Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: The Gods of Night Vale

Welcome to Night Vale constantly amazes me with how unique it is, especially when it comes to religion. It manages to take real religious ideas and weave something entirely new and different from the thing that originally inspired them. The Smiling God, the beagle puppy, and the angels are inspired by Abrahamic religions, but while it’s clear that Huntokar and the other gods are definitely at least inspired by real deities, the creators of Night Vale have managed to create their own unique pantheon.

art by Mia DiIorio

Several episodes ago, we learned that the god Huntokar, who has been mentioned in passing throughout the show, is the god of Night Vale and has been protecting the people of Night Vale since the very beginning. However, we came to discover that her protection also nearly doomed Night Vale by causing the multiple versions of the town in different universes to collapse in on themselves. In this episode, Huntokar mentions that she is one of four old gods that include the Glow Cloud (ALL HAIL), the Woman from Italy, and the Distant Prince.

Writers tend to take two different routes when it comes to adding deities to their stories. They either use gods of real religions, or they invent their own. Creating your own deities has the major advantage that you aren’t taking the risk of portraying another religion’s deities in a potentially harmful way. However, we cannot escape the fact that we are affected by what we know about religions and their deities and inevitably the audience may realize that these “fake gods” are inspired by real ones. It’s fine to be inspired by real deities, but it’s important to still develop them in such a way as to make them their own unique god, otherwise the portrayal could still end up seeming problematic. And that is exactly what the creators of Welcome to Night Vale were able to do. Their deities are clearly inspired by different real gods, but are written in such a way that they become their own unique god and are not simply a copy of another deity.

Spoilers for Welcome to Night Vale for up to Episode 113.

Afterworlds: YA about YA, Girls Falling in Love, and Growing Up

I picked up Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld after finding it on a list of books with lesbian/bisexual/queer female protagonists. The descriptions of the book also promised an eighteen-year-old girl learning to navigate adult responsibilities, self-aware YA, and satire poking fun at paranormal teen romance novel. And Afterworlds largely delivers—although without knowing to look for satire, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it, and while the protagonist is a girl who likes girls, it’s unclear if she’s bi or lesbian. However, the main strengths of this book are actually the variety of female characters and all the different relationships between them: it’s populated with girls and women of different ages, including queer women and women of color, who are friends, lovers, siblings, mentors… But I’m getting carried away, so let’s backtrack and proceed in an orderly fashion, shall we?

Spoilers for the book below, obviously.

Oh, My Pop Culture Summon: Shiva from Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy games like to use a lot of religious references in their worldbuilding. From summon spells, monsters, plot, themes, and even to character names, they take a lot from numerous religions around the world. We’ve got Norse mythology, Shintoism, Abrahamic religions, and others all wrapped up in these games. Unfortunately, especially when it comes to monsters and summon spells, they don’t always use these references very well, and in some cases, they completely alter religious figures in order to make them suit a particular purpose in the story.

Because the games take from so many religions and use them in so many ways, it’s hard to get a good grasp on whether or not they have a positive or negative portrayal of religion. As such, they end up with a grab-bag of religious themes—some of these are neat, others not so much. Falling into that latter category is Shiva, one of Final Fantasy’s more popular summons.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Science-Minded Characters & Religion

via sodahead.com

Many of you probably think of religion and science as always constantly at odds. And while it’s true that religion and science often disagree with each other, many of you probably don’t realize that devoutly religious people have contributed to science. Catholic Jean-Baptiste Lamarck developed the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics (a sort of early theory of evolution). Fr. Georges Lemaître was a cosmologist and Catholic priest, and is the father of the Big Bang theory. Of course Catholics aren’t the only religious people to contribute to science. Obviously, Albert Einstein, one of the most famous and influential scientists in history, was Jewish and was agnostic but strongly identified with his Jewish heritage, and Judaism was a major influence on his life. Jonas Salk was devout in his Jewish faith (and often seemed annoyed by the religion vs. science debates) and a medical researcher. He is famous for developing the first polio vaccine. Jābir ibn Hayyān is both Muslim and the father of chemistry. Abdus Salam, another practitioner of Islam, won the Nobel Prize in physics for his electroweak interaction theory. In fact, it’s because of his faith that Salam pursued science. He said:

The Holy Qur’an enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah’s created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart.

So there are a lot of scientists throughout history who contributed greatly to their field and still loved and professed their faith. But you wouldn’t know that if you looked at our pop culture. Almost every science-minded character is an atheist. There is nothing wrong with having a lot of characters be scientists and atheist or agnostics (in fact, it’s important to have characters like that), but I worry that if every science-minded character is an atheist or agnostic, we end up perpetuating the conflict between religion and science.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Satan is Literally a Dark Wizard

When you grow up reading a lot of genre fiction, especially young adult and high fantasy, a major turning point in your emotional growth is realizing that “the dark lord”, as you have come to know this all-too-common character archetype, doesn’t really exist. In reality, evil as an ideal is never made manifest in a single adversary whose sole objective is to destroy and corrupt the goodness in the world. Sure, there are people who are “bad” from your own perspective, and bad qualities like selfishness, prejudice, and lack of empathy are generally culturally agreed upon, but even the worst people are generally heroes in their own minds, people who have not yet been shown the error of their ways. No one sets out to be Sauron or the White Witch or Voldemort, and no matter how much power and influence bad people achieve, I know of no instance where anyone has claimed that their ultimate goal was the advancement of the cause of evil.

