#plot points and character arcs are dropped entirely between books for no discernable reason

[captain-noir]

been slowly making my thru the vc books and i can say now, with certainty that the show is in fact superior in almost every conceivable way. i think nostalgia was clouding my judgment but apart from iwtv and tvl and maaaybe qotd....these books are fucking ridiculous

[habitmorelikefuckyou]

EverymanHYBRID - Pacing, Character-Driven Plots, and Comic Relief

Everyone shut the FUCK up I’m shifting into hyperfocus mode

In all seriousness, EverymanHYBRID is one of my favorite series period, and I have SO much to say about its writing and production. It’s, in my Personal Opinion, probably the best-written of the main Slenderverse ARG (Though I’m willing to admit that this is probably influenced by personal bias and you’re absolutely allowed to disagree). And I just want to go in-depth with some of my favorite elements!

(obvious spoilers for EverymanHYBRID if you haven’t seen it)

I think HABIT, and the way his character is written and used, is probably the best place to start.

HABIT, in my opinion, is an EXTREMELY interesting villain- right down to the concept. HABIT is literally the personification of the darkest, most horrible things people are capable of. He is a literal embodiment of humanity’s sins. That is quite possibly one of the scariest and most cosmically threatening concepts they could have chosen. And what’s even more interesting is the way they then approached that concept-

They made him fun.

That’s something I see everyone who watches EMH hook onto. The villain, the main antagonist, the horrible old-as-time pure evil mastermind, is a fun character! He’s witty, he’s funny, he’s rude in that flippant, crude, lighthearted way we’ve come to associate with characters like Deadpool. He doesn’t act with any sort of discernible logic or pretense. And that’s the point.

Let’s skip ahead to the last stretch of the series for a moment. After “:D”, pretty much the rest of the videos consist entirely of Vinny and Habit alone, with occasional appearances from a very traumatized Evan. That’s 25 videos- about a full fourth of the story. The final 1/4 of EMH is almost entirely Vinny and HABIT. Now, why is this important? Well, look back to the beginning. If you look at this entire series with an analytical perspective, you realize that among some other themes, one aspect of the series never leaves entirely- its humor. 

No matter what arc or event the story touches on, there’s always some form of comic relief. It wasn’t always doom and gloom. One of EMH’s trademarks, in my opinion, is how they constructed the plot to move consistently between those two tones, and even mix them.

How does this relate to HABIT? Think about that thing I said- for the last fourth of EMH, the only characters we get to see for the most part are Vinny and HABIT. Vinny, at this point, is a very changed man. He’s not the same college guy making videos with his friends that he was in video one- he’s worn out, scared, broken. Before this, all of the humor or heart the story had come from the guys’ interactions, but Vinny is alone and empty now- he can’t provide that without breaking character.

And THAT is why HABIT being a fun, flippant character is so important. He not only gets to have that creepy, unhinged vibe- it’s a utility. It’s a way to incorporate that element back into the story in a way that still upholds the plot. They made the villain funny because only a villain could possibly be funny in that kind of situation.

Like I said earlier, the story wasn’t always oppressive and scary and sad. It broke up its tragedy with humor or love. That wasn’t just a style choice; it was necessary to tell the story the EMH crew wanted to tell. That’s the thing that some people don’t seem to get- you can’t have a story be nothing but sad, upsetting things piled on top of each other with nothing in between. It’s not the low point that you feel, but the drop from a high point to get there. You need highs if you want your audience to care about the lows, so you need some element of levity to a dark story if you want people to care when it gets dark again. That’s what makes HABIT so cleverly written. He manages to do that without moving an inch outside of the character we’d expect. 

That point also serves as a good segway to something else I want to talk about- Pacing.

EverymanHYBRID, in comparison to most other ARGs, is a slow-paced story. Yes, the conflict begins about six videos in, but if you think about it, that was barely the start. We don’t even get a direct hint to HABIT’s presence until 20 videos in. There’s also the livestreams they did, and all those normal videos were included for a reason- to let us get attached. The thing about EMH is that it was a HEAVILY character-focused narrative. That means that taking your time to get the audience attached to your characters is crucial.

Because of the long-form medium chosen to tell the story, the guys had to establish a foundation that would last. In a particularly short piece of media, like a small book or a movie, a few (WELL WRITTEN) scenes can give you all the character-building you need, because those scenes will still be fresh in the audience’s mind at the climax. But in a longer story, like EMH, you can’t do that- you need to take a while to establish those characters as people, because the audience needs time to build that association. Your audience isn’t going to be thinking about that one time that character had that one conversation in video ten by the time they’re getting murdered in video sixty. There needs to be a substantial connection between character and audience if that sad stuff is supposed to have any impact.

And EverymanHYBRID does that- and then they do more. They don’t just take it slow in the beginning. They set up that foundation, and then they keep building onto it. 

During my second rewatch when I was paying much more attention to the actual writing of the series, one thing I noticed is that after every arc- every major event or tragedy- the story hits the breaks a little. We get a step back, we get a breather, and once again it’s just us and the characters with the threat pushed to the backburner. We not only got to see the characters as people in the first act; we got to see them at every step of the story. 

We get to watch in detail how Jeff unravels from the sweet, helpful, kinda goofy guy he was in the first episode to the depressed, hopeless shell he’s become by the time he dies. We get to see every stage of Evan’s devolving mental state from the funny, hot-headed sidekick to the suicidal, broken mess HABIT makes him. Vinny’s journey from the soft-spoken, friendly leader he was at the start to the hollow murderer he is by the end is long and arduous, and we get to see every checkpoint of that transformation. They don’t just break these characters. They make sure that we get to watch them break- because that’s the point.

That’s what makes EverymanHYBRID a character-driven story. The essence of the story isn’t the scary supernatural conflict; it’s how that conflict affects and changes and torments these characters, their relationships, their reactions and then the consequences of those reactions. The pacing was designed to make sure that those aspects were always the main focus, whether we realized it or not. At its center, EverymanHYBRID IS a horror story, but it’s absolutely NOT a thriller- EverymanHYBRID is a tragedy.

The story isn’t about Slenderman, or The Rake, or even HABIT. It’s about the Mining Town Four. It’s about The Voyeur, The Guardian, The Firebrand, and The Everyman. It’s about Stephanie, Jeff, Evan, and Vinny. It’s about a group of innocent people cursed to be reincarnated over and over in an infinite cycle, while trapped in a neverending conflict with unimaginable horror that they can’t ever hope to defeat. It’s about the hopeless, destructive, unfair struggle between man and evil. 

And they represented this idea through the most obvious and yet most clever medium possible- through four young, innocent, likable friends, who are tortured, driven apart, and destroyed by a formless source of malice that they don’t understand. EverymanHYBRID, in the end, is a tragic retelling of the oldest moral concept there is, on an impossibly large and yet painfully personal level.

And in my opinion? It’s pretty damn impressive that they managed to do all that with a youtube channel.

[alwaysspeakshermind]

Top 5 Anti-Varchie Arguments & Why They Make No Sense

#3: “Varchie breaks up every other day/they’re so toxic.”

Yeah, so...to quote both Hamlet 3.3.87 and that one Bugs Bunny meme—NO. 

[Quick but serious question: is this whole “they break up all the time” thing a trying-to-be-cleverly-snarky exaggeration, or are people really just that unobservant? I want to believe it’s the first, but I see it so often now that I’m becoming horribly afraid it’s the latter.]

Over the course of three seasons and 57 episodes, Archie and Veronica break up three times—three!—and each of those times, the breakup is precipitated by outside events, no one is happy to be breaking up, and both parties make a concerted effort to remain friends while neither ever actually quits caring about the other.

Regarding the toxic argument: no they are quite obviously a safe and non-toxic ship. (Although they do appear to present the occasional choking hazard for children under the age of 13 who cannot seem to swallow Varchie’s happiness).  

“Toxic” is, however, a term I refuse to unpack and dissect at the length it deserves right now because I’m so incredibly sick of the misconceptions Tumblr and the rest of the internet perpetuates regarding toxic/abusive relationships that my exhausted frustration with this subject alone can fill pages and it’ll drag me off topic. So instead, I’m just going to point out that while none of Riverdale’s main ships is toxic (everyone’s just young; there is an actual difference), Varchie is the ship with the fewest elements the internet typically likes to designate as such (antagonism/aggression toward each other, childish/petty behavior designed to get under the other’s skin, resentment/bitterness directed at the other person following a breakup, etc.), so the frequency with which this argument is thrown around is extra-laughable. 

Especially considering how demonstrably willing both Archie and Veronica are to overcome their unfamiliarity with each other’s world, share each other’s concerns, support each other’s interests, and essentially serve as each other’s partner because they both consider all those things fundamental parts of being in a relationship (which they are).

**IMPORTANT NOTE: if you struggle to discern the difference between:

(1)  a healthy real-life relationship (which, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, will in fact include arguments because people are people and no human being who possesses a mind of their own agrees with another human being all the time)

(2)  a toxic real-life relationship (which can include arguments but doesn’t have to)

(3)  healthy and toxic fictional relationships (which are entirely different beasts, particularly in book or TV series as plot requirements frequently dictate that characters react in ways that no actual person would, because the narrative needs conflict or drama to function and publishers/networks still over-rely on relationships to provide that conflict or drama)

then you probably will believe Varchie is toxic, and you definitely need to do some research that goes a little deeper than Wikipedia/that one post with a bunch of notes that was written by a person who came out of their first college psychology class feeling like Sigmund Freud. Toxic relationships are no joke, and it’s a little frightening to see how many people on the internet are so confused as to what constitutes one in reality that they frequently interpret normal, healthy relationships portrayed in fiction as toxic, and borderline-toxic relationships in fiction as healthy. (Also, it doesn’t help that people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to paint their dislike of a certain pairing in homilectic terms, are in the habit of taking scenes that check off a few of the “toxic relationship” boxes and twisting them out of context so that they can pretend there’s an element of moral superiority to their prejudice.)

But, important reminder! Fiction and real life are not the same thing, so if you want to measure fiction by reality’s standards, you have to apply liberal amounts of common sense to your assessments of the goings-on in a fictional world and recognize that many developments are necessitated by things like plot advancement, network executives, deadlines, and your basic this-actor-got-sick or that-actor-is-going-leave-soon randomness. Playing judge, jury, and executioner on the toxicity of TV relationships is, if possible, even more complex than just judging the toxicity of real-life relationships because by arbitrary unwritten law, TV relationships must include some onscreen friction. 

