Getting TWATD at the Wake, ii: The Eulogies

Every month, two writers returned to this blog. They did an essay each. For five years. And now it’s all over.

The Wicked + The Divine #45 came out a month ago, and we’re still at the metaphorical wake. In this part, we pick out two characters we haven’t written much about, consider the paths their lives ended up taking, and write their obituaries. It could get emotional.

Spoilers for… well, for the entirety of WicDiv, I guess, below the cut.

Tim: Endings are bittersweet things at the best of times, and for a series as preoccupied with death and heartbreak as The Wicked + The Divine, we were never going to reach a conclusion without shedding a few tears. Still, there are many ways in which #45 is a happy ending for several of the characters – and that’s truer for Aruna, the god formerly known as Tara, than possibly anyone else.

Looking across the span of the series as a whole, she is a character who has suffered abuse, indignity and manipulation. But here at the end, Aruna is free from many of the troubles that plagued her life both before and during her time as a god. I don’t know if the Aruna we see in 2055 is living her best life, but it seems infinitely better than we could have expected after #13, the issue which gave us a painful glimpse into a character who had remained a mystery up to that point.

Pre-Godhood, Aruna had been made to feel uncomfortable in her own body by sexism and misogyny. That feeling was amplified by her divine transformation and the increased celebrity that came with it, culminating in her begging Ananke for the mercy of death. But Ananke’s manipulation accidentally set up Aruna to transcend the cruelties inflicted upon her. As a miraculously preserved head, she was free from the burden of her body, and free to reinvent herself.

With the help of Jon, Aruna she was able to reject a new form when she wasn’t ready for one – and, once she was, to create one that existed beyond the constraints of traditional biology. Her story touches on themes of transhumanism, not an area that WicDiv has traditionally dabbled in, but one that has some interesting connections with the themes of people seeking immortality. As you might expect given the ideas of gender and bodily autonomy at play, it’s also easy to read through a queer lens.

I’m glad that, while it’s clear Jon and Aruna have developed a close partnership over the years, Gillen and McKelvie chose to leave the exact nature of their relationship open to interpretation.

Aruna’s previous discomfort with the spotlight, and Ananke’s subsequent exploitation of that fact, also ended up benefitting her in other ways. Her distance from the rest of the Pantheon meant she avoided jail time after the events of #44 (it probably helped that it’s hard to handcuff someone when they’re just a head).

You could also maybe draw a line between the sudden outpouring of appreciation following Tara’s death and the way she was able to successfully campaign for the Pantheon’s early release, performing benefit concerts and raising awareness. This goes some way to colouring the previously devastating ending of #13 in a new light, as the insincere chorus of Twitter observers become a platform Aruna is able to use for good.

There’s an important distinction, though – this time around, she was able to approach a musical career and fame on her own terms, as Aruna rather than Tara. Also, the fact that her ‘death’ wasn’t a permanent one doesn’t take away from the tragedy of it, or how the comic made us complicit in the culture that led to it.

Aruna’s story following her ‘death’ could be called WicDiv’s ultimate triumph. The old truism about suicide being a permanent solution to a temporary problem feels especially apt here. Ananke took someone who was miserable and vulnerable, and proceeded to place them in a situation that they couldn’t cope with. Ananke became Aruna’s sole source of ‘support’, isolating her from the other gods, amplifying her insecurities until Aruna felt the only solution was to take her own life.

Strip away some of the details, and the story starts to take on some truly dark parallels, but unlike so many real-life stories, there is a second act to Aruna’s tale.

Once the true nature of Ananke’s plans are revealed, Aruna is eventually able to escape her role in them, retake control of her life, and eventually thrive on her own terms. WicDiv may be a story that largely approaches death as a firm reality, but by giving Aruna a reprieve from her seeming demise, it allows us a glimpse of a real happy ending, in amongst the more complex feelings the final issue evokes.

Alex: Aruna’s story is a happy one because she escapes the cycles that life locked her into. But the god I want to talk about, I’m not sure they ever did. Which might not be a terrible thing – it was always a little different, with Dionysus.

