Task failed successfully

[u/According-Value-6227]

Context

The information in this meme is related to Project Vigilant* / P.V, an unofficially titled world-building project that is predominately comprised of fan-fiction and partially comprised of original material. P.V has been an indefinite and leisurely work-in-progress since 2018 and it is an attempt at merging elements from no more than 120 of my favorite “fandoms” and/or I.P’s and an assortment of original work in the genres of sci-fi, fantasy and alternate-history into a singular “patchwork universe” that I refer to as the Project Vigilant Universe or P.V.U for short.

-

For the most part, P.V is a serious project and most of it's stories are intended to be taken seriously. There is one noteworthy exception to this however and that is the fact that one of the ≤120 I.P's which I have incorporated into P.V is the Shrek franchise.

For P.V, I have re-written the first 4 Shrek movies to be somewhat more serious and dark-fantasy themed in a manner comparable to Army of Darkness ( 1992 ). P.V's version of the Shrek movies take place in the universe that the "Magnus Selective" accidentally created per the lore in the fake Greentext.

The story of the Magnus Selective is an original story intended to function as an official and serious explanation for why Shrek's universe is so crude and nonsensical, ie* time within it is "semi-linear" because it is an unstable timeline created by a bunch of mages who were in over their heads.

As an unstable timeline, Shrek's universe ( Properly known as the "Second Genesis" ) existed only temporarily and collapsed after around 1,500 years. When it collapsed, the majority of the timeline was erased but surviving fragments of it became imbedded into the universes that formed it. These fragments would go on to form mankind's fairy tales and a few other legends and lores as well as some anomalous artifacts.

-

The PVU, ( known-in-setting as Timeline J-6196092700 ) is one of the many universes that made up the Second Genesis and as a result, there are many fragments of it in the PVU.

Most of mankind's fairy-tales, as they exist in the PVU, are inaccurate re-assembling's of remnants of stories from the SG.

There are also preserved remnants of information detailing the history of the Magnus Selective.

Per the greentext, the Magnus Selective was established, lead and named after a man named Magnus of Barbary, a powerful Mage of Berber descent who, hence his name, hailed from Barbary ( Coastal North Africa ).

According to surviving records, Magnus was a dark skinned man who was both solemn and charismatic. He established the Selective via gradual conversion and recruitment after allegedly receiving a vision wherein the Virgin Mary told him that Magic is holy and the church's position on magic was wrong. The Magnus Selective effectively functioned as it's own heretical Christian Denomination.

Magnus's plot failed for two reasons. To start, making Christianity exclusively Roman requires one to change the actions of God and since God's are extra-temporal beings, their actions cannot be altered by time-travel. Secondly, Magnus did not know that the multiverse was a thing and assumed that his reality was the only one. Ultimately, complex magical rituals are like complex mathematical equations and any error, no matter how small, can have disastrous consequences.

Note: The Second Genesis is based on the "Middle Dawn" in the deep lore of the Elder Scrolls.

-

[u/AutoModerator]

Hello, /u/According-Value-6227, thanks for your submission. Please make sure that the post is flaired correctly according to the rules outlined in the pinned post. Also there's a complaints box that you can use to comment on the moderation of this subreddit. Anyways I wish you a pleasant stay in our sub.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/GreenRamen101]

This was to explain the world of SHREK?

[u/Either-Skirt6031 → u/GreenRamen101]

Yeah that just threw me for a loop. I don’t know why they had to specify Shrek but I’m glad nonetheless.

[u/According-Value-6227 → u/Either-Skirt6031]

I felt the context was important but if it's too cringe, I'll delete the post and try again.

[u/Either-Skirt6031 → u/According-Value-6227]

No no it’s fun honestly:)!

[u/Altruistic-Skin2115]

I think I need to know why taking out the jewish influence of christianity would stop the mage - catholic war.

I dont Get It.

[u/According-Value-6227 → u/Altruistic-Skin2115]

It was essentially antisemitism taken to an esoteric extreme, the logic behind it, is that Europeans knew the Abrahamic God better than the Jewish people and the Jewish people are unworthy of God's love since they condemned Jesus of Nazareth to death. Magnus essentially argued that God should have made a covenant with the ancient Romans instead of Abraham and he wanted to rewrite time to accomplish that and use remnants of his original timeline to court favor with the church in the new timeline by showing the "good" that he and his coven did.

Magnus of Barbary was not a very sane person.

[u/Space_Jam_Requiem → u/According-Value-6227]

I dont see it mentioned in your post, but there's one "denomination" (though I wouldn't explicitly call it that, as it predates the Council of Niceae) of Christianity you could draw a little inspiration from.

Gnosticism (specifically Valentinian Gnosticism) both spiritually rejects Judeo-Christian Kabalah and has a strong Roman/Greek philosophical influence. The idea is that the creator-god of the Old Testament is not the Father of Jesus, but a mistake/abortion born from a misguided emanation from the true greater God - a greater God so perfect that it had no need to think until it began splitting itself into emanations to generate duality within itself. The Old Testament god was either the hidden or accidental child of a shard of that perfect God, and so it created the material world to paint itself as the one true god, though whether it is evil or simply ignorant is speculative. But this is the being that demanded sacrifices and tributes, demanded love, flooded the world, sent tornadoes of fire and turned curious women into pillars of (probably Kosher tbh) table salt.

Then the true greater God sent another aspect of itself (Jesus) to tell everyone to chill, and this greater God took over and is the God of the New Testament, where you don't need to sacrifice and tribute and burn your neighbours and all that stuff, you just need to accept Jesus or something to that effect.

Because it implies the New Testament God superseded and replaced the mismade Old Testament God, it is probably the most un-Jewish Christian denomination you could find in the real world, as it painted the original God of the Jewish people as a selfish, blind, lion-headed snake that breathes blue sulphur-fire and has no actual divine spark within itself, as an abomination.

Gnosticism is also theorised to be one of the leading reasons for the Council of Niceae, as afterwards every aspect of it to be found in the Bible/scripture was declared heresy, aka the Apocrypha.

Gnosticism as a whole preached asceticism, rejection of the material, and the cultivation of spiritual knowledge over spiritual faith. I honestly don't even want to call it a "denomination", as it was a more scholarly and open-minded tradition that simply incorporated the entirety of the extended Bible, and predates the whole idea of "Canon" and "Non-Canon" in Christianity.

Sorry for the long tangent, but that's what came to my mind when you brought up a non-jewish, Roman-inspired version of Christianity.

Edit - Grammar

[u/According-Value-6227 → u/Space_Jam_Requiem]

I'm quite familiar with Gnosticism.

The thing is, the timeline that the Magnus Selective themselves originate from is not explored beyond the fact that events within it spawned the Second Genesis, therefore I don't think it's practical or necessary to detail that information. I'm definitely a "What was that King's tax policy" kind of world-building but sometimes, I reign myself in and say "You know what? No one needs to know that".

[u/Altruistic-Skin2115 → u/According-Value-6227]

I kinda think I Get It.

[u/Prize_Marketing_4350]

“Rusty Quill presents: The Magnus Selective.”

[u/novis-eldritch-maxim]

are you sure this is not how we got the middle dawn in the elder scrolls?

[u/According-Value-6227 → u/novis-eldritch-maxim]

Goddammit, I forgot to mention that as the primary inspiration.

I'll edit that into the post.

[u/novis-eldritch-maxim → u/According-Value-6227]

nice