It’s the Lord of the Rings fan in me saying this, but while I find the God Tier moments totally triumphant I think this picture is a really important element in the whole thing (my personal take on it, anyway) because something warm and sweet and young is lost when Gandalf the Grey is reborn as Gandalf the White.
It’s the same reason I sob at the end of Pan’s Labyrinth even though Del Toro has said that he believes the film’s fairy realm is real and not just a dying child’s imagination. It’s the part of The Lovely Bones I sobbed at hardest when I saw it, when Susie awakens in her heaven and she’s so luminous that she literally glows but she isn’t human anymore, she was a little girl and then she died and now she’s perfect but something precious and vital was burned away forever.
I mean, Origins and Overtures exists within the Wolf House series essentially so that no matter how much Bette and Jay have later in the story, no matter what good things happen, the full cost of that first initiating loss is properly understood by the reader.
And okay tl;dr I know I know, but basically: for each of the gods that are born, a child has died. Vriska bled to death slowly, her consciousness screaming as she pleaded for a mercy killing. Aradia was murdered, the boy she loved used as the weapon.
And the kids are the saddest of all, because we know the kids best. We watch them being silly and young and exasperated by their guardians and teasing one another and being earnest and brave and reckless and stick fake arms in a cake.
And then we watch them die.
And even if they rise again as gods after that… well, who ever heard of a god getting an ordinary thirteen-year-old happy ending?
