Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20170602170443/@comment-32182236-20170603001001

The first two paragraphs, you make good points, I have nothing to add to that. Good job. But as for the rest..

Except that gets right to the point: the beasts aren't "seen" in myths, because by definition they can't be seen, since they don't exist. They are creatures with forms that are imagined, and that imagined form is captured through painting, sculpture, and so on. Your claim is that there is an illustration of what is presumed to be a monster with a human soul, therefore that monster actually existed and the illustration is an accurate rendering. The conclusion does not logically follow from the premise, since illustrations are not always records of things that are actually witnessed. Dragons are fake. Monsters with human souls are real. Just look at Asriel Dreemur, as the "God of Hyperdeath". There's the difference.

How would the monsters know that something with the combined power of seven human souls would break the Barrier? There's no actual scientific study that can be done, since there is only one Barrier, and yet that speculation turns out to be true, based on some reasoned conjecture. What is so different about that conjecture from one about what might happen if a monster and human soul combined? Why is the latter a form of conjecture that needs to be proven prior to the war beginning to explain why the war happened? Because, one fits in with current knowledge at the time, the other doesn't. We know seven mages created the barrier. That means the power of seven humans is the power of the barrier. Easy math. (If three mages made it, it would only take three human souls to destroy the barrier.)

A monster soul, is very weak, however. Where would they get the conclusion that a monster with a human soul would be any more powerful than two humans, or, well.. the power to destroy a whole village? From what is known about soul powers, a monster with a human soul would most likely be only slightly more powerful than a human.

But by the same token, presumably you want the "horrible beast" part to be an indication that there was a monster that absorbed a human soul, and because that monster caused all of these problems, the other monsters came to resent it. Which leaves open a gaping hole: why not just say there was a monster that took a human soul? It's a hole that exists no matter what, but the more negatively the monster is described and depicted, the more that oversight suggests that rather than an incredibly important historical event that precipitated a war was glossed over, that even just never happened, and the story played out precisely as it is actually described.

Unless the monsters just don't want to admit to themselves that the war was all their fault. Shifting the blame on someone else is something that can happen a lot. If they keep telling themselves this was a figment of the humans' imagination, they'll be able to better bring themselves to fight the humans. It's harder to bring yourself to fight if you KNOW you're fighting innocents, and are technically on the "evil" side.

The story did play out exactly as described, though. Long ago, two races ruled over the Earth, then the humans attacked due to the power of a monster with a human soul.. The humans won, and sealed the monsters underground! The part left out was.. WHY were they fearful of this power specifically when they attacked, and not earlier?