Mother God

A recent thread on gamefaq drew my attention to this question :

Is Deus male or female ? Or neither ?

Grahf keeps talking about the "mother of destruction" and "mother god"... I didn't think too much about this before. Mainly because Miang is the human manifestation of Deus' will and this "entity" is meant to possess female bodies only. She's also called the mother of humanity and all that. When Grahf talked about the "mother of destruction", I mostly thought about Miang.

At the end of the day, I think Deus is genderless. But it used (more like hijacked) the Wave Existence's creation (a female body and a mother persona) to "survive" and plan its full revival/recovery. So, in a way, Deus survived as a undying female entity (Uroboros) for 10000 years... kinda. But as a machine, it's genderless.

I've always interpreted it as genderless, but I can see where the dispute could come from. I kinda count Miang and her hosts as female, and her connection to Deus is undeniable, but I didn't think it went that far.

I was under the impression that those 'mother of destruction' comments were directed at Miang because she was apparently directly involved in the fall of the previous civilization and countless other similar incidents before - the one the underground city and missile silos belonged to - and thus was a person that caused nothing but destruction, thus the moniker.

But if Grahf was speaking about Deus in there ('mother' as in the entity that spawned what would eventually become mankind on this planet and 'of destruction' because the only purpose for this being mankind's eventual death to fuel Deus' restoration)...

I know less about mythology than the wikipedia articles, so I apologize in advance if I say something silly, but, if I remember right, a bunch of IRL religious beliefs, apparently all by themselves, attributed the female gender and several character traits thought to be characteristic for it to things that didn't even look like they could have either, but, in people's opinion, were the source of all life there is. (Earth itself is a prime candidate for this.)

So, if Grahf were referring to Deus there, Deus' own gender, recognizable human qualities or lack thereof, are completely irrelevant; as a being who spawned (or caused the creation of, as the case may be) basically all of mankind on that planet, it could still get called 'mother god' regardless because of how human mind works.

Or he could always assume that Miang and Deus were one and the same and speak thus about both? I dunno.

Yikari wrote:
So, if Grahf were referring to Deus there, Deus' own gender, recognizable human qualities or lack thereof, are completely irrelevant; as a being who spawned (or caused the creation of, as the case may be) basically all of mankind on that planet, it could still get called 'mother god' regardless because of how human mind works.

^ I really like that idea!

RadicalDreamer wrote:A recent thread on gamefaq drew my attention to this question

Heh, that was mine. Rather cruelly got deleted because I failed to put "spoilers" in the title...

The intent of the thread was to challenge this strange thing I've noticed, whereby Deus will either be called "it" or "he"... but never "she". When confronted about this, people will usually say something about how the being in question doesn't have a gender at all... then continue to call it "he". When, in this particular case, "he" is blatantly wrong.

Note that there is a distinction between biological sex and gender. When it comes to gods and similar beings, talking about their private parts is in a lot of cases fruitless and beside the point. What's important, I think, is that gods are overwhelmingly human-created personifications. They tend to have a parental edge, as well. But seldom will you find a classical god who is simply characterized as a "parent" (I personally can't think of one) -- they are instead mother and fathers. These assignments are static, impervious to the being's fluid sexuality (cf. Loki turning into a mare and giving birth) or complete lack thereof. Gendered characterizations are intrinsic to humans' relationships with gods.

I definitely think the decision to make Deus a "mother" warrants a more serious look, since it is a deliberate deviation from the "source material". That is, the Old Testament God (= the Demiurge) upon which Deus is roughly based (and was even going to be named after at one point) is called "God the father", or, in Japanese, "chichi naru kami". In Xenogears, this becomes "God the Mother", or "haha naru kami". Deus incarnating in human form as a woman is a clear parallel to the Abrahamic God incarnating as a man, as well.

If nothing else, I think it would make a great deal of sense for the people actually living in the Xenogears universe to refer to their God as "She", as it seems consistent with what's been presented and would sound rather more natural in English than "it".

