#but it just. totally fell by the fucking wayside this week what with my actual paid internship shit

[oflgtfol]

trying to juggle my jobs rn and i just feel so like . lol. like jack of all trades master of none. No i do not have a full time professional career but i work all these weird ass, unique, semi specialized, and not connected at all jobs that make people double take every single time they hear about Any of them. michaels is my most normal one UNTIL i start talking about framing then everyone is like what the fuck. i was telling my coworker at my other job about framing and he was teasing me about how passionate i was getting about like frame anatomy and construction. he had me rating his framing setup for his college diplomas and i was like "well i like the fillet but the mat is uneven and the glass is not anti-glare and also probably not anti-UV" and all his only response was. asking me what a mat was. and then at michaels i talk about my other job and everyone is always like dude that's so cool. they're more wowed by the uniqueness of the job but sometimes they ask me about the logistics too and then i'm getting the teasing about being passionate about some niche nerd shit. i cant even talk about that other job here because it's so weird and specialized that i'd doxx myself. and my internship. i've mentioned it before but i tend to avoid outright discussing it as directly since it also is more high stakes than michaels but its still like, augh? it had me in contact with fucking county executives over both the phone AND email and shit about stuff pertaining to social work and welfare. augh

oh and another point of chaos to all this is also a volunteer opportunity/informal unpaid internship that someone at my other job works at and i saw her hoodie for it and was like omg i totally wanna join. and i definitely definitely cannot talk about what that is cuz that will 100% doxx me as well if i ever were to work there. all i can say is that it is an actual scientific research thing. but like how the fuck do i have time for any of this and why does none of this have anything to do with each other. custom framing for art and photography; social welfare programs; scientific research; [redacted]. there's so many cool and interesting things in the world why cant i do all of it

#i didnt wanna ask my internship supervisor about a grad position beyond volunteering bc its like #im NOT going to the masters in social work program i dont really wanna fill the space up when others could take the position #and actually have it be relevant to their lives #but well SHE reached out to ME so like tee hee I GUESSS....... #i still need to reach out to the volunteer research position guy #i told my coworker i'd email him this past monday and she was so stoked she was like it'd be sooo fun to work together there too #but it just. totally fell by the fucking wayside this week what with my actual paid internship shit #brot posts #this is insane LMAOOOOOOOO #let me email the guy first and see if he even has the time to take on and train a newbie before i start trying #to factor that thing into all this mess as well #literally totally forgot about it until i was writing this post bc this whole week ive been trying to schedule that zoom meeting with #my internship supervisor

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

you look pretty, too.

first off: spider-man: far from home is a lot of fun. much like the end of homecoming, it left me feeling warm and happy and already making plans to watch it another time. it doesn’t hang together quite as well or quite as coherently as homecoming, but it takes more risks and displays more ambition, and honestly, how could i not appreciate that? 

far from home is absolutely FANTASTIC as another chapter in the mcu saga, much more so than any other film in the series (bar homecoming). it gives a great ground-level perspective on all the mind-bending cosmic shit that goes on in the other movies and does a fair bit of world-building. because it’s so interlocked so organically with a larger narrative, it serves to both bolster that larger vision and provide snide commentary on it. there are so many wonderful moments in this film that deal with the extremely bloated and extremely complicated legacy of iron man, and one gets the feeling that, even by the end of the film, spider-man hasn’t completely shaken off the spectre of tony stark. 

maybe because far from home functions so well as an episode of the mcu, spider-man doesn’t get to own even his most heroic moments. there’s still nothing here that i can brand as Iconic on the scale of some of the most memorable shit from other entries in the franchise. it also means that there are so many extra-textual pressures from so many directions on this movie, that the writing often comes off as sloppy.

anyway. i have a veritable fucking dissertation brewing in my head right now, so let’s get right on it.

SPOILERS ahead. if you’re on a device/app that doesn’t recognise the ‘read more’ cut i’m about to insert here and don’t want to be spoiled on basically every aspect of the film, please scroll past as fast as you can.

