CONTENT WARNING: Sexual violence and misogyny
Don't worry, hypothetical John, I've got your back - it's mostly the horror. The theology I just find a little confusing.
Why do bad things happen? When I ask this question of theology and get an unsatisfying answer, I come away with the feeling that I know something other people don't. When I ask it of horror, I feel like maybe I've just missed something. I think it's because the goal of theology is to have you walk away feeling good and the goal of horror is . . . to make you feel bad?
Right? Being scared is a bad feeling. Being grossed-out is a bad feeling. The weighty despair and utter moral vertigo at the scope of human depravity that comes from witnessing imaginative cruelty - that's a bad feeling. But if you walk away from horror media having never felt fear or disgust or faithless dread at the indifferent moral order of the universe, you're probably going to be pretty disappointed.
I guess that means The End is not a disappointing horror experience. You've got a world where the apocalyptic disasters of the Book of Revelation happened, leaving only a small scattering of survivors - the so-called "Meek," who sided with neither heaven nor hell (this is the part where the theology gets confusing). God abandons the Earth to these fence-sitters, closing the gates of both afterlives in history's biggest flounce. This poses the ultimate moral test to those who have previously refused all religious conviction - what do you do if this life is all there is, and the only consequences of your actions are those that can be imposed by the exercise of worldly power?
And one of the possible answers is The Atlanta Confederation - a group of men who decided to band together to capture every woman and girl they could find, pump them full of drugs, and keep them as slaves in a system that is exactly as bad as you're imagining.
What am I supposed to say about that? I hate these guys. I'm not happy I read about them. But maybe that makes them antagonist material? Like, Freddy Krueger was a pedophile. And it's not as if I think Jason or Michael Myers are charming dinner party companions. I can see how a horror game would want to have a bunch of guys the players are really, really going to hate (ah, hate, another bad feeling I forgot to list before).
I can't even really say that it seems gratuitous. From a philosophical perspective, the Atlanta Confederation is kind of interesting. The first, knee-jerk question you're going to ask yourself is "how did these assholes manage to dodge hell?" And the book's implicit answer is that they didn't do anything hell-worthy until after the end of the world. They were too chickenshit to do the really bad stuff when they thought God was around (the founder was a member of the KKK and a regular churchgoer, and . . . the theology is confusing), but as soon as they're sent a prophetic dream saying that God no longer cares what happens on Earth, they act on the darkest impulses imaginable.
This could, potentially, just be a version of that obnoxious question theists sometimes ask - "If you don't believe in God, what's to stop you from raping and murdering?" - but I'm choosing to interpret it more generously because I can distinguish between a healthy atheism and a collapsing theism.
However, where it gets a little sketchy for me is when we look at the Atlanta Confederation's sworn enemies, the Swamp Rats, a guerrilla resistance movement of former slaves who live in the dangerous areas near the outskirts of the colony and do everything in their power to take it down. The Swamp Rats are all female, because the Confederation kills or chases off any men it doesn't recruit and they're having a crisis of leadership - Rachel Duvalier wants to focus on freeing the enslaved women, and Mary Colwell, former US Marine, want to kill every man she sees, even innocent travelers who might not know what the Confederation is doing. A certain degree of anger is understandable, and operational security means you can't afford to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who looks like they might be friendly to the Confederation, fair enough. But also, Mary and her faction are man-hating feminists who will literally crucify men based on nothing more than guilt by association (Mary even goes so far as to drop the f-slur in relation to a gay man who is feeding the Swamp Rats information).
It's a bit of a caricature, not helped one bit by the implication that camp tensions are exacerbated because the ladies need dick ("It is also impossible for any heterosexual woman in the camp to get any R and R. This has led to a lot of edgy, violent inhabitants in an edgy and violent colony.")
And what am I supposed to say about that? Taking a step back and trying to see the game's broader context, I think it's less internalized misogyny worming its way into a fictional feminist conflict and more that the Tyranny Games crew is just really bad at nuance.
