#somewhat negative

I’m sick of people (the type of reblog baiting that is “reblog this or else you’re a (some type of insult/bad quality relating to a person you usually don’t want to associate yourself with)” type of reblogs) reblog baiting man. I fell for it once and I felt super grossed out after feeling like being tricked to do that instead of reblogging outta my own free will (like a lifeless puppet… urgh), so I deleted that at one point DESPITE FULLY AGREEING WITH THE MESSAGE ITSELF. It got worse for me when I realised how much it affects people with OCD especially, which is a lot.

I ABSOLUTELY get wanting to know if people agree with you and you aren’t alone and that you want to spread a message… I guess. IT IS NOT OK TO ME to force reblogs if it means somehow I’m in the wrong for not wanting to reblog something or people are basing those morals and holding THE FRICKING BLOCK BUTTON against people just because they didn’t reblog the same thing, especially if I liked the post, because the majority of people who’ve been on tumblr a while have liking muscle memory and y’know, like stuff they agree with!!? and that includes me!!!

Reblog bait triggers some people’s OCD, ESPECIALLY MORAL OCD in a stressful manner that makes it hard for them to function when they stumble onto reblog bait. YOU might have OCD and maybe YOU don’t get affected, I get it! but if others with OCD see it, it’ll likely trigger them in a negative manner, and I actually cannot stomach that too well. I’m a lady often with nerves of steel, mind you, so that means a heck of a negative thing to me.

Look, you’re also *not* a bad person, having OCD/moral OCD yourself or not, if you reblog that reblog bait, but really, please don’t let reblog bait guilt trip you and force you into reblogging something you would otherwise just go ‘like’ and move on with your life with. Only do such things if YOU specifically want to, and not via guilt or remorse! Please.

I’m just… weary that a lot of the reblog-related posts (that aren’t tag games or other fun things) is often reblog bait that guilt-trips you or attempts to force your attention when I and maybe you, would’ve given it the time of day if it wasn’t so forceful. There’s that saying/qoute that springs to mind to me… “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” And I think keeping things like that in mind will maybe help ya out. Don’t let people tell you how to run your reblogs. If people hate that, so be it. They aren’t yourself.

Now, of course, I have to say… people who base their blocklist on just moral reblog bait now peeve me off a heck of a lot - I GET where they’re coming from, but seriously, there’s a high chance those kinds of people you wanna block will completely ignore it anyway. (And usually, liking the post means they likely agree with the post, so there’s a high chance you’re shooting yourself in the foot TWICE, so to speak.)

The full pantheon abdicating! This is basically where I expected us to go. Since 39 it seems like the natural place for the story to be headed. Laura’s revelations, along with the Daddy Forgive Us special made it clear that the only way out of the game was not to play it. I was kinda luke warm on that concept, but it made sense for where the story was at that point. I was waiting to see how it actually played out before getting fussy about it.

I give him a C for execution here. Maybe a C+. 

I thought Dio’s moment was great. Jon’s was beautiful. Inanna’s I definitely could have gotten behind if he’d actually gotten to have any of that arc on the page instead of getting put on a bus 30 chapters ago. 

The rest range from “meh” to “yikes.”

I could have liked this, I wanted to like this. Given how much “OKAY” has been miles more thoughtful than Mothering Invention, I was genuinely hoping to like this. I would have loved to see these kids find something more important than godhood to live for. But that’s not what we got.

We did get them realizing that being a god is not worth dying for. Which is good!  And essential! And basically the central conceit of this comic! 

But.

But...  

I really wanted to see our cast value their lives period. And while there was some of that, there was far more of seeing them be humbled. We saw them beaten down until they had no choice but to admit they Were Not Special (or at least, were not as special as they thought). I was hoping for them to find a capacity to value their lives because their lives have value whether or not they are special, but instead it was a story about being humbled, and I guess to me, I just can’t see that what young queer artists need is help being humbled. They need help being valued as people, they need the internal presence of self to command that value be respected, and they need the external support to give them a fighting chance at that.  And not to be That Fan, but that fighting chance doesn’t come from individual actions. It comes from worker solidarity and respect for labor as labor.  It just doesn’t work for me to have a series around the exploitation and consumption of young talent and leave anything material about money and labor practices out of the material.

(McKelvie’s My (6000 F) pantheon has unionized joke, but unironically.)