In fact, one of the first things you’re taught about writing fiction is that no one wants to read/watch/hear about the thing that almost happened, so don’t waste valuable narrative time portraying that—yes, everyone likes to joke about how they would love to watch a show where the kids went to class everyday and everything happened normally, but it’s a joke. It’s not true. No one who’s done with high school really wants to go back again and listen to an hour of boring lectures week after week, and no one who’s still in school wants to come home and watch a show that’s a repeat of their entire day. TV shows (or books, or movies) expect you to understand that each episode/scene/chapter/whatever is a story they’re telling you about the time something did happen, and that expectation also extends to fictional relationships. Just because you happen to witness a couple’s every fight/argument/disagreement onscreen does not mean you’re expected to conclude that “OMG, this couple is so toxic! All they ever do is fight!” 

No.

That would be like concluding the only holidays in the town of Riverdale are Christmas and Labor Day because we haven’t seen them have Halloween or New Year’s yet. You’re expected to put two and two together and assume they’ve celebrated those holidays that logically must have preceded and followed Christmas, just like you’re expected to grasp the underlying implication that after weeks/months of happiness and fun and peace, these two characters who love each other are now squabbling/experiencing tension over something important that they disagree on. Archie and Veronica are shown working together, being happy, enjoying one another’s company etc. multiple times before conflict ever arises between them, and them figuring out how to navigate through that conflict is intended as a facet of the story’s plot and a developmental point in their character arcs, not a red flag denoting an unhealthy relationship.

But anyways.

Back to the “they break up all the time” argument and why its fallaciousness is so obvious that it needs to be retired with all possible speed. (And as a bonus, also back to its close relatives “they break up for stupid reasons and get back together in five minutes.”

The “Shouldn’t-Be-Necessary-But-Apparently-Is”Quick Guide To Varchie Breakups:

Breakup #1: The end of episode 2x08

Duration of breakup: Almost one whole episode (that spans the course of at least a couple days)

What leads to breakup: Archie, the comfortable-with-feelings person, drops the L-word and desperately wants to hear it back. Veronica, the uncomfortable-with-feelings person, isn’t sure she can say it back and doesn’t want to go on acting like it’s not a big deal when she can see how important it is to Archie.

The outcome: Neither Archie nor Veronica’s actual feelings change at all from the time of the breakup to the time of the reunion. (No, not even when Betty kisses Archie.) Veronica just finally realizes that what she feels for Archie is love, so she goes to see him and tells him face-to-face. Archie is happy to get back together right then and there, and they resume where they left off.

 “Breakup” #2: The end of episode 3x06

Duration of “breakup”: three +/- episodes (end of 3x06-beginning of 3x10)

What leads to “breakup”: Archie believes Hiram’s vendetta against him endangers everyone close to him, not just him, and decides running away is his only option.

The outcome: Once again, neither Archie nor Veronica’s actual feelings change. They both attempt to move on/forget (Archie with Farm Girl Whose Name Escapes Me, Veronica with Reggie), but don’t exactly succeed as evidenced by Veronica’s anger, Archie’s remorse, and how quickly they want to get back together when he returns to town. 

NOTE: This is the one I sarcastically refer to as “the breakup” because it was over the phone (which, as everyone who’s ever utilized this dodge knows, is the easiest way to keep yourself from going back on a hard decision you don’t want to make. It should be obvious to those with functioning sensibilities that Archie does it that way because he knows if he goes the in-person route he’ll have to see Veronica cry and won’t be able to handle it). Besides that, Archie tells Veronica that he loves her and she was “it” for him from the day he met her, and it clearly kills both them to say goodbye. So again, as any viewer with common sense can see, it’s a breakup in name only—their heads are forced to accept what their hearts can’t, and everything they think is resolved is really only postponed.

 Breakup #3: The end(ish) of episode 3x10

Duration of breakup: ALMOST TWELVE WHOLE EFFING EPISODES (end of 3x10-middleish of 3x22). COUNT THEM.

What leads to breakup: Archie has in no way recovered from his rough experiences over the past months, and is behaving erratically. Veronica observes his out-of-character behavior with a lot of concern, and Reggie (whether accidentally or on purpose) fuels the idea that Archie is no longer Archie, so when Hiram ends up shot the day of the PSATs, Veronica knee-jerk reacts due to all the stress, worries that Archie might be responsible for it, and doesn’t contradict Archie when he asks if they’re done.

The outcome: Once again (surprise, surprise!) neither Archie nor Veronica’s feelings for one another change. They again try to move on/forget each other by dating other people (Josie and Reggie), but it doesn’t work. They remain close, continue to look to each other for comfort/support, and as soon as they’re faced with a life-or-death scenario, they throw caution to the wind and tell each other the truth (“I love you. I don’t think I ever stopped loving you”/“My heart ached for you. Because I felt the same way.”)

 To recap: what do these breakups have in common?

(1) Each breakup is due to a legitimate concern involving the other person, i.e., they are breakups for mature reasons, not breakups for “How dare you not text me back within five minutes” or “I’m a free range pony that can’t be tamed” reasons (with all due respect to Fat Amy)

(2) Neither Archie nor Veronica wanted to break up

(3) Both Archie and Veronica continued to love each other

When you’re young, the un-fun truth is that you frequently make really bad decisions in love. (You also do it sometimes when you’re older, too.) Archie and Veronica breaking up because they mistakenly perceive certain issues as insurmountable, trying to move on with other people and then going back to each other to make things right and reaffirm the love they couldn’t pretend away the instant the opportunity arises isn’t them being fickle, or toxic—it’s just them being young and clueless and trying to recover from young and clueless mistakes as maturely as possible. 

