#well writing as a coping mecanism time would be more accurate

[pomegranate-salad]

This is what I see, welcome to reality

I wrote this on perversion in books and wicdiv to cope with today. As one does. I want to state that this is a topic that is in my sense underexplored outside of individual examples, meaning everything I’m saying here comes from my own thoughts and not any literary theory, so give it the credit you see fit. Mention of Deadly Class spoilers, abuse, and hope, maybe.

As usual, let’s start with a bit of oversharing. When I was I prep school, I had a math teacher who was an honest-to-god pervert. I’m not talking about a mean teacher, or a creep, I am talking about a pervert in the clinical sense. Every Wednesday, for four hours in a row, students would have to get to the board one by one, and remain there to be demeaned and humiliated over a problem they couldn’t solve, sometimes standing there for half an hour, until they were sent to their seat crying. Then, at lunch break, our teacher would seek the student still crying in the hallway. Not to console them, to tell them they could do it, or to apologize ; no, it was to tell them that thanks to him, they would manage to get better.

One of my friends was driven close to suicide by his verbal abuse. Yet, when she had to redo a year and had to choose whether or not to switch schools, she decided to stay because “our teacher is just so good at pushing students”. She was not the only one. I spent the year pointing out the obvious abuse to my fellow students, yet gradually, it was as if they were losing the ability to see or acknowledge it. People who were revolted by his way of speech at the beginning of the year were eating in his hand a few months later. But in these few months, any standard of acceptable behaviour was removed to be replaced by a unique reference, a unique basis. Soon, my fellow students started complaining that the other teachers weren’t hard enough on us, that to be the best of the bests you had to be under constant pressure. How could we complain that he was being mean to us ? Could we pass our entrance exam without him ? Of course not. We needed him. Without him, we were nothing.

 This is what a pervert does : cause pain, destroy a person’s self-esteem, trust and hope, and then replace it all with dependence to him. A pervert is not satisfied with making someone suffer : this person has to fall on their knees and say thank you. A pervert will lock you up and make you say they’re your way out.

But doing so doesn’t only involve destroying anything in your life that could help you get out, it also involves destroying the very idea of getting out. Why pretend you’re a good teacher despite abusing your students when you can convince everyone a good teacher is necessarily an abusive one ? A pervert goes after your values. The abstractions you believe in, without even realizing it, forming a net ready to catch you when you fall. When life gets hard, when relationships become complicated, when you fail, then you still have hope, friendship, self-love. Even when life is messy and you feel lost, you still know that truth exists. Values and principles bigger than you are still there even when you don’t see them around you.

But these abstract concepts are fleeting. They need reinforcing. Most of the time, a turn of the wheel is enough ; you were doubting, but then something comes along that makes you trust yourself again.

But when a pervert comes along, they will surround you with their presence, and they’ll start choking those values until there is no standard to refer yourself to, no principle to go by, to value to aspire to. You can lose friends and still believe in friendship ; when a demanding partner refuses you see your friends for months and months, tells you they don’t really like you anyway, when your friends start attacking you out of frustration for your blindness, it becomes harder to believe in friendship. You can be lied to and still know the truth exists ; when someone starts lying to your face, makes you doubt everything you hear, it becomes harder to believe there even is a truth. Systematically, one after the other, every benchmark erodes, until you have no scale, no basis to your judgement, no way to determine what is normal anymore. And when this happens, then the only lighthouse in your life will be the towering tyrant holding the keys to your world, because they built the bars themself.

