people have been fawning over how humanlike the gods are for a month now, but now its wrong to compare them to mortal powers because they're otherworldy beings that can't possibly be thought of in human terms? or is the suggestion that they're like mortals, but they're just an innately superior group of people that deserves to have power over everyone else?

Hello anon! Are you the same person who got all up in my askbox yesterday? You certainly seem to have an equally poor grasp on what I actually said and a willingness to make it somebody else's problem. However, I no longer have a headache and am feeling less cranky, so lets treat this as a genuine question.

I never said it's wrong or even inaccurate to compare the gods to humans/mortals. What I said is that some seem over-eager to equate them with groups or systems where they don't actually fit, or to project or own world onto them. This tends to lead to poor textual analysis. For example, equating the gods with mortal rulers (specifically tyrannical rulers, even), the one percent, a higher social class, rich people, or colonizers of mortals all read as comparisons made from the assumption 'gods are the most powerful sentient beings of Exandria; therefore I will compare them to the most powerful people of our world'. Do these comparisons make actual sense as parallels? No! Kings and rich people and colonizers aren't innately more powerful than others because we don't live in a fantasy world where magic is real. You can take said power from them and redistribute it fairly. You cannot do this with the gods.

Ultimately, the last few words in your ask neatly sum up the problem with this mindset: do the gods deserve to hold this power over everyone else? Lets look at this through a comparison: do sorcerers like Imogen deserve to hold power over everyone else? She, like most sorcerers, was born with powers others do not have and has no way to get rid of them. They cannot be taken from her and redistributed to the masses to make things more equal, because they are a part of her innate self. In using them, Imogen can do good, but she also sometimes ends up hurting people by reading their thoughts without consent or, at times, even meaning to. So, does Imogen deserve this power? By now, you might see the problem. It doesn't matter whether she deserves her power because you can't take it from her without killing her, no matter how unfair you think it is that she has it. 'Do they deserve their power' is an irrelevant question that people keep coming back to. What you're actually asking is, 'do the gods deserve to live', or even 'do we have the right to kill them' which is a lot more loaded.

The gods already evened the playing field as much as was possible by locking themselves behind the divine gate, severely diminishing their influence on Exandria. They can no longer cause any more harm than any mortal, because now they must act through mortals such as clerics and paladins, through which they do a lot of good (or have we already forgotten about c1 and c2, or even the resurrection of Laudna by a divine cleric and the actions of FCG in c3?). If this still isn't enough for you, you might want to ask yourself whether what you actually want is fairness and the good of the people of Exandria, or if you're just looking for pointless revenge for the sake of it.