Talk:Erastil

Elemental Sorcery

Pardon my heavy-handed approach, but the information on elemental sorcery that was added on this page is not Paizo canon, and therefore cannot be included in the wiki. Please take a look at our canon policy for further clarification. --Brandingopportunity 20:53, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Removed content

The following content was removed by PDV:

Erastil condemns suicide, and the souls of his worshipers who take their own lives are condemned to Avernus, the first circle of Hell.

Kobold Quarterly is a canon source, but current canon sources omit this detail. -Oznogon (talk) 03:07, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

It has been explicitly disclaimed as ever being canon. Unless there's a category for sources which are potentially canon but unreliable (and preferably a more widespread policy of noting canon conflicts and unreliable sources, which has been badly needed for most of a decade by now), Kobold Quarterly should be entirely removed as a canon source, since it clearly has a record of publishing content which is never fact-checked against the actual canon. PDV (talk) 16:53, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

I don't have the source for that explicit disclaimer, can you please add it here for context? That's useful information that I regrettably didn't know. -Oznogon (talk) 22:22, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Tracked a source down to James Jacobs in 2021:

"While that article was written by Wes Schneider, it's also a ten-year old article and I am 100% sure he wouldn't write it that way today.

It wasn't an article I had any input in, despite being the one who invented Erastil back in the late 80s/early 90s. It's certainly not a part of Erastil's canonical lore today in Golarion. Because, again... Erastil doesn't judge souls. That's Pharasma's job."

Adding this to Meta:Erastil along with the clarifying context. I'm getting on a plane soon and so if I screw it up, please feel free to edit. -Oznogon (talk) 23:39, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, those KQ articles never got reviewed by Paizo staff, nor were ones written by Paizo staff developed by other members of the staff to ensure their canon implications were on point. Plus, some of the canon stuff that Paizo published in official products themselves from that era has since been retconned because of sensitivity concerns or because it doesn't align with the overall brand anymore.

In this case, the implication that a LG deity would somehow condemn people for a very real-world mental health condition is tasteless at best, and actually harmful at worst. This change for Erastil aligns with past retcons made to his more problematic early canon to make him more of a good god instead of a chauvinist and oppressive traditionalist. I think it's highly unlikely that Paizo ever explicitly addresses suicide and Erastil's thoughts on it in any canon source, for good reason. Like slavery, it's simply a topic that is too fraught to really broach with modern audiences, and for what? Just to make sure this one obscure line of text from a product from nearly 20 years ago is adequately corrected? Not really worth it.

I think an effort to be complete is admirable and should be the wiki's primary mission, but in cases like this, I don't really have a problem with this one line just not being in the wiki. If we need to move it to a meta page so it's there but not really visible, I guess that's ok, but in the end, I think we can all agree that this bit of lore is pretty gross and that preserving it for completeness's sake is just prolonging the confusion and harm it could potentially cause.

I don't know that we need to throw the entirety of Kobold Quarterly's licensed Pathfinder material out, but I do think having a discussion of the right way to handle things like this that are likely to never really be addressed is a valuable conversation to have, just not in the Talk space of one particular article.— Yoda8myhead (talk) 22:45, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

To be clear, I don't disagree with the removal. The canon change policies on retcons and canon changes approved in January suggest retaining removed or changed content outside of the main article space and providing context for the removal, rather than striking them without explanation. That was my only goal here. Sorry for any confusion. -Oznogon (talk) 22:59, 20 August 2024 (UTC)