#fuckingtara

Welcome back to Tim + Alex Get TWATD. We’ve changed format slightly, to match the standalone different-artist-each-issue nature of WicDiv’s current arc. Alex and Tim will be alternating writing duties, posting a single essay every month, picking out a particularly interesting thread from the latest issue. It’s formalism, probably.

Below is Alex’s piece on Issue #13. Below the cut, spoilers. Trigger warnings for sexual violence. Don’t read any further if you haven’t read the issue.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt this dirty after finishing a comic. Ugh. Issue #13 is a magnificent piece of work, in the way you might tell someone, you’re a piece of work, you are. It wormed inside my guts and hardened, and now I feel like I need to shower.

A lot of that feeling is because I’m complicit.

I went into this issue, which finally shines the spotlight on Tara – the last absentee member of WicDiv’s Pantheon – expecting her to be revealed as a villain. The comic makes that assumption easy. Pretty much every time her name has appeared, she’s been referred to as “fucking Tara”. Even Laura, fangirl extraordinaire and our one-time viewpoint character, dismissed her. And when this issue starts, we’re treated to a moment of what looks like egomania.

We open on the faces of enraptured fans at a Tara show, her trademark pyrotechnics smeared across the page. It’s reminiscent of the Amaterasu gig from issue #1, a large room packed with people all in love with the woman on stage.

Until Tara breaks the flow, breaks out an acoustic guitar, to play one of her old songs. Even the fans in the front row wilt. We’ve all been at a gig where this happens, where the performer takes a self-indulgent trip into obscure b-sides or ‘one we just wrote yesterday’ – but because this is WicDiv, the experience is amplified. Tara isn’t just abandoning The Hits, she’s stepping away from the euphoric not-quite-music spectacle that the gods normally provide.

And it turns into a riot. You might not side with the audience but, remembering all those dull mid-gig moments, I found it hard to blame them. Like I said, I’m complicit.

Because the rest of the issue works to recontextualise this opening scene. We see Tara’s pre-Pantheon history, as a beautiful woman who knows that makes her a target. An over-achiever who can’t help but succeed. We see that Tara’s not being indulgent but trying to avoid taking the easy route. Your sympathies start to shift, but maybe there’s still a little voice which says, oh no, life is too easy? Boohoo.

Then comes the double page spread, the only one the issue allows itself. It’s not a showcase for Tula Lotay’s gorgeous art, but a wall of tweets. Tara’s @ mentions. Filled with rape and death threats, assorted misogynistic insults and, just to mix it up, a little bit of racism.

If you’ve followed any of the 'Gamergate’ bullshit on Twitter over the past year, or the increasinge number of public shamings (to borrow a term from Jon Ronson’s book on the issue), this spread will be familiar. They’re an uncomfortably close evocation of the real thing.

…And I’m aware of the inherent privilege there, the assumption this is the kind of thing you only ever read about because (I’m a white male) it’s never affected me. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of any tweets like this – which is to say, if you’re a woman on Twitter with opinions who doesn’t chose to hide either of those facts – I cannot even imagine what these pages represent.

But, speaking as an outsider, the horrifying thing about the spread is how the use of the Twitter format makes you complicit. On the tablet I’m reading the issue on, at least, you have to zoom in slightly to see the individual tweets. Pinch, swipe, scroll. I didn’t have to read every single tweet – you get the gist pretty quickly – but I did anyway.

It left me feeling like a voyeur, and thinking about the way I consume these horrors in real life. I’ve wolfed down accounts of online abuse, screenshots from Reddit forums, tweet after sexual violent tweet. And then I’ve shaken my head, thought thank God I’m not one of those misogynist wankers, and thought myself a better person for it.

I can see myself in this issue. Not as one of the abusive tweeters, but not as Tara either.

I can see myself among the mourners on the final pages, when the Twitter stream makes a reappearance. One of the people whose voices were entirely missing when Tara was alive, popping up now to add their lamentations to the pile. Not a monster, hopefully, but certainly not helping. Complicit.