How is order and chaos

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Figure 2: Structure versus randomness. Figure 3: Complexity—entropy diagrams. Change history 17 May In the version of this Review Article originally published online there were several errors. References 1 Press, W. Google Scholar 7 Binney, J.

Google Scholar 19 Chaitin, G. Google Scholar 34 Brandstater, A. Google Scholar 47 Crutchfield, J. Google Scholar 51 Crutchfield, J. Google Scholar 58 Welberry, T. Google Scholar 60 Sebastian, M. Google Scholar 61 Feldman, D. Google Scholar 73 Crutchfield, J. Google Scholar 79 Eigen, M. Google Scholar 80 Adami, C. Google Scholar 81 Frenken, K. Google Scholar 82 McShea, D. Google Scholar 83 Krakauer, D. Google Scholar 85 Bialek, W.

Google Scholar 87 Crutchfield, J. Google Scholar Download references. Crutchfield Authors James P. Crutchfield View author publications. Ethics declarations Competing interests The author declares no competing financial interests. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. About this article Cite this article Crutchfield, J.

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View options Order by latest to oldest Order by oldest to latest Show all replies. Get Pocket Gamer Biz in your inbox. Superpower , and which is slowly but inexorably extorting, coercing, or outright conquering all civilization in the West. Notably, the balance is tilted decisively in favor of Order — as one Agent puts it, you don't join the Gun to win, but to lose gloriously. The Traveller in Black by John Brunner is set in a magical land where the struggle between Order and Chaos underlies everything.

The Traveller himself is an agent of Order. In The Dinosaur Lords , Falk justifies to himself fighting against a divinely-ordered Crusade as fighting for Order as opposed to discord represented by the horde. The Elder Empire : The central conflict. On the Of Sea and Shadow side, the heroes are mostly fighting for Order, as they know that letting the Empire fracture into countless mini-empires will result in nothing but war and bloodshed.

On the Of Shadow and Sea side, the heroes are mostly fighting for Chaos, as they believe that the species has evolved past the need for a single omnipotent authority. The problems with both sides are discussed; if there's a single Empire that means there's a single point of failure that can be exploited, while if there are multiple empires there will be no way to force them to cooperate in the face of a major threat.

Live-Action TV. Babylon 5 had the Vorlons and the Shadows. Originally they were portrayed as Good Versus Evil Vorlons projecting angelic images of themselves vs. Later, their millena-old conflict is revealed as rival philosophies run amok: the Vorlons believe the best way to promote growth among the younger races is through order and obedience, while the Shadows believe evolution is best served through chaos and conflict.

The Vorlons and Shadows are eventually revealed to be similar, with both groups trying to force the younger races to choose a side or die. The idea was taken from Babylonian mythology, hence the name of the show. Sheridan ultimately has to lead the younger races into collectively telling BOTH sides where they can stick their rival philosophies, and to go away and leave the younger races alone to make their own choices.

Firefly : The chaos-loving Independents who lead The Heroes vs. The Unification War is a more complicated matter. A lot of Independents weren't all that nice; thugs and debt slavers right out of Charles Dickens. It was when the war was declared that it got worse. Core Worlds versus Rim Worlds. On a Core World, it's all peaceful and prosperous lives in clean, high-tech cities Things couldn't be more different on a Rim World - it's crapsack Wild West living down to the wooden buildings, horse and cart and widespread poverty, and life is anarchic and often violent Perhaps the message to take away is civilisation needs a healthy moderation between both to work.

Notably, the Firefly team itself is a mix of orderly Simon , Inara and chaotic everyone else people. Quite a few pairs in House. Cuddy's job requires her to be the Order to House's Chaos. The fact that House needs to ask Cuddy for approval of his methods doesn't affect much at all since according to House, Cuddy can never refuse him for one reason or another. If she does refuse, he usually gets around this via a loophole either he, Wilson, or one of his fellows can find around policy.

