#wicdiv unsolved

[furthergospel]

Wicdiv #38 / Mothering Invention spoilers under the cut!

Remember how Dionysus has footage of the person he loves (which should be Cass, yes?) dying in a hospital bed? I was rereading #38 and it struck me as odd that the Norns were in a room with three hospital beds in it.

To be fair though, the room in the video is fairly different from the one the Norns are in - the chair seems to be of a different make, and so does the bed. There’s also more screens and what appears to be a window in the room, so I assume Cass isn’t going to die in this specific room. Cass even has flowers by her bedside. 

On the other hand, the palette of the room - heck, down to the color of the chair in the corner - matches up to the death footage. It seems to be an intentional parallel. One notes that Kerry’s room and bed in the private hospital of #15 are distinct from what we see in the CassDeathFootage and in #38:

I do find it interesting that gilkelvie chose to make the Norns’ prison so much more threatening than the Morrigan’s - Morri’s looked baroque, modern, shiny. This one is austere and has ties to the idea of death and illness. On top of that, it ties into the footage of what presumably will be Cass’ death. On a Doylist level I can only assume it’s a form of foreshadowing. On a Watsonian one I assume Woden has the setup like this in case he actually injures Cass badly enough that she requires medical attention, and also as a way of threatening the Norns - “I might hurt you badly”.

I’m hoping all three of the Norns make it out of this prison, but what I’ve said about the parallels here doesn’t seem to bode well for Skuld or Verdandi.

[furthergospel]

CONCEPT: a disgruntled old Ananke watching Hannah Montanna on Disney Channel.

Spoilers for issue #38, mothering invention arc! Stuff under the cut.

I was talking to my co-blogger Osiris about Ananke and Minerva and I realised something: Minerva manifests in 2013, with the memories of Ananke (she references past events, shows an awareness of modern technology and modern geography). She’s also managed to act like a perfectly normal teenager around the other gods, and none of them have sniffed out anything odd about her.

Baal ascends to godhood a month after Minerva’s manifestation and, as the  @thecrowstars​ points out, Minerva likely appears publicly around September that year. She thus had to interact with Baal a few months after his ascension and pull off her act.

A few months doesn’t feel like enough time to catch up with all of pop culture and put together a convincing persona. Especially given Minerva’s seeming immaturity compared to Ananke (crying and needing comfort during the Faust Act’s events).

As such, I propose that 2014′s Ananke fastidiously did research on what Minerva needed to know and made up for her 13 year gap in media consumption.

I rest my case.

(this post made with thanks to @thecrowstars​ for her timeline of wicdiv events: http://thecrowstars.tumblr.com/post/174015516252/wicdiv-timeline-of-events )

[furthergospel]

BRINGING SEXY BODIES BACK

Spoilers for #41 under the cut.

Something that stuck with me when we hit Luci, Inanna, and Mimir regaining their bodies was a question: has this been foreshadowed? It felt both out of left field and... not.

Then I remembered the 1831 special.

We saw a death god bring another god back using part of their body (notably not their head; notably, the hand is not enough for a proper resurrection).

We saw a god sacrifice their body to stabilize the resurrected god.

That’s why this beat in #41 has textual precedence - we’ve already seen a god’s body being sacrificed to stabilize another god’s resurrection, only it turned out wrong because of Ananke sabotaging things. Of course, this still begs the question of how Laura figured any of it out - that’s probably what bothered me about this the most at first. But I have faith that Gillen will come to that eventually.

[furthergospel]

Xolotl here throwing something out about the letter in wicdiv #28. Spoilers for wicdiv 35 and 36.

Given these issues, Ananke’s letter in 28 is almost certainly addressed to baal. In 35 we see that Minerva gains all of Ananke’s memories. It seems unlikely that a letter expressing her intent is necessary (though this is YMMV). Next, in 36, we see that minerva is well aware of her murderous purpose and of the existence of persephone as a god and not some external demonic entity.

Ananke’s letter, however, states her intentions and leaves instructions behind (which Minerva would not need if she absorbs ananke’s memories either pre- or post-death) and also calls Persephone “the destroyer”. She is clearly speaking to someone in the pantheon who is not Minerva.

And since Baal is under her thumb with the sacrifices, it makes sense: she’s sending the letter to Baal. She even mentions years of sacrifice at the end of the letter, which feels like a real dig at him, another way to pull his strings. 

(Endnote 1: If I am correct it makes it interesting that she cries while writing it; it gives me the sense that she might not have just been confronting her mortality, but also feeling something genuine towards baal? Hmm. I suppose we will see. I somehow felt like the darkness killing baal’s dad was fishy and ananke-orchestrated rather than organic)

(Endnote 2: On the other hand the child sacrifice feels like something Ananke would not throw into the mix lightly; there is so much room for something like that to backfire (scandals, discovery) and outweigh the possible benefits of it as manipulation fuel. I feel like this means the child sacrifices do occur throughout each recurrence in one form or another? It sure seems relevant when we look at 1831. Could fall in line with the thematic idea of the adults stepping on the youth, a la David to Jon or Ananke with the Entire Pantheon)