thank you for answer my reliquary/(ex)catholic dream ask! i also don't particularly think that any of them are full-on Catholic catholic but the little mention of even thinking of it As a relic is so fascinating to me
the reverberations of religiosity in dsmp are so interesting to me (but i'm currently studying religion, so it's kind of a revisitation with a new lens? :P)
there's so much about dsmp (that you say, is fundamentally baked into the story) that plays with/reiterates/refutes typical religious understanding (at least—i mean likely all of them are coming from christian/new greek mythology (for lack of a better word, idk, post-pjo) religious background, so playing w that space at least) and i just find it so fascinating, especially as you say, there are many god(ly) characters (+ religion that happens To people!).
i think what's especially interesting to me is that, like, none of these religious elements are really 'necessary', like the whole prime church thing grows out of a joke and becomes a real thing. and then, of course, catholic tommy (+ on people drawing catholic with a bigass crucifix, people—increasingly?—drawing c!quackity with a cross, esp (afaik) in the las nevadas fanarts. what does that imply about him!!).
(+ fwiw, on catholic relics/its uses, i was recently doing a reading on discourse on resurrection esp. in early (medieval) christianity, and there was a discussion on whether or not saints' bones constituted the whole or only part of a body—on the one hand, the saints had to be entirely enshrined within the part, otherwise the divine energy (for lack of a better word) would be nullified. but also, resurrection requires the whole body, reconstituted. so, there's a funny kind of unintentional parallel there too; stagger!dream on the one hand has faith (ha) that resurrection works, but the relic also constitutes the whole. and then he throws it into the lava, much to the disappointment of all the dsmp!catholics, im sure)
sorry for this hilariously long ask lol. the wording of 'relic' is just so full of implication that it just sent my mind spiralling (in the way that great fanfiction gives the space for!)
YESSS i love this ask i'm sorry it took a couple days to get round to answering it!! i love the way you phrase it as "reverberations of religiosity," and i think you're definitely right about how most of that religiosity is likely theologically and aesthetically inspired by christianity and uhhhh "post-pjo" understandings of greek mythology. probably american protestant christianity specifically, based on what we know about some of the most vocal CCs and their backgrounds; at least, i think that's a reasonable assumption and we can definitely point to those influences in the story. there are also places where religiosity/religion in dsmp looks a bit like the divine patron system in D&D and some other ttrpgs to me, though idk if i would argue there's a direct connection. it's possible, i suppose!
none of the religious elements are "necessary" to the story in a strict sense, but i do think they're sort of a natural next step for a story that's about A) what it means to build something, and B) what it means to have power. my thoughts on this are pretty disorganized but monotheistic concepts of God as ultimate creator/builder and ultimate power-holder are really playing into why introducing deities to a story like dsmp just...makes sense? (actually, maybe one of the most interesting angles here is that the dsmp doesn't use a monotheistic system?? idk, feel free to weigh in!)
another thing i find really interesting is that a machinima style/computer game-based story doesn't need a concept of religion in order to feature resurrection as a plot point, because even though we tend to associate the two IRL, a video game already has built-in revival mechanics. so resurrection on the dsmp never had to be religious, and the fact that the CCs made it explicitly religious anyway is really interesting.
as far as stagger's concerned, i arrived at that scene (and at dream throwing the knuckle bone into the lava after reviving tommy) because i was trying to work backwards from what we know dream knew about revival at the time. the only part of the fic that could be considered canon-divergent is the premise, which is that the bulk of the stagedduo revive book experiments happened after dream's incarceration, rather than before. we don't really have confirmation either way about when the experiments canonically took place, but dr3 has made some very convincing arguments (and also some bits here) that they likely happened prior to the prison arc. speaking personally, the only reason i'm still kinda on the fence about when those experiments happen is that there some things about dream's behavior in prison that reallllyyy make it look like he doesn't know much about how the book works, especially in retrospect after we've seen more examples of what revival looks like in canon. the main resurrections that we actually get to see (aside from vikk and lazar) are tommy, wilbur, and dream himself. when punz revives dream, he does it long-distance. he doesn't have a physical corpse, he doesn't have a ghost, and he's not in the same location where dream died. this means you apparently need NONE of those things to revive someone; you can revive anyone from anywhere with just the knowledge of the revive book! this new info totally recontextualizes dream's resurrection of wilbur from a year or so earlier: if dream could've brought wilbur back any time with very few restrictions, why did he wait so long? why does all of the dialogue in wilbur's revival scene lead us to believe that ghostbur has to be in the same room with dream in order for him to be resurrected? that scene is very much framed as opportunistic: dream reviving wilbur because ghostbur happens to be there, because tommy was stupid enough to bring him along, and dream takes this opportunity to demonstrate his power (and why they shouldn't kill him.) imo, in light of the new info about how revival works, wilbur's resurrection reads as having happened that way because at the time, dream thought he needed to be in physical proximity to a person's ghost in order to revive them, and only later discovered this wasn't the case. which to me implies that the revive book experiments hadn't happened yet. so, working backwards from all that, i tried to picture what may have been going on in dream's mind when he was thinking about reviving tommy.
IF (because we don't know for sure, but if!) tommy was really the first person dream revived, or one of the first, then dream wouldn't have had much experience raising the dead yet. we know for sure that he didn't know you don't need a ghost to revive someone yet, which can also serve as an explanation for why he waits a couple days before reviving tommy — he may have been waiting for tommy's ghost to appear. when he realized there wasn't going to be a ghost, i think it's fairly logical to assume he may have gone for the next best thing: the physical body. considering all this, I don't think it's a stretch to say dream could conceivably try to resurrect tommy using a body part (knuckle bone, in my fic) and when the revival works, he assumes it's because you need a body or a ghost, and only much later finds out that you don't need either of these things to make a resurrection work. the reason i wrote dream hiding tommy's knuckle bone was because i kinda doubt the warden would let dream sit in there with the corpse for all that long (what if the prisoner whittles one of tommy's femurs into a javelin! oh no!) so that part was extrapolated from what we know about sam's neuroses during this arc of the story.
you mentioned you were doing research on relic discourse in early medieval christendom and for the record i would love to know whether there was ever any consensus reached on that btw! like, did the church come to any sort of conclusion on whether the part constituted the whole, or no? ngl it is extremely funny to me that my fic accidentally replicated centuries-old theology beef 🙏🥴 HILDEGARD VON BINGEN I'M SORRY FOR MAKING YOUR RELIGION ABOUT MY MINECRAFT TWINKS PLEAE FORGIVE M
