No More Mr Asshole

First off, apologies for big gap between our last piece and this one. We usually aim to have all three drop within a week of each other, but a) I’ve been moving house so finding half an hour to put thoughts to computer screen has been tricky, and b) Western civilisation appears to have set itself on fire over the past couple of weeks, and it’s tough to write about comic books when your Tumblr feed is filled with real people suffering real injustices.

It’s this confluence of events that led to this piece, actually. As I was deciding on a topic to tackle, social media was deep in the throes of deciding whether or not it is ethically acceptable to punch a fascist, prompted by the assault on Richard Spencer on Trump’s inauguration day. 

The most compelling argument I heard was that when you are calling for the extermination of an entire subset of people based on ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender identity or some other inherent aspect of identity, you have forfeited your right to reasonable debate, and instead must be met with brute force resistance. That line of thinking inevitably led me to everyone’s favourite neon misogynist, Woden.

Woden has done awful, terrible things. He has been an accessory to multiple murders, collaborating with Ananke to facilitate and cover up the death of several of his fellow gods, as well as numerous regular people. He openly acknowledges that he treats women as objects for his sexual satisfaction, and he exerts an abusive level of power over the Valkyries. Plus he is smug, cowardly, manipulative and probably doesn’t smell too fresh in that leather suit either. 

But is he irredeemable?

You might well be angry I’ve even asked that question, and I totally understand and empathise with that reaction. Woden represents many of the worst things about people in general and men specifically, channelled into someone with extraordinary power. He is an abuser who has worked against our protagonists from the start, and he absolutely deserves punishment for his actions. How could he ever hope to wipe the slate clean?

Part of this involves the in-universe limits of The Wicked + The Divine. Assuming that the original premise of the series still stands post-Ananke, even if Woden were to realise the error of his ways tomorrow, accept full responsibility and welcome justice, he’d have barely made a scratch in his richly-deserved prison sentence by the time he was due to pop his clogs. Hardly a satisfying move towards forgiveness.

Let’s presume that traditional forms of justice aren’t going to work here – after all, they’ve hardly constrained the Pantheon so far – and turn from the question of how Woden would redeem himself to if he even could. Laurie Penny’s ‘interview’ with him in issue #23 is particularly illuminating in this regard. Hell, it’s even called “Sympathy for the Nice Guy”.

Woden’s self-awareness of his own awfulness only serves to heighten it, like a terrible sentiment written down in italics. He’s an engineer, and part of what he has engineered is his own amoral detachment. No, amoral is the wrong word. Woden is immoral – he realises what he’s doing is wrong, and does it anyway. “I know why 90% of the shit I do is wrong,” he tells Penny. “My problem is just… why not? I can’t think of a good reason any more. Or at least no reason good enough to stick.”

Issue #25 gives him a good reason. He’s terrified of Persephone and what she’s capable of, and his trip into the Underground (and possibly some level of darkness below even that) scares him straight, at least temporarily. He frees the Valkyries from their servitude to him, and promises to help Cassandra in her investigations. It may be reparations at gunpoint, but at least it’s reparations.

If Woden is now on the straight and narrow, will the other characters, the book itself and our response to him start to soften? How many good deeds does it take to make up for the evils he has committed? Do they even count if he’s been intimidated into acting this way, and is fear even a sustainable method for keeping him in line?

Maybe. Fear is what drives a character like Woden. Fear of women. Fear of power, and powerlessness. Fear of death. Whatever he felt down in the darkness must have been pretty damn scary to override those things, and that kind of terror makes people unpredictable. Is Woden irredeemable? I don’t think so, but I also don’t think we’re going to see him truly trying to repent any time soon.