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Mythology Feats and Cosmology

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@Ant, Couldn't get a hold of Sera, however after after speaking to a bunch of people on the Discord, there seems to be no major issues with the Jade Emperor profile besides it being Mythology.
 
Okay, and what are the summarised reasons for the extremely high tier?
 
Antvasima said:
Okay, and what are the summarised reasons for the extremely high tier?
The Jade Emperor not only rules over but is the underlying principle for all creation, including Heaven, which is both Supreme Polarity (Taiji) and Non-Dual, which would require many valued logic or Fuzzy logic.

To further cement this, in the Stories with Pan-Gu, The Jade Emperor helped create creation along side him, and in many more the Jade Emperor is an avatar/appointed by the Three Heavenly Worthies who are expressions of the Dao itself who place the Jade Emperor on the 33rd level to rule over all lower deities which ranges from the Points on the compas, to the Dragon Gods and so on.
 
I don't think it should even be here, so I clearly don't care what tier it is. I don't have the patience, the interest, the time, or energy to look at the profile. Using the standards of vs debating though, I wouldn't consider certain concepts as 1-A, especially in Taoism, but in the actual philosophy they are because fallacies like NLF don't apply in real life.

See the issue here? Not to mention there are numerous incarnations of the Tao (which is literally Dharma of Buddhism/Hinduism or derivative of it) and depending on the source (of which there are many) things like Taiji can be anywhere from 3-A to 0. I don't even know anymore because the new system is a thing. That's all you're getting from me. I'm frustrated with life as it is and trying to cope with the constant feeling of anger and anxiety, I don't want to talk about this crap :/

If Ultima gives the "Okay" to this, I'm fine with the tier I guess, because he's considerably knowledgeable on both the new system and general mythological concepts and ideas.
 
@Sera

Okay. I am sorry that you are stressed out. Please follow the advise that I gave you in private. It generally helps.

@All

Is somebody willing to ask Ultima to comment here please?
 
Antvasima said:
We will not add any major modern religions to the wiki. It would severely offend too many people.

I would appreciate if we immediately drop this subject so the discussion does not get out of hand again.
If they die out, can we make profiles for them?
 
If we allow profiles for mythology tied to modern religion, that is inevitable anyway. Since for some reason, the close relationship between mythology and religion is blatantly ignored.

On a power-scaling wiki such as this, we have to treat everything with scrutiny. We don't place anything claimed to be omnipotent at 0 just because, but in reality we can't use NLF as an argument. It does not apply to real philosophy or religion and thus the mythology that is spawned from them.

Jade Emperor is a literal deity in Chinese religion and Taoist theology. Shénism (Chinese religion) is the most widespread Chinese religion. Mythology can be downstream from religio or one could say they are comparatively similar. If we don't allow Christianity, we likewise don't allow Christian Mythology. Same with Hinduism and Hindu Mythology, or Islam and Arabian Mythology. Should be pretty straightforward, right? I'm not talking bout mere legends like Jack Frost, I'm talking about myths closely tied to modern religion and yes Shénism is a modern religion.

Folklore should be left alone entirely, it has no place here alongside Goku, Sonic, and Pikachu. Can't we just focus on modern fiction for once?
 
I agree with Sera. If the Jade Emperor is closely tied to a modern religion, we should not feature him.
 
Taoism is in fact a modern religion (although it isn't an organized religion per se, like the Abrahamic religions are so calling it a "religion" is rejected by most scholars so let's call it a philosophy). However, it has several millions of followers.
 
What Sera said in the first paragraph of her post is basically my take as well, and I personally think we (As in, the wiki itself) shouldn't consider actual religious concepts as being anything, tiering-wise. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think religion is outside of scrutiny or anything of the sort, but it is still in a grey area that is extremely subjective and ostensibly separable from fiction, and thus we can't just put it into a framework where we can analyze and nitpick it as we do to any other fictional verse, at least not without displays of some severe cultural insensitivity.

That's because faith and belief is something that people impose upon their worldview and experiences, and incorporate into their own world. If you went solely by purely religious context and narrative, then something like the Taiji or the Tao would definitely be at least 1-A, but that'd be because we can't apply fallacies like hasty generalizations to something as subjective and generalized as it, and because it'd be ridiculous to suggest something like it is limited in any way in the context I am talking about here.

Meanwhile, if we analyzed it through the cold lens that we use in a VS Debating / Indexing context, then you could interpret the Taiji to be as low as Low 1-C, because of our common practice of nitpicking stuff to death through the use of fallacies and being overall very strict when it comes to giving stupidly high tiers to... anything, really. As you can infer, that obviously clashes with the interpretation that the Taiji can't be anything but 1-A or even higher (maybe even untierable), which looks at it through purely religious and metaphysical lenses.

That's all I really have to say on the matter.
 
Thank you for the evaluations. I definitely don't think that we should feature religious figures related to Taoism in that case.
 
I'm Blue daba dee daba die said:
Does that mean we should axe sun wukong because he is related to buddhism
Sun Wukong is a purely fictional character, so no. Journey to the West is, in fact, widely considered by modern scholars an allegory for the Chinese government of the 14-16th centuries. It was never ever conceived of as a religious text by the Buddhist or Chinese peoples of the time to begin with.
 
