post-issue 34 WicDiv thought

doomedavocado:

rollingeddie:

pomegranate-salad:

otto-von-stirlitz:

tomrobertturner:

otto-von-stirlitz:

myfirstsearchengine:

gothshostakovich:

I’ve been chewing over the revelations in the latest issue, and the big take-away thought i’ve had so far is:

Ananke chooses “which gods take the children” and seems to be doing so in order to “cage” them & generally has an adversarial relationship with them and of course needs them to “destroy themselves.”

SO…it would seem a pretty valid reading to say that Ananke has been choosing which gods to put into which kids based on which god would be the WORST fit for them. More specifically, she pairs them with the god that aligns with their most negative traits and destructive tendencies. She gives them the powers and pretense to indulge their worst (or most dangerous) impulses and boy, do they go for it.

She gives the obsessive work-aholic historian the ability to divine the past. So Cass wastes six months of her life on a dead-end puzzle and probably does permanent damage to her digestive system with all that coffee.

She gives a self-effacing hardcore altruist a hivemind, and Umar destroys his own mind trying to save everyone he’s connected to.

She tells a naive weeaboo that she’s a reincarnated Shinto goddess and just like that, Hazel is granted the divine right to culturally appropriate from the Japanese with no remorse or self-reflection. She doesn’t have to *learn* about Shinto if she’s literally Amaterasu!

etc.

Hmmm, this makes a lot of sense.

Edgy and unfulfilled teen becomes literally Satan so all hell can break loose.

Warhammer nerd gets Nergal, so he feels even more humiliated.

A Desi girl gets (some) Tara and is told that she has to figure it out, not crossing out the Hindu Tara.

A neglected and abused teen gets cat goddess, which is saying volumes if you remember her speech about “cats not giving a fuck”.

There must be some another irony about Ball getting such a hypermasculine god.

I think we’re onto something…

This is interesting, although it doesn’t really track with Inanna:

Cripplingly shy teen breaks out of his cocoon as the best version of himself.

Yeah, Inanna is one character that definitely does not fit the pattern. But having “the nice one” could theoretically benefit Ananke in other ways.

I think it does line up.

Tell a shy (maybe closeted) young adult they can now live out loud because they’ll be dead in two years anyway. There’s a huge chance they’ll go too far in the opposite direction and push their version of love and happiness without considering the others’. That’s basically what happened with Baal, and Inanna’s comment about why he “doesn’t understand why everyone can’t be like him” hints that he doesn’t really think he’s in the wrong in this whole ordeal.

I don’t read Inanna as a slightly more functional version of Dio, but as someone who is convinced his philosophy and way of life IS the best one. In his way, he is quite selfish. And that’s only because he’s still a good person that most of the time his selfishness tends to help others as well. But sometimes it doesn’t and then things get ugly. And the worst thing about Inanna is that he does not seem to want to change that about himself. So yeah, Goddess of love and heaven who also disrupted the balance of life and death by wanting to get her lover back from Hell… Seems to follow the pattern to me.

and about the one god who is always there. It has to be either Lucifer or Persephone. If it’s the latter one, she only summons them, to kill them right then and there on the spot, because they’re too powerful to keep around. She clearly didn’t plan for her to live and started calling her the destroyer to turn the others against her.

Building off this excellent post with some unfortunately long theorising:

• Re: Inanna, as far as I recall, only developed their philosophy regarding the lack of fear, *after* they ascended and got hit with the two year limit. Before this they were nervous, repressed and shy: Ananke making a teenager like this an outgoing god of sex and love was likely intended to play up this internal conflict instead of ending it like it did. (I think this also contributes to Ananke’s murder choice)
• Re: Baal, making a teenager this incredibly powerful god and then killing his dad with the Great Darkness? (I’m fairly sure we can attribute the Great Darkness to Woden Shenanigans, guided by Ananke as Ananke never mentions it in past recurrences) That’s going to do some damage, and direct a forceful and charismatic leader of the gods on a wild goose chase under Ananke + Woden’s complete control.
• Re: Baphomet. I see Baphomet as Anankes gift to the Morrigan: she enables the continuation of their pretty shattered and unhealthy relationship with a two year death sentence that Morrigan is clearly more into than Baph. He’s probably the most obviously self destructive of the gods both before and after so it’s easy for Ananke to manipulate and scapegoat him. Also looking at the wiki page for Nergal, he was seduced by an Underworld goddess and forced to rule there by her side. Gotta respect kieron for that foreshadowing.
• Re: Persephone. She is awakened last and is therefore the other god, the mother to Minerva’s maiden and Ansnke’s Crone. I agree with @rollingeddie that Ananke tracks her down, awakens her last and immediately tries to execute her. She is after all, one part of a two part mystery, and one that Ananke can never let her, or anyone else, solve.