Question: Why is Odin such a dick in your games? Is it part of his legend or do you have a separate reason for that?
Oh, Odin. Has there been a band of PCs yet that didn't hate him both in and out of character? (Trick question: most of them end up not hating him anymore in character because of social knack shenanigans, but that just makes their players hate him more in real life.)
Being a dick is definitely part of the Odin's glorious and time-honored myths; it's easy to forget due to how nicely he's usually portrayed in modern sources (Marvel's Thor, in which he's generally shown to be a wise and benevolent old grandfather with everyone's best interests at heart, comes to mind), but this is a guy who habitually does things like disguise himself and refuse to help out his son while simultaneously telling him he's a cuckold, or digging up dead women to demand she tell him the future and then refusing to let her go back to sleep in spite of her begging until he gets what he wants. His dickery is pretty well-established, though like most gods he has many facets and is also positive in many of them. He's actually extremely similar to Loki in personality; the only real difference between them before Ragnarok is that Odin is the king and Loki is dependent on his goodwill.
So yes, to a great extent he's such a bastard because, well, that's what he does in myth, too. He's a trickster god; he just happens to be in the surprising position of ruler, which most tricksters aren't. Most other pantheon heads are associated with things like law, order and justice, the basic foundations that keep society functioning; Odin does do those things, but he also directly subverts them when he feels like it.
For us, Odin also represents a lot of the Aesir values and culture, which, while very fun to write metal songs about and watch in movies, are actually pretty horrible for the people they're happening to. As any of the Vanir could tell you, the Aesir are a race of raiders and conquerors, which means that they're inevitably going to make enemies when they roll into other peoples' territories and start looting all the wenches and ale. Odin's at the forefront of those sorts of things as the god of war, and having Scions in the world through which he can work is the perfect chance for him to get to exercise those tendencies after the gods' long absence.
Finally, of course, Odin is an increasingly desperate god, and desperate people do desperate things. His death has been foretold, his attempts to circumvent it are doomed to failure, and he's facing not only his death but the deaths of most of his friends and children, the betrayal of his blood-brother and the destruction of everything he's built over the centuries. Even if he weren't already the kind of guy who throws his friend's kids in jail for looking creepy or goes to other peoples' houses in disguise for the express purpose of pranking them, that's the kind of motivator that makes people do insane things, and he's been living with it for a very, very long time. It's quite likely that for Odin, the ends justify any and all means if it gives him even the longest shot at averting or delaying the end.
None of this means that Odin can't do good things, of course. He certainly can, and has, even in our games. But, as almost all gods in Scion continually illustrate, doing good things does not necessarily make you a good person; he's fully capable of taking care of people he cares about while being the biggest bastard in Asgard to someone else, often at exactly the same time.
Oh, social knacks. Craziest, messiest mechanics in the whole game.
ReplyDeleteGeoff's player: Goddammit. I hate Odin.
DeleteJohn: No, you don't. You love Odin. Odin's the best.
Geoff's player: ...I really fucking hate Odin.
I don't think Odin is any better or worse than most other pantheon heads. Zeus screws everything in sight and has a bad habit of locking whoever pisses him off in tartarus (the greek equivalent of hell). Amaterasu is a stuck up, racists uber traditional bitch (pardon my language), and Horus is the same way for the Egyptians.The trimurti naval gazers who sit with there heads up there asses while the world burns and Shango is pretty much a psycho who is easy to piss off. The only pantheon kings I can think off who actually fit the role (I.E. deserves it) are Nuada, who seems to be noble and caring toward his subjects through and through and Hutzil, who may be a blood thirsty monster but is still a straightforward and just ruler by the bloodthirsty atzlanti standards.
ReplyDeleteOh, definitely - mythology's rife with people just as bastardly as Odin. Gods, in general, tend to be larger than life, which means that their mistakes and temper tantrums are also larger than life; there are few of them who don't have a story or two in which they're behaving like jerks.
DeleteIsn't it WEIRD that Nuada is one of the more reasonable Pantheon heads (along with Perun, who is a great guy mostly) but the rest of his Pantheon is essentially a bag of rabid dicks?
DeleteYeah, seriously, the Tuatha are definitely not the people I think of first when I think "stand-up guys who are clearly not going to murder, mutilate or rape anyone in a fit of inappropriate rage".
DeleteIts cause their theme is getting rid of all the shitty kings....so eventually they find a good one to love and worship, and then he dies.
DeleteCue sad Irish flutes.
DeleteThe Norse weren't all about slaughter and conquest. They had a highly democratic society, they gave women a high level of equality and there stories and poems need no explanation. Odin is a tricky bastard, but he also imparted practical wisdom to humanity in his role as the grey wanderer and his tricks are always meant to teach a lesson. He's not pleasant but in the hard Norse lands and with Ragnarok coming, being pleasant is a luxury he has never been able to afford. Pleasant is for the world after Ragnarok.
