User blog comment:DJay32/The Duel of Shaman Kullermes and Migrant O-Thorde/@comment-28939893-20161009025221/@comment-1988716-20161009225806

It's pretty much said in the poems each character gives, Kullermes is Rapture and O-Thorde is Mephi (Kullermes = Kullervo [Finnish mythology] + Hermes [Greek mythology], two parallels to Jordan's arc in Rapture, O-Thorde = Authority, which I recall Mephi being fundamentally about, with the Slender Man acting as a Fear of authority).

It wasn't, like, a serious rivalry or anything. Our mythos around this time only had a few people on at one time, we were pretty laid-back and productive. Rapture was shaping up by this point to be a very long story, with a plot wrapping Fears in much seriousness (at times) and epic scope, and Omega's Mephi was entering its second act and was also turning out to be massive and serious and grand. Our small community at that point was "divided" into which of the two massive stories one was reading; very rarely would one be caught up with both. So naturally, Omega and I would read each other's stuff and take inspiration from each other, with Rapture influencing Mephi and Mephi influencing Rapture, and we wound up with a strange "rivalry" of mutual influence.

It definitely didn't happen anything like in the story. I had a lot of fun with the weird mythical-esque prose and that influenced the direction the story itself would go. Ultimately, this story is meant to be a sort of "Those were good times, I appreciate them." Omega and I have always had a positive relationship of acceptance and whatnot and I wanted to bask in the nostalgia a bit and write a moody piece for it.