Trope Talk: Fantasy Gods

It probably doesn't surprise you that I find mythology and the gods very interesting, considering… like… 50% of my channel backlog - but it may surprise you to learn that this fascination is, in large part, rooted in how the stories of gods shape the way we think and write. As an atheist myself, I think of gods as a subset of the stories that we tell each other to make things make sense. But that doesn't mean I find them meaningless - just the opposite. Stories are how we communicate meaning in its purest form, and the stories of gods infuse meaning into a world that I personally believe does not innately have any beyond what we thinking animals give it. When the first proto-hominid looked up at the stars in their myriad shapes and said to themself "there's stories in there," that's what I find most interesting to think about. How do we conceive of the world around us, how does that give rise to gods, how do we give name to the forces at work in the universe that we recognize are beyond us? And throughout all this wonder and mystery, one question keeps echoing up through the channels and caverns of history: What exactly is a god? *100,000 years of holy war later* And now that we've gotten all that out of our system, how do we write a god? In the wonderful worlds of fiction and fantasy, the cosmology of the universe can be whatever we want it to be, and that frequently means populating it with deities and demigods of all stripes. But how do these gods work? How do they interplay with the rules of the universe, what are their limitations, and how do they reflect the real world mythologies and religions that shape how the writers conceive of gods in the first place? Now the fun thing about this trope is that even an initial definition is gonna give us trouble. Turns out writers are not the one group of people who find the question "what exactly is a god" easy to magically agree on. In some settings, gods are basically just strong people who typically don't age and have some suite of thematically appropriate superpowers to back them up. In others, gods are originators that created part or all of the setting world and are responsible for its continued existence. In others, gods are sustained by the belief and worship of mortals, embodying important concepts and subject to be changed, weakened, or even killed if they lose enough mortal support. In more animistic framings, "god" is just a category of spirit that are embodied in all sorts of different things. In some stories, gods are distant and unreachable power sources who buff their followers with useful abilities and spell slots but are typically prevented from direct intervention. Some stories feature gods at war with each other, some actively malevolent deities. And there's a whole space of cosmic horror where gods are beings beyond all mortal comprehension whose best-case scenario is flat indifference and worst outcome is active malice. This is a mess to categorize. I'm having flashbacks to my dragons trope talk. But if we can't lock down a single tidy classification we can always start breaking things down into subtypes and see where that takes us. To start, let's go where everything starts: with originators. These gods are responsible for the creation and/or shape of the world they're in. They are usually absolutely enormous and frequently dead, or dormant or slumbering or otherwise unlikely to get up to any world-shattering activities in the timeframe of the story. There's a lot of mythological precedent for originators, since most people have at one point or another asked the question "how did all this even get started in the first place"; you get the classic Tanakh approach where a singular god created absolutely everything out of basically nothing, or the Zoroastrian angle where one good god created everything perfect and then a sh*tty bad god decided to cause problems on purpose; there's also the popular Greek approach where things like the earth and the sky just sprang into existence out of Primordial Chaos, but you also get things like the Norse version, where the gods we're more familiar with killed a guy and sculpted the world out of his corpse. This is also the format of one of the Aztec creation myths, where Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl teamed up to kill the monstrous Cipactli and turn her body into the land. But originators don't need to die in the process of creating or becoming the world. In the Lenape creation story, the world has to be rebuilt after an apocalyptic flood and a turtle volunteers to be the new foundations, growing to enormous size and supporting the whole new landmass on his back. There are far too many creation myths for me to comprehensively lay them all down without dramatically underselling the sheer variety at play here, but suffice to say that all this and more provides abundant inspiration for writers trying to get their cosmology started. The originator or originators create the world or become the world or lock themselves into the eternal responsibility of fighting for the world, and this usually means they either can't or won't take much of an active role in the proceedings from here on out, because they're too foundational or too vast to fit into this little world they've created. Frequently, one of the first things the originator does is create a first generation of more worldly gods. The originator is usually too distant, too busy or too dead to wrangle the smaller-scale workings of the world they make, so it makes sense to populate the cosmology with more specific guys that can handle the details. This can be intentional or accidental; it's not uncommon for the next generation of gods to arise spontaneously from things like spilled blood or………… other bodily fluids. Swim in the Nile at your peril. And this usually kicks off the pantheon, which will then be able to continue expanding in the traditional way - gods boning down in ways I can't show even as classical paintings without risking demonetization, mortals finding ways to ascend to godhood, or other gods joining from other pantheons that came from… somewhere, don't worry about it. All this has a ton of mythological precedent, with the generations of Greek titans and gods definitely inspiring a lot of writers, and the Norse pantheon's near-continuous expansion

