Takhisis: Just Who is She?

You know, I might as well just address this huge plot brick.  

And it's a big one.  And I'm surprised that a lot of people have yet to cry BETRAYAL when it comes to having the friggin Queen of Darkness as the head god of the universe that Kiryuu, Telek, Alan, and all of them live in.

Like what the flying fuck nuts is this bitch doing in these stories?

This bitch.



Her!



Exactly, what the fuck is she doing in the story?

Maybe it's because most of my readers aren't readers of Dragonlance, or else they'd recognize the game.  And yes, I call her You Know Who because of this line...

• Not even fools or children speak the name Takhisis lightly. Her name summons darkness, destruction, and death. Swathed in shadow and hatred, she desires only the domination and destruction of Krynn and its folk.
  

Yeah, she's the High God in my stories.

So, what the fuck is she doing in the story?



Well, that story pretty much covers it.  Now, I'm gonna be asked if the whole War of the Lance thing happened in my universe because Takhisis became High God immediately after she got her but kicked by Huma Dragonbane.

Because evil wins?

How the hell did this happen?  Takhisis becomes the High God?

She's so over the top cliche evil that even the Wicked Witch of the West would be demanding that she dial it down a notch.

Let's just try to separate the two a bit.  Takhisis from the original source material and Takhisis from my stories are basically two different things.  As in, my Takhisis isn't a shallow, bratty bitch who doesn't get her way and throws a tantrum whenever she gets defeated by a bunch of low level PCs at the end of each story.  Yes, Takhisis, the Mistress of Evil on Krynn, gets her ass pounded by Level 4 D&D Characters every friggin' day of the week.

And these guys are pretty much the fucking Power Rangers and Takhisis is really Rita Repulsa.



Yes, you heard me!



The giant five headed dragon is actually Rita Repulsa.  

And she pretty much sends down some sort of monster or causes some sort of shit just about every week for the continent of Ansalon.  And no, I'm not kidding about that either.  The other Gods of Darkness on Krynn don't hardly do anything.  They're pretty much like Takhisis' henchmen.  Sargonnas, (who by the way inspired the name of Sargeras from World of Warcraft, yes, that is a thing...and I wonder whether or not I'll have it as an official thing...) who's supposed to be Takhisis husband (after she was dumped by Paladine) is technically Lord Zedd, only with Rita, or Takhisis, actually calling the shots.

And I guess Chemosh is Goldar, and Morgion and Hiddekel are Squatt and Baboo.  And maybe Zeboim is Scorpina or something. 

And yes, some of you who know your theology will take note of the names, Hiddekel, Chemosh, Zeboim.  They are all names from the Bible.  Hiddekel was a river, Chemosh was was the god of the Moabites from the book of Numbers, and Zeboim was a civilization that existed in the Bible.

But here, they're all evil gods.

Because one of the original creators was a big time Methodist.  Namely Tracey Hickman.  And you can really tell in the War of the Souls Trilogy.  It wasn't as noticeable in the other books, but in the War of the Souls where the gods had a gigantic rewrite, yeah, it's obvious.

And the High God himself...or rather Himself, is actually supposed to be the actual God.  Tetragrammaton, YHWH, Jehovah...the God of Abraham and Isaac, and no, I'm not kidding.  So does that make Paladine Jesus?  Well, he does sacrifice his godhood at the end of the War of Souls, so...maybe?  I dunno.  

Well, so since the High God is well...the actual GOD from the Biblical text, that would make pretty much Takhisis and Paladine technically his seraphim.  And Takhisis is more or less Lucifer in the grand scheme of things.  She was a holy being who helped bring life to the world, and then she betrayed those close to her for her conquest of power.  And especially wanted to usurp the souls of the living into her personal slave army.

I think I like my Rita Repulsa theories better.

Takhisis: Morgion, send down a Draconian Patrol, I want the Power Rangers, I mean Companions of the Lance distracted!  Oh, they're giving me such a headache!

And Tracy Hickman, being the big religious nut he was, hamfisted in the War of the Souls that goodness really was the correct way.  Screw Free Will and all that shit from the ending of Dragons of a Spring Dawning, where Paladine tells the Companions that there must be a Balance between good and evil.  You know, we've seen what happens on Krynn when Goodness takes over, we get the friggin Kingpriest!  And an extinction level asteroid thrown at the planet.

What did we get when Evil takes over?  Takhisis stealing the planet?  Yeah it did cause some civil unrest, but they were able to figure things out on their own afterwards and everything seems fine.  Well, except for all those Dragon Overlords.  But still relatively fine.  Hell, unless you were Kender or Qualinesti Elf, your life was pretty good during the time of the Overlords.  A few of them even allowed their enemies some freedoms in their land.  Khellendros didn't have that big of a problem with Goldmoon and her Mystics, and he seemed pretty civil to the Knights of Solamnia so long as they paid his high taxes.  

Nope can't put in that new pool at Vanguard Keep today, gotta go pay Lord Khellendros' high property tax.