It's kind of fascinating, actually, because the whole game is about nuance. People who were neither particularly good nor particularly bad (though we have to talk about the way this idea is conflated with belief in monotheism) and what happens when they are no longer subject to the usual moral constraints. In addition to the Atlanta Confederation and Reverend Tommy Thrillkill, there is a holy man who is described as a "living saint" and a Voodoo priestess who is basically a superhero.
But in-between? That's where they have some trouble. Take a less fraught example than the Swamp Rats, the Archangel Gabriel. His story is that as God was opening the seals and killing most everyone on Earth, he felt pity for humanity, so much so that he was distracted at a critical moment and locked out of Heaven.
He crash-landed in Denver and his angelic majesty absolutely broke the minds of the human survivors he encountered. They rely on him utterly for protection, sustenance, and shelter. Not out of any sort of negligence or laziness, but because they can't do anything but worship him day and night.
And there's a really obvious, nuanced, and fascinating story to tell here. Gabriel's immense compassion means that he can't abandon the people he destroyed, even though it was just a terrible misunderstanding. And maybe, as time goes on, he falls to the sin of pride and resents God, for abandoning both him and the helpless apes he has grown to love. You know, the story of a mostly good person who nonetheless causes inadvertent harm by their own inalienable nature.
However, The End goes another way with it. "Now he regrets his moment of weakness and refuses to be damned to this god-forsaken place. He has gathered up his worshippers to fill him with the power of faith. When their faith flows through him, he will storm the gates of Heaven . . . or die trying. He cares nothing for the humans worshipping him. All that matters is returning to heaven, to this end he will happily sacrifice each and every one of them."
Gasp! The angel is secretly evil! Who could have ever seen that coming?
Less superciliously, this reversal of the direction of abuse is really just the game's go-to tool. One of the other main conflicts is between a small society that has grown up around a survivalist bunker in Waco Texas and a significantly larger (approx 2800 vs 4000 population) group of organized Native Americans. Basically, the Native Americans were politically radical, before the apocalypse, rejecting the God of the white man without actually worshipping the devil, so they got left behind. And now they have a vision of reclaiming all of the continent's stolen land from the other survivors, potentially returning the entire hemisphere to indigenous control. And they plan on accomplishing this by . . . you guessed it - barely discriminate violence ("Anyone who cannot prove at least one-sixteenth American Indian heritage is scalped." Oof. I can think of at least two things wrong with that sentence).
The practical upshot of these clumsy attempts at nuance is that frequently, the ideas inspired by the book are more interesting than the actual words printed inside the book. And how much credit do I want to give The End for that. I could be really mean and interpret this feeling as "The End is occasionally interesting by accident," but I don't think it's truly accidental. I don't think the authors were unaware of the interesting ideas at work here. I think maybe they just didn't have the breadth of experience necessary to explore them in a satisfying way. You know what they say, if you're attempting theology before your 40th birthday, you're doing it wrong.
(Actually, I have no idea if "they" say anything like that, it just feels like something that might be true.)
So let's teach those callow young Christians a lesson by having a middle-aged atheist attempt theology instead!
No, really, the theology of The End is very weird. According to the FAQ at the beginning of the book:
The thing that took everyone by surprise is how generous God was. If you believed in a single, benevolent God and lived your life according to the doctrines of the religion you practiced, you were admitted into heaven. Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists. People who followed a polytheistic religion still had some hope, provided that they followed their religion's most benevolent god and followed the virtues of humility, self-sacrifice, and love.
If you had truck with the forces of evil in any way, shape or form you were damned. Most Pagans, practitioners of Magic, and roleplaying gamers (ha ha) were all thrown into the pit. Those who used religion for their own ends were also damned, like televangelists, faith healers, and mediums.
The feeling I got while reading this was that the author had never, in their entire life, been asked a difficult question about their religious beliefs. I think they legitimately thought this was a less arbitrary set of conditions than usually put forth by rapture-believing Evangelical Christians. And it's not. It's just more inclusive. Why is monotheism even entering into this at all? What correlation does believing in a singular god even have with basic human decency?
