Question: How do you explain Hera being a PC God? Did she finally get tired of her husband's constant adultery and decide to have her own bastards, or does she just adopt like nearly every other Greek goddess in Scion?
While Scion: Hero sets Hera in the first case, presenting her as a cranky witch of a goddess who is having her own Scions because Zeus can't say boo to her about it now, we've never liked that option. While the idea of getting some revenge on Zeus via turnabout has some small appeal, Hera is a goddess of the sanctity and strength of marriage; it doesn't make sense for her to suddenly turn adulteress any more than it would make sense for Ares to declare himself a pacifist or for Aphrodite to decide she was going to be a vestal virgin. Hera adopts in our games, not because she's worried about Zeus getting mad, but because to do otherwise is to go against the very grain of who she is as a goddess and what she represents.
The Greek goddesses are actually split down the middle for us in terms of who adopts and who doesn't; Hera, along with confirmed eternal virgins Artemis and Athena, all adopt their children to avoid breaking their sacred vows, while it's more likely that Hecate and Aphrodite probably have their own children (and, while it's a lot more dangerous for her, Persephone's had at least one during the months she's away from Hades). That is definitely a higher percentage of adopting goddesses than you see in most pantheons, which is most likely a function of the very high value that Greeks placed on chastity as a measure of a woman's virtuousness and moral strength.
It's not all of them, though. And if you can come up with a reason that a Scion might be the actual blood child of a renowned virgin goddess that you think is sound and your Storyteller will run with, that could happen as well. They may not be going out to intentionally have babies, but rape or meddling from tricksters with Illusion or high social Epic Attributes are both easy ways to trick some poor goddess into having a baby the old-fashioned way (if you're willing to deal with some of the fallout hitting your Scion for much of his life, of course!). We actually have an example of such a character in Shadan, who lives in fear of the probable backlash of Sraosha discovering that his sister is not as virginal as he's always striven to keep her.
Just weighing in here, but the idea of Athena imitating Zeus and transforming then eating someone she might have romantic feelings for (without ever engaging in sexual congress with) and nine months later needing her skull cracked open to give birth always appealed to me a little, though I'd only ever use it for one of Athena's scions and have the rest as adopted by her.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds pretty awesome, actually - I can dig the recurring imagery. All the maternity, none of the sexcapades!
DeleteAthena's one of the easiest for adoption, actually, because she has mythical precedent for adoption - she raised Erichthonius, the serpent-god son of Hephaestus, after the smith-god failed to get her to have sex with him. There are definitely other creative options out there, however.
I know its mentioned in the Deva writeup that Gods can just power down an make "mortalesque children". I can't imagine it would be hard to convince Zeus to have sex in such a fashion.
ReplyDeleteThat's quite true - technically, Scions of Hera could be her actual children if either she or Zeus chose to Avatar down below god-level to conceive them. That's the solution we usually go with for Scions of Vishnu and Lakshmi, as they're equally famous for their monogamy.
Deletethis is an interesting way to go, but i think it takes away from the theme of how dire a straight the gods are in. having a goddess like Hera go against the grain or having monogamous gods like Vishnu and Lakshmi have children out of wedlock just adds import on how royally screwed the gods are with the titans breaking out of prison. As for the argument of whey this should apply equally to Artemis and Athena, Hera is a goddess of fidelity which means sex inside of marriage, while Athena and Artemis have never had sex in there existence (or if you follow the book Artemis prefers girls over boys). I like the fact that Hera has biological children of her own. Taking that away also takes away a fun part of divine politics. It could be fun playing a biological son of Hera dealing with wrath of Zeus, not for being Hera's son, but just for plain get backs for all the shit she gave his children over the eons. Yes Hera having sex outside of marriage is a fundamental change, but that adds to the game, and like I said before it shows just what the gods are forced to do to bring soldiers into the world on there side.
