#anake

The Wicked + The Divine - Adaptation of Archetypal Creatives In The Wicked + The Divine

Now then, before I start, I would like to be very clear: This is not meant to somehow establish that the characters of Wicked and The Divine are basic character archetypes. The characters of Wicked and The Divine are extremely unique, nuanced, and each have unique narratives. All I aim to do with this piece is to establish the archetypal creatives that the gods of Wicked And The Divine are modeled after. I was inspired to this after seeing the most recent issue and the story developments there.

Secondly, while I will be picking a chief style of creative person for each of the gods, this will not be the only one they represent for the most part. It's just the one they draw most heavily on and informs the way their story plays out within the comic.

And finally, I will be avoiding spoilers for the comic until the end, after outlining the creative types that each god embodies. Then, I will explain why these things are so notable and what they mean for the storyline as we approach the end. So with that mostly sorted out, let's get down to brass tacks. Order in this case will be mostly by how easily I can place each character as a specific sort of creator.

So, let us start off with the one whose creative type can be seen in who he takes his design from: Baal. Baal’s ability is taken directly from his own belief in his superiority, that he is better than everyone. So, as he believes this and gains fans who also believe in it, he has to act grander and  more exceptional to match the superiority that his fans have granted him. And to avoid spoilers, I will say nothing about how this ties into the events of the latest issue beyond saying that this is entirely why he only says the two phrases, no justification between. Because he believed he was the superior and that made him what he was. And yes, most of this also applies to the man from whom Baal’s look was taken from: Kanye West.

Next up, let’s take a look towards the one-time lover of Baal, Inanna. With Inanna, we have someone whose abilities are taken from their want, their need, to stand out amongst the crowd. And so he channels that energy into his looks, what he creates, and makes it his persona. Makes it so everything about him is to be the unique one, the one who does things that seem outlandish in order to gain some attention. And it shows in the musician chosen to be his inspiration: Prince, a man whose most notable things outside of his musical talents were his unique outfits and his temporary name change to a symbol called the “Love Symbol”.

Thirdly, we have the mobile rave himself: Dionysus. Here, we have a person who finds himself driven and almost dutybound to brighten and help people. With his particular talents, how he accomplishes this is by helping them out of the dreariness and lack of contact that the regular world has and welcoming them into the small collective that he creates with his talents. He takes this selfless want to help people to the extreme, shown in how his own abilities prevent him from going to sleep and how he keeps using them despite this eventually deadly side effect. And while there isn’t as easy a one to one for the sort of person he was inspired by, it’s simple enough to consider him a broad strokes interpretation of many DJs.

Next on the block is Tara, the most hated of the Pantheon despite her own best efforts. And she draws her powers from her efforts to be normal, to act like the people she is playing to. This even extends to the point that she attempts to perform for an audience without her natural abilities but instead from something she created outside of her persona’s talents. But, even with all these efforts to be ‘the normal girl’, Tara still believes herself to be superior to her audience. She flipped out when her effort to create music without use of her talents bombed, and blamed it on the audience before ending up ostracized by the fans of the Pantheon for ‘wasting’ her talents on her own efforts to create something else. Now, while her style and that are not as easily pinned down as with Baal and Inanna, her attitude and general personality archetype can be identified to general females in pop music in the modern day. But, to give a strong example, Tara’s hatedom and her own ‘girl next door’ schtick are most likely lifted from Taylor Swift.

The Morrigan is our next stop on this tour of the Pantheon and their multitude of creative personalities. And with her, we reach a creative type that tends to end up romanticized in fiction but that is not typically as great in real life: someone who draws their creativity from mental illness. In The Morrigan’s case, its her shifting between her three selves that stands in for most mental illness rather than a more direct attempt to represent Bipolar Disorder as might be assumed by the trio setup she has. And from this, we see how she draws her creative efforts from her mental illness, allowing her create her own thing with this persona. But it’s not like she only has a mental illness in order to facilitate her having some talent, with her illness resulting in many scars and other issues for our next one to be covered. Would give a real life music example but…..that doesn’t exactly seem cool, so….let's give the example everyone jumps to when they think tortured artist: Vincent Van Gogh.

Baphomet’s entire creative type is the non-believer, someone who considers themselves utterly lacking in the talents to create whatever it is that makes them so powerful and known. In Baphomet’s case, this is due to the circumstances that granted him his godhood being so inextricably linked to The Morrigan rather than anything that he would consider having made himself. With this creative, they typically end flipping between more on large bouts of introspection and self-pity and extroverted efforts to distract away from this tumultuous internal life. One major concern with this type of creative is the fact that they will typically remain close to whatever abuse it is that granted them their ability to be creative, which can result in a great number of issues that will be covered at the end of this massive write up. I would give a real life example here but….that feels a little slimy.

And now we reach Urdr, the closest this list has to a midway point. And here, we get an interesting creative that….ends up hard to define concretely mostly due to their presence being mostly built off of being against things. With Urdr, we have a creative who aims to point out the problems with the field they are skilled in. With Urdr in specific, that means proving that the miracles each god performs is a sham. And with this method, the creative ends up in a cycle of attempting to disprove themselves by….doing the things they are trying to disprove. For the prime example of this mindset and creative output in action, it might be best to look at the earlier musical work of Ke$ha, where she was parodying party girl songs to the point it could be easily read as just more party girl songs.

