Arella
45 years ago - Angela Roth is born to a homeless teenage mother.
38 years ago - 7-year-old Angela is abandoned by her mother, and is taken in by the first in a series of abusive foster homes.
29 years ago - 16-year-old Angela is taken in by a mysterious, wealthy benefactor, groomed to be his future concubine by his staff, secretly a cult to the demon Trigon.
27 years ago - 18-year-old Angela marries her mysterious benefactor, believing herself to be in love, but soon discovers that he is actually an earthly manifestation of the demon Trigon. She is abandoned on earth to hide her child from Trigon's enemies, and tries to kill herself, but is saved by the mystic Azar, who brings her to the dimension Azarath. Her daughter Rachel is born, taught to control her magic by the mystics of Azarath. She becomes a student of Azar, taking the new identity Arella.
10 years ago - 35-year-old Arella witnesses the death of the mystic Azar. Her daughter Rachel, fearful of the return of her father Trigon, leaves Azarath for Earth, assembling the new Teen Titans, who successfully trap him in an interdimensional prison.
8 years ago - 37-year-old Arella is the only denizen of Azarath to avoid imprisonment when her daughter Rachel falls to the influence of her father Trigon. She tries to stop the Teen Titans from killing Rachel, but fails. This breaks Trigon's connection to the mortal plane, which allows the imprisoned denizen of Azarath to weaken Trigon so the titans can defeat him, forever stripping him of his ability to walk the mortal plane. In the end, she sacrifices her own life, allowing Raven's soul to be reborn and ascend to a higher plane.
Parents of superheroes are often as important in the telling of the overall mythology as the heroes themselves; while there's a lot to be said for characters who are powerful specifically because of their own choices, but it's far more in keeping with the legacy of heroic characters going all the way back into antiquity that they are heroes because of the choices their parents made. In this case, we're talking about some very, very bad choices.
Arella's Comic HistoryArella appeared for the first time in New Teen Titans #3, only a few issues after Raven herself. Raven was heavily defined by her mysterious origins in those early stories, which also drove a lot of the overall story's plot; Trigon was THE looming, terrifying baddie, and the slow buildup of his menace was a big part of that. Arella would go on to be heavily featured in a lot of the stories of the New Teen Titans, serving as a source of exposition in a lot of the weirder stories they came across.
Raven would, in later years, often wind up being folded into younger groups of Teen Titans, and that meant that we would regularly revisit the story of Angela Roth and her fall as the consort of the demon Trigon. |
Our Arella StoryWhen Raven as a character was first introduced, the particular sort of horror narrative that her backstory was telling was actually a fairly new thing; horror cinema had undergone quite a revolution in the last few years with movies like Rosemary's Baby and the Omen. From within that context, the story of Raven's mother's fall was a pretty modern one. It's only now, with decades of hindsight, that we can look back and see just how much this story feeds on this particular era of horror. While Raven has had goth culture grow up around her in the intervening years, her mother's story gets to hyperfocus on it's horror roots.
With that in mind, we've deliberately tried to draw from the horror movies of that era to refine Angela's story. Traditionally, she's often depicted as fully aware that she was giving herself as the wife of a demon, even if the initial experience was actually romantic. There's actually a bit of a balance to be maintained between exactly what she does and doesn't know; the goal is to have it feel at least at some level like Rosemary's Baby. The answer seems to be in making her the unwitting pawn of the cult of Trigon, something that we might actually be able to tie into the Cult of Blood later on. Because we've already made the decision that Raven is going to ascend to a higher plane of existence in the years between the fall of the New Teen Titans and the creation of Cyborg's team, It makes sense for this to happen because Arella sacrifices herself to save her daughter. In the end, Arella gets to have a pretty incredible story. |