Gigi – Small God of the Sports Bra

[image description: A gorgeous day by the sea. A mermaid with dark skin and red-orange scales sits in profile atop a high-dive. She has a tattoo of a crown of laurels on her near shoulder, and wears a 2-tone blue sports bra with a 3 inch zipper and a black band at its base. Text reads, “115, Gigi ~ Small God of the Sports Bra”]

Small gods associated with innovation are the most likely to remember the date they, or at least their portfolio, came into existence.  Gigi has existed for centuries, but was originally the small god of strained corset stays, before she became the small god of punishing lower back pain.  When she felt a change coming on in 1977, she prayed to herself that she was about to become the small god of cosmetic breast reduction or something equally soothing.

Instead, she became the small god of sports bras, and anyone who tries to say that this is just as good has never tried to do aerobics with a large chest and no underwire.  Compression hides many ills.  It doesn’t cure them.  The two are not the same.

So she went to the small god of body modification and requested a reverse little mermaid.  Not the most common procedure (that award goes to earlobe piercing), but not unheard of, either, and in short order, Gigi was no longer a member of the Busty and Bipedal club.  Her portfolio might not allow her to shed the former, but there was nothing about her that required the latter to endure.

Water forgives many things, including gravity, and breasts are buoyant enough to make her otherwise insufficient tools suitable for the job.  What is a sports bra but a swimsuit with delusions of grandeur, after all?

If you’re looking for the small god of the sports bra, look to the sea.  Unlike the little mermaids who came before her, she isn’t planning to come back onto the land.  Gigi walks on knives for no one.

The bra’s pretty, though.

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Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smallgodseries/

Homepage: http://www.smallgodseries.com/

Bewariel – The Small God of Not-So-Little Mermaids

[image description: An underwater scene slanting rays of light illuminate a ragged rocky coast. A striped and fiercely-clawed mermaid with a swirling tail swims amid shining silver fishes. Text reads, “#11, Bewariel, the small god of Not-So-Little-Mermaids”]

All gods of the sea are gods of hunger in one way or another.

Gods of drowning.  Gods of the deeps.  Gods of thirst—for who, surrounded by saltwater, can find a single drop to drink?  Gods of everything but plenty.  The sea is the greatest cornucopia the world can even know, filled with fish and seaweed and salt enough to season the sky, but nothing there is free for the taking.

Once upon a time, in this glorious feast of silver and salt, there was a sea king whose daughter fell in love with a human prince and followed him to the shore, where only death, despair, and the dry death of the unwanted waited for her.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved a boy, a girl who was a dream of a man who loved a man, and both found themselves voiceless in the face of their futures.  And one was real and one a dream, but as time went by, it became harder and harder for the world to know which had been which.  And the man was glorified and had all his rough edges sanded away by the sea, and the girl was given the happy ending he could never have given her, until his original creation faded away.  Like seafoam.

Rough edges and unwanted girls must go somewhere.  No story is ever truly, totally forgotten.  And in the shadow of all the voiceless ones, the ones who yearned to be remembered, the ones whose love had been denied, she formed.

Bewariel, small god of not-so-little mermaids.  She has the teeth and claws her charges do not; she has the power to defend herself, and them.  She hears the prayers of the voiceless, and she comes, on fins of sapphire and silver, to do what must be done.  She is the answer and she is the question and she is all that remains of a girl who loved not wisely but too well, who shattered in the shadow of the sea.

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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smallgodseries/

Homepage: http://www.smallgodseries.com/