What Happens After a God Goes Mad?

Source: What Happens After a God Goes Mad?, Curious Archive, 23:12, uploaded 2024-07-19, Watch Later position 812.

Curious Archive begins with a childhood shock from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Beneath its bright, cartoonish sea lies a kingdom-sized graveyard, a land drowned by the deities that gave it life. Ganondorf says that the gods destroyed the people, and the narrator remembers recognising himself in Link’s puzzled face. The thought that humans might be insects to the divine runs through mythology, so the video asks what follows when a god’s mercy becomes cruelty and sanity becomes destruction.

Power, corruption, and worship

In Berserk, a divine body grows out of a mad dream, and the world itself becomes sick with despair. Its godlike beings began as humans who sacrificed their humanity for power. Griffith, once a knight, accepts a bargain that might give him the perfect kingdom he wants. The pursuit of power corrupts him, although the story keeps responsibility with the person who chooses it. Mortals and gods explain their cruelty through fate, yet Griffith still decided to be cruel, and his decision makes the world around him crueler.

The Zelda series offers a more hopeful image of divine sickness. When a minor deity becomes corrupted, the madness often appears as an eyeball-covered parasite that a well-placed arrow can remove. The main deities have no such detachable disease. The people living under their rule therefore accept their actions, since helplessness makes obedience understandable. Worshipping that cruelty raises a harder question.

In Blasphemous, the supernatural force called the Miracle spreads painful curses with an unjust hand, yet the people revere it and regard their suffering as deserved. The game draws on plague-era Spain, where flagellants and bloodletters treated self-punishment as a suitable response to divine reprimand. The video finds the practice easy to mock from a distance, then turns towards the people inside it. When a plague cannot be cured or escaped, calling it a miracle can give an otherwise senseless world a form that a person can endure.

Divine sickness and the mind

The Hellblade games make divine madness inseparable from a human mind trying to interpret pain. Senua sees giants and keepers of the dead, while other characters place their faith in her visions. The story presents her as a person living with psychosis intensified by trauma, although an eighth-century setting gives her few ways to understand hallucinations apart from cruel gods. Indika uses a similar confusion. A nun in nineteenth-century Russia hears voices and sees visions that she attributes to the Devil, while the game’s sudden changes in camera and style make her declining state part of the form. The image can shift from an Ingmar Bergman film to an eighties arcade game, and a deliberately silly scoreboard appears during serious scenes.

That visible game-ness draws attention to the player. Hellblade keeps its world cinematic, although Senua sometimes looks through the fourth wall towards the person controlling her. Indika makes the player feel the medium more directly. Both games suggest that the player is a mad god with power over a character’s world, even as that power remains limited by the rules of the game.

Other games reverse the relation. In God of War, Thor invades the game-over screen and forces the player to continue fighting. In Hades II, Chronos refuses to let the player pause. These tricks make a deity seem able to escape its medium. Fear and Hunger makes divine power physical through difficulty and punishment. Its gods have suitably twisted desires, yet the terror comes from the game’s ability to make the player mechanically powerless. The narrator describes trying to finish it whilst feeling less like a controller than a person being controlled, unable to turn away from hardship.

Rain World gives this relation a quieter shape. Its colourful science-fiction world hides an ecosystem that punishes carelessness, and a first playthrough gradually draws the player towards something unnamed. At its centre stands Five Pebbles, a godlike artificial intelligence whose superstructure rises above the clouds. His attempts to follow the programme given to him by the vanished Ancients have created horrors, destroyed regions, and damaged other intelligences. The sickness of the sovereign appears as sickness in the land.

Five Pebbles is also a creation. In the Saint campaign, set far in the future, the player can find him alone in the snow with his resources exhausted by attempts to repair his mistakes. He thanks the player for the company without the anger that marked his earlier appearance. The player can leave him there as the cold overtakes him, leaving two abandoned beings beneath the absent care of their gods.

Inherited violence and cruel parenthood

The discarded Five Pebbles leads into the video’s most persistent relation: a mad god creates another mad god. The deity Valteil in Fear and Hunger produces a ruined life and abandons it. Senua’s and Indika’s visions partly arise from parental mistreatment, and Griffith has the manipulative Void as a kind of tutor in evil. Divine power begins to resemble parenthood because both relations give one being authority over another’s life.

The Spine of Night makes the relation explicit through an abrupt cosmology. The land is formed from the skull of a dead god, the first gods rise from its dream, and humans emerge from the dreams of those gods. Humans then kill their parents because the gods have treated them cruelly. The film reveals that the universe repeats this pattern without end, with gods killing gods in an endless chain of cosmic parricide. The twist arrives without much preparation and the film barely returns to it, yet the image fits an older mythic pattern. The video points to Zeus destroying his cannibalistic father, similar Babylonian and Mesopotamian stories, and Fafnir’s murder of his cruel sorcerer father in Norse mythology.

In Poor Things, the chain becomes a family history. Godwin, known as God, transplants an infant’s brain into the body of its dead mother, creating Bella as a new form of life. His experiment makes him a version of the mad scientist and makes Bella resemble Frankenstein’s monster, since her education leads towards knowledge and resentment of the imperfect father who made her. Godwin himself was abused and experimented on by his father, so his violence repeats a pattern he inherited.

