Golden Xan
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Mallius Odium
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Harbinger
- Mar 30, 2019
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Hey everyone,
Some time ago I started to wonder how deep will be the participation of Gods, Elder Gods and the like in the Deadhaus universe. Lovecraftian themes have been a mark in most of Denis' games. In Blood Omen, you were transformed into a Vampire and manipulated by many individuals, but mostly a God from another realm. In Eternal Darkness, you are manipulated by 4 Gods, all at the same time in parallel realities.
Yet, the more I thought about it the more I saw that Gods, or any other variation of them, are not really that great. Sure, they are powerful, they can influence the lives of lesser beings, mostly humans or self-centered individuals. Sure, they live a long time and often have monstrous appearances, to our standards. Sure, they are often shown to be gigantic creatures and they have an incredible presence on so many little things.
But they are still flawed.
They still make mistakes that cost them their lives. They are still prone to a very human error: overconfidence.
In Blood Omen, the Hylden god (also known as Dark Entity) thinks he is more powerful than Kain, who he created himself. Yet it still loses to him in battle quite easily.
In Eternal Darkness, Mantorok is the greatest of the 4 gods we see, but he was still bound by a Liche using a simple spell powered by a single lesser god. The other 3 believe they are all-powerful and that nothing can stop them now that the greater one is gone, yet time after time they set up challenges that end up being overcome by ordinary individuals. Individuals that, despite their bravery, are only really capable because they have access to the gods' own powers. And in the end, even though one of the gods can see it is being "betrayed" by its main pawn, it still thinks everything is going according to plan... and dies because of that.
Not just that, all the gods in Eternal Darkness depend on the humans to manifest themselves. They can influence the world, they can summon creatures somehow, they can smite humans who oppose them into a pulp... but they still depend on their pawns to influence the world. They still have to risk themselves and their plans by trusting their powers to individuals who very much oppose them. And even though they are often portrayed as patient and all-seeing, they still make the same mistakes that all other gods made in the past, in this and other universes, in current and past games, where they always over-confidently believe that they will win, despite all evidence to the contrary.
If you look at the gods themselves, they are amazing creatures. They are big, they defy nature, they have a tremendous capability to plan and manipulate, they are powerful, they inspire awe and fear... but they are still mortal. And if they don't die, they can still be stopped, trapped, blocked... their plans can be thwarted, their powers can be cancelled by the powers of lesser individuals with even less capability, and they are still so heavily dependent on things outside of their control.
Perhaps even worse than all this is that they have no idea what to do with their existence. Absolutely no idea.
The best thing they can think of is to try and perpetuate themselves for all eternity. All they think of is eating. All they have as a purpose is to try and create a system where they can rule without opposition, but only so that they can eat forever and ever uninterrupted.
They don't have any meaningful goals. They don't use their powers to try and find out what they are or where they came from. They don't think of making friends with other beings to achieve their objectives together. They have no desire to help others. They have no curiosity, no desires, no spark of creativity towards anything that isn't related to filling their bellies. If they were to achieve what they wanted, they'd be nothing more than eternal blobs.
That's their main issue. Gods are instinctual. They are not much better than animals. They just happen to be large, freaking ugly, long-living alien animals. If they are given what they want, they will just be for all eternity.
That's why I say they are Giant Alien Turtles. They live a long time, they are powerful, and they are ugly. But that's all there is to them.
A great exemple of a truly powerful and evil god is the Entity in Dead by Daylight.
The Entity lives on a dream-like realm where it controls. When a dark event that is really filled with emotional energy happens on some world, such as a disaster or a grotesque killing, the Entity creates a fissure in the location of that event. Any being with a soul that comes near that fissure is sucked into it and transported into the Entity's realm.
The Entity feeds on their emotions. Fear, desperation, pain, thrill, relief. So it creates an environment, completely made of thought, where the individuals are put on an eternal cycle of suffering. It sets up a monstrous individual, the Killer, to hunt down four Survivors, who are mere passers-by, victims of the Entity. Their goal is to fight each other, over and over. If one of them loses, a portion of their soul is eaten by the Entity. If they win, they are brought back to the beginning to fight again.
As a god, the Entity is still exactly what I described: it has no purpose other than to perpetuate itself. It is a monstrously gigantic formless alien being. If it achieves its goal, it would resume its existence to the maintenance of that goal. But its difference from other gods is that it is so great that there is no possibility of opposing it.
The Entity cannot be reached. You cannot refuse to participate, for all you have to do in order to participate in its macabre game is exist. You cannot convince the Killers to stop chasing you, because they are soulless pawns of the Entity. If you somehow were able to do that, it wouldn't matter, because given time the Entity would consume you just the same. Escaping from the challenge only resets the killing. There is no way of knowing the Entity exists unless you are in its realm. The only way the Entity can die is from starvation, but it has countless souls to eat, and even if they were to eventually end there is no shortage of supply outside its own realm.
