No but really. Religion in fiction. It's great. I love it. Because I love religion. But so much of the time religion is handled super poorly. Poorly or greatly done though it is here we talk about this. What are your favorite handlings of religion in fiction. What are your least favorite. What are your thoughts on Susan Pevensie. let's roll
I like the sound of quasi medieval Catholicism. I must look into this apparently now because QUASI MEDIEVAL CATHOLICISM. My favorite presentation of religion in a fiction thing is probably the Zelda franchise. Religion there is just very organic and I am very fond of that. Dark Souls and Bloodborne handle religion in a lovely way too. Bloodborne in particular I am fond of because it's like some sort of quasi-Catholicism set up by college kids who told their professor to fuck off because they wanted to drink alien blood.
Brandon Sanderson's stuff! 'specially the Mistborn books after the first one. In the first one the country's ruled by a guy who's achieved phenomenal power and set himself as a god-king... and after he falls, his religion continues on, because yeah, we know how he did it now, but that doesn't mean he wasn't something greater and a part of something greater still. Spoiler And they're actually entirely right! Another character starts a resurrection cult around himself, which is still going along just fine 300 years later despite God basically writing a tell-all book about him and what kind of person he was and how he faked his resurrection. And even one of the people who knew him personally joins this religion, because he still sees something divine in the story of this smarmy Byronic Hero trash fire of a human being and what he and a kid he rescued off the street accomplished. And there's another character who collects information about long-dead religions as a hobby, and people often ask him what the hell point there is to keeping this information instead of something more practical. Spoiler And all of those religions- all of them- end up being critically important in the resolution of the original trilogy.
I like Kurtz's Deryni world because the characters (although they are somewhat cardboardy High Fantasy characters) take their religion seriously. Plus, in a world where ritual magic actually works, she can play around with how people who can perform "miracles" explain it to themselves. Too often, religion in high fantasy is an excuse to get a cleric character into the party. Kurtz occasionally falls for this, too. I think it's really hard to create a working/believable/deep religion from scratch.
I get so pissed by how religion is handled in the Dragon Age universe. their Warrior Queen Singing Jesus is cool and all, but the other two religions - the Dalish polytheism and dwarf's worshipping of their ancestors/the Stone - are either used as a narrative punching bag or ignored and that makes me so damn mad. The elf stuff is becoming more relevant, but they're also retconning stuff to the extreme and disregarding their own worldbuilding sometimes and. ugh.
I am still fucking pissed at what was done to the Dalish religion. And Solas's existence. Why the fuck do the god damn Chantry assholes get to have their Female Jesus, but I don't get to have my gods who aren't God and my reconstruction of an ancient faith? Pissing on the ashes was the best decision I ever made.
I adore the treatment of religion in David Weber's Safehold series. Spoiler: spoilers! basically: humanity is Fucked Over by a genocidal alien civilization. we send a few arks out. one survives, starts up a new world on a new planet. alas, the people put in charge of the project become (half) megalomaniacs, and set themselves up as archangels in a very interesting take on something approaching High Anglicanism. it's fucking fascinating. it's carefully done, highlighting the good things about religion as well as some of the incredibly fucked up things about religion. I highly recommend the books, and not just for the religion stuff either, but it's so damn refreshing to read sci-fi that doesn't have a massive hate-on for Christianity/religion in general (without prostrating itself at the neo-conservative religious front, either). so. good. (and also there are about five million other reasons the series is good.)
They still could have had all the Dalish religion plot points of Inquisition if they'd just. handled them better, and had given some thought to the idea that the dalish arent idiots or might have remade their religion and... ugh. shown some... perspective or... another side!! but no, it's all HA HA THE DALISH ARE IDIOTS THEY GOT EVERYTHING ABOUT THEIR RELIGION WRONG and ignore the cultural genocide they suffered and the fact that the enslaved elves were probably NOT the followers of fen'harel and you know what i'm not. i'm not gonna get worked up over this right now. i still want to write about my canon inquisitor being a Full Blown Priestess and develop the dalish religion a bit but i'm way too lazy to write and make it presentable to the rest of the world.
I am especially fucking pissy about it because I'm a reconstructionist myself. No, our methods will not be perfect. Some of our things will be hideously wrong. Potentially a good deal of it may in fact be historically incorrect. That does not somehow mean it's not meaningful. It's possible to have nuance with this sort of thing. It's also possible to have gods that are gods but not God. Like. That is a very easy thing to do. Very, very easy. It's also pretty common. Honestly it kind of just kills my enthusiasm for the game. Perhaps that's me getting personal and what not, but no fuck it. I am upset with it. It was a shitty, shitty way of handling religion. And it makes me actively hate the Chantry even more than I already did. I just really don't want to play through to the end or through Trespasser because of it. I saw something of myself in the Dalish and then it was dashed against a wall because Bioware doesn't understand nuance with faith apparently.