Anyway this comic was all about Don’t Let This Happen To You.  And that’s a good start, but I was hoping for it to be so much more than that. It could be that this is me looking at WicDiv and wanting it to say something broader about specialness and creativity and mental illness and exploitation. 

(There’s a lot to be unpacked wrt presenting itself as a story about the whole world through all of human history, while also intending to be  psuedoautobiographical for a very specific set of circumstances. But that’s not this post.)

It’s weird because like, Fandemonium already delivered masterfully on Laura learning to value herself outside of godhood.  Laura’s last pre-apoptheosis soliloquy about “I can’t save any of them, but I can still help them” was one of those wham moments that really cemented this book’s place in my heart. Living through Fandemonium and realizing that the gods were people, and needed actual love and support from people who cared about them as people, and that just being a decent friend is something worth living for, fuck!! That’s good shit!! That’s fucking excellent!! 

And for the rest of WicDiv’s run, I was always waiting for the story to get back to that place, but it never really did. 

 (ETA AFTER 45 IS OUT: ok fine I fucking love that Laura saved Luci. Big Gay Hero Girl drags naughty non-devil out of hell and they kiss, fucking A+. But “can’t save but CAN help” is still something I wish the comic had followed up on more. The friendship thing got touched on a little bit too,  but never in a way I found as satisfying as Fandemonium.)

So anyway Luci going Full Diva. Her future is this and her future is nothing.

The longer I chew on it, the more I like it, and the more it seems like the inevitable place for Elanor Rigby’s story to go. It’s a good continuation from where we last saw her have any scrap of agency, but also frustrating in that “the lat time we saw her have any scrap of agency” was basically the entire comic ago. It was jarring to have her go from [One Sassy Line Per Issue] to [Maybe I’m The Final Boss]. Her story suffered deeply suffered from all the time she spent off screen. But despite all that, I’m very much really looking forward to whatever the fuck Laura Wilson’s going to do about this. 

I’m trying not to get my hopes up for Talk Her Down ending. It seems perfectly in line with this series to end with the moral of “sometimes, no matter how kind or brave or caring you are, people you love pick their addictions over living.” That’s a song I’ve already heard live and in person, and I don’t really want or need to hear anyone else’s studio cover.

Uh final thought on 43 is.... Minanke DOES seem to count herself as part of the 12, which still lines up with my Emily Was Also A Fake God theory (Fauxmaterasu theory? Nokami hypothesis? Amaterasuspicion?) but it does seem unlikely to actually be a Thing between now and the epilogue. shrug.

(ETA AGAIN: I had to write out my feelings on 39 and Laura’s own abdication (unpotheosis?) to properly respond to 43. So here’s a draft of another unpublished post that I fleshed out.)

I have extremely mixed feelings about chapter 39. 

First Feeling: thank fuck the pregnancy plot is over. 

Second feeling: establishing abdication as an option established a nice overarching shape to this book. Things have felt directionless for many chapters, but this does make it seem like we are back on some kind of track.

Third Feeling: kinda liking abdication as a general direction for endgame.  For most of the series, I was hoping the whole that there actually was Something Important about the recurrence, but since it's clear now that it’s basically all lies, I like this this angle well enough.

Strongest Feeling: hell fucking yes to Laura’s shaved head. 

(Tangential Feeling: buzzing your own head is good and you should think about doing it. Doing it for catharsis in a moment of crisis is A-OK, but I did it once just because I felt like it and it was fucking great. banishing your high maintenance hair does not cure depression, but it does give you back an hour of personal upkeep every day and the fuzzy head is wonderful to touch.)

Contrary to most of the fandom, though, I absolutely loathed Laura’s monologue here, and the context that it puts around her not-choice. There’s a lot of shitty Hot Takes out there about how mental illness and addition and creation intersect. A lot of people will suggest that being unhealthy makes you a better artist, and what’s more that being a better artist is worth being unhealthy.  This series is unambiguously and steadfastly against that message, which is one of the absolute best and most important things about it!  I don’t want to diminish that.

But that all said, seeing Laura alone in the dark describing “an addicts moment of clarity” was... jesus it was all kinds of personally painful and upsetting. It hurt real bad, and not in the way I though I had agreed to be hurt. And I’m not sure how to spell out why.

