Cronenbergian Tardis

Lots of articles and reviews coming out for DIE, which I’ll be posting across the month, but this one’s something different. As well as doing a lengthy interview, I invited Alex Spencer of Polygon and twatd along to the latest DIE RPG playtest

Bonus:

So 39# , what an issue.Laura is back, persephone is gone and we get some answers. I feel like this issue tied the main loose ends for me in the most beautiful way.

So og Persephone has revealed the fourth rule, and the fact that is complete bs. She doesn’t know the break the cycle but hopes that one day a Persephone will. AND SHE DOES.

Lets go back to issue 6 :

This panels are pointing to their downfall. Ananke aand Woden only see in circles. Only relying on what happened. Ananke is basing her strategy on myths. She controls Baal using his own myth of Baal Hamon, and she believes its necessary. She believes the myths is what keeping her in power. Why she always wins.

But as soon as Laura deviates from the myth she is clueless , she is powerless. This is a beautiful fuck you to books like the white godess. Yes we can see patterns in different myths and mythologies but as soon as something doesnt fit the form or the circle of the hero the academics are clueless. And so is she. This makes me so fucking pleased.

Ananke only knows how to react to patterns and as soon as Laura does something original , Ananke lost. She doesnt know how to react. In that way Laura is a new og persephone she is a pathmaker, she created something new. New art, new way of creativity in the very same way og persephone invented the gods, Laura is making something new. Recurrence 2.0?

Laura is not a god that much is true. She is something new , she can create fire. Like Ananke said :

Laura lights that match , she have that power to inspire. She brings the fire to the humans. She brings them inspiration. Which hell if we think about issue 5 where she only lit a tiny match because she had only started to discover herself.

Look at how confident she is now. I know she used to be persephone but i think Prometheus may be more fitting. I never really understood why Prometheus for the Prometheus gambit. You kill a god to get his powers but Prometheus is not a god.

I think the name is more fitting here, she brings fire, inspiration to the humans. But she is not a god.

I just find it to be a really beautiful closure. Part we dont need gods we have the inspiration within us. Part we are our own gods? Sort of thing.

conservatives:

A TRANS PRIDE BATH BOMB

OF WHICH BUYING HELPS CHARITIES

i was pretty sure of the “ananke chooses the gods herself” theory from early on, which appears to be confirmed now. but nonetheless, after the 1923 special the resemblances between recurring “figures” in the pantheons intrigue me. i’m not sure if we’re actually meant to read into them, but this is a book about cycles, so i figured listing them wasn’t a bad idea if they turn out to be important. at the very least, it leads us to wonder how ananke is so good at pegging what god will be best for someone’s personality when she usually barely knows them…

anyway, spoilers for the whole book under the read more.

Alex: The 1923 Special has sent me down a rabbit hole made of Wikipedia entries and half-remembered university lectures, so I thought I’d try and gather together a guide to the gods’ real-life equivalents, and what they represent, three deities at a time.

Thankfully, this time, without any gods who are sneakily three people. Or well… maybe not. We shall see.

Bits of history, connections and plot spoilers aplenty after the break.

Second, someone pointed out that she kinda seems like Ayn Rand. As a slightly later writer who benefitted from the trail blazer by Woolf as a highly philosophical and uncompromising woman novelist & abused these benefits to spout fascist garbage, she could be the “missing link” here. Also, seeing her posing next to the bespectacled bigot Baal makes me think of Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky…maybe Gillen saw that biopic.

I appreciate your reading of Woden. I didn’t know or forgot the bit in Lang’s biography about Goebbels offering him a job and that really puts Woden into historical perspective. I was extremely disturbed to see Expressionism folded into Nazism like that, and it’s good to know there is some pretty concrete historical backing for this artistic choice. I was struggling to content myself with a more conceptual reading about how the Nazis coopted avant-garde aesthetics more broadly, but this just lines it up succinctly.

By way of explanation >.>