Earlier seasons had Foreman Order, because he followed policy more in earlier seasons and Chase Chaos, because he agreed with House just to kiss-ass. Or Kutner with anyone else really. Classic Doctor Who had the Black and White Guardians, cheerleaders for chaos and order, respectively. While the Black Guardian generally appeared as a villian, it was suggested and confirmed in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe that the White Guardian was just as bad. Though an opposite Order aligned group has not been shown.

As they share some dialogue, some speculate that the two may be related, if not the same being. The Doctor himself is a benevolent force of chaos just look at the effect he has on his companions' lives , and many of his enemies represent cruel order.

The Daleks believe in cleansing the universe of all that does not meet their standards of purity and perfection i. The rest of the Doctor's race, the Time Lords, were "ancient, dusty senators" who were afraid of change and chaos. While they weren't his enemies for most of the original series though they had their moments , they were nonetheless very law-bound and the Doctor was considered a dangerous renegade, who was tolerated because he occasionally came in handy.

In Yes, Minister , Hacker tries to claim that the role of the government is to do good and fight evil. Humphrey dismisses that notion with a dry laugh, and explains that the government is actually there to maintain order amid chaos. Even Sister, Sister had this!

Tia and Tamera had very different personalities. Tia order was the neat, studious one, and Tamera chaos was the party girl. In Odo, this is tempered somewhat by his upbringing among humanoids, sending him into Lawful Good instead of Lawful Evil.

A mostly subliminal but ever-present theme on Game of Thrones , referenced most directly during a conversation between Varys and Littlefinger. Varys works for the good of the realm, and because of his powerless upbringing understands exactly what happens to the weak when there is no order or realm to protect them. Littlefinger, on the other hand, rebels against a system that would relegate him to a life as an irrelevant hedge lord, and sees chaos as a way to ensure his rise to power.

Varys describes chaos as "a gaping pit waiting to swallow us all," while Littlefinger describes it as a ladder for the strong to climb. They're both right. A reoccurring theme in Nowhere Boys. In Season 1, the Big Bad is an entity known as the Restoring Demon, who is obsessed with restoring order whenever there's a magical disturbance.

In the feature film The Book of Shadows , the Big Bad is a girl named Tegan, who is revealed to be the personification of Chaos, and wishes to take revenge on "Bear", the personfication of Order. In The Magicians Umber and Ember are respectively gods of order and chaos.

They joined forces in creating Fillory because their natures would balance out and allow for something greater than they could make on their own. So long as both remained in Fillory the world was stable. After Umber was driven out by the Beast there was nothing to stop Ember from indulging in his darker urges and bringing the entire world to ruin.

The children's educational show Odd Squad pits kid secret agents and the orderly powers of Math against a grab-bag of silly chaos-spreading villains and freakish goofy phenomena.

It details a war between Apollo who brings wisdom and order and Dionysus of love and chaos that decimates the human followers. This is ended when the astronaut from Book I at the end of the previous album shows up and tells of how he has existed after plunging into the titular black hole.

They dub him Cygnus The God of Balance as a result. From the lyrics: "Order stormed the surface where chaos set norm - had there always been balance? This is a far more common dichotomy in ancient religions than concepts of "good vs.

Consider almost any ancient Pantheon such as the Norse or Greek Gods with flawed and often immoral dieties. They aren't exactly "good" in the sense of being moral and upright, but they represent elements of Order and human understanding and were almost always opposed to some rival group representing forces of Chaos and primordial nature.

Over time, and especially under the influence of medieval Christianity, Order became more associated with morality and the divine while Chaos became associated with evil, sin, where applicable the devil. This is the central tenet of Zoroastrianism. Followers worship Ahura-Mazda, the embodiment of truth, order and justice — and oppose chaos and disorder the Lie.

