Die 2
Split the Party
by Kieron Gillen
art by Stephanie Hans
2020
In the first volume of Die, we learned that on Dominic's 16th birthday, he and five of his friends gathered to play a bespoke roleplaying game. They vanished from the Earth for months, and when they came back, they were unable to speak about anything that happened there, and game master Solomon remained behind. Then, a couple decades later, as they were all staring down the disappointments of their mid-30s, they got pulled back to the game world, back to the 20-sided planet Die.
When they returned to Die, each got back the supernatural powers they had the first time. Also, Dominic, who seemed happy enough to be a man on Earth, became a woman named Ash. Going back again opened up a lot of old wounds and traumas, and the group couldn't leave until everyone agreed. Ultimately, they killed Sol, but then the group fractured, with three wanting to leave, and two wanting to stay behind.
In volume 2, Split the Party, we return after more weeks or months have passed, and both sides are basically hopeless. Ash the Dictator, who can compel people to do things; her sister Angela, the fairy-powered cyberpunk Neo; and Matt the Grief Knight, whose powers are fueled by his own and others' sadness, are trapped in the besieged remains of Glass Town. Izzy the Godbinder, who can compel spirits to do do favors for her on the promise she'll do them a favor in return in the future, and Chuck the Fool, who can be supernaturally lucky, so long as he remains over-confident and non-self-reflective, have been transported to the far side of the planet. Everyone is starving and desperate at the start of the volume.
Die seems to be made up of the remains of the games others have played there before. Glass Town, and the countries Angria and Gondal, were all invented collectively by the Brontes; the conquering army from Eternal Prussia seems like it came from the war games HG Wells used to play on the living room floor with Robert Louis Stevenson. My recognizing this isn't a spoiler, but neither is it something Gillon necessarily expects his audience to already know. The characters certainly don't. An explanation of the allusions is part of the plot. Zamorna, who is as fiendish as he is handsome, is another Bronte creation; he eventually describes himself as a ravisher of 17 year-old girls, dreamed up by a 17 year-old girl who wanted to be ravished. Gillon makes him literally a vampire.
The last time the group was on Die, they initially treated is as just a game, the place itself and its inhabitants as unreal. They acted as though their actions had no consequences, as though they were the only people present who could be hurt or who had lives that mattered. They were also, after an unspecified period of just having fun, desperate to figure out how to escape and return home. Eventually they came to accept that Die was real, magical but real, that the people who lived there were real. We don't really know what they did before reaching that point, but we know they regret a lot of it, now.
And they regret all the chaos Sol caused, and that their only plan to defeat Sol involved allowing Prussia to wreck Glass Town. Sol, though dead, persists as one of the Fallen, the zombie-orcs that the group used to just think of as generic monsters to kill.
Ash, Angela, Matt, and their prisoner Sol go to Angria, where they are greeted by Ash's son, Augustus, who is a member of the Ruling Party here. It seems that as teenagers, Izzy dated Zamorna, then Ash dated Zamorna and got pregnant, and Izzy got a goddess to agree to take over the pregnancy when they all returned to Earth. Izzy and Zamorna arrive not long after Ash, (Chuck is off sleeping with elf queens instead, apparently,) and Izzy confesses to the group's role in the conquest of Glass Town, which gets them all locked in bell jars in prison.
While they're locked up, their jailer is the ghost or remnant of Charlotte Bronte, who briefly tells the story of how she and her siblings made up their parts of Die. Allegiances shift, and Ash agrees to help Izzy save the world before they leave again, which involves a complicated plan to temporarily amplify her Dictator's powers to make herself the queen of Angria and place Zamorna under her thrall. We'll have to wait to see what she'll do!
Meanwhile Chuck shows up, luckily at just the right time to rescue Matt and Angela, leaving the zombie of Sol in prison. They have a different plan to save the world, so they're off to the races too.
Gillon's use of so many literary characters and setting components here reminds me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Fables, though I suspect the gaming history he's drawing on is much less familiar to most people than the literary heroes and fairy tale figures from those series.
Portal fantasies where you change when you pass through the portal (and I guess magical girl series where you transform to activate your powers) have the potential to include magical gender changes, but I think Gillon has done more with that idea than I've seen before. My one complaint is that Ash is so reserved and taciturn that we hardly know how she feels, or how Dominic felt about briefly becoming a girl and then turning back into a boy all those years ago. Dominic was bi, and maybe the experience helped him accept his attraction to men? But in neither body does Dominic or Ash appear to experience any kind of gender dysphoria.
