Content warnings:

• depictions of fictional instances of police brutality; allusions to real-world instances of it, and to murders by cops

• discussions of suicidal ideation and attempted suicide (fictional)

• discussions of trauma

• discussions of homophobia and transphobia (fictional and real-world)

After 7 years of strife, the Nimona movie is finally out, and I couldn't be more hyped.

I'm genuinely curious about how many people are experiencing it without the context of the comic, and how much narrative richness and emotional meaning they’re finding in it. As someone who's cared deeply about the original story (maybe not as long as the seasoned veterans, but for a few solid and passionate years), I cannot possibly look at the movie through any other lens but a comparative one – and all the similarities and differences between the two narratives are so very exciting to me.

I see the fact that the movie took a different direction as a very precious opportunity to peek into the creative process behind both and see what decisions were made to steer the narrative one way over the other. And exploring how those decisions vary between the original and the adaptation makes me really emotional about the conversation they end up having with one another. So, ramble time!

Narrative, Setting, Theme

The first thing that really stands out to me about the Nimona movie is how different the feeling of it is.

The heart of both narratives is rooted in subversion: taking a medieval European fantasy aesthetic, putting it in a futuristic setting and through that subtly highlighting how this de-contextualized form holds no substantial and authentic content; making the defining trait of fantasy, magic, the dangerous outlier and reject; making us justly side with the assigned villain and the murder-ready “monster”.

The original comic, though, commits to the subversion in its very style of storytelling, in a manner that is almost self-aware. It is established very early in that Ballister's assignment as a villain is in line with the rules of the world: it is more of a thankless, stigmatizing job he's landed with, having no other options since he doesn't fit the bill of a knight or even a lawful citizen "aesthetically". While in the movie, Ballister's initiation into villainy is a genuinely disruptive, shocking and world-shattering event for many, and the Institute's goal is to capture and eradicate him, in the comic he is shown to have a direct line with both the Director and Ambrosius, has some weird terms of contract going on and evidently plays a defined role within the system that is valuable to the Institution – it's just that under this system, he literally cannot win.

In that, Nimona-the-comic seems to rebel against the very rules of storytelling – and while the movie is still directly critical of the "hero" narratives, acknowledging the sense of kinship that the rejected, especially LGBTQ+ people, have always found with the monstrous in media, the original comic seems just a bit more specific about it in a way that I will allow myself to be a bit partial to.

The arguable benefit of the movie choosing a more, let's say, immersive approach and not playing as much with the fact that it is, in fact, a story, is that it probably works better for potential relatability – something the adaptation seems to favour a lot. By "relatability", I do not just mean emotional experiences – clearly, enough people have connected to that in the original comic – but rather how clearly the setting is meant to be read as contemporary to ourselves. Once again, being partial, I unwillingly fixate on the slight comparative un-subtleness of how that is done, in the depiction of background characters, for one – but that might not be that noticeable to any fresher viewers, I honestly wouldn’t know.

Regardless, there is an obvious degree of deliberation to how differently the setting and the theme are handled in the movie – specifically if we look at the figure of the Director. In the original comic, at least to me, she feels more fused with the Institution – while in the movie, she is something of an exaggerated and ailing expression of the society-wide paranoia, but also clearly at odds with the rest of the world. She holds onto a position of power and uses it to her benefit, but that is largely done through lies and secrecy, and, as we see in the finale, her sway over her subordinates is not impervious once the false narrative is exposed. The movie makes it clear the entire Institute is meant to be questioned – but it falls to the Director to be the sort of bad apple that would finally spoil the already stale barrel.

The difference between the two depictions of the Kingdom is additionally exemplified in how Ballister and Ambrosius' arcs transform from one version of the story to another, with the comic Ballister being much more jaded and at least partially resigned to his role of the villain that acts in accordance with the status quo, and the comic Ambrosius being much messier, much more deeply conditioned, much farther gone and thus ready to play by unsavoury, deceitful, self-gaining rules.

While, once again, I am deeply attached to the harsh, unsightly messiness of the relationships in the original comic, and the true degrees of betrayal and hurt between Ballister and Ambrosius always felt like a core aspect of their story, the way things unfold between them in the movie is necessary for Ballister's reimagined character arc. For his movie character, the growing disillusionment cannot happen in the same manner if he feels outwardly wronged by the person he trusted most in his life.

The way his injury and amputation happen in the movie also serves the theme of de-conditioning from our acceptance of even the seemingly pristine, "just" violence in the name of protecting the “order”. At the end, the reimagined story is less about a self-serving and self-aware system, and more about the overwhelming paranoia and guardedness that gives rise to the state's license on murder and violence, which will eventually inevitably be turned against the very people it’s supposedly meant to protect.

Bringing this back around to the Director's character, it seems crucial that in the movie, she is very much the product of the culture, all the shared fear and guardedness turned up to the max. She and Nimona are somewhat counterbalances to each other, two very different communal Shadows. The Director carries all the shared fear, readily exploits and manipulates it in others, but ultimately represents a form of it that most citizens of the Kingdom would actually flinch away from in horror. Nimona, on the other hand, is the expression of everything repressed and shut down, pushed out beyond the borders of the self-contained, guarded world – but the fear others feel towards her is much more conditional, pre-conceived rather than authentically experienced, and once the wall is brought down, she is embraced.

It feels somewhat narratively dangerous that in the movie, the Director seems to carry most of the weight of the corruption, despite specific dialogue and especially the central role of the Gloreth lore pointing to the hateful misconceptions lying at the very foundation of the prevailing culture. At the same time, if the problem is with the person in charge rather than a de-personalized institution, the line between the corrupt government and the people at large ends up somewhat blurred. By making the Director act from distorted, overpowering fear rather than cold calculation and cruelty, the movie seems to steer the viewer towards self-reflection. If one of the hopes it holds is to encourage families to open up and show vulnerability in accepting their queer kids, the fear that leads to rejection has to be pointedly human, while the extreme expressions of it - disturbingly inhumane.

Still, the narrative is openly and radically anti-system, and I'd like to take a moment to specifically reflect on how the comic and the movie expose the Knight archetype as merely a fantasy take on cops, and how the two narratives represent police brutality.

In the comic, the system is more openly hostile towards the general population, and the rightful rebellion and riots seeded by Blackheart and Nimona are violently suppressed by knights sanctioned with the use of heavy weaponry.

In the movie, we never see the knights attack the general population – but Ballister, specifically, is continuously targeted by trigger-happy law enforcement, literally disarmed by Goldenloin in a moment of shock and affect – and then there's also this scene:

The movie seemingly steers away from showing the world as far too jaded, the system as far too ruthless, heartless and overpowering – but the specific nods it has to the real-world stories relayed to us by news reports make the representation of police brutality genuinely unsettling, despite the fact that the perpetrators are not as obviously delighting in violence. Once again returning to the idea of fear, the movie shows the system lashing out in hyper-vigilant self-protectiveness – and the people that are doing the lashing out are holding swords and guns, and they are legally enabled to do what it takes to keep the supposed peace.

In that, the movie's theme does great justice to one subset of the epidemic of police brutality:

'“Police training starts in the academy, where the concept of officer safety is so heavily emphasized that it takes on almost religious significance. Rookie officers are taught what is widely known as the “first rule of law enforcement”: An officer’s overriding goal every day is to go home at the end of their shift. But cops live in a hostile world. They learn that every encounter, every individual, is a potential threat. They always have to be on their guard because, as cops often say, “complacency kills.”

Riot and riot suppression fit very organically into the gritty and brutal and insidious fight against the Institution the comic depicts, adding to the omnipresent "harshness" of the story, while the movie seems to appeal to the specifics of everyday horror stories in a way that mostly exemplifies the overwhelming paranoia that can make any socially vulnerable person a target, regardless of how openly they rise against the system.

The system’s indifference to how compliant any single person is, as long as they hold a marginalized identity, is a crucial circumstance of Ballister's arc in the adaptation, too.

The Folly of the “Pick-Me” Attitudes

As stated above, placing Ballister at the very start of his history of rejection and depicting him as stranded, confused, repeatedly victimized and gradually disillusioned rather than jaded and alone is very central to the story the movie tells.

The original comic seems to focus more on such physical attributes of villain coding as visible disability, gracefully trashing that whole trope. In the movie, Ballister's status as a gay character seems to be much more relevant, both through how we see Ambrosius himself be somewhat socially targeted for their involvement and through the very specific way Ballister engages with Nimona.

Ballister's a "villain", Nimona's a "monster"; both are persecuted, but one is by definition more "human" than the other. The tension of Ballister's arc resides in his hesitations, him struggling to align himself either with the system he's slowly exposing as disingenuous and corrupt or with an entity he was taught to fear and avoid, and who would make him only more of a target through their alliance.

Ballister's quiet, nervous exploration of what it means to be “monstrous”, what it's like to be like Nimona, is deliberate messaging, placing one queer person who is struggling but still trying to fit in next to another queer person who has much less of a chance to, unless they were to kill and eradicate who they are entirely.

It is not necessarily ultimately helpful to draw clean-cut lines within the LGBTQ+ community and say that a trans person's experience is fundamentally different from a cis gay person's experience: historically, those are bound to intersect in the forms of the oppression they face, one way or another. However, with the externally imposed definitions and the varying attitudes of people outside the community, and how those belonging to the community respond to them, it is fair to call attention to the fact that, while a lot of queerness is inherently bodily, a lot seems to ride on how radically and openly you embody your identity.

With Nimona's constantly shifting, openly "inhuman" form, she is much more of an instant target than Ballister was pre-profiling, when the gentle hand-holding could be mostly kept out of the locker room, reserved for more private moments.

When Ballister asks Nimona, "What if you hold it in?", it seems pointedly personal. It’s what Nate Stevenson seems to talk about when referring to Nimona’s refusal to conform as an antidote to this experience of self-censoring: “<..> that’s something I think that queer people deal with all the time: how to turn yourself into the most socially acceptable version of yourself so that you receive the love and acceptance that everyone needs.” And when Ballister accuses Nimona of seeking him out to "give them someone else to hate", he is ultimately doing the very same thing: pushing Nimona down and rejecting her, so that he could still have the shred of acceptance he would otherwise lose by fully siding with her.

Tying that back in with the setting and theme and the commentary on police brutality, the movie Ballister's specific victimization arc focuses on how systemic oppression of the marginalized intersects with state-sanctioned violence. His reluctance to openly rebel might be symptomatic of the fact that under a regime driven by fear and paranoia, you don't even have to be anything truly dangerous to become persecuted – just slightly different from what the "norm" is supposed to be. Ballister's misguided attempts to disengage from Nimona's supposedly harmful presence depict a desperation to hold onto any hope of protection in a world that is ready to make you a target. Fear comes in again, getting in the way of vulnerability.

It’s interesting that in the comic, we see Ballister managing to align himself with some part of the world in an authentic, genuine manner, and in that unwillingly betraying Nimona, who feels she has no option to do the same - while in the movie, Ballister is ready to leave the Kingdom entirely, but it is Nimona who wishes to stay behind and liberate it. The very crux of their conflict in the original comic is different, too, stemming from the specific, weird, captivating tension omnipresent in their relationship.

In the original, Ballister has no qualms about pitting himself against the entire world - as long as that’s what it means to act in accordance with his morals. His eventual distrust of Nimona is not in favour of anyone else - instead, it comes from him understanding she’s not sharing the whole truth with him. They both care for each other so undoubtedly and painfully – but this tragic circumstantial lack of trust is at constant risk of stepping in, making them both guarded, suspicious of one another. In the comic, camaraderie and love don't always automatically make way for vulnerability – and a lot of that has to do with the very heart of the story, Nimona herself.

Guarded Heart, Bleeding Heart

It's impossible to ignore how different movie!Nimona is from her comic counter-part. The latter is an absolutely iconic embodiment of a severely traumatized teen, forever guarded, forever hiding something, forever anticipating some form of hurt and rejection and lashing out in truly disturbing ways in response to that.

Nothing shows it better than how the two stories go about handling Nimona’s arrow wound. In the comic, she goes along with Ballister’s insistence that she rests, not disclosing that she will be healed in a matter of moments, and then either forgets to continue faking her injury or wildly underestimates how long it would take to fully heal in an average person.

The gradual reveal of the true extent of Nimona’s regenerative powers is beautifully memorable, making the reader share in Ballister's unease and apprehension, because, a) how would this be happening, and, more worryingly, b) why would she hide that?

In the movie, the entire thing is instead resolved in a short, yet pivotal scene that I am stupidly enamoured with (just... something about Nimona quietly going along with Ballister's fretting, looking at him in tame surprise... it gets me). The fact that Nimona doesn't even try to hide that she is much less hurt than one would expect, and, even more so, directly states: "I'm not a people", shows that she is a much different character from what we saw in the book. She's, well, out of the closet, which plays into the movie's theme of authenticity and vulnerability and how those make you a target in a constantly on-guard world very well.

Nimona's emotional experience is completely transformed, too. The comic Nimona deals with some truly devastating, excruciating feeling – but she doesn't get vulnerable. She gets angry. The degrees of her anger are world-consuming, destructive, as monstrous as they get – and she's not that easy to reach. When Ballister responds to her trashing his place by giving her a hug, she pulls away and withdraws – because she knows this is only a fraction of her real hurt, real rage, real capability to unleash it all onto the world that's made a wreck of her heart.

She's not that quick to believe that Ballister really accepts her – because she is too scared and too guarded, too familiar with her real self being impossible for others to handle to not try to hide it.

In the finale of the comic, we see the tragedy of the situation they find themselves in: the Institution's torture triggers a split between Nimona's stunted child self and all her destructive, violent anger expressed in the most "monstrous" part of her. She wields her trauma like a weapon: if they are going to break her down into shards, they better expect those to cut. She is guided by vengeful refusal to go down without bringing hell to those that have hurt her. She barely holds any hope for a better life, for happiness, for acceptance – she is simply surviving, and when the world tries to kill her, she sets it on fire. They made her into their monster – now they'll have to deal with one.

The choice Ballister is faced with in the wake of that is sort of the essence of the original comic, showing all the messiness of loving bonds in a broken world full of jaded, traumatized people whose hurt is so often bigger than their grip onto the care they hold for one another.

All through the gradual reveal of Nimona’s true power, it's easier for the audience to cue into Ballister's emotional experience over Nimona's, because we learn these new, unexplainable things about her at the same pace as him. The major breaking point between them comes from Ballister’s sense of wariness because of Nimona’s reluctance to be honest with him. Despite his earlier assurance that he doesn’t have to know everything about her to trust her, he still cannot hold onto that trust when it seems that Nimona is pretending to be someone she is not.

In that, the comic explores all the complexity of openness and care, and how much we can hope to hide from others before they no longer fell like they know us.

Nimona's response to Ballister’s guardedness, in its turn, comes from her experience of being hounded and hurt - and there is no way around that, no chance of not tripping that up by questioning how she may still be alive. That is the tragedy of their situation, how the distance between them that grew out of an impossible lifetime of trauma became breeding grounds for secrecy and apprehension.

In the finale, Ballister's tortured attempts to keep both Nimona and Goldenloin safe leads him to endanger Nimona in a way that is both sort of unavoidable and a deep betrayal of her. The complexity of the ending is that neither of them could've done anything different, neither of them could've acted better by one another in that moment – simply because the world has dealt enough hurt by that point to make it impossible.

The way the final confrontation looks in the movie is much different – because Nimona herself is different. Not hiding the fact that she is "not a people" from the start means that when Ballister says "I see you", she has enough affirming experiences to look back at to believe that. And, most importantly – when he reaches out, her heart is on display.

Movie!Nimona makes herself vulnerable – and gets hurt. She reaches out to a child on the spur of the moment, hoping to feel seen by someone as easy to scar as herself again – and gets effectively re-traumatized. In the ensuing scene back at the lair, she lets herself hurt openly, and admits to feeling genuinely suicidal out-loud. (Insane that they did that, by the way!) She's not unused to rejection, and she still anticipates it from Ballister at basically every turn – but is also more ready to risk getting rejected by allowing herself more openness and authenticity.

She doesn't even keep up the ruse of the fake backstory, like comic!Nimona does. Instead, she makes it clear right away that she was not actually going to try to explain her true nature - but keeping it obscure is a form of honesty of its own. In that, she refuses to pretend to be something easier to comprehend. The comic Nimona is a mystery we're meant to feel confused and uneasy about, specifically because how little she is ready to give away about what she might possibly be hiding. The movie Nimona is a mystery that openly claims herself as such, offers no explanation, but does not try to play the part of something that is more familiar and palatable. She's a glowing embodiment of the young queer experience, defiant and vibrant, and in that - so, so incredibly vulnerable, so easy to hurt.

Through all their differences, the movie finale makes me look back at the comic finale and see it in a new light. Comic!Nimona refuses to make herself open – but it's obvious she couldn't actually escape vulnerability. That vulnerability is embodied in Ballister: it is through hurting him that the Institution can actually reach her through all the hardened shell of trauma-induced desensitization to pain and torture; and when her embodied trauma attacks Ballister, it is with the intent to destroy the last person left who can hurt her. At the end, despite all the distance she still kept between them, her constant excruciating anticipation of rejection and her continuous attempts to not show too much of herself to him, Ballister still ends up holding her raw, hurting heart.

In the comic, Nimona only lets her pain show in fits of destructive rage and hatred – and in that, the narrative seems to tragically isolate her, showing us a kid who is seemingly simply too messed up, too broken, too hurt and too violent to not push others away once she shows the true nature of herself. That is a painful, heartbreaking moment of self-reflection, of realizing that you both never deserved the hurt that made you the way you are and cannot hope that anyone will actually accept and love what it has shaped you into. For all of Ballister's wish and desperation that Nimona still sees him as someone she can trust, she chooses to walk away, hopefully transformed in some small way, but not yet someone who is ready to not be alone.

The movie's take on the final confrontation, showing Nimona attempting suicide on-screen (insane that they did that, by the way!!!), illuminates a specific aspect of the comic Nimona's dark emotional experience that, at least to me, has not been obvious until now.

