Bittercon: Bringing the Gods on Stage

[marycatelli]

as part of bittercon

Bringing the gods onstage seems to have two major pitfalls.  One is that they can swamp the main characters.  The other is that they don't come across as convincingly godlike.

Making the main characters divine, or semi-divine, is one way to get around the first problem, but it brings in the second one in spades.  Gods that act like spoiled three-year-olds are not convincingly divine.  It's not much of a defense to say that the original myths show them this way.  For one thing, modern fantasy writers tend to go far beyond the myths in the stupidity of the gods.  For another, the gods are the Powers That Be of your universe.  The stupider they look, the stupider the world looks.  Not to mention that generally, the characters -- and the writer! -- do not come across as that much better than the gods.  (Set the bar a little higher than "better than a spoiled three-year-old" please.)

Some writers manage to pull it off.  John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos.  Rick Riordian's Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a little more mixed.  Sometimes they are fully divine, sometimes they are convincingly toned-down either for rest or for dealings with mortals (even when they are being arbitrary, nasty, and capricious), but sometimes they are just too thin.

But if the main characters are merely mortal humans, even though the gods have to be offstage much of the time to avoid the first problem, they still have to be divine when they appear.  Convincingly awe-inspiring.

One trick to avoid is to have them avoid lecturing the characters on moral principles.  Trust me on this one:  no writer has come up with the plain and obvious solution to any moral conundrum that people have broken their heads and hearts over for millennia.  And even when the writer is not trying to be novel, most of the time, what they reveal is their total unfamiliarity with what has been said and thought over the millennia -- and the depths of their shallowness.  Marcus Aurelius is a minor philosopher, lent undue prominence by his position, but most such lectures could be improved the writer's having bought Meditations and ripped it off shamelessly.

Also, it seldom advances the plot.  Which can't, to be sure, be said for the far more common technique of having them appear to push the characters around.  Leaving aside that the technique frequently does not make them convincingly divine -- a plot device is not divine -- it also railroads the characters.  Bringing us to the other problem, of swamping the characters.  Not that it is not a common problem when the hero is the Chosen One, or Destiny Says that something must happen.  Obscure and oblique statements from the gods, though, may merely raise the question why they weren't clearer, or didn't provide more help or what have you.

Gene Wolfe's Soldier In the Mists and Soldier of Arete seem to me to handle this, but by a technique that has limited applicability:  the gods, in spite of having cursed Latro to lose his memory every night, don't care much about him.  He sees them, he talks to them, and they aren't trying to shoehorn him into something.  And gloriously numinous gods, at that.

Humm.  Come to think of it, the most convincingly numinous gods are also those whose mysterious messages are the most satisfying.  They actually convey that the god is aware of more than the character and has considerations that the character can not fathom.

Or, the god can actually only leave signs.  This can be tricky.  But even when another character can plausibly argue that something was chance, a character can take something as a sign.  Which also be helpful in lending depth to the world-building

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

But why would a real god fool around leaving a sign instead of giving a clear command?

[marycatelli]

Because the writer doesn't want the characters railroaded by the plot. 0:)

So you devise a reason. Or you make your god so numinous and awe-inspiring that you convince the readers that they can't understand his reasoning, his mind is so much greater.

Humm. Come to think of it, a convincingly numinous and awe-inspiring god would also explain why the god does not put on too much of an appearance: it would crush the mortals and destroy their freedom.

[cedunkley.livejournal.com]

It's a difficult decision as to what presence you want a god to have in a story.

Do you go with the God speaks directly to the character with commands a la Moses? Or do you have them disguised as a mortal as part of the traveling group? Or do they manipulate events or emotions from afar? Or do they provide portents and/or visions that can be interpreted (often incorrectly) by mortals?

Each one of these would have quite the impact on the telling of a tale. Not an easy decision at all.

[marycatelli]

What most writers should do, in my experience, is decide what kind of story they are writing, and then work backwards to the religion and the gods.

Humm. I didn't point out above that you should also realize that how much you bring the gods on stage will affect your world-building and its religions. Ah, well, it was a long enough post without that.

[cedunkley.livejournal.com]

Being a huge Tolkien fan from a very young age I developed the whole creation myth for my universe from very early on. The gods exist as real entities, but only play a direct role very early on in the timeline and towards the end of the timeline.

Their former presence remains a powerful influence upon society, however, and shapes certain aspects of life and civilization.

For most of the stories I have in my head, that will eventually all be written out (whether they ever get published or not), only one in particular has a god as an actual protagonist. The events in this story actually reshape life itself throughout the universe I created.

I think, if one is going to get a god involved, the consequences of their participation need to be severe, in one form or another, be it for good or for ill.

[marycatelli]

Of course. The Powers that Be. If they don't affect things, how can they possibly keep the entire world running?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

What about the Gods and Goddesses in Megan Whalen Turner's books about Gen? They serve the dual purpose of being the only supernatural forces at play, and also being mysterious and advancing the plot. And all of their nagging (which is only stated briefly) can be summed up, as one of them says in the middle of the second book, "stop whining". They seem to be one of the big cases of doing it right.

The worst case I know of of getting it wrong is Dragonlance, but usually I pretend not to have read them.

[marycatelli]

Yes, the Turner books do it well. Especially in that you can only see the gods, sometimes, in hindsight.

And Dragonlance -- trying to tell us that a horrible tyrant was Good. No, thank you. I've read Aristotle. All virtue is the mid-point between two extremes.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Divinity can also work when it's limited in power. I rather liked how Lois McMaster Bujold handled them in the Chalion books. The gods are bound by rules,a and can only work though mortals in particular ways.

OTOH, there is a good reason all my epic fantasy characters are atheists, animists, ancestor-worshippers, or have completely absent gods.

[marycatelli]

Well, they do, in fact, work through those rules. Whether they are bound to them absolutely or use them to give humans free will is another matter.

[theironchocho.livejournal.com]

The Percy Jackson books crack me up, but it is a big disappointment to see the gods bickering with each other constantly. In the final book, Demeter was presented as a nagging mother obsessed with eating cereal. I think Demeter is one of the most powerful Olympians since she brought the seasons and decided if the crops were going to grow, making her a giver of life or death.

I think Riordan may have used this tactic because it needed it to seem as though his gods were to childish and stubborn to fix their own problems so they needed their kids to step in and be the real heroes.

[marycatelli]

I think he overdoes the childishness a bit -- but not the quarreling. The Greek gods really did quarrel quite a bit. Then, mixing that with convincing divinity can be truly interesting.