1. sorry to start off with a bummer, but the premise of this movie is bullshit. i see no reason why this whole shebang couldn’t have been set in new york. there could’ve been more time to deal with endgame-aftermath, we could’ve had more aunt may (criminally underused both here and in homecoming), and peter’s emotional arc could’ve had more set-up. the european locales contribute nothing beyond being pretty backdrops; all of the vital players in the story are american; a lot of the jokes revolving around them being tourists just. don’t. land.

1.25. i appreciate the impulse to be Different given how many Spidermen have appeared on screen just in the last couple of decades, but the european setting is wholly incidental to the plot and wastes valuable time, so.

1.5. apparently a fair bit of footage setting up the vacation was cut so that we could get into the action faster? but honestly, regardless of pacing, the vacation could’ve used some set-up; the jump straight to the holiday was jarring, and i can’t help but feel some vital foreshadowing regarding peter’s spidey sense was sacrificed as collateral. that wonderful moment in the climactic fight when peter realises he can trust his spidey sense to work around mysterio’s illusions feels like the end-point of an arc that never began in the first place.

2. honestly, what a genius way to work in somebody as goofy as mysterio, tho!

2.25. *flails* ok. a little digression here, because my love for this character needs actual build-up, and the build-up needs to start with how much i disliked captain america: civil war. there’s an intriguing ideological conflict that’s set up at the core of the movie that never gets followed-up in any meaningful sense and ends in a facile little brawl between two sets of superheroes who, in any case, are way, way too close to the situation to give us any interesting insights about it. what the two spider-man movies have ended up doing, however, is giving us actual glimpses of the legacy of having superheroes at all instead of just talking about it. the vulture swooped in on the carnage left behind every battle between the avengers and civil war, selling alien tech to anybody who would pay for it, from small-time weapons dealers to desperate people looking to arm themselves in a world that experiences cataclysms every other week to shady-ass governments and secret agencies. a lot of silent and potentially catastrophic damage has already been inflicted by the time spider-man takes him down. similarly, mysterio zooms in during a particularly vulnerable time, playing a world both ravaged and rebuilt by ineffable cosmic forces to build himself up through fancy smoke-and-mirrors work. as always, mcu’s spider-man delights me over and over again with just how organically it both manages to feed off and enrich this larger universe it belongs to.

2.5. mysterio talking about how people these days tend to believe flying people in capes more than technology used in more traditional ways--about how people would believe anything these days--is a bit of snide commentary on the state of the mcu itself and perhaps the world in general. there are now more and more ways to construct narratives and bend lies into almost-truths. social media, ‘deepfakes’, clever editing: you can build yourself into whatever you want the world to see you as if you just have access to the right tools. and it isn’t just mysterio that’s indulging in deception here--so are the ‘good guys’. nick fury getting skrulls to impersonate him and other shield agents to handle missions on earth is a quieter, more insidious kind of unsettling. it’s a mode of deception that is so much more complete and effective than mysterio could ever dream of achieving: you are being lied to by your enemy, but perhaps it is the lies that are being told in the name of your protection that you must be truly wary of.

2.65. quentin beck walking around in a cgi suit while orchestrating and editing big, fake spectacles where a cgi-ed mysterio fights a cgi-ed monster? fucking. brilliant. i thought i would crawl out of my own skin with how fucking meta that was.

2.75. mysterio’s motivations aren’t entirely clear and his ‘toast’ to his team midway through the movie is one of the cheesiest infodumps i’ve seen on film, but jake gyllenhaal makes it all fucking work. there’s a seething, manic energy just bubbling under the surface, and he puts it to brilliant use. he had me totally sold on both his intent to kill peter dead and his grudging affection for the kid. few actors could’ve pulled this off like jake gylly.