Comic!Nimona's resolve to stay with the more monstrous part of herself even as their lives are being threatened comes off as an angry, defiant act of choosing herself and refusing anyone else the comfort of thinking they can try to get rid of this part of her and pretend they're not trying to also kill the child part. She's refusing to have anyone separate the darkest and most dangerous aspects of herself from the entirety of her, and if they're going to try to eradicate that, they'll have to watch her die with it.

When first reading the comic, I did not interpret her isolated resolve as a form of suicide ideation – and it's a specific one, too, bitter, spiteful, challenging the world to look her, a hurt child, in the eye and admit that it wants her gone. Still, it betrays an inability to conceive of a different ending for herself, anything but rejection, isolation and violence. Comic!Nimona is as suicidal as movie!Nimona is – but for her, death is a tragic form of commitment to her true nature. It is almost like she - and perhaps even the narrative - believe that when she is at her most authentic, the choice is between either world destruction or self-destruction - and she resigns to self-destruction at the end.

The movie Nimona, on the other hand, wants to see the system burn – but is still holding onto hope of some connection to humanity, to something else that is alive. Her early bond with Gloreth is formative both in the trauma of the eventual rejection and in how it shows how without the external pressure, prejudice and fear, Nimona can have companionship that is truly meaningful, truly a home for her.

In the movie finale, her trauma-induced breakdown leads her to endanger random people – but the driving urge is, once again, of self-destruction, and this time that is made abundantly clear. Her suicide attempt is a challenge, in a way, showing, here, here's my heart, spear me through if you want to so badly, I won't even fight anymore - but it's important that she chooses Gloreth's statue to do so. That is both cyclical and showing that to Nimona, her pain is inseparable from vulnerability, and that the reason she's hurting so deeply is because she knows she doesn't have to. She knows what it's like to be loved. She's tired of losing it over and over. She trusts those who manage to open up to her with her heart, and time and time again, she ends up hurt at the end, and she tries again – until she can no longer stand it.

The tragedy of the comic Nimona is that everything she's been made through repeated victimization makes her deny herself the idea of being accepted, and there is little Ballister can do, under the circumstance they find themselves in, to reach her in any way other than a small one.

The tragedy of the movie Nimona is that she makes herself incredibly, unprecedentedly vulnerable in a guarded, fearful and oppressive world, and even though she's choosing to live, to feel alive and exist as herself, the world strips away her willingness to continue doing so.

Movie!Nimona wants, desperately, to be seen - while comic!Nimona does everything in her power to avoid that. At the end, though, she still needs it - more than anything.

With how much the movie matters now, in an age of growing hostility towards trans people and trans youth across the world, the narrative that shows that Nimona is not only deserving of love, but isn't without hope of finally getting it, and an ending that tells us, loud and clear, that she is wanted, she belongs, she is seen and there is a place for her with the people that care for her, are vital.

In a recent blog post on his Substack, Nate Stevenson talks about his journey with Nimona, and how she was born out of a deeply personal experience. “I didn't think I deserved love”, he writes, “but maybe she did.”

What gets to me with the release of the movie is this idea of an introspection, a grown, transformed creator looking back at something he made as a teenager; the comic Nimona as an embodiment of that teenage self's suffering, and the movie Nimona as a message to that self and all the other young kids like them, from the perspective of someone who's found his place in the world and can see all of this young person's pain and just how deserving of love and acceptance they are.

The original comic is a one-of-a-kind artistic masterpiece, something born out of a place of incredible vulnerable authenticity. I don't know what my perspective of the movie would be if the comic didn't exist – but I think I find the most meaning in this new story when I imagine it as a hug, a message of love and understanding to all this messy, dark, hopeless hurt. The comic says: “I see the monster in you, and she belongs.” The movie adds: “You were never even really a monster to begin with.”

Today, I am grateful both of these things can exist in the world, in a quiet, complex conversation with each other. If you don't feel like there is hope for you, if all your darkest parts are far too unsightly – the original Nimona is here to hold all that loneliness and hurt. But for every person that feels that way, I hope there is a moment when they can fall into the arms of someone who sees them, and feel like their vulnerability, whether intentional or not, is finally rewarded with all the overwhelming love they deserve.

Content warnings:

• discussions of ableism

• discussions and criticism of religious dogma and religious bigotry (Christianity specifically)

• references to school & social trauma

• brief discussion of child abuse

Introduction

Would you look at that! At last! The final instalment of the “Character VS Status Quo” series!

If you are not a Seasoned Reader™, there is some fun juicy context to be gained from these previous posts:

• Introduction

• Chicory: A Colorful Tale

• Encanto

But if you’re only here for that pure Owl House goodness, the previous essays are not strictly necessary outside of the general theses they provide:

1. Our contemporary work culture and societal order operate in terms of standard, because standard is the key component of capital: capitalist profit forecast relies on predictable, invariable performance.

2. This defines and shapes not only the employment and work process, but the overall education system we are subject to, as well.

3. At the same time, the ideal of a fixed standard is inherently unrealistic and causes constant friction between the demands of the capital and the everyday circumstance and limits of a human life.

4. The standard is so rigid, universal and impersonal that we are all bound to fall short of it one way or another, and at the end we can only hope to “pass” as the version of ourselves the society expects. That is true of workers’ performance as well as such things as identity, presentation, gender performance, physical and mental ability and neurology, cultural practice, so on and so forth.

5. When it comes to the work standard, disabled people will present the greatest challenge to the expectation placed upon them and expose the inhuman conditions that affect all of the society universally; but social isolation and ostracization will paint them as “odd ones out” whose experiences fall out of the “norm”. The same mechanism broadly applies to all who are otherwise socially marginalized.

6. As the result, a false binary of “standard vs outcast” is created instead of an organic spectrum of performance, socializing and functioning.

7. The social outcast will feel deeply alienated from the general human experience due to the rigidity of the standard, but at the end of the day, they are the rawest link their community has to the true nature of the human experience.

8. In narratives that depict extremely isolated, lonely outcasts burdened with being their community’s Shadow and seen as the enemy instead of one of the victims, the catalyst to challenging the status quo usually appears in the figure of a “newcomer”: someone who breaks the illusion of the unique unsuitedness of the outcast, usually by discovering their own mode of struggle under the same incompassionate system.
   

Now, this is hefty! But if you’re familiar with the show, you will see why I’ve been really impatient to talk about how The Owl House, with its unsubtle critique of capitalism and colonialism and its rich narrative of disability, explores this story structure and elaborates on it.

As I first conceived of this essay series, The Owl House seemed to slide perfectly into the “character duo” formula outlined above: just like in Chicory and Encanto, we have an original reject and a starry-eyed newcomer who breaks the former’s long-term isolation by bridging the gap between their experience and everyone else’s. However, as I sat down to outline this instalment of the series, I realized the picture was somewhat different from what my bias led me to assume: Luz, our newcomer, never quite gets fully victimized by the same system that has hurt and isolated Eda, the original reject of the Boiling Isles. It is not the Demon Realm that presents her with the challenge of belonging - it only ever triggers it.

Luz’s character arc centres around the intense self-loathing she internalized from her own status of the original and fully isolated reject back in the Human Realm. She’s a newcomer to the Isles, but not to the rigid standard. And so, what lies at the core here is the way the two planes mirror each other, creating a complex and nuanced narrative.

On top of that, the character cast of the show is large, diverse and vibrant with personalities, all of which relate to the theme of societal expectation and rejection one way or another. At the end, we end up with an elaborate system within The Owl House’s storytelling that will make me do a bit more legwork instead of just drawing concrete and straightforward parallels to the previously discussed formula - and boy, am I excited to do that!

Dual World-building and the Plague of Christian Dogma

The plot of The Owl House plays out across two interconnected worlds: the Demon Realm and the Human Realm. The first episode perfectly establishes them as two large environmental narrative foils to each other: in Gravesfield, Connecticut, neurodivergent kids with poor impulse control and learning disabilities get sent to camps meant to teach them to “think inside the box”; in Bonesborough, Boiling Isles, wild witches, coven dodgers and general harmless weirdos get thrown into the Conformatorium.

The coding is not at all subtle here, and at a first glance, the Boiling Isles just seem to offer a more fantastical spin on the realities of the human world: in this version of it, the pressure to conform is no longer masqueraded as care for the “misguided children”, and non-conformity is instead being openly treated as a crime. And, like in every other fantastical narrative that offers a metaphor for our own experiences, the characters get to experience a degree of rarely realistically available catharsis by standing up to the oppressive force in a high-action scene. And Luz is more than familiar with the trope! Leave it so someone well-versed in fantasy escapism to organize a prison break, simply roll with a magical fight and be more than ready to just accept that this is how things are resolved around here.

Such is the simple, subtle beauty of the first episode: our protagonist gets to live out a short scenario of tangible rebellion and be validated in her belonging with other “weirdos”, emotional need resolved, curtains, hooray! Except, of course, both the Reality Check Camp and the Conformatorium are just the more obvious expressions of an elaborate, omnipresent system that has laid the blueprints for their respective societies. Because of that, making sure that Luz avoids the reform program and Belos’ prisoners avoid incarceration does not guarantee a freer life for either of them down the line.

Let’s briefly review the system shared between the two worlds. The core elements of them may be summed up as such:

• The enforcer/The law-maker
  The ultimate enforcers would be considered Emperor Belos for the Demon Realm and (implicitly) the overall government body in the Human Realm. These actors establish the shape of social institutes of work and education, and determine the consequences for those who fail to abide by the rules.
  
  The ultimate enforcer directly or indirectly appoints smaller-scale enforcers: the Coven Heads and Principal Bump in the Demon Realm, the unnamed school principal in the Human Realm.
  

• “The job market”
  Constituting of a network of specific workplaces combined with the overall work culture, it is established by the reigning power and managed by a lower-level enforcer.
  
  The micro-splitting of the society of the Boiling Isles into specialized covens appears to be a fantastical take on the separation of labour in modern global economy. Getting specialized is a life-time commitment, and one’s success at finding a niche to preform well in ultimately defines their social standing.
  

• The school system
  Established and managed similarly to the job market and ultimately tailored to provide the latter with fresh human resource (which we can see in the tracks intentionally mirroring the major covens). Hexside is shown to be initially ultimately powerless before the intrusion of the Emperor, and Bump standing up for the school’s autonomy for the sake of his pupils is nothing short of a small-scale uprising.
  

• The outcast
  Inevitably singled out by the strict and harsh demands of the school and employment system as they are pushed by the enforcer.
  

• The law enforcement

  Created in order to deal with the inevitable challenge the outcast represents. The law enforcement is embodied in the Conformatorium-Camp duo, the entire Emperor’s Coven (i.e. the cops) and, on a smaller scale, in the school detention system.

With the eventual reveal of Belos’ design behind the Covens, we get full confirmation that the entire system exists in an ultimately self-serving and self-reinforcing cycle: the person at the top imposes every aspect of it with the goal of maintaining their position of power and control. The job market and the school system are direct expressions of the enforcer’s agenda, allowing him to remain the enforcer; the outcast is the only element that is not deliberately crafted, the only expression of the organic human nature violated by an oppressive system; and law enforcement is thus created to round the entire scheme off, making sure the outcast does not exist as an alternative to the system but is instead forcefully included back into it by means of if not reform then punishment.

A crucial aspect of the dual world-building here, of course, is the fact that both of the rigid oppressive systems manifest so similarly not by coincidence but due to a shared origin: the religious Christian dogma that in the case of the Boiling Isles was seeded by Philip/Belos and blown out to the scale of the entire societal order with his rise to power. In that, the story points to the aspects of our own mundane lives that we see as a given, like the standardized school system and the ways discipline and social hierarchy are implemented within it, and acknowledges their less-obvious roots in Christian fundamentalism. If you think about it, The Owl House is just one large critique of the Protestant work ethic as the crux of capitalist exploitation, and that’s punk as all hell.

Another interesting parallel between the two worlds, their versions of the same system and the intense social pressure created within them is reflected in Luz’s two families, the birth family and the found one (i.e. Original Mom and Witch Mom). In both worlds, she ultimately ends up as a special needs child in the care of a single mother who already exists somewhere near the margins of what is conventional. The differences between Camilla and Eda’s respective social standings are considerable, of course, but paradoxically, Eda welcoming her status of a reject means we do not see her struggle as obviously as Camilla does. For Luz’s Original Mom, the stakes are raised by having social credit to lose. She is much more reliant on it: her class and status, her stable job - because she cannot powerhouse her way through life like Eda-the-most-powerful-witch-of-the-Boiling-Isles could. Thus, the more reliant someone is on living up to the externally imposed standard while also being inherently vulnerable to it, the greater strain they’re dealing with.

Eda, on the other hand, does not suffer the full socio-economic ramifications of her outcast status until Season 2. We know she is a hustler, having to illegally trade in human stuff, and her life is certainly not made easy by being a wanted criminal and needing regular refills of her basically life-saving medication. However, her pure magical potential gives her enough leverage to feel empowered in the world she navigates. Initially, the biggest price she pays is the extreme level of social isolation, including the people she used to be the closest with: her father, her sister and Raine.

That, and Eda’s general disregard and open disgust for what is conventionally asked of people of the Boiling Isles, means she almost becomes the extreme opposite to Camilla’s attempt to protect Luz by pushing her to adhere to the standard. Eda gives Luz a respite from the constant pressure to conform, but initially discourages Luz from pursuing her genuine passions, like attending Hexside. Once the personal projection is overcome, though, Eda is quite commendably committed to supporting her effectively disabled apprentice and helping her learn magic in a way that would accommodate her very straightforward physical limitations.

Once Season 2 rolls around, though, Eda’s progressing disability tanks her most natural magical potential, and her social credit is greatly depleted by a public trial. Still lacking any external social support, having only recently reconnected with Lilith who is now as disadvantaged as Edalyn herself, means that Eda struggles to put food on the table - and that pressure is, once again, reflected in her and Luz’s position as a single mother and a special needs kid. We get, for example, the incredible bit of dialogue in which Eda mentions having to prioritize getting the specific foods Luz can actually digest while being already on a tight budget.

Through Luz’s story, The Owl House shows us time and time again how the rigid standard hits the already incredibly vulnerable and disadvantaged family units the hardest, as well as how unforgiving it is towards parents that are simply trying to do good by their children. And, of course, at the end the entire weight of the system and its cruel repercussions rests on the shoulders of an already ostracized, struggling kid who has no choice but to internalize their caregiver’s struggle as their fault.

We will talk more about what that means for Luz’s character in a later segment. For now, with the mechanics of the two realms and how they reflect each other hopefully properly established, let’s look at all the many stray bits floating back and forth between them.

Surf Dimensions, Reject the Binary

The Owl House is such a non-binary show at the very core of it, is the thing.

The dual world-building and the seemingly neutral binary of the two realms appear deeply thematically relevant, especially in the context of the final climactic resolution of Luz’s struggle against Belos. In the show’s finale, she embraces her own non-binarism and how she transcends the rigid boxes of belonging: she is a child of the Human Realm, student of the Demon Realm, and something else on top of all that, ultimately self-defined.

And Luz is not unique in that: the narrative is teeming with numerous fluid elements, travelling between the two worlds through portals made possible with the use of a bigdener deity’s blood. Humans’ understanding of magic and witches and the entire genre of fantasy are, at the end of the day, an expression of the natural and inescapable bleed-over, and the Azura series becomes fascinatingly full-circle in that: ultimately inspired by whatever glimpses of the Demon Realm humans got over the millennia of their existence, then slipping right back into the Demon Realm and ending up on bookshelves there. The fact that Azura is the main bonding point between Luz and Amity just, ultimately queers the narrative in a very literary sense. Their connection is built on the recognition of the ultimate fluidity of their respective experiences, their deep, heart-felt connection to something that is both their world and something beyond it.

Another equally subtly fluid element of the narrative is the entire Clawthorne family, starting with Evelyn Clawthorne, who travelled to the Human Realm at least once, but most likely repeatedly. From there on out, each Clawthorne is pretty much inherently “more than”, not just a witch but a part of a mixed witch-and-human bloodline.

That genetic non-binarism remains hidden and implied until Eda revives the old family tradition by discovering the portal door and starting her own long history of trans-realm travel. Her connection to the Human Realm gives her shelter when her home life becomes unbearable, a source of income when she becomes fully isolated and marginalized, and eventually - Luz, a vital part of her found family and the person who broke Eda’s decades-long self-isolation and othering by reconnecting her with the rest of her world. The fact that Luz immediately ends up in the company of the Boiling Isles’ reject and finds instant safety and security in the solidarity of weirdos is therefore more than just a lucky coincidence: Eda’s “weirdness” is narratively inseparable from her interdimensional fluidity, and both her and Luz ending up in the margins of their respective societies is what makes them stumble into one another.

Belonging vs Fitting In

To continue this long parade of floating bits, Luz herself finds a narrative foil in Vee, something that is made especially clear in Vee literally wearing Luz’s face and the two of them essentially trading places in their respective home worlds. In that, they are given a similar advantage: by the force of circumstance, they both immediately end up surrounded by societal rejects upon entering a new world, which gives them a leg-up in adjusting to the new environment and saves them from instant alienation.

At the same time, Vee and Luz reflect two very different strategies of belonging. Vee’s adverse experiences over in the Demon Realm meant that her priority upon entering the Human Realm was not so much to find the freedom to be herself as to very literally survive. And in order to survive, she has to fit in, to mask herself and pretend to be someone she’s not. Immediately ending up in a group of weird alternative kids means she gets a lot of space for error and social blunders as she finds out how to be human; being sent to a camp that is meant to train kids out of non-conformist and/or anti-social behaviour means she simultaneously gets a crash-course in fitting the bill of an average standard-compliant teenager. In that, Vee technically finds herself in the safest possible place for herself - but physical and social survival provide her with shelter, not true belonging.

