Anne Screams and Screams

Question: Why would people continue to use the Atzlanti when you created two good replacements, the K'uh and the Apu? I mean, they fill the same Mesoamerican niche. Both pantheons seem to mirror some aspects of the Aztec gods without being the Itztli conveyor belt the Aztec Scions become for their divine parents. Plus the Maya twins sound completely awesome.

Okay. Hi. Question-asker, I'm sure you're not really an evil troll and you're not trying to make me cross-eyed with rage, so please don't take my passionate cascade of fury too personally here. It's not you, it's Europe.

There are three exceptionally good reasons to keep using the Aztlanti, even if you are also using and enjoying the K'uh and Apu. I will list them for you.

1) The Aztlanti are not the same as the K'uh or the Apu.
2) The Aztlanti are not the same as the K'uh or the Apu.
3) THE AZTLANTI ARE NOT THE SAME AS THE K'UH OR THE APU.

This question... just... there are so many things wrong with it that I'm losing my mind trying to decide where to start. All this energy going into staying civil about it isn't making it any easier, either.

First of all, probably well-intentioned person who I'm sorry I'm yelling at right now, the Apu do not fill a Mesoamerican niche. At all. In any way. The Inca people who worshiped them lived in Peru and the surrounding territories of South America; they were nowhere near Mesoamerica and, as far as we know, never had any contact with the religions farther north. The religion that worshiped the Apu was not even slightly close to the religions that worshiped the Aztlanti and the K'uh - not conceptually, not in ritual, not even geographically. It is as far from the territory of the Aztlanti to the territory of the Apu as it is from China to Australia, you guys. And yet nobody comes over here and asks why the hell we would want to write an Australian pantheon when there's a perfectly good Chinese pantheon already in the game, because that would be FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

You're not the first person to look me dead in the eye and say that the Apu are unnecessary because they take up the same cultural "slot" as the Aztlanti/part of the Mesoamerican world/basically worshiping the same gods, right? You probably won't be the last. But these are gods who are no closer to one another than the Irish gods are to the Hittites, so why the fuck does everyone keep deciding that they must be the same people?

I will tell you why: because Europe. We have an awesomely global audience on this website and we love hearing from Scion players around the world, but the fact is that the vast bulk of Scion players are in the United States, Canada or western Europe. That means they've all grown up learning history from the point of view of European colonialism and conquest, and holy shit does that mean people are misinformed like whoa. The European invaders who discovered and subsequently conquered the ass off of the Americas did not bother to differentiate much between different cultures that they encountered; they were there to get natural resources, keep rival European kingdoms from gaining territory on them and stop all the heathen devilry that they saw going on everywhere. Who cares whether this flavor of brown people is slightly different than that one, when they're all going to be learning Christianity, dying of smallpox or working in the same fields for us anyway? Not only did they not care about the differences between cultures in the New World, they actively pretended that there wasn't one, leading to a perception of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas as an undifferentiated soup of "savages".

Of course, that was centuries ago, right? Yes, it was, but the hell of it is that it still strongly and violently colors our perceptions of the people who inhabited the Americas before the Europeans arrived. All of our historical and religious records were written by those Europeans, designed for consumption by those Europeans and disseminated by those Europeans, and they have carried that prejudicial lack of differentiation through for hundreds of motherfucking years. American history textbooks offer a quick sketch of life before Europeans in a few pages and then dedicate the entire book to what happened once the white people showed up. American religion textbooks talk about vast swaths of land covering totally disparate peoples as if they were exactly the same. The state of most historical texts when it comes to discussing the pre-European-invasion Americas is deplorable on a nuclear level, and that affects everyone who grows up with them.

