds died, and their dwarfs feeding her? Is this the first iteration of dwarfs?

Hel didn't get the souls, they were devoured by the Snarl, (ie, cessation of existence), at least that's what we've been told.

[Sir_Norbert]

So many.

I had not thought Death had undone so many.

P.S. Did anybody actually count them? Or at least ballpark that figure?

It's impossible to do either, since the grey background of the lower half of that panel is probably made up entirely of memorials that are too small to be distinctly seen. The number of distinct memorials looks to be roughly in the tens of thousands.

[DaggerPen]

Just how long does Hel expect to hold power, and why does it even matter compared to all the time she has lived?

Have you ever played a game with friends/family/etc. for which you knew full well there was no real reward but winning, and which you knew full well you would play again in the near future, but still pulled out all the stops to win, because dammit, you are gonna win this thing? I would not be surprised to know that this was the case for Hel. That, or once she gets the power, she can 'gerrymander'to stay on top for a while, as was suggested above.

If the possibility of something happening is so low it has only happened in this world and not in any of the googleplex previous, that makes this world somehow special, because the odds of happening would be 1 in a googleplex. Whether its because this one lasted long enough, or because of any other reason, this being the only world with ascended gods makes it special. Which, because I don't think it is (and the current comic really suggests that is NOT what Rich is driving at), I think needs an answer different from "it's just a 1 in a billion flunk".

And I didn't say anything about it needing to come up in the story, so right back at you with the "You shouldn't argue against things people didn't actually say."

Grey Wolf

I have no particular stake in this argument -- I find it equally plausible that ascended gods did not exist before this world, that ascended gods did exist and some of the gods we know weren't there from the beginning, and that ascended gods have existed before but die when their world does -- but I just need to take a moment to say:

"Fluke". The word you two are looking for is "fluke." "Flunk" means something totally different.

Oh dear, that's a lot of dead planets.



Maybe they have tried creating empty worlds, or specially designed prisons. It didn't work. They have had a lot of experience.

In response to your signature, just so you know, the forum actually does have a thread dedicated specifically to requesting name changes. I'd link it but I'm mobile; it's not too hard to find, though.


As a general note, I am surprised by the widespread assumption that Hel's bet, which was explicitly stated to have been created for this world, which is explicitly stated to expire when this world does, and which the other gods clearly did not realize would result in Hel getting this influx of souls she did, has always existed.

[Saknussem]

I admit to usually getting emotionally involved in my gaming. I do; I admit it. I'm guilty as charged. Reading OoTS is a vicarious campaign for me -- especially since my gaming group scattered to the four quarters of our continent (or just plain disappeared from the earth).
My first response to reading the whole strip was "Oh dear Goddess . . ."
My second response was "Manannán mac Lir help us"
Okay, shoot me, I'm a Celtic neo-Pagan with roots in Ireland for the past 1400 years. LOL
I KNOW it's a comic strip, but still . . .

[Grey_Wolf_c]

In response to your signature, just so you know, the forum actually does have a thread dedicated specifically to requesting name changes. I'd link it but I'm mobile; it's not too hard to find, though.

They are quite aware

Grey Wolf

[jwhouk]

I was rereading the Godsmoot comics to get a better sense of the god's attitudes and Odin's quote alongside his vote in #999 gets me the most: "I see worlds within worlds and yarn winding yarn." Since he's all about prophecies and seeing stuff, perhaps he's seeing what the Snarl is doing? Yarn winding yarn sounds like the Snarl is indeed creating things of its own.

If you look close at 672, you realize there isn't just one world in that flashback that Blackwing saw.

[DaggerPen]

They are quite aware

Grey Wolf

Ah, cool; just wanted to make sure. Ty!

[ratfox]

I have a new respect for the gods, or at least for Thor. After all these worlds, they still CARE.

[Wysper]

WOW!
Such an crazy reveal.

I can't help but wondering how this new information factors in with the plans the IFCC has. Or the Dark One. They are the only non-mortals involved in this. So in theory, they should know about the countless dead worlds.

Is the Dark One's plan is to move the gates, so Snarl isn't threatening the Material Plane anymore, and instead move it to the Outer Planes? Maybe even kill the Gods, so he is the only one left?
Or is he thinking ahead to the next world to be built.

The Quote the IFCC "I convinced [Tiamat] that it was an unfortunate necessity of a secret scheme to bring down the gods of Good. Technically True, I suppose"
They didn't want V to stop the Gate from getting Destroyed.

[The MunchKING]

Either Thor wants Durkon to save the world by resealing the Gates, or Thor wants Durkon to let the Snarl out so it can eat all the gods and end this cycle of destruction and recreation.

Thor's not bishie enough to be a Final Fantasy Villain.