The inherent difference in their goals is what leads Vee to undermine Luz’s struggle and resent her for abandoning a safe life and a loving home. At the same time, Vee has the advantage of a sense of social safety and inclusion into a group of peers: something Luz never got to experience in the Human Realm. On top of that, Vee does not seem to display any of Luz’s signs of ADHD, which was the main point of pressure that Luz and Camilla were dealing with within the rigid, unaccommodating system. All of that means that Vee has friends she has had the chance to be weird around and not be rejected on those grounds, and her dynamic with Camilla is inherently much more different from Luz’s: Vee like no one else can understand Camilla’s intense compulsion to keep her daughter safe by concealing the aspects of her that are considered “other” and undesirable.

Eventually, though, Vee’s camouflaging strategy of belonging becomes compromised, and the way that happens underlines both how vital a disguise is for her - and how important it is to still have someone who’s in her corner at her most authentic.

Camilla herself gains valuable experience when helping Vee through another adversity: she is forced into a situation in which protecting a child (soon-to-be her child) means putting herself in opposition to another person in a way that would generally be considered “anti-social”. The very definition of protection gets redefined, from the hope of helping a child “fit in”, in a way that smooths out any intrinsic difference between them and the standard, to being her child’s shelter, their rock, a place of unconditional safety to count on regardless of how well they succeed in making the rest of the world accept and accommodate them. Having to do that for a kid that is so inarguably different from anyone else just might’ve been the start of Camilla’s readiness to reconsider whether she was right to decide against sheltering Luz in a way that would “set her up” for further alienation and bullying.

A place of belonging and authenticity as a refuge, a secure base to start exploring one’s true destiny and identity from, is a running theme within the show. We see it mirrored in its abuse narrative, represented by Amity and Hunter. It is the discovery of a secure, unconditional, truly supportive bond that makes space for their messes, secrets and weaknesses, that helps them start envisioning a life for themselves that is not defined by their abusers. It is when that bond is threatened, when Luz is in danger, when Belos is using Hunter’s body to hurt Flapjack, that both of them take their final stand and challenge their abusers, reclaiming their autonomy. In the scene in which Amity stands up to Odalia, she talks about self-definition, how finding a supportive friend group makes her think about what kind of person she wants to be. For Hunter, finally standing up to Belos means stating all of his deep authentic desires and refusing to ever again go against them.

A degree of challenge against imposed authority is vital for a happy, authentic living, and we can see how character after character is only fully enabled to do so when there is someone else in their corner, loving and supporting them unconditionally. We even see that in Eda, who is supposedly a self-reliant, stubborn and unrepentant rebel: with how she has confided herself to utter isolation on the grounds of her curse, she is technically still abiding by the status quo rules even when vocally challenging the external expressions of it. By continuing to evade the Emperor’s Coven, Eda is effectively disrupting Belos’ attempts to enforce the law, sure, and that is crucial to the world’s survival. On an internal level, though, she has allowed the system to define her in its arbitrary terms. Her identity is compromised and erased by being an outcast, the faulty “crumbling brick”, and she seems to initially unconsciously accept that that’s all she’s ever going to be - otherwise, she would still be pursuing belonging. It is only when Luz enters her life that Eda becomes ready to renounce this act of violence against her identity not only externally, but internally, and considers that her life can be more than just isolated survival on the margins.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that in a show that is so deliberately about self-definition, one of the elements of the world-building are palismen - magical companions that connect with a witches based on their truest, authentic desires for themselves.

It is also telling that the narrative’s enforcer, whose agenda is to compromise any true identity in favour of the system that serves him, habitually consumes the very essence of these creatures, basically surviving by subduing and draining other people’s authenticity.

Enforcing the Binary

Speaking of Belos, let’s look at his very unique place in the dual world-building. Technically, he also traverses planes and travels between realms - but instead of being a fluid bit, he is the singular source of arbitrary rigidity. Unlike Luz, whose presence on the Boiling Isles shows her dual belonging, Belos holds himself in unbending opposition to the Demon Realm. In that, instead of transcending the borders of an artificial identity, he chooses to bring a rigid system to the world he has travelled to. Through his enforcement, the duality becomes a binary: Human vs Demon, God’s law vs Witchcraft.

Belos is the singular source of the rigid system that overtook the Boiling Isles, and with it - of the pretend binary of “lawful witches - Wild Witches”. The population of the Boiling Isles is led to believe that their society is neatly split into those who abide by the supposedly god-given standard and those who dishonour the world order: the marginalized, the outcasts, the deviants. It is in much the same fashion that the majority of our own society will perceive addicts, the homeless, psychotic people, etc., as “too far gone” in their failure to comply with the societal norm. Specific forms and degrees of social deviance have become subject to such wide and total alienation that an average middle-class person might as well feel like they’re living in an entirely different world from anyone struggling this intensely.

At its core, though, the separation created by Belos’ Coven system is entirely arbitrary, artificial and, at the end of the day, purely illusory. The most insidious part of it is that Belos himself does not actually believe in it: the entire population of the Boiling Isles is equally, indiscriminately corrupt in his eyes. He is the only person aware of just how false and shallow this societal disparity is, and he is the only person aware of the true binary at play here: himself, representing the entirety of humanity, against the entirety of the Demon Realm. In that way, all the Coven-compliant witches aligning themselves with the Emperor’s rule in opposition to the Wild Witches are not much different from upper-middle class citizens choosing to believe they have more reason to relate to billionaires than to those surviving below the poverty line. Religious sin-based dogma, the law, the capital - all of those necessitate that someone is below you on the social ladder, just so you didn’t have to feel like you’re losing the cosmic lottery; and so everyone but the enforcer leans into the hierarchy readily, throwing the most marginalized under the bus in the process.

At the end, it seems that if you find yourself within a binary system, one way or another, it is something you’re being subjected to, an external force robbing you of a natural existence - unless you yourself are the self-aware enforcer creating a rigid order of your own accord.

All of that pays off beautifully in how Luz and Belos serve as each other’s narrative foils: Luz’s organic fluidity is an ultimate challenge to Belos’ claim that his opposition to the witches is natural, that he represents the entire human race and that his quest upon the Boiling Isles is bigger than himself and his own self-serving agenda.

Outcast, Chosen, Weirdo

Which brings us to one of the yummiest bits of The Owl House’s narrative: Luz’s place on the Boiling Isles.

The audience all seem to venerate what The Owl House tells us about the entire fantasy & isekai genre. So much has been said about Luz’s character, her initial determination to be the hero of the story, and the rift between the Boiling Isles and the simplified and protagonist-centred version of a magical world she had absorbed from human media.

Furthermore, the way Luz is paralleled with Belos exposes the unfortunate colonialist undertones of portal fantasy, especially when it is accompanied by a “prophecy” plot. The combination of the two is so omnipresent in contemporary art that we don’t even bat an eye at a story about an outsider who, for some reason, is divinely chosen to right a world they do not belong to, and is, inexplicably, better suited to shape it than those native to it.

With Belos’ undeniable colonial agenda and the way Luz’s own expectations are repeatedly challenged, though, the viewer is more or less forced into understanding that Manifest Destiny is not a neutral trope, and that “a great purpose” is not at all the ultimate cosmic justification for entering a foreign world that mainstream storytelling makes it out to be. Belos’ and Luz’s respective relationships with the world itself, represented in the Titan, show that well: Belos’ entitlement leads to violence, subjugation and extraction, whereas Luz engages with the world earnestly, choosing to learn its organic language and communicate with it on its own terms, not for any personal profit but, truly, just for the purpose of making a friend and finding a place of belonging. It serves the narrative well that a chance like this is being taken by an Afro-Latine girl from Connecticut, a descendant to both the Native and the forcefully relocated peoples.

Even Luz’s earlier misguided attempts to make herself the hero of the story are ultimately sympathetic in the context of her personal struggle, though, seeing how she is a nuanced and compelling character with a broad emotional range and a whole hoard of subconscious emotional issues. Luz’s desperate need for protagonism seems to stem from her position at the very bottom of the oppressive system that dominates the Human Realm, the one she carries the full crushing weight of as a neurodivergent, learning-disabled child of a single parent.

Before arriving at the Boiling Isles, Luz had already had plenty of experience of being “the alien” in the room: she is consistently othered from her peers and dismissed and shunned by authority figures. Back in the Human Realm, her otherness is undeniably seen by everyone, including her own mother, as a failure: Luz appears incapable of simply “being human”, since the strict standard and expectation have pretty much universally replaced raw and organic humanity, and most people seem able to roll with that smoothly enough.

Becoming “Luz the Human” flips that script entirely. It is the ultimate validation of our girl’s inalienable identity, and it is a reminder that in the Demon Realm, she is different and exceptional in the most neutral, objective way, and so any struggle to learn the ways of it is more than expected. Luz learning magic in spite of it is her exceeding expectation, instead of laboriously crawling over the bar of “bare minimum”.

Luz’s earlier pull towards the trope of Manifest Destiny appears to be something of a need to overcompensate. For a Chosen Hero From Another World, being different or “other” is a good thing. In a circumstance like this, Luz would be able to experience being a literal isolated alien as something that means she is here to make things better instead of worse, for once in her life.

The lessons she learns from Eda and the unconditionality of Luz’s belonging with her help her gradually outgrow the protagonist complex.

This unconditional belonging, combined with her unique status that doesn’t feel like a moral failing, means that Luz is fired up and excited to learn magic, despite what is basically just another form of a learning disability. That shows just how social the nature of Luz’s struggle in a regular human school is.

What we see as the show progresses is that Luz’s core identity goes securely uncompromised as long as she is allowed and empowered to fluidly work with her objective magical surroundings without the threat of a moral failing. And, quite tellingly, it is when her found family comes harshly up against the rigid system enforced by Belos that she finds herself deeply challenged again.

The place Luz ends up in at the start of Season 2 is eerily familiar to her. She is forced to relive watching her single mother struggle when left one on one with the burdens of (the capitalist) system, sees her having to strain the limited resource she has left to take care of her child’s specific and unconventional needs. On top of feeling like a burden, Luz is also left with the deep-seeded guilt complex that tells her Eda’s current vulnerable position is entirely Luz’s fault. That is how the sense of unconditional belonging gets threatened: Eda might still be very vocal about how much she treasures Luz’s company, but in the simplest, most everyday material expressions of their lives, being different the way Luz is different is bad again, being different is hurting her family again.

The fact that Luz and Eda (and Lilith) get to openly and consistently bond over their disabilities, with Eda having to learn glyphs from her own protege, probably provides Luz with a degree of reassurance that can keep her mental state wobbling between less and more stable for most of the season’s run. By the end of it, though, she is once again forced to overhear her caregiver talk about the immense sacrifices she feels she has to do for Luz’s sake - combined with the promise of sending her away. That tips Luz over, making her absolutely desperate to be part of the solution, because she is so excruciatingly tired of feeling like she is the problem. Her scrambling to take things under control, to be the one who makes it right again, is most likely her attempt to avoid what she would perceive as further rejection: didn’t Eda promise they would stick together? Can’t she see how much it hurts Luz to be someone Eda has to sacrifice her entire life for, how that demolishes any hint of faith Luz might muster in actually managing to make Eda’s life better? Can’t she see that what Luz needs is for them to find any possible alternative to the hostile system, to this notion of their suffering being inescapable?

When Luz first comes to the Boiling Isles, she is enabled to simply be herself for the very first time. And that is something she seems capable of learning to be content with it - as long as her environment doesn’t make her feel like “herself” will inevitably bring pain, suffering and separation to her and those she holds dearest.

Healing the Reject

The ultimate climax of Season 3 and the show overall resolve Luz’s debilitating self-loathing once the rigid separation is once again overcome in favour of fluidity. The previous season is spent building up her overwhelming sense of guilt: her coming to the Demon Realm undoubtedly hurt her mother, and the events that followed seem to Luz to underline, time and time again, that this foreign world is better off without her.

There is a lot of subtle complexity to how Luz’s story challenges the incidentally colonialist “chosen” trope, how at the end of the day, she’s not meant to rewrite the world (like Belos was attempting to) but to influence the lives of individual people; how the way she achieves that is by embracing her authenticity and humanity, not by making herself fit a rigid expectation; how in that, she herself is being taken care of by the people whose lives she has enriched, and that taking care of her is a vital part of such enrichment; and how whatever power Luz has in the Demon Realm is simultaneously freely and affectionately offered by the Titan and claimed with full personal autonomy. How that doesn’t make Luz special - it just makes her friends with someone who trusts her with their own power in a moment of need. In what other adventure plot would “Well, you’re the one here, so I guess I’ll leave this to you of all people” be as much of an inspiring and touching pep-talk from a patron deity? Only in a story in which the character has struggled, time and time and time again, to justify to herself her right to be there, just because it makes her happy. Luz never becomes chosen - she only ever gets to choose for herself.

But what’s even more important is that at the end, what Luz needed was not some proof of her “purpose” on the Boiling Isles but instead the ultimate validation of her transcending the binary of “human - demon” and the limitations put on her identity. What gives her a moment of awareness and authenticity that connects our protagonist with her own, deeply personal mission, is the recognition she receives from Camilla. It is her mom choosing to cross the border alongside her and embrace everything that’s given Luz a home, however bewildering it is to Camilla herself, that helps Luz start untangling all the guilt she carries.

The hurt Luz accidentally dealt to Camilla lay at the very heart of every other self-loathing spiral, as if at the end, Luz needed to somehow justify her decision to stay in the Demon Realm by proving it was bigger than herself, that she at least brought ease into others’ lives. But that just traps her in a cycle of ever-growing anxious insecurity, forever fearful of dealing more pain as proof that her choice was cosmically wrong and self-serving.

Camilla’s side of their relationship is defined by her deep care for Luz and her horror at the thought of failing as a parent. That’s what she fixates on when Luz talks to her for the first time in month in Season 2: how awful it feels to realize her child’s been miserable living under her roof. It is something Luz frantically attempts to reassure, aware of the fact that it’s not her loving mother but the society at large that leaves her feeling this alienated. With how challenging their situation had been for a while, though, it takes longer for them to work through all the complicated, hurt feeling around it.

Just like every other outcast we’ve looked at in the Status Quo series, Luz ends up painfully exemplifying all the universally suffocating constraints of the societal order - but with just how pronounced, obvious, inalienable from who she is her inability to fit in is, she ends up the Communal Shadow, rejected and overlooked entirely, so that others didn’t have to adjust to her challenge. What that means for Luz’s loved ones, especially her mother (who, in the eyes of the society, is tasked with keeping her child both in line and happy), is deep, empathetic suffering that is inseparable from their care for her. For Camilla, loving Luz means worrying about her; and with the disproportionate amount of worrying she has to deal with, Luz is left to internalize the notion that having her in one’s life is sort of just… that. Only pain and stress and worry, and not much else.

When Luz comes to the Demon Realm and inadvertently endangers Eda by making her care about Luz enough to come rescue her, when she upturns Amity’s life by “making her do stupid things” when Luz is around her - all of these seem to reaffirm that loving Luz is a daunting trial, and that, really, everyone’s lives are made easier without her around. And it’s not like they can un-love her - but that is the problem, that makes Eda want to sacrifice herself, just because she cannot undo all the care the two have developed for one another. So at the end, the only solution Luz can come up with is an impossible and chilling one: the world would’ve been a better place if Luz didn’t simply leave it but had never even existed to begin with.

It is only when Camilla follows Luz across the divide, demolishing the binary of “a home one fails to be happy in vs. a foreign world one has to justify one’s engagement with”, and offers her unconditional support and understanding, that Luz is once again empowered and enabled to simply be herself instead of a tool of either providence or misfortune. But doing that requires that Camilla herself becomes vulnerable and discloses her personal struggle within the rigid system. She has to be honest about the unfairness of the expectation placed on her and her daughter, because the only alternative is her daughter believing that the problem is with her.

Of course, once the truth of that is acknowledged, Camilla cannot in good consciousness ask Luz to go back to trying to adhere to the standard. The only way forward for both of them is to reject the pressure - in whatever way that is available.

The dual world-building of The Owl House functions in a way that makes the Demon Realm the more dramaticized and action-packed half of the system, which is necessary for hosting the show’s high-stakes adventure plot. That also means that in the Demon Realm, the fight against a rigid structure can be exceptionally direct and highly cathartic, with the ultimate dictator fully defeated at the end.

Ironically, Belos makes it easy for our characters to bring his system to ruin: by holding himself in constant, deliberate opposition to the rest of the world of witches, he makes himself a fully removable foreign body. His agenda, even though initially concealed, is eventually very obviously spelled out - and past a certain point, he does not try to hide that the purpose of the system he enforced is to hurt the witchkind.

What that means for the ultimate climactic resolution is that with removing the dictator, the rest of the characters are able to fully shake the unnatural Coven system and the oppression that comes with it. Belos has deeply conditioned and colonized the population’s minds in a way that should not be understated - but he also undermined all his work by single-handedly executing an act of direct large-scale violence on the Day of Unity. In that, he made the separation between himself and the witches clear, and so uncovering the truth of their natural state became as easy as rejecting whatever Belos stood for. The version of the system as it is exhibited on the Boiling Isles is in itself much more streamlined in how it originates from a singular enforcer, and so it is easily destroyed, too. (Too bad Belos never got a taste of colonial American democracy and was still mucking about under the English Crown before getting whisked away to the Demon Realm; maybe he would’ve gotten some fresher ideas than an “Empire” otherwise.)

Evidently, shaking the foundations of the same system over in the Human Realm is much less possible. Even more so, the characters that still reside in it by the end of the show are rarely even allowed any sort of “out” - and that is something that ultimately makes them relatable, because, as disheartening as it is, the rigid and suffocating environment that Luz suffers in is wide-spread, almost omni-present in our reality, and we may do our best to distance ourselves from it, but few of us get to disengage from it fully. The show’s dual world-building serves an interesting purpose that is extremely kind to the viewer, simultaneously giving us the catharsis of watching an unnatural and oppressive societal order crumble and not fully alienating us by taunting us with an (as of yet) unrealistic and utopian escape.

