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Well, if you have a religion that explicitly claims only their God is real, and all other gods are fake or demons, then someone writing an urban fantasy where "gods" are real pretty much has to decide whether or not the Christians (and Muslims and Jews) are right in this universe. I've seen some fiction and RPGs that kind of tried to handwave this, but Christians will inevitably be offended at Jesus being treated as just another source of exorcism points, while pagans will be offended at any implication that their gods aren't real. And the best reaction you can hope for from Muslims is that they don't read it.
I mean, yeah, this is kind of a central premise of fantasy in general. It's simply set in a world that's not accurate to real life. I don't care about that, I just care that the world follow its own internal rules rather than break them in order to make certain groups even more wrong. In a world where people's belief creates gods, you have to justify why the largest group on earth somehow hasn't created a god. In a world where gods are powerful beings that people believe in, you have to justify why (at the very least) no god has filled in for the (for some reason) nonexistent Christian god in order to gain more influence.
EDIT:
I think the big thing is that if you are trying to set something in the modern world, ideally your magic system explains to an extent why the world exists as it currently does. If Jesus is just another source of exorcism points, why is Christianity by far the biggest religion with a strong tradition of exorcism? Why is Christianity so much bigger in general, with such different beliefs? Presumably if gods were real then religions which believe that multiple gods exist are going to outcompete religions that assert that there's only one god; adherents to the latter are going to be getting smitten left and right.
I don't attribute malice to these authors at all, I think they just have stories that they want to write that aren't 100% internally consistent, which is fine. The issue is when they build these worlds which aren't accurate to reality, then use them to make points about things which are accurate to reality. In a world where all gods are real, Christianity would be vastly different than it is in real life. But take your world where all gods are real, then plop Christianity down in the middle of it unaltered, and of course it will look silly because that belief system wouldn't have grown in that world organically.
Well, it's more than that. If you use the popular trope that "gods are powerful in proportion to how many believers they have" then yeah, you would expect a world with Christianity to have made Yahweh into a really powerful god.
Except - you are implying that the Christian God is really just another god among many, and not qualitatively different from Zeus or Astarte or some ancient forgotten Slavic bog-demon, He just happened to go viral at the right time and now He's got really good ratings. Christians (and Muslims) believe in the One True God who is Alpha and Omega. The idea that if Christianity as a religion became fringe, God would become just another wispy little godlet competing with the likes of Quetzalcoatl and Tiw is literal heresy.
Of course the sort of Christian (or Muslim) who reads urban fantasy or plays RPGs could probably handle this in a fictional world. But mainstream fantasy series or games that demote Jesus to Just Another Demigod are often accused of mocking Christianity. (And nowadays I wonder if anyone would dare giving Mohamed a stat block.)
Sure, but the alternative is to deny God's existence, which may be even more heretical. Authors tend to skirt around this question, and that's fine, but if they don't address it then I'd prefer they not address adjacent issues either. If your world is "All gods exist except for the Christian God, but people still believe in him and follow the Bible anyways" then that's fine so long as you mostly ignore that side of things. But if your story has strong themes revolving around homosexuality and homophobia, and all your in-story homophobes are Christians, that feels to me like you're cheating. Essentially you're obliquely asking "Assume your religion and its teachings are false. Are your religion's teachings false? Let's explore that question!"
Even that would be OK if this hypothetical universe's new rules were consistent, but they're not; they seem to go out of their way to also directly contradict Christian beliefs even when it wouldn't be internally consistent. So all I'm asking is that if you decide to cripple your magic system in order to support your ideology, you don't go way further out of your way to also center your book's themes around the part of your magic system you just crippled.
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Solomon divided the Other and the Innocent worlds, like, several thousand years before Christianity appeared and spread (mostly among the Innocent).
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Iirc, the reasoning was explicitly Doylist. Wildbow mentioned at some point that it seemed likely to turn into giant flaming culture wars and so he decided to just kind of ignore the entire glaring topic.
I figured, and he's done a pretty good job with that aspect of it altogether, but he's still very much fighting against Christian morality without really addressing the source of that morality. As one example, how about marriage? Marriage is literally a vow, generally to love and protect your spouse, but I haven't heard of a single practitioner getting forsworn due to a divorce. So maybe practitioners don't make the same vows? It raises all sorts of questions because you really would expect marriage to be just as if not more significant than a familiar. People should get forsworn for cheating on each other all the time.
As another example, hospitality is a big thing in-story, and to break hospitality is to invite loads of bad karma if not worse. How about responsibility to your family? This should be just as important but the universe seems to care very little for it, not penalizing parents for mistreating their children or children for rebelling against their parents.
So, totally separate from the whole god question, the nature of the universe should be inclined towards very traditional morality but isn't, and my assertion is that this is simply because Wildbow created an internally consistent magic system and then slanted it slightly to be more progressive. There's no way that a magic system that wants people to fit into clearly defined roles would like people being genderfluid or polyamorous.
btw I edited my previous comment just as you added that one, if you want to respond to the edit.
This is actually a low-key important part of the story, though I think there's only 1-2 explicit conversations about it. Practitioner couples write up elaborate contracts, complete with punishment provisions and escape clauses, and then swear to follow the contract. They're taught from a young age to never make a promise to anyone else, especially in the heat of love/affection, and then their marriage traditions bend over backwards to ward off the possibility of foreswearing. And this has a bunch of downstream effects on practitioner culture, when every marriage is calculating and transactional and all human relationships are missing a core element of good faith and comradery.
