This post is by guest blogger Unlockable Character.
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Tom: proud to be a 8-bit man.Get off your ass and get on the mountain (mountain or throne — I don’t like either choice—Zeus sits on mount Olympus—oh, I don’t care, pick one)
I would like to be God.
Since I’m lactose-intolerant, and ice cream makes me fart, I know can never be God. (God can eat whatever he wants without negative effect, and he only farts when nobody is around; he says he’s going out to have a smoke, but I know what’s really going on.)
But what I know most about God, I learned from Alan Moore. I read Watchmen and saw what happened to Doctor Manhattan, how he grew into a god and gave up on the petty struggle of humans, and went off into space to create his own living things.
I’ve never had the opportunity to read the Miracleman Olympus story, but I’ve read a little about it and I think I understand what happens. I’ve also learned a little about God by watching Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with Anthony Quinn as Zeus. (No. I’m not screwing with you about Hercules; I mean it, as a god, Zeus rocks.)
Godhood is complicated. Humans can’t understand, so we create super heroes because having the power to make fire or fly or shoot laser beams from our eyes is peanuts compared with the awesome complexity of God’s powers.
But being a god is like what Steve Martin says about becoming a millionaire: “first, get a million dollars.” A god must be omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. Without that, don’t even think about trying to be a god.
Being omnipotent (and nigh-invulnerable as The Tick describes himself) is pretty common in the comic book world. But omnipresence is less common, given that most superheroes can only be in one location at a time. Omnipresence can be faked, if one is able to move really, really fast, or if one is large enough that their presence is felt everywhere by everyone simultaneously; but in comics, dude, omnipresence is really hard to draw. Omniscience can be similar to a very high level of telekinesis, but again, that’s pretty rare.
Now this is important: You are not a god to ants. You may be somewhat omnipotent by being bigger than they are, and you’re sort of omnipresent because you can damn sure squash a whole lot of them with one stomp from your Converse All-Stars, but you don’t have any idea what they’re thinking. And if you got down close enough to their level, they could probably swarm all over you and bite you into an anaphylactic shock and probably bite you dead. Something God would never let happen.
And this is what has me thinking about the nature of God; with Alan Moore’s help, I think I’ve come to understand that there are 5 stages of godhood: creation, vengeance, benevolence, apathy or despair, and re-creation. The order of a few of them can be switched around, but I think anyone who ever aspires to be a god needs to experience at least four of the five stages.
So even being a god, you need to follow certain rules. Remember the movie Schindler’s List when Goeth is shooting people (well, because he’s a Nazi) and because his position in the camp makes him feel god-like. But then he’s convinced to change and be more forgiving. He can’t handle the burden of godhood; it makes him feel stupid to be benevolent, and so he reverts to shooting people. This is why being a god is so difficult for humans, the vengeance part of being a god is so damn much fun.
When I was young and dumb enough to think I could make money writing, I wrote a story that I wanted to see animated into a movie. It was about a guy who was genetically engineered to reproduce by splitting into two identical people. Don’t ask me how that was supposed to happen, but he would get a little bigger and each cell would swell and split and he blacked out temporarily until he opened his eyes and there were two of him: the original and the double. The original then says, “I wanted to offer some advice or some comfort, but I was already gone.â€
After he split, he had to rest and eat before he could do it again. The double was unable to split.
It took place in the future, after some huge war and most of society was just loose tribes roaming the land. Some followed the guy, trying to catch the doubles so they could eat them. After a while, the original could produce doubles without the need to rest afterwards.
But then the original guy was caught by one of the tribes and he was given a tattoo of bull horns on his face so that they could identify their golden cow, the one who produces food. Eventually, he escaped by using one of his doubles as a decoy.
One day the original split to produce a double that could also split. And that double produced a double that could split. It was then that they realized that they were god.
Each time, the group split to double their numbers. After ten splits, barely three hours later, they were over one thousand strong. After ten more splits, they numbered over one million.
These were not individuals with their own personalities. How could they be? They were barely one day old. They were still duplicates of the original, with his desires and perversions. And their single desire was to kill everyone on the planet.
I never worked out the killing part, how this massive naked army moved around the planet to kill everyone, but I knew what they would do when they were done.
After all the killing, the duplicates all killed themselves. Bodies were burned or thrown into active volcanoes or sunk to the bottoms of the oceans.
But at the end, when all doubles were gone, there remained a few survivors. A few children were left alive and put in a safe area, away from predators, with enough food and water and shelter. The original watched over them in secret, but left them to figure out how to live with each other. When they were old enough, he went off and died as the others had. There were no books or artifacts left for the children to influence their behavior as they grew, but the original had left them some musical instruments. The End.
Okay, so it’s a crap story. That’s not the point. The point is that I was thinking about being God and it reminded me of this story. And you just read it, so mission accomplished.
But the point of this whole thing is: stop crushing the ants. If Nietzsche is right that “God is dead†and I’m right about the 5 stages of godhood, then God isn’t dead so much as he’s become apathetic. And since the next stage is re-creation, then stop crushing ants NOW. Because God’s no stranger to irony and the next incarnation of the world could have the ants be giants and us be tiny. And you know those ants are gonna be pissed.