Monthly Create-A-Servant Contest

[BnEl15]

Hmm, I think I might've forgotten some of my old social studies lessons.

This following idea is a convoluted one, and I apologize if I can't describe them better, but hear me out here.
Say country B adapts mythology from country A, but adds a bunch of, let's say... OCs. These OCs aren't originally present in country A's mythos, and while their origins are vague, one popular theory states that they might be ancient local deities from country B whose actual legend had been completely lost until their reappearance in that "new" adaptation (country B "retcons" them as always being present in the OG country A mythos). Does that count as syncretization or assimilation?

[pinetree]

Syncretism is a cultural phenomenon and doesn't have to be limited to religion. A group adapting another group's religion to fit their own culture counts, the lack of an obvious second faith being mixed in doesn't really matter because the insertion of these new characters into the myths — regardless of origin — is already a reflection of both cultures interacting.

The actual sociological definition of syncretism might be more restrictive than that (I have no idea) but I won't be.

Something new being created by either the interaction between two cultures/ideas or the assimilation of a culture/idea by another. That's what I'm looking for, you guys don't have to worry so much about the minutiae.

[BnEl15]

Hoho, alright then.
This won't be easy, but I might have something to work with in that case...

[Random]

Hmm, I think I might've forgotten some of my old social studies lessons.

This following idea is a convoluted one, and I apologize if I can't describe them better, but hear me out here.
Say country B adapts mythology from country A, but adds a bunch of, let's say... OCs. These OCs aren't originally present in country A's mythos, and while their origins are vague, one popular theory states that they might be ancient local deities from country B whose actual legend had been completely lost until their reappearance in that "new" adaptation (country B "retcons" them as always being present in the OG country A mythos). Does that count as syncretization or assimilation?

Not qualified, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think that's technically academically neither, and would instead be considered appropriation - it's not assimilation unless country A is actually culture A who is a minority in country B, and syncretism implies a combination that isn't occurring. Not that it matters all too much, but still.

[Comun]

bro if i can be very very honest I understand nothing from the prompt. can someone make a tl;dr or something so it's easier to digest?

People already tried and failed to explain the core idea, so I'll just run examples instead to see if that makes sense.

Example A

Brazil has a sizable African population due to almost 4 centuries of European colonizers bringing African slaves to the new world. However, most slaves were still very devout to their Candomblé religion and their hardass Christian slavers wouldn't let them practice their heretic ceremonies if they could help. The Afro-Brazilian solution to that was inventing Umbanda, a Brazilian syncretic religion that associated each Candomblé god with a Catholic Saints so they could convince the white men that the names of their gods were just their regional names for the saints, enabling them to continue their rituals as normal because they were "worshipping the saints".

So any Umbanda

God/Saint

orixá

you can pick is automatically a syncretism sheet. You can even cheat yourself out of having to create a personality section since there are already canon versions of

Martha

Obá

orixá of turbulent waters and

Georgius

Ogum

orixá of iron, combat, and hard work. Try searching Martha Alter or Georgius Alter on Pixiv for an easy faceclaim maybe. It's been 7 years, someone must have drawn that.

Then for the Umbanda lore, you can say the saints chose to wear the role of Candomblé Divine Spirits out of mercy to the suffering people who wished for them. That gives every orixá an automatic qualification for Pretender but try fitting them in more regular and specific classes, only busting the Pretender card if you really need to. Their normal Saint forms favor specific classes instead of unnecessarily jumping straight to Ruler, don't they? Not to mention the 30% chance that canon will already give us a Latin American colonization-based Pretender this month in the form of Hernan Cortés's infamous Quetzalcoatl stunt.

Example B

Buddhism is highly widespread in East Asia. India, China, and Japan are notorious for how they accepted this wave of Buddhism by associating the Buddhas with gods from their own local religions. This means you can sorta identify which Hindu god is which Shinto god by looking at which Buddha they both are. Type-Moon loves exploiting these connections. See how Raikou is regarded as Indra's daughter, for the most extreme example we have.

Then we have Alexander the Great's conquests unifying Greece, Egypt, and India. Check Asterism's Greco-Buddhism links for more details. The point I'm trying to make here is that there is a direct line connecting Japan and Egypt. And we have never seen Ra's design, unless we count his Pharaoh proxy Ozymandias as it for whatever reason. In conclusion, Ra can still be Tamamo with a silly bird hat.

Example C

Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy is a New Age religion famous for blending multiple beliefs together, mostly notably tying Buddhism to Western ideas. One of the most important figures in Theosophy is Maitreya, described in classic Buddhism as the future Buddha who would eventually appear to elevate humanity to a new level of knowledge. A huge topic of debate within Theosophy is who will become Maitreya. A major theory proposes that Maitreya will incarnate to Earth as a London man.

