Massively fragmenting your brain so you can remember all the millions of years (or more) you’ve spent reliving the same events over and over will do that to you.
The average width of a shoreline is ~35 meters. She stated “Many Miles” of beach, so I’m going to say 10 and probably end up lowballing it. One mile is 1609m, so one mile of beach that is 35m wide is 56326 square meters of beach. With an average depth of 3m and an average grain size of 0.3mm, factoring in things other than sand in th beach such as dirt, animals, objects, and air being around 23%, one square meter with a depth of 3 meters will have around 163 BILLION grains.
Multiplying that by our total area is 9.18×10^15. Over ten miles, it becomes 9.18×10^16.
Also known as 90 Quadrillion grains of sand. If that’s at a rate of one every hundred years, you get
Hold on a second.
Every reset, the ONLY thing Zoss changes is the young man, healthy, 15-25 years old, in the same generational bracket as Allison. Presumably an alt version of each has existed before AND after the cycle in which he was chosen, that went on to live an ordinary existence. The previous 9 Quintillion versions of Allison went on to live a normal existence, at least for a few years, before the reset.
If we assume that Zoss is the absolute greatest Misogynist pig ever & that she is the absolute FIRST woman he’s ever chosen, we can extrapolate that if the average population of males (including non-human species) 15-25 (or equivalent for different life spans) is about half a billion per planet, on average, multiply that by 777,777, then maybe throw in a generous guess of a trillion for a few especially advanced worlds that had managed to locally colonize other planets within their native universes prior to their gate being opened (OR remains sealed like Allison’s), thus having had lots of elbow room for expansive population growth, which brings the total male candidates available to 389,888,500,000,000.
Ok, even if he’s expanded it to men twice that age, to 779,777,000,000,000, that is still less than 100th 9 Quintillion!
Has Zoss reused the same men 110-150 times each?!?! Maybe throw in a few exceptionally fit old men to get it at least down to an even 100!
Maybe he thought he could try them over again with a different approach.
Or MAYBE, he just forgets, loses track.
But not ANY woman? No matter how exceptional? Even those few at least as good as the female demiurges had been before following him to heaven?
Also working on the assumption that Zoss doesn’t give the same mortal a god-ton of chances before moving on, such as starting the looping *after* a pick has been made, and only going back to before his death when he gives up and selects a new one.
…But you know, if Zoss had spent a little bit longer pondering between loops I’m sure that-
I figured he usually picked Zaid. Because as far as I recall, all of the visible prior heirs looked like Zaid in that one panel where the process was originally described.
Actually seems correct with the age range 15-25 years, i am thing he resets the universe to the begining,not just right before he gave them the power.
That’s quite a few years for each atempt.
About the women, think about it, if you have to go through every living being you would sperate them in categories not just randomly picking up idiots.
And what wijld the categories be ? Age like he is alredy doing. Then what ? Only logical thing is men/women.
He is a male (for all we know) , so he started with men.
I think he just hasn’t started women.
Alison might be a mistake or she could just be the first woman, the best candidate he could find.
Which is more logical he made a mistake or it was intentional?
Everyone thinks it is a mistake because he has only chosen men before, but why would it be?
I got news for you. You missed something massive. You missed something important that Agog said.
You missed something so important. The boy is never chosen. Agog says ‘you’. Implying that There has been previous iterations of Alison specifically.
“You” might mean in the destined role in the great act of theatre sense not in the this individual person sense, meaning Kill Six Billion Demons not Allison specifically
I believe this to be the case. “You” isn’t Allison. Or Zaid. Or any one mortal. You is the role being played, not the player. It’s all the new conquerors over times.
You’re also still assuming that this all happens within the same generation. Zoss can pick his successor whenever he wants – in this iteration, ten thousand years passed between the big demiurge war and Jagannoth resurfacing. Presumably he could have picked any person from the 777,777 universes in at least that vast time range.
Most importantly, Gog-Agog may simply be lying. I don’t think she actually counted all the grains of sand on a beach. She’s an insane clown person. She just wants to say “yo bitch I am o l d”
How do you define what it “sane” in a Hive-Mind? I think her original form was as a larval insect of a species similar to the antagonist aliens in “Ender’s Game”, which drove home just how ALIEN that kind of a mind is. Wiggins discovered that they had sincerely not understood that individual sapience was a thing until the second invasion attempt failed, (they apparently thought the original resistance was some kind of weird natural phenomenon, like a tornado), then they spent the rest of their lives TRYING to figure out how to communicate & negotiate a peace, Wiggins being the first to crack the code, but, alas, just barely too late to save them, tragically.
So, HOW can we call some creepy crawlers “insane” when we have no idea what sanity would be for them? What’s the baseline?
I’m pretty sure it’s been Allison this entire time in each reset. He’s made mention of seeing the beats of this story before when incubus had his hooks in her during the heist. Also gog just stated that Allison has been chosen in each reset.
So I’d really reccomend you read things, rather than project a Strawman so you can start a pointless and inappropriate rant about misogyny for no reason.
