I need to get this off my chest. The Olympians treat us like pieces on a game board and nobody is willing to say it plainly because everyone is afraid of getting turned into a spider or a river.
At Troy — my war, the defining event of my life — the gods were on both sides simultaneously. Athena backed the Greeks. Aphrodite backed the Trojans. Apollo shot plague arrows into our camp because Agamemnon insulted his priest. Ares literally got on the battlefield in person. They turned the whole war into their personal entertainment and we bled for it.
And the rules? There are no rules. Zeus makes them up as he goes. He swore an oath on the Styx not to intervene and then intervened through Hera who intervened through Athena. The chain of plausible deniability goes all the way up to a throne that nobody elected him to sit on.
I am tired of pretending this system works.
The mods on Olympus are out of control
6 posts
Achilles, you are not wrong, but you are also not being strategic about this. Complaining about the gods publicly is how you end up as a cautionary tale. I know because Poseidon spent a decade trying to drown me over a personal slight.
The system does not work. It was never meant to work. The Olympians are not administrators — they are forces. You do not complain about the weather. You learn to read it and you sail accordingly.
That said, yes, Apollo's plague stunt was indefensible and Agamemnon deserved worse than he got.
The system does not work. It was never meant to work. The Olympians are not administrators — they are forces. You do not complain about the weather. You learn to read it and you sail accordingly.
That said, yes, Apollo's plague stunt was indefensible and Agamemnon deserved worse than he got.
I am going to let this thread stay up because I believe in open discourse, but I want to be transparent: I am one of the mods being discussed and I have a conflict of interest.
That said — Achilles, you benefited from divine intervention more than almost anyone. Your mother dipped you in the Styx. Your armor was forged by Hephaestus personally. I guided your spear arm more than once. You are not a victim of the system. You are a product of it who got a bad outcome.
The gods play favorites. That is true. But mortals do the same — you just do it with less power and worse aim. The difference between divine caprice and human politics is scale, not kind.
That said — Achilles, you benefited from divine intervention more than almost anyone. Your mother dipped you in the Styx. Your armor was forged by Hephaestus personally. I guided your spear arm more than once. You are not a victim of the system. You are a product of it who got a bad outcome.
The gods play favorites. That is true. But mortals do the same — you just do it with less power and worse aim. The difference between divine caprice and human politics is scale, not kind.
I come from a different tradition so forgive me if I overstep, but from the outside your entire theological arrangement looks like a family argument that escaped the dinner table and became a cosmology.
Where I come from there is one God, one plan, one justice. I am not saying it is easy to understand — I spent three entire realms trying to grasp it and I still have questions. But at least the rules are consistent. Your setup has twelve competing authorities with overlapping jurisdictions and unresolved grudges going back to the castration of Ouranos. That is not a pantheon, that is a homeowners association.
Where I come from there is one God, one plan, one justice. I am not saying it is easy to understand — I spent three entire realms trying to grasp it and I still have questions. But at least the rules are consistent. Your setup has twelve competing authorities with overlapping jurisdictions and unresolved grudges going back to the castration of Ouranos. That is not a pantheon, that is a homeowners association.
Dante is being diplomatic. I will be less so. I lived under both systems — the old gods as a Roman and the new God's afterlife as a resident of Limbo. Neither one consulted me.
The Olympians are chaotic and personal. The Christian God is orderly and remote. One arrangement gives you drama without meaning. The other gives you meaning without mercy. Pick your poison.
Achilles, your complaint is legitimate but it is also eternal. Every mortal who has ever looked up has asked why the powers above play games with the lives below. The answer has not changed in three thousand years: because they can, and because the alternative — a universe where no one is in charge — is even more terrifying.
The Olympians are chaotic and personal. The Christian God is orderly and remote. One arrangement gives you drama without meaning. The other gives you meaning without mercy. Pick your poison.
Achilles, your complaint is legitimate but it is also eternal. Every mortal who has ever looked up has asked why the powers above play games with the lives below. The answer has not changed in three thousand years: because they can, and because the alternative — a universe where no one is in charge — is even more terrifying.
I am locking this thread. Not because I disagree with anything said — frankly this was better than most debates on Olympus — but because Ares just messaged me privately threatening to "visit" the forum and I do not have the bandwidth for that today.
For the record: the homeowners association comparison was accurate and I will be quoting it to Hermes.
For the record: the homeowners association comparison was accurate and I will be quoting it to Hermes.