Some Thoughts On Writing Gods, Demi-gods, Immortals, Demons, Angels, Heaven, & Hell In Fantasy Worlds

>>If a character is a demon,how should they be written?

Any way you want them.

How do you see Demons?

  • If your story has a Christian/Jewish/Muslim type based setting, then Demons are likely hideous monsters with physical or spiritual bodies, who strive to build up an army against God. They probably are warriors and battle against winged beings called Angels.
  • If your story has a Catholic style setting, Demons will likely be disembodied spirits trying to possess people.
  • If your story has a Welsh, Scottish, or Irish style setting, Demons will likely be pygmy sized Humanoids, who play tricks and pranks on people.
  • If your story is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer type setting, then your Demons would be a Fantasy race similar to Elves, Orcs, Goblins, and Dwarves. They are not good or evil, they are just another race of being.
  • If your story is a Charmed type setting, your Demons are from an alternate Dimension, one that is not a nice place to be, so they are trying to escape it to live on Earth, but are killing off Humans to make room for them to live here.
  • If your story is a Japanese-type setting, they were be beautiful Elf-like creatures, with the powers of a demi-god, and often just living peacefully, until someone pisses them off and they decide to kill everyone around them to restore their peaceful life.
  • If your story is a Cthulhu, Lovecraftian, Cultists style setting, then your Demons would be tentacle aliens (true monsters) that eat Humans, and are seen by Cultists a ancient Gods, but are in fact just giant hulking, mindless blobs looking for food.

Those are just a few of your options. There are dozens more out there if you start looking around at the various ways in which people have interpreted Demons.

In my own novels, I go sort of the Buffy-style road with my Demons. They are physical Humanoids from a different dimension. They can pass for Humans, except for the fact that they have neon coloured hair and eyes, and wear outlandish clothes. Basically, the Demons in my novels look like 1980s Glam Rockers. They are no more or less evil then Humans are and can be as good or as evil as they choose to be. Most just want to live their lives and tend to blend in with Humans, existing alongside Humans with most Humans never knowing they are Demons, and just thinking they are eccentric punk kids.

It's you novel. Write your Demons however it best fits the story you want to tell.


Do your angels and demons wear clothes in their realm? 

do your angels and demons wear clothes in their realm? from worldbuilding

Angels? No. Why? I've no clue. Angels are kind of arrogant snooty sots, though. Having a perfect body to strut around in, kind of makes you want to not wear clothes so everyone can see how perfect your body is....I guess. I'm not sure. One rarely encounters Angels in my world, so I've never fully developed their society. They kind of live in their own domain, not on Earth with everyone else, and are too busy prancing around being perfect goody-2-shoes, patty each other on the back because they are just so danged great and know they are so danged great, that they don't have time to do anything other then bask in the glory of each other's greatness.

Angels in my world are kind of - those guys you see strutting around every beach. You know the ones - those guys every beach has, that are strutting around in tiny string speedos, flexing their muscles and telling every girl they meet how lucky she is that she got a chance to see his great body today. The girls are rolling their eyes and thinking "Man is this guy a pompous superficial dolt. All he cares about are his looks." While the guy is telling his buddies "She digs me, man!"

In short, Angels exist, every one knows they exist, but it could be centuries between then glorifying their own glory, before they stop glorifying long enough to notice there's a planet over there that they are supposed to be guardians of and people they are supposed to be protecting.

But, whenever they do show up, they are always strip naked...and I've never stopped to think about why I designed them that way, so I don't know if there is a reason they are naked beyond their vanity or not.

Also in my world - Angels are the bad guys and Demons are the good guys.

Demons on the other hand...

Demons like to wear a lot of jewelry and bright flashy colours. Fluorescent Yellows, Neon Oranges, Eye Popping Pinks, Dayglow Limon Greens, Electric Blues... Demons live for unnaturally bright, super dramatic, overly garish, very 1970s/1980's colour schemes, with the Mr.T jewelry gold chain bling to match.

Demons love their bling.

Demons are everywhere. They show up in every novel of the series. None of them is ever naked. Some can pass for Human, most of Humanoid, some are Eldritch Aberrations. Type of clothes varies from one type of Demon to the next, but as a general rule the colours are always going to be way brighter then anything Humans wear. It's believe to be due to their seeing colours differently, but no one really knows for sure.

Demons also tend to have wild bright coloured hair (naturally, not dyed) - greens, pinks, purples... I designed my original Demons around 1987 back when I was a screaming fangirl of the Jew tv show and Jem dolls. And at first I had designed them to be aliens that had come to earth and were disguised as glam rockers because it was the only way they could fit in. But then I changed them to Demons designed as glam rockers.