3. aah, tony stark. we see iron man’s face multiple times through the movie, to the point where it’s less a tribute to the man and more a depiction of a spectre that’s haunting peter parker wherever he goes. he looms so large that honestly it seems like peter’s biggest battle here is fighting his legacy as iron man’s protege. 

while ensemble films like civil war and the avengers movies were content to let the tony/peter mentor/mentee relationship play out without bothering to interrogate it at all, having tony stark so integral to this universe’s peter parker’s origin story is something the solo spider-man movies have to grapple with. there was always going to be tension between tony’s sweeping, big-picture perspective and peter’s focus on being a friendly, neighbourhood hero; between tony as a symbol of the corporate elite and peter being relatable to the everyday, common man; between iron man in his ivory tower and peter painstakingly cutting holes in a sweatshirt in an apartment in Queens. both of spidey’s supervillains so far are born out of tony’s actions--and not even through a deliberate misstep, like creating ultron or trusting secretary ross. they are born out of callous indifference--people who fell to the wayside as tony stark’s corporate behemoth pushed on, oblivious. both toomes’ and beck’s anger is justified, even if what they choose to do with that anger is not. 

even when it comes to peter, tony is spot-on in his judgment of peter’s potential, sure, but there’s something awfully... glib in the way he thinks about peter’s life outside of being spider-man. bequeathing him EDITH is a shockingly irresponsible thing to do--and the decision nearly kills both peter and his friends multiple times! i know the saying goes, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, but as mature as peter is, i don’t think anybody ought to be solely responsible for controlling a super-advanced AI that can summon drones and engage an entire planetary defence system. it’s bonkers, and something i absolutely believe tony stark would do.

so, yes--both homecoming and far from home have no choice but to deal with iron man’s legacy, but they also do a good job in showing how complicated that legacy is. another thing that the solo movies have to contend with from the ensemble films is the clear love and respect tony and peter have for each other--if in civil war peter was utterly starstruck, by infinity war and endgame he’d begun to see tony as a father-figure. their relationship struck among the most resonant emotional chords in both movies, and it would have been near-impossible to have peter interrogate his relationship with his just-deceased mentor in the light of all of that. so while the actual movies complicate and darken tony’s legacy, peter never gets to acknowledge any part of it, which is a pity.

(having iron man appear as an actual zombie in peter’s trippy mysterio-induced vision was a great touch, tho: the words ‘next iron man’ followed him through the movie not as a privilege but as a noose cinching closer and closer around his neck)

3.5. all of this aside, tho, i do feel like something vital about spider-man was lost forever when, lost and hurting and alone, peter could summon a private jet and build himself a new suit in tony’s fancy 3d printer. i realised when i was watching this that i’d been expecting peter to fashion a plan entirely out of his own ingenuity and determination, but this peter... has all of stark industries on call. 

4. tom holland’s peter is as charming as ever and i hope he gets to play him for as long as possible--it really does feel like peter’s still in the beginning stages of a very long and fruitful arc. here he’s traumatised and exhausted, pulled by the allure of avengers-level fame and pushed away by the burden and trauma that being an avenger truly entails. he’s wide-eyed and wholly likeable when he’s chilling with his friends or pining after mj, but his bone-deep exhaustion and grief and guilt shine through the cracks in his veneer at exactly the right moments. peter’s put through the wringer here, both emotionally and physically--and holland plays it all perfectly.

given how much is going on in this film, a surprising amount of time is devoted to peter and mj’s budding romance? and almost every second of it absolutely works?? their sweet, tentative kiss on the bridge after the climactic fight feels absolutely 100% earned, and i’m HERE to see them grow as a couple.

5. the fucking mid-credits scene, man. the entire theatre gasped as one, followed by excited chatter and scattered ‘oh my god’s as the end-credits rolled--i’ve never seen anything like it. this is an incredibly bold new direction for spider-man, and it hit me absolutely out of left-field. i can’t wait to see what happens next.