So who could be this London man in the Type-Moon universe? Who revealed the greater truth of Buddhism to the world? To answer that we need to know what is Nasu's version of the Buddhist truth. I reason that enlightenment is the act of seeing beyond Earth's texture. So this hypothetical should be about a big-name British man that told humanity what the universe looks like outside of our domain. The man's name is Douglas Adams. Through his multi-parter ludonarrative masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Buddha Maitreya gave humanity its first glimpse into the greater truth of the universe through a lighthearted window for more pleasant studies and easier comprehension.

I hope these random ideas have been at least clarifying, if not inspiring. Good luck with your sheet if you do decided to make one.

[Alexcoene]

The point I'm trying to make here is that there is a direct line connecting Japan and Egypt. And we have never seen Ra's design, unless we count his Pharaoh proxy Ozymandias as it for whatever reason. In conclusion, Ra can still be Tamamo with a silly bird hat.

So Ra is Ozy's cute little sister. I see, it all make sense.

[Serra]

and serra, how dare you invoke the sheet i dont even list in my own compilation

I needed an evil great enough to rival the one I was about to unleash (?)

[DracoScribe]

I go to sleep and I wake up to two Servant sheets and two pages.

...not the biggest amount of stuff to read to wake up to, but still. XD

Don't worry, Spelror.
I lived my whole life in a place commonly attributed as a hotbed of syncretism, assimilation, and acculturation, and still can't come up with shit.

Saaaaaaame. My first thought when I saw the syncretism prompt was "Hey! I live in a hotbed of that stuff! I can use this as an excuse to finally make a Filipino sheet!" only to be reminded that researching Filipino stuff is ass for the very same reason...

Yes I know about aswangproject in terms of easy-to-access info for pre-colonization myths...but that doesn't help in actually finding something that not only matches the prompt, but will inspire me to make a sheet out of 'em! I'm having trouble looking for what syncretised with what. Though that could just be my terrible Google-fu so who knows...

Getting ready to read Random's sheet

Looks pretty normal to me. :V

Okay maybe not so just for the sake of reading a sheet, but still.

Something new being created by either the interaction between two cultures/ideas or the assimilation of a culture/idea by another. That's what I'm looking for, you guys don't have to worry so much about the minutiae.

Well I'm definitely making something new out of combining two things with the idea I settled on for the moment...I just hope I can bullshit its existence.

People already tried and failed to explain the core idea, so I'll just run examples instead to see if that makes sense.

Example A

Brazil has a sizable African population due to almost 4 centuries of European colonizers bringing African slaves to the new world. However, most slaves were still very devout to their Candomblé religion and their hardass Christian slavers wouldn't let them practice their heretic ceremonies if they could help. The Afro-Brazilian solution to that was inventing Umbanda, a Brazilian syncretic religion that associated each Candomblé god with a Catholic Saints so they could convince the white men that the names of their gods were just their regional names for the saints, enabling them to continue their rituals as normal because they were "worshipping the saints".

So any Umbanda

God/Saint

orixá

you can pick is automatically a syncretism sheet. You can even cheat yourself out of having to create a personality section since there are already canon versions of

Martha

Obá

orixá of turbulent waters and

Georgius

Ogum

orixá of iron, combat, and hard work. Try searching Martha Alter or Georgius Alter on Pixiv for an easy faceclaim maybe. It's been 7 years, someone must have drawn that.

Then for the Umbanda lore, you can say the saints chose to wear the role of Candomblé Divine Spirits out of mercy to the suffering people who wished for them. That gives every orixá an automatic qualification for Pretender but try fitting them in more regular and specific classes, only busting the Pretender card if you really need to. Their normal Saint forms favor specific classes instead of unnecessarily jumping straight to Ruler, don't they? Not to mention the 30% chance that canon will already give us a Latin American colonization-based Pretender this month in the form of Hernan Cortés's infamous Quetzalcoatl stunt.

Example B

Buddhism is highly widespread in East Asia. India, China, and Japan are notorious for how they accepted this wave of Buddhism by associating the Buddhas with gods from their own local religions. This means you can sorta identify which Hindu god is which Shinto god by looking at which Buddha they both are. Type-Moon loves exploiting these connections. See how Raikou is regarded as Indra's daughter, for the most extreme example we have.

Then we have Alexander the Great's conquests unifying Greece, Egypt, and India. Check Asterism's Greco-Buddhism links for more details. The point I'm trying to make here is that there is a direct line connecting Japan and Egypt. And we have never seen Ra's design, unless we count his Pharaoh proxy Ozymandias as it for whatever reason. In conclusion, Ra can still be Tamamo with a silly bird hat.

