Honestly my favorite subversion/version of the hyper malevolent god of death and destruction trope is the Winnower from Destiny. (Yes. He is canon. Don't listen to what r/Destinylore tells you, they are just illiterate.)
The Winnower can best be described as the abstract platonic concept of simplicity and Winnowing given form. All simplicity and simplification from the way your brain simplifies sensorial inputs into concepts and ideas you can think about to natural selection to the act of death to the act of imposing order onto chaos and removing unnecessary aspects of a system. All fall into his domain. He isn't a god of death as much as a god of absence and removal.
I'll let him put it best.
did you know that I created you?
Your mind and your body and every thought you've ever had. Your senses. Your consciousness. I made you. Not the gardener, but I.
Did I reach out and place my special mark upon you? No. Nothing so crude.
In the beginning, your world was a garden too. The whole floor of the world-sea was a mat of bacteria, and the very first animals, adorable blobs of ooze, grazed upon that mat in endless idyll. They had no concept of the existence of other beings. Why would they? Their most complex function was a kind of gentle spasm, to scoot forward while they grazed. And if they bumped into each other on that warm seabed, all they did was ooze onward, untroubled. There was nothing to their life except the uptake of carbon compounds from the bacterial bed.
And then—one day—the fall occurred. So much earlier and so much more necessary than your myths remember. Some poor mutant discovered that it could collect carbon compounds much faster if it stopped grazing on the bacterial mat and started dissecting and eating the lumps of predigested carbon all around it: its neighbor oozeballs.
It couldn't help but do it. It couldn't help but thrive. We don't get a choice about the rules. We just play the game.
It was the first defector—the first predator. It changed everything. Now the oozeballs needed sensors to watch for danger, and brains to integrate those senses and generate plans of survival, and swift neurons and muscles to enact that plan. This was the Cambrian Explosion, the great birth of complex life on your world. I caused it. I, the defector, the destroyer, the one who takes.
The thing is. He isn't a god of death and evil. We use his powers for good all the time. The simple act of enforcing laws and justice technically falls into his domain. He doesn't think existence is suffering And he himself says this.
Beings who deserve no thought:
Those who peddle the tired gotcha that all life hastens entropy. They are fatuous little nihilists who pretend to prefer no existence to a flawed one. They bore me.
He just... Believes that existence is a constant battle against all and you have to abide by his law: Exist lest you fail to exist. Essentially he embodies competition and opportunism to the max. The clashing of markets and ideals and laws and nations all serve to fuel him and whatever comes out on top at the end of the day is worthy of existing.
Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace.
Out in the world we ask a simple, true question. A question like, can I kill you, can I rip your world apart? Tell me the truth. For if I don’t ask, someone will ask it of me.
And they call us evil. Evil! Evil means ‘socially maladaptive.’ We are adaptiveness itself.
Ah, Oryx, how do we explain it to them? The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means. The universe is run by extinction, by extermination, by gamma-ray bursts burning up a thousand garden worlds, by howling singularities eating up infant suns. And if life is to live, if anything is to survive through the end of all things, it will live not by the smile but by the sword, not in a soft place but in a hard hell, not in the rotting bog of artificial paradise but in the cold hard self-verifying truth of that one ultimate arbiter, the only judge, the power that is its own metric and its own source—existence, at any cost. Strip away the lies and truces and delaying tactics they call ‘civilization’ and this is what remains, this beautiful shape.
And it is majestic. Majestic. It is the only thing that can be true in and of itself.
What I fucking love about him is the way he talks. He firmly, deeply believes that he has already won. Even if you, the player, beat his minions and chosen and those who fight in his name. You have already proven his point and made his choice. So he just hams it up. He fucking calls a millions of years old alien God-King who has sterilized entire galaxies "My man" and tells him to "kill them and take their stuff". It's so entertaining.
And the thing is we never have or will fight him. He is deeply proud of us, the player, to the point of glazing us after we beat one of his admirers. He just occasionally pops up in lore tabs to go "Hey, how are you doing. You beat this alien god yet? You did? Nice. Anyways I just want to say that I am a big fan of your work and you should keep at it, even if you don't like me back."
romaincrisis
stormborns
origamiaround
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
dededos
tangentwithtanner
yousharknotpass
