Question: Rhea, mother of Zeus and the other Olympians - how do you treat her in your games? She is often represented as a kind figure, with a lot of lion imagery. Do you consider her a god or a Titan?
Rhea is very definitely a Titan - she's referred to repeatedly as a Titaness and is part of that most important generation of Titans, along with her siblings Cronus, Hyperion and Coeus, who led the Titanomachy against the gods before being bound in Tartarus. This doesn't mean she has to be antagonistic, of course; she's certainly benevolent toward her children at least a little bit, to the point that she wanted to save them from being eaten by Cronus, and she is never mentioned as being part of the war against the gods herself.
We've actually talked about Rhea in-depth before in this post, which was back in the dark ages of the archives. In a nutshell, while we have no "official" stance at the moment because Rhea has not been involved in our current game plotlines (or has she, players?), I prefer the later Greek mythology that claims that Rhea became Cybele after the shock of her husband and children warring against one another, and that she currently plays out the role of that insane but interesting divine figure. She's tolerated by the gods, partly because she's their mother and partly because they're probably pretty afraid of her, but she isn't really one of them. She might be benevolent sometimes, but at other times her madness might win out.
I was actually surprised to see Rhea not in Ourea with her husband. I guess due to her position as Ops, Goddess of Opulence, I envisioned her as simply being the plentiful harvest mother wife of Saturn, the Lord of Agriculture. I was up in the air this morning (in fact, I find this question extraordinarily serendipitous since I was going to bring her up anyway) as to whether I'd want Rhea living in Ourea with Cronus but sympathetic to the Olympians and trying to find (impossible) compromise between her vengeful husband and son, or have Rhea living on Olympus with her children but a possible key figure in calming Cronus to some extent. That's just me, though. I like Rhea a lot.
ReplyDeleteGreek myth is pretty clear on the fact that she isn't hanging out with Cronus and the warring Titans after Zeus jumps him, which makes sense since she wouldn't want to take sides and wouldn't want Cronus to murder her for saving one of their sons. We didn't think it would really make much sense for her to be part of Ourea, both because of that and because Ops is sort of a secondary role for her and she doesn't really say FERTILITY to us in all caps as a result.
DeleteOf course, you could do whatever you want with her. :) I love the Cybele idea, but that's just me.