Why are 10 million dwarf souls even important?

[Quild]

I had the same thought and I was planning on a thread of my own, until I did the (rough) math:

1. At strip no 275 we learn that (in the time of the order of the Scribble) the world was made around 1.000 years ago, therefore year 1.186 should be correct.
2. Dwarves in DnD are considered old at around 200. Durkon was stated to be 55 y/o and young. Therefore it's logical to assume that a "generation" of dwarves should be around 100 years.
3. Assuming no severe population increases or decreases we can summise that each generation should be around 10 mil people (as stated by Hel for the current generation).

That puts us around 110 million already dead and claimed dwarven souls.

We also know that the Northern Pantheon consists of 18 Gods, where Odin is the most powerful (as implied by Hel) and we can assume that power comes with the number of souls claimed (as also implied by Hel), therefore Odin should have the most.

Another easy assumption is that there is some way of distributing the souls among them and we also know that dwarves do not want to end up with Hel. That, along with Thor and Loki's scheeme of which we don't know the details yet, makes me think that Hel gets the least number of souls per generation.

So, let's say that Odin gets double what everyone else is getting and Hel gets half.. That would put Odin at around 12 mil souls and Hel at 3 mil.
In this scenario Hel really gets on top of him with the 10 mil bonus from world doom.

Of course this doesn't have to be the exact case or the eaxct numbers, but it shows how due to the small number of generations that have passed this 10 mil bonus could turn the tide for her. After all 10 out of 110 is 9% which is a significant figure.

I rest my case.

You're forgetting that Northern Gods don't only get dwarven souls. They get souls from other races. And for these races, Hel doesn't get much souls when the deceased lacked an honor/dishonor system.
Humans have a way shorter lifespan and are likely to be way more numerous than dwarves. That should matter. Or would without the power burst Giant's speak of or whatever else reason :D

I do not understand comments that boil down to, "I don't think the plot works the way the text says it works." I understand that characters can lie or be mistaken, but at a certain point you have to understand that the only way for me to communicate non-visual information to you in the strip is through dialogue.

I do not crunch numbers when writing dialogue. Do you know how I picked 10 million? I googled the medieval population of Scandinavia and made it about the same. The more important point is that you should assume that the characters are more familiar with the relevant details than you are—and if they say, "Hey, this number is the right number!" than you, as a reader, should accept that as being true within this story unless the story gives you some clue otherwise (like a character saying, "Ten million? That doesn't sound right").

I promise you that the resolution to this story will not be, "Oh, hey, Hel did the math wrong!" In fact, I promise you that the exact number of dwarves will never matter at all, for any reason, ever, and that every single character will continue to act in a way consistent with all of Hel's math being correct and true. And if that bothers you on some math-level of your brain, just pretend that the words "ten million" are a typo and it should say whatever number you would feel would be big enough to make Hel's stated plan "make sense" to you, personally. Because it really doesn't matter. It's not like I could have possibly picked a number that would please everyone anyway.

I was under the impression that you stated several times that characters don't know everything about how their own worlds work and could be wrong.

While I didn't expect Hel to be wrong in this precise case for some reasons (I believe you explicitely said that she was hyper-intelligent being a few days ago), I'm surprised by your statement!