And believe it or not, their relationship has been handled very well by Riverdale. There are few other TV couples who’ve been as steady as A&V, and none of them are teen couples (in fact, the only ones that even come to mind out of all the shows I’ve ever seen are married and/or background couples, not main couples, because main characters’ relationships are always put through more drama). It is basically unheard of for a teen show’s protagonist and their primary love interest (who, incidentally, is also another main character) to only go through three breakups in three seasons. It is rarer still for each of those breakups to have a justifiable concern at its core, and rarest of all for the characters to take the mature and difficult let’s-be-friends approach rather than the easy and childish let’s-personally-attack-the-other approach. 

That is not a back-and-forth and/or toxic relationship. That is a fictional teenage relationship handled more maturely than many a fictional adult relationship, and that is good. 

Postscript to the rant: 

Veronica does not break up with Archie in 1x01, because they are not yet together. 

Veronica does not break up with Archie in 1x11, because they are not yet together. 

Archie does not break up with Veronica in 2x01; he’s telling her he wants her to leave because he’s upset and lashing out. 

Archie does not break up with Veronica in 3x01, he just tries to soldier-heading-off-to-war her because he loves her too much to want her to waste her time waiting on him and Veronica refuses to agree to it because she loves him too much to back out because the going looks like it might get tough. 

I don’t know why all of these scenes are forever being cited as breakup scenes, but they are, and it’s so bafflingly incorrect that it makes me shudder. They’re not breakup scenes. End of story.

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine 36

Spoilers, obv.

Well, this was a fucker.

I wrote the following while drunk a few weeks ago.

This is something I only found myself chewing over the way home from drinks in town when I select a Spotify playlist for fist-pumping tracks. And it's mainly stuff like Ram Bam's Black Betty and My Sex Is On Fire or whatever, but it also includes Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire. Which is out of place in such a playlist, but also welcome.

It's a song which came out during the brief period between me becoming someone who bought pop music and someone who was a hardcore metalhead. It's a song I bought, and intensely loved. It's perhaps not a surprise. It's in its deeply unfashionable way, entirely me. A pure burst of reference pop.

It's a gimmick song. A list song. It's a list of events from Joel's life – it gives the impression of building towards the present day, but really is pretty fucking random from across the timeline, selecting stuff as it would occur, a ramble. The song is so sleight to be sarcastic, but it's delivered with a frustration and attack. The words are all meaningfully chosen, with juxtaposition between huge events and trivia equally sang with commitment, but the context is so traditional a frame to be almost dismissive. Yet with this disengagement – and with tricks thrown in to maintain interest from its monotony and add towards a slowly build tension – it builds towards an apocalypse, before backing off to a statement of that is how life feels as it is being lived, and the sense of apocalypse is an illusion, and the real horror is that this will continue ever onwards.

So, I was listening to that, while thinking about this issue, and sort of smiling.

And I can see what drunk me was getting at.

Okay – this is a tricky issue to talk about, as you slice somewhere and its guts come falling out. I've written a lot, but I'm also aware that writing that begs more questions which begs more specific answers. As always with these notes I say "This is a collection of thoughts from the making of the issue, but not comprehensive." Even in one like this where I'm saying a lot, that still holds true. This could have gone on forever. And on and on and on and...

Yeah, you get the point.

Perhaps the most common request from WicDiv fans is “Are we ever going to get a list of all the pantheons?” or, for the more demanding, “are we ever going to get a list of all the gods.” The latter makes me blink, for reasons I'll probably segue into, but we did want to do the former, at least as best as we could within the limitations we've set ourselves.

But also, I always think of the nature of murder and plans stretching across time. “I have been murdering people for hundreds of years” is a cool line, thrown off, never examined. I kinda wanted to examine it, and play with what the human brain does with repetition.

I recall a critique of the brilliant (and highly influential on yours truly) Heavenly Creatures, of the considerable sympathy you hold for the titular teemage murderers despite the horror of the murder on screen. The critique noted that the murder on screen was highly sanitized, and the actual murder had forty-five injuries, over twenty of which were head wounds. So the three or so blows shown in the murder were bad enough. When we're forced to really live with the actuality of what the murder required, to not just hit thrice, but again and again and again and again and again and again and many more times, at which point does any sympathy we have evaporate in the face of the actual reality of the horror of what they did. Murder is ugly.

I found myself thinking of an aside in one of the WW1 episodes of Hardcore History, which describes American reporters sitting in Belgium, watching the German army march past on the first offensive. It's over a million soldiers. The reporters sit in the cafe, and it's instantly astounding. And then it goes on, and the effect deadens a little. And then it becomes almost comic. And then, hours later, when you realise it's taken an entire day for these people to stomp past, it becomes surreal, brains shaking at the sheer size of it. That.

Also, Modern art, especially music, is about an exploration of repetition with minimised variations.  Paul Morley's Words And Music posited all pop music as a line from Alvin Lucifer's I Am Talking In A Room to Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head, from which a city emerges. That.

And a lot more – that's a selection of thoughts that went into this. It's idea rich, and frankly there's some stuff which – like any experimental piece – was a surprise for the team itself. We walked away with new stuff in our heads, learned from having a jackboot stomp on a human face across all human history, and what we saw when we juxtapose all these things together. I highly recommend trying the impossible, at least once.

When I first suggested it to Jamie, he was excited. The thought was that it'd be a whole issue, with three panels a page. This would have been an easier task, partially as it would be the only work required in the issue, and also the framing in a wide panel would require more detail, but less total research. In short, you wouldn't have to worry about what people were wearing on their legs in periods with scant research.

That fell by the wayside when I did the tight plotting for the arc. We couldn't afford the space, and I can only imagine what the response to the issue among the anti-this-kind-of-stuff readers if we had.

(The response was exactly what we expected it be, in terms of strong polarisation between The Best WicDiv Thing Evvvvaaa! and those who it had no effect at all, that its non-traditional form of comic narrative was essentially invisible.)

It was a few other things as well – in one way, I just wanted to give Jamie a guitar solo. I think he's the undisputed costume designer of his generation in the American field – even putting aside his work on WicDiv, he's responsible between three of the most influential looks of our time, two of which are going to be everywhere for the next five years at least (Miss Marvel and Captain Marvel being the Everywhere-ers, and Ameican Chavez being one of those period touchstones.) The idea of having half an issue devoted to 128 new and individually reseached character designs is absolutely a mike-drop. No-one's done this. No-one would try to do this. I wanted Jamie's peers to cry at the idea of even considering trying this. Admittedly, this involved Jamie crying doing it, but the cost of doing business.

So yeah – while arrogant and desperately overambitious, especially in the context of a monthly comic book (this is easily as much work as two monthly comics) this is one we're intensely proud of.

I have also promised everyone I will never do it to them again. Because once you've done it once, there's no need to, right?

Okay – let's do this.

Jamie/Matt's Cover

Continuing the theme of the arc in terms of covers of “Persephones” and “Anankes” and “Minervas”, and clearly set up to be a “Hey, here's a new interesting character.”

Babs Tarr Cover

God, Babs is a hell of an artist. As usual, we just asked what she's be interested in, and the Persephone on Bike seemed too good to resist, with the implicit MotorCross Crossover thrills. Wonderful stuff.

Page 1

Cutting this to the bare minimum is always the thing. Enough to treat the characters as iconic as the ones in the present – the three panels with 2/3rds main image is what we use for the vast majority of the traditional transformation, and with small tweaks we keep the same beats.

We'd normally do a LOC CAP or similar in this scene, but that would step on the effect as we start LOC CAP-ing on the next page.

Of course, by now, we know how this scene goes...

PAGE 2-12

I'm not going to go too deep into this, and try and talk about top level thinking and the choices you make when going on this kind of an endeavour, especially when you know that there's no ideal one. History is a mess.

If you want a panel by panel walk through of the periods, I direct you to Twatd's extensive 6000 years of murder. They've also just put it in an ebook for their patreon folk, if you want to throw them some coins. I'll be picking up some various bits of details.

First leg of this fucker was me, basically on my own with the history books and the spreadsheets.

The main part of that was simply positioning each one, for definite. Until now, I've allowed myself some flexibility, based into the nature of the recurrence. I didn't need to know the exact dates until I wrote a story in the period, so I didn't nail them down. As we set up in the first issue, it's every ninety years from the end of the previous pantheon. The Pantheon length varies between 1-3 years, depending how quick the gods die. A 1 year pantheon would be them all dying in two calendar years, and a 3 year one being a very slow one. There's few of them. Most Pantheons are across 3 calendar years (Therefore, a 2 year pantheon). I'd checked I could land a pantheon on 455 earlier, based on the squishiness in these math, but I learned how to actually work a spreadsheet, put the math in, and tweak.

On another bit of the spreadsheet I started doing the other half of the work, which works in parallel (but mostly separate) from the main thrust of history. As in, Ananke's story. Where she is at each point in history, what she learns there and what she's trying. There's some areas where the change in her tactics is quite obvious, and can be discerned from just what's shown in the panel. The ones where it's major but bemusing are likely the ones we'll be delving into in the future – either next issue, the final special or some other point.

Even writing this part was strange, entering the mind of someone who's been working on a project for 6000 years, and the waves of ennui and experimentation and strangeness. How to think like Ananke? It's hard. Every ninety years this thing happens. How she gonna play it this time? You occasionally get WicDiv readers asking “Why doesn't Ananke do X thing?” and this answer she probably gives would be “Yeah, tried it a few times, doesn't work nearly as well as you think it would.”

The biggest problem is choosing the pantheons, and the narrative it's choosing to tell through it. With the big list of pantheon dates the two core questions are...

What's the most culturally influential thing going on in this period that we know about?

How can we get the best global sampling that we can?

The latter is the fucker, because records are bad, and while history isn't written by the winners, history is written by those who write histories or at the least those who make things which historians can find or those historians have bothered to try and find. That warps the options for choices intensely, and often ways which frustrate our desires and choices. The script draft had multiple options for each category, and we chewed them over – there's a page in this month's Image+ which shows some of my notes there. Especially with the super-long-lived cultural empires, we looked opportunities to justifiably use anything other than them to just avoid 3000+ years of alternating between China and Egypt.

(Seriously, of all the many things this project has given me, a better understanding of the physicality of time, both its expanse (as in, HOW LONG HAS EGYPT BEEN THIS CULTURAL CENTER?) and its shortness (It is 66 full-lifetimes between us and the start of this mess. The last page skipping back from 2013 hits the majority of what we think of as history. It's a vertiginous book if you let it get beneath your skin, and we had to.)

Equally, we should unpack “culturally influential.” “Culturally Influential” normally means “invaded and killed a bunchy of other folks and made them take on your culture.” This is mainly a list of cultures who've dominated their locales. This has always been there in WicDiv. The 20th century Pantheon is primarily (though not solely) American. The 19th century one was primarily European. 455 is about the fall of Rome.

I'm not sure if I have to state the obvious: all the choices flow from the nature of WicDiv gods as cultural epiphenomenon (or, if not epiphenomenon, heralds. Or both. Either way, the gods dovetail with the rise of "civilization")

We map the gods to known history. If it's troubling, it's troubling because world history is troubling. And I do find that troubling.

At the same time, the concept of the book also lets us create spaces for possibility. We are showing one god from the period - Persephone. There's another dozen elsewhere. While we've shown some pantheons work with a tight geographical focus (such as the London/UK one) others have sprawled across considerable spaces, covering at least a continent and sometimes more. Some of the pantheons shown in this issue imply that kind of gap, normally signified by Ananke dressed in culturally different garments than the Persephone. Equally, some of the more extremely positioned Persephones are a snapshot that implies that gods can end up that far afield, at least occasionally.

In other words, if we drop a pantheon anywhere on the continent it implies that in some of the pantheon are in areas other than the direct place we're putting them. Steppes People bar one Hunnic one. Africa South of Mali. Most of East Asia, bar China and Japan and one Vietnamese Persephone we squeezed in. A lot of South and North America. We just don't have the history to know what or when to pick, and the relevant reference to draw even if we could.  

(The exception we forced was Australia, as we didn't even have a single god on that continent. As such, it was key to show a god on that continent to show that gods could be on that continent and by implication they could in one of the other pantheons.)

The above grates, but this issue was one of a bunch of compromises and decisions. This

There's also an attempt in the Ananke/Persephone pairings to talk about various stories. Sometimes the Persephone prefigures a culture's dominance. Sometimes it prefigures its fall. Sometimes it prefigures an option simply not taken. There is an implicit complexity and ambivalence to what we're showing here, as human history resists easy answers.

The naming is the other major bugbear. After the above choices were made, I spent a clear week going back and forth for a standardised naming system to use. Having one which I felt made sense, I spot the couple of exceptions where it didn't, and flick back entirely the other way. There's been times when the whole thing had generalised “Africa” or “Europe” captions. There was times when I considered not even having any captions at all – but these sacrifice so much in terms of the thrill of the mystery of these names. When (say) “Uruk” turns up it's meaningful and interesting, and losing that seemed a huge cost.

The rules we went with were as followed...

If we want to place this Persephone to a specific locale that exists and I want to specifically set the story in that limited locale, we use that name. (e.g. Athens, Uruk)

If a cultural region exists, and I don't want to tie the story to happening to a specific settlement in it, I use the cultural region (e.g. Egypt). If I want to be a little more specific, we can include geographical detail (e.g. Northern China).

If nothing exists for sure, use pure geography (e.g. The Upper Nile.)

All this also ties into my own knowledge of any areas. Some areas I have more confidence in choosing where to place the implied story. Some, I'd rather step back and be broader. This is based upon the background knowledge in a section. To do otherwise, I'd have to do reading akin to a WicDiv special for every panel in this issue, and as each WicDiv special is basically 6 months work, I'd have to had spent 33 years on this one.

This has one eye on the future – if we ever go back and do stories in WicDiv's history when all this is open, I want as much room to manoeuvre as possible. Do not close stuff off we don't have to, while also leaving enough room for people's imagination to populate the world.

Christ – this is 2500 words already, and I haven't said anything yet. You should see the script. There's actually a page of it which is going to be in the next Image Plus. I was a little reticent, as any one page was either too long or too fragmentory. We included one, which includes a couple of notes in from various levels of the production. The basic structure is that the panel is split between a “What the interaction is between the Ananke and the Persephone” and the “What period is this set in or what choices do we have?” And then there's a mass of conversation, both online and in person, after that. We say that all scripts are conversations, but it was never moreso in this issue.

The main take away from the second half was wanting to give Jamie as much room as possible and cut as many corners as he needed to get through it.

This is Jamie. He's never going to cut any corners.

(There's sections at the start where I suggest doing things like dropping backgrounds entirely and making it symbolic or whatever, but Jamie! That guy. THAT GUY.)

The baton of the workload then passed to Jamie. This is simultaneously a much bigger workload and a significantly different. I was performing a great filter. He was digging into specifics.

To get an idea of the scale of this, hired a costume researcher for this for a week of solid work, and they managed to do about a quarter of the periods, and even then not completely. The rest were done by Jamie and Katie as they proceeded through the issues.

Our costumes and choices are most conservative in the periods we know least about, and are normally excused by “if we don't do this, we miss this culture out entirely.” The further back we went, the harder it was, but even that isn't on a level playing field. When we get past the history and into the quasi-myth it also becomes tricky. It's just tricky.

As this was all only completed right up against the hard deadline, it also left barely any time to actually do the level of due diligence we wanted. We were expecting that we'd have stumbled over something accidentally mortifyingly offensive by accident in terms of colour choices or something else easy to stumble over, but the surprise is that there's been relatively little about that. We were expecting to have to do a bunch of tweaking when we come to the trade, and just mea culpa. In fact, there's only a handful of things to tweak – one place name which, after due consideration, I think I'll change and one architectural mishap. Frankly, this is much better than we were thinking, though I guess there's time for more stuff to be spotted.

Right – let's do a quick tour through the pages, with me pulling out bits and pieces which spring to mind.