and complex interpersonal dramas also definitely feeds into a lot of pantheon politics in fiction. Tolkien took this model and used it almost verbatim for his Silmarillion legendarium situation. His capital-G-god Originator is Eru, or Ilúvatar, who goes on to create the Valar, several of which have extremely obvious parallels to the Norse pantheon, but are not equal to the original capital-G god that created them. Since Tolkien was intentionally trying to craft a mythology that could reconcile Christian monotheism with Norse polytheism, this framing makes sense - and it lets him work in some classic Paradise Lost by making one of the Valar Morgoth, the One Who Decided To Be A Diva About It And Introduce Evil Into The World. Below the Valar are the Maiar, less powerful but still the same kind of thing as the Valar, basically demigods or angels; this is the category of being that contains Gandalf and Sauron, fun fact. So everything anyone deals with in Lord of the Rings is like at least two whole power levels below the god conflict that happened in the Silmarillion, which really helps put the whole thing into perspective, huh. In a similar vein of High Art, Transformers also uses this model, with Primus and Unicron serving as titanic planet-sized Originators - one good and one bad - and Primus going dormant as the planet Cybertron before creating the Thirteen Original Primes to functionally serve, less as gods, but more as a legendary pantheon of ancient paragons who pioneered a lot of important Transformers stuff. The Elder Scrolls also likes this angle, which makes sense given the very Norse aesthetic they like to go with - the general gist across its various creation stories is: there were these twin primordial gods of order and chaos, naturally one good and one bad, got into a big ol' tussle before yeeting themselves outside of time, leaving the Aedra and Daedra to arise from their spilled blood. One of these new god guys convinces or tricks some of the others into creating the material world and gets killed for his troubles, leaving a fragment of his spirit to reincarnate in times of great turmoil and become the player character. Skyrim lore is bananas and I can't get enough of it. One fun angle of the Originator model of worldbuilding is it introduces a mild-to-severe element of cosmic horror. After all, if that originator god is still around in some capacity, even dead, they're still so much more vast and foundational than any of the greatest godly forces still at work in the world they created. By their very nature, they transcend the known world in every way. Which means if somebody manages to get their attention, the results can be absolutely catastrophic. This also has some very basic mythological precedent! While Mother Nature has had a lot of her sharp edges softened in the pop culture perception, in Greek Mythology, Gaia was frequently at odds with the Olympian gods because they kept killing her kids, and Gaia's Vengeance usually means unleashing a horrifying monster if they're lucky and an apocalyptic set of natural disasters if they aren't. If the originator made the world, theoretically they could unmake it, which means if they wake up and decide to cause problems, or even just roll over in their sleep, it could immediately become a Class One Apocalypse. But this can also end up working out for the good guys! In some stories, a bad guy might get bad enough to actually attract the attention of the primordial originator - maybe the bad guy is trying to end the world and the primordial originator likes being the world, so they very carefully shift a tectonic plate around to squish them or something. It's a rare bit of deus ex machina that's always a fun surprise when it happens. Actually, on the subject of cosmic horror, that is another popular way for fantasy gods to be framed. The Cthulhu Mythos is built around the idea that if godlike beings of immense cosmic power really existed in our universe, the best thing we could hope for from them was indifference, to sneak by beneath their notice like the powerless little ants we are, because to draw their attention is to invite horrors beyond the scope of any mortal mind. Why should we assume that humans are the Main Characters of the universe when the universe is so much vaster than the ancient philosophers dreamed? A universe without a god may seem cold and uncaring, but surely a universe with gods that felt nothing for us would be far worse. Cthulhoid horrors tend to be reality-warping nightmares for whom the laws of physics are more like suggestions, so far beyond human comprehension that to even perceive their shadowy imprint on our reality is to go irrevocably mad. And there's elements of precedent for this in even the most classical anthropomorphized mythology - Zeus allowing Semele a glimpse at his true form and absolutely vaporizing her has phenomenal implications for the nature of divinity in Greek Mythology, and how much the gods must be holding back in every other myth to avoid evaporating everyone they see. There's also the classic Pillar of Salt incident from the destruction of Sodom, which has that appealing