Children of the Gods (Important poll #12306)

…Do we even know that for sure? I guessed that while both have half of the Essence as their souls the only one ending up with control over the power would be the Bearer, meaning the Bestower would be cut off from using the power of their own soul.

The Bestower and the Bearer are both born with the Essence itself as their souls, until the time of their 18th summer solstice. On that night, at the peak of the solstice, their powers would come alive and the Bestower would transfer the Essence into the Bearer. The Bestowers were not created to be able to withstand the Essence, so the transfer would occur willingly or not. The Bearers would then be overcome with the power of the Essence and use it to their own accord.

…Doesn’t give us much answer about that tbh…

Yeap, you give us many reasons why you feel your MCs are nearly as powerful as you would like them to be. But you also very arbitrarily ignore certain factors about the story and the circumstances your MCs are in.

  • First, our MCs does not know they are supposed to be the most powerful being on the face of the Universe until they are told, and yet you seem to take that fact for granted from the beginning of the story. The point is : you are not suppose to feel like a God/dess or something. Your MCs believes they are a “normal” demigod (Even if we as readers know better).
  • Second, all instances of us using our magic/fighting abilities took place either in flashbacks or before the Blocker that was put on us was removed. Which means that what you seem interprete as something trivial, like escaping fully-trained and possessed Seekers for 3 years, is not trivial at all.
    Because we did without training or knowledge, or any sort of supernatural power at all. Indeed, the blocker cut us off from our godly source, and the bearer only has access to the essence once they are 18.
    So the power we have access to during the first chapters of the story are the scraps of the scraps of our powers. Basically, it is true that it does not seems impressive out of context, but if you pay attention, it was quite a feat.
  • Also, while summoning the power seem to require focus, the magic never fails when our MCs call it. It knows, and bends to our will even without formal training or theoretical knowledge. So even if the displays of power are small in size they are great finesse and complexity.

So objectively, our character is not weak. Really, they are not. They are probably more powerful than most, if not all other demi-gods. Our problem is that we are untrained, and outsiders (feared ones at that).

However I totally agree about the frustration that your MCs might feel at being so damn so powerless in their own lives. You are given no choice, nor any opportunities to better/change/decide your fate.
So the citizens of Olympus treat you coldly out of fear, or superstition, or suspicion. And the Gods treat you like they would any other demigod : like a servant. What else are demi-gods meant to be if not loyal servants of the gods. And no they don’t really fear you. Not until you are 18. And then they can bribe you with immortality (in your current form, yesyesyes… let’s not go back on that particular subject because it is still better than being dead).And if all fails, there is the Aeson kill switch (poor Aeson).

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About the powerless I am talking Out of character. Mara doesn’t feel powerless she is far secure of have a chance of win and manipulate all in her favor. Capitan powerless is @idonotlikeusernames lol. Mara is sexy cute a good magician and totally focused in gain power and vengeance against OLympus.
Edit However myself as a player feel all contrary. And feel text maybe should be little less unfair in how shit black is all in Olympus for us and How perfect is Aeson life.

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The problem there being that my mc really doesn’t like his current form, at least not compared to both of his brothers who are taller and in the case of Aeson also far better looking than he is and if that “immortality” is going to prevent us from altering our appearance with our supposed “full” powers ever, then it is pretty much worthless.

The point is that if anything after that blocker removal we are seemingly weaker, not stronger, at least for the moment.
Perhaps we would have needed a couple of months in order to fully recover and surpass our old peak strength, but it is abundantly clear that we are not getting the time we need to properly recover.

Maybe not, but it did prevent us from training and getting much better all that time, which is why we are currently so inferior to Aeson even when it comes to things other than height and looks.

Unfortunately they only seem to make us about equal to an average demigod at best when we must compete against the elite.

I don’t agree with you on the complexity there. In any case if my mc is forever prevented from using his “full” powers once he has them from altering his own body and appearance in any way it all mostly becomes moot anyway.

Yes, most of our problems come from being utterly untrained and uninformed, but the end result of that is that it does make us weaker and less able than our competitors in those “trials” and of course Aeson in particular. Potential doesn’t matter all that much if it would take us years to train it, since that is time we are clearly not going to get now, so we must get by with whatever “tricks” and “hacks” we pick up in the field, but they will never beat comprehensive training.

The most frustrating thing is that the other demigods, particularly the Scooby Gang and Aeson treat us exactly the same, like servants, when they are at least supposed to be our equals, even now.

Not really, if it means being stuck forever with his demigod “body” as it is that “bribe” is not at all appealing to my mc.

Yes, particularly Aeson. And, like I said before, even if we are on par with the average demigod currently, well it’s not the average ones that we’ll be forced to compete against in any case.