@Ultima

That's case-by-case.

Multiple Native-Indian mythologies of the old possess concepts that are similar to those found in Eastern religions, yet we wouldn't consider them "undiscussable" through VS Debating lens. We just need to watch out for how closely related it is to an actual religion, IMO.
 
Of course. My problem is with attempting to tier religion itself, not fictional works or similar types that utilize concepts similar to them. I am mostly saying that what we should avoid is putting any character at some stupid high tier because of a religious interpretation of a certain philosophical concept which doesn't necessarily translate to VS Debating lenses. It's a case-by-case basis, as you said.
 
However, the profile itself doesn't use any Religious aspects of The Jade Emperor and only the philosophical and Mythological aspects.

And defiantly the Philosophical aspects are scalable as they should be able to be placed under the same level of scrutiny we place everything under, if not more.
 
Matthew Schroeder said:
I'm with Sera and Ultima that a lot of our Chinese / Asian Myth profiles suck. Even Sun Wukong actually.
That's not what they're saying, we're discussing the revised version of the Jade Emperor profile and the connotations it has.
 
Journey to the West is just the fictional retelling of a real life pilgrimage.

Xuanzang is not a fictional character, he's a real person credited with founding the Chinese Faxiang Buddhist sect. Yes, his guarduans like Sun Wukong are fictional characters.

Also, Wukong's 2-B rating comes from Buddhism itself, not anything in the actual story.
 
Sera EX said:
Journey to the West is just the fictional retelling of a real life pilgrimage.
Xuanzang is not a fictional character, he's a real person credited with founding the Chinese Faxiang Buddhist sect. Yes, his guarduans like Sun Wukong are fictional characters.

Also, Wukong's 2-B rating comes from Buddhism itself, not anything in the actual story.
Which is why I think that the Mythological characters should be fine as even the cultures parody and flanderise thems

While dojng research on the Jade Emperor I found multiple Chinese child books on the topic showing it's not taken overtly seriously.

So Mythological characters should be fine and as long as the profile doesn't delve into the religious background like the Wukong Profile does, as it doesn't give massive paragraphs about how the Buddha is better than other "fodder religions", it should be fine and no offence can be found.
 
Immortalgodd said:
Jade Emperor in myth and religion is different though.
They're seen as the same being, even if the way they act and such are different.

Like a watcher would think of Goku (Super) and Goku (Manga) as the same person even if there are different things
 
So should we remove the Sun Wukong profile as well, if it is partially derived from Buddhist scripture?

Also, are there similar problems with any other profiles that we host?
 
Antvasima said:
So should we remove the Sun Wukong profile as well, if it is partially derived from Buddhist scripture?
Also, are there similar problems with any other profiles that we host?
Not really, having a religious origin definitely shouldn't have a profile be deleted, and for Mythological characters to scale to Mythological/Philosophical feats is fine.


There is currently no logical argument present which should have them be removed.
 
Let me repeat myself:

Wukong's 2-B rating comes from Buddhism itself, not anything in the actual story.

This is clearly a problem. It's not even about religion at this point, it's about a character scaling to something not within their story.
 
Sera EX said:
Let me repeat myself:

Wukong's 2-B rating comes from Buddhism itself, not anything in the actual story.

This is clearly a problem. It's not even about religion at this point, it's about a character scaling to something not within their story.
Which was something I literally fixed in my rendition of the Wukong Profile.
 
Antvasima said:
So should we remove the Sun Wukong profile as well, if it is partially derived from Buddhist scripture?

Also, are there similar problems with any other profiles that we host?
As I said above, Sun Wukong, even at the time he was written, was never viewed as anything more than a fictional character by anyone. Deleting him would be stupid. If his current rating is based off of Buddhist scriptures, that's something else and a whole 'nother issue, unrelated to his right to be here.

Speaking of which, I'm not exactly sure if Sun Wukong's rating being derived from the Daoist scriptures is an issue or not.
 
Sera EX said:
Let me repeat myself:
Wukong's 2-B rating comes from Buddhism itself, not anything in the actual story.

This is clearly a problem. It's not even about religion at this point, it's about a character scaling to something not within their story.
Then find something else to scale him to.

I'm sure there are plenty of other pertinent feats in Journey to the West to use for his profile. Why should he be deleted based on something that can be fixed via the same type of revision process we implement for other characters every day of the week?
 
From what it seems, Daoism as a philosophy (So specifically the philosophy branch) should be totally fine for use, as a Philosophy it is already held to a higher standard than VSB, so it is is fine to use.

We don't have to use religion for any of the profiles, so it all should be fine.

To note as well, my rendition of Wukong's page doesn't feature the Buddhist scaling, his Buddhist key is unknown because we don't know how powerful the Buddha is, just that he is more powerful than Wukong.

My Jade Emperor rendition only features Daoist philosophy.
 
It's not the same thing nor the same character. It's someone else he was based on, so...irrelevant. Multiple mythologies outright rip-off or base characters in older mythologies, but we don't treat them as the "same god"
 
I am fine with if the Sun Wukong profile is revised instead.
 
I never said delete him based off having feats from an outside source. Me wanting that file gone has to do with a different point. That should be clear based on the change in direction of the conversation.
 
Yes, that was my own take. Sorry if I caused confusion.
 
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