And that's why this question is happening today, because four hundred goddamned years ago the Europeans couldn't be assed to tell the difference between different races in the Americas and, after destroying most of those cultures anyway, never had the inclination or the ability to correct the issue. Those Europeans who were interested in the cultures of the natives did not do a great job of finding out much about them, usually because 99.9999999999999999993% of them were Christian missionaries trying to convert them and stamp out their indigenous beliefs anyway, and the information they sent back to Europe (where it turned into our heinous conception of the pre-conquest Americas) was piecemeal, patched, incorrect and sometimes directly made up. That's where the trend of thinking of the Incas as the same people as the Maya and the Maya as the same people as the Aztecs began, because well-meaning cultural assassins sent back most of our information from that time period in the form of "A Treatise on the Superstitions of the Brown Peoples" or "Folk Beliefs of the Dirty Natives: A Treasury for Children."

It's odd that we tend to notice this a lot more with the North American native cultures than the ones south of Texas. Oh, the vast majority of us still don't actually know the difference between Lakota and Blackfoot and Navajo, not in any meaningful way, but we at least know they are different. This is probably a combination of the North American native presence having survived on reservations and as resisting nations for much longer, and of them being an important force in US history, which naturally makes more people in the US (i.e., most Scion players) pay attention to them. But, bizarrely, as soon as you cross the line into Chihuahua, suddenly everybody thinks that there's no real difference between various groups of people down there.

But my friends, I am here to tell you that there is a difference. There's a difference between cultures in Mexico itself, and there is A MASSIVE FUCKING DIFFERENCE between people in Mexio and people in PERU. Have you looked at a map? Do you know where Peru is? IT IS NOT CLOSE TO MEXICO. The fact that both cultures were conquered by the Spanish does not magically make them twins. At the moment, the Apu are the only fully-written pantheon on THE ENTIRE CONTINENT OF SOUTH AMERICA, and you want them to be the same as the people of Mesoamerica? What, do you think there's nothing else in South America except for monkeys and trees? That it's inexplicably the only continent in the world where religion never existed before Christianity? What is the logic here?

So: no. The Apu are not part of the Mesoamerican niche. They never were and they never will be.

More importantly, NEITHER IS ANYONE ELSE. Do you know why? Because there's no such thing as "the Mesoamerican niche". Holy shit. We are not talking about the earwax-flavored Bertie Bott's Every-Flavor Bean. We are talking about religions, cultures, entire societies of people, and furthermore we're talking about a large area of the world with uniqe history and ideas. Here, let me go ahead and find a quick map transposition for you. I'ma put Mexico over in Europe, and we'll see what happens.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Mexico could swallow Italy, Greece, France, Germany and several of the smaller Slavic countries and still have room for dessert. Why on earth do people insist on believing that there are ninety bajillion different ethnic groups in Europe, but only one in all of freaking Mexico? And, you guys, you guys, that's just MEXICO. Contrary to popular belief, THERE ARE MORE PLACES IN MESOAMERICA THAN MEXICO, and that means that it's even closer to being nearly the same size as Europe, and holy BALLS, do you understand why it is bananas to call it a niche?

Albanian mythology is a niche. The pre-Japanese mythology of Okinawa is a niche. The non-deitied spiritual shamanism of Lappish tribes is a niche. Mesoamerica is not a niche. It is a MAJORLY IMPORTANT AREA OF THE WORLD.

We didn't write the K'uh because we wanted to replace the Aztlanti; that is about the worst description of what we were trying to do ever. We wrote the K'uh to complement and accompany the Aztlanti, the same way we wrote the Bogovi to complement and accompany the rest of the European pantheons. They are not the same. They are not redundant. If anything, the fact that there are still only two pantheons in Mesoamerica is pretty shitty when there are definitely more than that in real life (no, I'm serious, there are, these are not the only two religions in Central America). What the living fuck.

And no, the K'uh and Apu do not "mirror aspects of the Aztec gods". I am stabbing that notion in the face, right here, right now. The Aztec religion was certainly influenced by material from the Maya, among others, but so was every other goddamned religion in existence. Cultures influence each other! That's normal! That's what happens when two ethnic groups meet and shake hands! It doesn't make them the same, and it also doesn't mean that they don't have a discrete, concrete, real and important religion of their own! It does not mean their gods are not their gods! I CANNOT YELL ABOUT THIS ENOUGH.