I have thousands and thousands of words on why it struck such a sour cord in me, but a lions share can be summed up with “fuck absolutely every story where a Troubled Girl just needed to get traumatized/humiliated/humbled enough to Realize How Bad She Was Being.” Double fuck this one in particular for showing the girl getting over addiction/mental illness by literally sitting alone in the dark thinking about how much she fucked up.  That story is tired, and cruel, and dangerous, and thank Christ I encountered this comic at 30 and not 19 because I would have swallowed it down with all the other poison that Helpful Adults fed me.

But yeah though, her shaved look is fucking adorable as shit.  Neither she nor Britany made any hair mistakes.

ETA ULTIMATE: That last bit is the one thing in this post I don’t quite still stand by. By the end, it’s clear that the above wasn’t at all the story this book was trying to tell at all. I thought WicDiv was trying to tell some Epic Truths, Hard-Facts-About-Human-Nature shit. But despite the sweeping setup (All Across The World and Through All Of History) the book was using a complex allegory for a very specific situation (Selling Your Soul and Name and Life To Creative-Industrial Machines), and that made it muddy.  

(Insert Principal Skinner meme here “Am I out of touch? Was I simply interrogating the text from the wrong perspective?  No, it’s the original creators who are wrong!”)

I’m from a family of mentally ill, addiction-prone, recovering-Catholic artists.  Laura is in my blood. Half the people I love are Laura.  I have Laura’s painting on my wall and her books on my shelf. I’ve sat with Laura’s mother a few years after Laura’s death, as her father now slowly dying in the next room, and listened to her music for the first time. (It was good. It was really good.  And I never even knew.)

These experiences colored my read, but how could they not?  

I do now, I think, understand what Gillen was trying to say- the addiction he was talking about was to stardom, the attention and accolades, and free pass to make your own shit be everyone else’s problem. I understand now that the “art” that the gods made was always supposed to be Not Real Art, that there was no true “message” from their songs- all noise, no signal. It was never about Laura’s art, or even Laura as an artist.  And that was unpleasant to reconcile.

Because when you're Laura, or Elanor, or any of them, life doesn’t have to grant your ill-advised wish before it fucks your head and kills you. Sometimes you fight as hard as you can with every fiber of your being and you’re still in Hell. Sometimes you’re doing all the Meetings and self-reflection and therapy you can manage and you’re still a Destroyer. But the shit you create while you’re down there is worthy of creating. What you do with your too-short, too-fucked time matters. A fucked up life was still worth living because it was your life to live. And... I guess, from the story presented in Faust Act and Fandemonium, I sort of thought that this was what WicDiv was supposed to be talking about. I thought it was going to be about doing something good even when life is fucking you. But instead it is a cautionary tale that  that suggests you could have stopped getting fucked at any time if you had just gotten over yourself and said the magic words.

We spent half the comic watching Laura drag herself through the mud. Half the comic was focused on Her Mistakes, when so little of her circumstances were actually her fault. “Punish Ophelia until she gets over herself” is not at all what WicDiv meant to be about. I imagine the creators would be aghast to hear that’s what I got out of it. But the text is what the text is.  While it is intended (and successful!) at being many other very good things, this one really bad thing is still part of that mix, and that sucks.

Maybe I should have picked up on the discrepancy between my read and the intent sooner. Probably I should have just done myself a favor and stop reading once I did.

2016, 2017 while my life was going a bit to shit, this comic was exactly what I needed. Being in the fandom made my life better and helped me meet cool new friends and get through some of the hardest shit to happen to me since I was a kid. Then in 2018, it slid into source of frustration and soured promise. Now at the end I have no idea if I liked it or not. 

But that’s fine, now that it’s done. The ink is dry, the ritual is over. It’s just a comic book now.  Some pictures I still love and some words I don’t always agree with. A lot of noise, arguable amounts of signal, but not a song I want to play on loop anymore.

I have no real conclusion to draw here. I respect at how firmly WicDiv rejects dark and unhealthy parts of being a professional creator- especially unhealthy things that are generally just accepted as Common Wisdom. I don’t think it took enough care in spelling out what it was rejecting, though, and I do think it was remiss in not finding good healthy things to embrace as an alternative.

All of the above notwithstanding, I have to give it credit for delivering almost exactly what I wanted in terms of lesbian nonsense. That ain’t nothing.