Topic on Talk:Ortiz Lopez

From Blaseball Wiki

Thanks for taking the time to write this all up so thoughtfully. These are definitely difficult topics to grapple with, in terms of representation. I hope you'll forgive me for nitpicking a few small things and leaving the bigger questions to people who have thought about them more.

First I want to poke the greek pop mythology aspect. My general take on that is that Hades and the greek pantheon in general exist in our fan wiki blaseball world- that would mean gorgons, harpies, Aphrodite, and a lot of other fantastical things from that mythology (or whatever distorted pop version of it we've accepted) are just part of everyday life. If that's the case, I'm not sure there's a good reason to exclude gorgons from any particular backgrounds- and even if there is, that's part of why Ortiz's specific origin is left vague. We tried to write the article in a way that made the question of "How did a gorgon wind up in a Nahua tribe" narratively unimportant- although it is blaseball, so you could write that fanfic if you wanted. I understand, though, that your problem is less with the presence of both things and more with the integration (or lack thereof) between the two.

Another thing I wanted to mention is the Jesus comparison. This specifically is something we were acutely aware of going into this- we didn't want her to Literally Be Xiuhcoatl, or imply that she's directly its offspring or whatever. My reading was that she simply feels a spiritual connection and draws from that- making it less analogous to "Son of God" and more analogous to how any Christian mother might relate to the Virgin Mary. Admittedly, the desire to make her ~mysterious~ may have ultimately undermined that to some degree, but I think the vagueness was intended to allow for a deeper connection without specifying its exact nature in a way that would be problematic.

I know these are both minor and kind of tangential to your points at large, but they are both coming up pretty often so I felt it pertinent to give some insight into what we were thinking. I also know that our two main research people are writing up more revisions and a response that should address your core criticisms, so even if I'm nitpicking, you'll have something more substantial to read over soon that should hopefully do some work to resolve some of the problems you mentioned.