Here, we'll do the European comparison again. The Greek pantheon is big on burned sacrifices, right? Oh, look, so is the Hindu pantheon. The Slavic pantheon has gods dedicated to truth and justice? Oh, look, so does the Persian pantheon. The Canaanite pantheon has a triad of sky/water/death gods who rule it? Oh, look, so does the Greek pantheon. The Chinese pantheon maintains an important religion observation of honoring one's ancestors? Oh, look, so do several of the Australian pantheons. Are you going to suggest we should just ditch one of each of these comparisons because the other is already "covering" that? NO. BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE FUCKING INSANE.

Yes, the Aztlanti, Apu and K'uh all practice blood sacrifice, and yes, they all believe in some variation on the idea of the gods maintaining the cosmic power of the universe. But that doesn't make them the same any more than the Dodekatheon, Pesedjet and Orisha all practicing slavery makes them the same, or the Devas, Amatsukami and Yazata practicing purifiying fire rituals makes them the same, or the Tuatha, Aesir and Nemetondevos all believing in courageous acts of warfare makes them the same. Religions with common themes are found all over the world, usually right next to each other. Of course nearby religions sometimes influence one another with religious practices, but when you move on to saying, "so probably they're the same", you're wrong and you have to leave now and go live in Wrongville. For most religions, even the things they have in common are expressed, experienced and worshiped differently, because that's what different cultures do. I just talked about how Aztec blood sacrifice and Maya blood sacrifice are different in a lot of important ways on the vlog a little while ago, but I think you sent this question in before then, so consider it a get out of jail free card to escape my volcano of rage.

That's not to say that there aren't crossover moments here between the Aztlanti and the K'uh (not the Apu, because they are South American and have nothing to do with anything here); they do obviously share a god or two and have clearly waved as they passed one another in the hall now and then. But that's no more damning than the fact that the Aesir appear in Slavic myth now and then, or that Lugh is a god in good standing in three different pantheons' rosters, or that Guanyin is so Chinese it hurts and yet was originally a Hindu deity. The K'uh are the K'uh, and the Aztlanti are the Aztlanti, and to say that their gods or their religion are similar enough to ditch one and run with the other is to be tragically, epically, head-smashingly incorrect.

Also, I am about to perform Itztli myself on the next person who complains to me that the Aztlanti are evil monsters who just want to have children so they can later murder them for blood sacrifice goodies. That attitude betrays such a fundamental lack of understanding of what the Aztlanti are all about that I can't even do anything with it. I know that's what the Scion books are selling, but please, everyone, stop buying it; those books are possibly more shit-faced drunk in their portrayal of the Aztlanti than any other pantheon, and that's saying something. If you have the time and the interest, read up on Aztec blood sacrifice, why it was practiced, and what it means to the gods; I recommend David Carrasco's City of Sacrifice, but any halfway decent book on the subject should do. It has nothing to do with greedy gods who want to devour their offspring, and everything to do with the entire world and all living things in it doing their part to keep the universe from collapsing.

Look, the point of all this yelling is not to tell you that you can't stop running the Aztlanti. If you don't like them, don't run them. You should never run any pantheon - from the RAW, from our PDFs, or from anywhere else - if you're not interested in them or you don't feel like they're adding to your stories. If you love the K'uh and the Apu and don't want to deal with the Aztlanti, then you should open the field for Scions of the K'uh and the Apu and leave the Aztec gods to sit at home and tell each other stories about the good old days. Lots of Storytellers only use a few pantheons in their games, and there is nothing at all wrong with that.

But don't remove them from the game because they've been "replaced" by the K'uh and Apu. They haven't; they couldn't be. All three are highly different pantheons of highly different cultures with their own unique importance and mythological symbolism attached. None of them render one another redundant any more than the Aesir render the Tuatha redundant; they enhance one another by fleshing out their part of the world that much more. If you don't want 'em, you don't need to play with 'em, but don't pretend they're somehow unworthy of inclusion.

And yes, the Hero Twins are total ballers.