ひげ
This video is insane. It's an hour and a half long so it's a big one, but it's got some great history about Japan itself that I had never heard before. Really puts things into perspective.
Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs?
@icedquinn spoiler to the video, but he ends up saying that this is basically the way that the western games where you kill gods are structured, but with japanese ones it's a little different. western games are all about escalation, but japanese ones are more metaphorical and have to do with divinity being intertwined with the state. in a very condensed nutshell.
@beardalaxy Sick video, basically compacted 90% of what they teach in four years of college about Japanese government, religious, and societal history, into 90 minutes. Glad this guy did real research because other types of videos like this literally just read off of a Wikipedia page.
Japan is in a constant challenge the powers that be, whether it's the physical government or an idea of a higher power. And yeah, I think these struggles happen in every society in the world as well, but it really is interesting that with Japan and other East Asian nations, it goes back to the beginning of their recorded history.
Interestingly, without knowing any of this and not even thinking about the god-killing meme, I still decided upon this story for my game(s). It is a cycle, wherein a mortal kills a god and becomes one in order to replace said god, eventually falling victim to the same cycle in one way or another.
It was really interesting to listen to this video and think about why it was that I chose that as the motif, even down to the game's title (God's Disdain), without knowing any of this history or even really thinking about it as a way to pay homage to JRPGs or anything like that.
I think a big part of it certainly was subconscious realization of how a lot of games similar to the one I'm making feature the trope of killing a god, but I wonder how much of it has to do with my religious upbringing as well.
I was raised in a heavily Christian (Mormon, at that) household and ultimately left the church when I was 19 for reasons I'll not get into. It felt like, in a way, I had "defeated the god" of the religion that was responsible for so much strife in my life by refusing to participate any longer, despite the challenge of breaking the social contract I had unwittingly signed before. I was an outcast in the same way I'd imagine Moon Channel's description of people who break the capitalist god's social contract in Japan are. Perhaps, in the same way that such a thing influences those types of people to incorporate god killing into their stories, the same motif found its way into mine. Not killing actual capital G God, but killing something that rules over your life that you feel is actively making it worse, and rising above to beat it is all anyone wishes for.
It's really interesting to just think about how, despite large cultural differences, racial differences, and a vast ocean in between us, humans can still have so many similarities in what they go through, how they think, and how that thinking manifests itself as action.