Religious lore, make my own, or use the existing?

[Wicked_Nightmare]

I'm in the beginnings of writing a noncon set in a fantasy universe. It involves devils and corruption themes, as well as opposing and powerful holy forces to create some difficult decisions for the humans caught between.

It's made me wonder if I should invent my own background lore for the story to avoid controversy. I've started thinking on that, so far it's mostly renaming things like angels and demons to something else, but I like the idea of being able to make my own rules and history if I want.

The potential downside is that it takes time/words to convey this alternate universe and may slow down the story. and If I don't make it different enough, people may get offended anyway.

What do you think? should I just call them demons/devils and work from fairly universal symbols, or take a little time to invent my own variants that play by my own rules?

For me, it comes down to what's less distracting to more people. Which way is less likely to take you OUT of the story and ruin the experience?

 

[Handley_Page]

I'm in the beginnings of writing a noncon set in a fantasy universe. It involves devils and corruption themes, as well as opposing and powerful holy forces to create some difficult decisions for the humans caught between.

It's made me wonder if I should invent my own background lore for the story to avoid controversy. I've started thinking on that, so far it's mostly renaming things like angels and demons to something else, but I like the idea of being able to make my own rules and history if I want.

What do you think? should I just call them demons/devils and work from fairly universal symbols, or take a little time to invent my own variants that play by my own rules?

For me, it comes down to what's less distracting to more people. Which way is less likely to take you OUT of the story and ruin the experience?

For my part, I think inventing your own is better; you can make the logic hang better.

 

[Hypoxia]

The fantasy multiverse is a splendid place. Some instances are quite unique; some may be 99.99% congruent with other instances. You could easily kludge together a universe with features cherry-picked from various myth-faith systems, or just slightly alter one to suit your needs. To "avoid controversy", exploit one or more remote or powerless belief systems -- Zoroastrianism, not Scientology (unless satire is the goal).

 

[MatthewVett]

There is a benefit to using pre-existing mythology, which is that people immediately have at least some idea of what to expect and they can get the gist a lot faster. Even if you change things around a bit, there'll still be a nice foundation that will let people understand things more quickly.

 

[sr71plt]

Create your own world, if you can. But steel yourself. There still will be readers who will comment that you got it wrong.

 

[unregistered]

 

[TamLin01]

You ask me (...which I suppose you did only in the most general sense), fantasy writers get far too hung up on backstory and "lore" and other mumbo jumob. You're writing a story, not a backstory. Whatever is quickest, most accessible, and requires the least amount of tedious exposition is the ideal option. Get the necessary evils out of the way and then get to what's important: character, conflict, feeling.

 

[PervOtaku]

There are a few TV Tropes entries that hover around this topic, for instance http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChurchOfSaintGenericus and some of the ones linked to from there.

I can't find the article that states this outright at the moment, but the upshot is it's easy to use old mythology systems for a story, but hard to use religions that are still being actively practiced, because you may want to avoid offending anybody. But a lot of these fictional religions are fairly recognizable as being close to an existing one, so you don't really have to change a lot of details if you don't want to.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

And for heaven sakes don't offend the muslims by calling your deity Mohammad. We would want Lit. blown up or anything.

 

[Bramblethorn]

What do you think? should I just call them demons/devils and work from fairly universal symbols, or take a little time to invent my own variants that play by my own rules?

For me, it comes down to what's less distracting to more people. Which way is less likely to take you OUT of the story and ruin the experience?

If you want to put effort into creating an original cosmology, go for it. But don't feel like you have to do it. It's fine to work from universal symbols and focus on other areas of the story if that's where you feel inspired.

And for heaven sakes don't offend the muslims by calling your deity Mohammad. We would want Lit. blown up or anything.

Deifying Mohammed would be problematic; for all the reverence he gets, Islam is adamant that he's Not A God. Featuring him as a protagonist or rewriting parts of his life might also cause trouble, as happened to Salman Rushdie.

But there's plenty of fantasy in Islamic settings, by both Muslim and non-Muslim writers. The 1001 Nights is a huge influence on modern fantasy; more recently there's Gaiman's "Ramadan", Craig Thompson's "Habibi", and Saladin Ahmed's "Throne of the Crescent Moon", probably many others I've missed.

 

[sr71plt]

Here's a thought. The Muslims don't countenance depicting images of Jesus any more than they do of Mohammed. Jesus is a prophet in Islam. Islam and Christianity are from the same root (as is the Hebrew religion, for that matter), with the same God. It's not a deification of Mohammed; it's a belief in rendering images of him. It's connected in a tertiary way to the Christian "no graven images" concept. The two religions just went in different directions in following that line of concept.

Most of the current trouble is because folks go out of their way to stick it to the Muslims on their beliefs, and the Muslims take it more seriously than others being stuck do. (Although Bush the lesser fought a dumb war merely on the basis of Saddam Husein having stuck it to his father in rhetoric and having survived his father's attempt to cow him for it.)

 

[Wicked_Nightmare]

Juuust in case anyone was curious, I started making my own lore, and leaned into the idea.

I was just going to mainly work with demons and devils, but now I'm coming up with my own world and it's helping me decide how certain things should happen or work.

All the suggestions about using dead religions etc. are sort of beside the point of "which way will be less distracting?" Because I was planning on using directly, or as inspiration, the generic secularized Christian symbols; things like demons and angels.

I've already come up with my own variants that will probably differ more than being the same thing with a different name. I already like how I can just decide how they work as it suits my needs.

 

[SamScribble]

I'm pretty sure that all deities were invented to 'explain' what, at the time, were unexplainable. What causes thunder? Why does it rain in October? Etcetera. So, if I was going to 'invent' a religion, I would probably try and tie it back to an 'unexplainable'. Otherwise, what's the point?