Yep, thanks for mentioning that, but that is just one of the things I take as an example of our poor control, certainly poor enough that my mc isn’t willing to even try and perform plastic surgery on himself even after getting his full powers, or else as an example that at least magically we have actually gotten weaker/worse due to the effects of the blocker removal. If that is the case then we are plain not given the time (for our “magic”) to recover from the effects of the recent blocker removal.

It’s funny but for me it is quite the opposite!
My MC is a little wistful when she thinks about Aeson and the life he’s had. How he was “safely” on Olympus, how he has family and friends, even if he had to deal with the gods. Because utlimately, she feels lonely but she doesn’t kow how to trust anymore.

But as a person, I deeply pity Aeson. Just as much as I may pity my MC.
Because, yes, we were all alone and hunted and afraid. We had to do terrible (how terrible depends on your headcanon but still) things to ensure our survival, and we suffered a lot of loss from a young age.

But so did Aeson. He lost his mother very young, to sickness, and it is terrible burden to watch someone you love wither away. Then he was sent to Olympus to be trained. Olympus, not the underworld, where Hades resides. They separated him from his father in hope of bending him to the Gods’ Will, and they tried to teach him to be a obedient and lethal servant to the gods. And all the while he had the intimate knowledge that they would always consider that his true value lies only in the fact that he is your weakness, and the only thing that can kill you should you prove to be disobedient.
He is the embodiment that you don’t need to be alone to be lonely, and that for all of his fame and glory, he wear chains sturdier than ours!:cry:

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It’s the difference between show and tell.
We are told that we are powerful or will be and on level with normal demi-gods now, but we are mostly presented with the execptional demi-gods and so feel weak in comparison.

Actually I do feel like the gods fear us, and that is not a feeling that makes my poor mc feel safe and secure and powerful. (There is nothing more dangerous than a scared person).

Magic still get the short end of the stick post blocker. In the trial the spell we can use is specifially said to not do exactly what we wanted it to,.

Those lack of oppertunities and control over the fate is exactly where the feeling of being powerless comes from. It doesn’t matter what our powerleves is, if we can’t use that power for anything.

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I would again like to repeat again that I don’t necessary think that that feeling of powerlessness is a bad thing or bad writing. Underdog stories are after all tried and true and when we are what we are, a lot needs to be heaped upon our MC in order to make us an underdog - in that direction I think @Rohie is making the right call.

It is just that those tropes, which an underdog makes, are depressing and thus nobody should really be surprised when some readers take that to its logical conclusion.

It is also important to remember that different readers brings different emotions to the text, so what they chooses to interprent as important to a story or which emotion of the MC’s they latch on to make a story feel different.
.
I feel powerless because lack of control and knowledge are things which in real makes me feel powerless and so those scene in the text resonate stronger with me than the random burst or power or the victory of an amazon in combat (because combat is not something that important to me in real life) thus it adds to the powerlessness. We all brings our hang ups to a text which colour what importance we place on what we read.

And then we are not even getting into character/roleplaying and how that effects the story being told. (Ie, someone very into roleplaying will feel frustrated when they are forced to act out of character which they will sometimes, because as awesome as these games and this story is, there is a limit to what can be written into a text.)

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When you are 18 you can change that. So long as you don’t change the nature of your being (human), you can change its form. Like super plastic surgery. Without the pain or the scientific limitations.

I genuinely don’t know what you are talking about. And re-read the texte. I am not being snarky or anything I don’t know what you are talking about.

Again, what are you talking about. Is it how your MC feels? If so, you can headcanon anything.

I did not go back to re-read everything but I do remember out off the top of my mind that our MC can do at least two thing that require finesse : invisibility and growing vines (before the death of GF/BF/Bestie)

Invisibility can work only two way: either you bend the light spectrum, in that case long and well enough that trained non-human individuals cannot even spot you, or you get inside of someone’s mind and make them believe that your are not there at all. ( one would have to ask which “version” of invisibility it is to @Rohie ) Either way, it is a greater step in magical appilcation than you, me and even our MC might know.

Growing Vines : Either you literaly bend time around the vines to make them grow faster, or you bend reality around the vines so that they would be what you what them to be. Or you are the new Poison Ivy…

I partially agree. Our lack of training is our main weakness.
But if you give a nuke to an untrained moron, it is still a nuke. Our problem is that the moron (us) might just blow himself up with it.

I again do not know what you are talking about. Headcanon? Otherwise my answer is that we’ve known them for 3 days. I know teenagers are friendly, but do you expect them to treat you like an old friend?

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There’s more to it than that; if you make yourself unable to be affected or impacted by the light spectrum, you could make yourself invisible, but you would also effectively blind yourself; with no light to hit your eyes, there’d be no way of seeing at all.

So invisibility would also require a method of rendering the receptors in your eyes able to receive the light while simultaneously making yourself invisible. Now THAT is complex; that in itself is effectively circumventing the laws of physics. It’s even more complex than you would expect.

