Gorr the God-Butcher is the hero of the story

 I have never in my life related to a fictional character so hard as I did to Gorr in the moment when he met his god and found him to be worse than worthless. Gorr's renunciation of his god is exactly what I felt when I renounced mine:

If somehow he existed, the bastard accepted my praise but refused my prayers. He accepted my sacrifices but refused my pleas for help. He had the power to fix the shit he fucked up but couldn't be bothered. He made me give up pleasures and endure pains in this life with an empty promise that he'd make up for it in the next. When I asked for mercy, or even acknowledgement of my suffering, the response was contempt and dismissal. If my god had really existed, and had a physical form that could be attacked, I'd have taken the sword and beheaded him too.

Gorr is RIGHT. If gods existed that made demands and commandments without ever bothering to help those that needed them: then they would deserve obliteration, not worship. The only way the writers could make Gorr a villian for the purpose of the story was to have him kidnap a bunch of children. Otherwise, he would be unambiguously the hero, the guy to root for 100%. Even in the movie's universe where Thor is a pretty decent guy (after millennia of being not-that) - Thor finally getting off his ass and doing something to help those less powerful than himself doesn't justify allowing the continued existence of all the other gods that don't.

But in the real world, the Necrosword isn't some evil, sentient force that holds malice against the selfish and indifferent gods. In this world, the god-killer is simply the double-edged blade of facts and logic. No god can survive it. Maybe the fatal stroke is the problem of evil, as it was for me; maybe it's the inconsistencies between the various contradictory commandments of any given religion's scriptures; maybe it's the simple absence of evidence FOR a god; but no god can withstand a person being honest with themselves about the question of the god's existence. No god can stand up to the test of logic and evidence, and no god that fails the test would deserve worship. 

Take up the sword.

Kill them all.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Baby in the bathwater?

On Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Evangelical Republicans, and Judas Iscariot

A matter of principle