ReplyDeleteEh, I don't know if I agree. There are metric tons of ways the game shows that gods are in dire straits; Hera not having sex is not going to make it seem like they're suddenly having a fluffy happy good time. It's a tiny, tiny piece of a huge world in which the gods are getting hammered; removing it is in no way going to make anybody suddenly think things aren't really that bad.
DeleteMore importantly, there's just no reason for her to do it. She doesn't have to; she can always adopt someone else's kid. She literally has no motivation to do it unless she wants to, because the serial shagginators of the divine world can have huge numbers of children without having to work very hard, and Hera can choose any one of them to be her champion. (Or, as pointed out above, just Avatar down to have legitimate Scions with Zeus.)
I do see the appeal of the reversed situation with a Scion of Hera having to deal with problems because of his parentage, but you can do that just as easily if he's an adoptee or her kid with Zeus. There's no need for him to be illegitimate.
being adopted just doesn't have the same weight as if he is truly blood related. also (and you're probably getting sick of me referring back to the book) I like to go with the view that there really aren't that many scions in the world (maybe a few hundred) with many of them being jealously guarded by the god who sired them (even if they never give them a visitation). Scions are a commodity and even though the less responsible gods don't check to see if they have children, I'm sure the pantheon heads make sure they are kept track of. Adoption can be a sticky issue, and besides I like the idea of Hera having at least one or two natural children. She may be the goddess of fidelity but it seems like Zeus has sex with everyone but her, with there own marital unions being few and far between. her infidelity does not have to be as Chronic as her husbands or done out of spite but with him busy fighting a war, running Olympus and screwing anything in sight but her, a goddess has got to get lonely.
ReplyDeleteI agree somewhat, actually - I also prefer that there are only a few Scions in the world. Creating a Scion requires a hefty Legend expenditure to get them Birthrights, not to mention probably risking Fatebonds to meet them and get them started in the world. But that doesn't mean there can't be untapped children of the gods around - if Apollo's out sowing his seed and ends up with five kids that live to adulthood, he's probably only going to tap one or two of them to be his Scions. The other three would live out their lives as mortals - unless someone like Hera wanted to adopt one, of course.
DeleteIt's a pretty common misconception that Zeus doesn't have sex with Hera. He does, actually. Quite a lot, one would assume. Not only are there stories of them spending literally weeks in bed (such as in the Iliad, for example), he went to pretty great lengths to get her in the first place (she was one of the first ladies he ever pulled his shape-shifting shenanigans on, except that he then married her, something he didn't do for any others). There's an entire festival, the Daedala, dedicated to the fact that Zeus gets very upset when Hera's not around; when she left him, upset over his infidelities, he orchestrated an entire festival to lure her out and beg her to come home. We tend to assume that he must not care about Hera much if he sleeps with other women all the time, but his behavior in myth generally suggests more that he just happens to really like sleeping with ladies, not that he does so because he doesn't get to sleep with his wife.
Also, if you like to look at things from the Roman angle, Jupiter and Juno are actually much more maritally solid than Zeus and Hera; the Romans downplay his infidelities a lot and their marriage was considered one to be idealized and emulated.
I don't know about you, but I don't get the impression the titans started their break out 15 to 20 years ago and thus Gods went out and slept around on an unprecidented Scale. I presume gods had been doing their thing like they always had and now the situation is dire so children who normally would have been exceptional mortals get tapped.
DeleteSure maybe some of the kids were setup via prophesy but I doubt the Monkey king(for example) was shagging people out of any sort of plan.
I agree
DeleteWe go with far fewer then a couple hundred.
ReplyDeleteIt really seems more like your mixing your opinions on scions with your opinions on sexual liberation and fairness.
Zues' punishment for infidelity would be angry wife. Her punishment would be death. There is a very real reason that the male gods fuck around and the female ones dont. They are analogues of a society that mimiced them. Zeus is an angry man, and the arbiter of the laws of his people.