Doubt + Necessity

"Oh ye of too much faith."

First, I’d like to thank those who left thoughtful comments after I skipped last month. All’s as well as the world will allow, just a brief flirtation with burnout as I figure out time and energy with current and upcoming projects.

The question of what art and/or work you do with the time you have is an appropriate one for this month’s cosmic mystery. In The Wicked + The Divine (a graphic novel series by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson, Clayton Colwes, and others), the gods incarnate on Earth every ninety years in an event called the Recurrence. They awaken within twelve teenagers and enthrall the world for two years—and then they burn out and they’re gone.

Is it real? That seems to be up for debate—the Recurrence is more the focus of underfunded academic conferences rather than the lynchpin of various sociopolitical developments. But it’s real to Laura, who wants more than anything to become a god.

It’s 2014, and the gods are pop star echoes of musicians the reader probably recognizes: Inanna≈Prince, Amaterasu≈Florence Welch, Woden≈half of Daft Punk (‘Where’s the other one?’ is a question the creators absolutely want the readers asking.)

Lucifer takes a liking to Laura and invites her backstage to sit in on an interview between newly-awakened Amaterasu and journalist Cassandra. An assassination attempt interrupts the interview, and Lucifer ends up in court, where she becomes the primary suspect for the mid-trial murder of the judge. Laura overhears Lucifer ask Amaterasu to find someone named Ananke.

You can’t blame Laura for needing to look her up on Wikipedia. As far as myths go, Ananke’s kind of obscure. She’s Greek, mother of the more famous Moirai sisters, a god of fate in her own right and, more exclusively, a god of necessity.

She isn’t one of the twelve reincarnated gods. She’s an eternal presence who gave up her powers to guide them throughout the ages, trapped in a cycle of loving them and missing them. She’s the one to find them every Recurrence and tell them of their true nature, and she’s the one to mourn them when they’re gone. Part of that guidance is that she protects the gods from mortals and mortals from the gods. There are rules to how the gods spend their time on Earth, learned the hard way over millennia. Even Lucifer initially yields to her wisdom.

The mystery: which of the twelve reincarnated gods framed Lucifer? And why? Spoilers ahead.

Laura enlists skeptic Cassandra and befriends several gods in the search for the murderer. Then Lucifer breaks out of prison and Ananke kills her before she hurts anyone else… and it all kind of goes to hell from there.

Ananke will do whatever it takes to keep the Recurrence recurring, for, she says, human civilization will fail if she fails.

Sometimes cosmic mystery just needs a character who knows what’s really going on. They’re how lore and secret truths make their way to the reader and the other characters with the emotional stakes attached.

Doubt, however, is part of the story from the beginning. Laura’s belief is anchored in her desire to become a god, but the first people she befriends in this circle are Lucifer—Father of Lies!—and Cassandra, the cynic with a background in Recurrence academia and a media/fandom YouTube channel. Lucifer dulls the gods’ shine and Cassandra’s sharp critique without discrimination, all while drawing attention to the question, Why are the gods here?

Then skeptic Cassandra emerges as the twelfth god, Urðr, one of the three Norns. Ananke and Urðr: two gods of fate, present on Earth, and they can’t seem to agree on what’s happening and where this is all going.

Last October, I had some thoughts about the role of the ‘unreliable explainer’ in the film The Empty Man. (I haven’t come up with a better name.) In short, this is the character who seems to have all the answers to all the cosmic questions, and who abuses that esoteric authority to manipulate whoever falls into their crosshairs.

Ananke knows how these kids behave once they’re told they’re gods, and she’s a very old hand at playing their egos and relationships against them. Ananke even knows how to manipulate the biases of cynics like Cassandra. (Aruna/Tara’s relationship with her pre-god art and with Ananke breaks my heart every time.) When you believe you’re special, even doubt is proof. This is one of W+D’s messages to the future: history is a tool, as much as any other human invention. Don’t let those who know how to manipulate the past decide your role in the present, even if you like it.