Hey, Reichu! Thanks for signing up here! I'm sorry your thread got deleted. :/ That sounds extraneously harsh on GameFAQs' part. You won't have that problem here. :3

It's been a while since I've played all the way to the part of Xenogears in question, but I do remember that Krelian starts talking about Mother God rather late in the proceedings. I don't remember if other people call Deus Mother God, either, so when my memory of it iced over, it did so with a pretty genderless outlook in regards to Deus. Looking at concept art of the Deus boss, it seems very feminine as well.

katimus_prime wrote:I do remember that Krelian starts talking about Mother God rather late in the proceedings.

Yeah, and this prompts the weird bit from Citan about "Mother and "Great Mother" and Deus wanting to slurp everybody back into her womb whether they're fated or not. They make a big deal of it at the time, then never mention it again. Oh, Disc 2, you little scamp.

I don't remember if other people call Deus Mother God, either, so when my memory of it iced over, it did so with a pretty genderless outlook in regards to Deus.

Very early on, there's Grahf's "haha naru kami", or "Mother God", which is referring to the one he plans on destroying, and hence to Deus. There are numerous references beyond that point, some of them unclear in precisely who they're referring to. I will have to commence work on a comprehensive list!

I'm sure a genderless outlook was facilitated by Honeywood's choice to nearly always omit pronouns when deities are being discussed. (He did slip up in one place I recall and call W.E. "he", which doesn't quite pan out because the only gendered human characteristics the W.E. has at all are feminine ones, as it says to Fei's metaphysical face, but anyway.) This isn't an invalid choice, and was probably even wise given the climate of the times. Opposition to Xenogears' localization wouldn't have taken well to God being characterized in the feminine, I'm sure.

But in an ideal translation, I don't think "it" works very well, for the reasons I provided previously. It is expecting an unnatural level of detachment from the characters who live and breathe that universe. If they talked about God using a neutral word like "creator", "progenitor", or "parent", then "it" might work, but humans usually aren't comfortable with that kind of ambiguity. They want a big mom and/or dad up in the sky watching over them, and their language will reflect that.

(That said, there is some research on Japanese pronoun use with regard to deities that I need to do, in case I am needlessly making myself sound foolish...)

Looking at concept art of the Deus boss, it seems very feminine as well.

Speaking of which, it took me stupidly long to realize that Final Deus incorporates a lot of Opiomorph's design. I wonder if that's meant to signify anything "deeper"?

Boop, going through pages and pages of walkthroughs and let's play archives trying to figure out how badly Ramsus damaged Nisan in Vendetta (spoilers - he didn't kill everyone and Elly beat him in Vendetta by batting her eyelashes?) brought me to this page - http://lparchive.org/Xenogears-%28by-The-Dark-Id%29/Update%20119/ which I think pretty much sold me on Deus as a she...unless Deus preferred other pronouns and never spoke them, but, you know.

What on that page specifically sold it to you?

It was the concept art at the very bottom that sold me solid finally. (I'm so dense.)

Why are you "dense"? I'm actually very curious now what you saw in those pictures to sway your mind, since I'm not sure I know what it is.

This does remind me of how much I love Deus' initial WTF design. I kind of wish the final version (last boss) had been a natural progression of what they had going here. Which would've meant NOT fighting a rotted husk version of the "adult" form in Mahanon. Maybe fight the child form instead, and instead of it mysteriously destroying itself off-screen, Karellen et al. show up THEN to stop our party. So, restructure the events in Mahanon something like this.

1) We see the bridge first, as before.
2) We visit Raziel second. Instead of Karellen interrupting Citan's hacking, Deus does. Citan is at least able to pinpoint the source of the disruption and we go check it out.
3) We find child-form Deus in suspension. Instead of attacking us, we attack it, since we learned from Raziel that this thing is the core of the Deus System and getting rid of it would be good.
4) Before we can finish pummeling the God-Child, Karellen-Miang-Graf show up. Graf distracts us with a curbstomp battle while Karellen, having obtained Miang's blessings, has Deus carefully transported off to wherever that giant nanoreactor is.