One of the offshoot sects, called Zurvanism, names the Lie as Ahriman, the brother of Ahura-Mazda, and holds that the two are always in conflict over the spirits of mankind. The two are both the sons of Zurvan Time. In Egyptian Mythology , the god Set is considered to embody constructive chaos the forest fire that allows new growth, for example while the Order versus Chaos was the primary division in Egyptian culture, with the word ma'at meaning not just order but also justice and rightness.

Isfet meant both chaos and injustice. The Pharaoh was the "Lord of Ma'at" who upheld both social and cosmic order through his combined political and religious authority.

Without this authority, the Egyptians believed that the primordial chaos which existed before Creation would overtake the world and dissolve everything. What else could be expected when the Goddess is Eris, Goddess of Chaos? Actually, Eris is Goddess of Strife.

The Principia Discordia explains that the Greeks were somewhat "off" in their appraisal of Eris. Although it generally prefers the "disorderly" method, as Discordians believe the world is far too organized already. The Seelie and Unseelie courts of The Fair Folk represent Order and Chaos or Light and Darkness respectively rather than Good and Evil, although that is how many modern fictional treatments align them.

Both tend to be equally dangerous and unpredictable. Many creation myths start with a primordial sea of chaos, from which gods and creatures are born that eventually bring order to the chaos and create the earth. The Taoist creation story from the Zhuangzi is about a chaotic, bag-shaped god named Hundun 'chaos' , who lived before the universe existed, and two emperors called Shu and Hu Brief and Sudden.

Hundun treated Shu and Hu kindly, so they decided to repay his kindness. Let's try drilling some into him! People like the emperors meddle with the primal world by trying to establish rules and regulations for it, thus killing it.

In mythological studies, there is a trope called " Chaoskampf ". Yu the Great killing Xiangliu during his work stopping the Great Flood may also count, although Yu is not a storm god. Pro Wrestling. Another, similar conflict from the Attitude Era was down-on-his-luck Psychopathic Manchild Mankind 's running battle with the 'Corporate Champion', The Rock , which involved the clean-cut rising star and corporate shill of the WWE getting squashed under forklifts, thrown through tables, and repeatedly gagged with Mankind's Companion Cube , 'Mr.

However, in his earlier feud against Jeff Hardy , Punk played the role of Order, contrasting his personal dedication to the Straight Edge lifestyle against Jeff's excessive self-indulgence. Tabletop Games. Werewolf especially tended to picture Chaos as good, but mostly because it was the underdog of that fight.

Mage had the technomancers of the Technocracy to act as Order, the insane Marauders as Chaos, and the diabolic Nephandi to serve as Entropy, with the Player Characters supposed to stand somewhere in between.

The cosmology in the Mage: The Ascension setting stressed the importance of the Unity of these three forces. When in balance, they feed into one other in a perfect harmony of creation, existence, and destruction leading to new creations.

The Crapsack World nature of the WoD is a result of that balance having been broken in favor of stasis and corruption. Incidentally, in the creation myth for Werewolf , the Wyrm was originally supposed to be the blessed end brought to all things that had fulfilled the purpose.

Then the Weaver, who'd already been driven batshit crazy by trying to define the limitless Wyld, tried to define the Wyrm, which twisted it and turned its purpose towards unending corruption. The Were-Spider source book details their more minute distinctions of each force in the way they determine their Auspice. Each were-spider has what amounts to a primary alignment with one of the three forces, and a secondary alignment which determines how they expressed it. It is not as hard-written into the story as in the other gamelines, but Vampire: The Masquerade has this kind of conflict too between the three core factions presented, with the Anarchs representing chaos, the Camarilla representing order, and the Sabbat representing destruction, based on their general demeanours and goals.

This in itself gets twisted around a through the individuals of each sect a lot, however, so it's definitely not as prominent as the more solid examples in the setting. The Camarilla is generally presented as the good guys in this gameline, with some Anarchs shining through occasionally, though it leans more towards being the lesser evil than actually being good. The Wyld is a place instead of a force, but one that The Fair Folk inhabit as the representatives of Chaos.