Bella eventually understands the darkness of her creation without treating Godwin as a simple enemy. She feels disappointed by him and remains sympathetic because he tries to raise her with the kindness his own father withheld. Her line, “I am finding being alive fascinating, so I’ll forgive you the act,” leaves the moral question open. A creator owes a creation care, although creation also produces a person who can judge the creator.

The claymation short Adam asks the same question through the hand that creates and torments a clay figure. Adam begins as an ignorant, animal-like being who bites the hand that feeds him, then receives punishment from that hand. The image can stand for a cruel parent or a god. Clay makes the animator visible in the relation, since stop-motion requires the artist to keep touching the material frame by frame. The hand therefore belongs to the person who gives the figure life, and fiction makes the author a parent and a god at once.

Satan inside Mark Twain’s unfinished world

The Adventures of Mark Twain turns authorship into a literal scene. Mark Twain travels in an airship that contains portals into his own books, including the unfinished The Mysterious Stranger. Inside one of those stories lies an incomplete void inhabited by an all-powerful angel named Satan. Satan knows, or seems to know, that he is only a thought inside an unfinished work, yet he decides to create life himself.

His first creations are simple, like an animator’s early experiments with clay. Their society grows more complex as plots develop and characters acquire their own lives. When the world becomes ugly, Satan does what a writer might do with a story that has stopped working: he destroys it. The film presents creation and destruction as a small model of the creative process, with the author trapped inside a medium that still exposes the sculptor’s fingerprints.

The video links this fictional Satan to Twain’s life. Twain began The Mysterious Stranger in 1897, a year after his daughter Susy died of meningitis, and the surviving versions carry his distrust of organised religion and his anger at the world’s suffering. The story ends with Satan calling reality a grotesque and foolish dream, which becomes a literal description of the film’s unfinished universe. Twain’s grief gives the mad creator a human source without reducing the work to biography.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein supplies another version of the same relation. Victor Frankenstein creates life, although the author had been shaped by her own family history, including her estrangement from her father William Godwin. The video treats these stories as links in an inherited chain: one cruel god creates another, and each new creator repeats some part of the damage received from an earlier one.

The chain also explains why fictional creators need cruelty. The gods in The Wind Waker flood the land because the developers judged a drowned kingdom more interesting, and the Zelda series turns its divine curse into an endlessly repeating story of suffering. The video does not accuse authors of moral wrongdoing when they hurt fictional people. A writer owes a character a different kind of care from the care owed to a child, although the ideas of parenthood and godhood still shape how stories imagine power.

Phil Tippett’s handmade hell

The video finds its closest answer in Phil Tippett’s stop-motion film Mad God. A figure descends in a diving bell through fossilised remains into a hell built from machinery, waste, and bodies. The world looks as though a cruel deity designed every part of it, yet stop-motion keeps reminding the viewer that these objects existed and had to be moved by hand. The machinery of suffering has a physical reality that most fictional violence lacks.

Tippett made Mad God over roughly thirty years. A 2023 interview with VFX Voice describes his first three minutes, a long interruption, a later restart, and the volunteers who helped build the film’s environments. Tippett says that he wrote down dreams to find a structure for the film, while the film’s imagery came from his practical work and from the history of hell, anthropology, geology, and psychology. The video uses that production history to read the title as partly autobiographical. Tippett’s own account also describes a period of severe mental illness and his hatred of the project before he forced himself to finish it, which makes the comparison between creator and world more specific than a simple joke about artistic darkness.

The film leaves its god uncertain. The Assassin, who descends through the levels, is not above the world’s cruelty. He steps on a small group of gnomes because he can, which gives him the same arbitrary authority that governs everyone else. The world may have an overseer, or it may consist of people who keep choosing to behave monstrously. Near the end, one of its inhabitants creates a new universe in a beautiful time-lapse made through practical effects. The sequence invites a reason for the destruction that came before it, then offers none.

Meaning after the explanation fails

The video ends with the value of these stories rather than a theory that explains their gods. If the meaning of a god’s actions could be perfectly understood, the god would seem rational rather than mad. Stories about divine insanity leave room for cruelty that has no clean cause, which resembles the experience of suffering when the world refuses to explain itself. The comfort comes from recognising that hardship can be senseless and still fail to become the victim’s fault.

The final answer belongs to creation. A person cannot decide whether the gods above them are sane, kind, or present. They can decide what kind of creator they will be within the smaller worlds they control, including the games, stories, and relationships that depend on them.

Further reading / references

• Arthur Cotterell and Rachel Storm, The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology.
• Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle.
• Fiona Sampson, “The Treacherous Start to Mary and Percy Shelley’s Marriage”, Literary Hub, 2018.
• Trevor Hogg, “Phil Tippett Emerges from an Inferno to Create ‘Mad God’”, VFX Voice, 2023.
• Ed Pilkington, “Mark Twain Manuscript Reveals Author’s Pain at Losing His Daughter”, The Guardian, 2010.