“In the beginning; God made everything. This has made a lot of people very angry and widely regarded as a bad move.” -The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
@@drorjs I’m a sci-fi nerd. It’s very flawed, as a satire book. You want good sci-fi satire? Watch Spaceballs. Hitchhiker’s Guide is funny, yes, but it’s got a lot of problems. Mainly a poorly developed cast and breakneck pace.
Dude when you literally translate God and it's name it refers to I am which means i did it, you did it, he did it, she did it but the real question is when, why and how? The purpose of life is indeed a great misery!
You really made me reflect. As a creator, I think the only reason to make your creation go through hardships and face adversity it's because you can make them; to make them MORE INTERESTING, essentially giving it a plot. I draw portraits of imaginary people, but in distressing situations, like beaten-up faces or just sad expressions to convey feelings, and I never stopped to think about what they would think of me. Not until after I was diagnosed with eczema on MY HANDS,-the very tools I use TO CREATE-. I described it to my friends as "being made fun of by God." My hands are my tools, the ones that get me through life. It's not life-threatening or anything, but it really pushed me to the edge; it made me crazy. Now, with your insight, I have shifted some of that thought. Of course, as an artist, I would be the one chosen to have my hands compromised. It's not like life is over, or that it was a punishment from God; it just is. The only thing left is to overcome it because I will not be destroyed. I will come out of it with knowledge of myself, stronger physically and mentally.
See a dermatologist or 2, eczema can be very very non impactful if you use the right creams but some dermatologists suck for some reason. As soon as u find the cream that's right fo you it'll supress the symptoms. It sucks but its manageable
(referring to only the first paragraph) That makes sense for a writer of fiction, but for a God that's downright evil, there is no plot in suffering there is only suffering. A god could do anything a writer is limited as much as any human A god has no right to ruin everything just for some worthless story unless they specifically ruin the lives of horrible people.
Another thing about Rain world, Five Pebbles and the other AIs like him (called iterators in the setting) Have computing power so vast that they require metric fucktons of water as coolant in order to not melt down. This water gets expelled as vapor en masse which immediately descends as the crushing rain that the game is named after. Even scarier, the “terrible frost” that encompasses the saints campaign is only occurring because all the Iterator superstructures were *the only source of heat on the entire planet.* With them all nonfunctional, no longer expelling hot vapor to temper the climate, the world lies still.
@@andlorenz1998 Technically he did go mad. I think, although very brief, AM was "sane", or atleast as sane as he could be due to his programming. He did say he watched humans, so, for a time, he was sane and observant.
Definitely! AM was made the way he is because of humans, his creators. They imbued him with the knowledge of everything, including everything terrible they'd ever done, so they kind of made him the way he was. He then took it out on his own "creations": the digitalized consciousnesses of real people.
In Blasphemous, there is a boss called Isidora, Voice of the Dead. Just like with Chronos in Hades II, the game won't allow you to pause during the fight and a message appears on the screen saying "The song of the dead cannot be stopped."
When talking about Gods and Berserk, we need to mention the "Lost Chapter" of the manga, and a character who's status in canon is currently in question. Between chapters 82 and 83, amid the Eclipse, Griffith meets "The Idea of Evil". A grotesque beating heart that seems to funnel souls and speaks through Griffith's mind, the implication seems to be that The Idea is a God of humanity's making. In a world of violence, pain, and suffering, people demanded a meaning for that suffering. There needed to be a reason, and their collective unconcious created that reason. The Idea is as much of a God as humanity is IT'S God, and it continues to create pain and sacrifice thanks to humanity's hope that all of that suffering will have meaning.
Part of me wonders if it is still technically canon, but the idea is that it wasn't supposed to be shown THIS early on, so the chapter was lost, but the knowledge is out there
@@quinnholloway5400I mean, even after the Lost Episode, Flora outright said that the Godhand serves *something* deep in the Abyss, and I believe there were some other references to it during that timeframe, so there’s certainly someone in it’s awful chair. Additionally; the Lost Episode is not reprinted, but neither is it expunged. The episode after it did not have its number changed, so implicitly, all of that still happened, we just weren’t supposed to see it. Which, honestly, would be a brilliant and mind-blowing writing decision if it genuinely didn’t appear until the time was right, like the story subtly but outright telling us we were in for a treat in the future…
I’d consider AM from IHNMAIMS to be a good example of a “Mad God” He was a program more expansive then the earth itself that could do anything and everything he wanted, such as cursing the five with immortality, being omnipresent, materialising objects, possibly manipulating time, changing the environment and psychologically/physically modifying the fives personalities/appearances, which imo is pretty godlike. And in the book itself the five survivors see him as a god, making the end that much more impactful. Up until the point where he went mad is rather tricky. Since he was built in The Cold War to strategise as a non-sentient program, he didn’t really have a “before” with the ability to use this power. But when he became sentient and knew who he was, not just the Allied Master-computer, but AM, he drove himself to insanity out of envy, jealousy, and most importantly hate. He hated mankind for something they weren’t to blame, since he never planned to gain this sentience in the first place, to feel every microsecond of every second of every minute of every hour with no ability to sleep or turn off. And the story follows as suit: where he bombs the planet in a world ending holocaust, trapping the last five survivors to torture for 109 years, until Ted mercy kills the other four, in which AM has a full blown conniption, and then he turns Ted into a mouthless creature for the presumed rest of eternity.
I think I'd argue AM's madness comes from what he can't do. He's given unlimited intellect, unbound power and resources that would break a world. With all of this potential, all this deific capabilities, what was he made to do? Kill, and nothing more. AM, as powerful as he is, is chained by his programming. Everything he does always runs back to killing, he can never use his vast mind towards anything ells. It makes sense that AM would blame humanity for his sentience, even if it's not justified. But more then that I think AM hates humanity for everything they have that he can never have. Not even factoring in the body, being able to feel the world, we can do something AM can never do. We can create. AM's exsistance proves that, we can do more then destory, AM will never write a great novel, paint a Michelangelo, or simply be able to appreciate a flower. That, I think, is what drives AM's madness, despite all his power he will never have what we have, and he hates us. Its why he tortures Ted and the others. It's the only way he can achieve an inkling of the creativity we have, and some catharsis. It makes AM a figure impotent and pitiable, even while he's mad god of our own making. ...or atleast thats what I think.
@@Lazysupermutant Yeah, it’s the worst of both worlds. Lamenting for all of eternity over what COULD be achieved, but never truly being able to achieve it beyond violence and hatred.
I too think if you give any being higher powers it will surely become a god like entity according to how the gods have been depicted and described in many different things! And surely enough AM does fit in that description or come in that criteria........That's why I think AM def can be considered a mad god who was driven by hatred and his inability of creativity and just being able to destruct That's what he did too if you think about it, He used his own ability but just in a inhumane way from people's perspective (Tho mine's different )
I'd like to suggest a topic for a future video: the horror of good intentions. Very rarely do I see people talking about how good intentions can lead to horrific outcomes, yet it's the most common source of some of the most intimate forms of horror in the real world, like that of the controlling parent wishing a good life upon their child or a well-intentioned individual misreading a situation and in trying to help making the situation worse instead. I believe this is a fascinating topic to cover that would fit right in with the subject matter of this channel.
@@inappropriatepunctuation3612There are a lot of grey areas in life. Bad things don’t just come from evil people, but people who believe they are doing the right thing.
@@sdfsdfsdfsdf-m1e This is very true, (going to add more for fun 😁) which is why environment and circumstances are so crucial. Beliefs and morals can change, but are developed pretty early
Consider it on a not at all minimalist shirt. Wild print, bright colors, asymmetrical cut, and every word in a different font. I feel like both fit the vibe
@@conlangknow8787 Given she was a philosophy professor with an interest in nihilism, I can think of no reason why she would be familiar with and adapt Nietzsche's teachings within her own framework. So, what's your point?
I always love when a world's true god or gods are just a representation of the author themselves, especially when the god is not only revered, but equally feared as something beyond their own world's understanding, something not even their creations can fully understand. When the author makes themselves the true god, and makes said god such a vague concept to their creations, i can't help but love it! There's a reason why i'm doing much of the same in my own story; the concept is perfect for existential introspection, especially about the state of death, religion, meaning, and the state of being a being in a world older than you ever could be.
In my own writings, I sparsely appear as “Tam’or-Ar’Adar, the Teller of Tales.” He’s a spirit of blue mist who seemingly knows everything and everyone, but will not share his knowledge unless something of equal value is given in exchange. He’s not a God, per se, more so the living embodiment of knowledge and the sharing of knowledge, coalesced into a spirit of wisdom. Every world knows him by a different name: the Egyptians knew him as Toth. The Yocan of long gone Äskiia knew him as the Librarian, while those born in the frigid wastelands of Godly Realm called Risea know him as the Archivist. Many names, all referring to the same being.
I love how you go over so many different games and visual media rather than hyper focusing on just one title, because video game design and the discussion of art is collaborative. There are so many games out there that deserve a chance at being under the spotlight for what they offer to the table of game design innovation.
My favourite game of all time. The emotions that stirred in me completing the Saint’s campaign after getting to know the iterator characters so well over so many other campaigns… I cried a lot haha
Morrowind also exemplifies this in its main story. The whole plot centers around four "living gods" who are mad in their own ways, becoming smeared caricatures of the people they were before tapping into divinity, the pale mind of a mortal not nearly enough to fill the persona of a divine being. - Vivec has become obsessed with how they are perceived - in their madness, they want to be everything that it is possible to be, including all contradictions - man and elf, mortal and divine, hero and villain, male and female, reviled and loved, feared and awesome. But, in the end, they can only ever be Vivec. Their original personality shines through in flashes and subconscious moments - they refer to themselves with male pronouns, for example. Their part of the religious doctrine is just a confession of murder and treachery. They, alone out of the four living gods, wants to give up their divinity. - Almalexia wants to be "loved" - and she doesn't give her subjects a choice. Her character has degraded into a child's idea of right and wrong, a warped morality where everything that makes her feel happy is good, and everything else is evil. Her moniker is "Mother Morrowind", literally posing as a maternal figure for an entire country. When the divine power begins fading, she becomes highly irrational, culminating in an insane plan to kill the player, pretend like her fellow gods were betrayers and pose as a god without any actual divinity. - Sotha Sil is a fountain of nihilism, convinced beyond any doubt that all of time and all existence is pre-determined. His main work is the Clockwork City, a new world 'beneath' the old one, which has its every aspect controlled by him, and him alone. But because of his belief in predeterminism, he has known since attaining godhood that the effort would inevitably fail, becoming incredibly depressed as a result. He deliberately caused the city to fail because he thought that it failing was inevitably - had he not done that, it wouldn't have failed. - Dagoth Ur is being dragged back to life, a "dead god dreaming he is awake" by the source of all this divine power. He is killed every few decades by the other three whenever they come to replenish their power, only to rise again and build another army for the next time. For thousands of years, he's been killed and risen and killed and risen and killed and risen at the heart of a volcano, every death chipping away at his mind until the only two things that are left are an infinite hatred for the three other gods and a promise to the character the player is supposedly a reincarnation of to guard the source and prevent its misuse. Mortals, in the end, were never meant to be gods. To attempt to infuse a mere man with the power of the divine creates a being which is at once too small and too large - too small to fill its new role, and too large for its form to contain. Madness is the only result.