I think I should point out that I only just rediscovered this comic after 9 years. I first read some of it WAY back in 2014, then lost track and forgot about it, only to rediscover & BINGE it over the last few weeks.
The exchange between Jagaroth & her in her triple combo form on the floating island is still fresh in my mind. My perception of Hints of misogyny being a major motivator for Zoss’s priorities are the only way I can make sense of Alison saying “we’ve never met before”, along with Jag saying that there’s “something very strange about this cycle”, & only men appearing in the flashback of Zoss’s failed heirs, …🤔… UNLESS it was the Triple Combo he’s never met before, but maybe Alison by herself? I only just thought of that.
I honestly wasn’t looking for Zoss being “the ultimate misogynist” but I almost couldn’t think of anything else.
I don’t mind the heir being a woman but it WOULD give a ridiculous impression for the narrative for the VERY first women he tried to get it right.
I HOPE that I am wrong, and other women have been tried, but then I’m otherwise clueless about what makes Allison special compared to the predecessors. Hopefully Gog can finally give us a big clue.
Consider that Zaid is looking verry Zoss-like lately. And maybe it has less to do with Alison’s gender, and more to do with Zoss finally realising he has personally has enough attempts trying to do this on his own, this cycle he has picked someone else, who might be capable of admitting this is a burden that must be shared.
Yes but its a unit of time that references other units of time. This is pretty similar to the description of a Kalpa, and there are events in lore described as having taken multiple Kalpa.
Gog being this unfathomably old is crazy by our standards but its not that old by the standards of the old gods, who went through this process so many times their collective decision was to essentially kill themselves and birth a universe.
I think you’re missing the big differentiation here. Your assumption is that Zoss intends a male or even a particular male every single time and the confounding factor is that Allison is not, but there’s zero reason to assume that, especially given how unshocked Zoss has been about Allison having the Key. HOWEVER, what *could* be different is that Allison was NOT the intended recipient. The confounding factor therefore may be that the Key went to a random person rather than being given to a person with intention that they have it.
Are you talking about how Gog says “Two:” after Allison asks that question?
Gog isn’t answering Allison, she’s continuing her list.
“One: I’m the oldest…
Two: I too this form in order to survive…
Three: The roles all twist and change…”
You’re underestimating a little. We’re talking universes here. Our universe has an estimated 100 billion galaxies, each with an estimated 100 billion planets. So even if only 1% of all galaxies are even populated and populated galaxies are only 1% populated, that still gives 1 quintillion planets to chose from, just based on our universe. Plenty of people to choose.
To achieve knurding, all the time, without cessation… that would flay many a mind.
The vast majority of us live and breathe our illusions, our misunderstandings, our ignorances. To be truly sane, all the time — no wonder she comes across as so… different.
If she really has seen the world end and begin again quintillions of times, and she hasn’t found a way to interrupt the cycle, then making the process entertaining may actually be the most rational course of action available.
The only other option I can conceive of is to reach a state of absolute, Buddha-grade enlightenment, where you live entirely in the moment.
Obliterate all desire, all joy, and all misery to just kinda go with the flow. Problem is, such a mindset is likely impossible to find amongst Royalty, who are defined entirely by their ambitions and desires.
Perhaps that’s why Zoss has taken to forcing his successor into power? By choosing someone without that natural ambition, they have a much better chance of reaching some sort of cosmic clarity?
Buddhism isn’t about obliterating desire, joy, or misery. Buddhism is about obliterating the loss of agency stemming from our cultural conditioning and habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior through practiced focusing of your attention.
Specifically so one can feel as much joy and misery as possible. So one can really revel in the rapture of every exquisite moment of joy and misery.
YISUN calls for self love and destroying the grand enemy called ‘I’.
The power to cut infinity with the blade of Want is what makes true Royalty. To separate the I that is your conditioning and your true self. To realize there is no true self and yet you are. To be in the world but not of it; to understand your place in everything yet to be unbound of all things; to yield to your own will and yet be sovereign over it.
Not all the gods agreed with that. Some have experimented with third ways.
Which makes me wonder:
Have ALL 777,777 corpses been accounted for? If any are missing, and also have their universes sealed, could they have simply abandoned the Wheel to dwell exclusively in their own Realms, seeking other ways entirely?
I’ve been wondering that, as well. A wise golden-age demiurge could have foreseen the inevitable conflict and chosen to use their key to lock instead of open. The keys were so splintered before consolidation, would there be any way to tell if some tiny fraction was missing?
Of course, Jadis would ALWAYS know, wouldn’t she? Perhaps during the war she was the one responsible for finding those demiurges who thought to hide instead of fight. Unless one found some way to move their world OUTSIDE time, they’d never be able to escape her…
Still, Zoss seems to have managed something like that, so it’s certainly not IMPOSSIBLE to do, but I’m not sure if anyone else could’ve pulled it off.
They’re all facets of the same royalty. Zoss has achieved or nearly achieved Royalty. The archangel controlling Jagganoth is able to invoke the same power. But Hansa exists in unreality and also died long before this but was still a horrible old man anyway because YISUN taught him how to do this, despite also being long dead at the time.
