There are endless ways to interpret the Gods of the Silt Verses, but a really cool one is that they literally don’t exist—that they are literally and narratively lies that cannot have agency.
Because I’m me, a swag way of to think about this is like how devas function in vajrayana and esoteric Buddhism more generally: that gods are like moulds to pour your own mind and effort into. Like a fluid-based computer, they have no agency on their own—but can cause reliable and reproducible effects by interacting with them in specific ways.
This is obviously already metaphorically true in tsv, but the precise mechanism by which it is isn’t explored (rightfully so). But imo picturing them in this context makes the character work of that show even better. If you remove even the possibility of the Gods having any agency over the story at all—if they’re truly empty—you quickly run out of people to blame.