I wanna write somewhere an argument between Solas and Idrilla about the Dalish religion where Solas is like, being himself. and Idrilla goes just... "Well, duh, of course we don't know much about arlathan and most of what we have will be misinterpreted or just our own creation. Tevinter destroyed almost all physical written records from Arlathan and other elvhen cities when they enslaved us, and the few reliable writings we have were copies of books by tevinter mages about elvhen culture that were hardly concerned with anything other than the mechanism of their magic they could steal, and we only have those because some runaway elf slave during the Long Walk stole those from their master in the hopes they wouldnt die on the way to Halamshiral and that someone there knew how to read, and we lost most of those when the Chantry stole our lands and razed our cities and temples. Seriously, Solas, did you live your entire life under a rock?"
Why isn't that an actual option for how you respond to him? Seriously. Fuck. At least in some limited capacity it should be a thing you should be able to bring up. It's not like reconstructionists of any stripe are fucking stupid. We're more than aware of the flawed nature of what we're doing. Some get weird about it and go YES I AM RIGHT COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY but not all of us. Reconstructionists of culture and religion aren't stupid babies who are unaware of these facts. And I am going to be upset as a reconstructionist. I am going to be upset. I am also going to be upset as a Buddhist who is aware of the flaws of her religion's attempt to keep things alive. This is just a hard thing even when you have tons of written records and didn't lose everything in a fire. Also it just feels rude to people who had their cultures ripped out of their hands? Like something about the treatment just makes me very cranky because of the implications it raises about things like hoodoo and modern day Mayan practice. It's just very clumsily done on a number of counts.
While I'm plugging for Sanderson (again...) religion-related highlights from some of his other books: A direct agent of a deity who's never gotten around to reading their own religious text because "immortality makes it REALLY easy to procrastinate" A viewpoint character in one book who's a god who doesn't believe in his own divinity (and his chief priest is a guy who's firm in his faith precisely because he knew the guy as a human pre-godhood) A viewpoint character in another book who's a priest who's trying to convert a country before a deadline when his church will roll in and slaughter anyone non-converted in a holy war, and is in constant conflict with a violent zealot within his organization because he wants to keep it as nonviolent as possible A scary badass scholar-princess who's publicly an atheist in a very religious society, and lots of people (including one of the viewpoint characters, initially) expect her to be a shouty obnoxious cardboard atheist who demands other people renounce their religious beliefs, but she isn't and doesn't (That same society has a weird relationship with its priesthood- it's very present and very pervasive, but after the church tried to take over the world a few centuries ago, the priests and monks were barred from owning property and are owned as possessions by the nobility. Minor nobles might own one or two, while kings and princes support whole churches. They're officially barred from participating in politics, but as these things tend to go, affect it anyway, especially since that's where a ton of the scholars and scientists are.)
@Aondeug I loved Velanna in Awakening because of her thing about writing new Dalish stories - i wish the writers would remember that, it was a nice bit of Dalish lore that could become something really beautiful and touching instead of the hot mess that we have now I am very invested in elf religion and I wish I could develop it a little more, especially in the context of city elves vs the dalish and how their faith differs. I was thinking about looking into the development of afrobrazilian religions as a source of inspiration - like, a lot of african traditions got mixed with catholic faith so they could still be practiced during slavery, since the practice of non-Catholic faiths was prohibited (sort of how they got music so they could still practice martial arts) - so I was thinking that it would be a similar situation to city elves and the original Dalish who had suffered a similar process with the Tevinter religion, while the modern-day-thedas Dalish would be more concerned with getting their worship away from tevene and andrastian practices. BUT I don't know much about afrobrazilian religions except what i get from cultural osmosis, i'm white, this is very very bad no good cultural appropriation and if i went to a temple and asked the babalorixá or mãe/pai de santo if i could maybe research their religion for this fic i'm writing i think i would be rightly run out of the place. I mean, I have a genuine interest in it that goes beyond the fic and into, well, culture studies, and i really wanna know what's my orixá and pretty please let it be yemanjá but. either way. very very bad no good cultural appropriation. And i don't wanna botch the job and be disrespectful towards people who, like you said, had their culture ripped out of their hands in such horrible circumstances.
You could try to talk with these people? I mean you do have an interest in it outside of the fic. Go talk with them. Get friendly. Learn stuff, maybe attend some sort of service or class or something. Not sure about how things go there. It's a touchy subject, yes, but I don't think it's appropriation inherently. That's more how you go about it. At the least you might be able to learn things. Or you could become part of it maybe.