Basically the original premise was that ALL glam rockers were Demons and that that was why they had coloured hair and wore "loud" clothes. I had done this because at the time, I just wanted to have glam rockers as characters in the novel I was working on. Over the years however, the series evolved and the stories were based in Medieval times (900s to 1400s) instead of current era (current era was 1970s to 1980s because that's when I wrote them). I ended up now telling the stories of the grand parents of the original characters. So while in the original novels the Demons could fit in with the glam rock scene, in the novels I write for the series now, the characters are sticking out like soar thumbs, because of their wild hair and clothes.

Slimes, Oozes, Fungi, Shrooms, and similar ooey-gooey types don't wear clothes. But they are basically bubbling blogs of goo slithering across the floor and nothing to really put clothes on.

One of the primary characters (who is the main character's lover) is a time traveling Chaos Demon, with neon yellow glow in the dark hair. He not only wears clothes, but his clothes often take center stage as plot points in the stories, specifically his coat of many pockets.

GhoulSpawn wears a long green, velvet coat, that reaches to the floor and looks almost like a dress. Inside the coat, sewed to the linings, are dozens of pockets. Each pocket is in fact a bag of holding, and so GhoulSpawn is able to carry with him, everything he owns, including the 1974 AMC Gremlin that he drives and for some unknown reason a kitchen sink. He also keeps his herds of sheep in his pockets. When asked how he is able to keep the sheep in his pockets, he explains that each pocket is in fact a portal, and the she are not in fact actually in his pocket, but rather are in a field that exist in the portal in his pocket.

The stories are frequently tripped up by other characters giving GhoulSpawn an item to carry, knowing he never runs out o places to put things, but then all hell breaks lose when they actually need to retrieve the item from him and he, being somewhat absent minded, can never remember what pocket he put it in. And he's got like 50 or 60 pockets at least. So now they have to wait for him to unload his pockets.

Well, he's also a compulsive pickpocket and a thief, so since the time of giving him the item, he's now snatched up everything they've walked past that wasn't nailed down and stuffed them in his pockets as well. So he'll be there pulling the craziest damned stuff out of his pockets, everything from TVs he stole from the future to that pair of oxen they passed on the road to an elephant that he can't remember stealing and can't figure out how he fit it in his pocket. His herd of sheep will get lose and then they'll be chasing down sheep for hours. A few dozen pockets and several hundred items later, he'll ask: "What was it I was looking for again?"

But yeah. Demons tend to be clothed in wild, bright, neon colours t match their wild, bright, phosphorescent hair. Whereas Angels are super buff arrogant demi-gods who strut around naked as Michelangelo's David statue because they like to show of their great bods. And there's no real reason behind either of these things other then, it's just the way I decided to do it. :P


Eternal beings: their psychology

Eternal beings: their psychology from worldbuilding

  • How would be the mind, personality and behaving of someone that lived a infinite time before the existence of the universe?
  • How would be, after experiment infinite experiences or a infinite time between the nothing?
  • How does they perceive the time?


Not quite as long lived as what you are talking about, but I've got a character (a Faerie) who is over 2,000 years old. And the way I did him, was, when he was younger he was your basic average young person, then as he got older he went power crazy, crowned himself king, built an army and marched across the planet killing everything just because he could. After a couple of centuries of that, however he got bored with killing things and started keeping Elves for pets. Later as he got even older, and even more bored, he became a trickster - running around wreaking havoc for people (Humans, Elves, etc) and then sitting back laughing while he watched them sort the mess out. The older he gets the more mischievous his pranks become.

So basically what the idea is, is that Faeries do not start out as tricksters, but they live for so long, that they eventually do everything, try everything, have been everywhere, seen everything, that after a while they just get bored. They run out of things to do, so they start messing with people to pass the time, find out it alleviates the boredom, so do it even more. They don't realize that people now see Fae as evil, because they are like little toddlers having fun and don't realize they are hurting people.

Humans are so short lived and Faeries so long lived that the Fae just see Humans as like bugs or ants. Insignificant. Expendable. Play with it for a bit, then spray it with Raid.

Human emotions are also very different from Faerie emotions. So different that they don't realize Humans have emotions or feelings.

It ends up, because of the difference in lifespan, they have vastly different emotions and outlooks, and have difficulty relating to beings with shorter lifespans, in exactly same way Humans have difficulty emotionally relating to ants.

I'd assume that a race that was even longer lived then the Fae (like your race) would end up being even more emotionaly alien from Humans.

