Nasuverse Cosmology

[montypython]

Although I am a big fan of various Type-Moon works such as Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night, one thing that always nagged at the back of my mind was the massively convoluted cosmological system used in the Nasuverse works. Despite not being the first storyverse to have large-scale intricate rules (Middle Earth being a good example of such), in some ways the thing that bugs me is that however complicated the Nasuverse cosmology is, it seems doesn't seem to be as well-balanced or systematized as Tolkein's works or Star Wars for that matter. It gets to the point sometimes where I feel Occam's Razor would have a field day here. Just why do some authors feel the need to constantly add overly complicated elements to a storyverse just to flesh it out?

(FYI, here's a link to one of the major Nasuverse sources as a point of reference).

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Convoluted cosmology? Well, yeah, it's kinda convoluted I suppose, in some ways. But you have to remember that the two largest and most well known Nasuverse settings, Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night have multiple paths and sometimes even contradict themselves a little at some points. And yes, shit gets really complicated, especially when you bring things like ORT into the mixture. But that feels right, when you consider that the world is meant to be given a feeling like "there is shit out there more powerful and unworldly and insane than you can possibly imagine", so even when you have Dead Apostles, and True Ancestors, and people with Mystic Eyes of Death Perception running around cutting shit up, you know that in comparison to other things out there, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

But honestly, yeah, the world itself is very convoluted if you think about it too much, and some of the fanwankery that goes on can be kinda ridiculous. But I'm just in it for the stories, the character interaction, and the awesome fight scenes. Or in the case of Kara no Kyoukai, "one-sided massacres".

I'm quite enjoying Kara no Kyoukai, right now. Pity I'll probably have to wait a few months to see Oblivion Recorder.

[Ford Prefect]

The thing about Kinoko Nasu's setting is that, strictly speaking, it doesn't really have a unified cosmology. It has a series of different human cosmologies which are interacting at the behest of the Akasha. It's actually very difficult to see much of this stuff as being more than a series of metaphors being brought into existence via the will of a god-like force. For example, Fate/stay night differentiates between 'real' people like Arturia and Heracles, and 'fictional' people like Sasaki Kojiro, implying that Arthurian mythology and Greek mythology actually did happen; this is further suggested by the nature of Arturia's summoning. In all, this is pretty weird, so it's probably not really advisable to look at it on a very wide scale. It doesn't actually fit together coherently, and i don't think it's supposed to. the Nasuverse has something akin to Consensus from World of Darkness, after all, on a variety of scales.

Also Python, I apologise for not getting back to you on that question you sent me a while ago.

[Shinova]

Nasu doesn't help with his wording, but I imagine that if his language was much more direct and less round-about his universe would seem much less confusing and perhaps even make sense?

As for why it's so complicated, well I guess that's part of fleshing out a backstory, and the histories and systems of real life can get pretty complicated too. But like I said, the vague wording of Nasu's language probably has a lot to do why Typemoon-verse is so hard to grasp.

[Ford Prefect]

Even if thel anguage was less flowery, the simple fact is that Nasu relies a lot on pretty obscure concepts. There's no real way to make some of this stuff easier to understand via the usage of plain english.

[montypython]

The thing about Kinoko Nasu's setting is that, strictly speaking, it doesn't really have a unified cosmology. It has a series of different human cosmologies which are interacting at the behest of the Akasha. It's actually very difficult to see much of this stuff as being more than a series of metaphors being brought into existence via the will of a god-like force. For example, Fate/stay night differentiates between 'real' people like Arturia and Heracles, and 'fictional' people like Sasaki Kojiro, implying that Arthurian mythology and Greek mythology actually did happen; this is further suggested by the nature of Arturia's summoning. In all, this is pretty weird, so it's probably not really advisable to look at it on a very wide scale. It doesn't actually fit together coherently, and i don't think it's supposed to. the Nasuverse has something akin to Consensus from World of Darkness, after all, on a variety of scales.

Also Python, I apologise for not getting back to you on that question you sent me a while ago.

That's a good point about the Nasuverse being different cosmologies in a sense, hadn't thought about it that way. Having read many different storyverses and dealing with all the assorted issues regarding backstory construction and details, complexity in itself isn't automatically a problem, but if something's was/is supposed to fit together, using Occam's Razor can be very helpful as compared to continuously adding more obscure concepts to flesh out a setting/universe. The descriptions of the different realities in the Nasuverse interacting with Akasha in certain ways reminds me of an abstracted presentation of quantum mechanical concepts done in a spiritualistic fashion, which is something that seems unnecessarily balky at times. Indeed, it was the likeable characters and settings that kept my interest in Nasu's works more than anything else.

Feel free to take your time if you couldn't reply earlier, I'm still making lots of story revisions so that's going to take quite a while to sort.

[Ford Prefect]

I mean, when it comes down to it, there's basically nothing which Gilgamesh doesn't have in his vault under Uruk. He has katanas and claymores and a flying saucer in there. It's not like he actually went and collected them all: the Throne of Heroes grants them to him on the basis of his cultural significance. It's hard to reconcile that with a properly functioning history full of actual mythological firgures doing stuff.