When Mama Ain't Happy

Question: Where does Rhea fit among the other Titans? What Titanic aspect does she represent? Also, her role in myth is distinctly benevolent, so is she on the Gods' side in this conflict?

Rhea is a difficult being to peg for Scion; she's very obviously a Titan, but equally obviously not opposed to the gods, and furthermore she doesn't seem to represent any particular natural force in Greek myth, outside of motherhood. So what to do with poor Rhea? Surely Zeus wouldn't have tossed his mother into Tartarus, right? But then where is she?

There are a few options you can pursue with Rhea. The Romans transformed her into Ops, goddess of prosperity, and her links through them to fertility and wealth give her the potential to be considered a member of Terra as an earth and fertility Titan. As the ruling queen of the Titans and gods during the Golden Age (and especially highly regarded as such by the Romans), you might also consider her to be part of the Justice realm - if you use the book's version of Logos, she is similarly inoffensive and neutral as are the other Avatars that populate it, and if you run with our version of Sedeq, she might represent justice in opposition to tyranny.

If you want to use Rhea as an antagonistic Titan, the best way to do so is probably by following her fusion and eventual transformation into the mad goddess Cybele, which occurred over the course of her cults in Greece and actually predated the rise of Roman Ops. Cybele is one of my personal favorite crazy antagonists, because she's both sometimes benevolent - she served as protectress of some cities and occasionally provided hidden wisdom and prophecies to her worshipers - and sometimes violently insane and dangerous, to the point that her worship was eventually banned in most areas of the ancient world. She was most well-known as a goddess of mysterious visions, drunkenness and hallucinations, and terrifying orgiastic rituals that sometimes included male celebrants castrating themselves in her honor. It's craziness on an epic and frightening scale, and it's not hard to see why, despite her inexplicable popularity, various kings and emperors tried to stamp out her worship to stem the flow of insane drunken murders and mutilations.

The Greeks, once they realized that Cybele had a very prominent cult and was clearly no one to be fucked with, decided that she must be the same person as Rhea, and that she had fled from Cronus' anger after saving her children to go mad in the mountains of Phyrgia to the east; it's not a stretch to believe that poor Rhea might go bonkers, especially since her attempts to save her children resulted in said children killing or imprisoning everyone in her immediate family and taking over the world that she had once ruled with her husband. As a figure representing motherhood, madness and mystery, she might be a good candidate to join the Avatars of Comprenion as the representation of madness revealing enlightenment to those who can handle it, or again as part of Terra thanks to her connection to mountains and wildlands.

I'd probably consider Rhea and Cybele to be the same for Scion's purposes; it works very well, from explaining why Rhea's not around anymore to explaining why Zeus and company seem to have accepted Cybele's cult without so much as a peep of protest. Depending on how thoroughly you want her to oppose the gods, you could play her madness plenty of ways: she might have good days when she remembers that they're her children and aids them or bad days when she only remembers their crimes against her family and wants them punished, or she could have no memory of being Rhea at all, having become and elusive wild card that the gods might or might not want to get involved in their troubles. If you really want her to be an antagonist, it's easy to rule that Zeus had her belatedly dumped into Tartarus as well after he realized that she had gone nuts; if you want her to stay more ambiguous, she might never have been imprisoned, and Zeus and his siblings probably just hem and haw and try not to talk about her if at all possible.

I know John's going to call me out because he knows about my passionate love of Cybele and how much I want her to be in Scion somewhere, but she's still probably the first place I'd go to include the mother of the Olympians. Just think of all the fun you could have with Scions trying to redeem her or trying to work around her because their parents have forbidden them to actively fight her - not to mention the earth-shaking parties she and Dionysus could throw if they ever got together!