selenak

In lieu of any profound Good Friday thoughts: it strikes me, not for the first time, how the imagery comes up again and again in a lot of fantasy and sci fi, and I'm not talking about Aslan and Narnia.

In American Gods, you have the son of a god dying tied to wood (there is even the obligatory spear in his side) and being resurrected after three days by Easter, no less. (Eostre of the Dawn, to use her old name, but she's Easter in the novel.) Of course, sacrificial death and resurrection are hardly unique to Christianity; as the novel itself points out, Shadow's death and rebirth echoes Odin's/Wotan's method of aquiring poetry and wisdom in myth, and then there is Baldur, whose avatar Shadow most likely is, the young god who is killed due to Loki's machinations and resurrected in time. But the Christian version is the one likely to be on most people's minds when they read this. Shadow-as-Christ-figure works as well; he stops an apocalyptic war.

JMS in Babylon 5 isn't exactly subtle but very effective with his use of the religious imagery tied to Easter. There is, of course, Passing Through Gethsemane with Brother Edward going literary through his own version of the night of Gethsemane; he already has died, in a manner of speaking - as Charles the murderer he used to be before his mindwipe - and has been resurrected, as it happens with his own killer at the end of the episode. This prefigures the fate of various regulars - Sheridan who gets the literal death and resurrection business plus the being betrayed by a close friend, Sinclair who becomes the Messiah of the Minbari by going through a symbolic death and resurrection (which in turn was prefigured by Draal's fate in season 1's "Voices in the Wilderness", and it's no coincidence that the other candidates for this were Sinclair and Londo), and G'Kar who gets the Good Friday imagery in full force - the flogging by the ~~Roman~~ Centauri soldier, the passion walk carrying his own cross, even the fall to the ground during that walk. However, G'Kar evades the complete Messiah fate by essentially withdrawing from his people afterwards (you could say the apotheosis of G'Kar as a Narn martyr is that fall when they all rush towards him and he tells them to be strong; from this point onwards, he's either at odds with other Narn or so revered by them that he's no longer real to them). The character who does the actual hanging on the cross (for his sins and the sins of his people, you might say, to save them at any rate) is Londo, ending the show in the sacrificial white.

Moving over to Star Wars, I think a case can be made for Luke as not so much a Christ but a Parsifal figure, not understanding at first what he sees but then, after having gone through his own suffering, being able to heal the rotten state and fallen hero he finds. But the most overt use of Easter imagery is one missing in the others: the Pieta. There are two depictions of Mary with her son throughout the milllennia that haunt the public consciousness, the Madonna, the young mother with the baby at her breast, and the Pieta, the mourning mother with her dead adult son in her arms. I think Lucas uses it in the prequels, but in reverse; Anakin (who has no father), holding the dying and then dead Shmi in his arms in Attack of the Clones is the son holding the mother in the exact same posture (and the way Shmi was tortured echoes the cruxificion), and sure enough, the reverse happens - this event triggers not salvation and life but a series of deaths and eventually a fall. (Not until RotJ and Luke holding the dying and then dead Anakin/Vader in the same posture is the cycle stopped.)

Now, as opposed to Lewis and Narnia, none of these people wanted to create a direct analogy in their stories. They used parts of the story because they found them effective and evocative. And it works.

ETA: And not entirely ot, I just posted a somewhat redrafted and hopefully now accessible for non-watchers of Angel the Series version of my Connor essay at