Hi. Um I'm reading your Gods among us series rn. I started like a couple hours ago and I'm on chapter 6 rn but i needed to pause and just say. HOLY. SHIT. this? is AWESOME. Dude. Dude. I can't deal with how good this fic is???!!! Its dark and fucked up i love it. Also the world building is immaculate!!
I'm literally kicking myself for not picking it up sooner. Honestly many many kudos to you. thanks for sharing this!
Hope you have a lovely day!!!
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Thank you so much for such a beautiful, glowing comment!! I’m sorry it took so long to respond to these but I kept them so that I could look back on them easily when I needed a confidence booster (which is too often lately). This is such a lovely, sweet comment. Thank you so much, you really made my... well, weeks that I’ve had this in my inbox lol. I’ve reread it so many times.
But one can only be selfish for so long and it’s time to get you an answer.
[Find the series we’re talking about here: GOD’S AMONG US] I’m pretty thrilled when people say they like the worldbuilding because I had so much fun thinking about it. If you haven’t checked them out already, you might be interested in the Appendices. (Also, I am still working on additional stories in this verse! I’ve just been very distracted by other projects lately. One is very close to completion though!)
Re the “War is a growing pain”/dual natures stuff... ultimately this fic was born from some thoughts I’ve had for original work over the years and my musings on the nature of divinity; how living forever and having these insane powers that separate you from the beings of the next closest evolutionary level by lightyears would inform how one viewed not just other life/intelligence but existence in general. I’ve always felt like there was something missing from the way we write and talk about immortality and I still don’t think I fully did it justice but I hope I managed to scratch the surface a little. The idea that we get so caught up in the world around us and all it’s problems that it’s easy to forget all the ways things are better now than they ever were before was kind of the catalyst for “If you had the first hand perspective and experience of history to inform your thoughts, would you be jaded or awed at the potential of humanity?” And at one point someone described a country or a political concept as “young” and I started thinking about international relations as interfamilial relations or even personal growth; how humanity as a species might evolve along the same emotional and intellectual ebbs and flows as a single human... I’m sorry, I’m not articulating my thought processes very well 😭 I’ll move on to the easy answer now 😂
The time period! I did mostly want to leave it open to interpretation, but I did have specific reasons for making certain decisions.
SO while this fictional world is very similar in a lot of ways to ours, there are obviously some major differences. The biggest one is that these gods are known entities. No one questions whether they exist. There is no such thing as atheism in this world because the gods are tangible facts, happy to remind people that they do, in fact, exist. AND many of the gods are in same-sex relationships that produce children, the ones who are part of “fated” or “official” pairings are still ancient beings, monogamy isn’t really a thing for the gods (another one of those things that seemed unlikely for eternal beings). While there is still a lot of religious tension between sects and subsequent moralizing, it’s on a much smaller scale. So while each region of the world still has it’s own history and developed individual cultures, there is a also this massive shared experience with the gods. At the same time, the gods have largely secluded themselves from the world and humans, with all their problems and all their lack of power, don’t have that option. For good or bad, they can’t hide and are forced to deal with their issues.
All this apparently translated to this anachronistic, vaguely WWII era aesthetic on Earth with hopefully little bits from all over the world seeping in (If you’ve read any of the other fics in the series, Dick is India for the celebration of this universe’s approximation of Holi at the beginning of A Love Story and bits of his temple are definitely inspired by Japanese shrines) and the Hall of Divinity was largely stuck in a classic ancient Greek aesthetic.
A couple little notes: jeans and t-shirts have been around for a long time! Jeans since the 1800′s I think and t-shirts actually right around the time of WWII (though I think there were similar garments before that. And the stuff with the computers... that was meant to show that the gods do actually have jobs 😂 The computer in Tim’s rooms isn’t available on Earth. Jason is mesmerized by it. What he thinks of as a computer is MASSIVE and don’t actually have screens. The computer he sees in Tim’s rooms is the future and it’s Tim’s job to figure out how to inspire mankind to use it wisely when they finally invent it (inspiring mankind to invent it is Arsenal's job).
Thank you so much for such amazing and insightful questions! I really do still love this AU and I’m so glad people are still getting enjoyment from it. You honestly made my entire month lol 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖
