The Wicked + The Divine #37 - "Mothering Invention," Part 4

[laughing_tree]

Clearly, if we had the money, we'd have printed 90 black pages. The most poetical instrument in the world is a sledgehammer. -- Kieron Gillen











The present day:

Comments

[doodleboy]

Heh, I remember looking at the page-count for this issue in Comixology and going "That's weird, that's a lot of pages.". Then I read the comic and went "Oh...".

I still find Ananke's murderous journey darkly funny, the flashback in this issue is set up like a joke.

Poor Baphomet, he got exactly what he wanted. Another god sacrificed their remaining years of life to extend his own.

I wonder if Minerva got her god chosen because of the saying "Sprung out like Athena from Zeus fully formed.".

The black pages are interesting, my guess is this is WicDiv's version of the afterlife. No heaven, no hell, just nothingness for eternity. Honestly I think this is what the Great Darkness actually is, the cessation of existence after death with nobody to remember you. The darkness monster that Baal is fighting is something created by the previous gods in a ritual, much like Woden's monster.

Which reminds me of Ananke's original story about the gods, how they were created to fight the Great Darkness and always lost against it. Which makes sense, one of the reasons you make art is so you can leave something behind in the world that'll hopefully outlast you. Even though it's an incredibly imperfect form of legacy that will eventually fade with time. I imagine the original pantheon's goal was to fight the nothingness after death. Both by leaving behind their own emotions into their audience after they die creating a kind of immortality, and by creating the idea of an afterlife.

It didn't work so Ananke went with her own plan to stop the Great Darkness. That's where I think the story is going anyways. Wicked and Divine is about why we create art when we have so little time in the world, and I imagine one of the reasons is to hang onto the world a little bit longer after we're gone.

The only thing that contradicts this a bit is Anake's letter to Minverva, where she said "Death is a small thing compared to the great darkness.". If I'm right she's just talking about her death, because there's still Minerva to make sure her existence isn't gone and forgotten.

Godhood is a bid to be understood. I guess even with Ananke's method ruins her performance, she still created somebody who understands her perfectly.

[laughing_tree]

Insightful points, as usual...

I've been assuming the Great Darkness is just Ananke's term for the darkness between resurrections if she fails to do her four heads ritual, and all the other stuff is just a ruse on her part, inspired by and named after the real Great Darkness. She created a bogeyman to keep the pantheon in check and under control.

[doodleboy]

Yeah, that's what I think it is. Also it's a way to prod Baal into doing a ritual which will probably be really really bad.

I think it's speaking to a larger point of not (pun not intended) not over-mythologizing the Recurrence. The recurrence is a narrative built by Ananke and the original Persephone, and the things in it are going to be things from Ananke's own life. But these things are warped into the story. Kind of like how Kieron Gillen called Phonogram “warped autobio”.

Like I do love when we find out why Ananke named Laura's god "The Destroyer" it turns out to be much pettier than we thought it was.

We have all these characters obsessed over the rules of the Recurrence, we have an arc that promises us “THE ANSWERS” with the Recurrence lore after a ton of buildup. But the most important thing about the Recurrence was revealed in the first issue of this arc, that it’s a story written by humans serving the ends of the people who control it.