Most frameworks of morality grasp this concept pretty well: that good and evil are not absolutes, and that humans inherently have the capacity for both positive and negative behaviors. The major exception seems to be in certain camps of modern Christianity, which assigns a motive and influence to Satan that is very much comparable to the fictional and largely metaphorical presence of Sauron and other prototypical “dark lords”. While in Tolkien’s case, Sauron was a metaphor for industrialization, and in the case of children’s books, morality is artificially externalized and simplified for the sake of young readers, the Christian reading of Satan is—as far as many active faith communities are concerned—neither metaphorical nor exaggerated. Satan is literally a dark wizard.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Romani and Notre Dame

Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most popular films of the Disney Renaissance. It’s famously dark, and Judge Claude Frollo might be the most evil Disney Villain of all time. And that makes sense: Victor Hugo’s original gothic novel makes the Disney film look like a heartwarming bedtime story. One of the things I love most about the movie is its complex portrayal of religion. My fellow authors point out how it contains both positive and negative portrayals of religious beliefs and people. But The Hunchback of Notre Dame contains more just a few Catholic characters; we also see some relatively faithful portrayals of Romani beliefs, too.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Top 5 Female Religious Figures That Should Be On TV

Let’s face it: most religions, both in real life and pop culture, seem to be made up of a hierarchy of men leading other men. But most religions actually have many important influential and powerful female figures, yet upsettingly, they are often ignored, forgotten, or even rewritten in order to maintain sexist notions about women.

Now you might be thinking, how is geek culture in particular going to incorporate female religious figures? Exactly the same way geek culture interprets male religious figures. Sometimes literal angels or gods are featured in movies or TV shows. Sometimes characters symbolically or allegorically represent one of these figures. There is no reason that female religious figures can’t receive the same treatment as the male ones.

So here are, in no particular order, my top five female religious figures that need to be incorporated more into our pop culture.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Religion-Inspired Character Names

Character names have the potential to say a lot about that character. Names have power, and authors go to a lot of trouble to make sure that their characters’ names fit the people bearing them. It can be as simple as the etymology—for example, Malfoy comes from the French ‘mal foi’, or ‘bad faith’, and ‘vol de mort’ in French quite literally means ‘flight from death‘. Sometimes authors draw inspiration for their characters’ names from religious sources, but doing so is a tricky business. When employing religiously-inspired character names, it’s important that they are not used in a way that’s insulting to the original religion’s tradition.

[contains some spoilers for Teen Wolf 3A finale and Pacific Rim]

Oh, My Pop Culture Rebirth: Reincarnation in Fiction

Reincarnation is the idea that a person’s eternal soul is reborn numerous times in different bodies. In a religious sense, reincarnation tends to occur as a purifying process: through each life cycle, you either learn important lessons, cleansing your soul and becoming closer to heaven, or rack up karmic negativity, setting your eternal self back in the queue and, depending on the belief system, guaranteeing a shittier vessel for yourself in your next life cycle. The monotheistic Big Three—Judaism, Islam, Christianity) don’t generally hold with this concept, but it is an important part of many Eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism.

Reincarnation is also a time-tested trope in fiction, and I find it interesting that in most cases, it’s a hard and fast aspect of the fictional universe rather than a religious belief that some follow and some don’t. It’s just given that reincarnation exists.

Life of Pi

On Monday of this week I saw Ang Lee’s movie Life of Pi based on Yann Martel’s book of the same name. I had not read the book but my mother had and really loved it so we went to see the movie together. Not having read the book, I knew the main situation was that of a boy named Pi somehow stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger after a shipwreck, but I didn’t know how the two found themselves in that situation or how they progressed from there but I thought it sounded interesting. I was pleased to learn that the story of Pi is a very interesting tale of faith, strength, and personal growth.

The movie opens with Pi as an adult talking with an author who was told to seek him out because he had “a story that would make you believe in God”. Pi begins by explaining to the man how he got his name, his youth in India as the son of a zookeeper, and his experiences with various religions. Raised Hindu, Pi eventually encounters Catholicism and Islam in India and sees both religions as additional ways of God revealing himself in addition to Hinduism. Pi’s father, who opposes to religion in favor of science, admonishes his son that accepting all faiths equally is essentially the same as having no faith at all and encourages Pi to start to think more critically about these religions to which he subscribes.

Throughout the story Pi discusses moments in which he believes he is in the presence of God or is experiencing some form of divine intervention. He sees God in the power of the storm, feels God’s saving hand time and again, etc. and the art department did a fantastic job illustrating these moments on film. Everything is beautiful and comes so close to being unrealistic, yet doesn’t feel too manufactured. The majesty and wonder of creation are incredibly portrayed in this film.

On that same note, the 3D effect was also very well-done. I’m not a big fan of 3D and while I think it’s fun and has certainly come a long way from the old days of bi-color glasses I don’t find it particularly realistic (most of the time it feels like it’s assaulting me and tending to go out of focus when things are moving fast) and rarely feel it adds to the film. In Life of Pi, however, I thought the effect was masterfully done and only once did it feel gimmicky (when the movie was suddenly letter-boxed just so a fish could “jump out of the frame” at the audience) so I give major credit to the designers behind this who made me forget I was watching a REAL-D 3D MOVIE rather than just a movie.

Life of Pi makes some interesting points about faith and religion but leaves them entirely up to the viewer to evaluate. Pi never says that he has chosen any faith to the exclusion of the others, nor does he necessarily encourage anyone to choose his beliefs, his father’s, or anyone else’s. The movie makes the case that faith is a personal journey that comes right down to how willing one is to believe in the extraordinary and it is this message that takes the movie from simply being good to being meaningful. I highly recommend it for its enjoyable story, stunning visuals, and thoughtful commentary.