LogFAQs > #967990562

Here's two more:

The Incarnations of Immortality series. All of the primal fundamental forces of the universe - Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature, Evil, Good - are actually jobs that are held by ordinary humans who are granted incredible powers (and functional immortality) to fulfill their purposes. And the universe is basically broken and unfair because the role of God is filled by a total narcissist who has spent the last 2000+ years staring at his own perfection in a mirror.

Empire of the East/The Books of Swords series. A doomday weapon designed to prevent nuclear war unravels the basic laws of physics and makes technology (including nuclear weapons) impossible, and essentially floods the world with magic. Existing nuclear bombs turn into literal demons. There are no gods, but human belief literally creates them. The new gods basically act like people expect gods to act, doing things gods should probably do, and ultimately doom themselves by creating powerful weapons that cause humans to stop caring about the gods (and making them capable of killing the gods). And then all the remaining gods die because humans stop believing in them.



Yellow posted...

Unironically I'm a huge fan of modern Christianity lore. No other religion goes that hard on the magic unrelenting torture dimension. Other stories say "there's a bad place that sucks and ye get what you deserve", but only Christianity says there's an entire dimension that has reworked the laws of physics to be as tormenting as possible.

To be fair, Christianity itself kind of doesn't do that. For most of Christianity, the only real torment of Hell was the fact that everyone there is effectively removed from God's grace, which in and of itself is the worst torment any being can ever suffer.

The idea of Hell being eternal fires and torture sort of got tacked on as various Church leaders decided the idea of God not caring about you being the ultimate doom felt too esoteric for stupid peasants to understand, so they had to come up with new ways to convey to the dumb idiots just how bad it was. And then the Hell symbolism and idea of ironic tortures took a HUGE boost from Dante's Inferno, which was really just Dante's way of writing mean fanfiction about people he didn't like (because he wrote about them all getting tortured in Hell, ha ha fuck those guys).