i feel like it should only take a moment's thought to realize that having literal gods say 'oh gods' is silly. in canon they swear by the norns. iirc in comics canon thor also sometimes swears by odin, but loki doesn't. which makes sense since thor reveres their asshole dad but loki hates him.
Also dialect and stuff is just as built by who you hang out with, and stuff. Like, being an atheist didn't make me stop using 'Oh my God!', it's just standard phrasing around here.
Which is a very valid point.... for fics set in modern America as opposed to Japan during the Meiji Restoration. That's the crux of my issue--it's like having a French Revolution character go 'oh, Marie Antoinette is SO unbae, #canceled' in what's otherwise supposed to be a serious historical fic. Ignoring the cultural approach to expletives, exclamations, and religion is a good way to make it obvious that a writer has ignored everything else about a culture that isn't copy-pasted from the American highschool experience.
In Thor Ragnarok Thor does say “Oh my God” at one point but I believe that’s been justified by creators as he’s been spending a lot of time on earth and picked up a lot of sayings/slang/etc. which, makes sense to me I guess? It’s also a much sillier film so in my book it gets some extra leeway. :p
There's also a difference, imo, between a character saying "oh my god" and a historical character saying "oh my Amaterasu" or "oh my Allah" or "oh my Loki But Specifically Loki From The Most Recent Squirrel Girl Run"--the former can be annoying, but I usually chalk up to 'attempting to make dialogue sound natural'. The second is a "you tried, but not NEARLY enough" star.
Ooh, I saw a really interesting version of this just today! In comicsland, there's a loki-vs-loki thing going on in a pseudo-afterlife, with various iterations of who he's been. And when ancient viking loki is talking to modern loki and calls him "bougie", this really works well for me in terms of establishing a cool but unsettling atmosphere Spoiler: large And an interesting thing i noticed while trying to write alien robots is that you can find substitutions for a lot of 'oh my god', 'what the hell', etc., but when I went to look how my favorite comics handled it, the times it was least disruptive was when the writers just said screw it and rolled with the standard modern human phrasing.
Yeah the way I tend to go (for my own sanity, because otherwise I'll try to, like, conlang through an alternative to French braid and burn out within half an hour) is to play Tolkien and pretend I'm "translating" the text into modern english. Then again, thats for like. fantasy shit. If you need to know what, say, a japanese person or a muslim would use instead you can always, like. look it up. or ask. its not a mystery.
yeah, i tried to make the dialogue sound a bit old-timey in 'god eaters' and it didn't really work; eventually i concluded that you just gotta go with what feels natural for the characters, not the setting. which is why, in my head, casimir kivi talks with a minnesota accent.
Later! It's apparently from Thor #12: The War of the Lokis, which just dropped wednesday. Though I have to warn you, in... probably issue 10 or 11, he does die in a fairly gruesome way, which is Not a pleasant panel to look at, and I think this issue still continues to have some of that gruesomeness Spoiler He gets eaten by Laufey. Readers get to see the direct chomp action. I think one of his arms is bitten off? And I'm not reading directly, just seeing highlights, but I think in this issue they show him floating (with his bitten-off arm) in Laufey's stomach :T
I may be in the minority, but I honestly like when authors invent something to use instead of christian flavored exclamations. For me reading 'Oh my god!' in a world with no one god breaks my immersion, even if only a little, while I find exclamations that add to the world building by being new honestly enjoyable. I used to steal and use them irl as a wee nerdlet.
That's something I like about Kencyrath. The common exclamation is 'Trinity!', in reference to the Three-Faced God. Not everyone in Rathillien uses that terminology though, it's basically just the Kencyrath who do because they're the only ones who worship that god. The only other ones who might would be Kencyraboos. There's other ones too, all of them tied to the language culture of the Kencyrath and that to their history and mythology and what not.
To me a lot of the reason "Oh my Zeus" doesn't work is because it 1) misidentifies the use of "god" in the original phrase as a proper noun when it isn't (you don't usually hear Christians saying "Oh my Jesus!") and 2) inherits some baggage from the base phrase that implies the same relationship between speaker and the invoked god as in Abrahamic (and specifically Christian) theology, which is weird when the religion is, say, polytheistic. So something like "Zeus!" or "Zeus's beard!" works fine, but "Oh my Zeus" doesn't, and "oh gods" usually sounds better than "oh my gods."
I think it's the difference between making something that has in-universe justification and/or sense and just slotting another word into a phrase without thinking about it or doing any research into an alternate for the whole phrase.
