General RPGs' Puzzling Use of the Term "Goddess"

Thanks to Ecclesiastes for letting me bounce the banter that became the backbone of this bunch of blathering off him.  As always, you’re a damned fine (and patient) fellow, Ecc.



You know what’s weird about certain RPG worlds?  The word “Goddess.”

Now, the existence of the word “goddess” makes sense, in our own world.  The fundamental, earliest hierarchies of our historically and developmentally dominant societies, here on Earth, were largely male-centric to varying degrees, as were the systems of faith they by and large believed in, and the evolution of language depicts that.  Most of the religions of the human race’s foundational societies have either been A, centered around a single deity who is male, or B, had a pantheon of deities of both genders, but the most important and/or foundational deity or deities in that pantheon were male.

It follows that the default gender of the term “god” is regarded as male.  “God” is the root term for this concept of a deity, and generally speaking, the first, primary gender of deities in our species’ religious history, particularly the religions which have had the greatest influence on our society as a whole, is male.  So it makes sense that if you want to, in this world, refer to a specifically female deity, the term “goddess” is employed, because when you want to denote something as the gender opposite of what the thing is typically seen as, you either make a new word altogether, or add an addendum to the word to differentiate it from its original, base concept.  If the base state is male, then a suffix like -ess or -ette is common to tack on to denote that it’s a female version you’re talking about (a female “baron” becomes “baroness,” while a female Mario series NPC goes from “Toad” to “Toadette”), while (less commonly) if the base state is female, then a suffix like -er is added to denote that it’s a male version (such as a male “widow” being a “widower”).  Obviously some terms encompass both genders without need for differentiation (a “dancer” can be male or female, as can a “doctor”), but if you do have multiple versions of the same word, the simple, baseline word also inevitably corresponds with the gender most traditionally, originally associated with it.  As a result, the term “goddess” has been created to distinctly denote a female version of a god, because the history and nature of our society and our religions have by and large focused on male deities first and foremost.

But that means that it’s really weird that the people of Hyrule, for example, use the term “goddess” at all.

Because female deities are the only kind that Hyrule has.  To my knowledge of The Legend of Zelda series, all the deities of the land’s tales of creation and forms of worship are female.  Din, Farore, and Nayru are the 3 deities who created Hyrule and the Triforce, and then there was also Hylia at some point, who made the land’s people, if I recall.  And she was (and is) also a chick.  While there are male sages, and male spirits of the land, and stuff like that, the entirety of Hyrule’s religious pantheon has always been strictly female.  So by basic rules of thumb, the nomenclature in Hyrule should refer to Hylia, Din, Farore, and Nayru as “gods”, and the term “goddess” shouldn’t even exist.  Either they should only have the single term, or, at most, they should have the term “god,” to denote female deities, and a term such as “godder” to denote the theory of a male deity.

You see this sort of thing fairly frequently, and it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The titular land of Ys was created by 2 female deities and, to my knowledge (I’ve so far only played the first game), had no male equivalent of them running around anywhere, so they should refer to that pair as “gods,” not “goddesses.”  Fodlan of Fire Emblem 16, meanwhile, is a land with a single, all-powerful organized religion devoted to Sothis, a female deity.  Granted, other lands in the world of FE16 have different belief systems (Brigid, for example, believes in multiple divine beings), so the concept of male and female deities isn’t as unknown as it would be for Ys and Hyrule, but given Fodlan’s near xenophobia and aggressive belief in Sothis as the only true deity, you’d think that the only acknowledgement of the outside world’s beliefs in their language would be to invent a term like “godder” for foreign male gods, rather than adjust how they refer to their own single, female deity from the base “god” to “goddess.”  

Now, I can occasionally see an exception to what the rule should be.  The Lunar series, for example, has only a single deity within it, Althena, but I actually think that the term “goddess” makes sense for her.  Because, see, Lunar takes place in the far, far distant future of our world, at a time when humanity has fled to the moon, and forgotten its Earthly heritage.  So ultimately, you can make the logical argument that the conventions of language used in Lunar are directly related to the history of our own language conventions.  Just because the people of Lunar don’t actually have the slightest recollection or record of the time in the distant, distant past when the default term “god” was created in association with the, at that time, more standard idea that deities were male, that doesn’t mean that the term “goddess” wouldn’t have survived far past the point at which its denotation of gender has any value.  So in some rare cases, the strictly-female-deity society using the term “goddess” can still make some sense.

But in most cases, it’s something like Hyrule/Ys, where the default term of “god” would undeniably have implied a female, and/or Fodlan, where keeping that default term’s gender association would have been a matter of pride.  And yet, there’s a ton of RPGs out there with exclusively female, or at least clearly predominantly female, deities and pantheons, and they all throw the term “goddess” around willy-nilly.  Doesn’t make sense.