Judging Our Elders

Question: I've noticed in a lot of fan writeups, some gods end up being Titan avatars, some avatars end up being gods, and some avatars just end up being low-tier monsters. How do you decide what exactly is and isn't a Titan avatar? What's the criteria for being a force of ultimate power and not just an antagonist?

Different writers do indeed take very different directions with some figures. There is a certain amount of working with Titans that's subjective; while there are a lot of ways to go with a bunch of different deities and antagonists, in the end there will always be some that are in a grey area, or maybe that a writer just really had a particular brainwave about and wanted to include in spite of other options.

For some pantheons, Titans are very easy to pinpoint - the Dodekatheon, for example, as the originating culture that Scion's concept of Titans comes from, very specifically label all their Titans, so you can look at a glance and know that Oceanus is a Titan while Poseidon is a god. There's very little ambiguity there. But since they are the only pantheon that actively calls their Titans by that name, what to do about everyone else?

For us, the three major marks of a Titan are:

A) Cosmic distance. Gods are close to humanity; even if they are not even remotely human themselves, they have emotions and behaviors that resemble humanity's and they are involved in human society, either as objects of worship, keepers of crops, or whatever else they might be the divine patrons of. Titans, however, are not close to humanity. They are as far away from humanity as it is possible to get. They are seldom worshiped (and most often in very old, archaic cults if they are) and have little in the way of interest in or common ground with humanity, or even with the gods. If a figure is exceptionally distant - that is, they certainly exist and are important, but they don't really interact with others much or have no apparent purpose aside from existing - then there's a good chance they might be a Titan. This is why so many of the early generations of most pantheons are Titans; they just don't have a place among the gods and they clearly don't interact with humans, because they're part of the primeval origins of the world, not the vibrant thing that gods and humanity have made of it.

B) Cosmic Representation. Titans are representatives as much as they are individual people; they're expressions of the Titanrealm they inhabit, almost like personality quirks of the realm itself. They symbolize a particular aspect of a greater concept, like Kagutsuchi representing volcanic flame as a small part of the greater concept of fire that is Muspelheim. This one is trickier to differentiate, because many gods also represent particular aspects or things in the world and should not necessarily be barred from godhood because of it, but if a figure strongly represents a particular facet of a cosmic power like Water or Chaos, there's a chance they might be a Titan. While not every god has to represent some part of a greater power, every Titan does by nature.

C) Cosmic Malice. Sometimes deciding someone or something is a Titan is as easy as realizing that they are trying to destroy everything ever and should be stopped. Titans are threats to the world and the universe as a whole; they are destructive, sometimes on purpose and sometimes just as a result of existing, because they destroy the balance of elements in the world and cause one to strangle the others. Water Titans would drown the world given free rein; Order Titans would crush any deviation or creativity, while Fertility Titans would strangle progress with the supremacy of the natural world. They're not good for the world, because by nature they want to make the world like themselves, and that means destroying it. If a figure has not only the desire or has made the attempt to destroy a pantheon or bring the world under his or her sway, but they also have enough power that it seems like there's an honest possibility of them succeeding, then the odds are good that they're a Titan.

Obviously, these are guidelines, like most things in the Scion universe. Not every Titan will fit all three, or even two of them; some gods fit one or two without crossing the line into Titanhood. But they're very good indicators of the possibility of Titanhood, so they're what we look at when we're making decisions, even if we don't always follow them to the letter.

It can be hard to match up your more minor Titans, but when you've got people that hit the full triple crown up there (like Tiamat, for example), you've got an easy call indeed.