#the morrigan variants are SO interesting and i never see anyone talking.....

[vigilskeep]

lately i’ve been getting really into “warden who romances morrigan but doesn’t go with her through the eluvian”

[twatd]

(Don’t Believe in) Modern Love

Alex: In our second essay on issue #37, I take a closer look at the conclusion of The Morrigan and Baphomet’s relationship, how it decides to leave this complex pairing, and what that says about WicDiv’s approach to love, romance and everything in-between.

If you had to pick a single topic which dominates pop music more than any other… it’d be ‘love’, right? Elvis, the Beatles, the Shirelles, Motown, boy bands, Swift, Sheeran – down through the decades, love has always been the primary concern of pop. The physical kind, the painful kind, the big romantic all-you-need kind, whatever.

But in The Wicked + The Divine, a comic which is at least in part about pop music and at least partly an attempt to do a pop song as a comic, love has been strangely absent.

Issue #37 marked the end of WicDiv’s central romantic relationship, as the Morrigan & Baphomet came to a fiery end. They were the couple that took the spotlight, that variant-cover artists jumped at the chance to draw together, that got given their own dedicated issue. But it’s become increasingly apparent that this was never a love story, but a story about abuse.

After #37, there’s been a lot of criticism of how that storyline was handled. I’d point you towards Pomegranate Salad’s essay on the topic, and the various people sharing their own perspectives in response. They’re all much better placed to comment on this subject than I am, but there’s one thing I’d add, that I think goes some way to explaining why people found this conclusion problematic: issue #37’s ending kind of reframes Baphomet/Morrigan as a love story, which it hasn’t been for a while.

That climactic sequence takes something grounded and relatable – a simple meet-cute that doesn’t require a single word to understand – and contrasts it with imagery that is neither of those things – combat between two gods, one transmogrified into a hideous bird-thing, the other armed with a flaming pole – to show how far their love has twisted from what it originally was. Then, just as their battle threatens to engulf the memories, we get these final quiet moments – first from Baphomet, then from Morrigan – which come back around to those roots.

The sequence turns this into a story of tainted love, and on its own terms, does an exceptional job of that. The problem is that between meeting the pair as a dysfunctional couple and here, we’ve had 33 issues, during which their story became one about abuse – and again I refer you to the more informed voices on this topic.

This reframing made me think about love stories in WicDiv, and the sequence is fairly consistent with how the series handles relationships – not Baphomet and Morrigan’s, but more broadly. Romance in WicDiv is something that we mostly see in retrospect, through the regrets.

Let’s take the other pairings which have been given most space: Baal & Inanna, Laura & Baal, and Laura & Sakhmet.

The course of Baal & Inanna’s relationship certainly doesn’t run smooth, but in many ways it’s the most straightforward love story in the series. Naturally, by the time we meet either character, their story is already over. Baal’s affection only really becomes apparent after Inanna dies, as he mourns him and says: “I loved him”. Note the past tense.

It’s a line that’s picked up by Laura in #35, talking about Baal. The two are the series’ most notable romantic lacuna – we get a slow build-up over the first two arcs, but when do they finally get together, we skip over almost their entire relationship. It takes place in the time between Rising Action and Imperial Phase. We get a single glimpse of the two of them together in #25, forming a little surrogate family unit with Minerva, one issue before their – fairly muted – break-up.

At which point, her pairing with Sakhmet – which had been running alongside the open relationship with Baal – becomes the book’s primary romance. Except, again, we only get the odd panel of them together, and we don’t really know what their relationship is until it’s over. It initially seems like a strictly physical arrangement, and is presented as part of an unhealthy period for Persephone. It’s only after it’s too late – after Sakhmet commits mass murder – that Persephone says she was her “girlfriend”. It’s treated as a reveal, to the character herself as much as anyone.

Persephone positions the two of them as “doomed together”. It’s a line that Baphomet echoes an issue later: “One geek dooms another geek in gothic live-roleplay”. Tragic doomed romances are a grand tradition, and they’re certainly the main variety that WicDiv is interested in – and not just in the modern day. In the 1923 Special, we get the forbidden love of sacramental siblings Amaterasu and Susanoo, their love triangle with Amon-Ra, and Lucifer’s unrequited love for Set.

The focus on heartbreak rather than happiness makes sense given the tone of the series, but I’m not sure how much we feel either. When it comes to romance, it doesn’t really seem like WicDiv’s heart is in it.

And so, for the most part, we get love that’s visible only by its afterglow. Like Inanna/Baal/Laura/Sakhmet in the main series. Like 455’s Lucifer & Dionysus, the latter already dead by the time we pick up their story. Like 1831’s Morrigan protesting that his wife Woden is “cold”, that the “golden child I fell in love with” is absent.

It’s not that Gillen can’t write this stuff, or McKelvie draw it. Young Avengers and Phonogram’s Singles Club are both packed with romantic drama. (Which, heh, Gillen answered a Tumblr Ask about as I was writing this.) That suggests the absence is an intentional choice.

As for why… I find myself thinking of Phonogram, and especially Immaterial Girl, which is in part a cautionary tale about what happens if you value art above human connections. I go to the central mantra of Summer Camp's "Pink Summer", first track on the WicDiv playlist: "It's not how much you love/It's how much you are loved."

That's a deeply unhealthy sentiment, as I read it. The idea that it's worth giving up caring about the people around you, as long as you can make things that will cause other people to love you.

Maybe it's not the case that Gillen and McKelvie can't find the room for romance in their story. It's that the characters, wrapped up in the importance of their sacred work, can't find the room for it in their own lives.

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