Thursday DE: let me just check the alethiometer real quick

[needsmoreresearch]

How does your character feel about horoscopes and astrology? What about other forms of divination? Does divination play a role in your character's canon?

Comments

[holdingacat]

Astrology is pretty serious stuff in Night Vale. It helps that the horoscope is less 'you have a big project coming up in your life, learn to work with others' and more 'I think they saw you, Aries. Hold still. They cannot see you if you do not move. Shhhhhh! Don’t move! Don’t move! Don’t– Nope, they saw you. So long, Aries!'

...

You know. Cheerful stuff like that. >.>

Also, I know fortune telling is a thing in Night Vale (Josie Ortiz does it as a young girl) but it doesn't come up much as a plot point... so far.

[cottoncandypink]

Wilford doesn’t pay much attention to it, but it’s 100% a thing.

As for it’s role in canon, well. His girlfriend dives too deep with it and gets eaten by an evil house.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

As one does.

[cottoncandypink]

Natch.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato believes firmly that horoscopes, astrology, crystal balls, etc, are all complete nonsense and usually hoaxes.

That said, he does put some stock in his canon's Big Important Prophecy, which seems to exist in one form or another in every world in the Adventure multiverse and is, per the novels, believed to have been written by the Crests themselves. It seems to be a semi-complete record of important multiversal events, and predicts, among other things, Apocalymon's creation, the arrival of the Chosen, Takeru killing Devimon and Hikari killing Vamdemon, Vamdemon's return, and Taichi and Yamato unlocking their ultimate evolutions.

It's been proven accurate enough times that Yamato puts a fair amount of trust in it, but he's cagey about definitively calling it proof that destiny exists or anything like that.


Eden, meanwhile, has no idea about horoscopes and astrology, but his canon has the Book of Prophecy, which is apparently a perfectly accurate record of the future that cannot be changed in any way -- although KH3 seems to be hinging partly on the question of whether that might not be the case after all.

In this case, though, the Book isn't really divination of any kind: It's written by the Master of Masters, whose memory just sort of goes in both directions, so he's not predicting the future so much as remembering things that will have happened to him.

[death_gone_mad]

There's actually a skill called divination in the game, but it isn't anything to do with fortune telling. It is more like using a divining rod to find water, but in this case it is finding divine energies (because gods bleed the stuff apparently) and using it to craft uhhh... things with weird effects... boons, signs, and portents and then there are these weird sort of like pocket dimensions, and by pocket I mean really small and not just a mini universe, that you can use to harvest certain resources.

I haven't thought much about what this means re:Amascut's abilities or the consequences of her getting an actual injury that's more than just a flesh wound, but much of it is covered by "she's a goddess, lol" most likely.

As for fortune-telling style divination, it exists in canon but as far as predicting the future with it, it doesn't work. Mostly. There might be bits of it here and there for narrative convenience but canon avoids it. The worst of it is that the player character might be temporally displaced as heck and might have a destiny in that way according to other temporally displaced characters?

But, yes, there are tarot card readers and crystal ball gazers. Amascut hates that type of divination for the most part because she abhors the concept of predestination. The other kind, though, she's fine with. Certain folk will be creating weapons of mass destruction using it further along in the canon. Amascut wasn't behind it (in an obvious way anyhow) but she didn't do anything to stop it either.

Fairy Fixit doesn't care about it unless it involves asking the gods for guidance.

[have_no_mercy]

Tess doesn't really think much about horoscopes and astrology, but canonwise destiny is everywhere.

Rose thinks astrology is fun! She's not sure if it's real or not.

Kylo doesn't need to think about it.

Creed thinks it's full of crap and proof of how gullible some people are.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

As far as I can tell, astrology isn't relevant to anything in Overwatch. None of the characters even have canon birthdays because they'd make the timeline (already tenuous) harder to work with. Bastion considers it a weird superstition.

In Homestuck, the trolls' signs are the reason the Western zodiac exists on Earth, but it's more of a cosmic birthmark than anything with mystical significance. Aradia doesn't care much about either sense of it. Destiny is all over the place, but foretelling it is mostly up to players with the Seer class, or certain Prospit dreamers who get good at interpreting the Skaian clouds.

Fallen London has a weird form of horoscopes based on the movements of bat flocks on the cavern roof. I'm not sure if anyone besides Madame Shoshana understands it, but she uses that to make weirdly specific predictions. (Whether the predictions come true is not specified.) Thurlow doesn't know what to make of it.

[dwellsinthedetails]

One of Akira's friends is a scarily accurate fortune teller!

The Metaverse also relies heavily on cognition to function. If you believe a thing to be true, then it's true. This covers everything from 'that gun looks real enough to shoot bullets' to 'of course a cat can turn into a bus, why wouldn't it?' to... well. That would be spoilers.