God Kings

[frigidmagi]

Between covering Egypt in history and watching Stargate (my prof has a a grudge against Daniel Jackson it seems by the way), I've gotten to thinking about God Kings.

Within fantasy I'm thinking there are roughly two groups of God Kings in fantasy, actual flat out gods ruling their soceities and mortals worshipped as gods.

Of the gods the example that comes easiest to mind is Kal Torak of the Belgariad written by David Eddings. Torak (Kal is a title it means King and God, sublte and modest he is not) is god of the Angaraks, a race of men that he uses to attempt world conquest by military means. In the books this leds to the battle of Vo Mimbre. After the battle Torak is is left in a millenia long sleep, with the priesthood attempting to domainate the Angarak tribes, without there God, the nobles and kings (who were orginally just military commanders) managed to make sizable inroads on their powerbase.

As an example of mortals demanding the worship of their followers I'm going with Ma'ar of the Gryphon sereis by Mercedes Lackey. Ma'ar was one of the most powerful mages in the world, saddly the path to uber magic power seems to cause sometype of brain damage, Ma'ar believes he's a god with the right to rule the world and his rival Urtho believes it would be morally wrong to do more than defend his borders, someone had Urtho The Art of War and some tactical manuels huh? Ma'ar displays his power by creating and twisting new creatures and weapons for his armies, until killed by a nuke in the box created by Urtho (Urtho refuses to deploy powerful weapons until Ma'ar manages to get an agent close enough to posion him... Someone hand him the fucking Art of War already!).

As you can see both examples are rather negative which leds me to wonder how many God-Kings are there floating around in fantasy? Are all them assholes or do we have a couple of good guys? Are there other types of God Kings I missed?

[SirNitram]

Mulhorand has their God-Kings, who are, in fact, assholes. They caused the Untherites to get God-Kings, due to fucking around with the Weave in ways that make most other events in high-fantasy look weak(Oh? You have gods? *BZZZZZT* They can't help you here...), and getting Ao to step in.

[White Haven]

Hmm. I don't remember the God-King elements of Ma'Ar....he did some fucked-up shit, no doubt about it, and inspired extreme LOYALTY in his follows, but never that I can recall demanded to be worshipped as a god.

[frigidmagi]

It's clearly stated that his followers worshipped him and he had cult status.