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Characters Playing God

MiguelDHorcrux

Minstrel
I don't know if there are past threads on this, but I just want to ask if any of you experienced having your characters play God. I don't mean killing another character, since that basically counts as playing God in the sense that you try to be the God of that person by determining until when he/she lives. I mean, play God in a global scale.

This is the concept. In my story, the All-Father loved his creations so much he decided to live amongst them for thirteen lifetimes, each time as a human without any access to his omniscience and omnipotence. Although he knows that the nephilims (in my story they are higher beings, much like demons but they live in another plane) have injected dark magic into the world to tempt the humans to destroy one another out of jealousy, he can't punish the former since they are also his favored beings and he has full faith in humanity. But that's going too far already.

So, in his thirteenth lifetime as Wayland the Smith, his thirteen sons has been killed brutally by a practitioner of dark magic and their bodies brutalized. This powerful parental grief has caused the Wayland to tap into his omnipotence, and in his anger he created the Thirteen Khoans, ala Pandora's Box. They held all of dark magic in the world, leaving Sluaghs, a branch of humans living off of dark magic, a dying race and dark magic itself to the brink of extinction. Though as Wayland the Smith, he created a sword that can destroy it, but how and why, that's not relevant for this thread.

So here's the thing. My MC will end up destroying the Khoans and reintroducing dark magic into the world to save the Sluaghs from extinction. The Sluaghs are also humans anyway. They just happen to be born with traces of dark magic within them.

The line he will deliver before delivering the final blow is this:

"For if the All-Father is against this decision of mine, he should have made sure that I was never conceived in my mother's womb in the first place."

My question is, if you are the reader, will you be turned off by this arrogance? Or will you even consider this an arrogance? I mean it is the All-Father who created the Khoans in the first place, and the MC is playing God by destroying it.

Sorry for the long thread. Replies are greatly appreciated.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Well it depends on the purpose of your story. What's the character's arc? What's the story about? Is the character supposed to be someone good who is corrupted by power? What's the lesson we're supposed to take away from his actions?

I mean whether that's arrogance or justice will depend on context, and context is set up by you. The author controls perception by how they set the story up.
 
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glutton

Inkling
My question is, if you are the reader, will you be turned off by this arrogance? Or will you even consider this an arrogance? I mean it is the All-Father who created the Khoans in the first place, and the MC is playing God by destroying it.

Most fantasy readers have probably been pretty desensitized to an MC defying a 'god' as being an outrage considering how often it happens and how often the god is portrayed as being in the wrong and the MC as right.
 
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