Apotheon - 5/20 hours

The earliest theological thought I can remember was about Noah's ark. It's a story that really disturbed me as a child. Even at a very young age, I didn't believe that all the antediluvian people were irredeemably evil (though, obviously, I did not put it in so many words), and the thought of all those babies, puppies, and kittens drowning to death make me really upset. But more than that, I felt a kind of naive outrage at the hypocrisy of it all - how could God have flooded the Earth when one of his major commandments was "thou shalt not kill" (and oh, how an older, more cynical me laughed and laughed when I learned the more accurate translation was "thou shalt not murder" - a glib loophole big enough to drive a whole herd of camels through).

The various terrible answers I got to my questions about this story are what set me on my path to eventually becoming an atheist, and though I am now 35 years old, this story still makes me irrationally angry. I bring it up now because the story of Apotheon really reminds me of Noah's ark, enough so that it's kind of riling me up. (Which is desirable in an action game, of course, though maybe I don't need quite so much aggravation in my life).

What's going on is this - Zeus has decided he's fed up with humanity, so he's ordered the gods of Olympus to withdraw their blessings from the Earth. The crops won't grow, the seas and forests will not yield fish or game, and the sun shines only dimly. This leads to massive suffering and death down below, and thus a hero called Nikandreos decides he's going to do something about it. With the help of Hera, who appears to be a double agent of questionable loyalties, he is transported to Mount Olympus to storm the home of the gods and steal their gifts for the good of humanity.

After your first few victories, Hera betrays Nikandreos and Zeus casts him back to Earth, only this time instead of passively letting humanity die of starvation, the gods decide to assault the survivors, sending earthquakes, floods, and monsters to wipe out the survivors. But it turns out Hera's betrayal was just a stratagem (or was it?!) and she sends you back up to Olympus to finish the job. . .

So I've been experiencing a kind of low-level fury whenever I have to listen to a major antagonist. Like, Zeus was hoping the human race would die with "quiet dignity," which, I don't know, has he even met a human before? It was smug and arrogant and I wanted to scream at the screen, "hey, you're the one killing us, and you won'y even allow us the dignity you'd give a rat, to acknowledge that it is the nature of every living thing to fight for its own survival, fuck you, man!" But, of course, that wouldn't have helped anything.

If I'm being snarky, I'd say that the definition of a god is "an entity that expects you to thank them while they're hurting you." But if I'm being honest, that's just the nature of power, generally. I don't think people like to think of themselves as wielding power over others. I think, instead, that anyone who's not a psychopath is reluctant to use force except in response to an injury. But if you, personally, have a lot of power, especially of the kind that can hurt people, but isn't much use for anything else, then there is a temptation to become the sort of person who is easily injured.

And that can occlude the ways you control people with fear. Your victims may look at your relationship as placating you with praise and tribute, under the threat of violence, but if you've become used to the benefits of the relationship, and you blind yourself to the feelings of your victims, then maybe withholding praise begins to look like disrespect, and withholding tribute begins to look like failing an obligation. And how can you answer these insults? Only with power. Power is all you know, and you have a strong incentive to actively avoid learning anything different. Because people would speak to you honestly and deal with you fairly, if you were an ordinary person and not feared for the strength of your fists.

(This, incidentally, is why I hate the phrase "an armed society is a polite society." Because the whole point of enforcing politeness with a gun is that the fearless can engage in reckless brinksmanship and coerce elaborate performances of politeness from anyone sensible enough not to want to risk getting shot.)

Gods don't have a significantly different psychology from humans in this regard. They're really just an extension of this tendency to the ultimate. Because they have limitless and unanswerable power, the offenses that trigger their wrath become impossibly rarefied. Gods are, in fact, the only thing in the universe brittle enough to be wounded by lack of worship.

I guess that's part of the fantasy of Apotheon, though. We are born into the world destined to die. The violence of nature against our bodies is the one thing we cannot redress. Bu if you personify these processes as gods, then suddenly famine and pestilence and darkness have a face, and for all their power to hurt, and claim victimhood in the process, the gods are not strong enough to stop Nikandreos (mankind victorious?).