terror of the unknown - the survivors forbidden from even looking at whatever was happening back there, lest they go from being biology to geology. To be a god is to wield great and terrible power, and the mythos of eldritch horror asks the question, why should those great and terrible powers ever concern themselves with us? Even less overtly horror-based settings will often allow their deities a certain eldritch distance that makes them feel like more than just powerful people. This is common in settings where gods and godlike entities are power sources for magic - the gods are distant and beyond reality, but their presence can be manifested through the conduits of their followers, and if they ever show up personally it's a lot more likely to be in vast and terrible aspect than as a friendly neighborhood glowy humanoid. This can also be the angle taken by stories that are more focused on gods as parts of nature or the world at large than as reflections of humanity specifically - stories like Princess Mononoke feature gods as the spirits of the natural world, many of them

at direct odds with humanity, waging brutal and bloody war against the industrialization that threatens their homes. This angle decentralizes humanity from the god conversation and lets gods exist indifferent to or beyond humanity, and if humans get too ambitious about messing with them, the consequences can be devastating. Humans are not the main characters of this paradigm, and the universe's caretakers are not overly concerned with coddling us. But some stories take almost the opposite angle - one where the gods are not placed outside of humanity, but are instead shaped or even made by the humans who believe in them. These gods are sustained by the belief and collective consciousness of humanity, and rather than creating the world, they are created from it - shapes and personalities assigned to the parts of the world that hit humanity the hardest. These gods are usually anthropomorphic personifications of abstract concepts like war or death or justice or other comparable ideas that humans think about a lot. In these frameworks, gods can be harmed or even killed if they are no longer believed in. These gods are basically living stories; immortal as long as their story is told, but subject to change as the story evolves over time. Now, to my knowledge this idea is a lot less mythologically precedented than some of these others we've talked about - gods might get tetchy if they aren't sacrificed to, but in most cases that seems to be more about the principle of being disrespected and less about staying alive. There are plenty of myths where gods die, but it's almost never a tinkerbell "clap your hands if you believe" situation and has more to do with getting stabbed. But this idea of gods being sustained by prayer does have precedent in the way that actual religions work. Writers that take this approach frame gods, not as external powers shaping the world according to their whims, but as stories told by the human collective, changing over time and in some cases disappearing as their worship is stamped out or organically forgotten. These god stories are not powerless, but they are dependent on humans to make that power real. This is the framing used in most of the Discworld novels, where even extremely tangible concepts like Death are only personified the way they are because of the way they're thought of and perceived. Gods can become severely weakened if their believers disappear or their belief gets redirected into something else. The novel Hogfather centers on an attempt to kill a god - specifically the Hogfather, the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus who started off as a god of midwinter blood sacrifice to make the sun rise. By targeting the children who believe in him, the assassin nearly succeeds in killing this being who embodies the meaning of the sun returning after the darkest night of the year. The idea that gods are empowered and strengthened by their followers is a popular one, but it's certainly not universal. Loads of the stories we've already talked about feature gods that just exist, making or shaping or moving through the world largely independent of how people think about them; gods that don't seem to in any way be responsible for the existence of the world, but are nevertheless part of it. In fact, one of the most popular ways for gods to show up in modern media is as superheroes - people with powers and above-average toughness, but not necessarily cosmological significance. These stories frequently wobble on just how godly these gods really are - sometimes they're just Extremely Strong Highly Advanced Aliens from Another World That Looks Like Heaven who just happen to have a suite of abilities that follow some general godly theme, and then sometimes they're Fully Literal Gods whose power and strength is directly tied into whatever godly domain they supposedly represent. Still, this angle is usually one of the less metaphysical ones; it sort of takes the classical myths at face value as stories of unusually powerful people getting up to people-based shenanigans like fights and arguments and ill-advised romantic trysts. It's generally accepted in the study of mythology that the role a god fills in their religion is somewhat more complicated than just "that guy who got up to all those shenanigans we have stories about. " Is Zeus an embodiment of the sky and all its destructive fury and the principles of fatherhood and kingship and the obligation of those with power to show hospitality to those without, or is he a buff man in a toga who likes to hit stuff with lightning? Is Thor the infinite force behind the thunder, the slayer of monsters prayed to in times of despair