Give & Take: The Tribe Against the Gods

Eight-Episode Korean-Set Mythic Drama

Complete English-language season

Intended for Korean-language adaptation and production

A mother tries to save her daughter from the gods—and accidentally starts a revolution.

When the goddess Aera rejects a divine-patriarchal bargain that uses her daughter’s marriage to consolidate male power, she withdraws from the gods and builds a hidden matriarchal community in Ganghwa. As women remove their labor, belief, care, money, and obedience from the old order, the gods begin to lose both earthly authority and divine power.

Series Overview

The Tribe Against the Gods treats myth as social infrastructure. The gods are real, but their power lives not only in the supernatural—it lives in political office, criminal wealth, family hierarchy, fear, worship, and the expectation that women will continue to serve.

Aera does not defeat that order by raising an army. She leaves it. Then other women leave too: marriages, abusive homes, exploitative workplaces, sexual ownership, unpaid care, economic dependence, and compulsory obedience.

Withdrawal alone is not enough. The women must build somewhere to go.

Inside the Tower, they construct a functioning matriarchal society based on consensus, common resources, maternal lineage, bodily autonomy, collective care and accountable power. As that alternative becomes viable, the old gods discover that much of what they believed was divine authority had actually been supplied by other people.

The central question of the series becomes: What happens when women stop sustaining patriarchy—and can the new order resist reproducing the domination it rejects?

The Myth

The series takes the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as its mythic foundation but relocates its political conflict to contemporary Korea.

In the ancient story, a father gives away a daughter without the consent of either daughter or mother. Demeter withdraws from the gods, fertility collapses, and Zeus discovers that divine authority depends upon what others provide.

The Tribe Against the Gods changes the solution. Bong-cha is not property divided between mother and husband. She becomes an author of the new order herself.

Why Korea? / Adaptation Status

The series is written in English for development and is intended for Korean-language adaptation and production.

Ganghwa, Manisan, contemporary Korean family structures, political institutions, criminal economies, work culture, gender conflict, honorifics, kinship language and social behavior all require Korean creative authority.

The underlying story, character arcs and eight-episode dramatic structure are complete. Korean adaptation is expected to challenge and reshape dialogue, cultural behavior, institutional detail and any element that does not ring true in Korea while preserving the dramatic core of the series.

The current objective is to determine whether Korean writers and producers consider the underlying project commercially and creatively viable before commissioning the full adaptation.

Scripts

Series Bible

Korean Development

The Tribe Against the Gods is complete as an eight-episode English-language development draft. The creator is prepared to finance professional Korean adaptation if Korean creative and production partners believe the underlying series has a viable path to market.

Development conversations regarding Korean adaptation, production, shopping, co-development or licensing are welcome.

Susan N. Guggenheim
Creator / Screenwriter
Give & Take Universe, LLC