6. honestly, i could go on for longer, but i’m super-tired rn and need to re-organise my thoughts. ultimately far from home is a fascinating consequence of the burden of both extra and intra-textual legacies--funny, wild, and imaginative, but always aware that it can’t run too far away from all of its responsibilities.

#mcu #spiderman #spiderman far from home #far from home spoilers #SPOILERS #peter parker #quentin beck #mysterio #tony stark #this kid is So Important #meta

[lunawings]

King of Prism SSS episode 8 commentary (Yu)

So, in my opinion, I think the episodes we’ve seen up until now could be more or less enjoyed to the fullest by newcomers and/or people who haven’t seen Rainbow Live. 

But from here on out, there is a notable change. And I really mean from here on out: Episodes 8 - 12 basically require having seen Pretty Rhythm Rainbow Live to be fully understood I think. 

So if you watched this episode and thought wait.... why did they just skip over Yu’s backstory like that!?!

Two words: Rainbow Live. 

Anyway let’s get started.

I’m surprised the subber knew the correct spelling to ViviC Heart Session. That takes.... research!? ....Wait, it’s in the credits. Still, that’s some non-linear translation. 

Also I kinda wonder when and where ViviC Heart Session came from in canon. Yeah it’s the Pride the Hero ending, but there is a whole story on how they made and performed Dramatic Love for the Christmas concert, but nothing on ViviC Heart Session as far as I know. 

If you’re wondering why they’re all acting so weird, there have already been not one but TWO different story arcs in the Prism Rush Main Story about Yu ambitiously deciding to write songs and biting off way more than he could chew ahah.... 

They know. 

So this kinda dates this episode? Sort of? Despite the way it seems in episode 1, clearly the Prism One doesn’t take place right after it was announced ahah. 

The way Yu says this line makes me think it’s probably been a month or so already. 

So maybe it was announced in July-August (episode 1 takes place in “summer”), and happened in September-October, something like that?

So like literally JUST as I was thinking to myself “wow the subs have really gotten better in this episode....” THIS had to happen... How dare you translate Taiga’s “IT’S A FESTIVAL” as “party time”................

Oh well. Honestly though, aside from this, this episode has the best subs so far, BY FAR. 

Been wondering for months how they would sub MUGEN HABUUUUUU because I had no idea how I would do it myself ahah.

Although they don’t state it explicitly, it’s pretty clear this episode takes place in Okinawa. Among many other things, I think it’s the only place in Japan with habu. 

I may or may not have thought way too hard for too long about how Taiga and Kakeru ended up in this boat together. 

I mean I would like to think Taiga chose Kakeru as his partner in good faith that they could work well together. 

BUT KAKERU ISN’T EVEN ROWING COME ON 

HE’S JUST ENJOYING THE VIEW

THE VIEW BEING TAIGA IF YOU DIDN’T GET MY DRIFT

I suppose it could have been random pairs, but Shin and Leo also ended up together and that seems not random ahah. Speaking of which...

When I saw this episode for the first time I saw it as a 3-pack with Leo’s episode coming right before (the theatrical Part 3). So I had just gone though Leo’s episode for the first time and all the baggage that came with it less than 10 minutes earlier. 

And needless to say I was VERY MUCH NOT OVER IT AND EXPERIENCING VERY HIGH EMOTIONS ABOUT LEO

So during this scene I was like like

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

MY SONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

SAVE HIMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM 

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It actually took me until at least my second or third viewing to catch Kakeru trying to take a selfie with Taiga in the background there and I lost my shit. 

BTW I just want to mention that ViviC Heart Session was made for this episode. Well yes I know it wasn’t literally made for this episode, but it’s always sounded tropical for me and it just could not be more perfect.

I have been wondering for months what Taiga says here and I’m still not sure. (Not that I think this subtitle is wrong, but I mean I can’t make out the Japanese he uses. I just know folks in the theater laugh about it. Or they could just be laughing at Taiga’s method of escaping from Yu.)

Me at cheering: “IT’S SHIN. PICK UP.”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”

I wonder if like, they all got together and tried to figure out who Yu was least likely to hang up on.

