Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
And the Twelve Gods' immediate subordinates are high-level clerics, not paladins. Miko isn't their immediate subordinate; she just happens to be a high-level employee (which mostly means she's good at her job, not necessarily that she has a high rank—anyone who's worked in a professional setting knows those two don't always correlate), and one outside the typical managerial structure for that matter.
But Miko is explicitly highly-ranked. She's the highest-ranking paladin of the Guard (and the Guard includes clerics who could relay orders from the Gods to her anyway, so it's a marginal distinction.) And the entire function of her organisation is explicitly to act as agents of the Twelve in protecting the azurite gate against existential threats involving the Snarl, Crimson Mantle, and the like. There certainly aren't many people they would have a more urgent reason to talk to, and this is particularly glaring when she also explicitly wants to talk to them.

My basic argument was that Miko's position in the org-chart effectively makes her special. It's a distinction without a difference as far as where the Gods should be investing their attentions is concerned.

...The Twelve suck if you're viewing them as Tri-Omni guardians of the Material Plane. But they suck consistently, so they work as consistent characters, and the ways they suck allow stories about mortals to happen, so they work as setting elements. This isn't a Miko-specific issue; if they were Tri-Omni guardians, they'd have failed that task a thousand times to Sunday even without considering any past universes. But they aren't.
That has always been my position. I don't understand what you're complaining about.
I'm complaining, in part, because we've recently had an extended plotline that involves several OOTSverse deities explicitly conniving to manipulate mortal affairs, all while using several channels of direct and indirect communication with their senior followers to do so. It is reasonable why to ask why the single organisation of the planet that was probably best-equipped and motivated to coordinate with the Gods for this purpose were, in practice, completely ignored by their own patrons and/or stunningly bad at their jobs.

I mean, this wasn't such a problem 900 strips ago when things like Commune and Wind Walk had never been introduced or referenced within the story, but you can't just shoehorn these elements in the plot later on without raising questions about the competence of other actors.