This is the kind of power most of the demiurges tried for and failed to get. Its the whole reason Jadis is locked up and Solomon David is a hermit. It was also the whole point of the training Allison did after she left Jadis.
The only way to do that is to achieve Royalty, and Royalty means they simply wouldn’t care if they died, because thats the same ability Zoss has that lets him keep coming back after being outright killed. Basically every god who could do that is confirmed dead. But they were all personally taught by Yisun, who died a generation before any of them were born. So if they could do it odds are they’d still die and leave a corpse, they’d just perservere anyway.
i dont even think it matters if she’s ‘sane’ or ‘insane’, it matters that she’s lived such a long life that there’s no difference to be had. she has to cram millenia of the same soap opera in her head and she’s fucking SICK of it.
Yes, (momentarily?) sane Gog is the most frightening thing to appear in this saga to date. I’d nominate this as one of the top pages story-wise of all time.
Why do over half of all the universes have an earth & the gates open directly on to it?
I recall from the series “Sliders” a race of conquering hominids that evolved from an alternate line of protohumans than ours going 3 million years back. It was mentioned that they had the technology to potentially traverse any given universe, but why bother? There was always another earth to conquer.
The problem of using the Key to traverse within the normal spacetime of any given universe is he has to systematically search out where to even begin looking. Even given the timeframe Gog had implied, and systematically searched just one universe thoroughly, Zoss may have completed one whole one by now, depending on how abundant life really is per universe.
The flashbacks accompanying Jag’s exposition, however, implied that he’d been searching across the multiverse, hence sticking to the primary planet within each, the spiritual if not physical center of each universe.
I don’t think he’s bothered to explore each wider universe, YET.
True dat. Look at what one glimpse of eternity did to Jadis. Now imagine being exposed to that for uncountable millennia. It could REALLY twist your panties.
Oh I honestly thought that this was going to go the “Gog Agog was the first ruler of Throne and Heaven in the first loops” way but her being able to dance can do too
Now that you mention it… she’s the only demiurge who I can immediately envision absolutely killing it on the dance floor. Clearly, she is the most powerful by far.
Imagine reading a story and you can’t remember the events of the first few chapters, and also those pages got cut out and burned, and this is the only copy of the book in existence so there’s no possible way for her to re-learn that information.
It’s gotta be mega infuriating.
This is why you write fanfiction.
So you can fill in the blanks when things are lost or forgotten.
Or because the script writers fucked everything up so badly that even drunk and concussed you could do better!
I’m looking at you, writers of GoT S8.
I doubt it. My assumption is that ‘the very beginning,’ in this case, means the events of the loop when she was born – specifically, the events BEFORE she was born – and any loops prior to it.
I assume she began as a hive mind insect species, like the ones from “Enders Game”; she’s not a mass of “worms” as such. They look like grubs! She’s forever in a larval state, kept eternally young & juvenile, baby bugs. Carrion grubs, like maggots, but presumably there’s an adult form that she refuses to pupate into. Maybe it’s like a may fly, if she allows herself to mature, she will ALL die in a day. Maybe fear of this (and predators) is what drover her originally. I’m thinking she took her keys from the corpses of two demiurges who killed each other in a double K.O.
& maybe she’s forgotten this as part of the Beginning.
According to the Author, she’s what happened when an uncannily envious woman who tried to steal others lives got eaten by worms who inherited all of her feelings memories. Then they ate all the people she was envious of because now that they had thoughts and memories it seemed like a better idea then just sitting around eating stuff nearby like they had been. Then they ate everything else. Then a god game to conquer but it was just him and the planet made of worms so they ate that and now there’s a lot more everything else they had access to so it was time to start eating that and some more gods and here we are, Gog Agog!
That doesn’t disprove my thesis. Could be they developed a survival quirk in which, once they find a victim’s neural material, instead of just eating it as more arbitrary fats & proteins, they send out these little tendrils that absorb the data patterns of a tiny bit. The individual worm takes in its fill and then moves on to eat what it can in the rest of the victim, but doesn’t touch the brain again, in that sense, it is full. Another worm is always there to take its place & more carefully absorb another bit out of the brain.
This was likely originally done so to learn to survive against predators on their home world, but before getting the key or any abilities from dead gods, they must have communicated via pheromones, which would have made thinking slow.
Nevertheless, i remain hopeful that she’s a larval form & can turn into something like beautiful mayflies if she ever allowed her selfs to mature. Seems like a good send off for her at the end of the story, trillions of sparkling gossamer wings shining on thousands of worlds.
She might not mean that Allison/Solomon were themselves around. She might be saying it more in a, “Who was it who did it? Was it you, who hadn’t even been imagined yet? I didn’t think so” kind of way.
Soooo she can speak in a normal voice. You know how we were all safe from Gog-Agog because it’s alright, she’s crazy and she lives for the show? Turns out she’s actually sane.
Oops I’d forgotten these two bits! Though honestly I give myself a pass for not noticing the one that happened while Solomon was being roasted, I’d argue it dragged focus.