When they returned to Die, each got back the supernatural powers they had the first time. Also, Dominic, who seemed happy enough to be a man on Earth, became a woman named Ash. Going back again opened up a lot of old wounds and traumas, and the group couldn't leave until everyone agreed. Ultimately, they killed Sol, but then the group fractured, with three wanting to leave, and two wanting to stay behind.
In volume 2, Split the Party, we return after more weeks or months have passed, and both sides are basically hopeless. Ash the Dictator, who can compel people to do things; her sister Angela, the fairy-powered cyberpunk Neo; and Matt the Grief Knight, whose powers are fueled by his own and others' sadness, are trapped in the besieged remains of Glass Town. Izzy the Godbinder, who can compel spirits to do do favors for her on the promise she'll do them a favor in return in the future, and Chuck the Fool, who can be supernaturally lucky, so long as he remains over-confident and non-self-reflective, have been transported to the far side of the planet. Everyone is starving and desperate at the start of the volume.
Die seems to be made up of the remains of the games others have played there before. Glass Town, and the countries Angria and Gondal, were all invented collectively by the Brontes; the conquering army from Eternal Prussia seems like it came from the war games HG Wells used to play on the living room floor with Robert Louis Stevenson. My recognizing this isn't a spoiler, but neither is it something Gillon necessarily expects his audience to already know. The characters certainly don't. An explanation of the allusions is part of the plot. Zamorna, who is as fiendish as he is handsome, is another Bronte creation; he eventually describes himself as a ravisher of 17 year-old girls, dreamed up by a 17 year-old girl who wanted to be ravished. Gillon makes him literally a vampire.
The last time the group was on Die, they initially treated is as just a game, the place itself and its inhabitants as unreal. They acted as though their actions had no consequences, as though they were the only people present who could be hurt or who had lives that mattered. They were also, after an unspecified period of just having fun, desperate to figure out how to escape and return home. Eventually they came to accept that Die was real, magical but real, that the people who lived there were real. We don't really know what they did before reaching that point, but we know they regret a lot of it, now.
And they regret all the chaos Sol caused, and that their only plan to defeat Sol involved allowing Prussia to wreck Glass Town. Sol, though dead, persists as one of the Fallen, the zombie-orcs that the group used to just think of as generic monsters to kill.
Ash, Angela, Matt, and their prisoner Sol go to Angria, where they are greeted by Ash's son, Augustus, who is a member of the Ruling Party here. It seems that as teenagers, Izzy dated Zamorna, then Ash dated Zamorna and got pregnant, and Izzy got a goddess to agree to take over the pregnancy when they all returned to Earth. Izzy and Zamorna arrive not long after Ash, (Chuck is off sleeping with elf queens instead, apparently,) and Izzy confesses to the group's role in the conquest of Glass Town, which gets them all locked in bell jars in prison.
While they're locked up, their jailer is the ghost or remnant of Charlotte Bronte, who briefly tells the story of how she and her siblings made up their parts of Die. Allegiances shift, and Ash agrees to help Izzy save the world before they leave again, which involves a complicated plan to temporarily amplify her Dictator's powers to make herself the queen of Angria and place Zamorna under her thrall. We'll have to wait to see what she'll do!
Meanwhile Chuck shows up, luckily at just the right time to rescue Matt and Angela, leaving the zombie of Sol in prison. They have a different plan to save the world, so they're off to the races too.
Gillon's use of so many literary characters and setting components here reminds me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Fables, though I suspect the gaming history he's drawing on is much less familiar to most people than the literary heroes and fairy tale figures from those series.
Portal fantasies where you change when you pass through the portal (and I guess magical girl series where you transform to activate your powers) have the potential to include magical gender changes, but I think Gillon has done more with that idea than I've seen before. My one complaint is that Ash is so reserved and taciturn that we hardly know how she feels, or how Dominic felt about briefly becoming a girl and then turning back into a boy all those years ago. Dominic was bi, and maybe the experience helped him accept his attraction to men? But in neither body does Dominic or Ash appear to experience any kind of gender dysphoria.
We get one page of backstory about her relationship with Zamorna, how it intersected with her fraught friendship with Izzy, and what happened to her pregnancy. The emotion is implied amidst a spare recitation of facts, without the benefit an actual voice to lend inflection to the words. You know she's not happy, that her lack of affect is covering up some kind of pain, but all we see is the surface of the black box. We can only guess what's inside it. Maybe there's more coming, but I can't help but wish that Ash was either more expressive or that she had a foil, another character who experienced the same things but reacted differently, so we could discern more about how she felt by contrast.
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