The only way to fight against it within its kingdom would be to stop existing, and there is no way to do that.
The only way to fight against it outside its realm is having every living thing be so good and ascended that there is no violence, harm or disaster in your world. But even if that somehow could happen, there are other worlds, other beings coming to life, other gods trying to play, accidents happening...
The Entity is virtually unbeatable.
THAT is a truly monstrous being. And yet, all it happens to be is... a giant, alien, long-living being. Like an imortal turtle, it eats, grows and ages.
Despite how powerful it is, it also happens to be inconsequential. Aside from the unfortunate souls that wander into its realm, or the small influence it can have in reality, it is literally nothing but a leech of a much grander universe that goes on despite its existence.
In some ways, the very fact that there is a world beyond its own makes the Entity meaningless. And the Entity is as closest to the definition of "Elder God" as can be.
And that's why... gods are nothing.
They are as nothing as we are.
They are only called this way because we are smaller and less powerful.
We can influence the world in a lesser scale than them.
Even if we can get to their level, we will still have beings who are bigger and more powerful than we are.
And they will also be as inconsequential as we would then be.
In some ways, we are lead lives even more meaningful than gods. Because we have our own ideas and goals we can choose for ourselves. Our lives can be what we make of them. We are still bound by the rules of the living, as humans, but we don't have an obligation to follow any particular path.
Gods don't have that freedom. They must do that which sustains them in a specific way. They can find multiple ways of getting to their sustenance, but they are bound, destined to be what they are.
That makes us more than godly, even if we are weaker.
Gods, on the other hand, are still turtles.
They just happen to be giant and alien ones at that, doing their own thing.
And since I have this freedom, I might as well exert that freedom by showing them what they really are.
This began as a rationalization of the nature of godhood in Denis' games and developed into a spiritual thinking. Finally, it ended as a goal. If it is truly possible to kill Gods, Elder Gods and other powerful beings in Deadhaus, I will make it the goal one of my characters to do so with mastery. If nothing more, to prove they are just as feeble as we are.
If you got this far, I hope you enjoyed the reading.
Perhaps you have different perspectives of the Gods' meaning and presence in Deadhaus? You can share below.
At the end of the day, all I based myself on was the games that already came to pass. All this was from a human perspective... What would an undead think instead? We don't know what DHS has in store for us yet.
Some time ago I started to wonder how deep will be the participation of Gods, Elder Gods and the like in the Deadhaus universe. Lovecraftian themes have been a mark in most of Denis' games. In Blood Omen, you were transformed into a Vampire and manipulated by many individuals, but mostly a God from another realm. In Eternal Darkness, you are manipulated by 4 Gods, all at the same time in parallel realities.
Yet, the more I thought about it the more I saw that Gods, or any other variation of them, are not really that great. Sure, they are powerful, they can influence the lives of lesser beings, mostly humans or self-centered individuals. Sure, they live a long time and often have monstrous appearances, to our standards. Sure, they are often shown to be gigantic creatures and they have an incredible presence on so many little things.
But they are still flawed.
They still make mistakes that cost them their lives. They are still prone to a very human error: overconfidence.
In Blood Omen, the Hylden god (also known as Dark Entity) thinks he is more powerful than Kain, who he created himself. Yet it still loses to him in battle quite easily.
In Eternal Darkness, Mantorok is the greatest of the 4 gods we see, but he was still bound by a Liche using a simple spell powered by a single lesser god. The other 3 believe they are all-powerful and that nothing can stop them now that the greater one is gone, yet time after time they set up challenges that end up being overcome by ordinary individuals. Individuals that, despite their bravery, are only really capable because they have access to the gods' own powers. And in the end, even though one of the gods can see it is being "betrayed" by its main pawn, it still thinks everything is going according to plan... and dies because of that.
Not just that, all the gods in Eternal Darkness depend on the humans to manifest themselves. They can influence the world, they can summon creatures somehow, they can smite humans who oppose them into a pulp... but they still depend on their pawns to influence the world. They still have to risk themselves and their plans by trusting their powers to individuals who very much oppose them. And even though they are often portrayed as patient and all-seeing, they still make the same mistakes that all other gods made in the past, in this and other universes, in current and past games, where they always over-confidently believe that they will win, despite all evidence to the contrary.
If you look at the gods themselves, they are amazing creatures. They are big, they defy nature, they have a tremendous capability to plan and manipulate, they are powerful, they inspire awe and fear... but they are still mortal. And if they don't die, they can still be stopped, trapped, blocked... their plans can be thwarted, their powers can be cancelled by the powers of lesser individuals with even less capability, and they are still so heavily dependent on things outside of their control.
