The New Gods explained in Life Ore Death - part 1
Obloquy
CrossMyHeart And HopeToDie, StickANeedleInMyEye
- Location
- the Physical Realm
Ahem. These raise good points that are somewhat going to be addressed early in Season 2, but at the same time I'm realizing that revealing out-of-universe information ahead of time may make the in-universe information more comprehensible as well. So.
1) What does it mean to be a "New God," or at least to be called one?
The first important thing is that the term the Forever People use to define themselves, "New God," is very misleading; it's a clunky translation because English does not have enough words with the degrees of meaning for what they're trying to explain. There are several layers of nuance – origin, alignment, age, intent, etc. – that simply don't get translated well at all, so they gave the Very Simple version. (Fun Fact: in canon YJ we get to hear their native language before they have Motherbox translate early on, and the wiki page has a transcription.)
This is actually a very accurate description of my take on it, with the god half of "new gods" on its own being as descriptive as "mammal" or "reptile" rather than even just describing a species. "New" is similarly an age and power descriptor in a way; it's as much the caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly cycle having different names for the life cycles as anything, if there were far fewer limits on how large and old caterpillars could grow before moving on to the next stage since they very nearly don't die of old age.
The Forever People, most Apokolips agents, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel (arguably), Renka, Mother of Champions & Celestial Archer of the Great Ten, the Greek Nymphs and Muses, Asgardian Valkyries, Oa's Guardians, and many beings could potentially all be "New Gods".
A still-inaccurate explanation is: a New God is a flesh and blood being with a certain type of metaphysical presence that makes it more than flesh and blood, and through that the eventual potential to become much more. To speak of it in terms of size, a New God has a soul or spiritual presence larger than its body by a significant amount. This may and may not confer certain inherent powers.
For example, measuring it in New God spirit-size terms, Renka is more powerful than Wonder Woman, who is in turn more powerful than any of the Forever People, who are each in turn more powerful than Valkyeries or the Olympian Nine Muses. The reason Wonder Woman has superpowers strong enough to potentially overwhelm nearly everyone else on that list combined is for the same reason a one-pound iron saw blade, wrench, or screwdriver is better in almost every situation than an equally large unshaped iron ingot.
Apokolips and New Genesis variant of New Gods are basically just two planets of an entire species where every member is born like this.
2) How powerful are the New Gods (the Apokolips and New Genesis ones) and what are those powers?
In terms of power, it varies alot. Darkseid is at least one or two exponents more powerful than anyone else on Apokolips; he's so powerful, in fact, that he no longer technically counts as a "new" god but has not yet progressed on to the next 'life cycle' stage. The lowlies on Apokolips, on the other hand, may be weak enough that they shouldn't count as New Gods either, or are stuck around that level.
Things are happier on New Genesis, where… to talk about spirit-size again, if an ordinary human like Artemis has a soul that is 90% the size of her body, and a magically potent human like Aqualad has one around 110% the size of his body, even the weakest inhabitants of New Genesis could reasonably be expected to have spirit-bodies 150%-200% the size of their mortal bodies. Individuals on the status level of the Forever People, or most of Darkseid's Furies, would range 250%-350%, and then the ratio keeps going.
(I wish to emphasize that the size thing is a clumsy metaphor that I'll try to make more clear in a later installment. As mentioned with the tool-ingot thing, size is not all that matters, nor does the actual size of a physical body necessarily matter much, just the example ratio. I'm also trying to use "spirit" or "aura" rather than "soul" because the latter has connotations of personhood and morality I don't like.)
As to what these powers are, there are some shared underlying things, but it has to do with a "Mantle" tying the New God to some Conceptual Idea or Platonic Idea, and growing out from there. Darkseid is, for instance, the New God of Tyranny, and even though he treats his people horribly many of them literally cannot conceive of rising against him if he doesn't let them.
Scott Free is Freedom and he's a supernaturally good escape artist who can't be bound by prophecy or mind-control, is capable of subconsciously or otherwise evading pursuers and observation, and other tricks he still has yet to discover.
Orion is the Glory of War: on top of it increasing his already potent combat skills to make him one of the most dangerous physical fighters in the galaxy, he's pretty much immune to all the dirty tricks and cheap tactics that could cause him an inglorious defeat while fighting
It is possible for New Gods to share mantles – to be connected to the same or very similar ideas – but powerful New Gods tend to unintentionally edge out others from growing into that same Concept even if they don't intentionally eliminate the competition. When beings do share mantles, the individuals will often interpret the Concept in different ways: Scott Free is New God of Freedom in the sense of living freely and happily, escaping imprisonment, etc., while a less pleasant New God might be much more into chaos and anarchy with no rules.
Lastly, the words used to describe what a being is the New God of are just that: the names for the mantles are descriptions, not definitions. Not all the ideas translate very well, such as when we'll meet the New God of Beating People Into Unconsciousness.
3) How are New Gods connected to and related to Greek gods, Nordic gods, Egyptian gods, etc., or aren't they?
Mostly they are connected in the same way wolves, kangaroos, dolphins, cows, and brown bears are connected. They fall into the same wide category and share certain traits, and a long time ago they may have branched off from a common origin.
Or maybe referring to them as different breeds of dogs is better than different species of mammals, since there tended to be some directed plan or intent in the way they branched off, and they still remain capable of cross-breeding. Pantheons can be as much a matter of political affiliation as they can "nationality" or "ethnicity". The three furies of Greek myth are (in LOD) technically immigrants to that pantheon from elsewhere in creation, and there may be a shocking number of Earth-breed divine beings who have influences on other planets.
Similarly, Desaad is currently among the highest echelons of Darkseid's servants, and he was originally born on New Genesis in this iteration of their universe (a long time ago). The idea of Apokolips or New Genesis is almost as much about a political affiliation as a place. Almost.
As for… Well, the myths have Dionysus spending a good part of his childhood traveling around Eurasia and conquering a lot of it before coming back to get a throne on Mt Olympus. In Life Ore Death, the Greek gods are extant beings and people, and a lot of that stuff actually occurred in their past (accounting for after-the-fact inflation and myth drift).
Dionysus started doing that when he was a bit older than the age Diana left to fight in WWII, and kept on for a century or two before returning to Olympus to claim a throne. Similarly, Heracles was a mortal demi-god who ascended to some measure of full divinity at the end of his life.
This is basically the exact same way by which Apokolips & New Genesis inhabitants can lose the "new" part of New Gods, albeit sped up for certain reasons. The reason they don't have a planet full of beings as powerful as an Olympian is the same as the reason why Oceanus's 3,000 daughters combined still won't match up against Zeus, despite being of the same generation (kids of a Gen 1 titan) & mostly older than him.
I realize this still leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and probably inspired a few more, but it's late and I'll cover more of this another day.