So, yeah, that's pretty much the story of it, or at least the feel of it.  

So when exactly does my Takhisis deviate from the source material?  When I decided to make her competent.  Takhisis in the source material is incredibly incompetent.  It's like she sets herself up to fail and then gets pissed off when she does fail.  Takhisis, you wouldn't be so pissed off if you would stop making such stupid cliche villain idiot ball mistakes!  And basically the Gods of Krynn are pretty much idiots in the first place.  Or complete assholes.  Even the Gods of Light are assholes.  I mean Paladine attempts to be remorseful at least, but really it again goes back to the Kingpriest.  One guy pissed off the Gods.  One guy.  One guy because he was a douche, pissed off the gods, and that made them so mad they threw a giant rock at the planet and nearly caused an extinction.  And no, I'm not fucking joking.  

The "fiery mountain" the asteroid that hit Krynn was so gigantic that it broke apart one of the continents, caused massive surge waves, turned Tarsis into a landlocked city, fucked up the continent of Taladas to the point where pretty much 80% of it is inhabitable, and then put a giant Maelstrom, called that, in the ocean where Istar was.  And it also poke a massive hole in spacetime itself.  That rock was pretty much this...



I'm surprised it didn't get that bad.

I actually lampshade it three times in that short story Let the Sky be Filled with Stars when Takhisis made Paladine throw the rock himself.  

She knew what it was going to do and pretty much made him pay for his own stupid mistakes for not being more careful about what he was doing with Krynn.

That's basically like deciding that not only Hitler was a douche, but in order to end World War II and punish all of Germany for one guy's stupidity, instead of using nuclear weapons, we decide to just blow up the entire planet.  Most of the people who lived on Krynn weren't at fault for anything the Kingpriest did!

But like Paladine said: "And so-the Cataclysm. We grieved for the innocent. We grieved for the guilty. But the world had to be prepared, or the darkness that fell might never have been lifted."

You motherfucking destroyed half the planet because one guy decided to be Adolf Hitler!  Yes, Hitler was an evil man, but you don't need to fucking warp space time to kill him, you know.  Just do what we did, bomb the fuck outta Berlin...I mean Istar...divide half the continent up and pray to Paladine that some country won't turn into Soviet Russia.

And who was it that really did throw the rock at Istar?  It really was Paladine.  Paladine himself threw the asteroid at Istar.  That bit in Let the Sky be Filled with Stars was actually in canon with the fucking source material.  The fucking Platinum Dragon, God of Good and Law threw a rock at his own priest and nearly destroyed an entire planet in the process.

No, if you really want the actual context of that line, here it is...with the conversation!

• 
  
• "All this suffering, just for that?" Laurana asked, coming to stand beside Tanis. "Why 
  
• shouldn't good win, drive the darkness away forever?" 
  
• "Haven't you learned anything, young lady?" Paladine scolded, shaking a bony finger at her. 
  
• "There was a time when good held sway. Do you know when that was? Right before the 
  
• Cataclysm!" 
  
• "Yes," he continued, seeing their astonishment."the Kingpriest of Istar was a good man. 
  
• Does that surprise you? It shouldn't, because both of you have seen what goodness like 
  
• that can do. You've seen it in the elves, the ancient embodiment of good! It breeds 
  
• intolerance, rigidity, a belief that because I am right, those who don't believe as I do 
  
• are wrong. 
  
• "We gods saw the danger this complacency was bringing upon the world. We saw that much 
  
• good was being destroyed, simply because it wasn't understood. And we saw the Queen of 
  
• Darkness, lying in wait, biding her time, for this could not last, of course. The 
  
• overweighted scales must tip and fall, and then she would return. Darkness would descend 
  
• upon the world very fast. 
  
• "And so-the Cataclysm. We grieved for the innocent. We grieved for the guilty. But the 
  
• world had to be prepared, or the darkness that fell might never have been lifted." 
  

Yes, the lesson to be learn here is one ideology cannot be the correct way.   Goodness in Krynn becomes intolerance and bigotry.  This can be said about our own world with religions and philosophies that lie to hammer in that they are the good guys.  They believe in love and compassion, but at the same time, burn down villages who won't convert over to their beliefs.

That line in the book itself is a huge stab at religions like Christianity.  But no, it's all snatched back in the War of Souls trilogy by stating that Light is the only way and that guys like Gilean, and the other Gods of Neutrality were also punished along with the Gods of Darkness because they believed in something that was different than what the High God believed in.  But Paladine and his cronies were praised for their beliefs because the High God agreed with them.


And then the Gods turned away, but then blamed the people for turning their backs on them.  When really, it was the Gods' fault.  They withdrew their priests, didn't really say whose fault it was, and fucked up the planet so badly that it was lucky that it took only 3 centuries to bounce back.  The people on Krynn are some hardcore motherfuckers to survive an asteroid so massive that it warped space and time itself.  The Gods are stupid, but I do have to hand it to the people.