The most important part of this to me is what exactly helps and supports Luz as she is forced to continue existing within the constraints of the Human Realm - and that is having her friends and family as a shelter, a place of safe authenticity to return to, time and time again, and know that it is possible, and that on the deepest, most personal level, she is understood and accepted.

The Owl House is a show about family, belonging and self-determination in the face of an oppressive system that seeks to compromise one’s sense of identity in favour of a lifeless standard. And that is the ultimate value of Eda and Luz’s bond. What they give to each other is integration and re-integration into a world that breathes wild, free magic and empowers its inhabitants to connect with their deepest values and aspirations. Luz’s arrival and gradual absorption into the Demon Realm’s magic makes it clear that Eda, too, was never a stranger in her own land. Instead, with Papa Titan’s open and earnest affection for them, both Eda and Luz are quite literally favoured by the very ground they stand on, even as the arbitrary social order makes them feel othered.

Once again, like in the other Status Quo narratives we’ve looked at, honesty, vulnerability and solidarity are key to this integration, to finding an anchor in one’s bond with someone else and through that remembering our struggle is not a lone one. What Eda and Luz are to each other, what Camilla and Luz learn to be for each other, what the entire Hexsquad does for one another, is that - providing a place of safety and belonging. Implicitly, that belonging exposes the traumatic environment they were equally victimized by. Explicitly, it provides an alternative and reminds them that the status quo, however omnipresent, is not the only option ever given to them, and that they might still have an authentic life with their loved ones, however unwelcoming the outer world may seem.

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This post comes out on the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Before reading further, please consider supporting Ukraine’s fight for freedom and peace by donating to either of these initiatives:

• Solidarity Collectives

• Come Back Alive

• Medical battalion “Hospitallers”

Alternatively, support Ukranian individuals’ fundraisers. Here is one.

Content warnings:

• discussions of addiction, substance abuse (specifically alcohol) and co-dependency

• discussions of loaded and challenging interpersonal dynamics

• mentions of trauma and abuse, real-world as well as fictional

• repeated mentions of suicidality (in fiction)

• mentions of war (fictional)

• mentions of “splitting” (fictional, unrelated to OSDD&DID)

The song introducing us to Centaurworld is perfect. It is weird and silly, capturing the realm’s zany, deeply disturbing essence, and it gives us a concentrated, bite-sized serving of insight into the Herd’s whole deal and dynamic: they are clingy, overexcited, maybe overly dependent on each other on the grounds of their shared world-wide trauma and personal issues, and they enable each other’s maladaptive coping by trying to ignore the underlying issues and sing and dance through the impending doom of chronic anxiety and existential dread. Hooray!!!

This song also completely misrepresents the concept of co-dependency, which is something I happen to care a great deal about.

What’s fascinating and confusing to me in this is that Centaurworld as a show actually offers a wide variety of complicated relationship dynamics rooted in self-neglectful mindsets that end up compromising a person’s sense of identity - it’s just hardly the Herd that actually represents those. So let’s explore how the show handles the topic of un-nurturing* relationship dynamics, including co-dependency, and how that fits into its overarching narrative of trauma recovery.

*As someone who personally struggles with co-dependency and can get really overwhelmed with the need to overanalyze their relationships to try to figure out if they’re “healthy” or not, I try to avoid that label altogether. “Health” and “healthiness” can become quite powerful tools of shame and have an inherent standard of universal “normalcy” built into them - something that will simply not be available or relevant to people with specific and challenging experiences. It’s good to try to maintain and nurture our mental, emotional and physical well-being, but some of us never really get to be “healthy” the way others would understand it.

To start us off, I would really like to settle on a specific definition of co-dependency. This will get lengthy and intensely personal, but hey, what else is new :- )

Co-dependent ≠ Mutually Dependent

So like. This isn’t it.

The self-ironic embracing of mutually intensely dependent relationships is not something I would want to comment on in any way: there are plenty of things that make attachment confusing and challenging, and, once again, the standard of “healthiness” cannot be applied universally. A degree of mutual dependency probably arises pretty naturally in close and involved bonds, and with where I am in life, I do not want to even try to get into all of that and figure out where the boundary of “health” lies there.

What I do feel very much enabled to talk about is the difference between having your life closely intertwined with someone else’s - and experiencing genuine self-destructive co-dependency.

The quickest skim of a Wiki article would tell you that “co-dependency” developed from an earlier term “co-alcoholism”, which described the dynamic between a substance-abusing person and their loved one interfering with their recovery. “Co-dependency” as a word appeared alongside with the term “chemical dependency”, which was intended to describe a broader spectrum of addiction.

A co-dependent person is someone who assumes the identity of a caretaker in relation to a substance abuse-suffering partner, friend or family member and starts defining their life fully by what they can do for their loved one's well-being. They adopt self-destructive, sacrificial behaviours that lead to a full neglect of their own needs, and that is often accompanied by the ungenerous mission to "save" or "fix" another person – something that isn't fair to either party involved into the relationship.

A prominent Russian lesbian writer Evgenya Monastyrskaya has shared her own experience of co-dependency in her autobiographical novel. In an attempt to hinder her partner's substance abuse, she would bitterly, darkly drink along with him, just to leave him with less alcohol to consume. That is a quite powerful illustration of the degrees of dire self-destructive action a co-dependent person may take when operating from the assumption that they carry the sole responsibility for the struggling person's well-being, health and survival.

Self-sacrificial co-dependency can just as easily become controlling: the co-dependent pins all of their self-worth on the task of helping the dependent, and so when the latter is doing "badly" at being helped, an instinctive sense of resentment arises in response, with the co-dependent attempting to defend their sense of worth by attacking the person who refuses to benefit from their assistance. At the same time, the "giver"-"taker" dynamic becomes deeply entrenched in the bond, the dependent's addiction and need for assistance become the very basis for it, and so any movement towards recovery would actively threaten an involved, intense, intimate relationship, potentially making the co-dependent subconsciously resistant to the idea of their loved one actually getting better.

Over time, the understanding of "co-dependency" broadened to include any generally “unbalanced” dynamic in which one person assumes the role of a caretaker. The “dependent” doesn't have to actually experience chemical dependency to any substance. Instead, they might generally struggle with their mental health and exhibit great mental and emotional distress – something co-dependent tendencies are quick to get triggered by and respond to.

In my attempts to understand my own co-dependency, I listened to a podcast* in which the host asked their listeners: As a kid, did you often find yourself taking care of your emotionally unregulated parents, instead of accepting emotional help from them? Were you often burdened with the responsibility for their emotional state? Were you, ultimately, a caregiver to your own guardians?

*I am not naming the show here in order not to endorse it, as it very unfortunately follows the current trend of labelling emotional and psychological abuse as “narcissistic”, further stigmatizing people with NPD.

This sort of childhood environment is what may bring a co-dependent tendency about. It forces a person to absorb the notion that they're only as good as the help they provide, and in later life seek out a relationship that makes them feel fulfilled because in it, they get to play out the familiar scenario and endlessly validate their own sense of worth through supposedly tangible acts of intense care. The host of the aforementioned podcast points out how this behaviour is a self-soothing one: an attempt to avoid intense and deep personal pain by re-focusing on someone else's suffering and using caregiving as a familiar and bottomless source of distraction.

This understanding of co-dependency is closer to my own experience of it, and I have complex feelings on how it interacts with the original definition within the context of addiction. The circumstances described are different yet similar, and I’m not sure if it’s worth keeping them separate for the sake of being specific, or if it’s better to point to the shared grounds as a way of acknowledging the general interconnectedness of the human experience. Not having heard enough from co-dependent people whose tendencies get triggered by a situation of addiction, I cannot make any guesses about how similar our experiences or mindsets might be. However, it seems clear that there is something present in both scenarios that’s missing from the “We have to do everything together” etc. model of a relationship: the truly destructive form of co-dependency is dangerous because of how it one-sidedly affects a person's sense of identity.

In my own experience with co-dependency, these were the things I used to say to myself:

• “This person has suffered too much, and I have not suffered at all. From now on, I will dedicate all of my energy to taking away as much of their pain as I can. This will hurt and drain me, but that is okay, because I am supposed to lighten their load. They deserve to feel lighter, and it is only fair that that might happen at my expense”.

• “If I can just help one person, make one person's life better, if I can save their life, it will make my own ultimately worth living, because the world is full of suffering, and making someone happier is eternally meaningful”.

• “I will dedicate myself to giving them the life they want. I have little to offer to the world, and they have a lot. I have little personal ambition, and I don't care about many things other than them. I will do what I need to enable and embolden them, and I will simply be happy if I have a place in their life that is secure and mine.”

• “Love is supposed to hurt, because in real close relationships, you are not supposed to shy away from another person's suffering. I should not set a boundary between myself and their suffering. If I don't do uncomfortable things for them, how will they even know I love them?”

Here is the future I painted for myself when in the very deepest throes of co-dependent mindsets: “I will not have any other meaningful relationships. I will learn to drive only to ensure this person has the necessary convenience to get around without relying on people that aren't me. I will live in their backyard (!!!) and be a cool aunt* to their kids and be included into their happy and creative life as their main supporter and best friend. I myself will stop writing, because they are the one of us who is actually creatively gifted, and I don't want to step on their toes. Should they suddenly die, I would probably have to die with them, because my life has no meaning without them”.

As you may notice, there was little space in that future for myself, with every aspect of it fully defined by another person's life and thriving.

I still stand by some of the things younger me so ardently believed in: it still seems right to me that love should, at times, be uncomfortable; I still think that there is endless meaning and value to making a single person's life easier.

The co-dependency, specifically, comes in when one's own life and well-being feel less valuable than another person’s, when identity and personhood are lost in favour of servitude, and when caretaking becomes the ultimate basis for a relationship and the only thing that gives it meaning.

If you continue your quick online search of the term “co-dependency”, you'll also find some dogshit takes, like claiming that by providing a substance-abusing adult child with housing one would be “sheltering” them from the consequences of their actions and thus enabling their behaviour. As if leaving someone without support just so they could suffer the full weight of social and economical penalty would somehow be conductive to their recovery from addiction – something that naturally arises when someone lacks a support network, a nurturing environment and emotional closeness and care. As if an openly self-destructive behaviour will be instantly stopped by resulting in self-destruction. And I mean, in some cases it might, but that seems like a dangerous expectation to rely on.

The question of what someone should be expected to do for a struggling loved one is extremely loaded and should always be considered on individual, personal basis. No one should feel forced into caretaking for another person just because nobody else is there to do that; at the same time, for as long as we, humanity, occupy a tiny bit of space in the vast expanse of the universe, there will always be people that require the constant assistance of a caretaker. Taking on that role may very much be demanding and hard, but that wouldn't justify leaving that person without the assistance they need. We all get to define the boundaries we set in regards to what degree of care and support we are willing to provide – but it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the forms of suffering an average person would not want to get involved with would generally be something heavily stigmatized and taboo, and that it does not help our shared societal climate to continue prioritizing ignorant comfort over basic help.

All of this is to say: caretaking is a complicated topic, and a complicated aspect of a relationship; and it feels wrong to simplify it by claiming that the best thing one can do for a struggling person (even if they seem to be “choosing” their struggle) is to walk away. The implication that the desire to maintain any sort of supportive relationship with a substance-abusing person is inherently co-dependent seems quite ludicrous to me.

I would also like to challenge the idea of a “balance” in a relationship: it feels weird (and un-communist) to assign arbitrary values to the acts of love and care we do for one another and put them on a scale, seeking to maintain a perfectly equal exchange, when instead we should be providing each other with equal degrees of compassion, concern and respect, and work out the internal mechanisms of our relationships from a place of considerate communication.

All of this is to say: the fact of addiction or intense mental distress on its own does not a co-dependent dynamic make. In fact, I’m not sure we can even talk about a “co-dependent dynamic” as some sort of uniform type of a relationship.

In my own past, my co-dependency would enable and get enabled by the other person's abusive mistreatment. In other cases, as we discussed above, a co-dependent caregiver may become abusive towards the dependent, letting their desire to “fix” them turn into resentment, control and aggression. That is because, the way I see it, there is no such thing as a “co-dependent relationship”: “co-dependency” is not an inherent dynamic of a bond. Instead, it is a mindset held by one singular person, likely as a result of their upbringing, and likely occurring as a self-soothing mechanism. That mindset will erase your value and autonomy as a person, it will have you chasing the addictive validation of trying to “better” other people’s lives, and it will absolutely destroy either your mental and physical health, your bonds, or both of those things, sometimes deeply hurting other people in the process.

Once you identify it in your psyche, a co-dependent mindset is easy to spot: it’s in feeling restless and unsatisfied when the waters are calm and your care isn’t in demand; it’s in feeling thrilled at the idea of throwing yourself into holding someone’s hand through a horrible time and feeling ultimately justified in neglecting every other duty, need or prior engagement simply because “they need me, and what’s more important than that?”; and it’s in the feeling of complete loss and dread at the idea of being unneeded, no longer irreplaceable, no longer uniquely suited for providing a life-saving service.

Which is why it’s so jarring to see the term “co-dependency” be so widely misused. Not to be the kind of person who tries to stir the natural flow of language and changing definition in one strict direction, but the popular (mis)understanding of it seems to really play down the deeply harmful and dangerous, potentially traumatizing reality of what a co-dependent mindset looks like. There is a reason people seek therapy for co-dependency, and a reason why there is an AA-type twelve-step program for it, too (though that’s a whole OTHER can of worms to maybe one day open).

So, no, despite their mutually enabling, sheltering, boundary-lacking and flawed family dynamic, the Herd are not co-dependent - because co-dependency happens in one person’s psyche, not between people. Wammawink’s (and writers’) crucial mistake is in the pronoun she used: instead of saying “We’re kind of co-dependent”, it would be much more prudent of her to talk in first person singular. ‘Cause, yeah. Uh-oh, Wammawink.

Wammawink and Horse: A Conflict of Misplaced Identities

In my previous Centaurworld analysis essay I talked at length about how deeply Horse's sense of identity appears to be defined by her trauma. There was not much space for it there, but now, I get to excitedly point at a crucial little bit of her characterization and narrative:

Horse. Rider. Rider and her Horse. Horse and her Rider. Names that are functions. Identities that are fully replaced by who they are to each other, and by the content of their bond.

In the previous essay, I stated that Horse and Rider are trauma-bonded, and that much is perfectly clear in the story. However, there seems to be an extra element to that with the role Horse takes on in that relationship: she is the one providing a life-saving service. Generally speaking, a horse does not need a rider, and having one means being used for its bodily strength in service of someone else's pursuit. But Horse needs Rider to fulfil an emotional need of purpose, and to hold onto her sense of identity – which is why being separated from her is so terrifying to our protagonist, and why it becomes synonymous with self-forgetfulness. Horse needs her Rider to feel like herself, to feel whole and complete and right; not just her sense of worth but her entire sense of self is pinned on their very straightforward, very specific relationship dynamic openly coded into their very names.

Except, are those the names both of them claim at the very start of the show?

We only see little glimpses of Rider's own experience of the world, get little insight into her person, and that isn't helped by the fact that she does not become present as an active character until Season 2, which is generally agreed to have some significant pacing, development and characterization flaws. Even then, most of the characters that interact with Rider are centaurs, introduced to her through Horse and using the name Horse calls her by. The only human Rider ever interacts with is The General, who only ever calls her “kid”. It would make perfect sense for Rider to have an actual name different from the function she plays in Horse's life – which creates an inherent one-sidedness of their bond, in which Horse fully commits to only being identified within it, while Rider gets full personhood outside it.

That much makes sense considering that up until their reunion at the end of Season 1, both of them clearly and deeply cared for one another but had no way of communicating with each other as individuals, and so Rider had no reason to believe Horse was actually looking for and entitled to a two-sided, mutual and equal relationship. That is made clear at the end of Season 2, when Rider disregards Horse's input alongside her personhood in a moment of affectionate condescension. She very directly states: “You're just a horse”, which is not quite built up to because, once again, we get little insight into Rider's own history within their bond and her feelings about the recent developments in it; but it’s still telling.

Unlike their general trauma-bonding, Horse and Rider's power dynamic, role assignment and communication history are very specific and unique to the two of them, and that leaves a very distinct mark on Horse, who is forced to not only find an identity outside of her trauma-driven survival narrative, but also to discover autonomous personhood, and to find out who she is through previously unknown to her modes of relationships. And that's how we end up with a protagonist whose core defining trait is an identity crisis, who repeatedly asks “Who is she?” in an attempt to understand the objective fact of her own existence beyond the strict and limiting roles of a steed and a warrior.

If Horse does exhibit a co-dependent mindset (which she seems to do at multiple points of the show), it’s quite unique and specific, completely free of the “emotional martyr” spirit. She does, however, lean very hard into the “seeking out intense situations as the perfect environment to facilitate connection” aspect of it. Regardless of what the bottom line here is, her sense of self is undoubtedly greatly impeded by a one-sided relationship dynamic in which her servitude comes before her personhood, even with the other person's genuine care for her. Which is what, among other things, makes her such a fantastic narrative foil to Wammawink!

Wammawink and Horse's conflicting approaches towards the world and its dangers are the crux of Season 1 and the very bedrock of their bond that is so central to the show's narrative. Horse is used to taking care of herself and her loved one by bracing herself for a fight in order to ensure their survival, since there was never anywhere to escape to from the horrors of the war. Wammawink's response to her own intense childhood trauma is to shelter herself and her loved ones, ignore the past haunting them, and just do their best to enjoy every day together and stay happy and content and safe. Her frantic care for others manifests in the literal bubble she's put them in, in her tending to her Herd's every bruise and sore and making sure they are fed and comforted and loved. Playing the role of the parent to her friend-group-family appears to, indeed, be a self-soothing coping mechanism Wammawink seems to have trouble letting go of.

