#ppandaemonium!!!

[omegamoo]

As far as Whittled Pantheon goes.. a few questions. 1) It was originally a MC RP.. how has it being made into a group writing project affected certain liberties you have been able to take?

2) How has the loss of the original group of character creators affected the direction the story has gone and what difficulties have presented themselves as a result of this?

3) What aspects of the story have changed since its conception? (I.e., the Catalyst, characters' personalities and actions, etc., etc.)

Love this stuff (:

omg hi.. hiii... HI... long time no see hope you've been doing really well aaaahhhhh ahhh ahhh!!! also this set of questions is so freaking cool to answer... aAHHHHH HHH! AHHH!! also your smiley face is still the wrong way i guess some things never change :)

i will warn you that asking me about the whittled pantheon is like walking into a minefield and i think i got really incomprehensible here so i'm sticking this all under the cut. thanks so much for the ask

also i seriously think a lot about how this all happened w the og group :) and i for sure did not manage to properly say everything i wanted to within this ask haha

wanna start by saying i feel like since the beginning the whittled pantheon was always going to grow out of minecraft. like as soon as we said lets make them gods in survival minecraft there was so much like. worldbuilding and context and stuff that was automatically just so much bigger and complex than minecraft was able to provide and i honestly think that was very charming. like we - and by we i mean literally all of the original group of creators - put so much love and thought into this that of course it was going to grow further than we expected. and i think that's really beautiful.

1) moving it away from minecraft absolutely EXPLODED the possibilities which i think you ended up seeing the first part of? especially within the context of the old world which before really functioned as like... another server. since moving it away the worldbuilding has gotten really unique - specifically in regards to things like language and culture, which i feel like minecraft lays out within its own game lore? yk? so moving it outside of that really changed a lot. and things like... we're not tied to minecraft mechanics in terms of the nether and the overworld and the mobs and stuff, like that's not really a factor? anyways we were able to take a lot more liberties in terms of godly powers and abilities and creations, and worldmaps and timelines and just so much specific city culture and building. but as i'm writing this it's occuring to me - and i don't know if like, twig or tgm would say this as well - but it's a bit funny because even now picturing the new world/post catalyst i... still imagine it in the format and layout of our minecraft server. like in terms of where houses are, the paths, aides' tree and the warren... like when i picture that i'm still picturing the server. maybe that's just because your ask got me thinking about it i'm not sure but it's kinda funny!

2) i mean it changed a lot. i think this is the answer that is gonna vary the most if you were to ask it to tgm or twig because i think our individual relationships to the group and such are different but i will say that the main difficulty for me has always been like. wanting to include people in the process and getting nervous that people will feel excluded or that we've taken too many liberties with it and people will be angry that we didn't consult them, but also... it's hard to manage consistency and communication for as large and complex of a project as what the whittled pantheon was becoming especially within the context of the group at the time. and i think that bit kinda speaks for itself, haha. the main change i think was again the worldbuilding and a bit the arc of the characters - we never changed really personalities, exactly, i think the main cast stayed relatively true to original concept in many ways, but there's a bit of archetyping of characters in terms of their roles within the larger story that were impossible to predict when we started. the story itself for sure also became a lot more of a commentary on society which i don't think outside of tgm's stuff with agathodaemon it was beforehand - because largely that wasn't what the whole group was into, from what i remember.

the other thing in terms of all of that is, especially on my end, the attempt to stay true to the original concepts without like. being able to know for sure where y'all were going with it all. there were some parts of lore that either never got fleshed out or i personally never fully understood or never fit within the worldbuilding that the majority had set up, and so it was like. hard to make sure that that was close to what it had been while still making sense. thinking about maey forever. and idk like i'd talk to people and they'd be like "hey what's up with my character and can i write stuff" a year later and it was tough to be like "yeah here's kinda... how its changed. please don't b mad and also you can write stuff but its so much more complex now" idk it is kinda scary.

3) changes time EEE. lets see. im gonna make you a little list :]

the worldbuilding at its very basic essentials changed SO much. how the planet systems and how the Carver came to be are much more solid. i kinda dont know how to explain it because the effects of it are still the same but its just more detailed? if you want more the tag on my pinned post "whittled pantheon explanations" has a lot of it

other big change was the Failsafes - Melior, Palaemon, and Aides. failsafe is a type of god essentially and there are two per each world (the Carver isn't supposed to carve any other gods just set the two failsafes down and move on) and they are like the protectors and caretakers of the world. there's usually an earth one and a water one - for the old world, Melior is the earth and Palaemon is the water. this is why things get SO BAD when Palaemon dies, because he's fundamentally a part of the world. And Aides is the earth failsafe for the new world, and is awakened by Agathodaemon when he goes back to get Iota. failsafes can create passages (like. melior goddess of paths yk) between worlds (melior creates the one to the new world originally and aides then creates the warren back to the old world). so you can prolly see a lot of the similarities in terms of plot function, just we've kinda slotted it all into worldbuilding better.

uhm the Catalyst. no longer about turning into glass haha, that just stopped making as much sense. it's still the end of the world, but there's a lot more... politics? in it? it's more centered around the loss of water, so there's a lot of faction-action surrounding like... the last standing sources of water. the fortuna and iota stuff is still pretty much the same though.

a lot of character actions still stay the same at their core, i think. like there's been modification for sure but a lot of the story concepts that were fully written out stayed the same. maey's stuff with kappa has been slotted into worldbuilding but still remains at its core the same, the relationship between morrighan and ludo in all its godly toxicity still remains a lot of what it was. the whittled pantheon started out as a story driven by the characters. there's not some big bad guy out there to destroy them, it's entirely the actions of the characters and so in a lot of ways there was absolutely no way for us to ever lose sight of that bc that would fundamentally change the project.

final thing because this is so ungodly long. i think you will be maybe pleased toknow that to my knowledge the stuff in the new world with morrighan. that arc. + her convos with agathodaemon. are still pretty much the same.

anyways if you got to the end of this hey. hi. i kinda lost my mind answering this but i hope it meant something. the whittled pantheon means the world to me and what we created with the original server really i think fundamentally changed my life. and you had a lot to do with that, so thanks.

and uhm you are always welcome to pop into my dms or whatever.. i know we havent really talked in a while but i hope youre doing so good <3