Its almost 3am, I’m extremely stressed out and I feel the need to tear down something at the conceptual level so I can feel good about myself.
Stories about God being an actual prick are almost Ubiquitously terrible. Its been done to death, and without pointing fingers I’ve talked to several people relatively recently who had pretty much the same idea at a point. You look at the novel Cain by Jose Saramago and at least you can tell he knew what he was writing about in a literary sense when he portrayed God as a bigoted antagonist. Most stories (like the recent The Lost Book of Yahweh that prompted this post) are so tragically misguided in their idea of what belief is supposed to be about, they all read the exact same way. Is it probably dated? Yeah, I'd say so. Its still pretty goddang awful to hear about.
>>God is a relatively bad guy with human morals, forces protagonist to either go to Hell or worship him, and if you’re lucky gets killed off because “hes evil!!!!1” Coupled with a decent dose of “lol. The universe is for my fun : )” Not going to lie, without SPOILING much -
- the popular TV show Supernatural does this with much gusto and...it got old fairly quick. Thats another rant for another time however.*
Theres no nuance, no subtlety. You have a moment to reimagine a simultaneously complex yet simple character (no offense meant), and your choice is to take the stereotypical Bible Basher teen route? Come on, you can do so much better. Make God to have Blue and Orange morality, surely it makes more sense and is more interesting to read about than to read a projection of insecurity regarding how terrible you conceive the universe to be. Either make God an external force of nature thats hard to decypher, or have him be a passive observer of sorts.
I doubt you’re going to get the Good God/Bad God look down well without it coming across as either sanctimonious, preachy, or inversely -edgy or contrarian.
- Post note: Okay so, on the Supernatural topic, I do think the writers KIND of got a nice look at the Passive, Observer, Eternally-Bored God trope. Chuck definitely plays a nice psychopath but I wish they made more of an effort to make him seem perhaps (not sympathetic)...understandable.