When Wammawink first meets Horse, her first instinct is to “adopt” her into her hoard of friends to be a caregiver to, but she quickly realizes that is not going to work out because Horse stubbornly refuses the coddling care (something she would actually greatly benefit from, but also something Wammawink should really stop compulsively offering left and right). As the plot progresses, their dynamic develops more and more, providing subtle insight into their individual warped perceptions of others and themselves.

Horse exhibits a co-dependent tendency towards neglecting the people that are not her “project” for the sake of the latter, as it is seen in the second episode, in which she puts the Herd in grave danger and seems to care little about that. A part of that is also Horse’s skewed perception of the amount of peril an average person might be prepared to endure, but her bias towards Rider’s safety, specifically, is clear as well.

Wammawink is distraught and angered by Horse’s actions – and maybe the uncomfortable truth there is that in a way, Horse's selfish behaviour driven by selfless dedication ultimately reflects Wammawink's unconscious patterns, too. Where Horse is reckless, Wammawink is frantically fearful and overbearing, but those approaches are two sides of the same cliché coin. Horse is clearly driven by her personal agenda, her dependency on a specific sense of self that will lead her to harming other people just to feel right again – Wammawink is much the same, holding the Herd back under the pretence of keeping them out of harm's way, largely out of her genuine care for them, but ultimately because she wouldn't bear to part with the sense of purpose and identity she finds in being the mom-friend.

The deep emotional and narrative significance of Horse and Wammawink's dynamic is that they make each other deeply, irreconcilably uncomfortable. They struggle with freakishly similar things: intense childhood trauma and survival mindset, loss of family and a severely impeded sense of identity fully dependent on a specific relationship; and they respond to it in ways that clash in every single possible aspect.

What makes this even more exciting than your general “These two characters challenge and complete each other by being different in every way” trope is that the discomfort they bring into each other's lives stems from a challenged maladaptive coping strategy and their pre-conception of who they are and where they find meaning, sense and personhood. The fact that Wammawink and Horse challenge each other is unmistakably good, because so far, their close relationships only enabled their own self-neglectful behaviours. At the start of the show, they hate to be around each other because having to give up the safety and security of a self-soothing behaviour or a survival technique feels deeply counter-intuitive, an assault on one's very nature and idea of self.

At the end, though, they become something incredibly special to each other: people who relate to each other on the grounds of similar trauma, yet aren't trauma-bonded in a way that could potentially create a survival mode feedback-loop. That is what allows Wammawink to ease into a more equal relationship dynamic, and she is actually the first one to take a step in that direction, trying to bond with Horse over the supposedly shared experience of intense PTSD as the Herd approaches the place of Wammawink's major trauma. Getting insight into Wammawink's past in that same episode is also what helps Horse ease into their bond and welcome the terms of endearment symbolizing it, but making it clear the support goes both ways. It must've been crucial for her to learn about the degree of Wammawink's trauma to even consider that the latter’s way of life and idea of friendships was in any way accessible to Horse herself. Once she realizes she is not uniquely hurt, Horse is that much more ready to open up and be vulnerable with another person.

That beautiful and profound core of their relationship is what results in the ultimate emotional peak of the show: “Fragile Things Reprise”. There is just... so much to Wammawink using her caregiver anthem to reach out to Horse during her suicide attempt, but instead of evoking care as a way of soothing the hurt (others' and her own), using the song to appeal to the shared fragility of all things as the root of community, love and bond; her begging Horse to welcome the pain instead of avoiding it at the cost of her own life, using suffering as a way to reach Horse instead of seeing it as an opportunity to validate Wammawink’s own existence by making the feeling go away... It's truly something else. And what it comes out of is the alchemical merging of their essences, Horse's distrust of safety as something inherently ignorant of danger and Wammawink's compulsive need for security as a way to distract herself from the impending doom.

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In a recent conversation with my partner, we discussed Wammawink's characterization in Season 2 at length, mourning the lack of attention she got, how her arc took a back seat, and none of her feelings got enough space or resolution. In Season 2, Wammawink becomes less of a narrative foil and more of a narrative echo to Horse's struggle: Horse is feeling deeply insecure about her relationship with Rider, who got a new companion steed (because, once again, to her a steed is a necessary tool, and her understanding of her dynamic with Horse is much different from the latter's). Wammawink, in turn, is feeling intensely insecure about her relationship with Horse, who still seems largely fixated on Rider as her closest bond.

Our conversation and my partner's passionate input were really eye-opening to me. The writers could've done truly amazing things with this development, using Season 1 to show how Horse was perfect for challenging Wammawink's co-dependent tendency, then using Season 2 to tell a story of how even an inherently productive, healing dynamic can still get corrupted by the deeply ingrained notions of self-worth. The very basis of Wammawink and Horse's mutual care is that Horse will not let Wammawink become her one-sided caregiver; however, her pre-occupation with her relationship with Rider and her on-going identity crisis (and the warfare, I guess) mean that Horse is not in a place to really unpack everything going on between them and work on developing her relationship with Wammawink further.

That leaves Wammawink in a place of intense vulnerability, floundering to try to rationalize the current state of their relationship, to hold onto any assurance that it means as much to Horse as it does to her. And so it would make sense if, insidiously, the co-dependency mindset, the very thing the bond originally meaningfully challenged, snuck up on her and took over, forcing Wammawink to try to carve out a “special” and “irreplaceable” role in Horse's life.

The most dumbfounding part of their dynamic in Season 2 is “Becky Apples” - the song of mutual enabling. The two characters whose entire dynamic is built around them uncomfortably challenging each other's un-nurturing mindsets are actively encouraging and validating the very direct expressions of them. And, once again, that could've been used amazingly if the point was ever driven home, because even in this, Wammawink is the one to desperately reach for enabling as a way to relate to and bond with Horse. Horse, on the other hand, is sort of peeved by Wamma's insistence that their experiences are in any way alike.

If the writing in Season 2 was still committed to exploring all the emotional potential of their bond, this would create an incredible opportunity for Wammawink's characterization: her betraying the very core of her and Horse's dynamic out of the compulsive need to control her relationships with others by unproductively coddling their reactive responses to the world. If Centaurworld were to show Wammawink succumbing to her old patterns out of the uncontrollable fear of being replaced and in that going against what made their bond so transformative, that would make for an incredible exploration of co-dependency that honestly would make me lose my entire mind I think. I would never shut up about the impeccable messaging of that.

That doesn't happen, though, because Horse doesn't really seem to care about their bond or how Wammawink might be compulsively hurting it throughout the second season. The pacing of it is such that Wammawink doesn't really get much conclusion to her identity struggle, either. That is a real shame to see, considering how the very core narrative of Season 1 offers us some truly incredible subtle insight into these two very different people's experience of losing their sense of self to differently limiting mindsets and dynamics, and how the clashing of their behaviours was what snapped them out of those patterns and helped them find true and genuine two-sided connection.

Personally, I am way too biased towards Wammawink to accept the sacrifice of her character to every other plot point Centaurworld was in a hurry to cover in Season 2, buuuuut we do get something to compensate for her unconcluded co-dependency narrative, at least.

The War Crime Marriage

Enter narrative foil #3: The Elktaur.

The Elktaur/Elk/General/Nowhere King and The (Mysterious) Woman continue the fascinating naming conventions of the show: you either get a silly little cartoon name, or you get referred to by your function in a specific relationship or in the story itself, almost reduced to an archetypal figure rather than a living person.

What's special about The Elktaur is the fracturing of his archetypal identity: he gives us no name to call him by before his self-inflicted splitting into two parts, and from there, he assumes polar, mutually antagonistic roles in the world-story, becoming very literally “at war with himself” and dragging the rest of creation into it alongside him. The world becomes a stage for his internal drama, the shared history of every living thing becomes his own twice-self-centred story, and in it, he is The Hero - but he is also The Beast. Shadow narratives exposing toxic masculinity as an expression of existential dread and futile desperate fight against nature itself truly never get old.

Of course, the curse of the General-Nowhere King duality is the mutual loathing that makes them reject the other as a once-part of themselves. The General appears to fully identify with his role of the beast slayer: as far as he is concerned, the “beast” part never truly belonged with him in the first place, and the havoc it's wrecking on the world as the result of intense trauma and self-abuse it was put through must ultimately validate The General's (and The Elktaur's) original perception of it. Meanwhile, The Nowhere King seems lost in all the darkest feelings of rejection and pain he was landed with, with The General essentially compartmentalizing them in the part of his psyche he then attempted to sever - and so there is no desire for reunion there, only jealousy and hunger for revenge.

All of that makes The Elktaur's identity inherently compromised by his own self-rejection. He ends up as two equally unsettling expressions of the toxic masculine: a recklessly and darkly destructive force of unprocessed existential dread, hurt and jealousy - and what is ultimately a “nice guy”. So it makes sense that both of those would ultimately be defined in relation to The Woman – who is forced into his narrative as the unwilling object of his destructive obsession and gets reduced to just that, a female love interest, his ultimate passion.

The Woman's path with her own trauma is only hinted at throughout the series. “Nothing Good” exposes her deeply seeded and intense trust issues, her scene with the Nowhere King hints at a terrifying abusive dynamic, and her resistance to the magic of Centaurworld that rapidly transformed both Horse and Rider means that The Woman, perhaps unconsciously, plays into The Elktaur's agenda of keeping her confined within their “love story”: she is so unwilling and unready to let go of her past, feeling so deeply responsible for the acts of destruction taken in her name, that she becomes stuck in her trauma mindset, rejecting the natural healing the world would readily offer her. Once again, though, just like with Rider, we get little insight into The Woman's side of things, her own experience or how she processes the complicated history of her relationship.

But we know a lot about The General's understanding of it.

His possessive and unsettling mindsets are coded into the very wedding vows he offers to her: “I swear I will never stop thinking about you, / You have come to set me free. / And if you should hurt me, I'll always forgive you, / You are a part of me”. His unrelenting obsession that will not stop regardless of The Woman's own wishes is made obvious here: he authoritatively claims his partner as a part of him, something that inherently belongs with and to him, which means that being separate from her will, once again, assault his sense of identity. That means that, regardless of the circumstance, regardless of whether The Woman wants to be around him or not, regardless of the price the rest of the world would have to pay, he must have her in his life, because the alternative sounds as devastating and impossible as dying.

The General's arbitrary absorption of another into his soul and sense of self is even more disconcerting in the context of his splitting: he is the part of The Elktaur that feels very much in control of defining which part of him stays and which goes. The integrity of his self is not something The General actually honours as anything objective and untouchable: he feels very enabled to pick and choose what makes him, and so the mere fact that something is “a part of him” is not enough to justify its belonging.

The General claiming The Woman as something that completes his identity is both an obvious expression of the deep wound he left on himself by tearing his soul in two – and an insidious, deeply hypocritical justification of unchecked obsession. The man went “I am perfectly fine without this inherent part of me, it can separate from me and that will purify me, not take anything away from me”, then turned around and said “No, you can't go: you're a part of me, and how could I possibly be complete without something that makes me who I am? I will tear the world apart to get back to you”. His background emphasizes so very strongly that the sense of identity found in someone else can never be claimed as an objective truth: it is, more than anything else, an arbitrary justification of our own preoccupation, and it cannot be forced onto another person as something they have to feel responsible for or act in accordance with.

All of that, of course, doesn't mean that we cannot be deeply transformed and defined by people around us: Horse spends her arc discovering herself through the love given to her by her new family. What's telling is that her identity crisis culminates in the words “Who was she? Does it mater? She was loved”, pointing to her discovering the inherent fluidity of self and its lack of definition. The intense emotional distress both Horse and The General experience at their separation from a person they feel defines them and their place in the world-narrative comes from the idea that their identity can be in any way specific and rigid – and so being separate from the core aspect of it feels like breaking and shattering. That is the danger of losing one's sense of self to a role, a service or a relationship.

The Foil Trifecta

What this tells us about the Horse-Rider dynamic is that, as much as its nature compromised Horse's sense of self to a point of eventual suicidality, and as much as Rider's assessment of Horse was imperfect and hurtful, Horse's own perception of Rider was unfair to the latter, too.

Rider likely had a name and a life outside of their bond, which left Horse in a disadvantaged position of only existing within it (something that, in my experience, a co-dependent person might develop a lot of resentment around). But much like The Elktaur did a disservice to The Woman by refusing to recognize her personhood outside of her role in his story as The Female Love Interest, Horse sort of did a disservice to Rider by only comprehending her within their relationship dynamic and accidentally landing her with the responsibility for Horse's entire sense of self. It would be a lot for one person, to know that being separated from them made their loved one so utterly, existentially lost they almost took their own life.

(Horse's identity crisis around trauma recovery absolutely played an equal role in that, of course, as the previous essay discussed; I feel like the two go hand in hand, with Horse being so trauma-bonded with Rider that finding a life outside of the traumatizing environment feels like a threat to both her idea of self and the relationship she values most.)

In Horse's case, the impression of a narrow self-centred identity onto another person is much more unconscious, accidental, and occurring naturally from how she and Rider came to know each other and care for one another. That's what makes her journey so impactful: unlike The Elktaur, Horse had little chance of choosing anything other than the un-nurturing mindset that led to her world-shattering identity loss; but even through that, she still managed to find a better way to treat herself and the person she cares about at the end.

It's incredibly meaningful that in his obsession and conviction that nothing mattered as much as having the woman he “loved”, The General-The Nowhere King plunged two worlds into a devastating war – and that Horse found the strength to be apart from her identity-defining loved one in order to help protect the Centaurworld from the Nowhere King's attack. After spending the entire first season believing that nothing – not other people's lives, not even her own – mattered if she didn't get to reunite with Rider exactly the same way they used to be, Horse managed to overcome the co-dependent tendency to tunnel-vision on the one relationship she cares about most, and instead managed to recognize her care for and responsibility before the rest of the living beings she shares the world with. The Horse-Elktaur parallels do hit really hard, even with Horse's own journey not being handled very gracefully throughout the second season.

Where all this leaves Wammawink, though, is... a limbo. Her feelings of distress at the possibility of losing a core relationship are made clear throughout both seasons, and it's notable that, much like Horse, she was forced to learn to process her deep care in a way that also allowed her to eventually bear the idea of parting with the person she feels viscerally attached to.

In Season 2, however, little is done to address her on-going journey, and nothing really points to her as still being a narrative foil to Horse and through that, indirectly – to The Elktaur. Which is a bummer, because imagine how cool the latter would've been!

It seems that Wammawink truly just outlived her narrative usefulness after Season 1, got Horse to a certain point and then just... got stuck at a mid-way stage of her own attachment journey that did not get resolved. That's a real shame for, uh. a character who could be interpreted as co-dependent and thus feeling that they do not get to have worth, personhood, or a place in life outside of what they can do for someone else. Just uh. Just saying. In a narrative about finding an autonomous identity independent from someone else's story and needs, a couple of characters sadly just... don't get much screen time that isn't about furthering the more central characters' arc. (Can you tell I'm obsessed with Infinity Train Book 2, by the way?)

At the end, Centaurworld offers an incredibly rich narrative of relationship and identity, but still drops the ball at a few points there – and on those grounds, I will firmly take issue with the “co-dependent” line in the song lyrics, just because it highlights this occasional lack of commitment. Co-dependency fits into the messaging of the show so organically – but seems to still be misunderstood by it, both lexically and narratively, with Wammawink not getting to continue being characterized with the same amount of care and honesty in Season 2.

(But it’s a good freaking show, still.)

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• detailed discussions of colonial ideology, slavery and racism

• discussions of environmental crises

• discussions of (fictional) war

• mention of abuse

Love is an imperfect feeling. It’s a perfect state, but an imperfect feeling; and, at the risk of sounding a bit cliché, “love” might not be a feeling at all.

The way we define “love” is vague enough to account for countless contradicting, mutually exclusive expressions of it. We slap that inarticulate label on whatever shade of “strong attraction” is relevant at the moment, then say it’s love that drives people to do unloving things.

Love is multi-faced, multi-faceted, and confusing. We may “love” a person and we may “love” a thing. We may love different people in different ways, and some of them will look like frustration, even anger: “I love you, why do you not love me? I love you, why do you hurt yourself? I love you, why are you unhappy?”. Sometimes, it’s easy to justify great mistreatment with our supposed great care. “I do these things because I love you” - not “because I do not yet know how to handle my love”.

In my understanding of it, love can barely have any definition; it is ineffably objective, like gravity. Love is, oftentimes, attraction, a pull in the direction of a being, place, thing, and the most important words I’ve ever heard were “I cannot explain why I love you; I just do, because it’s you”.

Love as a feeling is imperfect, because it’s unconscious, undefined, because more often than not, it is a pull. When you are pulled towards something, there are countless varied ways to build the connection you yearn for. Not all of those ways will make the object of yearning feel loved at the end.

The love some of us seek is, ultimately, a paradox. It’s passionate, yet gentle; it yearns, but it leaves space; it comes as the most authentic expression of the lover, inalienable from them, yet it is about the loved, fully and uncompromisedly, always prioritizing the latter’s health, happiness, bliss. That’s what makes love the way we want to understand it, “true” love, mysterious: it is an oxymoron, a selfless desire. Embracing the full incomprehensible non-duality of it within the walls of our simple human hearts grants us relief from the constant grating dualism of our lives.

All of this is just my own musings, of course; but the notion of love has been explored in many of my favorite stories, often side by side with the theme of abuse, and the difference between the two: it’s hard to define love on its own, but it’s important to understand what masquerades as it while betraying the beautiful paradoxical core of it.

Love is a pull, but not every pull is loving - but it’s easy to claim it as such, to convince others, sometimes yourself, that because you’re doing something you really, truly, deeply want to, that means it is the right thing to do.

Loving something means that it feels cosmically right to have it in your life, as if you’ve unlocked an essential bit of your purpose on this earth. The object of your desire, the act of engaging with it echo something deep and authentic within you, and you are not yourself without it. Who would be horrible enough to deny you what you love?

I want to talk to you about passion and compassion, involvement and abstinence, curiosity and limitation.

I want to talk to you about science and expansion. I want to talk to you about entitlement.

