Well, isn't Makoto stuck living in Nerima anyway until we get in contact with her guardians?
Yes, but if we want to get her
out of Nerima, then parking her new home
in Nerima and relying on the Nerima weirdness censor is probably counterproductive.
We know that Genius Loci and Lilim are 2 different types of entities. Lilim can do thing like create Genius Loci and Youkai out of nowhere. Just because Ame no Uzume thinks she knows what's going and most of her advice helps Naru with her abilities doesn't mean that Ame no Uzume is correct and Genius Loci and Lilim are the same thing.
Ame no Uzume clearly knows that there is a difference between
genius loci ("us," in her frame of reference) and Lilim, because she 'knows' that there are no surviving Lilim.
On the other hand, either:
1) Ame-no-Uzume knows (probably due to time travel shenanigans) that Naru is a Lilim and is pretending not to know for some reason, or
2) Everything Ame-no-Uzume knows that Naru has done is something that can be explained by Naru being a
genius loci, or more specifically a "goddess of life."
We also have no reason to assume he ISN'T a Pandora-created Genus Loci. After all, Poseidon, Zeus, Athena and a whole bunch of other greek and roman deities as well as a bunch of Egyptian Deities, Nordic Deities, and Japanese Kami ARE Pandora-Created Genus Loci.
Sure, maybe Bacchus is actually different than every single other mythological god figure world-wide.... but maybe he isn't.
Well for starters- and this may be another one of those "size of Phobos" things you didn't know- even within Greco-Roman mythology, the figure of Dionysus is mythologized as a 'newcomer' to the pantheon, one who isn't quite the same as the others and doesn't quite fit with them. Bacchus being a different category of being than the other Roman gods would actually not surprise me very much.
I know these terms are innaccurate, but that is WHY I'm making sure to point out the inaccuracy. If we want to say Naru is an immortal and more powerful than human being who eats magic, and say that that makes her a Goddess, then we have to say that Succubi are Goddesses too, because they have the exact same qualifications.
It was a useful lie to not reveal Naru's true nature to Ami-no-Mizume, but it is not as useful as a way to consider Naru and her future development. If we want to refer to ALL immortal, powerful beings as Gods and Goddesses, we can, but it will certainly confuse the issue more than clarify it.
...You know what?
Lately you've been prepared to write at considerable length and with (by all signs) great passion about how much you want there to be
struggle in this game, how you want the characters to sometimes have to fight hard, be in danger, rise above challenging circumstances.
This isn't me knocking that, by the way. I'm with you there, that's not the point.
...
But you know what I want to see, too?
Poetry.
Fantasy, perhaps above all other genres of fiction, lends itself to bringing us in touch with the poetic, the symbolic, the mythic. It is a genre where the metaphorical becomes literal. It is a genre where imagination and reality blur together. It is a genre where the act of keeping a promise can be as profoundly significant as the act of setting off an incendiary charge in the enemy's main ammunition stockpile.
A big fantasy crossover like this,
especially one that touches on the heights of high fantasy with extraordinary magic powers and world-altering stakes, but also on much of what we now call "urban fantasy," about the intersection of magic with a recognizable reality that is akin to our own... A big fantasy crossover like this is a
wonderful place to cultivate our often-stunted sense of the poetic. To encourage each other to speak imaginatively, to use tools of rhetoric and metaphor and emotion.
But as implied above, for us to have poetry, we have to have a certain respect for each other's ability to make use of metaphor. We have to be comfortable with it when another person says "let us make swords into plowshares," instead of pointing out that swords haven't been a relevant military weapon in hundreds of years, and for that matter plowshares are obsolete too. We have to be prepared to accept that someone talks about "the forces of darkness" even though the bad guys don't seem to be any more literally interested in night operations than we are, and are not working for a literal absence of light.
...
And so...
When someone jumps in to squash something that is literally incorrect but, and this is important,
true in a poetic sense?
Sometimes, it strikes me as distasteful.
This is one of those times.
This is an Internet forum full of nerds. Most of us, in our secret hearts, cherish the distinction of "lorekeeper of the facts." Most of us like to be the one who remembers all the trivia and sets people straight when they mischaracterize some real or physical thing.
But sometimes that goes too far, and sometimes we hurt each other, or the quality of discourse among ourselves, in our desire to ensure that everyone around ourselves is factually correct.
I think you are pushing against that line.
Not out of malice. But perhaps out of an exaggerated sense of the importance of
correcting everyone until they stop being wrong. Or perhaps out of something else. In any case, I do genuinely think it would be a good idea- not to ask you to apologize, but just to bear this in mind going forward, that not everything needs to be first nitpicked to death, then further bludgeoned by having the nitpicks themselves defended just in case someone says "well, this could be metaphorically true or things could be more complicated."
It's okay to let people be wrong or 'wrong' on the Internet; you are under no contractual obligation to police our word usage.
If you don't want to take either of those paths... then all you are trying to argue is that it is impossible someone could get confused, and in that case is it really worth all this effort to try and force me to apologize for offering a simple clarification on something that everyone knows?
Because I'm getting tired of people playing conversation police and justifying themselves with righteous concern that this time they
had to step in, because "someone might misunderstand and get confused and make a mistake!" It's one thing when someone makes an objectively counterfactual statement ("night is black, white is day, Sailors Uranus and Neptune are just really close friends.") It's another matter when it's something that has a certain level of metaphorical validity to it and can be a useful tool for understanding reality, just not in the exact tone and choice of technical vocabulary favored by the quest's OCs.