You don't necessarily want a coherent soteriology, rooted in ethical philosophy. This is "theological horror" after all, and so arbitrary, whimsical, or even odious criteria for salvation all have the potential to say something really interesting about the problem of evil and the limitations of the various belief systems that attempt to grapple with this problem.
This is especially the case against the backdrop of the grotesque, baroque cruelty of the apocalypse itself. The book is unreflective about this issue, considering everyone who went to heaven to be "saved," without ever asking the (to an atheist) obvious question - at what point, during the unrelenting plagues, famines, wars, and global gigadeaths did the heaven-bound decide they were backing the right side? Right? You look out your window, see the skies darkened by flesh-eating locusts, and you think, "hey, whoever unleashed those things, that's who I want to entrust with my immortal soul."
To someone like me, what makes the Christian Apocalypse such fertile ground for horror is confronting the fear that the worst people I've ever met might be right about the nature of the universe. To that end, their ridiculously and offensively short list of who gets into heaven is a feature, rather than a bug. In exploring how awful the world would look if it followed their views, you're exposing the awfulness of those views. God is sending all the gay people to hell . . . and you want to side with God? What's wrong with you?
Casting a wide net for salvation mitigates that, possibly to a fatal degree. If God is so chill with so many kinds of people, why is he even destroying the Earth in the first place? And if he has a good reason for doing so, why would he do it so painfully? Why does this good God care so much about the worship of a benevolent deity and apparently not at all about people making the choice to embrace benevolence as a virtue and direct it towards their fellow human beings?
Maybe it's a bias on my part, but a good way to test whether a person's theology is full of shit is to ask them, "why are atheists capable of benevolence." Bad theologians will deny that it's even possible and try and convince you that any benevolent-seeming atheist is just pulling a con. Good theologians will realize that the question is a sort of philosophical compliment to the general problem of evil. Like I'm pretty sure the mainstream Christian answer is that God's grace is what allows us to know and choose goodness and it was given equally to all human beings, so someone might never even suspect the existence of God as a factual matter and still, broadly speaking, be "good."
But any theology that cleared even that low bar of generosity is going to have a very difficult time squaring itself with the standard presentation of the Apocalypse. All humans know grace, even if it's tainted by Original Sin, but the Apocalypse looks a lot like a failure of grace. If my wicked heart, which is but a pale image of God's immaculate love, will quail at the thought of my fellow humans starving to death, catching painful diseases, or getting eaten by some weird beast, how can the Almighty's do any less? He has the power to just turn off the world like a light switch. So why doesn't he?
And the answer to that is the same answer I wish the adults had given young me when I first started questioning the theological horror of Noah's Ark - it's just a story. It doesn't actually reference real events, either past or future. Rather, Revelation is an allegory and a prayer. It's about how even unassailable worldly power is destined to fall before the power of the Lord. It's God's promise - even tyrants die. And there is a kind of hope in that.
If you want to know the difference between theology and theological horror, that's a pretty good guide. Theology is about the hope to be found in the Book of Revelation, and theological horror is about the pain and terror we'd all feel if the events depicted actually took place.
As interesting as The End could be sometimes, it never quite got that distinction, and so it never truly lived up to its promise.
Ukss Contribution: Full disclosure - this book repeatedly disturbed me with its habit of using violence against women to provoke a cheap emotional reaction, and if it was a fantasy setting that just happened to take place after the Apocalypse, I probably wouldn't forgive it for that. But the introduction to the game billed itself as horror, so I have to acknowledge that making me uncomfortable is not automatically a deal-breaker.
That said, my favorite thing in this book was not one of its unique inventions, but rather something it took from the Bible, by way of pop culture - the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. I don't know what it is, but there's something about the "not quite a boy-band" vibe these guys have that really appeals to me.
I’ve read one wag nickname The Horsemen “The Fab Four.”
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