Don’t Hate The Player

Ho boy, this one’s been a long time coming. Apologies for the horrendous tardiness of this, our second essay about issue #39. Needless to say, I had a Lot Of Thoughts about this one, and it took some time to piece them all together. Also, life carried on happening, which severely cut into my “sitting around looking into space and thinking about comics” time. All that said, here is our final essay on the “Mothering Invention” arc. Time for some game theory…

Tim: There was a tweet a while back criticising games like Spec Ops: The Line for attempting twist endings where they shame players for their violent actions throughout the storyline, having only given them the traditional tools of a first-person shooter to progress through that story in the first place. I’m not sure it’s a critique that entirely works but there is a core of truth to it. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when you are told the rules of a game, you expect the win condition to lie within those rules.

Given Gillen’s background in video game journalism and the fact that his next project, Die, focuses on role-playing games, complete with a rules system designed for playing through the story, it’s no surprise that some of his thinking in this area has crept into The Wicked + The Divine. In issue #39, we get the twist that we’ve all been waiting for, Persephone’s fourth rule in the grand game being played across the centuries by her and Ananke. And then almost straight away, we find out that the rules don’t really matter – or rather, what matters is realising that the rules don’t matter.

It is one of those twists that, in retrospect, we should have seen coming. Ananke is obsessed with both rules and roles. The Promethean Gambit. Baal’s sacrifices. Sky gods versus underground gods. Every time a god ascends, she is there, reeling off descriptors meant to shape how they behave, the particular slot that they will neatly fall into. As time has gone on, we’ve seen how arbitrary these names and roles are, even as multiple members of the Pantheon have been polished off in poetic circumstances.

Ananke’s rules are meant to box the gods in, keep them predictable and operating according to her plans. More than that, we’ve seen literal boxes – or rather cages – again and again throughout the series. Lucifer’s glass cell. Woden’s neon prison for The Morrigan. Baphomet, held in the darkness of the Underground. Mimir, locked away behind the scenes. She may be free to come and go, but even Persephone’s secret hideaway has the feeling of a dungeon to it. Every time we see one of the characters stuck away in a cell, we want to see them break free, and Persephone’s rejection of her godhood is the ultimate jailbreak.

Let’s go one level deeper, and focus purely on this arc. WicDiv has never been a series to shy away from formalist trickery, and this arc has been no exception. With issue #33 revealing new levels of Ananke’s plot and her connection to Minerva, the appropriately-named “Mothering Invention” has offered use a closer look at Ananke throughout the ages in opening flashbacks. We’ve seen her deadly encounter with her sister nearly 6,000 years ago, revisited a familiar scene from 1923 with new information, followed Ananke through the ages as she kills off Persephone, witnessed what she experiences if her plan fails, dipped into her fateful meeting with Robert Graves in 1944, and returned to the first scene to explore what happened before and after it. A nice consistent use of the flashback structure, each deployment bringing us new information, right?

Except in practice, the structure has proved anything but consistent. In issue #34, we break with tradition and don’t get our usual time and place identifier – we are simply told it is “nearly 6,000 years ago”. In issue #35, we are revisiting a scene from the very first issue, albeit redrawn by McKelvie to reflect the growth and change he’s seen over the past few years. Issues #36 and #37 are complete departures, massive stylistic breaks that dominate the issues they come in, mirroring each other but also standing in complete contrast. #38 is the closest to a return to format as we get, but after the first two pages, every page jumps forward in time, giving us tiny scenes that fill in blanks. And finally in #39, we circle back around to the initial flashback, letting it play out a few moments longer. Oh, and it’s not the first thing in the issue anymore. And later on, we’ll be jumping back before it to see Persephone’s true plan be hatched.

You may ask so what? They’re all flashbacks, what does it matter if the format changes slightly every time? Well, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a close enough reader of The Wicked + The Divine to know that these kind of decisions are almost certainly deliberate. Gillen and McKelvie love their formalist structures, and the fact that there are so many inconsistencies between each flashback supports the idea of a story straining against its framework. We’ve seen that Ananke would like each Recurrence to play out almost exactly like the last, but we also know that Persephone represents an x-factor in that plan.

In each instance, the flashbacks show Ananke’s plan going wrong in some way. The initial creation of the game. The aftermath of 1923’s murderous weekend, with an elderly Ananke who, at the end, is unsure and hesitant. The missteps and variations that occur over 6,000 years of Recurrences. The existential horror of her plan even temporarily failing. A drunken mistake where she reveals a little too much. And finally, the true nature of the game, revealing that Ananke’s plans have always been built on a false premise. The architecture she has constructed across the generations to support her agenda is imperfect, and in this issue we realise why. She is so focused on winning the game that she can perceive that she has never taken a step back to wonder whether it actually matters.

This brings us, after much meandering, back to two of WicDiv’s central themes; mortality and art. If you are constantly grinding away to succeed in an artistic pursuit, chasing the muse, churning out content for the content god, there surely comes a moment when you step back and ask “What does a win look like?” Even if you have achieved great success by the measures of your industry or your peers, are you actually playing the right game? And similarly, when you are faced with the realisation that, no matter what you do, you’re going to die, it’s going to lead to some introspection about what it is you’re pursuing in life, and whether you’re just hewing to the path you’ve been set on by society, by family, by your own preconceptions.

Persephone’s monologue at the end of the issue is all about facing these questions. Not necessarily answering them, but beginning the hard, hard work of trying to wrap your head around them and face them honestly. “All these stories of what I should do fell away,” she tells us. She rejects the labels and the narratives that have been forced on her, the structures that have attempted to cage her and turn her into something simple. Strip all of that away and you step outside the game, into that black void of self-reflection. It can be tough to see where you need to go from there, but Persephone can offer you a light, at least.

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