But seriously though

WHO COULD EVER HANG UP ON SHIN

YOU MONSTER 

I said once that Jin was the best voicework in SSS, but Taiga man I dunno. Taiga is up there too. This scream is just so..... BRILLIANT..........

My reaction here changes from “OMG TAIGA ARE YOU OK” to just laughing hysterically. Sometimes in the same showing. Taiga I’m sorry. 

My new desktop background.

Seriously this episode is just SO BEAUTIFUL. 

Such a simple plot, but such amazing atmosphere and visuals that really take it SO MUCH FURTHER.

If I stopped to take screenshots of everything I thought looked amazing this post would never end. So just know I’m definitely thinking it. Just goddamn. 

For a long time I wondered how and why Minato found about about this.

But then I realized it actually makes a lot of sense.

So remember in my last post when I talked about my theory that Minato and Yu probably joined Edel Rose at the same time? Well, when Yu met Leo, basically the first thing he did was brag about knowing Over the Rainbow. So he probably did the same to Minato, and/or Minato just noticed him being way too friendly with Kouji. 

Considering Minato entered Edel Rose FOR KOUJI there is no way he wouldn’t notice that and wonder about it. 

So one day he probably worked up the courage to ask Kouji about it, and.....

Oh boy. 

BTW if you’re thinking huh? Yu’s family was separated? What? 

See: The Ito/Kouji plot in Rainbow Live. (And bring tissues.)

Just the comparison of how fast he picks up here. Even though the first thing he does is complain to her it’s like.... HALF A SECOND from when he sees it’s Ito to when he answers omg..... 

So I kinda questioned this subtitle here. Because the literal Japanese is just him saying “IT’S LATE!” 

So I always thought he meant it like “Do you know what time it is!?”

But then I thought about it some more. And I remembered the Rose Party 2018 event, where the voice actors played a game where they all decided new aspects of the characters. And one of the things that were tasked with deciding (at the afternoon performance I believe) was what Yu does every night before he goes to bed. And one of the answers was “discusses life problems with Ito”. 

So, maybe Ito does call Yu every night so he had been waiting on a call from her for a while.... 

And if so, in that context this subtitle is spot on. 

You win, Crunchyroll. 

Cheering audience: “THAT WAY”

Yu was so impressive Kakeru stopped taking pictures of Taiga for a full minute. 

DID I MENTION THIS EPISODE IS FUCKING BEAUTIFUL 

But so like. As soon as they started heading up the hill. Like practically from when they called his name, I was like..... Yu’s gonna cry. 

So then it was many long, long seconds of anticipation.....

until finally this.....

And I was not disappointed. 

Of all the beautiful things in this episode, I think the most beautiful thing may just be Yu’s crying animation here. He’s such a beautiful crier. 

I love this scene so much. It brings me so much joy. Because he’s not crying because he’s hurt or sad. 

He’s crying because he realized he has friends. 

HE’S CRYING BECAUSE HE HAS FRIENDS

YU

YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

You know, I didn’t even realize Taiga was hiding behind Kakeru until someone in the stream pointed it out.

Am I an asshole because this is Yu’s episode but most of my favorite moments involve Taiga/Kakeru. 

HUG HIM

HUG HIMMMMMM

OH MY GAWD I have NEVER so desperately wanted to reach through the screen and hug an anime character

Also Leo always cries when anyone else is crying. 

I spent so much time looking at Kakeru and Minato that I didn’t even realize Taiga too..... They’re BOTH sleeping on top of Minato omg.....

Also I can’t help but laugh that Leo is the big spoon on Shin. But it doesn’t surprise me. If you read Prism Rush stuff, Leo aggressively cuddling Shin in his sleep is nothing new.

Damn but. Okay so like, another way in which seeing this episode right after Leo’s influenced me is, during Leo’s episode I kept thinking about what PriPara coords were closest to the outfits that the boys were wearing and how I was totally gonna record arcade videos with them. 

