It has always seemed to me that there was a bit of a mismatch between the Cult of Gloom, a zombie-raising army of despair and horror, and the Ditkoesque Rheaume d’Iscorde where nightmares and madness cavort. We know that in the metaverse, Gloomweaver was invented to transition the Cult from horror comics fixtures who terrorized the innocent into a supervillain that the heroic Nightmist could metaphorically punch out. And we know that in lore, Gloomweaver was originally a human necromancer with a snake familiar who transformed himself into a demon god but thereby became trapped in the Discord realm, from which he hungers to return because he would have nigh infinite power once here again.
My new headcanon theory is that the writings from which the Cult of Gloom originally derived their ideology, about how the world will inevitably wrong you so you should simply spite it with eldritch power, originally came not from a glimpse into Discord but rather one into the Gray. They saw through some scrying window into what they were told was the next life, and it was nothing but despair and futility and resignation as far as the eye could see, and so they became the ultimate nihilists. Meanwhile, the necromancer reached out to Discord to seize ultimate power, and got it, and might well have been successfully been summoned back, except that his cult has been metaphorically dialing the wrong area code every time they try to call him!
Interesting idea, certainly, and it be possible, but personally I’m not convinced.
The main thing is that, to me, Gloomy’s gimmick is despair, while the Grey’s is apathy / complete lack of emotions. In my view despair is an emotion, so their gimmicks are conflicting rather than cohering.
As for the mismatch between Gloomy and Discord’s schticks, I’m agree that it’s a bit odd. And as you mention there’s a perfectly valid Watsonian reason for it. Just to add on to that, I’ll say that it can at times be interesting when the obvious thing doesn’t happen. “The Demon God of Despair lives in the Realm of Despair” or “The Demon God of Discord lives in the Realm of Discord” can both make fine stories, but it can be an interesting wrinkle when things don’t line up perfectly thematically like that, as can often happen in real life.
Another thing to consider is that, probably when both Gloomy and Discord were first introduced, they were just “Eldritch Demon God” and “Weird Extradimensional Plane,” and likely lacked their strong thematic gimmicks that we now associate with them.
Kinda relatedly, a “Cult of the Grey” is an idea that just occurred to me. I think that they would just be a bunch of people who sit around doing nothing but trying to not feel any emotions. Is that what Zen or Buddhism is? I don’t know much about Zen or Buddhism. (Well, I guess they can also try to open gates to the Grey and instigate its Encroachments, if they need to do something villainous.)
Also, as a sort of MAD joke, I had the idea of an alternate disparate GloomWeaver who got stuck in the Grey instead of Discord, so he’s just a chill guy who relaxes there and doesn’t have any dreams of conquest.
If the Grey is only ever apathy, it’s extremely boring. Boring things can have non-boring applications, but not a lot of them. This is comics, so I choose to believe that early portrayals of the Grey were absolutist, because that manufactures drama easily for simple stories, and then every time the concept got reused, they had to come up with new ways to use it that were less one note. Think of the Borg in Star Trek; the reason they don’t just win is that their original presentation as this unstoppable inexplicable force was gradually toned down and given some complexity. Eventually it went too far and they turned into joke villains, but that middle section where they were still scary strong but not unbeatable, that’s the sweet spot. And an unbeatable Gray that 100% kills all emotion 100% of the time is less interesting than one which can do a few different things.
I do feel that the Cult of the Grey would need to not just be Buddhists, in part because we have actual Buddhists, but also because it’s boring. I would envision them as a slightly less up-to-eleven version of SCP-8???, “A is for Annihilation”, which successfully turns Buddhist monks into Lovecraftian nightmare beings.
Not sure what definition of MAD you’re using here, so I’ll hold off on responding to that last part.
I mean, you’ve just succinctly explained why the Grey explicitly does not have its own stories and is not an antagonist in Sentinel Comics.
It’s not a force that is trying to do things, it’s a hostile environment that leeches every last dreg of emotion, thought, and will from anyone foolish enough to enter. There are no stories about the Grey. There are stories about people who come into contact with it in a variety of situations, or in which people try to harness its leeching effects for their own ends.
Changing the Grey into something that is based on despair and not emptiness just means that you’ve just created a completely different realm.