I hate it when the movies and literature portray Evil as powerful and dignified, while the Good is weak, emotional but manages to win with the “power of friendship” or some similar nonsense.

Evil is weak and small, and uses illusions and deception to pretend otherwise. The true powers of Good are so incredibly overpowering, the only reason Evil persists at all is the consistency of God – Word was given and this is the law now. In a battle of power against power, a battle of Satan against God wouldn’t look like a battle between Darth Vader and some weak “good guy”. It would look like a rat hunt. The power differential is like a galactic black hole against a hydrogen cloud. It’s not even funny. I tried to explain this in my last book, where Lord Shiva kills the worst super-demon with a single command, and then the actual problem is purifying the remains, because the demon’s existence turned his constituent kalapas into a deadly soul-poison. It’s not a fight; it’s garbage disposal. And, incidentally, that super-demon is orders of magnitude more powerful than Satan. Satan just happens to have permissions to use a God-made VR superweapon for a certain amount of time, and while it is so, the only thing that can harm him is his own sin. So, essentially, the only protection the evil ones have is the Word of God. Evil isn’t stronger in a fight. If it comes to a fight, it’s instant game over. You can’t fight against Shiva or Vishnu. They are so overpowered, they instantly win by just being there, if that is the Will of God. But if it isn’t, then they have to dance around the problem. That’s what creates the illusion that we’re in a contest of power between Good and Evil.

This is something I find annoying in Star Wars, where the Dark Side users are portrayed as inherently stronger. Everybody takes Evil too seriously in that sense. I mean, sure, it needs to be taken seriously in a sense that it’s a problem. It’s corruptive. However, if it corrupts you, it deprives you of true power; it doesn’t give it to you. In actuality, as you develop true virtue and goodness, you grow more “of God”, and power follows. As you reject God by embracing sin and evil, you lose not only virtue, but power as well. Tolkien gets this all wrong, making it a contention of power between good and evil; however, what he does get right is that Morgoth grows weaker by manifesting evils. He starts as being the mightiest of the Valar, and ends up being the weakest, easily disposed of into the Void. The only reason why it is easy for people to believe in the physical power of Evil is that this world specifically creates this illusion. If you could actually see how weak and decaying the evil souls are, how they are barely holding themselves together thanks to their physical form that allows them to persist for a while, you wouldn’t think them powerful.

The “Salvos” series is no better than the rest in this regard, for the most part. The greatest powers are usually either evil or morally indifferent. The world itself rewards you for all sorts of evil by allowing you to grow stronger. There is a hint that the growth in an evil direction is ultimately self-defeating, but in reality, some of the most powerful entities we’ve seen are evil. The good ones fight them and lose.

What I like is that the good ones don’t fight with hysteria, helplessly screaming at the enemy, or with “power of friendship”. They either learn to use true power or they lose. Salvos herself fights with focus, power and ferocity. She’s initially weak, but grows stronger. When she initially encounters Belzu, she can only run. The second time, he defeats her with his residual magic, without even being there. The third time, she talks to him, holds her own and escapes. The fourth time, her clones hold their own for a while but they eventually lose. The fifth time, she hunts him down and overpowers him, but the battle itself is complicated and he manages to save himself by creating a duplicate of himself that dies. She finds him, and he trembles before her, as she radiates Divinity of her Grand Skill, and she gets him to agree to terms. When he eventually betrays her, they fight again – both tired and with main Skills depleted, his illusions against her Angelic Premonition. He creates illusions, she sees just enough into the future to be able to fight blindly, and that must be the scariest thing for him, because he knows his illusions work, but she acts as if they are not there, and eventually kills him. She’s not portrayed as someone who wins through sheer luck. No; she’s just more powerful, and her Skill overpowers his. She doesn’t win through power of love or friendship; she wins because she grew in power to the point where he can’t hold his own against her. Imagine Luke Skywalker on the second Death Star transforming or deflecting Palpatine’s Force Lightning and then calmly approaching him and stabbing him through the chest with his Force-enhanced hand. That’s what this fight looks like. To Belzu, it looks like he’s desperately doing everything to distract and defeat her, and she acts as if none of it’s there; ignores things that aren’t real, avoids real threats, talks to him calmly like they’re having a beer in a pub, avoids his final attack and stabs him through the chest with her arm. Game over.

Salvos doesn’t win because she’s good. She isn’t weaker because she’s good. Power and moral virtue don’t mix in that world. She wins because she’s smart, powerful and a good fighter, and she gets along with good people because she’s a nice person. At least, compared to Star Wars, this goes in the right direction, but it’s nowhere near the reality as it exists in the actual Heaven, the real world. I tried to describe it, hinting that the Gods are wonderful people, but also so incredibly powerful that one occasionally feels a hint of it in an otherwise normal conversation and then shivers go up your back. That’s because both true goodness and true power are attained by being of God, and ultimately by being claimed by God as His own person. Power, in that sense, isn’t neutral, and apart from God. The entirety of it is of God.