And then we get to this and I was like OH MAN I can’t wait until that outfit comes out so I can put it on my character.... then I was like.... WAIT.....

And I realized this is basically the only idol anime I watch currently where I can’t have the clothes and I was like......... ahhhh.... not fair..........

Seriously though it is kind of odd. For me anyhow.

But also because they don’t have to worry about an arcade game for King of Prism, they have a lot more freedom. Like in a show like this, usually all the important coords that season will all uniformly have wings or holograms or otherwise follow some kind of a theme.

But with this it’s like... WHATEVER. Give Yu a huge floaty cross?? SURE WHY NOT!!!! ahah......

PRISM LIIIIVE

Okay so I know this animation is straight from Rainbow Live. 

But this lightning guitar here, it’s a recolor of Sara’s guitar from PriChan isn’t it?

And if it is, this’s the first/only specifically PriChan (not PriPara) reference I know of in SSS.

So I guess the Prism System doesn’t score Prism Lives for boys yet, huh....?

So one Prism Live + one jump = this. 

But I suppose you could also argue that although Yu’s show was super personal and meaningful to him, he really didn’t do much for the audience did he? (The in-universe audience I mean, as it did plenty for me haha.) It was a rather street-style show in that aspect when you think about it. 

Oh well, I guess no matter what someone has to be last................................

Ah man anyway this episode.

So when I saw it for the first time, it actually didn’t leave that much of an impression on me. But that’s because it was a bit overshadowed by how EXTREMELY EMOTIONALLY DISTRAUGHT I was from Leo’s episode, and then I ended up leaving the theater thinking about the um, surprise that’s gonna happen next week in Alexander’s episode. So this episode kinda fell by the wayside. 

I was actually kinda jealous of how much you guys in the stream were freaking out about it. It really made me wish I had the chance to see it independently without the influence of Leo and Alexander. There are definitely advantages to watching these week-to-week instead of in odd bunches. 

Because the more I watched it, the more I really REALLY liked it, and now I think it’s probably my third favorite character episode after Taiga’s and Leo’s. (Or maybe even second. I keep flip-flopping.)

I was also a bit blindsided by how this episode didn’t really follow the normal formula. Since they skipped over Yu’s backstory, they had time for other things. They had time for, dare I say it... “filler”? By that I mean, time to focus on just the boys being boys. Although it’s something we get a lot of on Prism Rush, I realized it’s something we have been severely lacking in the movies and anime. Another big difference between this series and typical Pretty Series/Aikatsu-type anime (other than not being able to have the coords......) is the lack of filler, and I realized how truly valuable it can be. This episode is just such a jewel. 

So in between last week and this week I picked up a magazine (spoon 2Di vol. 50) with director commentary, and this was the last episode he commented on. 

He said this episode is about Yu going through his “rebellious phase”, which he never had the chance to have when he was younger since his family split up during such an important part of his childhood and he felt he had to be strong for his mom and all that. 

So instead he goes through it with his Edel Rose family.

GAAAAAH

Probably my favorite thing about Yu is how we’re able to see him gradually grow and change more than any other character I think. 

Who would have though that little boy we met in Hokkaido would get this far......

So next up is Alexander’s episode and um....

You may have noticed me talking significantly less about that episode that I have about others. And there’s a reason for that. And it’s not because I have nothing to say about it......

The events in Alexander’s episode basically set off a continuity train until the end of the series. IMHO it doesn’t matter what order you watch episodes 2-8 in, but from here on out it’s definitely all connected. 

So basically what I’m trying to get at is.... um.... g..... get emotionally ready for some future cliffhangers. I’m sorry. 

Also, your last chance to properly prepare by watching Rainbow Live.... you won’t be disappointed, I promise....... 

#king of prism #kinpri #yu suzuno #king of prism sss #king of prism shiny seven stars

[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.

#writer notes #the wicked and the divine #WicDiv