Writing About Fictional Deities

I’ve always found it hard writing about deities. That sounds kinda weird, especially when you consider what I normally write about over on the Phoviverse. Ever since I started writing the 4th version of the Phoviverse, gods have played bigger and bigger roles in the stories. But really, have I even created gods, or are they just insanely powerful mortal beings? Actually, I have lots of ideas and rambling thoughts about gods in fictional works.

The way I see it, writing fictional deities seems to come in several forms. Gods of everything, gods of big things and gods of lots of little things.

The most obvious is the single deity, the all-powerful GOD that is perfect and omnipotent in every way. But this sort of deity is boring as fuck. Mostly because it’s what a lot of people already believe in, but also because the whole idea of an all-powerful deity is insanely flawed. If you’re all-powerful, then why the fuck do bad things happen in the domain in which you rule. You can’t just shove it all under the pretense that you’re testing the strength and faith of mortals, because you really don’t need to. You’re all-powerful, you can make a mortal race permanently and perfectly faithful in you. Heck, an all-powerful god would trample all over non-believers with his all-powerful powers. But no, these sorts of gods are full of all sorts of loopholes. If a god was really all-powerful, then the bad guys, whoever they might be, would never, ever win.

Then you have powerful deities that rule over a single purpose almost perfectly. Generally these guys are pretty damn powerful and depending on their sphere, nearly as powerful as an all-powerful god. With these kinds of gods, it’s pretty easy to build religions around them, create supporters and enemies and give them reasons to worship, but I often ask myself to what point does one god’s power end and another begin? But on top of that, how do these gods act with one another? If you’re in charge of something huge, like Light or Time or Death or something, what happens if you take over another domain? You also can’t risk losing a god like that, because it would have dire consequences to a universe’s lore. These gods tend to either be very strict and distant, or essentially comatose, like the Divines in the Elder Scrolls series.

Finally, there’s the “gods for everything” route. This is basically what the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians had. They had lots and lots of gods. Some of them were gods that ruled over a big thing, some just ruled over little things. For example, you’ve got Zeus, the God of Lightning and the Sky; Hermes, the messenger god and Nike (actually pronounced NEE-KEE in Greek) who is the Goddess of Victory. But then you’ve got other gods, like the badass Goddess Athena, who was in charge of wisdom and the city of Athens, but is also in charge of weaving, olives and owls and dabbles in war every so often.

Just like the second category, it can get confusing as to where one god ends and another begins, but the great thing is that you can always make a new deity to fill a gap that hasn’t been filled yet. Making religions is somewhat harder unless you want to have various pantheons, but for a lot of gods, that doesn’t matter anyway because they’ll at best only receive the odd prayer or two. Most of the time, people have the choice to worship who they want anyway, and in-universe they have a lot more freedom.

Of course you can mix and match all these different types of god. But the question is, how powerful are they? That’s a really hard question to answer and frankly I really don’t know. I mean, things like “can you make a new god” and “can a god die” all depend on the universe, but power strength is so hard to determine. Sure, they’re gods, but they have a limit as well, right?

The deities in the Phoviverse fall under the second category. They’re gods of big things. In the MK4 Phoviverse, there are four main gods and two ‘big’ gods that cover everything else. Gods of Space, Time, Life and Decay, all guided by a Goddess of the Whole Universe and a God of Voids, Stasis and Nothingness. All of these gods are insanely powerful, but for some reason, they act similarly to how the Greek Gods acted – they’re all surprisingly human. Well, “human” is the wrong word because humans don’t really exist in the Phoviverse, but they act, talk and live like humans do, despite having vast amounts of power. They bicker and argue but they can be caring and can fall in love as well.

Really, I think emotionally human gods are the best gods. Because they aren’t perfect. They may think they are perfect, but they’re not. More importantly, a god with emotions can feel love and desire. A god might desire power and love domination, but these sorts of emotions give them reasons to keep on going.

Gods need reasons as well. And having a purpose makes them far better characters.

And then there’s Arceus.

Arceus is the Pokemon God who created the Pokemon universe. And he’s perfectly fine being captured by a 10 year old with a magic ball.

Editor’s note: I’m actually on the 5th version of the Phoviverse. This article was originally written in 2021, before I kinda abandoned the Phoviverse for a year or so.