 The subject of perversion has been on my mind a lot lately, for obvious reasons. But just like any psychological subject, it also exists in the media we consume. The way a pervert acts has been seized by countless pieces of media, not just to showcase it but to use it within their very foundation. Every book, movie, comic, builds a rapport with its reader. This rapport can be made of trust or doubt, fascination or disdain. Social and moral values are decisive when consuming a piece of media, because we are trained to expect positive consequences to acting according to principles, and negative ones when we break a social standard. Our normality when entering a story is one built by social values : get rewarded or get punished by acting within or outside their norm. Every creator has to play with these expectations in order to make a point about whatever values society holds. It’s not rare for a piece of media to try and get the reader out of their comfort zone, to deconstruct values the reader might take for granted. But what I call a perverse piece of media – with no implication that the author is themself a pervert – is one that has no other goal than to systematically destroy every established value the reader might have, to take away their sense of normality when approaching the story. There is of course no comparing a real-life abuser to what a book might do to its reader. But it can be enlightening to interpret the way certain books toy with and wreck their audience’s principles to the point where none of them has any relevance to the story.

A classic example would be Emile Zola’s towering saga The Rougon-Macquart : over the course of 20 books, any principled character sees themself degraded, every display of humanity is immediately punished, while the dregs of humanity gets what they want. Again, it’s nothing unusual for books to feature unfairness, to reward the absence of principles. But what makes this series not only cruel, but perverse in my sense, is the way it rams at higher values until they’re proven not only feeble, but completely vain. It’s not enough that Gervaise from the Dram Shop should fall into alcoholism despite having grown up with an alcoholic and trying her damnedest to stay away from the danger ; first it must be demonstrated that her efforts make absolutely no difference. First her entire world must fall apart because of alcoholism, then she is shown giving in to it. This is to me what perversion in a text looks like : acknowledge a value the readership holds – resisting degradation – and then destroy any impact this value might have on the character’s fate until the reader is just as convinced as Gervaise that there was no way she could escape her family’s stain. The menace has become our only key of comprehension of the character. The book replaces our values with its reality, a reality in which the only normality is the one it dictates. The same way a pervert isolates their victim from society until all standard is lost, a perverse book isolates its reader from the world they hold as real and drags them into a reality with no value, no other verity than the one it conjures at every page turn.

I’ve found this kind of world-building through merciless deconstruction of real-life values again recently in a comic : Deadly Class. Every arc in Deadly class takes on one specific moral value and then goes on to demonstrate its futility in the world it created. Maria’s bravery, Marcus’ aspirations of freedom, Willie’s kindness, Saya’s devotion to her friends, they all come not to support them but to hinder them in their quest for survival. Every noble impulse leads to death, any selfless move is the wrong one. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma with every inmate ratting on you. In the current arc, when master Lin tells Saya her nobility puts her in danger, you might not believe him, but you believe him more than at the beginning of the series. Every moral value was put on display to be proven futile ; every character’s death has buried their highest quality with them. Again, here lies the difference between a cruel book and a perverse one : a cruel book makes its character suffer for their actions but doesn’t question the higher values that led them here, a perverse one is after the principle ; the character is only the demonstration. By the end of arc 4, the reader knows no good deed is ever a guarantee of good results. If anything, any positive gesture is received with suspicion, as we know it will be used against a character later in the story. Deadly class has completely inverted the code of values with which we interpret the world : it dictates its own laws with every page, with every unjust death, with every treason, and each time our grip on our own normality gets a bit looser. The only thing to do now is to turn another page and wait for the story to provide us with reality, a reality that can no longer be compared or judged, but only accepted.

 To reiterate, I am not accusing Emile Zola, Rick Remender and Wes Craig of being perverts. I am not accusing the Rougon-Macquart or Deadly Class of being bad books. The Dram shop is a masterpiece and Zola, if you don’t know, was assassinated for taking a public stance against the tide of antisemitism.  Deadly Class is a gorgeously drawn, impeccably oiled story, the same way a military parade is impeccably oiled. There is much to be said for works that manage to drag you so deep inside their world you cannot grasp at your own reality anymore. Much to be learnt from them too. But in days like today, there is just as much to be said for works that stubbornly refuse to let themselves become perverse.

