TSV question re nature of gods and worship (S3 Spoilers)
(!may have accidentally asked this before sorry, phone being weird)
hey mate listened the whole tsv and while a great deal of the characters and emotions really resonated with me i struggled to be fully invested due to the absurdism of the setting, and was hoping could get some clarification on things that i can listen again from a different perspective:
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Context / notes:
I noticed a great deal of the modern gods depicted such as the grinding lord, st electric, slag king etc had strong overlap with the household and civic gods of ancient Rome- overseeing practical and everyday domains essential to modern life, (theres also comparison for state/institutional gods- haphaestus overseeing metalwork, forging etc): However with TSV it seems that in many cases the purpose of the god was developed before its identity ie 'we need something for turning wheels/generating power' and fleshing out the name personality later- this seems to very abstract and impersonal gods that receive very token 'tongue in cheek' worship as the people doing so know that they created and are feeding being blessing them.
As well there is overlap between folk and animist religions (spirits of rivers and mountains and mines) and the old elicit gods of TSV (think trawler man, elk of birch/bone god, etc)- while definitely more grounded as characters/beings in their own right compared to the modern ones which came out of a function that an identity was applied over, that character they do have is still very alien to humanity: there don't appear to be any gods resembling people with names and identities, it's not: 'heres chairon (has face/depiction) the ferryman, it's more, heres the carrion courier (depicted as a great vulture, that brings dead linger strait soldiers home or gets hungry on the way).
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My main questions are:
a) Assuming most people know that gods are not actually objective beings, and are dependent on their worshippers: why would anyone worship something they know isn't actually divine and created from them? How honest and genuine does that worship have to be? 'How do you feel bowing down to a cereal mascot
b.1) do the miracles / returns offered by the gods reliably outweigh the cost in sacrificing to them? Eg, Is a god rocket (seen in season3) more reliable and destructive than a base, unconsecrated one?
b.2) if so: Why and how did technology develop (heating, electricity, food, medicine) when sacrifice offers a shortcut to those results? Was the Industrial Revolution sped up by this?
c) do there exist other modes and forms of worship outside of the household/state gods that are legal, and the folk/animist gods that are elicit? le:
(1) ancestor worship? Can historical figures become gods, or gods appear that resemble the version of them being told?
For instance a military commander like alexander the great could become a god in life by being so famous/infamous with soldiers on both sides dying in and against his name?
(2) monolatry- is there a current 'god king' or zeus equivalent in the world? Or a dominant overarching religion?
d) we've seen saints before, but can a god try creating a messiah/jesus like incarnation? Instead of being these big abstract concepts then, there'd be a face and a name as the focal point for that worship.
(If you know the game blasphemous 2, think the miracle and it's plan to make a child 'incarnate devotion')
e) saint electric confusion- did the saint electric begin as a saint that became powerful enough to be a god? Similar to val in ssason3?
f) body and spirit is talked about a lot in s3, does this mean there is a soul and an afterlife in TSV? How does that work? And are gods made out of soul-stuff, or do they just hunger for it?- is it the significance of offering you or someone else' life as a sacrifice that feeds them, or is it the soul-stuff of the person that they want?
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Thanks so much love your work
Hi! I think if you struggled to connect with the absurdism of the show, these answers may not satisfy you, because it's intended to be taken as exaggerated satire with extensive unknowable elements rather than a 'rational' fantasy setting with a confirmed cosmology.
But I really enjoyed your well-ordered question structure so here goes:
a) well, why do any of us participate in systems which seem to be unjust and monstrous and unsustainable, built on patently self-serving and aggrandising might-makes-right narratives, and which are ultimately conditional at least to an extent upon our collective buy-in? Probably the answer is a combination of helplessness in the face of something so big and complex, a desire to belong and find purpose within the world we know, the individualist desire to personally thrive above our peers so that we don't become the next victim...
We also don't actually provide any explicit evidence, a la Discworld, around the idea that all acts of prayer or belief (whether authentic or feigned) consistently or mechanically 'fuel' the power of a god.
They're attracted to feeling, they're attracted to their element and sometimes to their language, and they're attracted to sacrifice. That's what we get.
b1) we strongly imply no, but that people keep on using them anyway. However in the case of the god-rockets they're obviously a weapon of terror more than a targeted strike.
b2) we imply that technological progress occurs semi-normally and that any actual divine involvement is more a marketing tactic or at best unpredictable and unreliable accompanying baggage. The implication of the uneven technological status of the setting is that practical progress is often overridden by whichever faith happens to have more soft power (e.g. internet already exists but will not be adopted in the Peninsula as the Saint Electric's church has a monopoly on radio).
c1) we imply yes - there's a soldier in S3 who's declared a new god of war - but behind the curtain, this may simply mean becoming a saint of a pre-existing god.
c2) there is no god-king, no. It's not what we're going for thematically, although the Saint Electric in practice fulfills that role in terms of how ubiquitous she is across society.
d) this would require the gods to be more anthropomorphic, 'real', and capable of agency than the show intends them, but definitely there will have been tons of self-declared messiahs over the course of the setting's history.
e) we imply that the Saint Electric is supposed to have begun as a regular human (and state as much in supplementary materials) but there's no need for confusion - it's just a story, and it might be false.
f) the Parish of Tide and Flesh mentions a Garden Below as a kind of afterlife / dwelling-place for the Trawler-man, so we can take it that many faiths believe in an afterlife, even if it's all ultimately just an extension of the fate offered by sainthood (ascend to the Saint Electric's heaven and become voltage for all eternity). All of the rest is far beyond our remit. The characters will never know, and nor do we.