I want to talk to you about true love.

And I really want to talk to you about The Sea Beast.

The Sea Beast’s Anti-Colonial Narr-ative

The Sea Beast is a 2022 Netflix-animated feature movie by Chris Williams and Nell Benjamin. It follows the story of a young orphan girl, Maisie Brumble, who stows away on The Inevitable - a legendary ship carrying a crew of Hunters, swash-buckling sailors that battle and kill deadly sea monsters at the order of The Crown. Maisie herself comes from “a long line” of Hunters, with her parents perishing onboard the tragically famous vessel The Monarch.

In the pursuit of the Red Bluster, the most dangerous and feared of the beasts, the crew faces mortal peril. Maisie and Jacob, The Inevitable’s most skilled sailor and Captain Crow’s adoptive son, end up stranded in the unknown, untamed lands teeming with the deadly amphibious megafauna. As they try to survive and return home, they discover something that goes against everything they’ve been told: the Red Bluster (“Red” for short) is not only inclined to let them live, but ready to help them and protect them as she guides them back to the familiar shores.

The movie’s narrative centers around challenging history revisionism and exposing the colonial expansionist underpinning of the good old “Man Vs. Nature” conflict. What I find the most admirable about how The Sea Beast handles that theme is the ease and simplicity with which the narrative fully commits to its central values. The story is definitely unconventional, but it’s not necessarily groundbreaking; it does not pose any new theses and rather just… gracefully addresses the already stated points of social discourse in a single story that is not afraid of being simple and kind. And through that, quite unexpectedly, The Sea Beast does something not every anti-colonial narrative manages to achieve: it challenges the parts of our psyche and mentality that are directly fueled by colonial thinking without being inherently colonialist.

This entire essay is inspired by the tumblr post I linked at the very start, and I give my deep, passionate thanks to the person who made it. It stuck with me, itched at my brain, made me realize that the connection between Western European science and colonialism had never before been made clear to me, and had me researching the nuance of that.

We know well enough that the driving force of colonialism was political and economic exploitation of foreign land and peoples. As tumblr user subsequentibis has succinctly stated, science was oftentimes a tool of colonialism, and occasionally - a “palatable” justification of it. What intrigued me, however, was whether the urge to explore unknown lands and species was inherently colonial as well. Certainly, a narrative is never neutral and needs to account for real-world context and implications; if the movie went with a different ending, we wouldn’t be able to justify it by saying “Maisie is a good person and would conduct her research ethically”, because in real life, this line of thinking could easily be co-opted to validate unethical research or expansion. That’s the same old copaganda mechanism at work.

However, the question of the ethics of curiosity kept nagging at me, making me return to the idea of a genuinely well-meaning, passionate person taken with the unknown who accidentally perpetrates exploitative expansion through their pursuit. Has that ever happened? Would that ever happen?

When it comes to the ethics of science, the problem is often painted to be with the imperfections of life or the faults of societies. It’s a safe, familiar story: a passionate person gets pressured to make unsavoury alliances, or maybe becomes an oblivious puppet for the selfish and powerful. Take, for example, Atlantis: The Lost Empire. In it, the enthusiastic scientist Milo Thatch is The Good Guy, unaware at first that he is being used by people seeking to get rich. We can argue about what motivated him to take a stand against them: was it his passion for the “lost” civilization or his questionable romance, or a combination of both?

Regardless of the answer, “love” came in to save the day, and the implication seems to be that it is fine to let “love” lead you to places that may have never been intended for you - as long as you’re nice about it. How often are we motivated by a feeling and not profit, though?

In real-world history, colonial expansion provided scientists with incredible funding and employment opportunities. Colonialism increased the need for cartography, medicine, sociology, agricultural advancement, it required that more scientists study all the new, unfamiliar environments and develop practical ways to navigate them. Atlantis remains a fun fantasy, and as much as I love the image of a scientist as a person driven by enchantment, as much as I appreciate the truly passionate and conscientious people I myself have met that are dedicated to scientific and scholarly pursuit, the love story is not what we seem to end up with most of them time.

Still, that answer did not satisfy me. As I read about researchers that unenthusiastically tried to cozy up to colonial officers to keep their funding, masters of applied science that seemed to find the most meaning in actively fueling colonial conquest, or revered “experts” on foreign culture that had no qualms about perpetrating systemic violence against the very peoples they were so fascinated with, I kept wondering if this apparent colonial mindset and entitlement would still be a problem when taken out of the explicitly colonial context. If we removed governments and corporations from the equation, if funding wasn’t an issue, if we lived in a world where other countries and lands weren’t historically seen as an economic and political resource - what then? Are scientists, ultimately, good people driven by an honourable pursuit that then gets distorted and trampled when the big bad Government or the dreaded Money come in?

As I dug into the history of colonial science and explored specific subsets of colonial ideology and mentality, I didn’t manage to find a concise and telling parable of a nice-guy scientist losing their sight of love on the path of passion. I did find something else, though: a thin thread running way back into our collective history and the evolution of the Western European and otherwise White mindset; something that is so common and, seemingly, so clear and obvious that it is rarely questioned.

I would love to retrace my steps with you, lay out the historical records and accounts, old philosophical works, and books and papers by people with much more academic credibility than myself, and ask if you notice the same things as I do. We will keep The Sea Beast as our entry point: it provides concise and clear-spoken messaging, powerful symbolism and some very important historical allusions that underline the core of the movie’s narrative.

We’ll pick up the plot re-cap from where we left off: Red unexpectedly befriending our protagonist instead of gobbling them right up and going for a nice nap. The way the plot progresses from that point develops an important theme that will become increasingly relevant to our long and thorough philosophical discussion: it is the theme of doubt and pursuit of truth.

Once the myth of mindless bloodthirsty monsters is proven false, Maisie starts questioning everything she’s been told about the sea beasts and the history of the war. With Jacob’s help, she examines the book on Hunters she’s been reading and re-reading her whole life in an attempt to feel closer to her deceased parents. The characters’ now skeptical approach reveals inaccuracies, exaggerations and obviously false information. Such, Maisie’s questioning of the story her people are told begins.

Maisie and Jacob share a similar past: a beast attack left both of them alone, separated from their parents and awfully vulnerable. Jacob got picked up by Captain Crow’s crew and given a new family; Maisie ended up in a home for “Hunter orphans”, with the history books and tales of courage being the only thing she had to remember her parents by. Jacob has lived the life of a Hunter for about a decade - Maisie is initially impatient to join their ranks. She echoes the motto shared among Hunters with exhilliration: “Live a great life and die a great death”. For both Jacob and Maisie, Hunter history and code are what ties them to their families, chosen and lost.

Having to question whether Hunters are truly the valiant protectors of the innocents, whether the war they’ve been fighting for generations is truly just, means the same thing to both of them: it’s a threat to their most precious values, casting doubt on whether their deceased friends and loved ones actually dedicated their lives to and died for a noble, beneficial cause. The journey of unlearning that is one of reconstructing their whole identities - and as they are mutually present through that process, they become each other’s new, authentic family.

When Red is captured by Captain Crow and brought to the Crown’s very doorstep, Jacob and Maisie are left with a hard choice: betray their new friend and the truth they have uncovered, or risk the only life they’ve known up until recently, by standing up to Captain Crow and the royals themselves.

As Crow is getting ready to kill the most fearsome of the beasts of the Dregmorr Sea before King and Queen’s eyes, Maisie connects the dots and understands a vital piece of information: every book containing falsified accounts of Hunter history bears the royal family crest. Facing the crowd that has gathered to witness the death of the Red Bluster, Maisie demands people’s attention and tells them the truth: the generations-long war waged between the kingdom and the sea beasts, the one that took the lives of many of their loved ones, was not noble, or meant to protect them. The Crown spread lies, created the myth of the dangerous monsters that would threaten the peaceful settlements along the shoreline - all to urge its subjects to fight a deadly battle for their own imperialist ambition.

The central narrative of the movie is a very specific and contained one: it is a quite unique tale of history revisionism and the fate of soldiers dying heroic, yet not honourable, and fully unnecessary deaths for their power-hungry rulers. The plot sticks to it, keeping the story straightforward, but multiple elements of the world building, bits of dialogue, motifs and historical allusions hint at a broader, complex and ethically sound narrative that subtly critiques discovery and expansion.

Historical Coding

A few historical allusions seem to place the events of The Sea Beast in a time period that would be equivalent to Europe at the end of the 16th-start of the 17th century. Let’s explore all the rich narrative implications of that.

By the end of the 16th century, the nautical exploration and expansion (and with it the first wave of colonialism) would be well underway. The entire setting of the movie basically screams "the Age of Sail", and it is especially evident in the portrayal of the royal family.

A prevalent visual motif following The Crown is the compass rose. That is the shape of the artificial island that houses the kingdom.

The rose appears as a part of the nautical map design of the castle's floors.

We do not have to wonder what ambitions the Crown holds when it comes to oceanic exploration: the Queen herself gives a glorified account of the kingdom's history, once small but harbouring the dream of crossing the unknown seas and reaching faraway lands. That is a straightforward summary of the age of discovery, which would conclude in the early 17th century, with the bigger world known and mapped out and ready for colonial conquest and exploitation; following that, the Enlightenment Period would begin and bring significant societal changes.

Consequently, the 17th century is also the time our own version of the sea monsters would begin to disappear: the pictures of mythical beasts that served as a warning of the dangers of the open sea in the Reneissance-era nautical maps would appear less in less post-exploration. See this article written by Hannah Waters for Smithsonian Magazine:

“As technology advanced, as our understanding of the oceans and navigation advanced, more emphasis was placed on human’s ability to master the watery element: to sail on it and conduct trade on it <…>. And thus images of the dangers of the sea, while they certainly did not immediately disappear from maps in the 17th century, became less frequent over time, and images of ships became more common.”

<…> On one map from the early 17th century, vignettes illustrated how to kill and process a whale. “Whales, the largest creatures in the ocean, are no longer monsters but rather natural marine storehouses of commodities to be harvested,” wrote Van Duzer. Some of the mystery is gone as the sea becomes another resource rather than a churning darkness to be feared.”

The symbolism is very potent and poignant here: in the real-life 17th century Europe, expansion meant conquest of the wild and eradication of the “beast” of the unknown, untamed, deadly nature. In the fictional world of The Sea Beast, these symbols of the uncontrollable and ruthless natural force are literal, and The Crown is sending people out to wipe them out, once and for all.

Another interesting historical allusion is The Imperialist: a warship presented by the Crown’s admiral as a tool of further expansion, meant to “push deep into the unknown world and eradicate every sea beast in [their] path“. The ship’s broadside is lined with gun ports housing static canons, which Captain Crow remarks on, claiming they would be useless against the creatures. This points to The Imperialist as a version of the “ship of the line”, designed in the 17th century and meant for a specific war tactic in which opposing fleets would line up in columns and fire from all their canons in the same direction; the more heavily armed ship, not the most well-maneuvered one, would be the winner.

I’d say this was mostly a fun little narrative hint at the specific time period, but there is another subtle element to it. The Hunters and the beasts are engaged in a war fueled by hatred, hurt and thirst for revenge. However, they share their battlefield, they risk their lives equally, they both suffer losses. This is “Man Vs. Nature” in a somewhat Romantic, even if still White Colonial, version of it: demanding that a human becomes a bit more like a beast, driven by anger and bloodlust and need for survival. It’s akin to Lermontov’s Mtsyri fighting a panther in a tight ferocious embrace, recognizing the animal as his brother and equal. The Imperialist offers a colder, almost industrial version of nature conquest: brute force and overpowering through technological advancement. Whether it would actually be useful for the in-world sea beast fighting may be less relevant.

Anyway, back to the 16th-17th century thesis! Establishing this specific period of nautical exploration has great narrative implications, both for the colonial theme and the potential rampant future expansion, and for the prevalent mentality and cultural transformation at that time.

Unlike the late 16th century Europeans, the people of our fictional kingdom are only preparing to finally cross the treacherous Dregmorr Sea and “discover” new lands beyond it. But all the warning signs are there: the continued talk of “the dark” that needs to be pierced and “the unknown world” that needs to be explored, the process of exterminating defensive forces of nature on the way to it. The characters unknowingly teeter at the edge of a fully mapped world, conquered elements, and the subsequent unrestrained imperialism - but they avoid crossing that line when the Crown is exposed and the expansionist agenda is disrupted.

The appearance of The Imperialist specifically seems to be a significant choice: without it, the movie’s setting could potentially be linked to an earlier period of discovery. What’s important about the turn of the 17th century specifically is what is only faintly hinted at in The Sea Beast’s story: the emergence of natural history the way we understand it today.

First, let’s return to the plot’s conclusion, at the very least to celebrate the degree of integrity one cannot always expect from a big-picture production.

At the end of the movie, in contrast to the expansionist determination to “pierce the darkness” and “push into the unknown”, the characters simply stay on their familiar shores and leave the sea beasts to continue their lives in their home, their natural and rightful environment. That is a surprisingly and sweetly tame, humble, peaceful ending when held up against our conventional adventure narratives. We are used to our protagonists braving the unknown and breaking through the constraints of their daily lives in order to see and experience the world - but the characters of The Sea Beast tell us it is okay to stay where you are and let secrets remain secrets.

The person behind the inciting tumblr post reflects on the audience’s reaction and some viewers’ disappointment at the fact that Maisie didn’t become a funky little marine biologist. That is because we are largely unused to the idea that it is okay to embrace our ignorance out of anything but poeticism; it may be okay to let something remain an exciting mystery if that’s what makes it more fun for you, but few of us seem ready to say “Alright, I don’t need to know more about this” out of respect for the object of knowing, or out of ethical concern. The Sea Beast is like a little injection of counter-culture to a small and elusive subset of our mentality that has a long and difficult history of philosophical thought, cultural revolution and - get this - Christian trauma behind it. And that very mentality creates an unsettling interplay of science and colonialism that I am very eager to explore.

For the purpose of keeping things simple, let’s for now dub this subset of our consciousness as mere “curiosity” and move on to exploring whether our sweet special girl Maisie truly possesses this essential to a potential scientist trait.

Maisie’s Character

Having rewatched the movie with the “marine biologist” angle in mind, I can understand why some people would expect a more How To Train Your Dragon-esque ending: the young person who questions the status quo building an alliance with the once-feared beasts by learning about them, understanding their behavioural patterns, diets, anatomy and so on. There is even a specific moment in the movie that almost seems to hint at that as the plot’s direction: the scene in which Maisie and Jacob find themselves in Red’s mouth.

In it, the terrified Maisie looks around and asks Jacob, who’s spent his whole adult life constantly engaging with the sea beasts, what sort of death they can expect. Will the Red Bluster chew them first? Will it swallow them whole and have them slowly digest in its acids?

Despite Maisie expecting Jacob to have a ready answer, some more intimate understanding of the beasts’ anatomy and habits, he replies only: “We kill ‘em, lass. We don’t study them”.

At a first glance, this creates a dichotomy of mindless eradication vs. involved inquiry; this dichotomy is false, of course, and the narrative acknowledges that. The main narrative contribution this dialogue provides is illustrating a specific character trait that Maisie possesses and Jacob (bless his bravado-fueled heart) lacks: a piercing and analytical mind.

In the very next scene, this contrast between them is brought up again - but with a very different angle. Jacob is getting ready to take on the beast the only way he ever knew how to: by trying his hardest to break the thick hide with brute force. “I just do it; I don’t want to overthink this, okay?”, he tells Maisie, who is concerned about his lack of a plan and the mortal danger he’d be putting himself in.

Maisie’s sharp mind offers a new, alternative course of action, and she asks: “Can you kill it from the inside?”. The two are immediately interrupted, and Maisie’s hypothesis does not get a chance to get tested. However, the split moment for which Jacob pauses, processing her suggestion, tells us that were they given a few more minutes, the course of the plot could have been diverted dramatically.

In a tense moment of frantically trying to come up with a way for her and her only remaining protector to survive, Maisie uses her analytical skills to turn their current access to Red’s anatomy against her. Obviously, that alone does not indicate that this young girl would take interest in dissecting living things out of pure curiosity and desire to understand them better. The specific circumstance made her feel like she had to choose between her own survival and Red’s, and she applied her quick thinking to the task of making it out alive.

The entire set-up, however, still subtly and masterfully illustrates how the perceived dichotomy mentioned earlier does not hold up: inquiry and understanding don’t exclude extermination. Even more so, they can and often do facilitate greater destruction by making it far more effective.

It’s vital for us to remember that Maisie’s capacity for looking at things critically, assessing the less-considered aspects of something, asking questions other people would not have thought to ask and seeking confirmation for the things she has been told, is also what allows her to eventually expose the Crown’s lies. She is not skeptical at heart: if anything, she is excited and over-enthusiastic, demanding to know more and more and more, and that demand is what eventually unveils the holes in falsified accounts and the gaps in the common understanding of the subject. She is, indeed, curious, and that curiosity drives her into deeper inquiry. That quality is overwhelmingly positive and beneficial to herself and the people around her.

At the same time, the narrative shows that inquiry isn’t always neutral, that a person’s flawed understanding of their situation, defensive instincts, or societally constructed prejudices may cause them to turn their sharp mind against something that seems to threaten them: another person, another being, nature itself. Which is why what’s more important than Maisie’s intelligence or even curiosity is her open-mindedness, her flexibility, readiness to passively yet earnestly observe, receive information freely given to her by the world instead of forcefully extracting it to her own benefit. And the most important thing is her heart, compassionate and loving, and the bravery she possesses to let it guide her no matter the cost.

It was once argued in Western European thought that the moral quality of the knower was what determined the moral soundness of their inquiry. Of course, that is a loaded statement for a culture in which morality was largely defined by Christian values; and it is those exact values that once deemed curiosity as something from the Devil. But the 17th century brought an important milestone that assisted the cultural “rehabilitation” of curiosity regardless of the morality of the knower, and deemed passive observation ultimately unsatisfactory. That cultural milestone also marks the beginning of the scientific method the way we know it today.

