Never Come Back To This Town

Resident Morrigan cosplayer Tim Maytom takes a look at WicDiv’s primary purveyors of goth-ic romance, The Morrigan and Baphomet, and their dyed-black roots, as seen in the recent issue #16.

Tim:

The suburban goth is a familiar archetype to anyone who enjoys teen films, but one that is rarely actually explored. They exist at the fringes of scenes, skirted over in cafeteria montages or haunting convenience stores late at night, seldom the protagonist or even the fleshed-out supporting character. When they are, it’s usually as morbid loners, like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice. But speaking as someone who orbited close enough to gothdom in his youth to know, being goth, emo or whatever other subculture you want to label yourself as is actually about finding a community.

The clothes, the music, the games: they are all ways of both rejecting the isolating, stifling life of small-town England, and reaching out to anyone who feels the same. It’s a uniform that shouts “I am rejecting the normal teenage culture. I don’t fit in. Come, let’s not fit in together.”

Of course, the truth underneath that is, as much as you may have left behind Hollyoaks, bland pop music and H&M, you’re still a teenager, and any youth subculture is just as filled with the betrayals, superficiality and raging hormones as the dominant culture that it’s rejecting. Everyone’s just paler and smokes hand-rolled cigarettes.

That’s the truth Marian and Cameron are feeling their way towards in this issue. Their intense, dysfunctional relationship is a subculture of two, rejecting and shunning everyone around them but unable to hold back their human tendency to hurt each other too. Even after becoming gods, the two stand more or less apart from the Pantheon, and they are introduced to the reader already at one another’s throats.

Cameron’s selfish nihilism drives him to push everyone away, either through action or inaction (watch the telling panel after Marian reveals her past illness as she awaits his questions about her experience, questions that never come). At the same time, he craves both the stability she can provide, and the validation she can give him.

Marian, meanwhile, shows off the triple nature of Morrigan even before her ascendence to godhood. Gentle Annie is her drive to care for and forgive Cameron, while bloody Babd is her passion and rage at his infidelity.

When he returns to her and she makes the decision to transform Cameron into Baphomet, is it Gentle Annie saving the boy who will fall apart without her; Macha wishing to reunite with her lover; or Babd dooming her cruel betrayer to death?

I doubt even the Morrigan truly knows. But one thing is for sure – these two are bound together, against death, against the world, and against each other. Goths till the end.