How to Kill a God

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Gods' immortality varies depending on the mythology. Norse gods were ageless but could 100% be killed

Imagine the opposite of this: A god of secrets that no one is aware of, which becomes more powerful the less people know about it?

The character of Talebot is very special. Lines like "I don't have guts, but..." really put into perspective how fleshed out his writers have made him.

I remember playing Okami, one of the few times fiction got me to sympathize with a God. The whole game you'd get more powerful by getting people to have faith in you, and at one point I thought "this would be a really frustrating existence."

i once read a story where a character asked "how does a human kill a god?" and a god replied "how does a machine kill a human?" and it really opened my eyes to the possibility that humans can have aspects or attributes that their creaters lack which allow them to overpower their creator

What really bothers me, about Frederick Nietzsche's quote, "God is dead, and we have killed him." is that's where people stop. They neglect the following thought, "And nothing can ever wash the blood away." He wasn't celebrating the death of God. He was mourning it. Thank you for addressing that.

"Gods are immortal" Kratos: Are you sure about that?

10:32 I like to think about the Radiance from Hollow Knight as a great example of this! In the lore of the game, the ruler of Hallownest, the Pale King, shows up and converts the people who follow the Radiance to follow him instead with the addition of giving them a mind. because of this, the Radiance almost ceases to exist because everyone has forgotten about her, until she used the last of her strength to appear in the dreams of bugs and infect them with her light, stripping them of their free will and mind.

"you do not get to kill your gods without destroying the version of the universe they held up" That is one nice statement right there, very well said.

I love how most stories have this macguffin that you need to get to kill a god, but in Terraria all you need is a copper shortsword, some track and some time

I love how in Asura’s Wrath he literally just has a bare handed beat down with Chakravartin

I'm not big into literature but the videos you guys make are astonishing. Even when most of the time i never heard of the things referenced I still thoroughly enjoyed watching. From the narration, art, audiowork and even sometimes short storytelling just makes me unable to stop watching. I genuinely hope this channel wil get discovered by a larger audience because the quality is imppecable.

I genuinely love how many of the methods of defeating gods translate almost one-to-one into ways to defeat tyrannical leaders and abusive parents (especially narcissists)

Another Good example in videogames is the Radiance in Hollow Knight, a deity that was almost completely forgotten in the kingdom of Hallownest in favor of revering the Pale king, and the associated infection ravaging Hallownest, turning bugs savage and hostile being the result of the Radiance influencing the inhabitants through their dreams as a desperate survival bid not to be forgotten

I believe the movie Labyrinth kinda illustrates your point of loosing faith in a god in order to defeat it with the line “You have no power over me.”

I loved this contemplation of the death/murder of gods. One of my favorite videos I've seen was this video talking about the relationship between Japan and Religion to explain why killing gods is such a common trope in their RPGs. To put that excellent analysis into as short a form as possible, Japan's government(s) for a very long time saw religion as a tool to consolidate power. That's why they hated newer religious movements (like Christianity) that put the rules of worship and virtue in the hands of individuals. Japan even had created a government sanctioned version of Shinto at one point that while not practiced widely today, still heavily influences their traditions and festivals. But as time went on, and governments swaped, the government sanctioned religions eventually died, giving way to the Emperor as their living God. To die for your God was the highest honor, so when Japan began to industrialize and seek new lands to continue that growth, many soldiers fought for their God-Emperor. But in the end, this would stop, too, with the end of World War 2. The Emperor was forced to state publicly he was not a God, and while the institution of the Japanese Monarchy lives on today, just like those Shinto traditions they are shadows of their former heights. With this, America brought with them a new God for Japan to worship... Capitalism. This system which brought great prosperity and wealth to the country. Emperors and Gods and spirits where replaced with bosses, executives, shareholders, Corporations. The God-Corporation is central to this analysis. An organization of massive influence and control and capital that the Japanese, just as with their Emperor, swore their lives to, not for promises of heaven, but heaven on Earth. And for a while the promise was kept, but with the crash of the 90s and the lost decade turning quickly into the lost 30 years, many Japanese people suffer in disgruntled silence with no end to the culture of working oneself to death. But in their stories, this rich and storied tradition of Japan murdering its own Gods with ruthless efficiency echoes over and over as a reminder that these God Corporations aren't immortal and aren't invincible. That they can be beaten. And I think that's a takeaway that America desperately needs as well.

In the words of my favorites cracked out wizard principal from DnD: "You can't kill a god, unless you kill all of their followers"

As a goblin once said, “do you know what the people wanna see more than a hero prevail, is to see a hero fail”.

I like the theory of a circular relationship. Gods give humans the essentials for life (like rain, animals, reality itself), what if humans gave Gods something in return for their lives? It also stands to reason that severing this relationship would theoretically kill a God, but also kill the humans that relied on it.