Ananke is one of my favorite unreliable explainers. The series is long, which means she’s not just a one-off mindfuck: she has plenty of time, both on the page and in the narrative, to shape the mystery with her false revelations.

In the six thousand years she’s been around steering the lives and deaths of these kids, she’s created a palimpsest of lies that spans recorded human civilization. She knows how to tell—and modernize—a story; she’s been doing it longer than anyone. Any time a character discovers something that casts doubt on one of Ananke’s answers, there’s another, deeper ‘truth’ waiting, all the more believable because of how horrible it is. This results in a sort of lore creep in which few characters (or readers!) interrogate the basic premise of the situation because they’re too busy, say, worrying if Valentine is lying to them about which version of Baal he is or what it means that Laura—it turns out—is the super-secret thirteenth god who is always Persephone and Persephone means ‘destroyer’ for a reason, right?

Let’s follow one of Ananke’s answer chains for awhile. Maybe it’s just because Eurovision finals are coming up, but I’m in the mood to interrogate what purpose entertainment serves. So let’s go back to the beginning: Why are the gods here? Don’t they have something better to be doing than singing?

—>They’re here to inspire humanity! It’s not their place to change the world, that responsibility lies with the mortals.

… but why isn’t it their place to change the world? They have all these miracles, they’ve grown up human so they have some idea of the wrongs in this world…

—>Those miracles hurt and kill mortals more often than they help them.

…so what are miracles, then? What are these superhero powers for?

—>Those are for fighting the Great Darkness, a malevolent force that has held humanity back since the dawn of civilization and constantly threatens to snuff it out.

… okay that’s a whole new thing so I don’t think I believe in the Great Darkness.

—>Oh weird! Here it is!

… Yes, weird that only sky gods can fight this Great Darkness. What’s going on with that? What role do the chthonic gods play?

And so on. Even after Laura, sick of half truths and dead loved ones, ‘kills’ Ananke, these chains of questions and answers keep tugging the characters along. Ananke’s lessons have a tight hold on some of them, and she left plenty of lessons behind that they need to prove wrong—or right. Besides, Ananke is still alive as one of the teenagers. (This is about the time I got annoyed by these ever-evolving ‘rules’—probably exactly the creators’ intent!)

Sometimes it doesn’t fit to give the unreliable explainer so much time. But in a cosmic mystery that’s about how to understand a cosmic mystery, it’s powerful to have the human face of the mystery betray humanity.

I don’t think it’s necessary for antagonistic unreliable explainers to get their comeuppance—especially if the cosmic leans horror—but this story’s all about uncertainty. It feels so good for Ananke’s downfall to come from her own certainty that she knows the deepest, most hidden law of the Recurrence—which ends up being just another made-up rule, so perfectly authored to appeal to her own fears, that she accepted it as gospel.

What’s the cosmic truth beneath that lie? What is left to piece together that hasn’t been destroyed by Ananke’s overwritings?

Nothing certain. The gods know they’re not gods, but they only get so much of the energy that gives them godlike powers. They don’t know where this gift comes from or what they’re supposed to do with it. But they get the time to find out.

W+D succeeds because its cosmic mystery centers on disproving a lie, but gives just as much time to the people affected by the mystery, and the choices they make when they think they’re gods and their lives are filled with grief. (I fall in love with a different character each reread; this time it was Valentine.)

Freed from these constraints, the survivors’ lives aren’t smaller, but bigger. There are no easy guidelines or laws for anyone touched by this not-unlimited cosmic power, just a choice: play god and burn yourself out, or take the rest of your life to explore your relationship with something you maybe, one day, will be able to explain to someone besides yourself. Finding people to love along the way seems to help.

NEXT MONTH

Thank you for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, let them know to check out the Cosmic Mystery Club.

Next month we’re continuing our exploration of the cosmic tension between life and art in Simogo’s 2024 reality-blurring puzzle game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. (There might be a little Blue Prince in there too.) See you then.