Example C

Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy is a New Age religion famous for blending multiple beliefs together, mostly notably tying Buddhism to Western ideas. One of the most important figures in Theosophy is Maitreya, described in classic Buddhism as the future Buddha who would eventually appear to elevate humanity to a new level of knowledge. A huge topic of debate within Theosophy is who will become Maitreya. A major theory proposes that Maitreya will incarnate to Earth as a London man.

So who could be this London man in the Type-Moon universe? Who revealed the greater truth of Buddhism to the world? To answer that we need to know what is Nasu's version of the Buddhist truth. I reason that enlightenment is the act of seeing beyond Earth's texture. So this hypothetical should be about a big-name British man that told humanity what the universe looks like outside of our domain. The man's name is Douglas Adams. Through his multi-parter ludonarrative masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Buddha Maitreya gave humanity its first glimpse into the greater truth of the universe through a lighthearted window for more pleasant studies and easier comprehension.

I hope these random ideas have been at least clarifying, if not inspiring. Good luck with your sheet if you do decided to make one.

Hmm. That first example is tempting, but for now I'mma just think about it while I'm working on my current idea...

Demetrius of Thellasoniki by Vance: Uh...I don't get what's going on... Okay I kinda get what's going on, in that Demetrius was subjected to something like the one time Demeter was burning away the mortality of an infant as well as some kind of reincarnation thing involving her that I didn't know about...but I'm just left wondering by the end of it why is it Demetrius specifically the target instead of someone else, going by the end of reading "An Ear of Grain Cut in Silence" section, "What? That's it? But I have so many questions!" Though admittedly there's a chance it could just be me being a dum-dum and it could just be answered by looking up Demetrius...but still. That's how I felt reading the sheet.

Serra's Archer: ...you have now also tempted me to basically rip off your idea with something similar/a literal counterpart

And I admittedly also feel...a little better about my idea, but I still feel like I'm bullshitting things. Idk. That low self-confidence man.

Anyways! A very fun sheet, and by fun I mean very lighthearted compared to the previous sheets so far (of which there are two). I recognized some of the legends mentioned throughout Archer's anecdotes, mainly Hou Yi's part (seriously...pretending to be both him and Chang'e? You're having way too much fun messing with your apprentice Archer), but didn't really actually properly figure it out. Interesting choice to go with "the star name"Apophis instead of "the 'god' name"Apep but I think I get why after looking it up. My favorite part of the sheet's the personailty. Just wild in a goofy way.

Oh. And just so you know Archer, I prefer the second ascension.

Because I have a bias for monsters. XD

[jishara]

Hey, is it okay for me to do a sheet where in actual history it's syncretism syncretism but I justify it as not actually syncretism thanks to Fateverse shenanigans but something else ?

[pinetree]

I guess so? Seems fine

[Drangle]

I mean, that's kind of the point? Unless I'm wildly misunderstanding what you're asking.

[TQG Imaginatorious]

Oh my god!!! I just realized that my Nezha could have qualified for this!!!!! Now I regret reworking her so highly Wait, I can still do her just in a different class! Or do her dad instead! Finally, a idea after days of no progress!

[Spelror]

I needed an evil great enough to rival the one I was about to unleash (?)

let us do this.

[Serra]

@DracoScribe: Thanks for enjoying my Archer so much! I'm glad that my sheet gave some inspiration and made you feel happier about your ideas And yep, I thought it'd be a waste to not have a fun giant monster form for a sun eater lol

Interesting choice to go with "the star name"Apophis instead of "the 'god' name"Apep but I think I get why after looking it up.

ngl, star logic aside, as soon as you pointed this out I thought "ah shit, I should probably still have both of those names in there, though, shouldn't I?" lol. So, I'll be adding the god name too, after all

[Baron Magnus]

I've voluntarily removed Hermes Trismegistus from the contest. Someone pointed out that I shouldn't make drastic overhauls of an already posted sheet for the contest and I, honestly, agree. So it's gone. As I've rescinded my second entry, this one will no longer occur either.

[Alexcoene]

I feel like that Synchretism skill is very unecessary, since that applies to a lot of figures, including Canon servants who don't have something like that, and his Trismegistus' effect of just getting fame boost is kinda boring for something that ought to be really personal with that name. And I don't see why Emerald Tablet would count as a separate skill instead of part of his Noble Phantasm, but I like its effect and the details you put in his class skills.

[Baron Magnus]

I feel like that Synchretism skill is very unecessary, since that applies to a lot of figures, including Canon servants who don't have something like that, and his Trismegistus' effect of just getting fame boost is kinda boring for something that ought to be really personal with that name. And I don't see why Emerald Tablet would count as a separate skill instead of part of his Noble Phantasm, but I like its effect and the details you put in his class skills.

