Aphrodite Ouranea

Question: Would it make sense to cast Aphrodite as a Titan Avatar? You have said that she has very limited associateds, and the most popular origin myth for her is her coming to exist out of the blood of the Sky itself...

To be entirely accurate, it's not Ouranus' blood Aphrodite's born out of. It's a bodily fluid of a distinctly more genitive kind, and it's the reason she's a goddess of sexuality and love. Not that lots of blood wasn't also involved.

Aphrodite's an odd figure; she certainly does have very cosmic, ancient origins, having sprung from the severed body of one of the most ancient Titans the Dodekatheon have to offer, but at the same time she's an exceptionally earthy figure, involved intimately in the affairs of gods and humans alike. I can definitely see the temptation to make her a Titan Avatar, because she does have very few associated powers and is far closer to the origins of the universe than are most playable gods.

Aphrodite's associateds problems stem from two facts: the Greek gods tend to be narrowly specialized, meaning most of them only have a few associateds to begin with, and Aphrodite's major association doesn't have a power attached to it. There is no Love purview, and while the original Scion rules tried to compensate for her by just dumping all the social Epic Attributes on her, this wasn't a good solution, since despite being exceptionally hot Aphrodite is pretty demonstrably not good at manipulation and generally not particularly well-liked for her scintillating personality. This leaves her in her current state, with only a few associations; she's one of the best examples out there of a god who is obviously very important but who isn't reflecting that in having a lot of associated powers. Stupid Greeks, always ruining the paradigm for everyone else.

But origins and associations aside, we don't think Aphrodite should be a Titan Avatar, and that's because she consistently and strongly breaks the first rule of Titanhood: she is very much not distant from the affairs of gods and mortals. She is a major player on Olympus, frequently involved in stories with other deities; she has love affairs with Ares and others, is caught in adultery by Hephaestus, gets wounded trying to defend her son Aeneas and complains to Zeus when things aren't going her way. Furthermore, she's directly involved in the affairs of humanity, from her kidnapping of Adonis to her seduction of Anchises, and she performs important functions for them as the goddess of love and sex. She had huge numbers of temples and devoted worshipers, thriving cults and hymns, and despite her personality foibles was generally viewed as a positive and necessary figure. In short, she has none of the hallmarks of a Titan Avatar.

If you're really interested in pursuing the idea of a Titanic Aphrodite, however, I'd point you toward an interesting development in later Greek philosophy, Plato's theory of the Two Aphrodites. Basically, he outlines the idea that there are two love goddesses named Aphrodite: the celestial, heavenly Aphrodite, goddess of pure love, overseer of the cosmic constant of emotion, and the vulgar or earthly Aphrodite, goddess of sexuality and human love. Basically, he separated the goddess into two parts, one in charge of the idea of divine love as a universal, cosmic power, and the other in charge of sexuality and earthly love of the sort mortals can understand. Further, he said that the heavenly Aphrodite was the one born solely of Ouranos, while the earthly Aphrodite is the one that Homer refers to in the alternate tale of her birth, in which she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione (also thus explaining why Zeus, so prone to shenanigans with all attractive women, never makes a move on Aphrodite, as she's his daughter). Under Plato's theory, it's the earthly Aphrodite who is prone to adultery and involved with humans and the other gods, while the heavenly Aphrodite presides distantly over love as a concept that spans the universe and trumps all other powers.

Now, this is a much later idea in Greek myth; it's clearly not part of the original cults and myths of Aphrodite, and it comes from Plato, to boot, who was prone to making up things like Atlantis or the original combined humanity myths in order to use them as allegorical and philosophical tales. But it became very popular with philosophers and actually gained some traction in medieval times when it was rediscovered by Europeans, and if some parts of it are obviously all Plato (the assertion that heavenly Aphrodite governs all homosexual male love, for example, while all love for women falls to earthly Aphrodite, is Plato and his preference for ephebe lovers all over), others have been played with by storytellers, philosophers and writers for several centuries. It's definitely not something I'd point to as original Greek mythic source material, but it's a very symbolically ripe place to mess around with if you're running an Aphrodite-heavy story or really want to explore the goddess's character.

Mess around with Eros, while you're at it - he's got two versions, too, one of them the Eros, son of Aphrodite and Ares, who is the god of love who hangs out with the Olympians, and the other the cosmic, Titanic Eros said to be one of the first things to exist, younger only than Gaia, Ouranos and Chaos itself. The dual versions of Aphrodite and Eros have to do with the popularity of the later Greek philosophical idea of love as the most powerful force in the universe, and however you choose to translate that idea into Scion, it can't fail to be interesting.