“young man im being very serious now i want you to do this for me or you will be in BIG trouble you hear i want you to go down to the gamestop and i want you to ask-
[…] The king said, (the third question is,) ‘How many seconds of time are there in eternity?’ Then said the shepherd boy, ‘In lower pomerania is the diamond mountain, which is two miles high, two miles wide, and two miles deep. Every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.’
shes resplendent. shes goofy mommy energy. shes so serious she scalds water. shes insane in the membrane. she has a one million iq. i didnt say her name, but i bet she popped into ur head…
Hmhmhm. Going loop after loop after loop being the only one to remember will drive you nuts. No wonder. I too would become billions to keep it all stored.
The repetition of “This I know, oh this I know” hits so hard, I can’t explain what it is exactly – the idea that Gog Agog has said this speech so many times that it is like a poem or prayer or spell to who knows how many different variations of the people she’s known, it just… AGH. The writing here is so goddamn good! It is stupid, how good this is. Infuriating.
I noticed that as well! The red curtains, the black-and-white zigzags, the dancing. What’s a liminal space between life and the beyond, to Gog-Agog, is a mere *performance*.
Funny answer: how can you NOT relate to a trillion trillion parasitic worms dressed as clowns
Serious answer, b/c I feel like it: it’s one of the basic principles of fantastical storytelling, dude. We relate to feelings and the broad valuation of experiences, no matter how fantastical those experiences are, as long as the storyteller is canny. It’s not really any more bizarre than seeing a human face in a ;–)
I’m starting to think this chick is crazy.
Massively fragmenting your brain so you can remember all the millions of years (or more) you’ve spent reliving the same events over and over will do that to you.
Oh dear, a million is a pathetically small number to describe her lifespan.
You should be counting in millions of trillions.
So I did some research (google) and quick maths.
The average width of a shoreline is ~35 meters. She stated “Many Miles” of beach, so I’m going to say 10 and probably end up lowballing it. One mile is 1609m, so one mile of beach that is 35m wide is 56326 square meters of beach. With an average depth of 3m and an average grain size of 0.3mm, factoring in things other than sand in th beach such as dirt, animals, objects, and air being around 23%, one square meter with a depth of 3 meters will have around 163 BILLION grains.
Multiplying that by our total area is 9.18×10^15. Over ten miles, it becomes 9.18×10^16.
Also known as 90 Quadrillion grains of sand. If that’s at a rate of one every hundred years, you get
9 Quintillion years.
9 goging Quintillion years.
It’s a wonder that Gog Agog gogs at all.
Hold on a second.
Every reset, the ONLY thing Zoss changes is the young man, healthy, 15-25 years old, in the same generational bracket as Allison. Presumably an alt version of each has existed before AND after the cycle in which he was chosen, that went on to live an ordinary existence. The previous 9 Quintillion versions of Allison went on to live a normal existence, at least for a few years, before the reset.
If we assume that Zoss is the absolute greatest Misogynist pig ever & that she is the absolute FIRST woman he’s ever chosen, we can extrapolate that if the average population of males (including non-human species) 15-25 (or equivalent for different life spans) is about half a billion per planet, on average, multiply that by 777,777, then maybe throw in a generous guess of a trillion for a few especially advanced worlds that had managed to locally colonize other planets within their native universes prior to their gate being opened (OR remains sealed like Allison’s), thus having had lots of elbow room for expansive population growth, which brings the total male candidates available to 389,888,500,000,000.
Ok, even if he’s expanded it to men twice that age, to 779,777,000,000,000, that is still less than 100th 9 Quintillion!
Has Zoss reused the same men 110-150 times each?!?! Maybe throw in a few exceptionally fit old men to get it at least down to an even 100!
Maybe he thought he could try them over again with a different approach.
Or MAYBE, he just forgets, loses track.
But not ANY woman? No matter how exceptional? Even those few at least as good as the female demiurges had been before following him to heaven?
You’re working on the assumption that the resets don’t go particularly far back.
Also working on the assumption that Zoss doesn’t give the same mortal a god-ton of chances before moving on, such as starting the looping *after* a pick has been made, and only going back to before his death when he gives up and selects a new one.
…But you know, if Zoss had spent a little bit longer pondering between loops I’m sure that-
I figured he usually picked Zaid. Because as far as I recall, all of the visible prior heirs looked like Zaid in that one panel where the process was originally described.
I for some reason believed Zaid to be some kind of reincarnation of Zoss.
I agree. Zoss has never picked a woman before because he has always picked himself.
So, Zoss is the one slamming the Reset button?
Big daddy Z can’t really be any other, can it?
Actually seems correct with the age range 15-25 years, i am thing he resets the universe to the begining,not just right before he gave them the power.
That’s quite a few years for each atempt.
About the women, think about it, if you have to go through every living being you would sperate them in categories not just randomly picking up idiots.
And what wijld the categories be ? Age like he is alredy doing. Then what ? Only logical thing is men/women.
He is a male (for all we know) , so he started with men.
I think he just hasn’t started women.
Alison might be a mistake or she could just be the first woman, the best candidate he could find.