I would think we as Humans should be terrified of them as well, because something that close to being a god, is also gonna be completely devoid of compassion, feelings, or any level of sympathy for Humans at all. They'd likely see us as less than ants - a virus on in planet, parasites to be eradicated. The closer something comes to being a true god, the more alien and less human it becomes, and therefore the more evil it is going to be towards humans as it will have no way of relating to us as all.




  • Both things, immortality and eternity, are extremely different at the practice.

Ah! I like that. Most people think of them as interchangeable. I've attempted to explain the 2 as different in my own novels.

The Faerie King I mentioned in my other post? He eventually dies. He gets in a fight with an Elf who stabs him. The wound gets infected and suddenly the Faerie who never had to think about immortality before, is faced with the realization of: "OMG! I'm not immortal! I can die. I'm dying. I don't want to die. I've lived so long already. I thought I would live forever."

He knows from seeing Humans with an infected wound, that he's only got a few days, perhaps a few weeks before the infection kills him. (it's the 900s so not much medical knowledge going on here, especially with Fae who tend to be childish and are prone to thinking they are immortal even though they aren't.)

So, he ends up casting a Lich spell, then committing suicide, so he can come back as a Lich (basically an immortal super powered vampire-ghost-like skeleton beast). He picked a Lich rather then something like a Vampire, because of the fact, that Liches don't die.

A Lich is a skeleton with bones made of ice, so they freeze everything. But they cast glimmer spells, so they look just like an ordinary person and can blend in with the crowd. In theory (our real world mythology and folklore) Liches become Liches so they can amass knowledge and eventually resurrect themselves as a god that will live for eternity.

You kill a Lich, and you think it's dead, but the next day, there it is again. You cut off it's head and sink it's head in concrete. The next day it's headless body is back digging for it's head. They do not stay dead.

Well, the way I did it in my books, is, what they don't find out until they actually become a Lich, is that, they have no ability to alleviate desires. They still grow hungry, but being bones made of ice, they can not eat, so they grow ever more hungry every day. Stab them and they feel the pain, but being made of ice, there is no flesh to heal, so the pain stays with them and doesn't go away. They still feel the desires for sex, love, and companionship, but being made of icy bones have no way to cease their lusts. Eventually they go mad. Completely insane, unable to do anything but fly frantically around screaming, because they are so over burdened with the pains and desires of life.

They don't realize they are not really feeling those things, that it's phantom memories their soul is experiencing. Liches in my books, end up seeking out ways to die to end their torment, so they start killing themselves over and over and over and over again, frustrated by the fact that they can not stay dead and keep resurrecting automatically each day.

Immortality, then becomes a thing that means: a person who can not die

Whereas Eternity means: lasting forever.

In theory an immortal can be killed, but no one knows how to pull it off, so for now they suffer in the inability to die. They may well end up living for eternity.






EK's STAR LOG
CATEGORY ARCHIVES:
NaNoWriMo Overachievers:
Help with Writing About Hell For Paranormal Romance Authors

As has been requested (endlessly) EK's Star Log is returning to the internet. You can still read the original archive here... https://eelkat.wordpress.com 

The reason you couldn't find it is because I set it to private un-index mode, meaning it no longer shows up in Google search results and can only be accessed by a direct link.

Meaning, if you didn't have the url for it, no amount of searching for it would tell you how to find it. Anyone who had the url could still access it though.

I had set it to private September 23, 2013, intending to move each page here to EelKat.com... however, November 14, 2013, after only moving about 30 pages, I was beaten up and left paralyzed for 5 months, then spent 18 months relearning to walk. I am still crippled and have limited mobility.

Below is one of the blog posts that originally appeared on EK's Star Log. The original articles are still online but no longer indexed in Google. Links to the original article, are included with this post, as is the original posting date. Clicking the links will take you to the original site, where you can see the old Space Dock 13 website still online. Space Dock 13 as it looked when hosted on WordPress from 2003 to 2013.

Help with Writing About Hell For Paranormal Romance Authors

Help with Hell

Posted on Friday, October 3, 2008 | Comments Off

On NaNoWriMo today I found this question: HELP with Hell!

1. There is a list of things to get you into hell. What’s on it? (SOOOO important-one needs to qualify my MC’s mom)

2. Heaven is going to war with Hell. God didn’t have a say in it. (God isn’t in my novel at the moment… just referenced a few times) Why would the angels want to take over Hell?

3. Can someone explain Hell to me? How (in any point of view, many and/or the most common) did it come to be, can you get out of it and why does there need to be one?

4. Who are main demons/angels? Who sided with Lucifer in the first war?

5. If the keys to Hell were stolen, what would happen to all the bad souls? Why would Heaven want the keys? What could they do with them? How would that help with #2?

6. Based on your answers for the above, why would the girl side with Hell in the war?











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