I did emerald tablet as a separate skill because... honestly it just felt easier to write that way. It's inherently part of the NP and requires it.

As for Syncretism and Trismegistus.... honestly I was considering going back to the latter and reworking it but ultimately decided against it. Having a homeland bonus, while kinda boring, is pretty significant. The former skill was done to signify the core personality, the human hermes, was more or less gone with only vestiges filled in by the other components remaining due to syncretism.

[DracoScribe]

Hermes Trimegistus by Baron Magnus: 'eeeey! I didn't think I'd see this so soon! I was actually looking forward to this when you mentioned you'd be doing him over on CaS. I have a fondness for the god thanks to Persona 3. Which...might be a problem? And by that, I mean while reading this, I found I was being way more critical on it than your other sheets, despite me not having that much knowledge of Trismegistus since I haven't looked into him (yet). Not so much on the skills made unlike Alexcoene. I'm fine with Trismegistus giving home yurf boosts on anything that ain't their turf, because well iirc the boost is very VERY significant, and that Syncreticism exists as a signifyer of his "core personality" (though I will say that maybe it could've been renamed to something that isn't just "syncretism"? For the reasons Alexcoene pointed out). I was being critical of how the story was being told and hoping, hoping, hoping so much to like it. And I really wish I did. I want to because it's not only Hermes, but Hermes Trismegistus. But by the end of it, all I just kept thinking about was "so many typos and errors" and "wait why is he like that". Not only that, I think I was expecting some of his trickery to still remain even with all the syncretism that more than likely has "stripped it away". Which just sucks. So...basically, as much as it really pains me to say this, I didn't like this sheet too much. It wasn't a bad sheet, that much I can say, seeing as I'm fine with all the skills and I like the NP by virtue of me going "oh hey you thought of one that is cool and feels like you made it make sense. Nice". But somehow the rest...it wasn't what I was hoping for, even if I'm not sure what I was hoping for exactly.

...again i really really wish i didnt feel that way and maybe ill like it better with a reread after some time past and my fondness for it from persona isn't filtering my view too much yeah right...but that was my impression. X/ and honestly I'm still torn between not mentioning it at all and saying it because I wanna be honest and admit it to myself even if I wish it wasn't the case.

Tldr: I think I had WAY too high expectations, and my fondness for a certain depiction of the god, might have ruined my first reading experience/impression of your sheet. All I know for sure is I wasn't really sold on it the first time.

[RoydGolden]

Hermes Trimegistus by Baron Magnus: 'eeeey! I didn't think I'd see this so soon! I was actually looking forward to this when you mentioned you'd be doing him over on CaS. I have a fondness for the god thanks to Persona 3. Which...might be a problem? And by that, I mean while reading this, I found I was being way more critical on it than your other sheets, despite me not having that much knowledge of Trismegistus since I haven't looked into him (yet). Not so much on the skills made unlike Royd. I'm fine with Trismegistus giving home yurf boosts on anything that ain't their turf, because well iirc the boost is very VERY significant, and that Syncreticism exists as a signifyer of his "core personality" (though I will say that maybe it could've been renamed to something that isn't just "syncretism"? For the reasons Royd pointed out). I was being critical of how the story was being told and hoping, hoping, hoping so much to like it. And I really wish I did. I want to because it's not only Hermes, but Hermes Trismegistus. But by the end of it, all I just kept thinking about was "so many typos and errors" and "wait why is he like that". Not only that, I think I was expecting some of his trickery to still remain even with all the syncretism that more than likely has "stripped it away". Which just sucks. So...basically, as much as it really pains me to say this, I didn't like this sheet too much. It wasn't a bad sheet, that much I can say, seeing as I'm fine with all the skills and I like the NP by virtue of me going "oh hey you thought of one that is cool and feels like you made it make sense. Nice". But somehow the rest...it wasn't what I was hoping for, even if I'm not sure what I was hoping for exactly.

...again i really really wish i didnt feel that way and maybe ill like it better with a reread after some time past and my fondness for it from persona isn't filtering my view too much yeah right...but that was my impression. X/ and honestly I'm still torn between not mentioning it at all and saying it because I wanna be honest and admit it to myself even if I wish it wasn't the case.

Tldr: I think I had WAY too high expectations, and my fondness for a certain depiction of the god, might have ruined my first reading experience/impression of your sheet. All I know for sure is I wasn't really sold on it the first time.

...But I haven't commented on the sheet? Think you're confusing me for Alex.

[DracoScribe]

GAH I MIXED THE THREADS I WAS LOOKING AT WHILE I WAS TYPING.

excuse me while i edit it and then hide under a blanket in embarassment...