Quote Originally Posted by KorvinStarmast View Post
One of the few good posts ever about OoTS deities. Well done.
Thank you.

The gods of OotS are sentient, sure, but they're more slaves to their nature than perhaps their own followers. To that end, they're not "sentient" in the mortal sense, but in an unrelatable, cosmic sense that leaves them at the mercy of forces they, for all their phenomenal deific power, can do little to counteract. Even in relating to one another, their own natures requires them to tie their own hands with unyielding, inane and unadaptable rules, and there's no apparent way for them to overcome any of that.

To subsist, they must have worshipers. To have worshipers is to be subject to those worshipers. And those worshipers shape their compulsions and natures such that they cannot be more than those worshipers define. Loki can only be Loki and can't be anything else, no matter what his chaotic little heart may desire. He's trapped in that role and all it entails. So's his daughter. So are all the gods. If power were a question of free will, they'd be anything but all powerful. They may be the personification of grand ideas and concepts, but in agency terms, they're less than people.

"You are what you eat" applies very thoroughly to the gods. Perhaps ridiculously so. And these are same gods who at one point created a world of sentient junk food...

Perhaps expecting reason and responsibility out of them is ... neither reasonable nor responsible.