ReplyDeleteThe Norse certainly had a strongly democratic institution in the thing (assuming you don't count women and slaves as people, of course, as they were not generally allowed to participate). Then again, they were also strong proponents of the absolute rule of kings and chieftains who were fully willing to kill one anothers' thralls and pay off their "owners" with weregild, so I'd dispute "highly" attached to that democratic tag. It's actually a weird thing to generalize about - since the "Norse" tag is applied to all kinds of areas from Iceland to Norway to Germany, not everybody was doing it the same way everywhere anyway.
DeleteI gotta disagree that Odin's tricks always teach a lesson. In particular, disguising himself as a ferryman who refused to give Thor a ride and spent most of the day insulting him and claiming that his wife was cheating on him did not have any particular lesson or purpose attached; as far as we can tell, Odin just loves a good pranking. As I said above, though, that doesn't mean he doesn't also do good things; he takes the initiative to deal with the children of Loki before they become a problem and makes sure that business gets taken care of when giants attack or what have you.
"Pleasant is for the world after Ragnarok" is a great example of what I was saying above! Odin's likely to consider that the ends justify the means until then - which means he's going to screw over a lot of people, but that's in the goal of averting Ragnarok (or at least saving some people involved in it).
As in most cases, he's neither 100% evil nor 100% good. He's just Odin: giant bastard, god of frenzy, battles, glory and eternal reward. He wears many hats.
Gonna need citations and examples firefight
Deletego to this website ww.angelfire.com/ny2/wiccan/norsewicca.html and go to the bottom where the writer compares the Norse myths and culture to Christian and Greek. Here is a citation from that discussion.
Deletethe Norse bequeathed great legal rights and social power upon their women, had numerous women as respected poets, lawmakers, warriors, seers, and priestesses, and women even monopolized the much valued Norse magickal system known as seidrh (pronounced "shee") [Odin only learned this magickal art after being tutored extensively by Freya, who was also considered Odin's equal in runic knowledge, though unlike him, she didn't have to make an enormous sacrifice to gain the runic knowledge artificially as he did; also, it should be noted that Freya took half of the fallen heroes whose souls went to Valhalla under her wing, and remarkably, she received first choice of these slain warriors over Odin]. Also, the idea of women's rights of property, marriage, and social opportunities were well established to the Norse, but were completely obliterated by the usurping Christians when they wiped the culture out by the end of the 13th century (which also greatly conflicts with Mr. Long's ignorant assessment that a society with a polytheistic religion is automatically less socially advanced than a society with a monotheistic religion, but more on that absurd statement below). It was not until the 19th century that women in America begin fighting to re-establish all of these rights that were lost to them by the ascendancy of Christianity, and it wasn't until the 20th century that any significant gains were made in the women's liberation movement, and women at the dawn of the 21st century still haven't gained the same status as men despite the many gains made in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's (that perhaps not coincidentally happened to coincide with the onset of the New Age movement). Yet, Mr. Long makes further statements that the Greek and Norse societies were less socially and intellectually advanced than we are today, and that monotheism is more culturally advanced than polytheism (but, again, I'll get to this a bit later).
Freya also has to pay for things by having a week long orgy with dwarves.
DeleteBut Im not sure what your quote(of a horrible website that has no sources on it and is mostly opinion) has to do with odins tricks always teaching a lesson.
Women may have not been slaves(except for the slaves...and anyone captures...and anyone not norse) but they certainly werent equals.
the quote came from a site made by a man who is a Norse Pagan so he has a deep understanding of both the religious and cultural aspects of the old Norse world. If you went to the website you would know that.
DeleteI think what he means is that we try to look at things from a historical and recorded myth perspective, rather than opinion pieces. I see that the writer of the site is Asatru, but that doesn't necessarily mean he knows a lot about ancient Norse culture; plenty of people are Christians and don't know squat about the foundations and history of the religion, after all. He might very well be quite knowledgeable, but since he doesn't cite any sources and we have no idea where he's getting his information, we have no way of knowing that.
DeleteCitation is important, especially on the internet, where it's very easy for misinformation to get passed around. The owner of that site, of course, has no need to cite things for our benefit - he's running the site for his own religious beliefs and community, so more power to him! But it's not a source we could really consider if we were trying to make a study of Norse history.
