Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Behind Stone Walls

Question: Does the Guardian Titanrealm exist? And if yes, what would it be like, and who would you put in there? (On a sidenote, what about Psychopomp? Same questions!)

Possibly?

While we can usually generally match up a purview to a Titanrealm, for the more "human" purviews this can sometimes be difficult. They're still important, universal mythological concepts that should be represented by a purview, but they aren't quite elemental forces the way some of the other purviews are, so it can be challenging to conceptualize what a Titanrealm dedicated to that idea would be like. Guardian, which has primarily positive connotations thanks to its associations with saving people from harm and preserving things from damage, is also difficult to titanize just because it's so often a thing we would think of as good, and therefore too benevolent for Titans.

However, there probably could be a Titanrealm related to Guardian. It probably wouldn't be the "Guardian realm", however, because that wouldn't make much sense, and we would suggest that it's possibly more of a place dedicated to boundaries, locks, walls and imprisonment - Guardian turned to negative purposes or taken to extremes, so that instead of saving people from danger it locks them down completely. A Titanrealm of Barriers, perhaps, or something like that. It would be populated by Titans who believed that protecting things meant controlling them utterly, or locking them away forever; or who wanted to protect things or people for bad or selfish reasons, for example kidnapping and locking up women to "save them" from actually living their lives and preserve them just for the Titan's pleasure; or who think of themselves as the ultimate authority over who deserves to be protected and who doesn't, and who intentionally let the weak suffer sometimes because they aren't deemed "worthy". We haven't done even a scrap of the research and work on such a realm we would need to do to give you a good potential roster of Titans who represent it, but we would look for figures who are older in generation, and primarily famous for protection and guardianship without being necessarily allies of the gods - Rhea, maybe, or the Jade Emperor. This might also be a great place to put the monotheistic or monotheistic-leaning Titans that Scion has trouble placing; Ahura Mazda might be a great fit for this kind of a place.

As for Psychopomp, we actually already wrote a Titanrealm based on that concept - it was the realm of Whedh, the Titan antagonist to the Arab pantheon the Alihah. Whedh is the Titan of Unity, an idea related to Psychopomp in that that purview is the purview of movement, travel and escorting the dead to their destination, and its ultimate expression is in making it literally possible to travel to and be anywhere in existence. Whedh goes a step further, as Titans are wont to do, and decides that all places should be the same place, thus making it impossible for anyone ever to need any other destination or have to travel any distance whatsoever.

Or exist, really, but that's the problem with Titans; they don't and can't moderate themselves. Even Titanrealms of positive places are, outside of those Avatars that represent positive forces within them, too uncontrolled and all-consuming to be truly safe or beneficial to things outside of them.

15 comments:

  1. I've always loved the idea that the Gods somehow harnessed the power of the Guardian Titanrealm and forced it to act as the underlying metaphysical foundation of Tartarus...I mean, think about it, what force can keep the Titanrealms themselves bound for millennia? Another Titanrealm dedicated to doing just that.

    As for Avatars, the only three I ever came up with are Kampe, jailer of Tartarus, Vindhyachal, the Hindu mountain God who sought to cut off all of southern India from the North, and Louhi, the Finnish hag who keeps all manner of beautiful things locked away in her realm of Pohjola.

    Incidentally, that's what I call the Titanrealm, Pohjola, Titan of Boundaries/Barriers/Divisions (that last because I see Pohjola as the opposite number to Whedh). Plus, I remember reading a partial writeup of a Finnish Pantheon sometime ago that put some emphasis on the Finnish ideas of gift-giving or Lahja and its importance to the culture, so a Titanrealm that defines possessiveness by its very existence seemed a good opponent for them.

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    1. Maybe it is a good place for Balor? Trying to hide her daughter so her son wouldn't kill him, Obviously it didn't work but and he failed. But he is difficult to place.

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    2. I put him in my War Realm, Mag Tuiread, as ruling Titan, opposing the Tuatha. Mostly because this is a guy whose entire purpose in existence seems to be a living superweapon. YMMV, of course.

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    3. Poor Balor, no one knows what to do with that guy.

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    4. Mad respect for you as always, Samudra. That's some seriously awesome stuff.

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  2. *lightbulb*

    Selfishness. Kidnapping women. Opposed to a culture that values pilgrimage...

    We may have a place to stick Tau, the main Guarani Titan

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    1. This reminds me...weren't you going to do more South American flavoured Scion Storytime Vlogs? *cough*Inca*cough*

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    2. Congratulations! I'll look forward to it :)

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  3. A greater titan is not going to exemplify the negative aspects of a concept; it is just going to exemplify all the aspects of a concept. It is up to the titan avatars within the greater titan to represent specific aspects of that greater concept. Those are the guys who might represent it as a negative.

    That is to say, within a prospective greater titan of boundaries there is the potential for both positive and negative titan avatars.

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    1. This is very true! The negative ones will be the ones that actually act against the gods for the most part, though, so they are likely to be the "lead" Avatars. Also, even positive Avatars are often dangerous to the World simply by existing - they exemplify positive things, but often to a dangerous extreme (for example, our use of Hestia in the Fire realm).

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  4. I was also going to suggest that the "Guardian" titanrealm might have been what the Gods used to create Tartarus, the place they managed to imprison all the other titans, but I see Samudra's already done so.

    It could also explain why ghosts were "attracted" towards Tartarus, and why the Underworlds were constructed around it, as the helpless shades felt better when close to its protective essence, and similar for the realms built to keep dead souls safe, or to keep living people safe from the dead. This was also why I originally imagined Tartarus to be/have been the titanrealm of Death, since that's even *better* explanation for the whole "draws ghosts like moths to flame" thing, but the Xibalba writeup was so good I just couldn't avoid using it.

    But I'd add that such a Titan could also be the realm of Stasis, since Guardian is all about keeping things *just as they are*, and might see ALL change as bad, as a form of "destruction", and so inherently "protects" everything by preventing change from ever happening. Where children never grow up, where winter never ends, where bad thing never happen...because *nothing* ever happens, at least not until Gods and/or their plucky Scions start to meddle.

    This sort of place would probably be easier to find candidates for in mythology too, since it could be seen as the sort of "endless formlessness before creation" type place, with similar function to Kaos or the primordial ocean Brahma floated on in the beginning, just representing rigid stasis instead of inchoate chaos.

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    1. Ooh, I think stasis is definitely a neat idea for one of the Titan Avatars in such a place. Very cool.

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    2. It wouldn't be a bad place for Huh and Hauhet from the Ogdoad...they are, after all, Avatars of Eternity.

      As for the ghosts and Tartarus thing...I always just assumed that the reason ghosts were attracted to Tartarus is that Xibalba was INSIDE Tartarus. They were attracted to Xibalba, but since they couldn't cross the boundaries erected by Pohjola, they stayed outside. Hell, maybe Pohjola's static influence is what kept them docile? And now that the twin forces attracting them to the Underworld and keeping them there have escaped, ghosts are running amok!

      I love discussing Scion metaphysics!!! :D

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