to turn his terrible weapon against the incomprehensible ills that plague us pitiful humans, or is he a buff man in a helmet who likes to hit stuff with lightning? I can at least tell you that one of those is a hell of a lot easier to write. So the God As Superhero approach gets a lot of airplay in modern media. Sometimes these stories will let you get comfortable with these gods as just people with superpowers and then bam, they'll hit you with "oh right, they're a god" and give them some crazy powerup just from remembering that and believing in themselves. This can be a little out of nowhere and can do bad things to the power curve if the consequences are allowed to reverberate too far, but that's kind of to be expected when you let a character be a kind of thing known for its omnipotence. The problem with making a god a character is there usually has to be some compelling narrative reason why the deus can't just ex machina their way out of whatever problem the plot has thrown at them. This can be done by making the problem big or by making the god small, and a smaller god is generally easier to handle than a god-scale problem. So gods in this kind of story will usually be narrowed down to a mythologically recognizable but not religiously significant scale - someone who can chuck a lightning bolt or two, but can't hold the universe in the palm of their hand. This can be justified in-universe by some kind of intentional de-powering; perhaps a divine barrier forcing them to leave most of their power behind when they incarnate

or another god stripping their power from them and banishing them in a weakened state, or that most of their divine power is stored in a weapon or a tool that they don't have access to. This can also be justified by sort of turning the original mythology inside out - making the gods never have been anything more than superpowered people who were worshipped as gods by humans who thought they were a lot more cosmologically significant. This is basically the exact same approach that historical christianization efforts used to strip the divinity out of every quote-unquote "pagan" religion they were attempting to replace, which……… I guess means it has historical and narrative precedent. Calling these guys "gods" feels a little weird, possibly because these stories often seem to struggle with locking down a consistent definition on what exactly that means, but hey - we haven't been able to define godhood yet, why would it start working now? Once you have gods running around in a story, a logical question to ask would be - what happens when a god dies? Can it even happen? If a god is sustained by belief, what do they become when they lose it? Do they just stop existing, or does something worse happen to them? Some stories answer this question by borrowing from real historical scenarios where a culture conquered by another religious group had their own religion and gods stripped of their narrative divinity, rewritten to be powerful humans or fae spirits or trickster demons. Maybe a god whose following vanishes becomes a fairy or a djinn or a whisper on the wind. Maybe gods can't die, but they can become something that wishes they could. Or maybe a god that dies is still a god. Still immortal and unending in some way, but changed forever. Maybe a god that dies becomes a god of the dead. Or maybe when a god dies, what it represents also dies and vanishes from the world, throwing it out of balance. Maybe gods can be replaced or reborn, or maybe they can sacrifice their divinity to become mortal. Maybe gods can't be killed, but they can be imprisoned. Once gods are characters, it's useful to know their limitations and what stakes exist for them - what can threaten them, and what might motivate them to act. As briefly mentioned in the Gods As Superheroes thing, many stories will introduce some kind of reason why the gods can't just do divine intervention whenever they feel like it, since a world where that was true probably wouldn't have many problems left. This is especially common in settings where the gods are actively benevolent and/or embroiled in some kind of cosmological war with a faction of evil god-equivalents that they have a vested interest in defeating. The reason for this bit of narrative shenaniganery ties into another real-world theological question that's been tormenting people for millennia - if [insert god or gods here] is both powerful AND on our side, why do bad things keep happening to us? There has to be some reason why all the heavy lifting is left to the mortals. And this question can be answered in a bunch of ways: in the Originator scenario, the gods created the world but aren't necessarily capable of micromanaging it, especially if they turned into the physical foundations of the world and/or died or went dormant in the process. In the Eldritch Horror scenario, the gods are powerful and capable of directly intervening, but they're all horrifying nightmares who wreak absolute havoc on our poor fragile reality and have no interest in helping us out in any way we would see as "help". In the Superhero scenario, the gods are benevolent and helpful, but not all-powerful - just pretty strong in their specific domains. The one with the most nuanced variety is probably the Power Source angle, where gods empower their followers to do various nifty things but for whatever reason can't seem to interfere directly beyond that. This can be for various reasons, but one of the more common ones is that the gods are just too destructive and if they try to touch the world directly it'll be Pillars of Salt from here to the mississippi. Their power has to be doled out in very small amounts in the hands of priests or clerics to avoid wreaking untold