Which is more logical he made a mistake or it was intentional?
Everyone thinks it is a mistake because he has only chosen men before, but why would it be?
I got news for you. You missed something massive. You missed something important that Agog said.
You missed something so important. The boy is never chosen. Agog says ‘you’. Implying that There has been previous iterations of Alison specifically.
“You” might mean in the destined role in the great act of theatre sense not in the this individual person sense, meaning Kill Six Billion Demons not Allison specifically
I believe this to be the case. “You” isn’t Allison. Or Zaid. Or any one mortal. You is the role being played, not the player. It’s all the new conquerors over times.
You’re also still assuming that this all happens within the same generation. Zoss can pick his successor whenever he wants – in this iteration, ten thousand years passed between the big demiurge war and Jagannoth resurfacing. Presumably he could have picked any person from the 777,777 universes in at least that vast time range.
Most importantly, Gog-Agog may simply be lying. I don’t think she actually counted all the grains of sand on a beach. She’s an insane clown person. She just wants to say “yo bitch I am o l d”
How do you define what it “sane” in a Hive-Mind? I think her original form was as a larval insect of a species similar to the antagonist aliens in “Ender’s Game”, which drove home just how ALIEN that kind of a mind is. Wiggins discovered that they had sincerely not understood that individual sapience was a thing until the second invasion attempt failed, (they apparently thought the original resistance was some kind of weird natural phenomenon, like a tornado), then they spent the rest of their lives TRYING to figure out how to communicate & negotiate a peace, Wiggins being the first to crack the code, but, alas, just barely too late to save them, tragically.
So, HOW can we call some creepy crawlers “insane” when we have no idea what sanity would be for them? What’s the baseline?
I don’t think the implication is that her original form was a larva, I think it’s pretty clearly stated that Gog-Agog came first, and the worm second.
Nah, the bigger question is- did every single one of them have to have a name that started with “Z”?
😛
I’m pretty sure it’s been Allison this entire time in each reset. He’s made mention of seeing the beats of this story before when incubus had his hooks in her during the heist. Also gog just stated that Allison has been chosen in each reset.
So I’d really reccomend you read things, rather than project a Strawman so you can start a pointless and inappropriate rant about misogyny for no reason.
I think I should point out that I only just rediscovered this comic after 9 years. I first read some of it WAY back in 2014, then lost track and forgot about it, only to rediscover & BINGE it over the last few weeks.
The exchange between Jagaroth & her in her triple combo form on the floating island is still fresh in my mind. My perception of Hints of misogyny being a major motivator for Zoss’s priorities are the only way I can make sense of Alison saying “we’ve never met before”, along with Jag saying that there’s “something very strange about this cycle”, & only men appearing in the flashback of Zoss’s failed heirs, …🤔… UNLESS it was the Triple Combo he’s never met before, but maybe Alison by herself? I only just thought of that.
I honestly wasn’t looking for Zoss being “the ultimate misogynist” but I almost couldn’t think of anything else.
I don’t mind the heir being a woman but it WOULD give a ridiculous impression for the narrative for the VERY first women he tried to get it right.
I HOPE that I am wrong, and other women have been tried, but then I’m otherwise clueless about what makes Allison special compared to the predecessors. Hopefully Gog can finally give us a big clue.
Consider that Zaid is looking verry Zoss-like lately. And maybe it has less to do with Alison’s gender, and more to do with Zoss finally realising he has personally has enough attempts trying to do this on his own, this cycle he has picked someone else, who might be capable of admitting this is a burden that must be shared.
its a metaphor for expressing an extremely large amount of time. I don’t actually that much time has actually passed. Plus each cycle is pretty long
Yes but its a unit of time that references other units of time. This is pretty similar to the description of a Kalpa, and there are events in lore described as having taken multiple Kalpa.
Gog being this unfathomably old is crazy by our standards but its not that old by the standards of the old gods, who went through this process so many times their collective decision was to essentially kill themselves and birth a universe.
I think you’re missing the big differentiation here. Your assumption is that Zoss intends a male or even a particular male every single time and the confounding factor is that Allison is not, but there’s zero reason to assume that, especially given how unshocked Zoss has been about Allison having the Key. HOWEVER, what *could* be different is that Allison was NOT the intended recipient. The confounding factor therefore may be that the Key went to a random person rather than being given to a person with intention that they have it.
Um, didn’t Gog just now specifically say that the universe has been reset by Zoss exactly twice?
Are you talking about how Gog says “Two:” after Allison asks that question?
Gog isn’t answering Allison, she’s continuing her list.
“One: I’m the oldest…
Two: I too this form in order to survive…
Three: The roles all twist and change…”
You’re underestimating a little. We’re talking universes here. Our universe has an estimated 100 billion galaxies, each with an estimated 100 billion planets. So even if only 1% of all galaxies are even populated and populated galaxies are only 1% populated, that still gives 1 quintillion planets to chose from, just based on our universe. Plenty of people to choose.
I think it’s worse than that. I think she is actually sane.
True sanity, in the fullest sense. A curse I would not wish upon my most despised enemy.
