Where the name God Slayers comes from (Patreon)

So... I just wanted to explain the name of my webcomic.  Of course, after I had settled on the name, I started seeing the same combination of two words everywhere.  I learned of a book series that shares the name, I've seen it pop up repeatedly now in a couple of anime series... So it no longer seems to me like the original name I first thought it was.  And, to be quite honest, I never really liked it that much in the first place.

But I'm keeping it, at least until someone makes me change it, and here's why.

The original concept for this comic comes from my youth.  I have always enjoyed settings where characters with overwhelmingly powerful abilities clash with each other.  Ever since I doodled my furry superhero comic in school, I've always enjoyed thinking up the most overpowered, nigh invulnerable characters I could imagine, then coming up with clever ways to bring about their downfall.  This has been a recurring theme throughout my life, and, for this comic, I decided to finally own up to it and just call these overpowered characters what they effectively are, compared to the average mundane population.  Gods.

Another theme that's important to me is that power isn't everything.  When we think of gods, we tend to think of immortal, all-powerful beings that survive for eternity.  Gods, in my comic, aren't that.  They are not eternal.  They are not all-powerful.  They can be killed.  And they die quite often.

In the earliest draft of this comic, there was an actual organization I had been calling the God Slayers -- those that slay gods, in the simplest of terms.  I plucked the name from the ether, applied it as a placeholder name, but it stuck.  The God Slayers were dedicated to hunting down and destroying these gods for the sake of maintaining peace and order.  Well... they've since been rewritten, such to the point where they aren't quite an organization with a title any more.  But I liked the name well enough to rethink it and reapply it in other ways.  I realized, shortly before I started producing comic pages in earnest, this was Kiva's story, and I knew how his story was going to go.  It made sense, after a time, to keep the name God Slayers and apply it to the comic as a whole.  This is Kiva's story, and it's a story about those who slay gods.

I'm still not crazy about the name.  I know it's kind of pretentious and probably even a little stale.  I don't mind, though.  I can't come up with a better name for this comic and its themes, and I've tried.  So I'm keeping it.