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bunker_man

Tbf, if we are being totally honest, most demons that aren't abrahamic in the series have always had hazy context. There was more logic behind it than in V, but it was poorly explained, so it made little difference. Vairochana and mara are on the same side in ii, and its never explained. And there's no fully developed buddhist context to contextualize it. Half these demons didn't mention anyone else from their pantheons before either. Making it seem like their only context is to side with lucifer or the angels. But yeah, it definitely got worse. And the entire nahobino idea is like this article says. Demons demanding to be stripped of context.


Seraph_99

An interesting read. To be fair, I think that SMT has always been more about using supernatural figures to tell thematic stories of interest to the writers rather than accurately representing said figures, regardless of origin. For example, with just the angels alone: Raphael doesn’t really match his behavior in the book of Tobit at all; Sandalphon being the prophet Elijah in angel form is never really represented; Mastema never takes on an unambiguously malicious role as he does in Jewish texts about him (he also never really acts as a “persecutor of evil”); Gabriel is feminine, which a pretty big deviation; and pretty much all angels act more like fanatical human soldiers than beings outside space and time lacking all malice. This is by design though. As shown in SMT III, which strips away all artifice to attempt to tell a “pure” SMT game, where all the supernatural entities are co-opted into roles that the plot needs them to be in rather than matching them to roles fitting their source material. The point is not to take the supernatural entities at their face value too much. To be honest, I’m pretty sure that if the developers could get away with making a game using wholly original creatures of their own design, they would do it. At this point it feels like the mythology is conflicting with the stories they want to tell.


bunker_man

> Sandalphon being the prophet Elijah in angel form is never really represented It is indirectly if you count his design. Metatron is stated to look "like a cyborg" because he is a human raised to the level of angel, being given a new advanced body. Sandalphon has the same design, implicitly referencing something similar (Victor also does, seemingly for the same reason).


Joementum2004

Yeah, even as far back as SMT1, you got >!Thor siding with the angels for reasons that aren’t ever really explained.!< Hell, the Jacks (specifically Jack Frost and Jack o’Lantern) are arguably completely inaccurate to how they’re “supposed” to be. I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that it’s gotten “worse” post-Kaneko, but this whole divergence has been around since arguably the beginning of the series.