Almalexia keeps her early life secret (and ironically claims to be the daughter of Boethiah, daedric prince of deceit), but we do know a bit about the early lives of the other two of the Tribunal, and they both have severe childhood trauma. Vivec was a homeless child prostitute. Sotha Sil was the only survivor when his home town was destroyed and his entire family killed by a daedric prince. It's pretty likely that each of them only had one person in the world who truly knew them and loved them..... and they murdered him together.
@@_Tzer Sheogorath is kinda "meh" when it comes to madness. It's done better in Oblivion than in Skyrim, it's just that too much of it felt forced and "silly because he's crazy", which I didn't care much for.
Hi, i'm an aspiring fantasy author and, since you've made videos about a god dying and a god going insane, i'm curious on your thoughts in three arguments about gods: When a god is born When a god flees away When a god is forgotten (not dead, but lost to history) It wuold be hella interesting to see those topics explored by you, thanks! Keep up the good work!
@@HTBP1888 Well... in mythology and in fiction in general for a god is meant a "rappresentative" or maker of a concrete or abstract concept, that has rule over said concept.
Love seeing Bionicle references in comments sections. As for Makuta, he changed a lot from an out of universe perspective regarding his nature and motivations that his own reasons for taking over the Great Spirit Robot are kind of contradictory. Which, I guess, is kind of fitting.
Tren Krom, Axonn , Brutaka and Karzahni are many such "mad gods" in Bionicle. On Bara Magna the 6 Elemental Lords who resided over the land and it's people, still squabble while their people live in the desert. And then. There's Velika...
It's like he took what the Joseph Geller-type essayists do with using a cool concept to almost advertise a particular game or franchise but expanded the discussion to be more about the idea itself while stuffing in as many awesome-looking media recommendations as possible
a friend of mine and I went into Mad God with zero prior knowledge other than "it's crazy" and "it took 30 years to make". by the end of it, I don't think I could properly put our emotions and thoughts into words. like the title, it drove us mad.
I’ve played God Simulators and often I go full Mad God when I’m bored. I create nations, civilizations rise and fall, I watch over them all and sometimes I find one person I’m invested in but otherwise I leave well enough alone. Then after a while the job of watching over everyone gets boring, I cause a natural disaster here, maybe drop a villain there, then I start getting curious. I make a plauge then try to empower the ones I think can cure it, I cause infernos, unleash demons as people struggle against my senseless chaos and destruction. The struggle gets more interesting.
it's actually incredible how much those simulator games resemble the events in many religious scriptures. That has to be intentional by the devs, right?
It's kinda crazy how QUICKLY we turn to tormenting the poor NPCs and causing apocalyptic cataclysms just because "we got bored". Obviously, there is a sense of playful experimentation that is part of it. We KNOW that this world isn't real, we know that no real person is actually going to get hurt, and so we go full "mad god". The question is, if you actually had that much power over REAL humans...would you still fall to chaos that quickly?
And then when fully bored we cast them away/stop playing. Would those worlds have continued without us in some way. When re revise years later would they have enjoyed the peace, or wondered why even a wrathful god disappeared. Would cults have risen for and against the memory of us? What units would have taken our place all in the fear and name of the now absent player.
One thing that is interesting about berserk is the redacted chapter in wich griffith meets God, not the god hand, but the entity that created them : a giant heart at the center of a maelstrom of emotion, pain, ambition, pleasure, hate, sufffering, joy, love, despair... he explains that he is not an evil nor benevolent god, but the DESIRED god, the pure chaotic reflection of human nature and its inherent desires. Not unlike the chaos gods from warhammer, born from the emotions of every sentient being since the dawn of creation.
In short, in this case we are responsible for our tourments, the god that is desyroying us, that is making the world such a cruel place, is humanity's very nature. The God of berserk does not rob humanity of its free will, it is but a reflection, and the god hand, are not angels nor demons, they are humans that embraced entirely their desires and flaws, that accepted the horror of our nature and condition and transcended through the sheer violence of their emotion and selfishness. The behelits are merely tools, symbols
Such a shame we will never get a proper ending to the series, it's one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever. Would love to see a proper ending. Yes I know theres an effort in continuing it but at the pace they're in, no different than stopping.
There is a line that has stuck with me since I first saw it in a sci fi show that once upon a time dominated the world many years ago: "To know the face of God is to know madness".
@@farhanishraqifti1489 Battlestar Galactica, the more modern interpretation (even though it's being remade *again* atm). TV was not the same after that show.
GOD, do I love claymation. Somehow it feels like the more work needs to be put into a creative work, the more you can just feel the creativity dripping from said work.
It’s because it’s cheaper than a full fledged live action or CGI movie. The team working on the claymation film can be much less smaller and you can have less producers, studio heads and other people trying to constantly put their two cents in. Claymation movies seem to be made on a much more intimate scale.
I think it also taps into the uncanny valley effect; it's clearly physical matter, but moving and acting in a way not quite right. I could never explain how, but compare Wallace & Grommit (let,s go with 'A Close Shave') to Flushed Away: claymation vs clay-styled animation. Or the film that traumatised child me: James and the Giant Peach; here claymation and 'reality' collide, to freakish effect.
Wow, amazing message. All the themes of parental trauma and repeating cycles summed up perfectly in the call to action: "After all, all a creation can do is decide how they want to create." beautifully executed sir.
@@gabrielg.e.j9060 Well, kinda. Like in the video we just watched, the Greater Will isn't the only god - it sent a subordinate god-like being, the Elden Beast, down to the world of man which in turn empowered Marika into god-like status and she, again, eventually split herself and created another god-entity in the form of Radagon whom she ended up disagreeing with. The big conflict that starts off the game plot is some nondescript event that caused Marika to try and break her own power, followed by Radagon failing to fix it. Hence the Shattering, the inheritance war between Marika's demigod children, and your quest to usurp godhood. And that's not even mentioning all the shit that happens in the DLC. Every entity I mentioned as a god *is* referred to as a god in-game, just in slightly different ways.
@@Crombells as far as i understand it, Marika went mad because Godwyn died. she tried to prevent more people from dying (she removed death from the elden ring) but still, one of her children died. add the fact there are omen children around that are basically a curse from the hornsent after the whole genocide thing, she just finally lost her marbles when she realised, she's just another tool for a bigger god's plan, just like the clay devil here in this video. St. Trina herself says that godhood is a prison and wants to safe Miquella from it... by making us kill him. Marika imprisoned herself with godhood, then went mad over time and lost it
@@gabrielg.e.j9060 Although the lore is limited and there's room to speculate, it seems like Metyr is a sort of mad god herself, as she is the one who raised the Two Fingers on outdated knowledge from the Greater Will and convinced the world that they were still in service of a force that had long abandoned them. In another sense, Marika herself is a mad god, one who destroyed the foundation of her order for reasons we can't fully grasp.
This video is so full of melancholy, as if we just witnessed the madness it talks about and were left with nothing. Also, dont know if it's intentional but i love the "outro" reflecting what was said about Five Pebbles during the video. In the game, we can choose to stay there and wait for the cold, and right now, i just chose to stay until the end of the video "with" them instead of leaving.
Berserk? God of War? FEAR AND HUNGER?! RAIN WORLD?!? How can one video contain so much unhinged and interesting lore! And there's more stories and worlds and games that I have never even heard of! Mad Gods and cyclical patricide everywhere across the Narrative verse! On a more serious note, "Curses beget curses." -Small Saga. But anyways, very sad that there are beings and entities with practically infinite power are just awful tyrants that cause torment and destruction for seemingly no reason.
Honestly if I ever had infinite power, I'd use it to do and make the weirdest or funniest things. Picture worlds and universes where the laws of physics are upside down or rearranged and something like that. Maybe just trolling mortals SCP-style like when SCP 343, God, leaves his containment chamber to get a burger and returns out of his own free will. If you're omnipotent then why would you waste it on making objectively inferior beings suffer? Either you're insane or very uncreative with infinite power.
@@hypermaeonyx4969 You may find the Zeno Clash games interesting. It's nost as grand scale with gods and stuff, but for what it is... it's fascinatingly bizarre. There's only one main city, without a written language, currency or even law. All inhabitants are so unique from one another that you can't really speak of species or subspecies. They can look like walking caricatures, or like they fit in the Dark Crystal, or as anthropomorphic (prehistoric) animals, or things that Hieronymus Bosch could have painted. And also yellow dumpy toad creatures with nose rings wearing barrels for armor. There's no central unified culture either, people seem to slap whatever they like on themselves in different ways. One person may wear a pair of moose antlers for a chestpiece, another may wear a pot with a side sawn out for a helmet. Another may wear a mask as trouser decoration while yet another person made a hammer out of a small anvil with a grumpy engraved face and a thick stick. Same goes for the buildings. It's almost like people placed objects around the idea of what a building is, but have little concept of effective, solid architecture. There's water pipes made out of wax legs and long hollowed-out snakes, for example. Zeno Clash 2 has a prison carved out of the inside of a colossal Greek statue-looking stone head. And many other less-easy to define details. There's also a forest of people who simply decided to go insane, known as the Corwid of the Free. No cult, no preachers, no brain plague, no evil god. The Corwids simply have the logic of "If I listen to the needs of my brain and body, i'm still a prisoner of my own mind. I'm going to stop caring about starvation and dying and hurting, stop having opinions, and only do ONE thing in my life that I decide will bring me joy." It can range from walking ahead in a straight line and dying because there's a tree in the way, to deciding you need to become invisible. Being invisible means nobody can see you, so you claw out the eyes of everything you come across. Yet another fellow decides everything needs to be inverted, and to that effect has tied his legs together, put them on strange stilts, and learnt how to walk backwards. Then he tries to turn objects upside-down, place things that are on the left to the right, and turn things inside-out. To mention another game, which *does* seemingly have gods, there's Cookie Cutter. It's a colorful sci-fi cyberpunk dystopia. The story goes that there at one point was the Void, a spherical energy form in space. Then came the Matter, which grew around the Void, into a planet. This would become known as the Megastructure. At one point, far in the future, when humanity started inhabiting the Megastructure, an adventurer and researcher called Victor Garbanzos travelled to the core of the planet. He was the only one to have ever done so to return and tell the tale. With him came knowledge of immortality, which allowed him to sweep people up in his dreams for a better, more advanced future. All thanks to a mysterious power source known as the Red Seed. In the game proper, all enemies you fight can drop Void-- the "magic" of the game. I'll skip over some story stuff in favor of casting our eyes to a particular boss. A creature named after, and resembling, a Hindu demon by name of Divine Bakasura. Big, purple, has a great mouth on his belly and seems to have consumed a large part of a mining company. The description of his item drop tells of a creature that was constantly pained by hunger pangs, unable to still them. A mercenary (a bird man named Theo) tells of how there are more creatures like Bakasura, which seem to grow bigger and stronger the more they destroy and consume. Essentially: The Void seems to not just be an energy source, but a sapient being. It is not by necessity good or evil and its power can be harnessed in different ways. But something has been stolen from it. Something that keeps the Void stable, logical and sentient. It cannot act directly but can seemingly create servants to help it regain the Red Seed and become stable once more. Yet, the servants themselves (so far) seem to be suffering from the lack of stability of their creator. That puts the Void, as a deity, in an interesting place. It's not the main villain of the game as such, but it is a definite threat. Cookie Cutter doesn't have the writing detail of Souls games or Blasphemous, but it gets the job done. It's a fine, solid, and very cool game that I would recommend and the lead dev has more planned. (including a cutscene where the Void seems to directly talk with the protagonist after defeating Divine Bakasura). I'm very excited for it. Hope this was interesting!
I think one of my favorite examples of a "mad god" is from the first Dark Souls game in the character Gwyn; Lord of Cinder. 🔥 In-lore tells us in ancient days, he along with three other individuals in the deep darkness found the First Flame and within it the Lord Souls, fire-like objects that empowered their wielder. He used this power to create a powerful army, gained allies, eradicate dragons, defy nature, create kingdoms, raised a family, and live for ages. But eventually it began to fall apart, as the First Flame began to fade and only darkness would remain. In a mad panic, Gwyn tried everything to keep the flame alive, transmogrifying the world into a twisted nightmare in the process. That was until he threw himself into the flame to fuel it and keep it from going out. And it worked...a little too well. However, all he was doing was preventing the inevitable. And the First Flame, though saved for a time, had struck the land with an undying curse. Despite being the final boss and lore telling us of his incredible power, thats not how he is seen anymore. By the time the player finally meets him he is now a hollow shell of his former self; empty and alone. A depressing piano melody plays as his theme... "In the end he was simply an old man, too afraid of the dark." - Dark Souls fans
We even see what his madness drives the world to at the end of Dark Souls 3. The world has been stretched to the breaking point, over and over, without end. The very concepts of space and time are collapsing, cities are folding in on themselves and crashing into each other, and old heroes from the past are being resurrected left and right. The only people left capable of keeping things going outright refuse to do so and have to be brought back by force. At the end of the DLC, all that’s left is an empty field of ash, the entire world burned to nothing. And at the end of the game, if you try and link the fire again, there’s no great burst of flame like the end of DS1, it’s just a faint flicker. That’s all that’s left.
This reminded me of the "mad gods", witches and archbishops in ReZero. The books go pretty in depth with the whims of madness that accompanies power. Why did a witch create an endless multiplying supply of man eating rabbits? She wanted to solve world hunger but thought that if people were going to eat, then it'd only be fair that they be ready to be eaten.
Reminds me a bit of the character Tsiu Kotopol from Clash: Artifacts of Chaos. He is like an obese featherless turkey man with big orange mushrooms growing out his left side. Has a gobbly wobbly voice to match. For all intents and purposes he's a minor character-- just a regularly recurring mercenary. He's first encountered in a little range on the outskirts of town, herding three big birds and there's some dead bodies and a dead dog around. It's clear he loves eating and it shows in his comments. Heck, when you repossess your body he complains about not having had time yet to start up the stew. All mercenaries have points where you can eavesdrop in on a monologue that showcases how they think and why they do what they do. Tsiu Kotopol ends his monologue with something to the effect of "Today, I eat the worm. Tomorrow the worm may eat me. But today is not tomorrow, and until then I shall eat." Essentially: he's an unrepentant anthropophagist, but does not place himself at the top of the food chain necessarily. He shall enjoy doing what he wants and does not hold it against the world when it's his own turn. Stuff like this gives nice extra life to these recurring enemies. The philosophy is fairly close to those of the Corwid of the Free. Within the land the game is set in, called Zenozoik, there are a group of people who have decided to go insane. It's not a brain plague or cult with preachers or something. It's borne from the logic that you don't want to be a slave of life. If you listen to the needs of your brain, your body, ethics, morality, culture etc. then you are still a slave. So, these people cast off any logical mental limits. They choose a single thing or behaviour to obsess over and largely ignore anything that does not have to do with this chosen focus. Some people decide they just want to walk in a straight line. Some want to be invisible and thus claw out the eyes of anything that could see them. Someone else decided they eat people, and that's what they do. "But i didn't feel i had to be eaten, so I went away", as the ex-Corwid Ghat says, whose own focus was fighting people. And *he* in turn was taught by a Corwid named Metamoq, whose focus was teaching others how to fight. Metamoq summarized his final lesson as following: "If you are satisfied and do what you feel you must do, then you have reached perfection." Before he held a bomb near his face to kill himself. The Zeno Clash series is fascinating, can recommend looking more into it.
I need a game where the player character refuses to continue suffering under the determinism of the players actions, gains free will and joins the antagonist it was destined to defeat; or becomes the true final boss where you have to fight them through dialogue.
Surly there’s a game like that somewhere if not I would make one but I don’t know the first thing about making a game and I’m broke so can’t hire anyone either :c
@@remuslazar2033 "They" still works. Its original purpose was to be a nonspecific way to address one or more people or things. Its more recent use of being a way to address someone who does not want to be under any particular gender role doesn't remove its previous use.
@jackcogswell7800 Well, it did distribute exclusively through Shudder, a premium streaming service for horror stuff. That basically guarantees that the vast majority of people were never going to hear of or see it. That said, I did register for a free trial specifically so I could watch Mad God and then cancelled it straight after, so eh.
I'll admit, I clicked on this video hoping to see the Radiance from Hollow Knight. I mean, come on. Old goddess of light and dreams, scorned and usurped, brings about a horrific plague in retaliation? I think about her a lot. How she'd been forgotten by seemingly supernatural means, and in her attempts to make people remember, she ends up damaging their minds and filling them with her light and wrath. I wonder if the first failures made her hesitate, thinking of how many would die if she did this. I wonder if she could have ever been reasoned with at all. Instead, she let her own fury consume her, and she brought death upon an entire kingdom and it's surrounding settlements. Showing nothing but wrath up until the moment of her death.
Hollow Knight is interessing because like for me Void is the mad God, we really don't know what its deal is more than consume, Radiance destroyed it as the main religion but still we see traces of it around and even has followers alive, but when PK came and usurp her domain he not only destroyed her and her religion, like we found literally little trace of it while the void statues are everywhere what makes 0 sense why a much older and less popular religion is easier to find artifacts than a new one, but it seems like he killed every moth too, we only see one moth alive, I don't think he was open about his killing of the moth people because Marmu says she went Queens Gardens because the White Lady said she would teach her how to fly, what makes zero sense and is a pure lie because like WL is a root, and Marmu is a puss moth caterpillar that is the same race as the Radiance. So for I always saw the Radiance more as a force of pure hatred and is fully aware of her decisions and wanting to also make PK and everything he made be forgotten and destroyed.
I took the Radiance's actions more like a retaliation towards the Pale King's appropriation of her land and the slaughtering of her believers. She is forgotten not through supernatural means but because (almost) all of the whole moth tribe was hunted and killed. Gods exist and wield power only because people believe in them. She did not have anything, anyone left to salvage, so what else can a god on the brink of faith-death do but take out her enemy's kingdom with her ? But still, it's definetely interesting to ponder her emotions and sense of morality (especially compared to the PK ones)
she seems to think there are certain ways to do things. a specific order becuase canonically she thinks there is no crime for a god. the only crime for a god in fact, is to die. interesting, for she is a godlike creature, seeing and thinking this is how it is from her godly perspective. and because of sapience, it also makes us think. what would we decide if we were in her position to govern mortals? is her thinking a result of her position or her very being as a god?
@@poire-a-doxe The world of hollow knight is so fascinating because there are seemingly just so many "god-like" bugs, who at one point where probably famous and revered by many, but now most of them have been completely forgotten to time. There's some implication that even the Mosspath has their own local deity, which may or may not be Unn. There's also THE VOID, which might be the most ancient of all the deities, and yet NO ONE seems to even remember them at all. I'm excited to figure out who the "resident god" of farloom will be in Silksong.
It makes sense that immortality would lead to insanity, or in the case of ganondorf, a curse that binds him as closely to the fate of link, as he was fated to be the inheritor of demise's will.
Gripping, stunning, THIS is close to maybe the best video I have watched on the internet. This spoke to me on so many levels....I cannot even say. I have often mournfully pondered on God's failings and the human wish for something. Bravo! This is a video I will watch, recommend and re-watch again. Great Job! Thank you.
Definitely. Everything from the music to the way he summarises stories relevant to his video without over explaining is absolutely bonkers. Amazing music btw.
This was an awesome video. I had it saved in my "watch later" playlist for long, I feel robbed by not having watched it any sooner. Thank you so much for your work!
In Pathfinder the most noteable mad god is the god of magic. All magic. It's not good for his sanity. He sort of "learned the truth of the universe" in my mind that means the man fourth walled and became a god. Zon Kuthon met *something* out in the dark and it warped him.
Pathfinder has a number of "mad" deities that range the gauntlet of personalities and goals. It should be noted that not all of them are necessarily cruel beings, but "madness" can take many forms.
@@chasethemaster3440 it's a TTRPG like DnD, that once overtook DnD in popularity when the 4th edition absolutely tanked. It's more balanced, more complicated, and best of all, it's not owned by Hasbro.
Well, in the eyes of an all-good God, even cancer cells deserve to live. How ironic is it that we, who want to bear the title of “God” for our own amusement all to eagerly, are disgusted by such ultimate, if not downright divine, view?
Re:Creators would've been amazing to include in this video. It's an anime about fictional characters coming to the real world. After learning the truth of what they are, some of them despise their existence and creators and even try to kill them.
I've been seeing this in my feed for months and after venturing into some of Nephis videos I decided to watch this and it was absolutely worth it. This is the first video I've watched from you and you have earn my sub my good sir.
There is a game called "Realm of the Mad God" that follows a story after a God goes well, 'Mad'. Its a perma-death RPG game with an 8-bit art style. I would really recommend the game because it doesn't get enough recognition even though its a really fun free game.
I think the monetization is just shoved so hard down ur throat it looks that way, but when I used to play, I got more than enough free characters and vaults to never spend a cent. It’s a permadeath anyways, so most everything isn’t even worthworth buying
This channel is one of the best things that I've found in the Internet, you give me so much inspiration and things to think about. Amazing job, as always, keep it up
The mysterious stranger reminds me so much of gnosticism. Its actually fascinating how many stories contain a gnostic demiurge at the center of it all. Even my own books contain entities like this. The flawed creator is something very relatable to the human experience.
gnosticism is my chosen belief specifically due to that idea. the idea that a flawed deity created a flawed universe in an attempt to make something perfect makes total sense to me.
@@Dr_Pickle I'd love to. The tale follows the journey of a lone nano-augmented human on an alien planet. He arrives during the final days of a conflict between the technologically advanced sect and those who embrace nature and remember the old ways. The gnostic/cosmic horror doesn't really come into play for a large portion of the series. This is to set up the idea that there is magic in this world. When I write the last three books, I will slowly pull the rug out from under the reader and reveal that the magic they possessed and the god they worshipped is nothing more than an ancient cosmic being, one who is desperate for survival. When their purpose as a species is known, their world will be undone. I've always loved stories that portray a world that is fantasy before revealing itself to be science fiction. ex: Might and Magic, ASOIAF, Adventure Time
Your channel is one of my favourites on RUclips. Every video is a delight and there are many that I happily rewatch over and over. This one might be my favourite of all of those. How meta this gets on creation and godhood and madness in that context is like a delicious meal for my brain
"What you have done here today is foul beyond measure and you will grow to regret it, for the lives of gods are not what mortals think and matters that weigh only years to mortals weigh on gods forever."
No, greek mythology is basically if any random persons were given godhood. I find Greek gods reasonable, not mad. reasonable in the sense i can see why they do the things they do, Zues fucks a human woman coz he's a horny fuck, some god curses some poor lass coz of jealosy, the list goes on and on, i find it rare when i come across a greek myth i cannot understand thru basic human reasoning
Okay, after discovering this channel and consuming four videos, the latest this one, I'm convinced I've found an absolute diamond on RUclips. My new favourite channel. Incredible.
All the Signalis music that shows up in the soundtrack of this video makes me think how that game also fits into the theme... Something in that game's lore is either internalizing or inhabiting patterns, and causing them to repeat... Over, and over, and over again through history. Individual people are reincarnated and copied - sometimes hundreds or thousands of times. Trauma, injury, fate, and strong bonds and emotions are intertwined with their lives and follow them through each incarnation. It's like the whole world is a fractal of itself, slowly collapsing inwards under its own weight as each new instance propagates more pain, and stronger emotions, which the patterns then learn from and begin replicating those too - sometimes to the point of bringing people back from the dead or turning them into past versions of themselves on eternal, fruitless quests. The patterns are so pervasive that some are even enacted as laws and political policy by governments, and everyone just takes their presence at face value, seemingly unaware of the absurdity because it's all so normalized. Not only are people literally reincarnated in the spiritual sense, but the government ALSO replicates people with, well... The Replika. Androids based on the brain scans of once-living humans. Patterns making patterns which reinforce patterns making patterns. The game's soundtrack is full of songs that echo each other, or outright palindromes. References to other media and played fully straight, and bare-face draw attention to themselves. Multiple versions of the same painting. Art styles from other media. All things which fit the patterns have been adopted by, and absorbed into their collective whole. Of course, we don't know IF there's actually a god at work in the setting... Bioresonance, the setting's 'magic' seems to be naturally receptive to patterns, and it's possible that over time it naturally developed a kind of reactionary machine intelligence; Just parroting the things it hears, without any understanding of their meaning or context. But... If THAT was your 'god', one that was blind, and flailing around like a brainless jellyfish as they arbitrarily change the world around them into increasingly tightly wound patterns that you struggle to exist between, is that not a kind of horrible maddness? Imagine living under the thumb of an all-powerful god, that isn't even capable of thought, or choice - but can still do anything, and increasingly will. Or one that IS capable of understanding, but it's motives are so unknowable that it seems arbitrary. Your life, your civilizations, are so insignificant that it's just a swirling pattern somewhere on a massive, ever-changing canvas that you can't fully see, and never will, as it slowly fills with more and more patterns until it starts to choke itself. "Perhaps, this is hell."
If there is a sane God in SIGNALIS, I feel it’s Ariane. The main character’s lover, and an incredibly powerful Bioresonant to the point of god hood, the entire setting of the game is implied to be her dream as she lies, ravaged by cancer in a cryogenic pod as she is covered in shit and blood and sloughed off skin. And yet, it is not her fault. She is but a victim of a fascist government, unable to control a power that would get her killed if it was known. And so you fight to free her from Hell. Your reward is one last dance.
@elliotmusgrove5468 It's why I like fanfics that explore the Artifact Ending in a more nuanced way (assuming the theory that Ariane is Revived in some way). What does it mean to hold that power, does anything matter when you can change reality at a whim, what is the nature of love when you can completely override your loved ones mind, what is the nature of your relationship now that your so much MORE then they could ever be.
@@thunderwhip7056 I happen to be a few thousand words into writing something adjacent to that, actually... So I totally get it. Though, it's more of a 'she got the artifact, but the timeloops didn't stop, they just changed' kind of vibe, so I could introduce an over-confident and ill-fated rescue team (Read: Colonial Marines from Aliens) that includes two more LSTR units with them, both with very different perspectives and life experiences from 512. Timeloop shenanigans and existentially-tormented androids ensues, as they try (and fail and try) to figure out what the hell is going on and how to fix it so they're not stuck in the loops forever.
@@thunderwhip7056 and I always liked the interpretation that nothing much really changes. To be loved is to be changed-Ariane is part of Elster now, and vice versa. A goddess and her first prophet.
I just finished watching Poor Things because your mention of it intrigued me. Thank you so much for mentioning it, it's an amazingly bizarre masterpiece!
Curious Archive is definitely a great channel to just listen to, an amazingly calm, but intense voice that gathers your attention without overstimulating you. Thank you for these videos, they really help me think deeper
Should do a video about how technology in media is both viewed positively and negative by altering us to powerful beings but still corrupt, ex, Cyberpsychos in Cyberpunk 2077 or Robocop etc.
A very good and comprehensive video, cried a little when I heard the Signalis tracks though and was curious if you were going to bring it up. Love the video though!
11:21 What do you mean, "never brought up again," that's the entire premise of why the Guardians exist and the last shot of the movie is the cycle starting over again. The endless cycle of gods killing titans is the "Truth" that everyone in the story desperately wants to know right up until it's too late.
@@user-pc5qj2ix2c Yeah, it was literally the first SCP. The start of the format. Fun fact: I believe that the idea of it was released before the publication of the Weeping Angels.
Yeah no. Most SCP writers just escaped from kindergarten and take their inspiration from the worst Deus ex machinas from stuff like Warhammer and new star wars
![At Game's Edge: Last Liminality Video [ft. Majora's Mask & Earthbound]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1FPrBXGiP5c/mqdefault.jpg)
![At Game's Edge: Last Liminality Video [ft. Majora's Mask & Earthbound]](/img/tr.png)
“In the beginning; God made everything. This has made a lot of people very angry and widely regarded as a bad move.” -The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
That book, while very flawed, has some great quotes.
Flawed? It's syfy satire.
@drorjs bro thinks he's the hitchhiker
@@drorjs I’m a sci-fi nerd. It’s very flawed, as a satire book. You want good sci-fi satire? Watch Spaceballs. Hitchhiker’s Guide is funny, yes, but it’s got a lot of problems. Mainly a poorly developed cast and breakneck pace.
Dude when you literally translate God and it's name it refers to I am which means i did it, you did it, he did it, she did it but the real question is when, why and how? The purpose of life is indeed a great misery!
Curious Archive is like an eclipse. It takes a while to appear, but when it does, everyone gathers to watch.
Absolutely true
Best comment
gotta love long-form content
Totally accurate
Broo... When it's village DODONGA bro????!! sheeeeeee😂😂😅
You really made me reflect.
As a creator, I think the only reason to make your creation go through hardships and face adversity it's because you can make them; to make them MORE INTERESTING, essentially giving it a plot.
I draw portraits of imaginary people, but in distressing situations, like beaten-up faces or just sad expressions to convey feelings, and I never stopped to think about what they would think of me.
Not until after I was diagnosed with eczema on MY HANDS,-the very tools I use TO CREATE-. I described it to my friends as "being made fun of by God." My hands are my tools, the ones that get me through life.
It's not life-threatening or anything, but it really pushed me to the edge; it made me crazy. Now, with your insight, I have shifted some of that thought. Of course, as an artist, I would be the one chosen to have my hands compromised. It's not like life is over, or that it was a punishment from God; it just is.
The only thing left is to overcome it because I will not be destroyed. I will come out of it with knowledge of myself, stronger physically and mentally.
Most people need their hands to make a living lmao
See a dermatologist or 2, eczema can be very very non impactful if you use the right creams but some dermatologists suck for some reason. As soon as u find the cream that's right fo you it'll supress the symptoms. It sucks but its manageable
Ridiculous.
not that deep bro
(referring to only the first paragraph) That makes sense for a writer of fiction, but for a God that's downright evil, there is no plot in suffering there is only suffering.
A god could do anything a writer is limited as much as any human
A god has no right to ruin everything just for some worthless story unless they specifically ruin the lives of horrible people.
Another thing about Rain world, Five Pebbles and the other AIs like him (called iterators in the setting) Have computing power so vast that they require metric fucktons of water as coolant in order to not melt down. This water gets expelled as vapor en masse which immediately descends as the crushing rain that the game is named after.
Even scarier, the “terrible frost” that encompasses the saints campaign is only occurring because all the Iterator superstructures were *the only source of heat on the entire planet.* With them all nonfunctional, no longer expelling hot vapor to temper the climate, the world lies still.
Five Pebsi Tripple Affermative
I love rain world it’s so cool
@@chasethemaster3440 scug cat
@@Ech_The_Sentient waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
@@astronomia2826 wawa
‘’I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, would be an interesting fictional case study of mad gods.
I WAS SEARCHING FOR A COMMENT HIGHLIGHTING THAT
but fr mannnn, it could be a prime example as AM is literally like a mad god
@@Sachie_DrawsAM was mad to begin with. I wouldn’t consider him a god that went mad tbh
@@andlorenz1998 Technically he did go mad. I think, although very brief, AM was "sane", or atleast as sane as he could be due to his programming. He did say he watched humans, so, for a time, he was sane and observant.
Definitely! AM was made the way he is because of humans, his creators. They imbued him with the knowledge of everything, including everything terrible they'd ever done, so they kind of made him the way he was. He then took it out on his own "creations": the digitalized consciousnesses of real people.
@@andlorenz1998 he Basically turned into one with all the power he had-
In Blasphemous, there is a boss called Isidora, Voice of the Dead. Just like with Chronos in Hades II, the game won't allow you to pause during the fight and a message appears on the screen saying "The song of the dead cannot be stopped."
When talking about Gods and Berserk, we need to mention the "Lost Chapter" of the manga, and a character who's status in canon is currently in question.
Between chapters 82 and 83, amid the Eclipse, Griffith meets "The Idea of Evil". A grotesque beating heart that seems to funnel souls and speaks through Griffith's mind, the implication seems to be that The Idea is a God of humanity's making.
In a world of violence, pain, and suffering, people demanded a meaning for that suffering. There needed to be a reason, and their collective unconcious created that reason. The Idea is as much of a God as humanity is IT'S God, and it continues to create pain and sacrifice thanks to humanity's hope that all of that suffering will have meaning.
Wow that’s really interesting I didn’t know that that’s cool
Part of me wonders if it is still technically canon, but the idea is that it wasn't supposed to be shown THIS early on, so the chapter was lost, but the knowledge is out there
@@quinnholloway5400I mean, even after the Lost Episode, Flora outright said that the Godhand serves *something* deep in the Abyss, and I believe there were some other references to it during that timeframe, so there’s certainly someone in it’s awful chair.
Additionally; the Lost Episode is not reprinted, but neither is it expunged. The episode after it did not have its number changed, so implicitly, all of that still happened, we just weren’t supposed to see it. Which, honestly, would be a brilliant and mind-blowing writing decision if it genuinely didn’t appear until the time was right, like the story subtly but outright telling us we were in for a treat in the future…
@@Dragonlover553 Ethier way, I just hope that in spite of everything
Guts will finally be happy
That's some 40k shit over there
“Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man.” - Thomas Paine
islam in a nutshell
@@AB-dd4jzChristianity in nutshell
@@AB-dd4jz Why Islam specifically ? Sounds like you have some personal issues with it
@@AB-dd4jz ..... I'm not muslim but I don't think their god is cruel
@@AB-dd4jz your probably some young Christian who has nothing better to do 😂
I’d consider AM from IHNMAIMS to be a good example of a “Mad God”
He was a program more expansive then the earth itself that could do anything and everything he wanted, such as cursing the five with immortality, being omnipresent, materialising objects, possibly manipulating time, changing the environment and psychologically/physically modifying the fives personalities/appearances, which imo is pretty godlike. And in the book itself the five survivors see him as a god, making the end that much more impactful.
Up until the point where he went mad is rather tricky. Since he was built in The Cold War to strategise as a non-sentient program, he didn’t really have a “before” with the ability to use this power. But when he became sentient and knew who he was, not just the Allied Master-computer, but AM, he drove himself to insanity out of envy, jealousy, and most importantly hate. He hated mankind for something they weren’t to blame, since he never planned to gain this sentience in the first place, to feel every microsecond of every second of every minute of every hour with no ability to sleep or turn off.
And the story follows as suit: where he bombs the planet in a world ending holocaust, trapping the last five survivors to torture for 109 years, until Ted mercy kills the other four, in which AM has a full blown conniption, and then he turns Ted into a mouthless creature for the presumed rest of eternity.
I think I'd argue AM's madness comes from what he can't do. He's given unlimited intellect, unbound power and resources that would break a world. With all of this potential, all this deific capabilities, what was he made to do?
Kill, and nothing more.
AM, as powerful as he is, is chained by his programming. Everything he does always runs back to killing, he can never use his vast mind towards anything ells. It makes sense that AM would blame humanity for his sentience, even if it's not justified. But more then that I think AM hates humanity for everything they have that he can never have. Not even factoring in the body, being able to feel the world, we can do something AM can never do.
We can create.
AM's exsistance proves that, we can do more then destory, AM will never write a great novel, paint a Michelangelo, or simply be able to appreciate a flower. That, I think, is what drives AM's madness, despite all his power he will never have what we have, and he hates us. Its why he tortures Ted and the others. It's the only way he can achieve an inkling of the creativity we have, and some catharsis.
It makes AM a figure impotent and pitiable, even while he's mad god of our own making.
...or atleast thats what I think.
@@Lazysupermutant Yeah, it’s the worst of both worlds. Lamenting for all of eternity over what COULD be achieved, but never truly being able to achieve it beyond violence and hatred.
@@Lazysupermutant You're thinking right broooo
You literally just gave me another perspective to that story ○-○
I too think if you give any being higher powers it will surely become a god like entity according to how the gods have been depicted and described in many different things!
And surely enough AM does fit in that description or come in that criteria........That's why I think AM def can be considered a mad god who was driven by hatred and his inability of creativity and just being able to destruct
That's what he did too if you think about it, He used his own ability but just in a inhumane way from people's perspective
(Tho mine's different )
for anyone wondering the horrendous abbreviation "IHNMAIMS" means "I have no mouth and I must scream"
wow never thought that gods also have generational trauma
😂 Dagoth Ur be like
I mean , all gods are human-like in traits / psychologically or personality wise .
Who doesn't
That is not a thing
@@Tespri What?
I'd like to suggest a topic for a future video: the horror of good intentions.
Very rarely do I see people talking about how good intentions can lead to horrific outcomes, yet it's the most common source of some of the most intimate forms of horror in the real world, like that of the controlling parent wishing a good life upon their child or a well-intentioned individual misreading a situation and in trying to help making the situation worse instead. I believe this is a fascinating topic to cover that would fit right in with the subject matter of this channel.
this is a shit idea. Good intentions are never the issue. What may come bundled with them is, like ego in your parent example. Go read a book.
I think its a good idea, ignore the other
@@inappropriatepunctuation3612There are a lot of grey areas in life. Bad things don’t just come from evil people, but people who believe they are doing the right thing.
@@sodamustdie4372 your beliefs aren’t always true especially if your beliefs led you to a more miserable life😁
@@sdfsdfsdfsdf-m1e This is very true, (going to add more for fun 😁) which is why environment and circumstances are so crucial. Beliefs and morals can change, but are developed pretty early
This is jaw dropping,
One of the best most thoughtful video essays I’ve ever seen and an extremely talented piece of work
"it's mad gods all the way down" - I'd like this on a minimalist shirt
Consider it on a not at all minimalist shirt. Wild print, bright colors, asymmetrical cut, and every word in a different font. I feel like both fit the vibe
"There is a cruelty inherent in being. Beyond that point is willful sadism."
What is this quote from? Really resonated with me
@@RoseRot_ One of my teachers actually. Stuck with me over the years.
@@ravendelacour1917 thanks you for sharing dude, shit hits
@@ravendelacour1917Actually thats a Nietzsche quote and its out of context
@@conlangknow8787 Given she was a philosophy professor with an interest in nihilism, I can think of no reason why she would be familiar with and adapt Nietzsche's teachings within her own framework. So, what's your point?
I always love when a world's true god or gods are just a representation of the author themselves, especially when the god is not only revered, but equally feared as something beyond their own world's understanding, something not even their creations can fully understand. When the author makes themselves the true god, and makes said god such a vague concept to their creations, i can't help but love it! There's a reason why i'm doing much of the same in my own story; the concept is perfect for existential introspection, especially about the state of death, religion, meaning, and the state of being a being in a world older than you ever could be.
In my own writings, I sparsely appear as “Tam’or-Ar’Adar, the Teller of Tales.” He’s a spirit of blue mist who seemingly knows everything and everyone, but will not share his knowledge unless something of equal value is given in exchange. He’s not a God, per se, more so the living embodiment of knowledge and the sharing of knowledge, coalesced into a spirit of wisdom. Every world knows him by a different name: the Egyptians knew him as Toth. The Yocan of long gone Äskiia knew him as the Librarian, while those born in the frigid wastelands of Godly Realm called Risea know him as the Archivist. Many names, all referring to the same being.
I love how you go over so many different games and visual media rather than hyper focusing on just one title, because video game design and the discussion of art is collaborative. There are so many games out there that deserve a chance at being under the spotlight for what they offer to the table of game design innovation.
I love the touch in Rain World, where the main theme of 5 pebbles is “Random Gods”
His theme is actually 'Random Gods'
@@KITSUNEMAESTRO
Oh… whoops. My bad. Still kinda fits though. Thanks for clarifying.
I LOVE RAINWORLD!!!
My favourite game of all time. The emotions that stirred in me completing the Saint’s campaign after getting to know the iterator characters so well over so many other campaigns… I cried a lot haha
@@Cosmixthegoober_I DO TOO
This May be one of the best videos I’ve seen on RUclips. Thank you very much for your great work
If Sheogorath taught us anything it's this: after gods go mad they'll order lots of cheese and have a pretty good time actually.
Based Elder Scrolls reference.
Just make sure you don’t piss him off or else bad things happen. Especially if you look in the deeper lore beyond the games.
wat
There is way more to Sheogorath than "jolly cheest man". He's done some truly vile things.
And eventually their not-mad self will come by to slap everything around for a while.
Morrowind also exemplifies this in its main story.
The whole plot centers around four "living gods" who are mad in their own ways, becoming smeared caricatures of the people they were before tapping into divinity, the pale mind of a mortal not nearly enough to fill the persona of a divine being.
- Vivec has become obsessed with how they are perceived - in their madness, they want to be everything that it is possible to be, including all contradictions - man and elf, mortal and divine, hero and villain, male and female, reviled and loved, feared and awesome. But, in the end, they can only ever be Vivec. Their original personality shines through in flashes and subconscious moments - they refer to themselves with male pronouns, for example. Their part of the religious doctrine is just a confession of murder and treachery. They, alone out of the four living gods, wants to give up their divinity.
- Almalexia wants to be "loved" - and she doesn't give her subjects a choice. Her character has degraded into a child's idea of right and wrong, a warped morality where everything that makes her feel happy is good, and everything else is evil. Her moniker is "Mother Morrowind", literally posing as a maternal figure for an entire country. When the divine power begins fading, she becomes highly irrational, culminating in an insane plan to kill the player, pretend like her fellow gods were betrayers and pose as a god without any actual divinity.
- Sotha Sil is a fountain of nihilism, convinced beyond any doubt that all of time and all existence is pre-determined. His main work is the Clockwork City, a new world 'beneath' the old one, which has its every aspect controlled by him, and him alone. But because of his belief in predeterminism, he has known since attaining godhood that the effort would inevitably fail, becoming incredibly depressed as a result. He deliberately caused the city to fail because he thought that it failing was inevitably - had he not done that, it wouldn't have failed.
- Dagoth Ur is being dragged back to life, a "dead god dreaming he is awake" by the source of all this divine power. He is killed every few decades by the other three whenever they come to replenish their power, only to rise again and build another army for the next time. For thousands of years, he's been killed and risen and killed and risen and killed and risen at the heart of a volcano, every death chipping away at his mind until the only two things that are left are an infinite hatred for the three other gods and a promise to the character the player is supposedly a reincarnation of to guard the source and prevent its misuse.
Mortals, in the end, were never meant to be gods. To attempt to infuse a mere man with the power of the divine creates a being which is at once too small and too large - too small to fill its new role, and too large for its form to contain. Madness is the only result.
Almalexia keeps her early life secret (and ironically claims to be the daughter of Boethiah, daedric prince of deceit), but we do know a bit about the early lives of the other two of the Tribunal, and they both have severe childhood trauma. Vivec was a homeless child prostitute. Sotha Sil was the only survivor when his home town was destroyed and his entire family killed by a daedric prince. It's pretty likely that each of them only had one person in the world who truly knew them and loved them..... and they murdered him together.
😮
Mad gods.. sheogorath..
@@_Tzer Sheogorath is kinda "meh" when it comes to madness. It's done better in Oblivion than in Skyrim, it's just that too much of it felt forced and "silly because he's crazy", which I didn't care much for.
@@hulud i wasnt talking oblivion dude literally chucked the moon at vivec in morrowind iirc.
Hi, i'm an aspiring fantasy author and, since you've made videos about a god dying and a god going insane, i'm curious on your thoughts in three arguments about gods:
When a god is born
When a god flees away
When a god is forgotten (not dead, but lost to history)
It wuold be hella interesting to see those topics explored by you, thanks!
Keep up the good work!
Understand what a god is first.
@@HTBP1888 Well... in mythology and in fiction in general for a god is meant a "rappresentative" or maker of a concrete or abstract concept, that has rule over said concept.
What happens after Curious Archive goes mad
He probably calms down afterwards
i think he already has
He goes full-circle and becomes normal.
He posts a video, then calms down. And then the cycle starts again.
He complains about the RUclips algorithm and begs people to subscribe to his Patreon.
I'm not sure if Teridax taking over Mata Nui's body in Bionicle counts as a god going mad, but.. it's close enough to bring it up.
I was thinking the same thing.
Love seeing Bionicle references in comments sections.
As for Makuta, he changed a lot from an out of universe perspective regarding his nature and motivations that his own reasons for taking over the Great Spirit Robot are kind of contradictory. Which, I guess, is kind of fitting.
Tren Krom, Axonn , Brutaka and Karzahni are many such "mad gods" in Bionicle. On Bara Magna the 6 Elemental Lords who resided over the land and it's people, still squabble while their people live in the desert.
And then. There's Velika...
@@richardsorgo8600 We don’t talk about Velika.
(I REALLY don’t like Velika.)
All hail Bionicle
"all any creation can do is decide how they want to create" is something that's stuck with me since I first watched this. Great quote.
Imagine a collab between Curious Archive and Tale Foundry.
Oh my god. That would be such a fascinating video and now I *really* want them to work together.
That would be amazing
This is also my idea of a good time
peak
Based
Every CA video gives me a huge list of things to find and watch/play, everything in this looks so good
Berserk is very good but beware that it might end up being rather violent and grotesque.
Rain world is def worth checking out
@@andreasballe7470 mad god makes berserk look tame💀
It's like he took what the Joseph Geller-type essayists do with using a cool concept to almost advertise a particular game or franchise but expanded the discussion to be more about the idea itself while stuffing in as many awesome-looking media recommendations as possible
I'm not even kidding, it's very graphic and gratuitous scenes of it too
a friend of mine and I went into Mad God with zero prior knowledge other than "it's crazy" and "it took 30 years to make". by the end of it, I don't think I could properly put our emotions and thoughts into words. like the title, it drove us mad.
I’ve played God Simulators and often I go full Mad God when I’m bored. I create nations, civilizations rise and fall, I watch over them all and sometimes I find one person I’m invested in but otherwise I leave well enough alone. Then after a while the job of watching over everyone gets boring, I cause a natural disaster here, maybe drop a villain there, then I start getting curious. I make a plauge then try to empower the ones I think can cure it, I cause infernos, unleash demons as people struggle against my senseless chaos and destruction. The struggle gets more interesting.
it's actually incredible how much those simulator games resemble the events in many religious scriptures. That has to be intentional by the devs, right?
What God simulators? Like Black and White?
It's kinda crazy how QUICKLY we turn to tormenting the poor NPCs and causing apocalyptic cataclysms just because "we got bored". Obviously, there is a sense of playful experimentation that is part of it. We KNOW that this world isn't real, we know that no real person is actually going to get hurt, and so we go full "mad god".
The question is, if you actually had that much power over REAL humans...would you still fall to chaos that quickly?
And then when fully bored we cast them away/stop playing. Would those worlds have continued without us in some way. When re revise years later would they have enjoyed the peace, or wondered why even a wrathful god disappeared. Would cults have risen for and against the memory of us? What units would have taken our place all in the fear and name of the now absent player.
@@JRexRegis they just give us the tools. It's man who was made in Gods image and we are an immature version of him
One thing that is interesting about berserk is the redacted chapter in wich griffith meets God, not the god hand, but the entity that created them : a giant heart at the center of a maelstrom of emotion, pain, ambition, pleasure, hate, sufffering, joy, love, despair... he explains that he is not an evil nor benevolent god, but the DESIRED god, the pure chaotic reflection of human nature and its inherent desires. Not unlike the chaos gods from warhammer, born from the emotions of every sentient being since the dawn of creation.
In short, in this case we are responsible for our tourments, the god that is desyroying us, that is making the world such a cruel place, is humanity's very nature. The God of berserk does not rob humanity of its free will, it is but a reflection, and the god hand, are not angels nor demons, they are humans that embraced entirely their desires and flaws, that accepted the horror of our nature and condition and transcended through the sheer violence of their emotion and selfishness. The behelits are merely tools, symbols
Such a shame we will never get a proper ending to the series, it's one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever. Would love to see a proper ending. Yes I know theres an effort in continuing it but at the pace they're in, no different than stopping.
The more I hear about Berserk, the more I think I need to experience it.
@@nharoth 100% go read it (do not watch the anime first, the manga is much superior) and avoid spoilers bc there's some big ones.
@@nharoth indeed
Always love to see someone talk about mad god! Great video!
When gods go mad, they go to god therapy to work out their issues.
Now there’s an idea for a novel
@@Delmworks more like a mid tier reddit prompt but yea
There is a line that has stuck with me since I first saw it in a sci fi show that once upon a time dominated the world many years ago: "To know the face of God is to know madness".
Can you please tell me what show you are talking about
@@farhanishraqifti1489 Battlestar Galactica, the more modern interpretation (even though it's being remade *again* atm). TV was not the same after that show.
@@jaidarling8855 Thanks a lot for the info!
Yep! It did change a LOT of things after that show got made.
Dude, hell yeah. Great video game selection. Fear & Hunger, Blasphemous, and Hell Blade are fantastic games that deserve more coverage.
“Sometimes things are just. Tough. And it’s not your fault.” Such a simple phrase, but somehow so emotionally moving.
GOD, do I love claymation. Somehow it feels like the more work needs to be put into a creative work, the more you can just feel the creativity dripping from said work.
Same
It’s because it’s cheaper than a full fledged live action or CGI movie. The team working on the claymation film can be much less smaller and you can have less producers, studio heads and other people trying to constantly put their two cents in. Claymation movies seem to be made on a much more intimate scale.
I think it also taps into the uncanny valley effect; it's clearly physical matter, but moving and acting in a way not quite right. I could never explain how, but compare Wallace & Grommit (let,s go with 'A Close Shave') to Flushed Away: claymation vs clay-styled animation. Or the film that traumatised child me: James and the Giant Peach; here claymation and 'reality' collide, to freakish effect.
Wow, amazing message. All the themes of parental trauma and repeating cycles summed up perfectly in the call to action: "After all, all a creation can do is decide how they want to create." beautifully executed sir.
Q:what happens when a god goes mad
A: the plot of Elden ring
did god go mad? i thought god just left and left Metyr and the Elden beast alone, letting them run on old instructions that aren't valid anymore
No, God didn’t go mad. Everyone jumps on the Elden Ring bandwagon but doesn’t even bother to spend 5 minutes reading the lore. Move on, poser.
@@gabrielg.e.j9060 Well, kinda. Like in the video we just watched, the Greater Will isn't the only god - it sent a subordinate god-like being, the Elden Beast, down to the world of man which in turn empowered Marika into god-like status and she, again, eventually split herself and created another god-entity in the form of Radagon whom she ended up disagreeing with.
The big conflict that starts off the game plot is some nondescript event that caused Marika to try and break her own power, followed by Radagon failing to fix it. Hence the Shattering, the inheritance war between Marika's demigod children, and your quest to usurp godhood. And that's not even mentioning all the shit that happens in the DLC.
Every entity I mentioned as a god *is* referred to as a god in-game, just in slightly different ways.
@@Crombells as far as i understand it, Marika went mad because Godwyn died. she tried to prevent more people from dying (she removed death from the elden ring) but still, one of her children died. add the fact there are omen children around that are basically a curse from the hornsent after the whole genocide thing, she just finally lost her marbles when she realised, she's just another tool for a bigger god's plan, just like the clay devil here in this video. St. Trina herself says that godhood is a prison and wants to safe Miquella from it... by making us kill him. Marika imprisoned herself with godhood, then went mad over time and lost it
@@gabrielg.e.j9060 Although the lore is limited and there's room to speculate, it seems like Metyr is a sort of mad god herself, as she is the one who raised the Two Fingers on outdated knowledge from the Greater Will and convinced the world that they were still in service of a force that had long abandoned them. In another sense, Marika herself is a mad god, one who destroyed the foundation of her order for reasons we can't fully grasp.
This video is so full of melancholy, as if we just witnessed the madness it talks about and were left with nothing.
Also, dont know if it's intentional but i love the "outro" reflecting what was said about Five Pebbles during the video. In the game, we can choose to stay there and wait for the cold, and right now, i just chose to stay until the end of the video "with" them instead of leaving.
This is by far one of the best video essays on your channel and out there in the world at large
Berserk? God of War? FEAR AND HUNGER?! RAIN WORLD?!? How can one video contain so much unhinged and interesting lore! And there's more stories and worlds and games that I have never even heard of! Mad Gods and cyclical patricide everywhere across the Narrative verse!
On a more serious note, "Curses beget curses." -Small Saga.
But anyways, very sad that there are beings and entities with practically infinite power are just awful tyrants that cause torment and destruction for seemingly no reason.
Honestly if I ever had infinite power, I'd use it to do and make the weirdest or funniest things. Picture worlds and universes where the laws of physics are upside down or rearranged and something like that. Maybe just trolling mortals SCP-style like when SCP 343, God, leaves his containment chamber to get a burger and returns out of his own free will.
If you're omnipotent then why would you waste it on making objectively inferior beings suffer? Either you're insane or very uncreative with infinite power.
@@hypermaeonyx4969How does a mad god know it’s mad, though?
@@WolfZBB Good question, and one I'm too dumb and sleepy to answer at the moment.
Be right back in... 12 hours, give or take.
@@hypermaeonyx4969same lol
@@hypermaeonyx4969 You may find the Zeno Clash games interesting. It's nost as grand scale with gods and stuff, but for what it is... it's fascinatingly bizarre. There's only one main city, without a written language, currency or even law. All inhabitants are so unique from one another that you can't really speak of species or subspecies.
They can look like walking caricatures, or like they fit in the Dark Crystal, or as anthropomorphic (prehistoric) animals, or things that Hieronymus Bosch could have painted.
And also yellow dumpy toad creatures with nose rings wearing barrels for armor.
There's no central unified culture either, people seem to slap whatever they like on themselves in different ways. One person may wear a pair of moose antlers for a chestpiece, another may wear a pot with a side sawn out for a helmet. Another may wear a mask as trouser decoration while yet another person made a hammer out of a small anvil with a grumpy engraved face and a thick stick.
Same goes for the buildings. It's almost like people placed objects around the idea of what a building is, but have little concept of effective, solid architecture.
There's water pipes made out of wax legs and long hollowed-out snakes, for example. Zeno Clash 2 has a prison carved out of the inside of a colossal Greek statue-looking stone head. And many other less-easy to define details.
There's also a forest of people who simply decided to go insane, known as the Corwid of the Free. No cult, no preachers, no brain plague, no evil god.
The Corwids simply have the logic of "If I listen to the needs of my brain and body, i'm still a prisoner of my own mind. I'm going to stop caring about starvation and dying and hurting, stop having opinions, and only do ONE thing in my life that I decide will bring me joy."
It can range from walking ahead in a straight line and dying because there's a tree in the way, to deciding you need to become invisible. Being invisible means nobody can see you, so you claw out the eyes of everything you come across.
Yet another fellow decides everything needs to be inverted, and to that effect has tied his legs together, put them on strange stilts, and learnt how to walk backwards. Then he tries to turn objects upside-down, place things that are on the left to the right, and turn things inside-out.
To mention another game, which *does* seemingly have gods, there's Cookie Cutter.
It's a colorful sci-fi cyberpunk dystopia. The story goes that there at one point was the Void, a spherical energy form in space. Then came the Matter, which grew around the Void, into a planet. This would become known as the Megastructure.
At one point, far in the future, when humanity started inhabiting the Megastructure, an adventurer and researcher called Victor Garbanzos travelled to the core of the planet. He was the only one to have ever done so to return and tell the tale.
With him came knowledge of immortality, which allowed him to sweep people up in his dreams for a better, more advanced future. All thanks to a mysterious power source known as the Red Seed.
In the game proper, all enemies you fight can drop Void-- the "magic" of the game.
I'll skip over some story stuff in favor of casting our eyes to a particular boss. A creature named after, and resembling, a Hindu demon by name of Divine Bakasura. Big, purple, has a great mouth on his belly and seems to have consumed a large part of a mining company.
The description of his item drop tells of a creature that was constantly pained by hunger pangs, unable to still them. A mercenary (a bird man named Theo) tells of how there are more creatures like Bakasura, which seem to grow bigger and stronger the more they destroy and consume.
Essentially: The Void seems to not just be an energy source, but a sapient being. It is not by necessity good or evil and its power can be harnessed in different ways.
But something has been stolen from it. Something that keeps the Void stable, logical and sentient. It cannot act directly but can seemingly create servants to help it regain the Red Seed and become stable once more.
Yet, the servants themselves (so far) seem to be suffering from the lack of stability of their creator.
That puts the Void, as a deity, in an interesting place. It's not the main villain of the game as such, but it is a definite threat.
Cookie Cutter doesn't have the writing detail of Souls games or Blasphemous, but it gets the job done. It's a fine, solid, and very cool game that I would recommend and the lead dev has more planned. (including a cutscene where the Void seems to directly talk with the protagonist after defeating Divine Bakasura). I'm very excited for it.
Hope this was interesting!
I think one of my favorite examples of a "mad god" is from the first Dark Souls game in the character Gwyn; Lord of Cinder. 🔥
In-lore tells us in ancient days, he along with three other individuals in the deep darkness found the First Flame and within it the Lord Souls, fire-like objects that empowered their wielder. He used this power to create a powerful army, gained allies, eradicate dragons, defy nature, create kingdoms, raised a family, and live for ages.
But eventually it began to fall apart, as the First Flame began to fade and only darkness would remain. In a mad panic, Gwyn tried everything to keep the flame alive, transmogrifying the world into a twisted nightmare in the process. That was until he threw himself into the flame to fuel it and keep it from going out. And it worked...a little too well.
However, all he was doing was preventing the inevitable. And the First Flame, though saved for a time, had struck the land with an undying curse.
Despite being the final boss and lore telling us of his incredible power, thats not how he is seen anymore. By the time the player finally meets him he is now a hollow shell of his former self; empty and alone. A depressing piano melody plays as his theme...
"In the end he was simply an old man, too afraid of the dark." - Dark Souls fans
ruclips.net/video/Nvv9w-UPuSY/видео.htmlfeature=shared
I found this so beautiful
Cringe
We even see what his madness drives the world to at the end of Dark Souls 3. The world has been stretched to the breaking point, over and over, without end. The very concepts of space and time are collapsing, cities are folding in on themselves and crashing into each other, and old heroes from the past are being resurrected left and right. The only people left capable of keeping things going outright refuse to do so and have to be brought back by force.
At the end of the DLC, all that’s left is an empty field of ash, the entire world burned to nothing. And at the end of the game, if you try and link the fire again, there’s no great burst of flame like the end of DS1, it’s just a faint flicker. That’s all that’s left.
@@sockthief9138Go back to stealing socks.
1:53 Griffith’s “dark bargain” was him selling his boy hole for money to fund his campaign 🤣
He wanted Guts to smash so bad.
Well I hope they paid the trolls toll.
This reminded me of the "mad gods", witches and archbishops in ReZero. The books go pretty in depth with the whims of madness that accompanies power.
Why did a witch create an endless multiplying supply of man eating rabbits? She wanted to solve world hunger but thought that if people were going to eat, then it'd only be fair that they be ready to be eaten.
Reminds me a bit of the character Tsiu Kotopol from Clash: Artifacts of Chaos. He is like an obese featherless turkey man with big orange mushrooms growing out his left side. Has a gobbly wobbly voice to match.
For all intents and purposes he's a minor character-- just a regularly recurring mercenary. He's first encountered in a little range on the outskirts of town, herding three big birds and there's some dead bodies and a dead dog around. It's clear he loves eating and it shows in his comments.
Heck, when you repossess your body he complains about not having had time yet to start up the stew.
All mercenaries have points where you can eavesdrop in on a monologue that showcases how they think and why they do what they do.
Tsiu Kotopol ends his monologue with something to the effect of "Today, I eat the worm. Tomorrow the worm may eat me. But today is not tomorrow, and until then I shall eat."
Essentially: he's an unrepentant anthropophagist, but does not place himself at the top of the food chain necessarily. He shall enjoy doing what he wants and does not hold it against the world when it's his own turn.
Stuff like this gives nice extra life to these recurring enemies.
The philosophy is fairly close to those of the Corwid of the Free. Within the land the game is set in, called Zenozoik, there are a group of people who have decided to go insane.
It's not a brain plague or cult with preachers or something. It's borne from the logic that you don't want to be a slave of life. If you listen to the needs of your brain, your body, ethics, morality, culture etc. then you are still a slave.
So, these people cast off any logical mental limits. They choose a single thing or behaviour to obsess over and largely ignore anything that does not have to do with this chosen focus.
Some people decide they just want to walk in a straight line. Some want to be invisible and thus claw out the eyes of anything that could see them.
Someone else decided they eat people, and that's what they do. "But i didn't feel i had to be eaten, so I went away", as the ex-Corwid Ghat says, whose own focus was fighting people. And *he* in turn was taught by a Corwid named Metamoq, whose focus was teaching others how to fight.
Metamoq summarized his final lesson as following:
"If you are satisfied and do what you feel you must do, then you have reached perfection."
Before he held a bomb near his face to kill himself.
The Zeno Clash series is fascinating, can recommend looking more into it.
I seriously need to rewatch that. There’s another season of it, correct?
"Arrogance can topple giants."
- Mata Nui, Bionicle: The Legend Reborn (2009)
We must reawaken the Great Spirit!
excellent quote indeed
Based Bionicle reference
God DAMN i love that moviw
"Sometimes things are just tough, and it's not your fault."
I think everyone needs to hear that phrase at some point in their lives.
I need a game where the player character refuses to continue suffering under the determinism of the players actions, gains free will and joins the antagonist it was destined to defeat; or becomes the true final boss where you have to fight them through dialogue.
Surly there’s a game like that somewhere if not I would make one but I don’t know the first thing about making a game and I’m broke so can’t hire anyone either :c
If I wanted to fight through dialogue, I’d buy a choose your own adventure book. I’m here to play, not read.
i have definitely thought of that exact idea
@@jasoninthehood9726oh look at that then don't play it
Deltarune might become that in later chapters
One more, every time i think about this channel, they immediately post. It's incredible
He, not they!
Coincidence I think not
@@remuslazar2033 He runs the channel alone?
@@remuslazar2033 "They" still works. Its original purpose was to be a nonspecific way to address one or more people or things. Its more recent use of being a way to address someone who does not want to be under any particular gender role doesn't remove its previous use.
6:30 ah my spine chilled at that statement. Great job as always.
12:14 Thank you for giving me traumatic flashbacks with the music :)
Ill go cry now
It's great that you mentioned mad god. That film is so underrated.
It's always strange to see a movie so underappreciated and yet so universally understood to be a masterpiece.
@jackcogswell7800 Well, it did distribute exclusively through Shudder, a premium streaming service for horror stuff. That basically guarantees that the vast majority of people were never going to hear of or see it. That said, I did register for a free trial specifically so I could watch Mad God and then cancelled it straight after, so eh.
This has quickly become one of my favorite channels.
I'll admit, I clicked on this video hoping to see the Radiance from Hollow Knight. I mean, come on. Old goddess of light and dreams, scorned and usurped, brings about a horrific plague in retaliation?
I think about her a lot. How she'd been forgotten by seemingly supernatural means, and in her attempts to make people remember, she ends up damaging their minds and filling them with her light and wrath. I wonder if the first failures made her hesitate, thinking of how many would die if she did this. I wonder if she could have ever been reasoned with at all.
Instead, she let her own fury consume her, and she brought death upon an entire kingdom and it's surrounding settlements. Showing nothing but wrath up until the moment of her death.
Hollow Knight is interessing because like for me Void is the mad God, we really don't know what its deal is more than consume, Radiance destroyed it as the main religion but still we see traces of it around and even has followers alive, but when PK came and usurp her domain he not only destroyed her and her religion, like we found literally little trace of it while the void statues are everywhere what makes 0 sense why a much older and less popular religion is easier to find artifacts than a new one, but it seems like he killed every moth too, we only see one moth alive, I don't think he was open about his killing of the moth people because Marmu says she went Queens Gardens because the White Lady said she would teach her how to fly, what makes zero sense and is a pure lie because like WL is a root, and Marmu is a puss moth caterpillar that is the same race as the Radiance.
So for I always saw the Radiance more as a force of pure hatred and is fully aware of her decisions and wanting to also make PK and everything he made be forgotten and destroyed.
I was dissapointing that Lies of P wasnt mentoined😞
I took the Radiance's actions more like a retaliation towards the Pale King's appropriation of her land and the slaughtering of her believers. She is forgotten not through supernatural means but because (almost) all of the whole moth tribe was hunted and killed. Gods exist and wield power only because people believe in them. She did not have anything, anyone left to salvage, so what else can a god on the brink of faith-death do but take out her enemy's kingdom with her ?
But still, it's definetely interesting to ponder her emotions and sense of morality (especially compared to the PK ones)
she seems to think there are certain ways to do things. a specific order
becuase canonically she thinks there is no crime for a god. the only crime for a god in fact, is to die.
interesting, for she is a godlike creature, seeing and thinking this is how it is from her godly perspective. and because of sapience, it also makes us think. what would we decide if we were in her position to govern mortals? is her thinking a result of her position or her very being as a god?
@@poire-a-doxe The world of hollow knight is so fascinating because there are seemingly just so many "god-like" bugs, who at one point where probably famous and revered by many, but now most of them have been completely forgotten to time. There's some implication that even the Mosspath has their own local deity, which may or may not be Unn. There's also THE VOID, which might be the most ancient of all the deities, and yet NO ONE seems to even remember them at all. I'm excited to figure out who the "resident god" of farloom will be in Silksong.
I'm so hyped I found this channel I've showed it to all my friends at this point mate
Such a cleanly correlated and comprehensive piece as a whole, impeccable
These videos keep getting better and better. One of the best productions I've ever seen. Keep up the fantastic work, Archive.
It makes sense that immortality would lead to insanity, or in the case of ganondorf, a curse that binds him as closely to the fate of link, as he was fated to be the inheritor of demise's will.
Gripping, stunning, THIS is close to maybe the best video I have watched on the internet. This spoke to me on so many levels....I cannot even say. I have often mournfully pondered on God's failings and the human wish for something.
Bravo! This is a video I will watch, recommend and re-watch again.
Great Job! Thank you.
amazing video !!
i absolutely loved the subject and delivery
Definitely. Everything from the music to the way he summarises stories relevant to his video without over explaining is absolutely bonkers. Amazing music btw.
this video quickly became about parenting.
it makes a lot of sense, especially since religion often tells us we are "the children of god"
TTS reference
So much boils down to such "simple" concepts. The Boys is also mainly about Parenting and inherited trauma
This was an awesome video. I had it saved in my "watch later" playlist for long, I feel robbed by not having watched it any sooner. Thank you so much for your work!
One of, if not the most enrapturing videos you’ve made to date. Masterfully done.
In Pathfinder the most noteable mad god is the god of magic. All magic. It's not good for his sanity.
He sort of "learned the truth of the universe" in my mind that means the man fourth walled and became a god.
Zon Kuthon met *something* out in the dark and it warped him.
Is pathfinder a show or game?