Perhaps even worse than all this is that they have no idea what to do with their existence. Absolutely no idea.
The best thing they can think of is to try and perpetuate themselves for all eternity. All they think of is eating. All they have as a purpose is to try and create a system where they can rule without opposition, but only so that they can eat forever and ever uninterrupted.
They don't have any meaningful goals. They don't use their powers to try and find out what they are or where they came from. They don't think of making friends with other beings to achieve their objectives together. They have no desire to help others. They have no curiosity, no desires, no spark of creativity towards anything that isn't related to filling their bellies. If they were to achieve what they wanted, they'd be nothing more than eternal blobs.
That's their main issue. Gods are instinctual. They are not much better than animals. They just happen to be large, freaking ugly, long-living alien animals. If they are given what they want, they will just be for all eternity.
That's why I say they are Giant Alien Turtles. They live a long time, they are powerful, and they are ugly. But that's all there is to them.
A great exemple of a truly powerful and evil god is the Entity in Dead by Daylight.
The Entity lives on a dream-like realm where it controls. When a dark event that is really filled with emotional energy happens on some world, such as a disaster or a grotesque killing, the Entity creates a fissure in the location of that event. Any being with a soul that comes near that fissure is sucked into it and transported into the Entity's realm.
The Entity feeds on their emotions. Fear, desperation, pain, thrill, relief. So it creates an environment, completely made of thought, where the individuals are put on an eternal cycle of suffering. It sets up a monstrous individual, the Killer, to hunt down four Survivors, who are mere passers-by, victims of the Entity. Their goal is to fight each other, over and over. If one of them loses, a portion of their soul is eaten by the Entity. If they win, they are brought back to the beginning to fight again.
As a god, the Entity is still exactly what I described: it has no purpose other than to perpetuate itself. It is a monstrously gigantic formless alien being. If it achieves its goal, it would resume its existence to the maintenance of that goal. But its difference from other gods is that it is so great that there is no possibility of opposing it.
The Entity cannot be reached. You cannot refuse to participate, for all you have to do in order to participate in its macabre game is exist. You cannot convince the Killers to stop chasing you, because they are soulless pawns of the Entity. If you somehow were able to do that, it wouldn't matter, because given time the Entity would consume you just the same. Escaping from the challenge only resets the killing. There is no way of knowing the Entity exists unless you are in its realm. The only way the Entity can die is from starvation, but it has countless souls to eat, and even if they were to eventually end there is no shortage of supply outside its own realm.
The only way to fight against it within its kingdom would be to stop existing, and there is no way to do that.
The only way to fight against it outside its realm is having every living thing be so good and ascended that there is no violence, harm or disaster in your world. But even if that somehow could happen, there are other worlds, other beings coming to life, other gods trying to play, accidents happening...
The Entity is virtually unbeatable.
THAT is a truly monstrous being. And yet, all it happens to be is... a giant, alien, long-living being. Like an imortal turtle, it eats, grows and ages.
Despite how powerful it is, it also happens to be inconsequential. Aside from the unfortunate souls that wander into its realm, or the small influence it can have in reality, it is literally nothing but a leech of a much grander universe that goes on despite its existence.
In some ways, the very fact that there is a world beyond its own makes the Entity meaningless. And the Entity is as closest to the definition of "Elder God" as can be.
And that's why... gods are nothing.
They are as nothing as we are.
They are only called this way because we are smaller and less powerful.
We can influence the world in a lesser scale than them.
Even if we can get to their level, we will still have beings who are bigger and more powerful than we are.
And they will also be as inconsequential as we would then be.
In some ways, we are lead lives even more meaningful than gods. Because we have our own ideas and goals we can choose for ourselves. Our lives can be what we make of them. We are still bound by the rules of the living, as humans, but we don't have an obligation to follow any particular path.
Gods don't have that freedom. They must do that which sustains them in a specific way. They can find multiple ways of getting to their sustenance, but they are bound, destined to be what they are.
That makes us more than godly, even if we are weaker.
Gods, on the other hand, are still turtles.
They just happen to be giant and alien ones at that, doing their own thing.
And since I have this freedom, I might as well exert that freedom by showing them what they really are.
---------------------------------------------------------------
This began as a rationalization of the nature of godhood in Denis' games and developed into a spiritual thinking. Finally, it ended as a goal. If it is truly possible to kill Gods, Elder Gods and other powerful beings in Deadhaus, I will make it the goal one of my characters to do so with mastery. If nothing more, to prove they are just as feeble as we are.
If you got this far, I hope you enjoyed the reading.
Perhaps you have different perspectives of the Gods' meaning and presence in Deadhaus? You can share below.
At the end of the day, all I based myself on was the games that already came to pass. All this was from a human perspective... What would an undead think instead? We don't know what DHS has in store for us yet.