The Thunder Rolls

You changed Ryujin's character heavily in Saki's origin story, from the boisterous frat god portrayed in the core book to a ravenous demon who impreganted Saki's mother by raping her then returned to eat Saki's mother and the rest of her family. Is this the "truer" version of Ryujin? and did the core book "Disneyfy" him to make him more acceptable?

First off, a little nomenclature confusion: Saki is a daughter of Raiden, not Ryujin, though it's an easy typo to make since they have very similar names. Hachiro refers to Raiden as "Raijin" in one of the stories, which is actually more properly his name; "Raiden-sama", which basically means "Lord Thunder", is a title of Raijin ("storm god", literally). To be honest, though we left it on the site to avoid player confusion, we prefer to use the name Raijin over Raiden, both because it's more exact and because it matches his brother Fujin ("wind god"), with whom he frequently appears in art and myth. I'm pretty sure that the books use the name Raiden because, thanks to a long tradition of video games using the name for their characters, it's more recognizable to a western reader.

Anyway, I know you know you're talking about Raiden, so let's talk about him!

Raiden's a weird god-choice in Scion. I probably wouldn't have looked to him as a playable god had I been planning the line (if the pantheon really needs a sky-god, I'd have suggested Tenjin), but again I think name-recognition helped him out. Raiden has very few stories in Japanese mythology; he and Fujin are sort of elemental figures, the terrible storm and wind, something to be avoided or propitiated. Those few stories that are told about him usually deal with people trying to get rid of or escape him, and those are often excitingly gruesome. My favorite deals with a hunter trying to capture the god to stop raids on his community; in order to lure him in he kills a young woman to use her belly-button as bait, but is ironically foiled when Raiden happens across the disembowled corpse first, thinks she's hot, and pops somebody else's bellybutton that he's been chewing on out of his mouth to fill in the hole.

The belly-button thing is for real; Raiden's single most defining trait, after the thunder and the lightning and the being a terrible ogre-monster, is the fact that he eats peoples' belly-buttons. It's still pretty common in Japan for parents to tell their children to hide their bellies during a thunderstorm so Raiden doesn't come for them (though it's more of a fable to teasingly frighten), and in more rural, traditionally hardcore Shintoist areas, even some adults still wear cotton bands around their stomachs under their clothes to ward off his interest. While Raiden is certainly considered a god (probably a very old one, predating widespread worship of the official Japanese pantheon), he's not a particularly nice one, which is understandable when his major attributes are being a hideous oni who causes storms and eats people.

Raiden's writeup in Scion: Hero (where, oddly enough, he is credited with discouraging the Mongol invasion of China, something I've always seen attributed to Hachiman instead) seems to me to be an example of how to put the most positive spin possible on a figure who is essentially a monster; the image of him as a portly, hilariously mockable god-buffoon is helped along by several recent portrayals of Raiden as goofy or laughable in modern Japanese pop culture, which enjoys poking fun at his ridiculous appearance. Video games in which characters using his name appear are almost always more positive than his ancient depictions as well, especially Mortal Kombat, which reinvents him as the benevolent protector deity of a fictional version of earth (I'm actually pretty sure that this game is the sole reason Raiden has Guardian associated in Scion). You certainly could go a revisionist route with him if you wanted to; you could always run with the idea that, thanks to his hideous physicality and loud noises, Raiden has always gotten a bad rap and is actually a pretty affable fellow. You could say that this is the reason he never appears with any members of Amaterasu's court or in fact has anything to do with the rest of the pantheon, other than similarly unruly elemental gods, throughout Japanese mythology.

But the Raijin of myth that we encountered was uniformly a terrible, grotesque, feared, stomach-eating disaster-monster, so that's how we portray him in game. He probably belongs in a Titanrealm much more than he does in a pantheon proper, as his brother Fujin (confusingly renamed Kaminokaze, but trust me, that's him lurking in Ehekatoyaatl) already is.

As for Saki and her ill-fated family, those events played out pretty much inevitably; it's doubtful that Raiden, even if he bothered to become a lower-legend avatar of himself, is going to get any human woman's willing sexual attention, and while Raiden might not have planned on eating everyone when he turned up for her Visitation, well, I mean, they were right there with all those tempting tummies. That character was looking for a good old-fashioned Japanese horror story, and Raiden delivered in spades.