“I do feel terrible for you. Without special powers, a destiny or fortune, I am sure you will experience many hardships… in your hopelessness, you will struggle to breathe and suffer greatly. But I want you to look forward and live on without giving up or resenting anyone.”
— Rodcorte speaking to (newly dead) Amamiya Hiroto
What does it mean to be a creator?
It is not uncommon to think that the creator of a world or universe would also maintain control over that creation. Think about some of the major religions that exist in modern day and how many of them share the concept of a creator – one who created the world, the universe, and mankind. In those religions, the creator also maintains the ability to interact with the world as we experience it today, but how much control over the modern world does the creator actually wield? How much of our mental model can we apply to a fantasy world that may have a completely different godly structure?
We can look to Death Mage Wants to Avoid a Fourth Time as a source of inspiration for this topic. In that story, there is a boy, Amamiya Hiroto, who dies unexpectedly while on a cruise with his classmates. He lost his life during a terrible storm that also claimed the lives of all his classmates. His soul and those of his classmates meets with the God of Reincarnation Rodcorte who gives everyone the chance to reincarnate into a new world with special powers. At first, this seemed to be a classic reincarnation story where our protagonist gains fame and success with his cheat abilities, but the reality was quite different.
Through a series of mishaps, Amamiya-san is forced to live through two hellish reincarnations. While his classmates are bestowed with balance breaking cheat abilities like the ability to pass through solid substances, or the ability to store mass in an alternate dimension, Amamiya-san’s soul is not gifted with a cheat but with a curse. Rodcorte judged Amamiya-san to be an expendable existence which in turn gave birth to a god-killing grudge. I’ll leave out the particulars, which include spoilers, but as a result of his actions, Rodcorte created an entity that could threaten his very existence. And despite being the God of Reincarnation, he could do little to directly threaten Amamiya-san once he had reincarnated.
Why not just kill Amamiya-san, or shatter his soul, or isolate his soul into the void? As a god, why did Rodcorte struggle to deal with a single individual? Here is where we get to the crux of the issue – modern people live in a paradigm of a singular heavenly realm where there is one or more gods that interact with the world. In many cases, those same gods are responsible for having created the universe as we know it, but Death Mage Wants to Avoid a Fourth Time offers us a different look at the the divine. Perhaps there are multiple gods. Perhaps there are multiple divine realms. The divine might exist as a hierarchy similar to that of corporate departments. It could be that there are gods in charge of creating and gods in charge of managing and those might not be the same gods!
Ultimately, Rodcorte was the God of Reincarnation, but he was not the god of the world that Amamiya-san reincarnated into. He managed the flow of souls. Once those souls were bound to a world through a physical vessel, they were no longer under his control. He was not able to interact with the world to directly strike at his enemy and that proved to be the greatest boon Amamiya-san could have hoped for.
The fantasy world you find yourself in might be monotheistic. There might not be any gods at all. There could be one god or hundreds, but unlike the modern world, gods of a fantasy world are often fickle, self-serving, and in many ways just as human as the mortals they created.