By what standards? I'd say historically, "child abuse" was common and often understood as being necessary.
This seems really uncommon and difficult. It's quite possible that precedent and karma does factor in here.
I actually liked how this was handled with Zed. It took considerable care and effort to essentially submit a "change of identity form" to the spirits.
Well, Helen's family springs to mind, they must fail any reasonable standard.
I agree with your point on marriage, but the point is that even emphasizing it to that degree seems a bit off to me. The universe itself should enforce marriage as its own Ritual, like a familiar ritual, aside from any explicit promises you make as part of it. Marriage is more than a contract and you shouldn't be able to simply define it differently using a few written words and expect the universe to comply, any more than you can just define a Demesnes to remove the part where you have to face challengers.
As far as Zed, it was handled as well as it could be, given that the universe is sympathetic. My issue is with the universe being sympathetic at all. I get that Wildbow doesn't want to write a story where the laws of reality are transphobic (though I'd argue that's all semi-realistic stories lol) and he's doing a good job given that constraint, but it does still produce inconsistencies.
Why? It's primarily Innocent business. Whatever connotations it had before Solomon, it's been thoroughly mundane'd since. It doesn't have to be "like a Familiar ritual" any more than buying a house as a practitioner "has to be like a Demesnes ritual".
Sure, it doesn't have to actually be a Ritual ritual, the point is that it should have quite a lot more weight to it than even something like buying a house, and the terms should not be so easily negotiable.
It does have more weight than buying a house, as for the ease of negotiation, that's a matter of opinion. Even actual Familiar rituals have wiggle room. You can even stretch them enough to have Familiar-Implements, Familiar-Demesnes and the rest of the permutations. If that's allowed, I see no reason why practitioners have to go along with Christian marriage vows word-for-word.
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I don't know that the standard is reasonable by modern sensibilities. Helen was given a dangerous opportunity for incredible power, and the whole schtick of it was that it had to be hidden from the spirits. The Graubard's might be a better example, but even then, they're "fixing" and "improving" their children.
How about that old crone from Pact? She was literally stealing her daughter's lifespan over and over again.
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I'm pretty sure it's either implied or said planily that practitioners don't make the same vows. Also, there's the "EULA argument", as follows: if no one actually reads the EULA when agreeing to it, then no one is actually held to it.
I assume practitioners are selected for being slightly more able to keep the promises they made. But no doubt there are ones who got forsworn for cheating.
The universe appears to subscribe to the patriarchal model of the family where the patriarch rules and calls the shots and the children rebelling is his problem. That's traditional enough if you ask me.
It doesn't though! I would be fine with that, it would be totally consistent, but if the universe actually worked that way then it would punish people for stepping out of line. A man who treated his wife and children with respect would take a karmic hit for it. In my original comment I mentioned female breadwinners. I think if the universe actually were that patriarchal, then there would be a clear and obvious karmic hit for allowing your wife to enter the workplace.
That's if you assume the universe sees being an iron-fist patriarch as a duty and not a right of the head of the family. When it's the latter, the patriarch would just as well get extra good karma for allowing liberties to his charges.
As for "entering the workplace", honestly this seems such a petty issue in the face of the larger corpus of worldwide tradition.
Obviously this is all a matter of how you approach interpretation. You appear to be aiming to dismantle the Watsonian explanations, while I'm aiming to create them.
OK, I feel like this is just the first objection that sprang to mind for you, because it's quite easy to come up with counterarguments. If you really think the universe sees this iron-fist patriarch thing as the right of the man, then you would expect matriarchies to be karmically penalized quite heavily because the woman is ruling over the man. In fact the story has already included a couple of powerful matriarchal families so we can rule that out.
I don't really want to waste more time on this hypothetical. It's quite obvious the universe is not in fact patriarchal the way you suggest it is.
Yes there have always been some women in the workplace, so just replace that with "women in positions of power" or "women joining armies" if you wish to and my point still stands. Even the rare historical examples of the latter 2 should not exist in this setting, due to thousands of years of tradition from before civilization really existed at all.
Yes, this is what it comes down to. I mostly love the magic system, what bothers me is that it has turned into more and more of a vehicle for a very specific and common modern ideology, and as it has done so more and more inconsistencies have arisen in the text. I have no incentive to continue creating ever more ludicrous explanations for the inconsistencies when it's easier to just shrug and say that this is obviously just how the author wanted it and so that's how it is.
Pointing out the inconsistencies is the easiest way for me to gesture at my main point, which is "this author has built a setting explicitly to support his ideology." The inconsistencies make it much more egregious, because it means the author cares more about the ideology than about the setting, but even if it were perfectly consistent I would still take issue with it. This reminds me a bit of the complaints towards The Cold Equations. Even though that book was perfectly logically consistent, people complained that the story itself is engineered such that its conclusion is foreordained. I particularly like sci-fi editor John W Campbell's complaint:
Work too hard to contort your setting into supporting your ideology and I will get annoyed, whatever the ideology. This example is somewhat more sensitive to me though because the Pact/Pale setting has probably my favorite magic system, and I am watching it get eaten alive by banal, generic ideology in real time.
That works both ways, I'll get annoyed when someone works too hard to dismantle a setting based on their dislike of the ideology it's built with.
The premise and the conflict of the story is that it's hard to break pattern and stereotype - but not impossible. Indeed there wouldn't be much of a story if everyone had to go along with the weight of thousands of years of tradition.
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