Natural Science and the Baconian Method

Francis Bacon was an English philosopher and one of the fairly prominent thinkers of the 17th century. He is cited as the person to have laid the groundwork for the modern scientific method by publishing his work titled “New organon, or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature”. In it, Bacon established the basis of empirical scientific inquiry: not simply observing the facts and deriving generalizations from those random observations, but engaging with the object experimentally and monitoring its reaction to varying circumstances. The modern scientific method has evolved past the guidelines laid down by Bacon, but his work is still considered seminal for the fact that it specifically centered experimental research.

In his Organon, Bacon gave an overview of the four “Idols”: cognitive fallacies that lead humans to make assumptions without properly and critically examining a phenomena. If you find the use of “idols” a bit questionable, the next part should clear things up.

In his work in the realm of “natural philosophy”, Bacon acted from a place of deep religious conviction. His scientific approach was profoundly biblically motivated - which is what played a big part in making the general European population less skeptical of the study of nature.

In his article for Current Science, Dr Sundar Sarukkai gives an overview of the history of Western European understanding of curiosity, and its connection to the contemporary approach to the ethics of science. Exploring the pre-Baconian attitude towards curiosity, Dr Sarukkai notes the religiously motivated distrust of inquiry into the workings of nature: curiosity and pursuit of knowledge beyond what was provided in the Bible were seen as almost diabolical, a variation on the myth of the Fall. Humanity has already pursued understanding beyond simple faith into the word of God, and so to continue questioning the rules of the universe was not considered in line with Christian belief.

As Dr Sarukkai points out, Francis Bacon defended scientific inquiry by claiming it in line with biblical interpretations, and successfully redefined “curiosity” as “charity”. In another work, Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature, Bacon goes to great lengths to establish a specific philosophy of scientific inquiry. He appeals to the lines of the Creation myth that establish an anthropocentric understanding of the nature of the universe: God has made it for man to rule. To Bacon, God bringing animals to Adam for the latter to name and then command establishes the holy and rightful duty of humanity when placed in the natural world: to understand, put name to and eventually subdue natural phenomena to our will and convenience. The pinnacle of research and understanding of the world would be full mastery over nature.

Bacon considered scientific inquiry a truly spiritual endeavor, bringing humanity to the degree of power that was available to Adam before the Fall. It was a service to God, as well, as the natural world was seen as a second “book” to complement the Bible: something to study in order to understand the will and might of the creator. Bacon believed that a core universal truth and design underlined every phenomenon, and that understanding separate expressions of nature was a way of connecting to the basic divinity of everything. Thus, false assumption was an “Idol”, nothing short of a false God, followed by an ignorant, unbaptised mind. Endlessly digging for the absolute truth of the world, on the other hand, became a form of righteous and holy worship.

By the end of the 17th century, the pursuit of knowledge was no longer seen as dangerous or frivolous; instead, it was painted as humanity’s duty. According to Dr Sarukkai, by the 18th century curiosity itself was fully rehabilitated and eventually redefined as simply “love of truth”. Dr Sarukkai claims that this rehabilitation profoundly transformed the European understanding of the ethics of science: that was the point at which the morality of the person conducting research became fully irrelevant. Curiosity was now seen as objectively positive, and so it did not matter who was following the instinct of it or under what circumstance. Acquiring knowledge could only ever be a good thing.

It is generally accepted that “modern scientific method does not follow Bacon's methods in its details, but more in the spirit”. That spirit can be described as methodical, experimental, empirical. Dr Sarukkai personally defines it as seeing the universe as purely the source of raw material for humanity to use and exploit.

There is an important aspect of this that ties Bacon’s conviction to colonial expansion. In his article “The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World”, Edward Peters, much like Dr Sarukkai, studies the changing status of curiosity in the Christian Europe, but focuses on its connection to sea exploration culminating in Columbus’ “discovery”. His voyage predates Bacon’s work, but the connection certainly bears great implications for the latter’s legacy: the gradual rehabilitation of curiosity was never separate from colonial expansion.

What is even more telling, however, is the time period in which Bacon’s philosophy was on a sudden and powerful rise: the Industrial Revolution.

Industrial Revolution and Colonial Belief

Before the mid-18th century, Bacon’s works were generally accepted as a solid defense of scientific inquiry, but there was no reason to believe his core ideological statements: that it was humanity’s destiny to rule nature, and that understanding the natural phenomena will raise man to the original God-given state of power over the material.

In Michael Adas’ fantastic book on colonial history and ideology Machines as the measure of men, the author gives an overview of the fascinating changes in European attitudes towards non-white cultures and peoples. According to Adas’ research into the accounts of early European travelers, at the very start of discovery and exploration they felt little fundamental difference between themselves and the rest of the world. Obviously, Europeans noted the shocking cultural distinctions, the less familiar physiology and so on. However, Adas points out, “whatever aspirtaions <…> Francis Bacon may have had for humans to control their natural environment… [before the mid-18th century, Europeans] suffered from the extremes of heat and cold as much as or a good deal more than most of the peoples they contacted overseas”. At the time of early exploration, the main difference that could not be reconciled in the European mind was the religious one. Artificial hierarchies of foreign peoples were being constructed, but were mostly based on what European travelers considered to be satisfactory material development: impressive architecture, entertaining culture and a digestible-to-them social order.

Later, as the Enlightenment Period (17th-18th century) came around and brought with it the rise of philosophical thought and theory, some European travelers started analyzing the political and social structures of overseas communities. The more educated ones occasionally commented on the level of scholarly and scientific development of other cultures and believed that the main obstacle to a society’s potential flourishing would come from “despotic” ruling. The level of scientific development itself, however, was not being used to extrapolate judgements on the very nature of overseas peoples and their mentality - as it would be soon enough.

The relatively tame early observations and musings are a striking, even shocking contrast to the major shift of consciousness that happened with the boom of the Industrial Revolution. With industrialization came a sense of control, mastery of environment, practice of bending and repurposing the basic principles of creation in order to generate comfort, efficiency and technological advancement. Baconianism came back with new force: Europeans had tangible proof of how discoveries of natural science could be used to transform their material lives.

A bit paradoxically, to the Christian mind, man-made machines became a proof of God. The European consciousness took the lavish technological advancement to be proof of anthropocentric (and specifically White-centric) creationism. Industrialization revealed to them that humanity’s holy right and duty was indeed in reclaiming its place as the master of the world. Moreover, technological advancement allowed for more research as the more powerful and precise scientific tools came around, and perceiving the natural world in fuller detail served as proof of the endless might of the God who created it all. For example, one of the colonial writers quoted by Adas claimed that teaching African kids about astronomy was the quickest way to indoctrinate them into Christian faith. Technological advancement became a herald of Christian conviction - while at the same time being hailed as the way to disperse the “superstitions” of paganism. Europeans felt themselves chosen by God to become the most “evolved” race upon this earth, and that fed into the colonial conviction of objective superiority that is nowadays reflected in the white supremacist movements.

Perhaps the most vibrant representation of the great cognitive shift the European society went through as the result of the scientific revolution and industrialization was their transformed relationship with the very concepts of time and space. That transformation was largely influenced by the capitalist need for urgency. The unprecedented precision of clocks, the equation of time with money, the invention of transport that moved at once unimaginable speeds - that made Europeans feel like they intimately understood and all but freely commanded the very (meta)physical foundations of creation. That bore a great disparity between their mode of perception of the world and the perceptions prevalent in other cultures - and Europeans could only see that as proof of other peoples’ lack of ability to comprehend time beyond just the present moment, their inherent laziness, or a shameful indifference towards the high ideals of truth and precision.

As the Adas’ book’s title succinctly states, machines and technological advancement were seen as the measure of ultimate worth - and not of an individual person but a people as a whole. In the colonial White-favouring mind, the achievements of European inventors gave credit to all their compatriots and contemporaries, because supposedly, all of this advancement was provided for by democratic ruling, support of scholarly research by the state, and the blessing of the Christian God who has “chosen” them to be the “dominant” civilization. Industrialization was nothing short of a destiny uncovered, and the implication almost seemed to be that technological progress was something that was either meant to happen in a people’s history or not, by the will of divine providence.

European expansion and colonization became openly motivated by making use of the natural resource of colonized lands with the purpose of maintaining their industrial control over nature. Applied science that made use of the accumulated Western knowledge was fully recognized for the transformative power it had on the very bases of European civilization, and, predictably, was utilized as a tool for further expansion.

European Knowledge & “Pure” Science

As you can probably see, all this veneration of scientific and technological advancement was distinctly colored with a sense of divine determinism, almost seeming to imply that there was nothing higher for humanity to aim for: the Europeans had already arrived at the final stop of civilization and evolution. The focus on the practical transformation of everyday life meant that science’s place was in increasing the scale and efficiency of humanity’s tools for mastery over nature. “Pure” science fully concerned with theoretical knowledge held little relevance to that advancement, and so its idea of progress and the drive to understand the natural phenomena better did not align with the colonial ambition.

The two core ideologies of colonial expansion stemmed from the assumption that the European civilization had already possessed the core understanding of the natural world (a.k.a. the means of overpowering it). From that quite arrogant assumption of having reached the pinnacle of man’s God-given power, colonial thinkers presented two different reasons as to why violent colonization of overseas peoples was necessary and even holy. The more honest one clearly exposed the true economic and political motivation of colonization, justifying it with gut-churning expressions of “righteous” anger: it claimed that non-white peoples lacked the divine purpose and/or natural predisposition for ruling over the natural world and making use of the rich resource of their land, and so it was only just for the “enlightened” European to take what is due and properly utilize what would otherwise be going to waste. The other approach is what we know to be the “civilizing mission” ideology, in which the knowledgeable Europeans were kindly sharing their epiphany with the rest of the world for the ultimate benefit of the “savages”.

What’s important to us is that in each version of colonial thought, the Western European scientific knowledge was intrinsically taken for an ultimate and objective universal truth. Industrialization had unlocked the divinely intended human potential, and so it was only right to either a) exploit other lands for the sake of its flourishing, or b) share the prophecy with those yet unaware. Further scientific research was undoubtedly being conducted, with industrialization and technological advancement leading to the creation of new, more accurate tools for measurement and observation, and Europeans got downright obsessed with accuracy and detail - but that seemed to be the focus: endlessly adjusting the lens to get a better look at something you already know the objective and fairly accurate outline of, just to further and further perfect your understanding of it. At the core, the European mentality of the time was built on the assumption that the greatest realizations had already been made. The veils of the unknown had long since been lifted, the world was mapped, the foreign cultures assessed, and the path towards stepping into their supposed power already well-trodden. Now, the question was of perfecting the knowledge and properly utilizing it.

This is fascinating to me, because this sort of approach is completely devoid of curiosity - the very thing we are supposedly talking about here. When it came to the mainstream colonial ideology, there seemed to be no fascination with the unknown biomes, uncatalogued species, unique possibilities for astronomical observation and so on. The core justification of colonialism in the era of Industrial Revolution was the entrenched belief that the European held objective and superior knowledge that enabled them to command the entire planet’s natural resource. Just like the sea beast turned dissected whale, the natural world was transformed from a dangerous mystery to a familiar, understood and tamed completely everyday product to use for one’s convenience.

Of course, that does not exhaustively describe every belief held by a colonial-era scientist or amateur science-lover, but these are the voices that were given the stage, conducted the mass discourse and echoed the overall shared sentiment. Still, what about our hypothetical Milo Thatches of the 18th century Europe? How did they fit into this ideological nightmare, and was there a place for them in the colonial expansion?

While digging through the accounts related to colonial science and scientific institutions in search of a story of an individual whose inquiry and curiosity led them to settling a conquered colonized land, the closest I got was the biography of Sir William Jones and the history of the Bogor Botanical Gardens.

The widely understood persona of William Jones appears conveniently historically vague. In our day, he is remembered for his seminal contribution to the field of linguistics; to his contemporaries, he was a well-known “Orientalist”, passionately and prolifically studying Indian culture, language and literature. He was also a key agent of colonial rule in Bengal, appointed a judge to the Supreme Court at the occupied Kolkata in 1783. According to Adas, his position and influence as an East Indes Company official was what granted Jones access to Hindu and Muslim writings that were otherwise jealously guarded. Accounts of Jones diligently studying Sanskrit in order to properly interpret the laws of Hinduism almost paint a picture of noble colonial jurisdiction, thorough and dedicated to doing the people it lorded over justice. Jones demonstrated great passion for the Indian continent overall, too, eagerly collecting botanical specimen and conducting astronomical observations during his time in Bengal.

We do not need to speculate about Jones’ loyalties and whether he was actively compromising an intrinsic value by refusing the very people he was so taken with its freedom and autonomy. Adas quotes Jones on stating the supposedly objective superiority of Europeans in social as well as “useful” sciences, and all his exaltation of Sanskrit’s grammar and passion for Hindu writing did not in Jones’ consciousness negate the belief that compared to Europeans, Indians, just like the rest of peoples of Asia, were “mere children” when it came to scientific thought.

This seems to illustrate a subset of the “civilizing mission” ideology. Through the rise of colonialism, numerous ideological debates were centered around the artificial hierarchy of foreign peoples that was constructed by European colonizers, ranking them from hopelessly undeveloped to once impressive or holding some valuable ancient knowledge yet unable to make use of it or get with the times. Colonial thinkers came out with think pieces on whether a certain “backwards” people could be “saved” by the spread of European civilization or if they were intrinsically, naturally devoid of capacity for scientific thought and therefore did not deserve the resource of their land or own bodies. Jones fits right into this discourse, eager to study and appreciate the ancient cultural treasures of a foreign civilization but approaching the people which inherited it with the same unalienable sense of superiority. The intention was to study an object fully separate from and inferior to him, not learn from an equal that deserves autonomy and respect.

A telling overview of the history of Bogor (at the time - Buitenzorg) Botanical Gardens, established in Indonesia under Dutch occupation, is given in Andrew Goss’ article “Decent Colonialism? Pure Science and Colonial Ideology in Netherlands East Indes”. In it, Goss compiles and analyzes various historical accounts, mostly relating to one of the Gardens’ directors, J.C. Koningsberg, and paints a detailed picture of Koningsberg’s attempts to carve out a place for “pure” scientific research, to both be allowed to stay out of colonial government’s operation and have the value of his work recognized by it. In an appeal to colonial officials that dictated the Gardens’ fate, Koningsberg claimed with what Goss sees as genuine conviction that “every contribution that further adds to the knowledge of this land’s nature… can only contribute to increasing the inviolability of our bill of ownership”.

Goss states that Koningsberg held political administration ideologically secondary to science. The entire article delves deeper into his complicated history with the contemporary colonial administration, the reluctant engagement of his colleagues in “PR” campaigns and semi-practical application of natural knowledge, and the eventual claim that the colonial officials laid onto the Buitenzorg Botanical Gardens as an ultimate justification of Dutch colonial rule: their supposed support of “pure” sciences served as evidence of a truly noble, selfless, dispassionate cause the Dutch were serving in a foreign land. This claim came about with the decline of the “civilizing mission” ideology, and the administration readily exploited the faulty ethics around “pure” scientific inquiry to parade their violent rule as an objectively selfless act of servitude to humanity overall.

So, there we have it: the passionate “pure” scientist that holds their research above political ambition, conquest and “utilizing” the natural resource; someone who only engages with the policy makers out of a lack of choice, but would otherwise stay out of the agenda altogether. What do we make of that? Obviously, Koningsberg was not opposed to colonial ideology, and was benefiting from the Dutch rule.

This is what makes a narrative of “neutral” or “positive” explorative expansion impossible: it would simply look like insensitive history revisionism. For a story that is deeply anti-colonial at its core, like The Sea Beast is, a take along the lines of “And then they did go overseas, but it’s fine because now they did it in a nice way!” would be a betrayal to the subtle yet earnest historical commentary that makes it what it is.

Still, there seems to be space left for a “what if” or two. “What if” the Crown is fully done for? “What if” the society is fully transformed? “What if” the vibrant multi-cultural population of the fictional kingdom brings about all sorts of varied philosophies that provide for a better relationship with the natural world? “What if” they find Red again and politely ask for permission?

All of these questions would most likely come from our deeply ingrained assumption that knowing is, at worst, neutral, and at best, objectively and unfailingly positive. The aforementioned and amazing Dr Sarukkai comments extensively on the belief shared between many modern scientists who are convinced that any ethical inquiry must only come into play when the practical applications of “pure” knowledge are being discussed. Hold governments and corporations accountable for what they do with the ultimately neutral and objective facts of the world; leave the scientific pursuit out of it, though. Dr Sarukkai quotes Paul Kurtz, a scientific skeptic, on the following statement: “[In the area] of knowledge and truth, <…> scientists ought, on utilitarian grounds, to be allowed to inquire as they see fit”.

Note the following words: “knowledge and truth”. They highlight what Dr Sarukkai repeatedly points out: the objective quality of scientific knowledge as perceived by Europeans. Scientific discovery is perfectly neutral because it shows what is already there, the material and natural workings of the world, and to try to censor that is to deny people the holy truths that are clearly within reach.

That is the endpoint of the transformation Dr Sarukkai describes: from the relevance of the knower’s “moral” character to the universal objective moral soundness of inquiring. To uncover “the truth” is an act of servitude; you can choose if you’re serving God’s plan, humanity’s prosperity or the faceless entity of scientific knowledge.

Another striking transformation from a subjective experience to an objective fact was the linguistic journey of the very word “curiosity” itself. Once exclusively used to describe the faculty of the mind, a person’s urge to know, “curiosity” eventually became a label to put on the object that inspired it. That unsettling projection of desire onto another as their objective, inherent quality almost looks like an unexpected form of victim-blaming directed at the natural world itself: if this thing didn’t want to be dissected and taxidermied, maybe it shouldn’t have been so damn curious.

