END OF THE LINE. FALLING. OXYGEN CAN’T LAST THE DISTANCE AND WON’T DIVERT POWER FROM THE PAYLOAD.
Commander Awake Remembrance and baby Gideon Nav aka “Bomb” as madonna and a child.
Seeing this incredible art piece again so soon after the “was Wake a bad mother” discourse, I feel it’s important to remember that The Locked Tomb is a horror series that enjoys playing with the resonance of Catholic ideas.
God the Father, but rather than in the sense of the benevolent archetype from which all loving parenthood ariseth, it’s your creepy vindictive step-dad.
Zombie Jesus, not as a trite online atheist joke, but as the horrifying result of God being the empire rather than transcending it.
And a Mary heavy on the “put down the mighty from their seat” that fully leans into the body horror of a biologically improbable conception of God’s child, who must die to save the world from the dominion of death.
Others have eloquently explored the question of Wake’s actions in their own context, but if we’re talking about ‘good’ parenting, I’m just going to leave you with the reminder that Mary, who is canonically incapable of sinning, lost Jesus for three days during a road trip when he was a kid…
Such good takes, wanted to back it up by saying I specifically drew this because the Madonna and Child overall is just so horrific to me from Mary’s perspective and I think Muir’s narrative makes it really clear and uses it to explore the themes of love in motherhood as horror in this series that I can’t stop thinking about.
Mary had something as intimate and perilous as conception and pregnancy manipulated into a means to an end for a god so beyond her power— was persuaded as a teen by angels who are so horrible in their existence humans have to be commanded to not fear them, and gives birth rejected from civilization, cold, and without comfort or support of midwives or her mother.
Like Mary, Wake had her pregnancy turned into an act of warfare (against sin or against necromancers it’s still a war), was convinced to conceive by monsters beyond her power (angels/lyctors same diff) and gave birth cold and alone without comfort or support.
And then the infant christ, like Gideon, is born not as a child to be loved but as a tool in their father’s war.
I will say until this I didn’t know there was discourse, but I will go ahead and say that I think the question is flawed. Wake never got the chance to find out if she would be a good or bad mother. The babe she held inside her for nine months and felt kick and allowed to transform her body with hormones and cravings was a weapon in a battle bigger than both of them. Wake was killed before the kid even drew breath, diverting her last life support to keep that baby alive.
We can theorize all day on if that was a tactical or an emotional decision but I hope the truth of that stays left open for interpretation because either way I think it was an act of Love. Love for the baby-called-Bomb, or love for the two souls forced to share a body who would never be free without it, or love for the the people who for 10000 years have lived under tyranny, or love for her niece who was too young to have scars all over and an SMG but her picture was kept with Wake most of her life and who wouldn’t have a future without the sacrifice.
