The Final Solution

Question: I have a question about Kagatsuchi. He is a titan avatar in the game, but in historical myth is he even still alive considering his father chopped his head off for killing Izanami? and what does that say about his personality?

Death is weird in Scion. You're right; Kagutsuchi is technically dead, having been beheaded by Izanagi within minutes of his birth and chopped up to turn into a bunch of volcanos. You would think this would put a stop to his budding career as... well, as anything.

But Kagutsuchi is far from the only figure in Scion who by rights should be at eternal rest instead of running around harassing people. Even if you don't count death gods like Izanami or Osiris or Yama, tons of Scion's titans and gods - even playable ones! - are technically dead. Huitzilopochtli sacrificed himself to help create the sun; Quetzalcoatl killed himself in penance for raping his sister, while similarly over in the Loa Ogoun did the same after being caught having sex with his mother; Coatlicue was beheaded by her own children; Houyi was clubbed to death by his own students for his bad attitude; Shennong poisoned himself trying to learn all the herbs of the world; Guan Yu was defeated and executed by Sun Quan; Ravana got curbstomped by Rama. There are actually more people among the Tuatha who are technically dead - Nuada (beheaded), Lugh (drowned), Dian Cecht (died of a plague), Ogma (killed in combat), the Dagda (stabbed with a javelin) - than are still alive. And that's not even counting the Aesir, who are all about to die, or anybody who dies but gets resurrected in a story.

That's a lot of people - interesting, mythologically rich people! - to exclude just because they happen to technically be dead. The easiest way to look at it is just that Scion is a game in which the awesome cosmic power to reverse death is available, and that means that death doesn't have to spell permanent removal of a character unless you want it to. Not everybody should necessarily be in a "revolving door" situation - after all, you still want death to mean something when it happens - but it's not the kind of game where death is the Forever and Incontrovertible End except in very extreme circumstances (having your ghost destroyed by someone with Mother's Touch, for example, or getting eaten by Ammit). Whenever death happens, it's really up to the needs of the story whether or not it's permanent; if the characters do heroic, mighty deeds that have a shot of reversing it, well, it's probably reversible. If they don't, or they lose to a greater power, it might be the final chapter after all.

In Kagutsuchi's specific case, there are a lot of options. His mother is, after all, in charge of the Underworld; she might just have let him right back out as soon as he died, either because she wanted to ruin her ex's day, because she didn't want her murderer as a roommate, or just because she still had enough motherly affection to want to give him another chance. He could also have escaped on his own, considering that he died at almost the same time she did and it's doubtful that she was quite on top of the Underworld thing yet at the time. My favorite option, however, is to consider that he did die but that it doesn't matter for him because he's a Titan; the act of killing him transformed him from an infant god into an aspect of the greater concept that he represented, namely Fire. Because Titan Avatars are really just ways that the greater Titan chooses to manifest itself, and because Japanese myth implies that Kagutsuchi was the first time volcanic fire existed, he might have fortuitously died just when Muspelheim needed a figure to become the lord of that kind of fire. Which makes everything Izanagi's fault, but really, a lot of things are already his fault. He probably won't notice.

Another thing to consider is that if you follow Scion's rules, Kagutsuchi can't be killed unless the gods want to destroy important parts of the world; as a Titan Avatar, killing him is a terrible idea. His beheading therefore might represent him being imprisoned in Tartarus rather than a true death.

Personality-wise, I'd probably play Kagutsuchi as very elemental and pretty much without any of the squishier human emotions like love or curiousity; if he feels anything, I'd probably give him a nasty temper to parallel the eruption of a volcano. He never had time to be a real person in myth, so his personality is probably solely shaped by his murder and his time in the Titanrealm.