 The Wicked + the Divine is not a perverse book. In many ways, it is the opposite of a perverse book. It has become comically hard to praise something for daring to have ideals. Cynicism is an epidemic ; the marketing of a caricature of moral values so removed from reality they have lost any meaning, from feel-good anthems to Manichean summer blockbusters, has caused the knee-jerk reaction to any “inspirational” piece to be disdain and mockery. Optimists are deemed popcorn creators, pawns of the establishment. Great art comes from demolition.

But here’s the reality : swinging a fist at someone’s principles is damn easy. Rebuilding them afterwards, and rebuilding them better, is another story. For some reason it has become a sign of naïveté to still be harboring values while the world becomes a shitshow. I don’t know many steps of human progress that have been made out of cynicism. I know a bunch of them that were taken out of higher aspirations.

Wicdiv is not a faux-inspirational work. It doesn’t shy away from the increasing inadequacy between higher standards and the ruthlessness of reality. And yet it aggressively clings to these higher standards, refuses to pervert them to establish its own world where values don’t matter and you are free to impose the reality you want to your readers.  And yet it would have been so easy for wicdiv to do so. The news Ananke delivers to Luci in issue #4 has taken another meaning in light of current political events : the fact that she must remain in prison despite claiming her innocence is not just unfair, it also means the pantheon implicitly accepts her culpability as the reality. Did she do it ? It doesn’t matter, as long as the story works for the greater good. Truth is the last thing anyone cares about. And when Luci breaks out, it is not to claim her innocence, but out of desperation, and in a sense, ready to accept the imposed reality as the only reality.  If wicdiv had stopped there then we would have learned the futility of truth within its world.

But then you have Laura, seventeen years old, standing for what she has seen and heard. A woman who has decided to trust herself instead of the most powerful and adored people in the world. Through Laura, Luci and the readership hear the same thing : the truth does matter. And the story will not rest until it has been uncovered. There is a touch of sublime in that moment, in the way it seems to restore balance, in an instant, to a crumbling world. Why should we care about the truth ? Because the story cares.

A similar moment happens in issue #20, when after seeing Persephone’s story, Cass tells her she is sorry. It’s a small gesture, but has anyone cared to make it before or after her ? Why should we assume that human decency still exists in this world if no one ever displays it ? Kindness, empathy, the simple acknowledgement of grief and pain, should never be taken for granted. They are not a primal impulse, but a socially crafted behaviour that must be enforced to keep existing. Despite the gods and x-men fighting, this is still our world, and these people are still human.

 Even more impressively, wicdiv doesn’t hesitate to showcase how easily these values can be weakened. After Ananke's death, Tara’s description reads : “killed by Ananke in assisted suicide to frame Baphomet. No one buys it now.” And just like that, the story of a murder becomes the story of another one, once again a crude caricature of a complex reality, turning with the wind as the louder voice demands it. Yes, it would be easy to leave it there. But I have no doubt that wicdiv will eventually make it right by the truth. And it’s not something that I can say about a lot of works. Just like there aren’t a lot of works I can read knowing that behind the injustice, the hardships and even the cruelty, there is a world still standing for me to climb on. No matter how much our characters keep failing, they will not take down what is really important with them. Friendship matters. Love matters. Truth matters. Kindness matters. It makes a difference. We can make a difference.

  Maybe I sound naïve. But maybe this is a mantra we will all need in the years to come, as the most powerful pervert on earth and everyone acting alongside him will come after these principles, one after the other, and will sully them until it looks like none of them even exists out of fairy tales. During these times, I don’t expect wicdiv, or any work, to save us. But if we’re in for years of gaslighting, then we should be thankful for any work that still dares to tell us that yes, the lights are indeed flickering. So thank you, Kieron Gillen, Jamie Mckelvie, Matt Wilson, Clayton Cowles, Chrissy Williams, and everyone else involved in making Wicdiv. Thank you, Wicdiv fandom, for providing me for beautiful, touching, funny posts, and making the comic live. What you do matters. And that is the truth.