Knurd.
To achieve knurding, all the time, without cessation… that would flay many a mind.
The vast majority of us live and breathe our illusions, our misunderstandings, our ignorances. To be truly sane, all the time — no wonder she comes across as so… different.
It is not pleasant.
And thus, I make sure to be just slightly drunk at all times.
It takes effort… And careful dosing.
If she really has seen the world end and begin again quintillions of times, and she hasn’t found a way to interrupt the cycle, then making the process entertaining may actually be the most rational course of action available.
The only other option I can conceive of is to reach a state of absolute, Buddha-grade enlightenment, where you live entirely in the moment.
Obliterate all desire, all joy, and all misery to just kinda go with the flow. Problem is, such a mindset is likely impossible to find amongst Royalty, who are defined entirely by their ambitions and desires.
Perhaps that’s why Zoss has taken to forcing his successor into power? By choosing someone without that natural ambition, they have a much better chance of reaching some sort of cosmic clarity?
Trying to turn every moment into a joke is one way of living in the moment. This could be one picture of what “enlightenment” looks like.
Buddhism isn’t about obliterating desire, joy, or misery. Buddhism is about obliterating the loss of agency stemming from our cultural conditioning and habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior through practiced focusing of your attention.
Specifically so one can feel as much joy and misery as possible. So one can really revel in the rapture of every exquisite moment of joy and misery.
YISUN calls for self love and destroying the grand enemy called ‘I’.
The power to cut infinity with the blade of Want is what makes true Royalty. To separate the I that is your conditioning and your true self. To realize there is no true self and yet you are. To be in the world but not of it; to understand your place in everything yet to be unbound of all things; to yield to your own will and yet be sovereign over it.
Not all the gods agreed with that. Some have experimented with third ways.
Which makes me wonder:
Have ALL 777,777 corpses been accounted for? If any are missing, and also have their universes sealed, could they have simply abandoned the Wheel to dwell exclusively in their own Realms, seeking other ways entirely?
I’ve been wondering that, as well. A wise golden-age demiurge could have foreseen the inevitable conflict and chosen to use their key to lock instead of open. The keys were so splintered before consolidation, would there be any way to tell if some tiny fraction was missing?
Of course, Jadis would ALWAYS know, wouldn’t she? Perhaps during the war she was the one responsible for finding those demiurges who thought to hide instead of fight. Unless one found some way to move their world OUTSIDE time, they’d never be able to escape her…
Still, Zoss seems to have managed something like that, so it’s certainly not IMPOSSIBLE to do, but I’m not sure if anyone else could’ve pulled it off.
They’re all facets of the same royalty. Zoss has achieved or nearly achieved Royalty. The archangel controlling Jagganoth is able to invoke the same power. But Hansa exists in unreality and also died long before this but was still a horrible old man anyway because YISUN taught him how to do this, despite also being long dead at the time.
This is the kind of power most of the demiurges tried for and failed to get. Its the whole reason Jadis is locked up and Solomon David is a hermit. It was also the whole point of the training Allison did after she left Jadis.
The only way to do that is to achieve Royalty, and Royalty means they simply wouldn’t care if they died, because thats the same ability Zoss has that lets him keep coming back after being outright killed. Basically every god who could do that is confirmed dead. But they were all personally taught by Yisun, who died a generation before any of them were born. So if they could do it odds are they’d still die and leave a corpse, they’d just perservere anyway.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Oh, you’re a man of culture, too. Nice one.
No.
Nothing human is alien to me.
But so much of the universe is not human.
i dont even think it matters if she’s ‘sane’ or ‘insane’, it matters that she’s lived such a long life that there’s no difference to be had. she has to cram millenia of the same soap opera in her head and she’s fucking SICK of it.
Yes, (momentarily?) sane Gog is the most frightening thing to appear in this saga to date. I’d nominate this as one of the top pages story-wise of all time.
Why do over half of all the universes have an earth & the gates open directly on to it?
I recall from the series “Sliders” a race of conquering hominids that evolved from an alternate line of protohumans than ours going 3 million years back. It was mentioned that they had the technology to potentially traverse any given universe, but why bother? There was always another earth to conquer.
The problem of using the Key to traverse within the normal spacetime of any given universe is he has to systematically search out where to even begin looking. Even given the timeframe Gog had implied, and systematically searched just one universe thoroughly, Zoss may have completed one whole one by now, depending on how abundant life really is per universe.
The flashbacks accompanying Jag’s exposition, however, implied that he’d been searching across the multiverse, hence sticking to the primary planet within each, the spiritual if not physical center of each universe.
I don’t think he’s bothered to explore each wider universe, YET.
I can fix her
Funny! She probably thinks the same way about you.
She could fix herself, but whatever’s wrong with her is way hotter
what is there to fix theres only Worm
She seems pretty on the ball to me!
Nope, the scary thing is she/he/they is/are entirely sane. It’s just Gog Agog’s mind is superhuman and inhuman. Gog is sane.
It’s *reality* that’s insane. 😀
I’m afraid that she isn’t
You’d be too, having experienced what she has.
