#to make a full judgment call (which is one reason an exu schizm would be really cool)

[nellasbookplanet]

Speaking of the gods and the titans, there’s this refusal (from some of fandom as well as from Ashton and the hishari within the show) to really reckon with the narrative purpose of the titans.

Sure, we can say that the gods were colonizers by arriving to Exandria after the titans and then taking over, and that they should be killed/driven off for it and the titans brought back (even though there has been zero indications that reviving them is even possible). But this reading skips over a pretty crucial detail: the titans wanted to kill all mortals. The Betrayers even tried to bring them back at the start of the Calamity to help with the extermination effort. When questioned by Ashton, he is told that only the strong would survive their return.

I'm not saying the creation myth of Exandria doesn't come with some less than salient implications (an outside force of 'civilization' arriving and 'taming' the untouched nature), but reading the gods as colonizers and the titans as indigenous comes with some pretty nasty implications of its own, given the titans' violent nature. You'd either have to do some pretty serious retconning of what the titans were like, admit that the creation myth and its implications are what they are and there isn't much to be done about it other than develop its compexeties (similar to the fall of Aeor), or lean into a different reading (such as the struggle between order and chaos, change and stagnancy, life and destruction). Leaning harder into the colonizer reading while shutting your eyes for parts of the established lore is just kind of silly and ignoring the complexeties of the situation in favor of easy answers.