Should We Make Profiles For The Divine Comedy?

Antvasima said:

I attempted to improve somewhat on the text structure. Is this acceptable to apply?

"Given that we do not allow profiles for religions, we also do not allow profiles for fictional characters who would act as substitutes or duplicates of religious entities. Meaning that we do not list fictional versions of real life deities, if they would end up with almost identical characteristics, statistics, and abilities as those from the actual religions. Fictional versions of the deities of actual religions are allowed as long as they have differences from the originals that are not superficial."

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Personally, I would keep something in the spirit of the "based on feats and reasoning that match those of the actual religions"-part. It emphasizes on the point that we don't want characters that substitute religions in a vs-debate context, while also making it clear that versions that by chance end up with the same stats and abilities based on entirely different reasoning would be fine.

Ultima_Reality said:

Hm. I wonder, do we have any specific lines in mind past which we start saying that a character is "just a clone" of the actual religious figure?

For example, an interesting point that I have in mind is basically that Dante's God seemingly passes that bar by an excess of detail. What about renditions that technically are in a similar condition but by a lack of detail instead? What if a character is just a very basic outline of Brahman, or the One, or Sunyata, for instance? What if a character has the attributes (Either general or exact) of the figure, but isn't explicitly treated as the figure itself? (e.g. It gets an original name and etc)

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Well, to do some work in that direction:
I think differences that are vs-debate relevant should be given more weight than those which are not, as that's the focus on our community and hence a stat and ability wise identical character functions more as a stand-in for the actual god in our context.
So a 4-B Christian god should be fine, even if having otherwise much of the same lore.

For non-tiering based difference I would argue greater changes are necessary. A version of Buddha that lives with Jesus in Tokyo is IMO fine, even if he somehow ends up with the same stats by chance.
But we would want to avoid god but in green.

For characters that are incredibly vague, I would wonder how they end up with the same stats and abilities based on the same reasoning.

Characters with similar attributes but made into different characters should be fine. Well, if it were blatantly just a name change maybe not, but I can't imagine that is a case we would encounter.

DontTalkDT said:

Personally, I would keep something in the spirit of the "based on feats and reasoning that match those of the actual religions"-part. It emphasizes on the point that we don't want characters that substitute religions in a vs-debate context, while also making it clear that versions that by chance end up with the same stats and abilities based on entirely different reasoning would be fine.

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Would you be willing to modify my draft text according to your suggestion above?

However, please explain further regarding what you mean here first.

DontTalkDT said:

For characters that are incredibly vague, I would wonder how they end up with the same stats and abilities based on the same reasoning.

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I don't mean characters who are so vague that they can't be tiered. I mean characters who use the same general metaphysics and then plaster the names of the figures ontop. Not exactly as heartfelt and detailed as Dante's depiction, but nevertheless in a similar look.

Which is why I think what you're suggesting is a bit weird. It seems to imply that, if a depiction of the Christian God lands at Tier 0 (Say, if Aslan or Eru Iluvatar were Tier 0), it'd begin to cross a line, even if these depictions obviously appear very distinct from the Divine Comedy in substance, even putting the tiers aside.

I mean, you can still have the "It uses different reasoning" bit even then. The White Light is supposed to be the Christian God, Trinity and all, but the particulars of that verse's metaphysics are things that Christianity would broadly consider heretical (i.e. pantheism/acosmism), for example. But then that's exactly where the "What about the slightly less detailed accounts?" comes in: The basic concept that fuels the ratings is so philosophically generic that you'll find it everywhere, and it seems weird for a verse to cross a line the moment it pastes the face of some specific IRL God on that blank template.

I think that Ultima makes good points here.