Babel Clash

I understand that in honor of Tom, we’re also going to talk about Gods, and whether they should intervene directly in the story or not.

Well, that depends.   Probably in telling this kind of story, you’re being inspired by the Greek or Roman pantheons of very interventionist Gods who are a long way from any modern, secular notion of benevolent indifference.   And you can’t really critique whether it’s the ‘right thing’ to do in a story or not, because this kind of story is almost a sub genre in its own right, and saying it’s silly is to write off the entire sub genre, to say nothing of a big chunk of ancient Greek and Roman culture.

But to do it in a modern storytelling context, there’s some obvious pitfalls — for one, can your Gods be defeated?   This is kind of important, because if they’re going to be bossing our mortal characters, the mortals are going to need to get their own back every now and again, because otherwise there’s no resolution to the drama.   Why fight against someone you can never defeat?

The biggest danger that I see in this kind of story is that the Gods will suck the dramatic life out of the mortals, because the mortals need to hold the dramatic fate of the story in their own hands.   So the Gods need to be restrained in some way, because otherwise our mortals may as well not bother getting out of bed in the morning.

But anyway, over to Tom…

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