coming back to an rpg after less than a week and a half:

(disclaimer: I'm gettin weird with this one)

okay, so, here's the thing. It's about the material conditions. Base and superstructure, you know? Back in the Axial age, 8th to 3rd century BCE, you have simultaneous religious developments across Eurasia that mirror state formations - as early empires mint coins and make official records, religions centralize and consolidate different local traditions into centralized orthodox religions. Confucius and Zarathustra and Socrates and the Buddha all springing up in the same general era because suddenly people have enough time and infrastructure to sit around and get existential crises.

And these new religions/mythologies/ideologies - I'll just call them "belief systems" - these new belief systems are very well-tailored for the worlds in which they exist, i.e. societies which are almost entirely oriented around agriculture and the agrarian calendar. It's no coincidence that spring rebirth festivals, autumn harvest festivals, and (in temperate climates) lights-and-feasting midwinter festivals are near-universal fixtures of organized religion, because organized religion perpetuated itself and justified its existence by organizing and orienting agricultural labor. Have you ever read the I Ching? It's a book of delicately textured metaphysics and probably a third of it is about grain and cows. Even the Confucians couldn't slake their never-ending thirst for agricultural metaphors, because they and everyone else lived in worlds where the Venn diagram of "state management" and "ensuring good harvests" was basically a circle.

So there's some issues with the idea of the "axial age," the first of which being "uh yeah I bet you can find some pretty wild connections when you have a time frame of over half a millennium." But then we fast forward to the 15th and 16th centuries and we see something remarkable. Renaissance Europe is arguably the clearest and best-known example: it's no coincidence that the Protestant reformation spread like wildfire in a time when the printing press, an explosion of metalworking and mining technology, and Spanish colonialism all fueled a growth in urbanism. And when you're a burgher, that religious calendar starts to feel less like a reflection of your lived experience and more like an arbitrary imposition from above. It is also, importantly, a weird time politically: a string of surprise deaths and inheritances meant that Charles V von Habsburg went from the king of Spain to the emperor of half of Europe (and all of Spain's colonies) in the space of a few years, meaning that the dream of a "universal monarchy for a universal church" was suddenly within reach for the first time in centuries but was also placed upon the slumping shoulders of a guy who treated being emperor like a day job - inevitable victory suddenly looked a lot like inevitable defeat. And so everyone decided to have a couple wars about it.

But we see similar processes elsewhere in the world: in Ming China, where the once-revolutionary reforms of Zhu Xi have already become sclerotic orthodoxy, advancements in paper-making and woodblock printing have created a new class of literate commoners, and the government is in the middle of an existential crisis: on a day-to-day level the imperial Chinese government is more centralized and formalized than ever before, but the actual head of the imperial bureaucracy included people like the Zhengde Emperor, who hated being emperor so much he created his own alter-ego superhero persona of Grand Marshal Zhu Shou so he could leave the palace to go on military campaigns. And thus Wang Yangming's "school of heart-mind," with its emphasis on the unity of knowledge and action and people's inherent, inborn capacity for understanding the "supreme ultimate," rapidly gained a diverse following, including everyone from disillusioned scholar-officials to soldiers who admired the emphasis on action all the way down to merchants and commoners who were used to being looked down upon by other schools of Confucianism.

Pretend I also included several more paragraphs about the development of Sikhism, and the Safavids converting to Shi'a Islam, and the Ottoman government starting to intervene more aggressively in religious affairs.

You may have already noticed the connections yourself: we live in a time of upheaval. Traditional bonds of church, nation, and even family are falling apart at the seams. State governments are bolstered with unprecedented new surveillance and data management technologies while at the same time those governments are headed by blundering oafs too incompetent to be dictators. Just as the agriculturally-oriented calendar of Catholic festivals began to feel like a tolerable nuisance at best and a dead weight at worst to the Tyrolean Gegenschreiber, the Norman Rockwell American Civil Religion feels the same to the 21st century vibe-coding gig-working van-living tiktokking monad. Organized religion may be on the decline, but culture, as nature, abhors a vacuum.

WHICH BRINGS US TO VTUBERS

The thing about vtubers - and Sunny Roosevelt is directly inspired by this - is that they remind me of the patron gods of ancient cities, craftsmen's guilds, and the family hearth. They are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere: the statue represents them and embodies them, but they exist without and beyond the statue. They are intimate and personal, but also fundamentally unknowable and mysterious. And they exist in a symbiotic relationship with their followers, sustaining themselves on the faith and donations of their flock in exchange for a sort of spiritual protection.

Caldera

Pre-release image for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind