#imagine saying you don't like cheese and then cheesemakers start hurling themselves off bridges and/or the cheese industry tanks for decade

[windcarvedlyre]

This started as a tag tangent but I'm making it its own post.

Have we had any more information to resolve the discrepancy between Venti and Nahida regarding how archons gain power: control or worship?

We know worship/faith gives gods power regardless, including Venti himself when he was a wisp, so at minimum Venti lied by omission. He has more than one reason to pretend to be weaker than he is, as he very clearly did in the La Signora fight even if we accept that he's not at his prime. We still have two possibilities:

Both are correct. Worship is a source of power for gods. Suppressing people's free will through other means is also a power source for gods (or archons specifically). This could allow archons' power to scale with how heavily they control their people but have faith remain as a semi-independent factor.

Only Nahida is correct. Or Venti was referring to faith too, just through a lens of being a god inherently being tyrannical (being fully aware we wouldn't interpret him this way lol). If you worship a god you're going to, to some extent, a) align your actions with what you believe they desire or embody and b) become emotionally and/or materially reliant on them. Both limit your freedom, potentially without you feeling like you're caged at all. On top of this, worship doesn't have to stem from love. It can be motivated by fear, and fear will always have a part in it even for the most benevolent gods.

Thoughts?