Page 3 – still dealing with regions-rather-than-places, with Uruk being a side-step. Also sets up the rhythm of things staying the same and then things changing – as in, repetition enough to let people know there's a pattern, then a subversion. As it's the opening, the pattern is pretty obvious – straight murder until a Persephone gets wise and fights back, and then a change of tactics. Er... I'm not going to go in detail on this stuff from now, as that's reading the bloody comic for you, and I'm not one of those comic reviewers who just do a synopsis of the comic and sticking a 7/10 at the bottom. Even when I was a critic, I was the type to write a synopsis and stick a 6/10 at the bottom as I was a big ol' meanie.

The thing which most strikes me as sad about the research is that any headwear is a total waste. Man! Decapitation is the worst.

Page 4 – Japan 2942BC is one of my fave Persephone looks. I also like Ananke Northern China.

Yes, the “Crete” one is very clearly a “Wait – what happened here?” one. More anon.

Page 5 – Watching Ananke across this period is the interesting one.

Wrangel Island is one of my favourite historical things, in that it's the last place Mammoths were alive on Earth, around this period. There's a story I've wanted to do that is set this period. Maybe one day I will. I want to do it as an OGN, but part of me thinks it's actually a 5 page short story.

Egypt shows the arrival of the Pyramids here – architecture in backgrounds is one of the trickier things we had to deal with, but something that big and iconic is hard to resist. This was one of the problems culturally speaking – that there's many cultures we couldn't get good (or any) reference for their houses, so they tended to be put in rural/wooded situations, which carries an implication we weren't fond of. Occasionally we pushed it as far as we dared with simple housing to avoid that.

Man, I love the movement Jamie does in the middle two panels – plus the treatment of colour from Matt. That's actually worth stressing – I said it was a huge amount of work for Jamie? It's equally hilarious for Matt. He normally gets to set up a palette on a scene, and then carries it to other panels. Here, he has to reinvent it every single time. Stuff like the transitions from Egypt to Wrangel Island is dazzling.

Page 6

I resisted the Druidic one for a while – the earlier Western Europe one too – but they were both also (I think) Egypt ones. Basically everything here which is us going “We can use this for another locale” is taking out an Egypt or a China. Egypt and China have done so much stuff, guys. It's kinda scary.

Australasia is clearly one where we played it particularly tight – by definition, Ananke will have travelled here, and we minimise as much of Persephone's clothes due to not knowing for sure what people would wear in the period.

Page 7

Honestly, with out own interest in decapitated head, we were hardly going to resist the Olmec heads, right?

I like the implication of the story with the Egypt one here. You can see Ananke taking the Persephone all the way beneath the surface for this scene.

Page 8

Any time I look at the Assyrians I think of taking my friend Sarah Jaffe – not someone who is into ancient history – around the British Museum. When passing through the Assyrian display, I tried to work out how to sum up the Assyrians. I ended up with “The Assyrians... well, the Assyrians were tossers.” I may have used a stronger word than “Tosser.”

How do we know this? They spent a lot of time carving pictures of how much a tosser they were, just so we all know thousands of years later.

I find myself wondering what looks Ananke most liked? Does she look back fondly at certain periods? Almost certainly.

Page 9

It's around this point the sheer size of ancient history starts to get to you. Especially in the earlier Egypt/China-duopoly drafts it was like being punched in the face. It goes on and on and on and on. Which is the effect we were looking for, of course.

I kinda wished I could find somewhere other than Macedonia to do this one, but I couldn't find anything that made sense.

Eturia is one of those implied-other-story ones. This is near Rome, but not Rome. Eturian culture was significantly different from Rome, and you wonder what a more Eturian influenced Roman culture could have been like. I mainly ramble by way of example in my thinking for some of these.

Page 10

Yes, I smiled at Judea. Into the AD!

The South East Asia one is Vietnamese, and one of the ones we had least to draw off, but when there was so many East Asia pantheons, having them all be China and Japan felt worse than doing one with minimal sources.

The Eastern Europe one is my one complete fuck up when scripting this – it was originally the Hunnic invasion of India, with Persephone as a Hun. Except I had just read a number wrong, and the Hunnic Invasion of India was a century later, at a similar time to the Fall Of Rome Pantheon. A quick last minute panic kept it as Steppes People, and just had it out there, in the regions were the Huns were pre most of this, foreshadowing.

454 is earlier in the Fall Of Rome special. One of my reads in my research on that one was that Roman failure to integrate Germanic peoples into the empire to rejuvenate it (as they had with previous migrant groups) was one of the prime causes for the western fall, so this seemed a symbolic way to go. And look at the dappling!

Page 11

Tikal is the one I'll tweak. That's a more modern name. I'll likely tweak to Yax Mutal in the trade.

The Constantinople panel is the architectural problem – that Hagia Sophia look is simply from a much later period.

The acting in the first four panels are basically my favourite thing in the whole issue. Yes, the fourth one is “that time with the Franks” as referenced earlier in this arc.

I did try to tweak numbers and end up with a 999 pantheon, but couldn't make it land, and I decided that the Nun Lucifer story would work better later, circa the Black Death. As such, doing a millennial pantheon this far from the AD timeline appealed. And look at the fashion!

Page 12

The next special is 1373, so close to the fourth panel here. More to come, etc.

First two panels are the Crusades, mirroring one another.

