Unclean

Question: Who do you think is the "sluttiest" god/goddess of the love gods? By that I mean who do you think is the love god of all the pantheons you have listed that stresses sex and lust most over love and companionship?

This question looked like so much fun that I shared it with the Better Next Time players, who were just arriving for game when it landed in my inbox. Responses ranged from "The Morrigan! She's always having sex with dudes!" to "Aphrodite! Come on, that's like her thing!" to (my personal favorite) "Ard! That goddess of virgins thing is clearly an enormous con." The wide range and the fact that almost nobody actually answered the question being asked (only one of those three is a love goddess, guys!) is a nice example of how wide a field there is when it comes to goddesses and their interpretations. (It's also an example of how loaded that word is - not one person chose a male god, only goddesses.)

My answer, hands down, would be Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess known as the Eater of Filth. While plenty of love gods are philanderers - Aphrodite's famous trysts, Aengus' career of heartbreaking, Freya's renowned nighttime activities - Tlazolteotl is the only one who is purely and solely about sex. There is no love component to her worship or associations whatsoever; she's a goddess of sex and sexual temptation, period, and there are no fuzzy feelings attached.

In fact, Tlazolteotl is in large part about how sex is bad and you should be punished for indulging in it. There are two phases to her behavior: mercilessly tempting men with the delights of the flesh, and mercilessly passing judgment on them if they give in. An entire system of repentance existed in Aztec culture centered around Tlazolteotl, to whom men were required to pray and beg for forgiveness for their sexual transgressions (of which there were likely to be a lot - the Aztecs were very big on rules about how many kinds of sex were Not Okay). She had the power to absolve them of their misdeeds (though, according to some scholars, she would only do so once in a man's life), literally consuming their sexual sins - "eating their filth" - in order to leave them pure again. She performed a very important function; she's a cultural expression of the idea that the power of sexuality cannot be resisted, only atoned for after the fact.

She's also in charge of inflicting sexually transmitted diseases on those whorish, whorish people that upset her. So you can see that there's not a lot of room in the Tlazolteotl worldview for cuddling and discussion of mutual hobbies (among the Aztecs, those belong to the realm of the goddess Xochiquetzal, a positive goddess of love and sexual pleasure). A lot of love and sex gods and goddesses are promiscuous (unsurprising - it's their nature!) and often immoral, but no other comparable god on Scion's rosters lacks at least some form of love imagery to go along with the sex.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'd peg Hathor as the most joyous and feelings-oriented of the love goddesses; she does have a strong sexual component, but it's the happy, celebratory kind of sex, and her associations with love and comfort are just as strong.