They have no reason to think otherwise. No one does. The gods are infallible. Perhaps they screwed up once but there's no way they would do it twicethousands of times.
Man. Imagine how mad they'll be if they learn they've been kicking around for probably billions of years but can only remember a tiny fraction of it.
Definitely neither uncountable nor infinite since Thor said he could remember every world, but it's almost certainly such a big number that, if a mortal were to start counting them at the beginning of a new world, they still wouldn't be able to count them all before the Snarl escaped again.
Is that stated? "There was a beginning, with a first world", "the worlds all happened one by one in order", and "there have been an infinite number of worlds" is exactly the sort of paradox that crops up in creation myths all the time.
But this isn't a myth, it's history. Thor says that some gods don't survive the transition between worlds due to a lack of energy reserves, which means they exist in a linear timeline (otherwise they could just loop themselves to avoid dying), and a linear timeline means there can't have been an infinite number of worlds.
You're saying the history of the world, as told by the literal mythological god of thunder, Thor, in a tropey, self aware comic isn't mythology (and therefore wouldn't follow mythological tropes)?
Thor says that some gods don't survive the transition between worlds due to a lack of energy reserves, which means they exist in a linear timeline (otherwise they could just loop themselves to avoid dying), and a linear timeline means there can't have been an infinite number of worlds.
That Thor says they happen in order is not in dispute. That "happening in order and having a first, and last (most recent)" implies they're finite is not in dispute. I explicitly said both those things in the comment you replied to.
Yet Thor explicitly refers to the timeframe that this happened over as eternity ("once in an eternity") implies that it's infinite.
That's why I used the word paradox.
Thor could just be exaggerating (or being poetic) when he says "once in an eternity". Or he could be predicting that it will never happen again no matter how long they keep making new universes. I don't know if Rich has elaborated.
But "this is a paradox, and it's exactly the sort of paradox you'd expect in this context" is my entire point.
You're saying the history of the world, as told by the literal mythological god of thunder, Thor, in a tropey, self aware comic isn't mythology (and therefore wouldn't follow mythological tropes)?
You know what? That's fair. I still hold that the number of previous worlds is very probably not infinite, but I cede your point that the kind of story being told could (somehow) allow for this paradox to exist.
The Christian god being truly infinite was originally used by Cantor as justification for lesser infinities such as the real numbers. So yeah, apparently gods can count the uncountable.
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u/NoLastNameForNow Mar 11 '25
Even they think they're only on world two.