In the original game, there were only three alignments: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. Lawful was frequently equated with Good and Chaotic with Evil, so it's not much of a surprise that future editions expanded the system into the nine alignments that we know today — which many people still have arguments about, in large part because of the popularity of Anti Heroes and Anti Villains in fantasy fiction.

C'est la vie. Even in the original edition, the Monster Manual had creatures defined as "Chaotic but good" or "Lawful but evil". This most likely led to the two-axis alignments.

The other alignments are also useful. A Dark Lord's just-following-orders minion or a heretic-burning priest is Lawful Evil keep the rules whatever the cost to people. A Thief character is Chaotic Good screw the rules, be excellent to each other. Players have hotly debated whether this means that Lawful Good is somehow "more good" than Chaotic Good, or whether goodness means being naturally chaotic. Wizards' own article on the subject appears here. They simply represent very specific, focused views of good and evil — Lawful Good views law and order as being essential components to goodness, while Chaotic Evil is so psychotic and self-absorbed it goes beyond what even Evil considers appropriate.

An "Evil" character has standards and is usually rational about their goals ; a " Chaotic Evil " character has no standards and will do whatever they want to achieve their goals, which are often horrific even to Evil beings. In the older editions, the Blood War was a massive mashup between the demons and the devils on which kind of evil pure rampaging destructive chaos vs brutal and cunning tyranny should dominate the cosmos.

Now its changed to war of Evil Versus Oblivion between the demons and the devils. Not only are the demons an infinite source of chaos and destruction but they cannot access the material plane until the devils are defeated. This makes the devils a Necessary Evil and are the only thing keeping the endless hordes of demons from overwhelming the cosmos]].

This handily explains why the devils who use order have not defeated the devils and why the forces of good have not intervened to destroy evil it is impossible with the demons and destroying the devils means that death of everything. In 4e, the equivalent of the Blood War of prior editions is being fought between Bane, god of war and conquest, and Gruumsh, god of destruction and slaughter.

Bane is a strategist who plays by the rules of war, while Gruumsh cares only for slaughter. Gruumsh covets Bane's position as god of war, and Bane uses the war with Gruumsh as a cover to make the other deities think he's distracted, occupied, and generally less competant than he actually is, though Gruumsh's unpredictability and bravado keeps the war much more even than Bane would like. The four all generally team up to oppose the Sphere of Entropy, a nihilistic variant of Chaos that's looking to eliminate life of any alignment, however.

In the alternate Nightmare reality, it's Chaos a. Freedom that's generally on the side of the angels, and Law there called Stasis that's considered a menace. The Neverwinter campaign setting can get like this with the right Game Master and playing the cynical side of Sliding Scale of Idealism vs.

One interpretation of the campaign is do you let Lord Neverember rule knowing that he might use Neverwinter as a stepping stone to conquer the northern lands, or do you dethrone him and risk the rioting that could cause Neverwinter to never recover from the disasters?

Tyranny or anarchy, take your pick. Magic: The Gathering : The conflict between White the color of tradition, society, law and faith and Red the color of emotion, liberty, and impulsiveness is at its heart the conflict between Order and Chaos.

Since none of MTG 's colors are inherently good or evil, this can take many shapes over different stories, such as a heroic White society fighting back the chaos of Red barbarians and monsters that threatens to destroy it or Red freedom fighters and revolutionaries fighting against an oppressive and hierarchical White regime.

Red and White are not however mutually exclusive, and some of the Guilds from the Ravnica sets explore the mixing of the two colors in some interesting ways. This is taken a step further in the form of the Rakdos Guild, the Black the color of selfishness, ambition and amorality and Red guild; more or less a self-indulgent and frequently psychotically violent chaos incarnate.