And @idonotlikeusernames does headcanon quite a gigantic amount of misery and angst for his MC; personally I think it’s all a bit unnecessary, but then again my MC is pretty well off for having been on the run for years. She also appears to have a great deal more self-esteem. But headcanons are headcanons. It’s his choice how he perceives his own characters’ experiences, after all.

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While I don’t exactly agree with a lot of what @idonotlikeusernames thinks here, this is one point I had noticed:

Prior to the transformation, we are fending off dozens of Seekers; after, we barely beat Virginia, can’t beat Calypso, and get easily strangled by Sage. This is something I didn’t notice until my last playthrough, when I wasn’t completely minmaxing strength, so maybe that’s the problem. Of course, I was still very strength-high, so I should probably have done better.

But standard invisibility doesn’t go against the laws of physics in any way. :innocent:

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…there’s always one person, isn’t there?

I suppose the entirety of the story doesn’t stack up with reality, but the idea was the complexity of the powers. Fiction or no, physics can and does still apply.

It’s the same principle as super speed vs. super metabolism, but until we have the Essence, we’re still at least partially bound by the laws of physics. After we get the Essence, you can float merrily into space while giving the corpse of Isaac Newton the finger for all I care, but right now we aren’t all powerful. Yet.

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At best it seems like we haven’t been given the time and (medical) care to properly recover from the stresses of that coma and having that blocker removed, at worst they did something else to us in that hospital that actually made us weaker than we should be. And of course this is the condition in which we actually have to compete against their elite, properly trained demigods.

Hold your horses there @Alexodia, isn’t the invisibility an effect we can only get from that mirror of the red sea, a magical artifact we can buy from that shop? If so it isn’t exactly our own “magic” or understanding of our powers that allows us to do that, which leaves the vines as the most complex thing we can possibly accomplish on our own.
Of course even the magical vines were again something we did before our coma, afterwards the one time we can actually attempt to use magic during the trials it doesn’t exactly work as we want or intended it to anymore, suggesting again that, if anything, we are getting weaker or at least our control over our powers is slipping rather than improving.

Possibly. But all magic has to happen somehow, doesn’t it? After all, magic is just science we don’t understand yet. Too many people use magic as a deus ex machina to avoid explaining what they can’t actually be bothered to explain.

“I just did this amazing thing!”

“Wow! How’d you do it?”

“Uhh…magic!”

I just think it’s irresponsible to just use the fact that something is magical and use that as an explanation simply because it’s magical.

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There’s an invisibility choice now for magicians, not needing the mirror.

Sage has super speed and we didn’t expect it, Calypso is an elite demigod spawn of bloody war training to fight together with the goddess of the hunt and we cut Virginia’s neck and the match was stopped, while I was getting cheered on plus I literally couldn’t lose…

@ParrotWatcher @idonotlikeusernames I stand corrected. My Bad!
I liked the fight with Virginia actually, even if it wasn’t a super easy victory. The way it is written feels like well-won battle.
I was not bothered being unable to beat Calypso = Daughter of Ares (prodigy, on top of that), trained her whole life to be one of Artemis’s hunter. Here her training and finesse beat our macktruck style power!

Not being able to smack Sage did bother me thought! :smirk:

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If she was actually one of our competitors my mc would agree, but she is not and again, he only barely beat her one on one, which isn’t exactly encouraging for going up against our real opponents in those trials.

Where is it? In any case if it is before our coma it becomes far less relevant.

Except we can’t actually use our powers here if playing as a “mage”, or has that been changed too? I didn’t even try to fight her again in my one playthrough of the new version thus far.

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The invisibility is when the hunter/seeker party meets you, so before the blocker/coma.

When is the fighting Calypso-thing coming from. I admit to never having seen that option?.

When we’re sparring in the PE class. (Choice of her, unromanceable Saint, and overly romanceable Adonis, my MC just decided to go for the fighting option.)

On second thoughts, @Rohie, it wasn’t her we were even fighting the first time any more, was it? So she wouldn’t have been able to have learned our fighting style, because it was the new brainwashed Seeker girl…

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@idonotlikeusernames @ParrotWatcher I’m not really sure how you are barely beating Virginia, my MC who has no combat ability takes her on with little problem (only a cut across the shoulder). Regarding Calypso, the first time you get the better of her because she underestimated you, before Olympus, the second time says she learned her lesson. A MC who focuses on combat/strength holds their own for a minute or two when most sword fights lasts mere seconds (haven’t tried it with other builds yet). Sage is fast and full of rage, which allows someone to surpass their normal limits and is “a hell of an anesthetic”. Plus we were caught off guard from her, so all in all I say my MC has been doing pretty decent in fights.

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Ah, well. My MC doesn’t like to fight, so generally avoids hanging out with Calypso outside class without a good buffer. Seems that was the right choice.:cold_sweat:

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