All the same, the point is that while the ancient Norse world wasn't perfect, I would like to believe that it was as he said, that while there was slavery and the raiding and looting, along side it there was the poetry and art. After all, people forge there gods out of there own beliefs and values, and out of the Norse myths I have read, I have never seen any of the gods treat there wives or female members of there pantheon as anything less than equals. Odin never says to Frigg to submit to him, or pull rank on her as her husband in arguments, (especially the ones she wins, which are many), and we never hear of Thor striking Sif or treating her like property (even in the tale where Loki cut her hair, and there he was defending her honor, not his). Were all women equal in the Norse world? No, just like not all people were equal under the class system, but from their myths, I do believe that many women in the Norse world in high positions held much power, (especially the seidh). Remember that though powerful, magic was considered a womans realm, and even Odin was mocked for it I think by Loki. I also read the prose Edda and read about a women who lived as a Viking for years before she decided to settle down and marry and even then raised her children to be warriors. The women who lacked freedom were lower class and/or slaves and shared the same lack of freedom as there male counter parts. I'm not romanticizing the past, just saying that many women had much more freedom before Christianity wiped it all away, and if humans really do express there values in there myths, then the stories of frigg and freya should be a testament to Norse womens freedom, power, and strength. In the hard northern climate everyone had to pull there weight, and imposing the kind of strictures that women in Greece suffered under could have affected economic production and basically went against the idea of we're all in this together, if all of us don't work we freeze, no matter if you are a women are slave or king, which makes me wonder how economics and social structure really suffered under christian rule when Norse women (the nobles and siedrh in particular) lost much of there power. The Christians kept slavery in the form of serfdom by the way.
DeleteI did go to the website. That is how I knew it had zero citations. For all we know he could be making that stuff up. Ive a great deal of my life in the south. Ive known near infinite christians who knew jack shit about their religion. This guy could be the same.
DeleteThere are the same amount of myths about women empowerment in norse as there are in most other ancient religions. Hera had tons of power, aphrodite and artemis, athena, isis, hathor, amataratsu. They were goddesses and they were given much respect. We have very few stories of gods actually treating their wives badly(outside of cheating on them) and they usually got punished for it in some way.
Im not sure why your arguing that the norse were somehow more enlightened. All of the ancient mythologies had similar veins.
"that while there was slavery and the raiding and looting, along side it there was the poetry and art"
What culture, in all of time, didnt have art?
And
On the other hand, what culture with a playable pantheon doesn't have raiding, Looting and Slavery?
DeleteIrish werent huge on it. Egyptians didnt need to do as much looting. Im not sure on japanese slavery...
DeleteBut yeah, that was my point. They're kind of all dicks, and all have some good qualities. People is people.
My hazy memories of the Ulster cycle includes all three for the Irish or at least on some level people being given away which seems pretty much slavery to me.
DeleteEgyptians didn't they subjugate Nubia as a place for getting gold?
And Japan I believe had your standard slave setups early on (Foreign groups) and criminals/debtors though I don't think that transitioned forward.
Had this discussion in ourown game, some pantheons seem to have a concept of morality as objective and others are morality as I can beat you til you agree. The Aesir seem to fall on the second side.
ReplyDeleteYeah, morality is a very subjective subject under the best of circumstances, but Scion makes you also address human morality vs. divine morality as well as the differing moral standards of different cultures. Which is one of the things I love about it, actually - Scions with their modern morals running up against vastly different points of view from established gods and Titans always yields interesting results, whether they decide to fall in line, fight the system or try to educate their "old-fashioned" relatives to think more like they do.
Delete«The Christians kept slavery in the form of serfdom by the way.» Nope, just their own peasants. Christians had black, mesoamerican, etc.. slaves.
ReplyDeleteFor the debate in question, I did a research on the topic of women in Norse culture and feminine deities.
Long story short, I came to the conclusion that the women had their place in society. In a culture where men drift away on hunting or trade trips, the women had to know how to defend the village. Since the women were the leaders of the households and in charge of raising the young males, a strong personality was attractive. The women were not inferior in our modern conception, they had a different purpose and use. Freyja gets an equal share of the dead with Odin after all. I don't think many pantheon rulers shared as much of their power. Of course, I won't rewrite my whole research, but you get the idea.
If we compare with say... Zeus, Odin didn't rape and coerce as much of the female godesses. That being said, he is much more roguish. As noted above, all gods can be jerks. It's just a matter of perspective of your story and your Storyteller. Odin sacrificing someone to avert Ragnarok or Freyr discarding his Surtr-slaying-sword to get laid? It's not that simple, then again, it never is.
There's definitely a different perception of women in Norse culture than in others - but every culture has different perceptions of women, after all, and I'd be very hard-pressed to think of one in which they don't have power and importance in certain areas. The Germanic tribes are no different; it's more a question of what we consider more "modern" attitudes to be.
DeleteOdin may not rape as much as Zeus, but that's not saying much (and I mean, does anybody rape as much as Zeus?). The story of the rape of Rindr and the conception of Vali is especially brutal.
As you note, it's always somewhat subjective, and whether or not someone is being a hero or an asshole pretty much depends on whether or not you agree with their assessment of the most important things that need to get done. If you're from another pantheon who is pissed off about Odin's encroachment on your territory, he looks like a war-inciting ass; if you're one of the Aesir who believes he's doing it to save everyone, he looks like a hero making tough choices.
Of course, I do prefer to portray him as a bit of an asshole, because, like Loki, he has a habit of pranking and frightening people for no apparent reason, not to mention lying to get his way with potentially disastrous consequences (see: building of Asgard's walls). Like most trickster gods, there's a streak of misbehavior there that you can choose to represent or not as an ST.