It is revealed that the entire reason the other nine Guilds allow the Rakdos to exist is to show to the non-guild citizens what a world without the guilds would be like. Furthermore, when a guild wants something done on a large scale that just isn't possible within their respected roles of the guildpact, they often commission the Rakdos to sow a little chaos and do it for them.

Or, in the case of the Dimir , they set things up so the Rakdos take the blame. The Kaladesh arc is a clear example of a story focusing on good Chaos versus evil Order, focusing on the chiefly Red-aligned Renegades fighting against the stifling, tyrannical order of the chiefly White Consulate.

Warhammer had both the Chaos gods and the Gods of Law, the later being obviously so obscure that they not only are barely mentioned, but pretty much absent from the main plot, although their followers are known to be extremistic.

There's also several other gods who are either rather neutral, or that side against Chaos, but are not considered Gods of Order. The Chaos Gods themselves do not simply represent Chaos; they represent corrupted Chaos. All Warp gods are affected by the emotions of their worshippers and all four Chaos gods personify, in part, something much more positive than their normal nature- Slaanesh is the God of Love, for instance, and Tzeentch the God of Hope.

The reason they are Chaotic Evil rather than Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Good is largely because the Warhammer universe is just that screwed up. The fact that all the other factions are about as Ax-Crazy as each other is what makes Chaos the worst faction of the lot in the first place.

Its not that there is no Good and Evil in this setting- it's that Evil exists, and it has won. Warhammer 40, typically defines itself as Order vs.

Chaos or rather, Order vs. Disorder, seeing as how one of the factions in the universe is called Chaos. There is no real Good vs Evil. Although there are some individuals who could be considered good, as a whole the sides are basically Bad vs Worse. Necrons and Tyranids are both off to the side a bit, but as Necron lore becomes more developed, they seem to be leaning towards Order. Their goal is wiping out sentient life in order to truly starve the chaos gods.

In the first Necrons codex, the C'tan are essentially the Gods of Order, as they're the complete antithesis of the Chaos Gods. The Chaos Gods exist in the Warp while the C'tan are wholly physical beings well, energy beings, but they have no connection to Warp whatsoever The Chaos Gods can substitute reality with their own, while the C'tan have mastery over the laws of physics, allowing both to do seemingly magical things.

The followers of the Chaos Gods tend to end up controlled by their emotions and become more and more mutated until they turn into mindless Spawn, while the followers of the C'tan had their minds transferred into unchanging metal bodies and became the soulless and emotionless Necrons. The ultimate goal of the Chaos Gods is to consume the galaxy in chaos by turning it into a giant warp rift, while the ultimate goal of the C'tan is to seal off the warp, turning every sentient being into soulless cattle for them to feed on.

Similarly to the C'tan mentioned above, in the Fantasy setting perfect order can be seen in the undead armies, the Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings, legions of mindless servants who thoughtlessly serve their masters in "the perfect, unending order of undeath. Winterweir has one of its main setting themes as the conflict between the Celestials Order and the Demons Chaos with neither side being especially good.

It stresses that neither is actually related to good or evil. It also calls Order "ethical" and Chaos "unethical" in the Character Alignment section. You may clap sarcastically whenever you like. In Traveller the Intersteller Wars are very much a war between "order" and "chaos". The Vilani Empire is about ten thousand years old and has done almost nothing new in thousands of years.

Yet at the same time it has highly refined all it's techniques and technology and has a political system designed to keep order. It is sometimes oppressive but it holds thousands of worlds together.

The Terran Confederation has a more or less democratic order and it has large numbers of only half-controlled Intrepid Merchants and Space Cossacks pushing in to the Vilani Imperium. By the time that most Traveller campaigns take place the interstellar wars are ancient history, the Terrans defeated the Vilani First Imperium and founded the Second Imperium which collapsed after less than years.

The Third Imperium is ruled by a blend of Vilani and Terrans Solomani and is a little more balanced than either of the last two. The Zhodani and Vargr are more extreme examples of Order versus Chaos. Zhodani nobles use their psionics to maintain a vaguely Orwellain police state while the Vargr have a extremely fragmented society where authority is based on "Charisma". They are not exactly at war, but they are often opposed.

