I know the official canon has him as this all powerful being.
But if he's so powerful, why does he need Roland to save the tower?
Kind of applies to It too, a multiversal being starves because a few kids stand up to him? So find another group of kids that scare easier. Why did it have to be THOSE kids?
just read this on vsbattles, yeah Gan stomps
Quote showing the size of the Dark Tower:
"If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things - as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our universe and our own lives, turning everthing yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it's already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.
Think how small such a concept of things make us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for such a race of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see... what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and imagine a trillion universes - not worlds by universes - encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, a chain never to be completed.
Size, gunslinger... size.
Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?..."
Jack Sawyer perceiving a mere aspect of what Gan is:
"In one sense he was not in the Agincourt at all, not in Point Venuti, not in Mendocino County, not in California, not in the American Territories, not in those other Territories; but he was in them, and in an infinite number of other worlds as well, and all at the same time. Nor was he simply in one place in all those worlds; he was in them everywhere because he was those worlds. The Talisman, it seemed, was much more than even his father had believed. It was not just the axle of all possible worlds, but the worlds themselves-the worlds, and the spaces between those worlds.
Jack Saywer was everywhere; Jack Sawyer was everything. A blade of grass on a world fifty thousand worlds down the chain from earth died of thirst on an inconsequential plain somewhere in the center of a continent which roughly corresponded in position to Africa; Jack died with that blade of grass. In another world, dragons were copulating in the center of a cloud high above the planet, and the fiery breath of their ecstasy mixed with the cold air and precipitated rain and floods on the ground below. Jack was the he-dragon; Jack was the she-dragon; Jack was the sperm; Jack was the egg. Far out in the ether a million universes away, three specks of dust floated near one another in interstellar space. Jack was the dust, and Jack was the space between. Galaxies unreeled around his head like long spools of paper, and fate punched each in random patterns, turning them into macro-cosmic player-piano tapes which would play everything from ragtime to funeral dirges. Jack’s happy teeth bit an orange; Jack’s unhappy flesh screamed as the teeth tore him open. He was a trillion dust-kitties under a billion beds.
He was the powdered henshit in Buddy Parkins’s nose, he was the trembling hairs that would soon cause Buddy Parkins to sneeze; he was the sneeze; he was the germs in the sneeze; he was the atoms in the germs; he was the tachyons in the atoms travelling backward through time toward the big bang at the start of creation.
He saw a googolplex of sparrows in a googolplex of worlds and marked the fall or the well-being of each.
He died in the Gehenna of Territories ore-pit mines.
He lived as a flu-virus in Etheridge’s tie.
He ran in a wind over far places.
He was...
Oh he was...
He was God."
Gan exists beyond everything and is the author of all there is:
"The Turtle spoke in Bill's head, and Bill understood somehow that there was yet Another, and that Final Other dwelt in a void beyond this one. This Final Other was, perhaps, the creator of the Turtle, which only watched, and It, which only ate. This Other was a force beyond the universe, a power beyond all other power, the author of all there was."
He's literally on the level of Azathoth or Overvoid/Presence, one of the highest level of supreme beings in fiction
Originally posted by cdtmSame reason The Presence or TOAA almost never directly interferes, even if the entire multiverse is at risk. Gan is above such things.
I know the official canon has him as this all powerful being.But if he's so powerful, why does he need Roland to save the tower?
Kind of applies to It too, a multiversal being starves because a few kids stand up to him? So find another group of kids that scare easier. Why did it have to be THOSE kids?
Although I believe Roland speculated that the Dark Tower itself might actually be a physical iteration/embodiment of Gan -- but I don't think that was definitively proven one way or the other.