“i took this form in defiance of god” my crackpot theory: she’s aesma
Gog-Agog being a god anon and anon.
Pleasure and pain, forgetfulness and memory, eternity in a single moment. Horror upon horrors.
Oh, I get it. She’s crazy.
She’s not crazy. She’s broken. Broken from being too old and powerful. From knowing too much. God amongst gods, Gog amongst gogs.
True dat. Look at what one glimpse of eternity did to Jadis. Now imagine being exposed to that for uncountable millennia. It could REALLY twist your panties.
Yeah yeah, the true shape of the wheel, we’ve all seen it
REALLY twist your panties
Yeah yeah, the true shape of the wheel
… Sheesh. Now I want to know which leghole to use first. Y’know, the practical questions. 😄
The answer to your question is Yes.
Always Yes.
i think she might just be going thru immortality growing pains
well this confirms what we all suspected in the most tantalizing and exciting way.
Prithee, what do you suspect, sibling?
that gog agog remembers the resets
Most importantly. She can dance.
Oh I honestly thought that this was going to go the “Gog Agog was the first ruler of Throne and Heaven in the first loops” way but her being able to dance can do too
The two are probably related.
Now that you mention it… she’s the only demiurge who I can immediately envision absolutely killing it on the dance floor. Clearly, she is the most powerful by far.
I wonder if it bothers Gog Agog if she can’t remember the very beginning
Imagine reading a story and you can’t remember the events of the first few chapters, and also those pages got cut out and burned, and this is the only copy of the book in existence so there’s no possible way for her to re-learn that information.
It’s gotta be mega infuriating.
One might say, that the pre-introduction for every book in existence, is missing.
We never know what we cannot learn about the preceding events.
Nobody can remember the beginning of their life, it’s part of the burden of being born.
This is why you write fanfiction.
So you can fill in the blanks when things are lost or forgotten.
Or because the script writers fucked everything up so badly that even drunk and concussed you could do better!
I’m looking at you, writers of GoT S8.
In that viewpoint, Cleo’s job is important.
I suspect it’d bother her more if she did, and that that’s why she doesn’t.
Let there be no genesis, for Beginnings are false and We are all consummate liars
9 Granite Pillar Splendid With Swords is observant.
Very much so.
I doubt it. My assumption is that ‘the very beginning,’ in this case, means the events of the loop when she was born – specifically, the events BEFORE she was born – and any loops prior to it.
I assume she began as a hive mind insect species, like the ones from “Enders Game”; she’s not a mass of “worms” as such. They look like grubs! She’s forever in a larval state, kept eternally young & juvenile, baby bugs. Carrion grubs, like maggots, but presumably there’s an adult form that she refuses to pupate into. Maybe it’s like a may fly, if she allows herself to mature, she will ALL die in a day. Maybe fear of this (and predators) is what drover her originally. I’m thinking she took her keys from the corpses of two demiurges who killed each other in a double K.O.
& maybe she’s forgotten this as part of the Beginning.
According to the Author, she’s what happened when an uncannily envious woman who tried to steal others lives got eaten by worms who inherited all of her feelings memories. Then they ate all the people she was envious of because now that they had thoughts and memories it seemed like a better idea then just sitting around eating stuff nearby like they had been. Then they ate everything else. Then a god game to conquer but it was just him and the planet made of worms so they ate that and now there’s a lot more everything else they had access to so it was time to start eating that and some more gods and here we are, Gog Agog!
That doesn’t disprove my thesis. Could be they developed a survival quirk in which, once they find a victim’s neural material, instead of just eating it as more arbitrary fats & proteins, they send out these little tendrils that absorb the data patterns of a tiny bit. The individual worm takes in its fill and then moves on to eat what it can in the rest of the victim, but doesn’t touch the brain again, in that sense, it is full. Another worm is always there to take its place & more carefully absorb another bit out of the brain.
This was likely originally done so to learn to survive against predators on their home world, but before getting the key or any abilities from dead gods, they must have communicated via pheromones, which would have made thinking slow.
Nevertheless, i remain hopeful that she’s a larval form & can turn into something like beautiful mayflies if she ever allowed her selfs to mature. Seems like a good send off for her at the end of the story, trillions of sparkling gossamer wings shining on thousands of worlds.
I don’t think Gog-Agog knows what Gog-Agog is.
Alt-text: youtube (dot) com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM
May you be blessed among those who bear no names!
It was her! I bet it was her. She seems nice.
Or METATRON. Or Himself.
Or anyone, really. Whichever is the most interesting, let that be the answer.
It was me, Barry!
Surprised no Dio was found here 🙁
RIP in peace beautiful prince
*idly clicks expecting same page*
*new page*
wuuuuuuut
“Not you-”
It may not be the first time Allison has been around, either.
That’s a good point, it does seem to be a reasonable inferrence from our pal’s choice of wording
Not Allison per se, but I thought Jagganoth said that the Fool-Voltron of Allison/Cio/Anmgel Face were something he had never seen before.