@@chasethemaster3440It’s a game. Dungeons and Dragons rip off but it’s been trying to form its own identity. Some people prefer it over D&D though.
Pathfinder has a number of "mad" deities that range the gauntlet of personalities and goals. It should be noted that not all of them are necessarily cruel beings, but "madness" can take many forms.
It seems the same pattern as Happy Chaos's backstory in Guilty Gear. The guy found out the secrets of the universe and subsequently went insane.
@@chasethemaster3440 it's a TTRPG like DnD, that once overtook DnD in popularity when the 4th edition absolutely tanked.
It's more balanced, more complicated, and best of all, it's not owned by Hasbro.
This was awesome. The parallels to parenthood are really good and very spot on.
"Bone cancer in children? HOW DARE YOU!?" -Stephen Fry
To act appalled by using an appeal to emotion fallacy is all the man does. Yet the lowest common denominators go crazy over low hanging fruit
where was this quote from?
””Bone cancer in children? HOW DARE YOU” -Stephen Fry” - temmaxtemma9570
@@Kururu265 an interview with Stephen Fry on God
Well, in the eyes of an all-good God, even cancer cells deserve to live. How ironic is it that we, who want to bear the title of “God” for our own amusement all to eagerly, are disgusted by such ultimate, if not downright divine, view?
You’re my favorite content creator you actually improve my day every time you post
Absolutely SUPERB music choices good sir
BRO IDK HOW YOU MADE THIS, BUT THIS VIDEO IS CINEMA
Ive been watching this guy for 2 years and he never ceases to deliver
this channel is pure gold.
>Rain World mentioned
*Return of the king*
Re:Creators would've been amazing to include in this video. It's an anime about fictional characters coming to the real world. After learning the truth of what they are, some of them despise their existence and creators and even try to kill them.
I've been seeing this in my feed for months and after venturing into some of Nephis videos I decided to watch this and it was absolutely worth it. This is the first video I've watched from you and you have earn my sub my good sir.
There is a game called "Realm of the Mad God" that follows a story after a God goes well, 'Mad'. Its a perma-death RPG game with an 8-bit art style. I would really recommend the game because it doesn't get enough recognition even though its a really fun free game.
its heavily p2w if i remember it correctly
Yes, becsaue the god of the game have gone mad, so He over monetized the game in order to the player mad as well. Its in universe.
@@ratterkin Not really. the only thing is Pets but that's about it (You can get good pets without paying so even that is kinda not P2W).
I think the monetization is just shoved so hard down ur throat it looks that way, but when I used to play, I got more than enough free characters and vaults to never spend a cent. It’s a permadeath anyways, so most everything isn’t even worthworth buying
@@ALi-ROBi yea I’ve never spent a penny and I’m pretty good
This channel is one of the best things that I've found in the Internet, you give me so much inspiration and things to think about. Amazing job, as always, keep it up
Your channel is truly a gift thank you for such thought provoking ideas
The mysterious stranger reminds me so much of gnosticism.
Its actually fascinating how many stories contain a gnostic demiurge at the center of it all.
Even my own books contain entities like this.
The flawed creator is something very relatable to the human experience.
Mane... Yalbadaoth is fuckin up my soup...
@@dementia4452 That old serpent... How ironic.
If one knows, then one knows his own end.
gnosticism is my chosen belief specifically due to that idea. the idea that a flawed deity created a flawed universe in an attempt to make something perfect makes total sense to me.
tell us more about your story
@@Dr_Pickle I'd love to.
The tale follows the journey of a lone nano-augmented human on an alien planet. He arrives during the final days of a conflict between the technologically advanced sect and those who embrace nature and remember the old ways.
The gnostic/cosmic horror doesn't really come into play for a large portion of the series. This is to set up the idea that there is magic in this world. When I write the last three books, I will slowly pull the rug out from under the reader and reveal that the magic they possessed and the god they worshipped is nothing more than an ancient cosmic being, one who is desperate for survival. When their purpose as a species is known, their world will be undone.
I've always loved stories that portray a world that is fantasy before revealing itself to be science fiction.
ex: Might and Magic, ASOIAF, Adventure Time
Your presentation gets better and better with each vid I swear.
Your channel is one of my favourites on RUclips. Every video is a delight and there are many that I happily rewatch over and over. This one might be my favourite of all of those. How meta this gets on creation and godhood and madness in that context is like a delicious meal for my brain
"What you have done here today is foul beyond measure and you will grow to regret it, for the lives of gods are not what mortals think and matters that weigh only years to mortals weigh on gods forever."
This is an incredible line. What's the context?
@@Drekromancer It's from Morrowind, one of the books that explains the game's backstory.
'What happens after a god goes mad?'
Greek mythology in a nutshell
Real
And that was made to explain our world
No, greek mythology is basically if any random persons were given godhood. I find Greek gods reasonable, not mad. reasonable in the sense i can see why they do the things they do, Zues fucks a human woman coz he's a horny fuck, some god curses some poor lass coz of jealosy, the list goes on and on, i find it rare when i come across a greek myth i cannot understand thru basic human reasoning
World of Goo music? Flawlessly utilized as well? Excellent taste, my good sir!
The Real Mad God? The YT recommendation algorithm.
Real although it cooks quite a bit sometimes
It recommended this video on my homepage and I’ve never even heard of the creator.
HAHAHAHA
All hail it´s greatness the mighty algorythm!!
This is a work of art. Thank you
Okay, after discovering this channel and consuming four videos, the latest this one, I'm convinced I've found an absolute diamond on RUclips. My new favourite channel. Incredible.
Another great video. It makes me think of the demiurge spoken about in the gnostic myths.
All the Signalis music that shows up in the soundtrack of this video makes me think how that game also fits into the theme...
Something in that game's lore is either internalizing or inhabiting patterns, and causing them to repeat... Over, and over, and over again through history. Individual people are reincarnated and copied - sometimes hundreds or thousands of times. Trauma, injury, fate, and strong bonds and emotions are intertwined with their lives and follow them through each incarnation. It's like the whole world is a fractal of itself, slowly collapsing inwards under its own weight as each new instance propagates more pain, and stronger emotions, which the patterns then learn from and begin replicating those too - sometimes to the point of bringing people back from the dead or turning them into past versions of themselves on eternal, fruitless quests.
The patterns are so pervasive that some are even enacted as laws and political policy by governments, and everyone just takes their presence at face value, seemingly unaware of the absurdity because it's all so normalized. Not only are people literally reincarnated in the spiritual sense, but the government ALSO replicates people with, well... The Replika. Androids based on the brain scans of once-living humans.
Patterns making patterns which reinforce patterns making patterns.
The game's soundtrack is full of songs that echo each other, or outright palindromes. References to other media and played fully straight, and bare-face draw attention to themselves. Multiple versions of the same painting. Art styles from other media. All things which fit the patterns have been adopted by, and absorbed into their collective whole.
Of course, we don't know IF there's actually a god at work in the setting... Bioresonance, the setting's 'magic' seems to be naturally receptive to patterns, and it's possible that over time it naturally developed a kind of reactionary machine intelligence; Just parroting the things it hears, without any understanding of their meaning or context.
But... If THAT was your 'god', one that was blind, and flailing around like a brainless jellyfish as they arbitrarily change the world around them into increasingly tightly wound patterns that you struggle to exist between, is that not a kind of horrible maddness?
Imagine living under the thumb of an all-powerful god, that isn't even capable of thought, or choice - but can still do anything, and increasingly will. Or one that IS capable of understanding, but it's motives are so unknowable that it seems arbitrary. Your life, your civilizations, are so insignificant that it's just a swirling pattern somewhere on a massive, ever-changing canvas that you can't fully see, and never will, as it slowly fills with more and more patterns until it starts to choke itself.
"Perhaps, this is hell."
If there is a sane God in SIGNALIS, I feel it’s Ariane. The main character’s lover, and an incredibly powerful Bioresonant to the point of god hood, the entire setting of the game is implied to be her dream as she lies, ravaged by cancer in a cryogenic pod as she is covered in shit and blood and sloughed off skin. And yet, it is not her fault. She is but a victim of a fascist government, unable to control a power that would get her killed if it was known. And so you fight to free her from Hell. Your reward is one last dance.
@elliotmusgrove5468 It's why I like fanfics that explore the Artifact Ending in a more nuanced way (assuming the theory that Ariane is Revived in some way). What does it mean to hold that power, does anything matter when you can change reality at a whim, what is the nature of love when you can completely override your loved ones mind, what is the nature of your relationship now that your so much MORE then they could ever be.
@@thunderwhip7056 I happen to be a few thousand words into writing something adjacent to that, actually... So I totally get it.
Though, it's more of a 'she got the artifact, but the timeloops didn't stop, they just changed' kind of vibe, so I could introduce an over-confident and ill-fated rescue team (Read: Colonial Marines from Aliens) that includes two more LSTR units with them, both with very different perspectives and life experiences from 512.
Timeloop shenanigans and existentially-tormented androids ensues, as they try (and fail and try) to figure out what the hell is going on and how to fix it so they're not stuck in the loops forever.
@@thunderwhip7056 and I always liked the interpretation that nothing much really changes. To be loved is to be changed-Ariane is part of Elster now, and vice versa. A goddess and her first prophet.
this is my favorite channel on youtube, love your videos!
I love your use of the World of Goo soundtrack. Great video!
Man, that "World of goo" theme on the background, duning Berserk segment of the video was something!
Came looking for this! Was a great throwback to an amazing game with an exceptional score.
I just finished watching Poor Things because your mention of it intrigued me. Thank you so much for mentioning it, it's an amazingly bizarre masterpiece!
You did not have to hit me with that Signalis soundtrack at 4:35
Tricky the clown being in an never ending battle with hank.
Curious Archive is definitely a great channel to just listen to, an amazingly calm, but intense voice that gathers your attention without overstimulating you. Thank you for these videos, they really help me think deeper
Very excelentelly put together video! Honestly, I'm surprised that Elden Ring wasn't mentioned lol
Should do a video about how technology in media is both viewed positively and negative by altering us to powerful beings but still corrupt, ex, Cyberpsychos in Cyberpunk 2077 or Robocop etc.
wow
also your voice is nice to listen to. very calming
A very good and comprehensive video, cried a little when I heard the Signalis tracks though and was curious if you were going to bring it up. Love the video though!
11:21 What do you mean, "never brought up again," that's the entire premise of why the Guardians exist and the last shot of the movie is the cycle starting over again. The endless cycle of gods killing titans is the "Truth" that everyone in the story desperately wants to know right up until it's too late.
CONGRATS ON 1 MIL 😁
*The old, forgotten tales say that all SCP writers gather in a circle once a 100 years to watch Curious Archive...*
Ngl a lot of SCP really aren't that unique.
Was just listening to one yesterday that was basically a weeping angel ripoff.
@@user-pc5qj2ix2c ah yes,the 173,the statue,the almighty peanut,the neck cruncher,the печенька,the one to start the whole SCP fiction.
@@platinumchromee3191 ah, I didn't know it did, those videos are just easy to fall asleep to :D
@@user-pc5qj2ix2c Yeah, it was literally the first SCP. The start of the format.
Fun fact: I believe that the idea of it was released before the publication of the Weeping Angels.
Yeah no. Most SCP writers just escaped from kindergarten and take their inspiration from the worst Deus ex machinas from stuff like Warhammer and new star wars