Over the weekend I blazed through Rick Riordan's newest Heroes of Olympus book, The Son of Neptune. I love this series. He weaves a fabulous tale with unexpected twists and turns, while tossing modern technology with mythology. Even more fun is each story builds on the last and is guaranteed to be resolved in a short series...no long drawn out story lines.
One thought that struck me as I read the book and contemplated the series was how much it sucks to be a demigod. Sure, you've got powers...harness lightening, control water, summon the dead, but everywhere you go monsters are trying to kill you and you can't hide because you have a distinct "smell", you have weird visions when you sleep, and Gods and Goddesses are constantly tricking, bribing or threatening you into do things for them.
In Rick Riordan's world, the Gods need the demigods and humans to do things for them, but they can't ever tell them straight out what they need because they're not supposed to interfere. (Um, what? Pretty sure that's all the Gods do!)
Instead they give them cryptic prophecies that promise the end of mankind and the destruction of the Gods unless some bizarre quest is fulfilled. Of course, on these quests the demigods lose their friends and things that are important to them and in the end the Gods are generally begrudging and/or just ungrateful.
I suppose it makes some sense. After all, how can you have power if you have no one to exercise it over. Since I don't believe in the ancient Gods...I think they're just fables made up by men, it makes me wonder what is it that makes humans feel the need to dominate something or someone else? Why can't we just let each other live life fairly? Recognizing our own strengths and weaknesses both as people and as "places".
I live in the plains and have barley..you live in orchards and have peaches...let's trade. It sure seems simple enough. I think that no matter where we are we're more alike than we are different. We all want to be happy and healthy. We want to see our children grow up in safety and peace. We want to see our love ones leave in the morning and not wonder if they're going to come home in the evening. We want to be respected and loved. Basic humanity.
Did I mention how all these poor, mostly doomed demigods came to be? Gods hooking up with humans. As exciting as that sounds, I'll be sticking with mortal men with narcissistic tendencies.
"Fiction can be fun!" -Jim Carrey, Ace Ventura
ReplyDeleteThe thing that is awesome about fiction is our mind's imagination is the limit. What a limit, though. Even dreams of our wildest fantasies are still bound by our mentality. Our nature, as humans makes it's way into all of our writings.
Personifying our traits in heroes and villains is an old practice but one that endures just as well as our greed, hope, love, egos, courage, fear, hatred and corruption. The sad thing is we as a race, and not a gender, nationality or hierarchy could achieve incredible thins on a planetary scale. Instead we choose to hinder our own progress with wars and political greed.
Those very things come not from people, but the person. What we seek to gain does not always have pure intention. Self serving motivation often leads to degradation rather than progression.
Much like these demi-gods use mortals for their benefit we often use our fellow man. I too have pondered a world where currency is no more than surplus of valuables that you may have. Food we all grow to feed our own families. Somehow as technology progresses and we do less for ourselves I feel we are actually going backwards in human evolution. Technology evolves and we regress as literal animal that we are.
When I dream of fiction I dream of global unification moving towards things like space travel and making other planets inhabitable. Then it hits me. It would be in our nature to war in between the planets over ownership or resources that we have
depleted, destroying these worlds in the process.
As much as I hate to sound like a dark minded whiny antagonist, sometimes I feel that we are no more than a parasite.
P.S. Space chicks think my sports car is hot.