devastation. Some stories will also explain the gap by putting the gods behind a barrier of some kind, walling off the heavenly realms from the mundane world below; this limitation may be self-inflicted or the result of some other worldbuilding nonsense. But it does tie into a larger question at the heart of this trope: setting aside what the gods are, what role do the gods play in the story they're in? In many cases the gods are structural, supporting the world and the mortal protagonists navigating it. In others the gods are problems - antagonistic to our protagonists, problems to be solved or evaded. Frequently the gods have plans of their own and the mortals are just pieces on the board to be used or sacrificed as needed for this grander scope scheme, putting the gods in a role suspiciously close to that of the writer. Or maybe the gods really do just wanna help, but they're limited by what they are, requiring the protagonists to meet them halfway, following the rules and making the right sacrifices to even get the chance to get their help. Maybe the gods are distant, hypothetical, perhaps not even real within the context of the story - just names to be dropped in worshipful settings to add texture to the fantasy worldbuilding without ever taking an active role. Or they just keep to themselves, largely unconcerned with the goings-on of mortals. Gods can be people, concepts, dreams or nightmares, rulers, families, facts of existence or loose hypotheticals. We are once again unable to comprehensively answer the question "what even is a god? " But I don't think we have to. Gods mean different things to everybody, and there's no reason fiction should be any different. Not to bury the lede, but part of the reason this trope is top of mind for me is that my comic, Aurora, is getting its second print volume very soon, hitting shelves late in April - and the arc that this volume covers is very heavy on the fantasy gods. When I started building this world

back when I was a kid who had just read Diana Wynne Jones's "Tough Guide to Fantasyland" and thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I was right and had good taste, I really wanted that classic Fantasy Pantheon vibe, with a list of like eight to fifteen tall beautiful people in togas or something, all of them with beautiful fantasy word-salads for names and domains like "justice" and "the turning of the seasons" and "nature and stuff", and instead of saying bad words my protagonists could curse with their names and it'd be really immersive and worldbuilding-y and flavorful and stuff. But as the story took shape and I learned more about world mythologies, my conception of what gods could be in this world I was building gradually changed. For the most part I, having read a lot of Discworld at a formative age, decided to go with the model that gods are created by the belief of mortals, personifying and embodying concepts that could exist with or without the god, but having a god allowing those concepts to take form and speak for themselves - which let me give my world gods of everything from massive existential concepts to individual geographical features. So you could have conceptual gods of things like War and Justice and Darkness etc. etc., but you could also have Genius Loci gods that were gods of places, sort of the soul of a location. It's got a little bit of the animism model too - everything has a soul, but some of the things that have souls are concepts like war or smithing, or environmental features like an island or a particular pattern of ocean currents or an unusually dangerous storm. Gods in this story don't typically have bodies unless they need one for some reason, leading to a lot of casual incarnation to solve problems; a god can make a body out of anything, but their most natural "true form" is shaped by how they're perceived, so even though they're quite powerful, there's a degree to which they aren't in full control of their own existences - a god whose believers start to fear them might become more terrifying in aspect against their will, but a god who wants to be feared could foster that on purpose to gain power and strength from their victims. But in this model, a god only exists where their domain exists. The god of a city can't just wander off somewhere else because the city is their anchor, their real body, basically. But the god of war can be anywhere that war is brewing. So some of the gods are very limited in where they can act directly, and while a god may not be easy to kill, that doesn't mean they're invulnerable. And none of them are omnipotent, which allows me to present gods both as challenges and people to be challenged by problems to solve. And if you remember from the Elemental Magic Systems video last year, this world also has originators in the form of massive primordial beings whose corpses form the planet that all this stuff is happening on. It's fantasy gods all the way down, baby, I can't get enough of the things! Wait til you hear what stars are. But yea, I wanted to talk about this because I really think this is one of the most fascinating elements of fantasy worldbuilding, but I've been so steeped in my specific approach for so long that I keep forgetting how interesting it really is. There are so many different ways to conceive of gods, to build a story around them. This is just the one I like the best! Uh, and also because if I didn't mention the book at least once I would be being very irresponsible as a writer, and I'm really trying to be better about that. New year new me, baybeee! Heuh boy. So… yeah! (Book's open for preorder! Unless you're watching this in the future, in which case it's out on shelves like a real publication! Ok! I love you guys! Bye for real! )