We don’t get much time with Umar before he goes all Olympian, but the moments we do get suggest there’s less of a gap between his two identities than there is for most of the other gods. He’s the guy who drives his friends down to London so they can get wasted on the way, who asks sensitive questions of strangers.

When he becomes Dionysus, the difference is mainly a question of scale. The group of people he’s trying to do right by gets bigger and bigger, and that makes this behaviour unsustainable. That first time we meet him, in issue #8, we get pretty much the whole Dionysus story. Dude takes on everyone else’s troubles, exerts himself to make them feel better, and makes it look breezy – only occasionally cracking and showing the weight of it all.

I’m not sure that ever really changes for Umar. He keeps using his powers to make people happy for a night, even as it starts to take a toll. He waits in the darkness, lets The Morrigan attack him, just to be there for Baphomet. He has faith in the power of the crowd, even as they crush him. He just keeps giving and giving, and it lands him in a coma.

This is Dionysus’ hamartia – the fatal flaw built into every one of WicDiv’s gods, the thing that ensures their downfall. As these things go, it’s not a bad flaw to have.

It marks him apart from the other gods. Gillen has talked about the Pantheon all being aspects of himself, his own flaws built out into characters, people he’s trying not to be anymore. But Dionysus’ flaw actually makes him someone to aspire to.

A spare Gillen quote from my Polygon interview that didn’t make it into the final article: “Umar is someone I’d love to be now… But Umar’s a fictional character. Therefore, it’s easier for him to be Umar than for Kieron to not be a shithead.” Even in the comic, we see how Dio’s behaviour is unsustainable – but to try and live that way, all of the time, in real life? It’s impossible.

I say this with authority, because in many ways I spent my twenties trying to be a Dionsysus. I’m an Inanna by nature – a pleasure seeker who tries to be kind but can sometimes forget that having the best possible time can have consequences on the people around them. (And, sidenote, it’s a fascinating twist on the archetypes that the god with these traits isn’t the one who, y’know, gave us the word bacchanalian.)

But, to be uncharacteristically nice about myself for a second, my idea of having a good time does tend to include bringing as many people along with me as possible. The version of me I like is the one who always opens up the circle on the dancefloor to sweep up strangers and stragglers. Or spot someone who seems left out and work to change that. Or pour hours into a project that’ll be seen by just a handful of friends, or just one.

I kind of buried that person this year.

This wasn’t an active choice, or something I was even conscious of doing at the time, but looking back I can see the reasons behind it. Firstly, because it’s not always clear whether people actually want these things done for them, or if it’s an unwelcome overreach, and that thought makes me to want up curl into myself and just die. And second, because I’m not good at knowing how to apportion effort, meaning it can involve frankly life-damaging amounts of preparation for very little payoff.

It’s not a sustainable way to live. Dio might be the best possible version of the WicDiv god, but he’s still someone sacrificing his self to become an idea. It kills him, eventually, and #37 shows how he’s remembered for it by the public, the people he gave everything he had to: ‘that guy on drugs’.

But eventually he is repaid by one of the recipients of his kindness, as a little bit of that selflessness rubs off on Baphomet. And Umar joins the rest of the Pantheon as they step back from their defining flaw, allow themselves to become more than an archetype. “I thought it was my job to save everyone,” Dionysus says, and I cry my little eyes out.

Maybe that was the moment I started to realise I’d been stepping back from that version of myself. Or maybe it was talking with Tim (my other, non-fictional model for the sort of person I want to be) about issue #45, when he explained how he read the older Umar: someone in whom all that kindness turned a little bitter. Aged like vinegar, not wine.

My reading is more hopeful than that, I think. The final issue trades in hints and suggestions of lives, but with Umar more than most. And personally, I fill in that blank with a different story: someone who has tempered his need to always put others first, and become more judicious about when and how and to whom he gives himself. And that? That is someone I’d really like to be.