I need to do some Deus fan-art already...

Reichu wrote:This does remind me of how much I love Deus' initial WTF design. I kind of wish the final version (last boss) had been a natural progression of what they had going here. Which would've meant NOT fighting a rotted husk version of the "adult" form in Mahanon. Maybe fight the child form instead, and instead of it mysteriously destroying itself off-screen, Karellen et al. show up THEN to stop our party. So, restructure the events in Mahanon something like this.

1) We see the bridge first, as before.
2) We visit Raziel second. Instead of Karellen interrupting Citan's hacking, Deus does. Citan is at least able to pinpoint the source of the disruption and we go check it out.
3) We find child-form Deus in suspension. Instead of attacking us, we attack it, since we learned from Raziel that this thing is the core of the Deus System and getting rid of it would be good.
4) Before we can finish pummeling the God-Child, Karellen-Miang-Graf show up. Graf distracts us with a curbstomp battle while Karellen, having obtained Miang's blessings, has Deus carefully transported off to wherever that giant nanoreactor is.

I need to do some Deus fan-art already...

Now that would be cool!  

Reichu wrote:Why are you "dense"? I'm actually very curious now what you saw in those pictures to sway your mind, since I'm not sure I know what it is. :B

Eh, I'm pretty often dismissive of my own outlook when I think something's up for debate.  ^^;

Anyway, looking at the concept art again, I may have been misinterpreting some of the hanging tendrils as hair.  Hair or no, it made me think of Miang.  I'm still hanging out in that section of the Let's Play I'm listening to at work.  I think I've listened to the scene at least twice, but I was too distracted to understand all of it at once.

I'm spoiler-texting this next bit because it's got some body horror in it.

Spoiler:

I may have zoned out in regards to Emperor Cain's involvement in keeping humanity safe or how much he really knew about Deus, but if using his powers to keep the "ones who were destined to become parts of god" safely sealed away from mutating into their "true forms," being without the parts to be reborn, Deus may have made the conscious decision to remain sealed until Cain's power was routed.  I may be missing large chunks of information the Gazel have said regarding this, but if I have the spoons to still work on my Ramsus fic during the next 3 months of overtime, I also want to know as much as I can about Emperor Cain.  And then there's that thing about the people who didn't mutate after Emperor Cain being killed preserved by virtue of living multiple lives, how does one go about doing that?  Is it restrained to the DNA sequence of the individual?  Was there someone who instituted it?  Could it have been Abel-era Elly, or was it also Cain's doing that somehow didn't involve his power?

katimus_prime wrote:Anyway, looking at the concept art again, I may have been misinterpreting some of the hanging tendrils as hair.  Hair or no, it made me think of Miang.

They do look rather hair-like. I was thinking about the image -- the pale creature with a skeletal face and tendril-like hair -- the other day and wondered if it was perhaps meant to invoke the classical "ghost woman" of Japanese lore.

The idea about stunted growth is interesting -- the Deus in Mahanon does look quite malformed. I shall contemplate this.

Regarding Emperor Cain and parts of God, I'm a bit unclear on the details myself. I'll have to revisit the matter once I brush up a bit.

Lookin' forward to seeing moar contemplations on this! (I've kinda been tempted to redesign a fully functional and adult Deus, but I have like, zero time anymore.)

I think that Deus is genderless. While referring to it as "mother god" and other mother terms, it might just be because it's the "womb" of mankind. As females are the ones humans associate with birth and creation for the most part, I think that's where they get the mother aspect from. It's like Zarathustra, it was also called the womb at one point but clearly Zarathustra is genderless.

That's just how I perceive it anyway.