#aroden bugs me a lot

[honourablejester]

So. After that post about crusades in fantasy, I just want to talk a little bit about my feelings about religion and the gods in Pathfinder specifically for a minute.

Firstly, I don’t actually like Iomedae as a goddess. I don’t object that she exists, you understand, but she wouldn’t be a goddess I would choose to play a follower of. That is less to do with Iomedae herself, though, and more with Aroden.

Because, see, I don’t mind that Iomedae is essentially the god of paladins. I don’t mind that she runs crusades against demons and necromancers. In a high fantasy setting like this, that’s what you have gods like Iomedae for. To fight demons. She’s doing her job, essentially. In case of demonic invasion, break glass. That’s why you have a war god or two in your back pocket for emergencies. I do not see, as I have explained exhaustively, the existence of demons in a fantasy setting and a god to fight them as any indication of real world religious opinion. These are genre conventions.

The god I do have an issue with is Aroden, the god of humanity, and his incredibly central role in the plot. Also Sarenrae, to a lesser extent, for similar reasons.

See. On the one hand, I do kind of get what story Aroden is aiming for. The human who becomes a god by his own courage and intelligence and strength, and who then goes on to sponsor humanity’s development and brings them out of the shadow of the telepathic Cthulhu monsters who secretly controlled them for so long. I get that.

The problem is that … Well, actually, it’s twofold.

The first problem is Aroden’s own background and behaviour, both before and after becoming a god. Aroden is the last surviving scion of the Azlanti Empire, Golarion’s equivalent of Atlantis, which was a vast techno-magical colonial power that had been ‘uplifted’, essentially, by the alghollthu, said Cthulhu monsters, to be better and more powerful than everything around them. The Azlanti had figured this out, and had planned to rise up against and destroy their ‘creators’, but the alghollthu saw this coming and dropped a fucking asteroid on them, destroying Azlant’s entire continent but also dropping the alghollthu themselves as well as the entire rest of the planet back to the stone age. Which … is fine, we can have fun with conspiracy theories here, I don’t object.

The problem is that Aroden, as the survivor, then goes to Azlant’s ex-colonies and attempts to do the same. To ‘uplift’ them, to keep Azlant’s culture and magical supremacy alive. Which. You do get. His culture just got literally vaporised, he wants to keep his homeland alive. But. He becomes immortal, he raises the Starstone, he becomes a god. And he then proceeds to become the patron deity of Azlant’s descendant empires. Taldor, in particular, the setting’s broadly Roman equivalent. He declares himself patron god of humanity as a species, and sets about trying to assert human supremacy. Taldor, as an empire, starts aggressively expanding pretty much immediately following this.

Aroden becomes, essentially, the god of colonialism? Species-based colonialism, at that.

Now. Sarenrae, as I mentioned, is doing pretty much the same thing over in the Empire of Kelesh, the setting’s Middle Eastern Muslim/Persian equivalent. The difference with Sarenrae, and the reason I don’t mind her quite so much, is that she’s not declaring herself humanity’s patron at the same time. So it’s less, you know. Race based.

If you are looking for the part of Pathfinder lore that does enter more problematic echoes-of-the-real-crusades territory, this is where you find it. The Mendevian crusades, despite the name, are mostly fine, they’re against an extraplanar threat. Taldor and Kelesh’s five thousand year war, on the other hand …

And even still, I might have not minded? Empires do this. Religions do this. I don’t necessarily mind the portrayal of a religious conflict between empires, even ones directly sponsored by a real deity. In this case, both empires are sponsored by a deity, and both deities are good. By alignment. Well, Aroden is actually lawful, not good, but basically neither of them have an evil alignment. So neither empire is especially vilified, at least not for their religion, they’re just … doing what empires do. Having a history like this as part of your fantasy world is not wrong, it’s good to explore that kind of history and verisimilitude.

The problem I have, the second part of the twofold problem above, is with Aroden. And specifically, Aroden’s role as patron of humanity.

Because Aroden is so central to Golarion’s lore. The death of prophecy, his death, is the defining event of the timeline. The entire Inner Sea region, the main setting until Pathfinder started branching out recently, is shaped by his actions. And they are broadly portrayed as … not necessarily right, but also not evil. Despite the fact that he is the scion of one human-supremacy empire and the sponsor of several others.

Humanity is considered kind of the rightfully dominant species of Golarion, at least of the surface world? The elves are from another world, the orcs, dwarves and goblins are all latecomers from underground, most other non-human species live in and around human civilisations. Most of the big historical non-human empires, like the serpent folk and the Ghol-gan, were explicitly evil, either initially or falling to evil over time, while humans, no matter how many empires we build, are more or less fine. Granted, Cheliax is a thing, so this is not one hundred percent. But, the thing is. Cheliax didn’t fall to devil worship until after Aroden died. So. We’re still here with Aroden as the rightful saviour and sponsor of humanity. And humanity, while following him, are the rightful inheritors of the world.

And it bugs me, because Aroden’s kind of a fucking dick? He’s a coloniser, originating from a colonising nation, and sponsoring others once he ascends to godhood. Now, again, Sarenrae, despite being of good alignment, also gets some of this, but Aroden being humanity’s patron, being a sponsor of colonialism on a racial/species level, gets me worse.

Now! Again. Something to consider here is that Pathfinder then explicitly killed him. Aroden is dead. And that is not a later decision, that was the initial event that kicked off Golarion as a setting in 1e. What does humanity do in a world where our sponsor god is abruptly dead. What do we do when our quite literal divine right up and fucking dies straight out of the gate. So Pathfinder is engaging with the problem. It’s just.

Aroden is so central. Humanity is so central. Even still, it’s not really questioned. Almost all the big movers and shakers are human, with the non-human ancestries kind of tacked on around the edges. And I do get it. The audience is human. A huge number of players, starting out, pick human as their ancestry, because it’s familiar. I do get it. But it does have some implications.

So yeah. Aroden is where Pathfinder’s worldbuilding around religion and species and morality bugs me. Not enough to write it off, it’s a fantastic setting, but yeah. It’s not perfect.

And Iomedae, unfortunately, despite the fact that she is mostly just doing her job, does get a bit of that by proxy as his inheritor.