My book, because i wanna talk about it.

This weeks blog is about something a little different, though it’s in the same vein as basically everything I’ve ever talked about. Passion projects, or, specifically, MY passion projects. I realized I don’t really talk about myself on my blogs, or I don’t think I do (?) and I’d like to share, like, the biggest thing in my life.

Since I was 12, I’ve been writing a story about a teenager who can see ghosts, and delivered the prophecy about their own death, which will reinstate order for the world. Kind of like trading one valuable human life for the greater good. I’ve had huge plans for this story for years, and it comes with characters you all are familiar with if you read my short story, Constellations, back at the beginning of the year! This story has probably been the single most important thing to me since its conception, and there has been an occasional stray from it, but I always go back. I love this story so much.

It explores messages of grief, specifically grief within people who are terminally ill, found family, and the concept of fatalism and discussions of free-will in a world where everything is “predestined”. The story even includes its own pantheon, entirely made up by me! I write a lot about grief, choices, sins, ect., and during the “heart of the story” assignment I realized that my struggle to find a message for my story was pointless. I already knew it!

Basically, I’ll be talking about my pantheon today, and the ways in which it is corrupt. The reason I’m doing this is because I’ve been reworking the entire thing, since I realized it wasn’t an entirely expansive, fleshed out, or realistic pantheon based on the fundamentals of religion and the world I wanted them to live in. Talking about it will help me understand it better, and I can’t exactly express over 43 gods who have been scrapped in a poem instead.

We have a few laws on how the gods themselves work , and these are examples that have kept me on track since I was 12, so they’re pretty easy to understand I think. The laws of succession, contradictions/opposites, connectivity, and dispersal. The easiest to understand is the law of opposites, but I do have to explain some smaller bit for that one to make sense.

You can’t have a god of fast food, or cellphones. There is not a technology god, entirely because I don’t feel like making that some sort of plot point and, if I include it, it will be. Gods don’t get so specific, or small in concept. We have gods of War, Violence, Conflict, and we have gods of sculpture and bigger concepts like that. Generally, once concepts get so small they’ve already been dispersed between demigods or godlings.

You also can’t have a god of two things, unless the other thing they’re the god of is the flip opposite of their other thing. Law of opposites! Like, for example, the god of health and injury is the same dude (in a gender neutral way), and just has two faces. The gods of truth and lies? Same dude. Death is also life. The god of order is also the god of chaos! Stuff like that. Then, with the law of opposites, sometimes it presents itself like the god of violence swearing to never hurt someone again, and being a pacifist—and eventually becoming the god of pacificity. In a greater sense, the god of war also governs peace. The god of purity is disgusting (nod to how purity culture is disgusting and exploitive). Memory and amnesia are the same guy.

Which, of course, brings the next law: connectivity. This is my favorite, because I just eehhehe I love it. There is a god, Riah, who is over both memory and amnesia, aka forgetting, is the sibling to the god, Cas (name changing soon I swear) who is forgiveness! Like.. like… ehehe, forgive and forget. There were also some others, which I genuinely don’t care to remember, but siblings come in pairs. Twins are REALLY common among gods, like two of the most prominent gods in the art world are twins, and they’re visual and performance art.

Finally, to sum up all of those rules, we have the law of dispersal. Every pantheon has some “start” god, for example Chaos (Khaos) for the greeks. This is that, and my version of that is Idyll. Kind of the big guy for all of the gods. Idyll split into four different gods, ceasing to exist by choosing to exist in them, and then those gods split up to make more gods. Like mitosis. The law of dispersal is all basically mitosis. You have greater gods, like the Ancients who represent some sort of element, and then lesser gods. Lesser gods can disperse into huge concepts still, like Humanity and the Sciences (who are two separate dudes) who dispersed into separate subjects like art, then literature, then poetry. Eventually, though, the amount of idyll in a god’s soul is so little that they don’t exactly get domain over anything, or nothing big, and those guys are known as godlings. And, if anyone from any of these groups has a child with a human, that child would be a demigod. Demigods aren’t really “over” anything, but they have a more concentrated amount of power than godlings in a specific subject. Take my books protagonist, Halo, for example. His mom is the earth, so he can like earthbend and stuff (not really). There is a character, Sol, whom he gets in a fight with who is directly descended from gods and not human in any way, and he lowkey mops the floor with sol, because Sol is so far removed from Idyll.

There are also groups and concepts like “False” Gods, then theres the whole reason people hate demigods, theres zombies and vampires and like the cult and also bird people…. And the whole blessing system and the tattoos, but I don’t!!! care about explaining!!! Those!!! Maybe next week (year?)

(if anyone has any ideas on what to call the gods besides gods… hmu. I saw someone call the pieces of their pantheon Totems and thats so cool but stealing is wrong or wtv. I had a friend suggest Mantle, but that feels too clunky + and also military (scary). Send help. Love you. kiss Kiss. Bye.)