#instead of just dumping all this new frankensteined lore from another franchise

[enchantrum]

Secrets of the Obscure is alright and all but am I the only one kinda miffed that they ripped off a lot of it from Dragon Age: Inquisition and didn't really add or change enough to be it's own unique thing?

even the rift hunting mechanic is Exactly The Same, because you Open the rift, then fight something then close it. the animation is almost 1-1 and even the eye in the rift looks like the Inquisition eye. if it wasn't for the fact that Even The Mechanic is the same I might not have noticed it so much, but the more I play the more blatant it feels

and then their wizard lore also just feels like how demons come out of the Fade in Dragon Age to possess mages. it's almost exact

disclaimer that I'm still enjoying it because it's fun and I like that we get to see Zojja again and have a better map for practicing skyscales for those who don't have one yet, but uh...this whole plot was stolen!

and yes I know there are certain fantasy tropes that re-occur in fantasy over and over, but this doesn't feel like that. it feels like the writers legit just snapped the base ideas from DAI and then barely added or changed anything to make it uniquely Guild Wars

imo it's definitely the weakest of all the packs

which is a shame because I LOVEDDDDD the intro. the whole sequence of having to defend yourself and run for your life was so ridiculously tense, I really felt like I was playing a horror game

but now I'm on Ep. 7 and all the potential feels wasted because I feel like I'm playing the underwritten fanfiction of another game that I already played 10 years ago and didn't like that much the first time

[laughtermagick]

Hell: Everything Is Made Up & The Points Don't Matter Anyway

The "traditional" image of hell for most folks today looks like this: creative torture in a sulfuric lake of fire ruled by a pitchfork-wielding horned red Devil. The concept of hellish afterlife is present in many religions, but the details differentiate dramatically, and what may seem nightmarish to one culture can honestly sound comically ridiculous to another. In fact, some of the very early Christians might laugh to hear how hell is now being portrayed in Western culture. "Hell" as we think of it today didn't exist when Christianity was first founded.

There are four different words in the original languages of the Bible that were later mistranslated into the single English word "hell". Here's the original words and their meanings:

Sheol (Ancient Hebrew)

Every single time the word "hell" appears in the Tanakh (or the Old Testament), the real word being used is "Sheol," which means "death" or "grave". For many ancient Jews, there was absolute nothingness after death, and even worse, there was no more blessed awareness of God. This is where the modern Christian concept of hell being "total separation from God" comes from. The soul didn't exist apart from the body, and when someone died, their breath/soul/consciousness didn’t go anywhere: it just vanished.

After military defeats and political subjugation for millenia, Jews began to change their view on the permanence of death. Around 200 years before Yeshua (aka Jesus), the Israelite nation was longing for justice. They revived an even older worldview (that of Iyov [Job] in the Tanakh): Evil has been allowed to run amok, but has very little time left! God will surely intervene to bring forth the "Kingdom of God," a paradise right here on earth. Furthermore, God will resurrect everyone who's ever died (moral AND immoral) in order to dote on the righteous and totally rub it in the faces of all the evildoers.

Yeshua put a new spin on this concept: Actually, the Kingdom of God would be literally created simply by people returning to the two greatest mitzvah (commandments) in Jewish scripture: a deep love of God and dedicatedly loving all human beings. Yeshua was especially concerned for the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, the immigrants - a total OG SJW, and definitely not someone preaching about Christian hell.

Hades (Ancient Greek)

It's important to note that the Greek underworld wasn't merely "Greek hell". There were designated places for bad souls (Tartarus), good souls (Elysium), really good souls (Isle of the Blessed), unremarkable souls (Asphodel Meadows), and even hopeless romantics (Mourning Fields). The word "Hades" occurs 10 times in the New Testament. Sometimes, the authors were even directly quoting scripture from the Tanakh, but they were writing in Greek, so they instead translated Sheol to "Hades," the name of the Greek god of the underworld. They were simply referring to where everybody goes after death: the grave.

Tartarus (Ancient Greek)

Remember how Tartarus is the place where Hades puts all the bad souls? This word only appears once in the New Testament: "For God did not spare the angels who sinned; on the contrary, he put them in gloomy dungeons lower than Tartarus to be held for judgment." What an interesting example of ideas cross-pollinating between cultures! The author was referencing Hebrew scripture (which originally said "deeper than Sheol") while also referencing Hellenic religion. The author was culturally Jewish, but he was writing this for gentile Christians who were very familiar with Hellenic ideas about afterlife.

Gehenna (Ancient Greek)

The word most often translated as "hell" in the New Testament (although it only appears 12 times) is "Gehenna". Gehenna is the name of an actual place located just outside of Jerusalem. "Gehenna" is the Greek version of the Hebrew word "Ge Hinnom," which literally meant "Valley of Hinnom." You see, the Valley of Hinnom has a dark history. Without going into too much detail, let's just say there were once rituals to evil gods that had a taste for babies. Later, the area was a landfill used to burn all the trash from the city. There aren't many other options for a place formerly designated for grisly human sacrifice, I guess.

When Yeshua occasionally seemed to speak of "hell," the word sometimes used (when not "Sheol") is actually "Gehenna." He was referring to the notorious valley that many Jews believed was the most desecrated dumping ground on the planet. Jews had even created some lore around Gehenna being a kind of purgatory; however, the longest a person could remain in Gehenna is 12 months, which is not even close to eternal suffering.

So, where did our current ideas about hell really come from? Largely, the book of Revelations (trippy AF and very, very open to interpretation) and especially the Apocalypse of Peter. Whereas Revelations was accepted by early Christianity as being scripture, the Apocalypse of Peter was definitely not. This is understandable, because it's even more batshit-crazy than Revelations. It describes hell as being... well, pretty much exactly how we imagine it today. It was incorporating all kinds of pagan sources and Greek philosophy, making a Frankenstein's monster of horror stories. And it gets really, really in-depth about the specific tortures assigned for different kinds of sins. I wouldn't be surprised if the writers for the "Saw" movie franchise were reading the Apocalypse of Peter for inspiration. The book was banned entirely in many churches, but this wasn’t the only "Apocalypse of-" book in circulation at the time, and those writings permanently implanted the idea of hell within the Christian religion.

The eternal torments of hell were not taught by Yeshua - it emerged much later among gentile converts who had preconcieved notions about afterlife. All these ideas about hell that were developed over the past 1,600 years are being retroactively tied back into the original scriptures by unaware Christians today. Hell started as fanfiction and got mistaken for canon.