Interestingly, they tend to mirror each other. Neither is necessarily good or evil. A Meta Game version is the Pink Mohawk vs the Black Trenchcoat in Shadowrun , where Pink Mohawks represents chaotic shadowrunners who goes in with plenty of explosions and gunfire while Black Trenchcoat relies on cold calculation to complete the runs. His Anti - Villain Song is a paean to the perfect order of the stars, compared to sloppy and rebellious human beings: You know your place in the sky You hold your course and your aim, And each in your season returns and returns, And is always the same Video Games.

The main plot of AdventureQuest Worlds is about Drakath, champion of chaos and the 13 lords of chaos. Order is less obvious, however the constant and stable conflict between good and evil seems to represent order and considering that it's Lawful Good vs. Lawful Evil , and the predictability of their fight going into something of a tradition, would represent order, an order that Drakath shattered when he came into the story. In the Metal Gear franchise, Solid Snake would do battle against both terrorists representing chaos and politicians representing law , both of whom threatened to destroy the world with their war with each other.

On a more thematic note, the war between Big Boss and Zero ultimately boils down to this. Big Boss's goal is to establish an anarchic perpetual battleground where soldiers are free to serve as mercenaries and do battle without allegiance to any government, ideology, or creed, whereas the latter hopes to unite the world under a One World Order government run by Big Brother A.

The The Witcher franchise, including both the books and video games, had three wars waged between the Northern Kingdoms Neutral , the Nilfgaardian Empire Order and the Scoia'tael Chaos.

There is even a card game based after those three wars, titled "Gwent"! Geralt of Rivia, on the other hand, did his best to avoid their three wars with each other, remaining True Neutral to the best of his abilities, just to focus on two things: Killing monsters for profit, and rescuing his adoptive daughter, Ciri.

The virtue system in Serpents Isle is quite different from past games. However, unlike the virtues of Britannia, Ophidian virtues are not good by themselves and must be practiced with its opposite counterpart to achieve balance, otherwise, wrongs are committed, called Banes.

Halfway through the game, the Banes of Chaos possess three major party members, which in turn annihilate the three major cities, which were guilty of practicing the Banes of Order. The three main cities were also notable in that they practiced bastardized forms of the three major Britannia Principles, Truth, Love, and Courage.

Monitor practiced a bastardized version of Courage and the Bane of Apathy. With their courage just being merely words and not true actions, they were wiped out by the Bane of Wantonness when he sent goblin hordes to attack Monitor. Fawn, worshipped Beauty, a bastardized version of Love, which caused them to commit the Bane of Prejudice to anything ugly. The Bane of Insanity killed the city with plague and flayed the city's priestess alive the Avatar restores her however. Moonshade a bastardized version of Britannia's Moonglow, the city of Honesty is a city of half-truths where the truth is only good when convienant.

This leads them to commit the Bane of Ruthlessness. When the Bane of Anarachy arrived, he had the town's inhabitants kill eachother. Order and Chaos have been divided into separate worlds in The Longest Journey. Although generally both sides try to leave each other alone, sometimes someone gets it into their head that their side is the superior.

The Thief games have the Hammerites, a particularly militant group of Knight Templars , as Order, and the Pagans, a demon-worshipping underground Cult of shamans and hippies, as Chaos.

Neither are portrayed as particularly nice. The protagonist , interestingly, could be considered a representation of balance: he's a thief, but his livelihood hinges pretty heavily on the institutions of the society he lives in, and he frequently steps in to keep things from going all to hell.

Shin Megami Tensei has this as its central conflict. Pick a game out of the series and despite ever-changing setpieces, backdrops and actors, the script remains the same. Unlike most examples neither side is shown to be better than the other, often becoming two types of evil depending on the game Neutral is generally treated better and is the canon ending in all instances of direct continuations , but just has different trade offs for humanity and demons.

