The Third Theme

Alex: From the backmatter of issue #33:

Look, Kieron, we know a direct challenge when we see one.

(Spoilers after the cut. So, so many spoilers.)

So what could that third theme be?

My immediate reaction is that, if it’s as integral as ‘art’ and ‘mortality’, it’s probably something the WicDiv Tumblr community have picked out before. But Gillen sells here it as a big reveal. That implies it’s not something as general as ‘identity’ or ‘youth’.

He also says this theme becomes clearer on the last page. Naturally, I’ve spent ages studying that image, trying to understand not only what the hell it means for the story, but also what it could be nudging at thematically.

So, yeah, obviously, it’s ‘heads’. Everyone in WicDiv has heads, right, up until the moment that they don’t. There, cracked it. Another successful solve by the Tim + Alex Get TWATD Literary Detective Agency.

But, considering the possibility – unlikely as it might seem – that I haven’t cracked it, let’s consider some other possibilities.

If these decapitated heads really are what they seem, the supposedly-dead gods given a (really crappy) afterlife, that seems to undermine the stated theme of ‘mortality’. Especially when you place it next to Minerva’s apparent Ananke-resurrecting heel turn this issue, and the return of Laura as Persephone after she seemingly died.

Presumably that’s by design, so maybe WicDiv’s third theme is a direct contrast to its second one: ‘immortality’. After all, David Bowie might be dead but – at least if you follow the people I do on Twitter – we still talk about him more than many human beings who are alive.

Or, more generally, you could sum the whole thing up as ‘cycles’. Nothing ever really goes away: not storytelling motifs like the two-page tumble into godhood, not long-forgotten plot points, not even characters we thought were dead 30 issues ago. This is certainly something that has recurred throughout WicDiv, from the very first “once again, we return”, but it’s hardly a secret – we were writing about all the circles and cycles back in June 2015 – and, as we said then, it’s more of a motif than a theme.

All the above is extrapolating from a single image. Striking and confusing as that image is, themes are emphasised by repetition and variation – so what if we take in the rest of this issue too?

There are three main strands in #33: the reveal of Woden and Mimir’s identities, Persephone talking through her survivor’s guilt with Cassandra, and the Minerva/Ananke/talking heads business.

The first two strands in particular are concerned with parent-child relationships. It’s strongest in David Blake’s awfulness to his son, but Persephone reveals that she feels responsible for her parents’ deaths at the hands of Ananke. These both chime with Minerva as the focus of the final pages, who was so mistreated by her own parents, and who also saw them killed by Ananke, the identity she’s now claiming to have assumed for herself. Parents are a presence in almost all of the gods’ backstories, as highlighted in Amaterasu’s British Museum showdown with Sakhmet in #31, where “family” was the trigger that led to her murder.

More specifically, what WicDiv seems to be interested in is the idea of the old consuming the young, treating them as a resource to further their own ends. Like, to pick a random real-world example from the last few days, baby boomers blaming millennials’ out-of-control sandwich habit as the reason the younger generation can’t afford property, rather than what their own actions did to property prices.

This is literally what David Blake is doing with Jon – tapping his powers, and justifying it as a down payment on the years his son ‘stole’ from him – and what Minerva’s parents did by monetising her demise. It’s also what Ananke, and arguably the population as a whole, does with the Pantheon. It takes a group of talented young people, and trades their lives for enlightenment or safety or power, depending how cynically you want to read the whole thing.

Actually, this does loop back to that final image, which puts the trade-off in its simplest possible terms, by framing it as an act of ritual sacrifice.

Actually, if we’re trying to condense this theme into a single punchy one-word, maybe that’s it: sacrifice.

That covers not just Blake and Ananke’s sacrifice of the kids, but the gods’ self-sacrifice in accepting the two-year sentence – at least, where there’s any sense were given a choice. 

At the kindest extreme is Dionysus, who gives every waking moment – and eventually, his life – to others. He does it because he’s a good person, but Imperial Phase has interrogated whether that is a healthy impulse. There’s another, much messier examination in the Valkyries, and the recent revelation that Kerry has returned to being Brunhilde. It runs through the Specials, in 455′s Lucifer and 1831′s Woden and especially Inanna.

Perhaps most importantly, sacrifice also ties in with Persephone’s revelation this issue, that she feels like she made a deal for godhood. “No price was too high,” she says, as the tears finally break through. For anyone who’s turned personal tragedy into something profitable or praised, that guilt probably feels familiar.

So, is that the third theme Gillen’s talking about? Dunno, tbh.

But I do feel pretty confident in saying that this has always been the central question posed by WicDiv: What are you willing to give up, in order to get what you’ve always wanted?