Page 13

When planning this originally, I thought 60 pantheons. I then failed to realise I did the math wrong, and if I started close to 4000BC, it'd be 66 pantheons – so we'd need 11 pages. I did have a draft with a slightly longer start, but I realised that I couldn't afford another page, when I had a lot of work to do in the latter half of the issue.

I also realised that it's not 66, as the first one is actually the one we saw in 34, which is by definition, not in this sequence. Which left us one panel at the end. We played with various options, but calling back to a sequence from issue 9 seemed a good move. It's a scene which, of course, reads differently now.

These are the most familiar pantheons, of course.

Page 14

Interstitial, a nod to the Kanye track. I originally had this as the interstitial at the end of last issue, but felt that it contextualised Baal in a crass and deceptive way, and made it more likely to be taken as literally without any nuance. By placing it between these two horror stories, applying the word to both Ananke/Minerva and Baal, there's more space to think about it.

Page 15

I normally do a tight synopsis for the whole arc before starting. I did for this arc, and it actually expands to next arc too. However, these always change. When I reached this issue, especially when I realised it would be 12 of the 20 pages, I did some reworking of plot threads, moving a couple of other beats either to a teaser for next issue or just to next issue – as next issue is one with much more space available for present day stuff.

I did it as basically Baal's origin (there's no other word for it – Baal is a classic superhero origin story, as pure as Spider-man's) requires the space. He's earned it.

Still – as there is one other key thing which needs space, the question how to approach it was there. The final choice was minimalistic and cleanly. Three panels here, into the flashback. Red colouring. Baal's colours now.

Flame fade out to flashback, ala all performance-storytelling we've seen so far. As in, Gods' signature segues to flashback.

Page 16-17

I love what Matt is doing here with texture and shape. It makes everything feels alive, like ornamental, pushing against Jamie's art. It's like a mural, it's art.

Not a back garden but a playpark. I imagine Baal on the way home, crossing across here, meeting the lady and...

2 page scene. This needs space, in its own way.

Page 18-19

A spread, but this is effectively one page in terms of page use. Trying to get as much story as we can from the limited page count available. This is almost all Star Superman in cutting to the basics – a single image showing a fragment of the fight, and one of Baal's line.

More red. You see where we're going, as it's building up.

“that night, I did it” just made me shiver.

Page 20-22

We talked about various approaches to this – on a single page. but we chose to burn pages. As always, these are free, and don't come from the page count of the issue. In this case, it lets us dwell on it, and hit it again and again.

Page 23-24

And a segue out, back into reality. This is where we crunch the details we feel people need to know.

Of course, this is why Baal has always taken the Great Darkness more seriously – not least he knows what he has to do if the Great Darkness isn't dealt with before another three months ticks over. You can probably chew over yourself how much is him believing it's saving the world and how much he believes it's just saving his family. I don't think you have to choose one or another.

“You don't need to know” is a very WicDiv choice, isn't it?

It's one of the things which is there, but never stressed – Baal, for all his bluster, has never won a fight in all of WicDiv, when actually fighting against someone who fights back. Here's the reason.

It's worth noting Baal had the necklace, at least occasionally, before issue 4 of WicDiv. Woden is completing it as he hands it back. As in, it's been tuned up for a while – obviously it needs to be completed with what Ananke suspected may be coming with Lucifer. Er... this is probably too much to say here? It just occurred. It's the sort of stuff we chew over.

I suspect “I want to die/but I want to live” is one of those axis which WicDiv is built around? I found it upsetting to write, which is normally a tell.

Page 25

I said this when asked about the pregnancy plot when the issue came out...

Thanks for your faith, but I understand cynicism. It’s not as if there’s much track record for media doing this well. I’ll probably write a little more about it in the writers notes - I just deleted a paragraph here as I want to chew over my exact wording carefully. The short version is, like everything we do, we take it intensely seriously and we didn’t go here lightly. I also have faith in the readers unpacking it and making their own sense of it as we continue - I think Pomegranate’s take is basically the best sort of response we could have hoped for at this point, really.

… and after chewing it over, I don't think there's much I can add to it, really. Further into WicDiv I'm sure I will, but it's too connected to everything, and any explanation just leads to questions I can't answer yet.

I do wish I had slightly more space here to push the pause as Baal chewed it over longer.

Page 26

The idea that Baal would burn down Valhalla only struck me as I was writing this sequence. Of course he would. It just made sense.

This is a great example of Jamie being an amazing storyteller. I put her outside, and Jamie asked questions about how far, what would be nearby and so on. So we end up with an image which grounds this melodrama back to reality, hard. We see this godly palace burn sown from a simple London street. The movement between the two worlds. And morning. This is real. We wake up.

Also – Matt follows him. After the mythic colouring we've seen earlier, here we have this very normal, very real dawn. He's wonderful.

Worth noting there is a considerable time skip. By implication, Baal's performance lasted much longer than it took to read.

Mildly frustrated the issue printed a little dark, so the message was nearly unreadable, and was missed as the cliffhanger it is. Namely, a message from someone (I suspect many will guess who) catching up on the nights events... and The Norns being locked up again after Cass has said stuff?

In the original draft for the text I used the phrase “Sectioned” but was informed it's something which wouldn't make sense for a North American audience. I suspect I'll tweak again to get a cleaner message out.

Anyway – mildly frustrated the information doesn't 100% land here, but next issue goes at it running.

Page 27

I wanted a simple title here. It's Baal's story.

And that's it. God knows how much I'll edit out of this mess. The next issue is out tomorrow, and hopefully you'll find it interesting.