For the evaluating staff whom I tagged: The Riordanverse, a children's book series by Rick Riordan about the mythological gods and magic creatures of many ancient cultures coexisting with the modern world, contains some feats of the gods
creating constellations. This thread discusses whether these feats scale to the AP required to manifest that many stars into the cosmos, a viewpoint I heavily disagree with.
Regarding the celestial bodies, I came into this discussion seeing it as a fairly simple matter. In antiquity, people believed Helios/Apollo drove the sun chariot across the sky, Selene/Artemis drove the moon chariot across the sky, and the stars were small, shining things the gods could hang on the sky as a way to immortalize the memory of heroes and monsters they favored.
Now, a core principle of the Riordanverse's cosmology is that
contradictory interpretations of the same natural phenomena can all be equally valid explanations for them, such as Persephone's abduction and Earth's tilted axis both being valid ways to explain the seasons, and as long as a belief system is remembered by humanity, it will continue to play its part in governing the cosmic order.
Under this principle, the obvious parsimonious conclusion is that in the modern era, besides dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of other belief systems, the sun is
both the sun chariot and a main-sequence yellow dwarf star, the moon is
both the moon chariot and a natural satellite of Earth ¼th its size, and the stars are
both little specks of light hung in Earth's atmosphere and giant spheres of plasma light-years away. As such, any feats of manipulating one of these interpretations don't scale to manipulating the other ones.
Compared to my simple line of inference, the arguments for the opposition have all been significantly more contrived and based on far weaker readings of the evidence.
- One was a claim that since the gods were shaped by human beliefs, and since humans now believed that the stars were parts of the scientific cosmos, the gods must've changed to accommodate for this. Of course, that's not how belief shaping reality works, as humanity's new beliefs about the sun and moon hadn't made the sun and moon chariots entirely obsolete, instead only shaping the cosmos to include an additional scientific model, so there's no reason to assume that somehow only the stars are now solely governed by their scientific interpretation and not any of the supernatural explanations. The only "rebuttal" to this I've received is the fact that the gods all dress modernly now, which doesn't mean anything when the gods can easily shapeshift to look however they want, so their looks are purely a fashion choice, not a result of humanity's beliefs directly influencing them.
- Another was a quibble over a sentence saying "the revolution of the planets and stars" instead of "revolutions of planets and stars" to infer that the gods could all somehow influence the revolutions of all celestial bodies as a whole despite the fact that two words in a sentence are far too little evidence to upgrade the gods whose best feats are all otherwise Tiers 7 and 6, even if we have no indication of effort on their part, to Tier 4 and also contradicts the far more explicit evidence that mythological and scientific celestial bodies operate separately from each other. In a nutshell, this statement can be read as conveying either meaning, and obsessively focusing on a minor grammar slipup isn't evidence at all.
TL;DR: Claiming that the gods are Tier 4 is based on rationalizing a contrived view of the evidence to highball them orders of magnitudes above what their reliable feats, which peak at Tier 6, have shown, and I don't get the impression that it's going to be convincing to the staff.