It’s clear that Jagganoth remembers only fragments of the past cycles, if even that. His account is unreliable in that regard.
She might not mean that Allison/Solomon were themselves around. She might be saying it more in a, “Who was it who did it? Was it you, who hadn’t even been imagined yet? I didn’t think so” kind of way.
Perhaps, but ‘you’ might also mean whoever was filling the role of the Heir.
It’s very true that have a gazillion resets, you’d probably start viewing the heir as the same person every time.
Poor thing. Ignorance is bliss. No wonder she tempts with entertainment and ego annihilation – it’s what she wants the most.
Soooo she can speak in a normal voice. You know how we were all safe from Gog-Agog because it’s alright, she’s crazy and she lives for the show? Turns out she’s actually sane.
Funny how that tends to make everything worse.
Well, she still lives for the show.
For the show is all that remains.
She spoke normally once before, right after Solomon got punched by White Chain
The result was actually rigged, have White Chain punch Solomon was her design.
Also just before she abandoned the crew to get julienned by jaggy
Oops I’d forgotten these two bits! Though honestly I give myself a pass for not noticing the one that happened while Solomon was being roasted, I’d argue it dragged focus.
Those Who Were Seen Dancing Were Thought To Be Insane By Those Who Could Not Hear The Music
“young man im being very serious now i want you to do this for me or you will be in BIG trouble you hear i want you to go down to the gamestop and i want you to ask-
The metaphor of the beach and the sand goes ultra hard.
[…] The king said, (the third question is,) ‘How many seconds of time are there in eternity?’ Then said the shepherd boy, ‘In lower pomerania is the diamond mountain, which is two miles high, two miles wide, and two miles deep. Every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.’
“The Shepherd Boy,” by the Brothers Grimm
Gog Agog actually usually has twelve regeneration cycles only but you see in the new series they actually granted her a NEW set which she used t
Bloody ancient bird, then.
It’s clearly a paraphrased version of the old “eternity” quote with the mountain and the bird, but I still like it.
Guys, I think that green chick is crazy.
I think that green chick is sane which is infinitely more concerning…
Guys, I think that green chick is hot.
Good news. She wants your body too.
“but hes the guy you wanna do
and you know it takes two
Luckily he wants to do you too”
– ‘Kiss the Go-Goat’, Ghost
Dance Macabre music in my head has been replaced with the ULTRAKILL ost, specifically the song of that name.
She’s not crazy, she’s aware and unmasked. Neurodivergent nihilist swag
shes resplendent. shes goofy mommy energy. shes so serious she scalds water. shes insane in the membrane. she has a one million iq. i didnt say her name, but i bet she popped into ur head…
Hmhmhm. Going loop after loop after loop being the only one to remember will drive you nuts. No wonder. I too would become billions to keep it all stored.
Jadis would like to differ.
She wasn’t there, but she’s (been) there, and “remembers”, so to speak.
it was ME! DIOGAGOG!
Oh curses! Someone got to the joke before me!
It probably was her, though.
Oh my god the Wheel is a halted program- they can’t get out of the while loop.
Gog Agogs lifetime is beyond comprehension.
Sublime.
The repetition of “This I know, oh this I know” hits so hard, I can’t explain what it is exactly – the idea that Gog Agog has said this speech so many times that it is like a poem or prayer or spell to who knows how many different variations of the people she’s known, it just… AGH. The writing here is so goddamn good! It is stupid, how good this is. Infuriating.
All that and Twin Peaks aesthetics for the stage to boot. Just.
Goddamn. Goddamn.
I noticed that as well! The red curtains, the black-and-white zigzags, the dancing. What’s a liminal space between life and the beyond, to Gog-Agog, is a mere *performance*.
“Big Daddy Z”
Should I know who that is?
I assume Zog, which is the Conquering King’s name
That was the King in Disenchantment. (Could be the same guy though, you never see them together in the same room.)
“Kneel before Zog!”
That would be referencing the minor historical figure, Zoss.
Whether you ought to know him as “Big Daddy” though… we’ll leave your personal life to you and the worm.
Zoss
Zoss I would guess
Zaddy
Zaidinator, Destroyer of Worlds
Al-Yisun and the Worm in the Black Lodge
Cio. All things considered, all signs point to her coming back.
oh, also: “i took this form in order to survive. in defiance of god.” is the most relatable thing i, as a trans person, has ever read.
that typo will eat me alive.
Well, I didn’t see it till you pointed it out so it can’t be all bad!
The typo is also in defiance of god.
Seriously though, that comment is rad as fuck.
i do not see the typo, where is the typo?
I appreciate that sentiment, but also, how can you possibly relate to a trillion trillion parasitic worms dressed as clowns
sometimes it just be like that
Funny answer: how can you NOT relate to a trillion trillion parasitic worms dressed as clowns
Serious answer, b/c I feel like it: it’s one of the basic principles of fantastical storytelling, dude. We relate to feelings and the broad valuation of experiences, no matter how fantastical those experiences are, as long as the storyteller is canny. It’s not really any more bizarre than seeing a human face in a ;–)
Seconded!
*raises my hand as well* : )