Order tends to result in the eradication of all independent thought and the reduction of reality to a vast machine dedicated to the worship of YHVH , whilst Chaos tends to spawn a twisted world of Might Makes Right and endless war. It returned as a major mechanic in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey , up to and including several bonuses extra attack combos, price discounts when recruiting demons and losses failed negotiations, harder to contact successfully a demon of opposite alignment depending upon your stance on Order and Chaos.

SMT is an interesting example in that although neutrality is often presented as canon, it is also often presented as not being that great of a choice, which ends up making the choice of endings seem like a 'shades of shit' kind of deal. Strange Journey in particular shows that allowing humanity to go on as it is could be a bad idea Spinoff series generally portray the alignments in a much more positive manner.

One example is Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon , where it's not them being forced to pick a side but rather how Raidou wishes to live his life. The only game with a Social Darwinist outlook in the spinoffs is Devil Survivor 2 's Meritocracy, but it's based on star signs instead of the typical alignments.

Screw Order. Screw Chaos. All of your options suck and nothing anyone does will bring an end to the neverending Crapsack World that is the MegaTen universe, so just end it all. The entire premise of Primal was this.

Arella was the literal personification of order. Her polar opposite is Abbadon, who has begun to tip the balance of power towards chaos. Grandia II portrays the two Gods of the story Granas and Valmar as personifications of Order and Chaos, both supposedly created by humans who leaned too far one way or the other.

It spells this out, very briefly, and the characters do not comprehend any of the implications. A little robot makes the remark in question. You see, Granas and Valmar were some ancient civilization's scientific researchers, who jointly discovered how to transmute matter and energy at will, i. Their partnership broke up when they realized their ideologies were split neatly along the line described by this trope — Granas wanted a perfect world full of happy people who never experience anything negative; Valmar insisted that life is made interesting by conflict The details are foggy, but we do find out that the war ended with Granas down for the count and Valmar or at least his giant bio weapon still hanging around.

Gameplay ensues. In an interesting twist, the Goddess of Chaos is depicted as a young child. The two also used to be one being: the original Goddess Ashunera cast out her own emotions, which became Yune, after accidently flooding the world. The Empty Shell that was left behind became Ashera, and lacking emotions causes her to make some If the words of a certain traitorous bishounen priest are any indication, this may well turn out to be the most primal conflict in the Suikoden series.

There are many ways one could wax fauxlosophic about this, but so far most of the writing on the wall seems to be margin notes. For instance, the conflict that created the Suiko-verse was between two embodiments of protection and destruction. Refreshingly, the series chastises both extremes, showing the horrors of "true Order" dharma, in the words of the aforementioned priest at least as often as the horrors of "true Chaos.

On the other hand, recurring Psycho for Hire Yuber is Chaos's standard bearer oddly enough, the two actually end up on the same side in at least one war. It's also implied that Pesmerga, whose sole purpose in life seems to be to eliminate Yuber, is Yuber's counterpart on the side of Order.

The two look very similar including their all-black wardrobes , have swords with the same name, and despite their human appearance are apparently immortal demons of some sort. While Suikoden Tierkreis isn't connected to the main series , it pits the hero against The Order Of The One True Way , an empire with clear parallels to Harmonia, just nastier and with plenty of horror. In The Elder Scrolls , this is heavily present though at times significantly played-with with the series' divine beings.

To note: The primary Creation Myth for most religions of Tamriel generally follows a pattern that, in the pre-creation "void", there were two opposing primordial forces - Stasis Order and Change Chaos. A few of the religions anthropomorphize these forces into beings most commonly known as Anu and Padomay, respectively. The interplay between these two forces led to Creation, sometimes anthropomorphized as the female entity "Nir". Nir favored Anu, which angered Padomay. Padomay killed Nir and shattered the twelve worlds she gave birth to.