Celestial Skullduggery

Question: Is my GM's interpretation of Tsuki-yomi as a Machiavellian schemer a la Game of Thrones valid? He recently killed Amaterasu (OOC Knowledge) for reasons never really explained.

Well, it's honestly pretty hard to guess what Tsukuyomi's mythological personality is like, because he doesn't have very many myths with speaking parts. We know how he was born and that he is in charge of the moon and the night sky, and we know that he was so offended by Uke Mochi's method of creating food that he killed her and was summarily exiled for his crime, but we don't know much about what he's like when you're having a conversation with him. Japanese mythology doesn't detail what his sense of humor might be like, what kinds of things he enjoys, what his pet peeves are, how he views the world and his place in it, whether he's homesick, whether he's glad to be exiled or bearing a grudge... none of that is touched on. In our games, we played him as stern and severely dedicated to decorum, but not above getting his hands dirty (or more often, punting a Scion out there to get their hands dirty) when the need arose.

But, that was our game and this is yours, so here's an important rule of thumb: the ST's interpretation of a god's personality should always be trusted. For one thing, this is not an area where you can look up a god's personality in a book and say, "Aha! You're doing it wrong, they should be way more loving/chatty/willing to do X thing I want!" While some gods have clearly demonstrated personalities in their myths and have a sort of generally universally accepted personality type - i.e., Ishtar is likely to pout or throw a tantrum if she doesn't get her way, Zeus is likely to hit on people he finds attractive, Tezcatlipoca is probably doing something terrible to you right now and you don't even know it - many, many more don't. And even if they do, remember that your Storyteller is roleplaying that god, just like they play a zillion other NPCs for you over the course of the game, and their interpretation of a god's personality is as valid as yours might be. If they play Sedna as terrible and cruel to male Scions but warm and welcoming to female ones because they want to play up that her treatment by her husbands and father has made her dislike men, then it's irrelevant that you would have made her uniformly hate everyone regardless of gender and don't agree with that portrayal. Even when everyone has all the facts about a given character's personality, different people will end up playing it differently and highlighting different parts of it. The Storyteller is literally in charge of what that NPC thinks, does and says when interacting with you, and by definition, they are never wrong. If you would have done something different than they did with their portrayal, that's cool, but it's still the truth in the game they are running.

That doesn't mean you can't point something out to your Storyteller if you think they're missing a key piece of information - for example, if the ST has Agni say offhandedly, "Oh, Indra and I get along awesomely, we've never argued about anything," you might mention to them that there was that one time that Indra almost got Agni killed because he refused to let him use a forest for fuel source and it actually turned into a pretty big deal and got a bunch of gods and Scions involved in a turf war. But don't do it in the middle of the action and hold the game up or make your fellow players uncomfortable, and don't do it in a confrontational or accusatory way. We recommend after game or during a break saying, "Hey, I recall reading X myth, did you know that one?" rather than leaping in during game to shout, "Nuh-uh, that's just not true, you don't know what you're talking about!" Storytellers are humans, and they can't know every piece of every mythology ever all the time. Don't punish them if they miss something once in a while.

But that brings us to the other major reason that you don't get to argue with an ST's portrayal of a god's actions or personality, and that's that they're in charge of the game and they know more than you do. There might be a ton of reasons for the way a god is acting that you have no idea about; they could have been mind-whammied by another god, accidentally drunk a potion of forgetfulness, made new friends or enemies over the course of the story, been blackmailed by an enemy into doing things they don't want to, or you might even be talking to someone completely different who is just impersonating the god you think you're talking to. You have no idea, and the ST is not only not going to stop every five minutes to tell you that yes, there's a good reason for this, it would actually be bad for the game if they did, since some secrets are supposed to remain secret unless you figure them out inside the game itself. You need to trust that your ST is portraying any character, not just gods, the way they want them portrayed, and go from there. And really, if you don't trust them to do that, how are you trusting them to run the rest of the game?

Personally, we didn't run Tsukuyomi the way you're describing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that approach is wrong. Considering that Amaterasu banished (and/or possibly divorced) him a very long time ago for something he probably feels justified in doing, it's not outside the realm of possibility that he might be carrying a grudge against her or that he would want to find a way to once again be an important force in the court of the kami that has been denied to him for all these years.