Hayward, who has been pretending to be divorced for no apparent reason: hey I have an idea for your backstory
but genuinely it’s interesting how Paige has to be “the Widow of Wounds” to get traction and trust for her god of martyrs, has to make up a story about a lost lover for her grief to be big enough to be believable. Was her mother’s senseless death and father’s final sacrifice not enough grief to sell the story?
It’s a fascinating parallel with the rewritten story of the Trawler-Man. Carpenter’s telling has that first disciple, that first saint, unwilling to get married; the Trawler-Man changed her to something more and less than human to let her get out of the marriage obligation. The propaganda retelling has that first disciple, that first saint, now mourning a fiancé dead in the war, and afraid of being overrun by the enemy. The Trawler-Man changed her to something more and less than human to allow her to fight back and protect her country from the invaders who killed her lover. The patriotic propaganda is obvious, but the amatonormativity now encoded into it makes it wildly different in tone, too. This is not a god of the river, a god for people to commune with the water; this is a god of nice, normal, brave, dutiful, patriotic families, and that means wanting to get married, actually, and not doing so is a tragedy rather than freedom. Making the Trawler-Man palatable to the people, or useful to the state, or both.
