Does fire annihilate water? No so much. It's at a severe disadvantage when you mix the two.
Anyone who's seen a still do its work (as I suspect roughly 90% of your dwarves have) knows what fire can do to water. Rather than treating magma as a tertiary state between fire & water, I expect dwarves would treat it as another
form of fire, given that they frequently use it to power forges & the like. Toady's decision to make the Fire & Magma spheres friends of each other (and opposed to the Water sphere) reinforces this. It's in magma form that fire has the greatest power over water--realistically, even a heavy rain falling directly onto an active volcano would simply puff into steam without even putting a dent in the churning lava.
It's no more ridiculous than unrelated combinations such as poetry and salt.
Oh, I've never been against gods having different,
unrelated domains. Indeed, with over a hundred spheres, each pantheon would need dozens of gods, if each deity was restricted to just 1 sphere & its close relatives. So while it would be a neater package to have a deity of, say,
oceans and salt, instead of poetry, having disparate (but non-contradictory) domains seems just the thing to keep pantheons unpredictable, but still quite plausible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios#Greek_mythology
So this guy was pulled by horses through the ky, pretty crazy, if it wasn't an actual myth...
In that link, the very same paragraph that mentions the horses describes them as being affiliated with fire. This is just another example of altering the animal to make it a better fit for its (new) environment.
All the tenuous connections we've made, and we deny the right of anything else to make them.
I'm not disputing anyone's right/ability to
make weak connections, only the plausibility of anyone
worshiping a deity held together by such frail bonds--especially when they have a wealth of alternative gods to choose from.
A god of balance someone found: Symmetry Balancedequal the Symmetric Stability of Neutralization.
My favorites are still the god of food, "Garlic Spicymuffins the Brunch of Peppers" and one of my own, a god of fortresses named "Castle Bastionshields the Defended Barricade".
Those oppositions [yin/yang bombs], are mostly rooted in our culture rather than something inherent. A totally different creation myth, with a totally different different pantheon of Gods, could easily see Light and Dark as equal, easily see Earth and Sky as Equal, and easily see desert and Ocean as equal.
Mostly agreed--some opposing matches can be combined and still make sense, while others cannot. For examples, I can imagine a god of War that at the same time represents Peace, because very often, wars have an almost completely defensive side, for whom the only reason for waging war in the first place is to maintain their peace. But a god that stands for Childbirth and Virginity simultaneously invites far more disbelief: Even if the goddess herself could somehow accomplish both qualities in the same body, her mortal followers surely could not. [The annoying thing here is that it has precedent: Quite apart from the Virgin Mary, the Greco-Roman goddess Artemis/Diana held both domains. One can only presume that she helped her followers through pregnancy while she herself remained virgin, but even so it would make far more sense to hand the childbirth aspect over to Hera/Juno (as many people in fact did), as Juno was already the goddess of marriage & women in general.]
And oh--simply because a desert can be
likened to an ocean does not magically equate the two.
However, the point is rather moot, as Sphere's of influence are in the game and wouldn't create directly opposing concepts like this.
The spheres *themselves* avoid creating conflicts, yes, we're just talking about the
secondary aspects of the gods--in the current version, that only means their name & physical depiction, but in future it might include other iconic tokens such as garments, tools, attendant animals, etc. Gods' names & descriptions can already run directly counter to their domains (a male god of pregnancy, or a god whose name mentions "rain" 4 times, even though Rain is actually controlled by a
different god in the same pantheon, etc.), and I'm hoping to correct this behavior.