Sahkmet stands as an inverse to Baphomet. Whereas Baphomet draws his creativity from embracing and wallowing in his abuse, Sahkmet’s creative type instead embodies someone who draws their creative drive from their efforts to avoid whatever abuses have befallen them. Which is why her character is so associated with practices that amount to rampant hedonism, with extreme amounts of sex, drugs, and liquor that all end up being how she creates. If you want to see this sort of mindset in a musical artist, the best example would be to look at the character Ke$ha played during her earlier albums. While it may not be accurate to the person she actually is, the character represented there is someone who very much hides away from any pain in the world through party girl antics.

Amaterasu, the God in this iteration of the Pantheon who is a very special case. Mostly because she takes her exceptionalism to heart much like Baal, but takes it to heart in a very different way. With Amaterasu, she represents a creative who gains their creativity from their own beliefs and uses her works as a way to convey her specific beliefs to people. And because of this, an innocent belief in the superiority of their spiritual ideas generally develops within the creative, whether they acknowledge it or not. While I am not particularly familiar with precise real life examples for this type of creative that are agreed upon, I do know that they exist out there.

Lucifer, the eternal rebel. And yes, Lucifer’s creative type is that simple: she represents the rebels, the people who derive their energy and creativity from going against the grain of society. Whether it be against the time’s cultural norms, a specific political system, or simply rebelling against what's mainstream, going against something is what they end up known for and what they usually make their best work in response to. While you could theoretically point at any number of punk bands and find an okay example, the top example would be Green Day. To be specific, the band during one album that is still hyped as their best work, American Idiot.

And now let’s cover one god who you don’t encounter until much later into the comic series, Persephone. Who…..you probably already know where she comes from if you look into the comic with even a casual glance. Well, let’s go. Persephone represents a creative type that is similar and different from the everyman that Tara is: the fan ascended. Someone whose most notable work before becoming empowered with creativity was following and being a fan of another creative to a massive degree. They tend to draw their creativity initially from borrowing ideas that the person they were a fan of has or had done creatively. To find this sort of person, you can typically look towards someone most famous for doing covers of other peoples’ songs or who are most known for directly using someone else’s style.

Woden. If you know the comic at all, you may have just inadvertently rolled your eyes because….yeah, Woden is a slimeball. And good news, the creative he embodies definitely ends up usually being a creepy slimeball like this. Woden’s creative type is a manager or producer who does not have a great deal of musical talent, but has the ability to make sure others are empowered to be creative. Y’know, within the boundaries he sets for them. So while he may not be the one making his art, he is at least able to generate exceptionalism within others. For an example of this that….isn’t as slimy as Woden can be, you can look at producers like DJ Khaled for a person whose exceptional skill is getting exceptional people together more than it is being personally exceptional.

And to round out our collection of gods and goddesses, we have Minerva. Now, while it isn’t shown well in the first few issues, Minerva occupies what I would consider one of the creative types that is quintessential: the legacy creative. Someone whose talents and exceptionalism are inextricably linked to her family to some degree, rather than being exclusively their own. And they get their creative energy by drawing on this history in order to best implement what has come before into the current age of creative endeavours. And for an example here, you can look at...pretty much any son or daughter of a musician who went into music, although it's usually most directly represented by those who go into the same genre of music as their parents.

So there we go, all of the wide variety of creatives represented most prominently by the gods and goddesses of The Wicked + The Divine. To all those not interested in spoilers, you may exit this post at this time.

Seriously.

This will be major spoilers for the most recent issues.

Like…...will shatter how you see the initial issues level of spoilers.

Just making sure all y’all who want to read on regardless understand what’s happening here.

Okay?

Okay.

So, why are all these creative types so important to the Pantheon in the most recent issues? Simple. Because the 2 year time limit on their lives is not a set timer for when their godhood burns through them and kills them. It's the average amount of time it takes for the personas that their creative types represent to become more of their personality than what personality they possessed before their godhood. And once a god or goddess buys into their own hype to that degree, their actions slowly become more reckless and self-destructive until their own godhood ends up killing them not through burning them out, but by their god-enhanced nature making them commit to actions that get them killed. The best example of this conclusion can be seen in the special comics that have been released over the years, with the 1300s Occurrence comic demonstrating it most clearly with the nun Lucifer who vastly exceeded the typical 2 years a god lasts.

And the god’s godhood consuming and killing them in this manner is what allowed for the relinquishment of their powers in the latest issue. By acknowledging that they are actual people with their own personalities and that they are not simply the personas that their creative types are engineered to display, they become able to move beyond their godhood and all the things it grants. You can even see through their creative types why it is that they said what they said when each relinquished their power and can even infer that Persephone was the first to do so because of being a fan of the Pantheon and being able to see this perspective once she was able to experience what being part of the Pantheon is actually like.

So yeah.

Favorite Variant Covers - Fandemonium, Issues 6 - 11

Art by Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson, David Laufente, Marguerite Sauvage, Frazer Irving, Christian Ward and Fiona Staples 

Chapter 4: How to Lie and Not Get Away With It