I’m a bit confused about time right now, but that’s okay because at least I have a few days of break! Monday is going to hurt though.
So I brought some of this up in my most recent sporking chapter, and I had thoughts about it with the latest God of War game, considering games that came previously in that series, so since I don’t know what else to write I thought I’d give it a go!
Fantasy Using Mythological Gods
I’ve written before about this thing I see in fantasy stories sometimes featuring the Greek gods, in which the gods get killed, and how that doesn’t work for me. It does work in mythologies like Irish or Norse, in which gods can get killed (and sometimes they do!), but in Greek mythology it’s weird. Immortals and God of War are pretty bad offenders here, where once the Plot gets going Titans and Olympians are offed right and left in increasingly gory ways. Which makes no sense–if the gods could have killed the Titans, why didn’t they just do that instead of locking them up?
Greek mythology is full of stories in which gods and giants defeat each other by capturing and imprisoning one another. If killing them was on the table, why didn’t they do that instead? There are attacks on and schemes to overthrow Zeus, and none of them involve doing more than crippling him–because the Greeks did not conceive of their gods as being killable. If you’re going to have the gods killed, you have to give me a reason as to why this is happening now and not any of the other times in mythology in which it would have made sense to do so.
[There’s a side note in one of the constellations in Rise of the Argonauts that implies that plenty of gods and Titans did die in the war between them, but that they are simply forgotten by mortals.]
Dresden Files has an interesting bit which implies that while immortal beings can be killed, it’s really darn difficult, and beings that we think of as gods can only be killed (even by each other) in very specific circumstances. Otherwise, you can chop them to bits and light them on fire, they’ll just regenerate and zap your face later on.
But there’s something else that bugs me when mythology, any mythology, is included in modern day urban fantasy stories. And that’s this: the gods existed up until modern day, and their status quo has remained the exact same since ancient times. Which is weird, because we’re trying to think of these gods as actual characters, with personalities and histories and such. The more you think about it, the stranger it gets.
So for instance, the gods only have a set number amongst themselves. Are you telling me that Zeus hasn’t had any more divine children in thousands of years? That no other gods have been born into his pantheon? Why not? There should be oodles of newer gods that weren’t in the myths yet, and they should represent ideas and forces that came along as time went by.
And all of the gods still have their old positions? In mythology, when Dionysus became an Olympian, Hestia gave up her seat for him. Has that really not happened at all since ancient times? Gods shifting around their ranks and positions? And if the gods can be killed, then this makes even less sense–if a major god died, someone would take his or her seat on Olympus, wouldn’t they?
The most recent sporking chapter I did has the queen of the Irish gods mention that her late consort, who’d she has been married to for thousands of years, was useless and stupid, so she thanks our hero for killing him and asks him to take his place (yeah, our protagonist is THAT kind of wish fulfillment character). But this makes no sense! Why on Earth would she remain married to a man she despised for thousands of years, when killing him was always an option?
A large part of the Plot is also her brother Aenghus being the main villain, and he has spent hundreds of years raising a rebellion against her. And she only NOW acts against him (indirectly) for Reasons.
If the gods have conflict, then there should be actual changes made within their society! And that isn’t hard. I’m not asking for much here! There’s a delightful bit in Godslave in which Set is surprised to find out that Horus and Hathor are no longer married because of an affair that happened–which Set isn’t privy to because he’s been locked up for thousands of years (and Edith doesn’t know anything about the gods so it’s all new to her).
There are sometimes worldbuilding reasons this divine stasis can work, but those can fall apart by other problems. If your world works on the ‘Every myth is true because human belief makes them so,’ then yes, of course the gods have to conform to what people already believe. But that rule hardly ever makes much sense, it’s just people copying Pratchett and Gaiman, who were using it to make a point about human nature.
What I can imagine working to maintain this stasis is that the gods aren’t so much people as much as they are embodiments of fundamental forces–of course they don’t change their hierarchy or structure because those are universal things. This is, I think, closer to how the ancients would have seen their gods, though very little fiction actually goes with the idea.
If the gods of ancient mythologies exist in modern day or fantasy settings, and they can be killed, there better be good reasons why they didn’t do that in the myths, or why it hasn’t happened to them in the thousands of years until then. If the gods have apparently the same social structure and positions as they did thousands of years ago, you need to have a reason for that too–that is, if you want to depict the gods as being very powerful people and not fundamental forces of nature.
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