Krynn itself is just a bit fucked up.  It gets made fun of in Planescape a lot, I noticed.  Most of the people on Krynn are completely clueless because their Gods like to keep them in the dark most of the time.  And this is where things separate.

I made Takhisis very competent, still capable of making mistakes, but none of them so blatant as the ones in the source material.  And she is not an evil god in my stories.  She is in fact a woman scorned.  I go by 2nd Edition Krynn, in which Paladine and Takhisis were lovers and mates, who did deeply care for each other, rather than really bratty siblings who constantly whine to the High God "DAD" about who stole whose toys.  In my stories, Paladine and Takhisis, two beings who were of darkness and light, but because of their opposites, were deeply in love with each other.  And then, Paladine, being the horny douche he was, decided to have an affair with Mishakal, and Takhisis got very pissed off of it.

Then she later filed for divorce and attempted to take her share of their property, namely the dragons, Krynn, and other things.  Yes, the whole All Saints War in my stories was an alimony dispute between two people filing for divorce because one of them couldn't keep his Johnson in his pants.  And the whole court case just goes on, and on.

Takhisis attempted to take the kids away, which resulted in the creation of the Chromatic Dragons, because the first dragons, being the Chromatic Dragons, weren't what they are as we know them now.  They were made of certain metal alloys that were later then tarnished when they went with Mom.  Takhisis then disallowed Paladine shared custody of said kids, which pissed him off and that's why he created the Metallic Dragons to replace them.

So, there it is, the fight between Paladine and Takhisis in roughly three paragraphs.  Tada!

But it does go a little bit deeper than that, especially when you add the Far Realm into the mix.  And King Ghidorah of all people.  Five-headed dragon vs. three-headed dragon.  Why the fuck hasn't anyone done a Deathbattle between these two yet?  Well, because I have, and again, like giving Neltharion a second chance, I again am the only one who did it.  Tis sad, I know.

Takhisis, after getting her ass kicked by Huma, decides that Krynn isn't for her, and she knows that she needs to prepare because she has this feeling that the Far Realm is going to come back and bite everyone in the ass.  So, she decides to kick the High God's ass, whom I call Rodimus Ao....there's a Transformers reference in there, and Takhisis takes over the job as new High God and becomes this.



Decides to create the rest of the Multiverse with Free Will as the main focus and instead of creating a religion, she creates only a philosophy that people like this guy....



...Follows.  And she also grants people who can connect to her, special Jedi powers.  Because they are in fact downloading a god's power into their bodies.  And most of you would think this was game breaking, but considering that they are fighting monsters that exist outside of all logic and reason, downloading game breaking god powers to preserve the safety of the Multiverse is actually necessary.

Takhisis also constantly gets brow beaten by her own creations.  Kedzuel is known to do it, Kiryuu is starting to get into the fun himself, G-Chaser and I did write the story where Ashley Williams meets Takhisis and half the story is about Ashley smacking Takhisis around because she found out that Christianity was wrong.  And that Takhisis was God, but Takhisis kept trying to avoid using the G-O-D word because she now hates it.

And given that the gods of my multiverse were basically mortal themselves one time...yeah.  Gods in my multiverse are basically just another higher level of evolution.  We even saw one character literally become a god in one of my stories.  

Jonathan Long...



Yup, that guy.  A lot of people are missing that guy.  I know.  And yes, he does join the ranks of the divine in the first Crimson Dragon story. I think it happens in the fifth chapter.  So, yes, godhood is possible in my stories.  It takes some work, but it is possible.  And Jonathan is a god, he's a very low level god, a demigod actually, but you have to start somewhere, right?  There you go.

So, that's basically Takhisis in a nutshell.  She's a little bit more compassionate in my stories.  Her main philosophy is it doesn't matter where you end up in the afterlife as much as it matters what you do with the life you were given.  Because everyone when they die go to the same place regardless to how they lived.  Because in my stories, the afterlife does not have meaning.  

And Takhisis herself does not see herself as a god, but rather a lifeform that is beyond the understanding of creatures lower than she is.  The best way to put it is...from an episode of Star Trek.  Comparing us to Takhisis is like comparing an amoeba to us.  As in hat we are the amoeba when we stack ourselves next to her.  We are a very simple life form.  We are small and insignificant when we try to compare ourselves to beings like herself.  

Well, we are small, but Takhisis doesn't think of us as insignificant.  In her eyes, we are very important.  Also, we remind her of what she once was.  She remembers that she too at one time was also a small and insignificant life form.  And maybe that is why despite the fact she is a creature so far above our understanding, that we can in fact in some way relate to her.

And this also means that Takhisis is in fact an eldritch abomination in her own right.  Because just like the amoeba who cannot understand how we function, we cannot possibly understand how Takhisis functions.  But still Takhisis is a life form, but she is just so far alien to us that to understand her would cause insanity.  So, I guess calling her a god is just easier on our heads.

I know some atheists might like this idea.