How to Kill a God

Click the link to take the Creating Unique and Powerful Worlds class for FREE! The first 1,000 people to use the link will get a free 1 month trial of Skillshare!

—

For how much reverence humanity has for the divine, it's interesting how much of your fiction is about killing them.

▬▬▬▬ Tale Foundry Community▬▬▬▬

▬▬▬▬ Tale Foundry Team ▬▬▬▬
• Talebot — The Talent
• The Taleoids — The Talent's Helpers
• Benjamin Cook — Writer, Director, & Voice Actor
• Momo Wang — Researcher & Writer

[TheTaleFoundry]

Click the link to take the Creating Unique and Powerful Worlds class for FREE! The first 1, 000 people to use the link will get a free 1 month trial of Skillshare!

[NixityNullt]

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?

[thesmerelajiah]

"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.

[LexusLFA]

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.

[Neutral_Tired]

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

[brightsoull]

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

[Zark]

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."

[WynterLegend]

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.

[Doodle]

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

[fauzanrafli]

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.

[Iguessimaperson]

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)

[RedGrave]

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

[KnightrideThrillz]

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.

[cutiepup]

I love talebot's personalty being explored more with each video!

[memeguyiii]

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

[nazqa]

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

[ceinwenchandler]

I once tried writing a suicidal goddess character. She was a goddess of betrayal. Her nature forced her to always turn on those she was supposedly working with. She hated this, but there was no way around it. Eventually, she decided she'd rather die than carry on like this. In her story world, she can't really be killed by normal means, and her power will be passed on to the nearest person when it happens, and because she's doing it to help her family not have to deal with her problems anymore, she can't do it herself. So she sets up a series of tests on a world populated by humans, meant to lead them to the way to kill her and make sure the one who does it meets her moral standards - without her being involved so directly that her nature forces her to abort the project. Then she settles down and waits.

She doesn't succeed. Another god who needs her alive intervenes and misleads the humans following her trail.

[orionriftclan]

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"

[Brocollinagreen]

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

[dreamsalongthepath]

Since you referenced Theros from Magic: the Gathering, I think I found another way to Kill, or at least alter, a god in fiction, that is depending on the laws of your world. One of the big reveals at the end of Theros, beyond Death, is that though you can’t necessarily neglect a god into non-existence, if you build enough of a following, you can become a god and slay one. You can also weaken a god to if you get more faith than it, and if you can corrupt the perception of a god than you can corrupt the god itself. At the End of TBD Elspeth literally takes her shadow spear and convinces everyone that her spear is the real Spear of Heliod (the Sun God), and Heliod’s spear just becomes a normal spear. And in March of the Machine, when the Phyrexians invade Theros, the “compleat” the population (think, turn into I have no mouth and I must scream monstrosity), they compleat the gods, and turn them into evil phyrexian deities.