I heard they are indeed very friendly if people are there genuinely willing to learn, because we're under a wave of white catholic extremism that's really putting these religions under pressure, and i have thought it was an interesting religion since i was little and there was a terreiro near my school (my religious studies teacher hated it and i could never even fathom why. baby marie was bad at these things). I don't think I would end up being part of it because religious dogmas have a hard time sticking to my brain (and that includes roman catholicism, the one i grew up with and fell out of in favor of deism), but i'm all in favor of learning things because there's a severe lack of learning things for everyone in all parts of life and i don't like not knowing things. anyway. I'm trying to deal with the alarm bells on my head to try and work headcanons for thedosian non-andrastianism and, well, it's... not my fault my mind went there when i heard about the elves in thedas, these religions and their history are part of my cultural background as a brazilian even if they're not part of my ethnic background. i mean, i probably know more about umbanda/candomblé than i know about judaism, and i'm like, a quarter jewish or something, since my mom's paternal grandmother was jewish. anyway, back on topic. That's the really complicated part of putting religion diversity in a fictional setting, because one way or another you'll end up touching some sort of someone's cultural practice in some tangential way - like, there's a difference between slapping a coat of paint on jesus and developing your own thing knowing it reflects actual people's experiences, and i think a lot of the problem with DA is that.. it doesn't seem to realize it is reflecting the experiences of actual people. i wonder how diverse the writing team actually is.
They're not diverse enough to handle any sort of non-Christian analogue religion with respect at least.
what do you think treating them with respect would actually be like? I mean, you are part of a reconstructionist religion, what would be a good way to portray something similar? besides being able to confront Solas about it, narratively speaking, or with customs among the dalish and stuff like that, what would you like to see?
Well, one thing I feel was missing is definitely what you brought up with wanting to have your Inq argue with him. While there are definitely reconstructionists who do hold a very "We are doing EXACTLY what the ancients did and are RIGHT" approach, many are more than aware of just how limited and flawed their methods are. We know what we know is likely wrong on many counts. We're aware that we don't know the vast majority of it. We're aware that we're having to mostly construct new things that are inspired by what little we know of the past. We know that we're affected by the religions and paradigms of major cultures near us. Reconstructionists aren't ignorant basically. Not necessarily. Another thing that I feel is that differences aren't respected in Dragon Age. It was more treated as being signs that the Dalish were definitely wrong. The fact is that differences is just a thing with religion and culture. It is going to happen. Catholicism in Ireland is not Catholicism in Mexico. They are still the same faith but there are a variety of differences. That doesn't make one more or less legitimate than the other, however. And the differences by themselves do not invalidate the thing as a whole. This holds even to reconstructionist faith. Especially to it honestly because we don't have an orthodox. Feel free to have a wide variance in how the Dalish clans view their things. Feel free to have them get into fights with one another about it. Just also dance the line of accepting that this doesn't invalidate it. One thing I am pissed about in particular is the treatment of Valisslin. The reason is that this is a thing that can be reclaimed. It can be made into a good thing, and honestly it had been. It was a thing of pride and cultural connection. A way of honoring gods. However, I feel by trying to drive home the point that they weren't gods I feel we've kind of fucked it up. Valisslin could be interpreted very similar to, say, the Cross in Christian faith. Which leads to one thing I remain pissed about with Western treatment of religion in general. We do not seem to understand that gods do not have to match the example of Abrahamic God. They don't need to omniscient and omnipotent. Nor do they need to be immortal or invincible. They don't need to be flawless. They do not need to be good or worthy of respect just by virtue of being a god. Hell, they can even be human. Deities can be a lot of things. The view of what gods are and how they work and our relationship to them varies a lot by faith. In the Gaelpol thing for example I view god less as a defined sort of being and more as a title of respect and status. Gods can be and have been fae, fomorian, and human or some mix of those species. The gods are more exceptional and exemplary individuals. God status tends to intersect a lot with hero in the Gaelpol thing. Gods are often heroes, and heroes may well be gods. You can become a god too. Yes you! You can become a god! Another thing is that the gods while often distinctly not human are also very similar to us. They have feelings and temperaments. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they are cruel. Sometimes they are silly and oafish. That doesn't make them not gods or unworthy of our offerings and respect though. If anything it makes them more worthy of it. Because despite their imperfections they are so, so perfect in a manner of speaking. Relationship wise many recon Gaelpols don't view themselves as being unworthy to the gods. We made a deal with them as sovereigns of our own land that we won from them in combat after all. While they very well can incredibly fuck us over and the idea of them being a mafia is pretty fucking accurate we can be worthy of them. You do not grovel to the gods. You hold your head up high and boast even. But you respect them and you give them things out of obligation and hospitality. You make deals with them and enter into tight reciprocal relationships. This is just one example of how this sort of thing can work. The point is that it's not like Christianity in respect to gods. And that is important. You can be very, very different and it's fine. So you could have the Creators be fallible or even cruel at points. You could have them be mortal and formerly elves too. None of these things has to equate to evil or bad or somehow unworthy of worship. Fuck, you can even have them be in favor of slavery and having to work past their views on that. Humans can and have changed the views of gods in mythologies. Don't be afraid to make them slavers. Either currently or formerly.