Continuing his exploration, Dr Sarukkai calls attention to the ethical constraints on curiosity in every other aspect of our shared existence. The intimate details of another person’s life are just as much of an objective truth, and one that could potentially tell us a lot about our society - but it is not seen proper to intrude on that. However, nature can be interrogated at any point and in any form, under the blanket justification of objectivity and universality: a subjective personal experience has little to contribute to our understanding of the world overall, but the basic principles of it are relevant to every single one of us, and hold the potential of transforming it; so who would have the right to deny a scientist this meeting with the universe?

The natural world is both lesser than another person, its rights unprotected as it is not a citizen of any country - and simultaneously much more valuable than any single human life, due to the pure potential and resource of it. The post-industrial attitude towards it seems to dominate the discussion around the ethics of science: it is great, it is even holy, to get to closer know God’s divine creation; but that creation deserves no respect, holds no boundary. It has submit to the might of the machine, and now it must lie there, docile, and let the scientist dig as deep into it as they might desire to, let itself be slashed open, unravel before the prying eyes, every tiny secret of its body open for reaping, because why would we ever want to know less? The beast is slain. The coast is clear. Our ships and microscopes and scalpels will reach as far and deep as they wish, and there is nothing anyone can say to justify diverting them. “Nature is clearly set against man, no longer a legendary dragon, but as a storehouse that should be discovered and can be exploited; the peaceful conquest of the riches of nature is bound to begin”. Praise to Bacon’s great legacy: the universe is, indeed, nothing but the provider of raw material, and it will not hold out on us.

Greatest scandals around the ethics of science come about when the natural value and the legal citizenship clash and intersect, when a scientist sees the potential of a specific human body and decides it outweighs the rights of the human person. The conversations around those scandals are riddled with complex, conflicted feelings: the means of acquiring this knowledge were unethical at best, inhumane at worst, but what should we do with it now that it’s here? Should we ignore the truth already uncovered out of our respect for the people hurt? That is so counter-intuitive to us, to pretend to not know; to give up a truth, to forget. And what do we do if the practical application of an ethical wrong is actively serving living people?

It seems hard enough to make scientific curiosity get along with the limitations of citizenship and human rights. It is the easiest choice, then, to give up the very notion of ethics altogether when it is the non-human natural world that is being interrogated, invaded, sourced for “pure” truths.

Dr Sarukkai challenges that comfort. Every interrogation is worth regulation; we do not currently possess a model for such regulation, because for the longest time, we have been growing into the notion that it is always good to know, and worse not to. The supposed objective virtue of inquiry left no space for the question of “Should we?”, as long as the answer to “Can we?” is “Just watch!”.

It doesn’t feel enough to deconstruct any ethical failing on a case-by-case basis, to say “This is where the individual person went wrong, and these specific steps should generally be avoided”. That simply brings us back to the core notion of an objective truth, a “pure” fact as the genuine pursuit of science, in a claim that the inquiry itself is an unfailingly noble cause. But there seems to be something missing at the very core of the Western European and White American mindset, something that is closely intertwined with the spirit of the modern scientific method, because, remember: that spirit follows in the philosophical footsteps of Francis Bacon, and it was his Christian conviction of man’s mastery over the natural world that inspired the empirical tools of knowing; and it was that exact conviction that flourished in the Industrial era, hand in hand with the ideology of colonialism. These threads come together, intricate and almost invisible, and run through the fabric of our mass consciousness, defining our degrees of comfort and convincing us our sense of it is objective, not defined by centuries of history and cultural development. That will become obvious if you use your search engine of choice to look up two loaded words: “decolonizing science”.

Oops, We Re-Colonized It

“Decolonizing science” was the very first step of my little research. Every article I could find was remarkably like the previous one, each rightfully criticizing the “parachute” model of research (please be sure to read about it!) and occasionally giving an overview of applied science’s role in colonial expansion. The article titled “Science Still Bears the Fingerprints of Colonialism” published in Smithsonian Magazine seemed insightful - until “pure” scientific knowledge came up.

The title itself now seems disappointingly misleading to me. A fingerprint grazes the surface and may be wiped off. That barely represents the tight ideological interconnectedness of colonial and scientific heritage. The real kicker, however, comes with the subheading “Science Must Fall?”. The author, Rohan Deb Roy embeds a video gone viral in 2016, of a few students from the University of Cape Town demanding a thorough deconstruction of the modern body of scientific knowledge with the purpose of decolonizing their immediate communities.

To me, it did not feel like Deb Roy gave this perspective the space it deserved. The author promptly moved on to explaining how science denial can and will be exploited by populist propaganda and self-serving decision makers - which is a fair, important point. The argument of the Cape Town “fallists”, however, was commodified as no more than a jumping point to the argument as to why “pure” science didn’t need reform - the problem was with keeping the applications ethical and research inclusive.

I would ask you to watch the video and try to empathize with the pain of generations that had their cultural belief and practice violently, viciously attacked by the hypocritical European colonizer, seeing their technological advancement as proof of the might of Christian God and simultaneously parading it as the ultimate end of non-Christian faith and the “slow gods of paganism” that couldn’t possibly keep up with their magnificent railroads. As you watch it, also remember that this argument isn’t being made for you - unless you yourself share the “fallists’” culture and community.

Smithsonian Mag’s Rohan Deb Roy heard warning bells of populism and climate denial in the demand to build a new, culturally specific body of knowledge - because we cannot possibly comprehend an existence of two or more different, separate sciences. Because science the way we know it today is, supposedly, the pure and final universal truth. Deb Roy warns us against refusing to listen to the voice of reason supposedly personified in scientific knowledge, lest we enable ignorant decision-makers.

What that sentiment fails to account for is the very thing the “fallist” speaker is trying desperately to communicate to others: Western European and White American science is totalist, it seeks to be universal, it claims to bear the seeds of absolute truth and generously disperse them across the rest of the world. That is what needs to be challenged: the very foundation of modern scientific knowledge and method, and the specifically European and Christian ideology it grew out of. The speaker’s message isn’t meant for us: it is meant for the descendants of people that were colonized and enslaved and indoctrinated into believing their colonizers’ message about the exclusive objectivity of Western European knowledge and worldview. The fact that we are supposed to feel intimidated by a local group of activists advocating for a decolonized perception of science, for revival of their native approach to the natural world and the growth of a unique scientific method that knows how to respect and account for their cultural experience - that is an expression of our deeply internalized globalization consciousness, which exists because the European West successfully enforced its mentality onto the rest of the world in its colonial conquest.

The very idea that scientific knowledge is a) objectively and exclusively true and therefore superior to personal or cultural knowledge and belief, b) objectively and undeniably good and should be sourced and shared as much as physically possible, is, at its core, a colonial mindset. Modern science and scientific method are eurocentric. The way scientific research is being conducted can be traced through the works of multiple dead Europeans, one of whom became the venerated hero of industrial colonialism for his claim that (the Christian) man belonged at the helm of the natural world, free to exploit it to his heart content. To reject the very thought of someone questioning the body of knowledge acquired through this set of deeply European values, to sound an alarm at the idea of them calling for a different culture of inquiry and to claim that such a request would harm the global good of humanity, is to accidentally re-colonize science all over again.

Rohan Deb Roy acknowledges the importance of conversations around the Western European and White American science’s failure to include cross-cultural experiences - but does so briefly, by criticizing the “racist and ignorant” comments left under the original video. This approach, still, seems to only echo the discouragement of unethical practices within the profoundly noble field of “pure” research: “Well, we shouldn’t be indecent about it, but the problem is not with science itself”.

However, ample historical evidence seems to suggest that the problems of racism, colonial mindset and prejudice, exploitation of nature and our understanding of ethics of curiosity and scientific inquiry all developed together and mutually shaped each other, and, like most things in life, cannot be considered fully separate from the complex context of their origin, influences and contemporary events. We cannot clear off the shuck of colonial history and reach the “pure” and untainted core of scientific knowledge the way it is “supposed” to be, and then delight in preserving it as untouchable and beyond any criticism. Science never formed as fully separate from our society, mentality, culture and history. An honest and productive discussion will require that we look for more than fingerprints and start questioning the very blueprints instead.

So what ties them all together: the praise of empiricism, the belief into the neutral quality of inquiry, the centering of “truth” and material accuracy above anything else, the “righteous” quest for the otherwise “wasted” resource, and the violent abuse of natural environments and foreign peoples? Let’s return to Adas’ extensive collection of first-hand accounts of colonial mindset and ideology, and talk about the spirit shared between the most vocal defenders of colonization.

Precision, Efficiency, Entitlement

Tell me if you see the same things I do here:

• In the first half of the 18th century, Jean-Baptiste Labat, a Dominican friar, criticized African people’s neglect of the rich resource of gold and blamed it on both their inherent “laziness” and dependence on the permission of local officials, meaning they could only work the mines “sporadically”. In his assessment, their lack of tools left them able to only “scratch the surface” of a vein of ore, then abandon it without digging deeper and reaping the full potential.

• In the late 18th century, Louis Le Comte shared his largely critical observations of Chinese culture and learning and claimed that this people lacked the precision and “penetration” of his own countrymen, the quality that, in his understanding, was essential to the study of nature.

• At the start of the 19th century, French naturalist and anthropologist Julian Joseph Virey reflected on pre-industrial societies that, according to him, were indifferent to investigating the “sources of life” and the “treasures of the earth”- a quality that marked them as docile, “mere cattle of the prairie”. Alongside that, he claimed that the people that had mastered the elements possessed the natural right to control the untapped resource of foreign lands and dominate the rest of humanity.

• According to Adas, starting from the 17th century (!) the focus on empiricism led to a stricter standard of measurement and observation, creating a demand for enhanced, more accurate tools and records. Two centuries later, numerous writers (among them - John Barrow, Samuel W. Williams, James Mill) ridiculed non-Western people’s “feeble” understanding of geography, their “poor” map-making and “nonsensical” navigation tools. Gustave Le Bon noted Indians’ supposed “disregard for precision”, their lack of instruments for accurate empirical inquiry. All of that, in Le Bon’s understanding, went hand in hand with the Indian people’s absence of “critical spirit” and their inability to “see things as they are”.

• In the second half of the 19th century, Frederic W. Farrar wrote of the “primitive” colonized peoples: “Among them generation hands on no torch to generation, but each century sees them in the same condition as the last, learning nothing, inventing nothing, improving nothing, living on in the same squalid misery and brutal ignorance; neither wiser nor better than their forefathers of immemorial epochs back, mechanically carrying on only a few rude mechanical operations as the bee continues to build her waxen hexagon, and the spider to spin his concentric web”.

• In the late 1870s, W. A. Rogers wrote: “Railways are opening the eyes of the people who are within reach of them in a variety of ways. They teach them that time is worth money, and induce them to economize that which they had been in the habit of slighting and wasting; they teach them that speed attained is time, and therefore money, saved or made.”

• At the start of the 20th century, French writer Charles Regimansent wrote about the way African people built roads: twisting around trees instead of cutting through the forest. He claimed that habit illustrated their undeveloped understanding of time and space and their ignorance of the time lost. Englishmen Goldsworthy Dickenson and Joseph Chailley-Bert reflected on Asian peoples’ attitudes towards nature compared with the European approach, the former noting how Hindu art depicted “the inexhaustible fertility, the ruthlessness, the irrationality of nature, never <…> her adaptability to human needs”; the latter observed expressions of that “subservience to nature” in Asian peasants’ refusal to drive birds from their crops, kill disease-spreading rats or poisonous scorpions.

What I see here is the same thread running through all of the statements: a frustration with another’s indifference to what the speaker holds above all else. The European mind transformed this mere disagreement in values into a matter in which one is either in the right or in oblivion. A foreign culture’s disregard for efficiency, speed, utilization became a mark of a thoroughly passive existence: why not do more, know more, work more, get more? The only root for other peoples’ alternative mindsets that colonial thinkers could come up with were laziness, docility, childishness, and an inherent lack of a precise mind. In the Western European mentality many of us still likely share these days, there is never any good, conscious and informed reason to choose “less” over “more”.

The frustration expressed in the colonial thinkers’ writing is entirely self-serving, too: it becomes the ultimate evidence of superiority, and a justification of any possible action taken to “right” the crime of indifference. It is almost an affront to Christian God and humanity itself to let one’s land and mind go to waste; if you’re not contributing to man’s great rise to power, if you are not squeezing every last bit of knowledge and resource out of the earth beneath your feet, at least move aside and let those aware of the noble pursuit of civilization make use of what is rightfully theirs. If your people cannot contribute a great thinker or a valuable discovery, they should at least be exploited for their bodies, their service, their physical labor - because the purpose of a human being is to further the strictly European agenda of expansion and domination.

The fixation on the supposed objective absolute permeates the colonial ideology, and it makes no difference between measuring time, making a scientific inquiry or exploiting every final bit of available resource - all of those are seen as equally universal values that may not be ignored for any other reason than an undeveloped mind incapable of grasping the missed potential. The European colonial mindset carries the flag of Baconian belief and sees the world as an oyster to devour fully, with no reason to hold back. It seems clear that the modern omnipresence of growth economy and its devastating effect on the environment and the most vulnerable communities worldwide is a natural extension of that sentiment.

This was the discovery that revolutionized my personal understanding of scientific inquiry. My original intent was to try to find a pattern of faulty ethics originating in scientific curiosity; instead, I came across evidence that challenges our modern attitude towards intellectual pursuit and scientific knowledge itself. It truly seems that we cannot separate the very heart of the modern scientific method from this perception of an absolute, this idea that because science uncovers a supposed universal truth, there may be nothing lording above it. This projection of one single subset of our lives into an objective virtue that cannot be disrespected by anyone who isn’t short-sighted or malicious continues the tradition of hailing an ultimately self-serving pursuit as the noble and impersonal mission for the sake of the entire humanity.

And that is not meant to bash scientific inquiry altogether, or to enable genuine science denial as a tool of right-wing propaganda. I believe knowledge can be a form of true love. Some of the most fulfilling periods of my life that gifted me a sense of connection with the rest of the world were defined by learning more about it. But when it comes to love, things are quick to get murky, complicated, muddied, and the lack of definition to it can lead us far astray; and if we are to have an honest, thorough conversation about the blueprints of Western European colonial thinking laid into the very foundation of the modern empirical scientific method, we cannot hold onto any supposed absolute other than the right of each one of us and the natural world to exist at peace, autonomous, flourishing and entitled to being left perfectly alone.

Scientific inquiry has, no doubt, been repeatedly villainized by religious dogma, and perhaps many modern scientists’ passionate defense of any and all research and endeavor is affected by the history of unnecessary and deliberate constraint of liberating knowledge; but the history of Western European philosophy reveals that the absolute status of scientific knowledge was imparted to it by a strictly Christian, euro- and anthropocentric ideology. The modern status of science exists not in spite of religious fundamentalism - it is directly enabled by the latter, by interpreting specific biblical text as a universal prophecy of humanity’s place in the world. The totalitarian approach we tend to hold towards factual scientific knowledge is worship recast. While an averse reaction to someone questioning the methods and foundations of science is a fair reaction in the face of political and religious push-back conscientious scientists undoubtedly face, it is also ingenuine to unequivocally place science as fundamentally opposed to politics and religion as an impartial and objective counter-balance to skewed personal agenda: historically, both of these forces defined science on the deepest, genetic level.

Curiosity and Doubt

Gustave Le Bon’s statement about the Indian people’s supposed inability to see things “as they are” is curiously juxtaposed by Dr Sarukkai’s note on the concepts of “curiosity” and “doubt”. He points out that, while “curiosity” existed in the Western European consciousness for a long time and before its “rehabilitation” was a prominent subject of cautionary tales, that is not something he observed in Indian culture and literature. In fact, the idea of “curiosity” is barely present in early Indian mentality at all - but the concept of “doubt” is prevalent and defining. Doubt allows to question the metaphysical nature of things despite their physical appearance; in Hiduism, it is a tool of spiritual awakening in the face of maya, the convincing illusion of material existence.

This is especially interesting, because another major contribution to the modern scientific method is Cartesian doubt: the process of eliminating false information until you identify a seed of truth that can no longer be questioned. Fascinating how in the European consciousness, even doubt is ultimately just a path towards proven factual certainty.

Let’s return to The Sea Beast’s narrative and our intrepid little knower, Maisie Brumble. Is she curious? Is she doubtful? Her passionate spirit certainly inspires her to know more, more, more, to ask questions, to observe the world closely, to get involved with it; and once the truth becomes apparent to her, she will not rest until she shouts it from the rooftops, until the unjust rulers are exposed for all to see. It’s crucial how she never tries to rally the people - only dispel the lies they were told. Maisie fits the bill of a venerated hero of science, someone who, borrowing the words of Rohan Deb Roy, “[demonstrates] remarkable courage, critical thinking and dissent in the face of established beliefs and conservative traditions”.

…But there is so much more to her than a discerning mind - and that completely transforms whatever messaging could otherwise be derived from Maisie’s pursuit of truth. Because at the end of the day, she cares less about knowing the exact detail of something than she does about doing the right thing. As the myth of ferocious beasts starts falling apart, Maisie and Jacob discover that the history books cannot be trusted - but struggle to piece together the true cause of the war that has been going on for generations. And at the end, Maisie is not that fixated on learning the full story: as she tells Jacob, “Maybe it doesn’t matter how the war started; maybe what matters is how it ends”. To her, the truth is not the end goal. Instead, it is a means towards making an honest, weighted, loving decision. Knowing what happened becomes secondary; the priority is living, and living a truly great life, a long, happy, noble one, free of cruel lies and grounded in kindness and respect.

Maisie is curious - but not in the insatiable way of empirical scientific inquiry. She outgrows the false tales told to her and develops a sense of doubt - but never skepticism, never the same need to test and push every single button until she arrives at undoubtedly solid ground and can from there claim intellectual and moral superiority. And neither of those things are what define her at the end. What truly moves her is love, the purest and universally inclusive form of it; and what helps her love flourish is her observing open-mindedness. That open-mindedness allows Maisie to approach the world without the firm conditioning that would make her ignore the suffering of another living being or accept an unfair, treacherous order of things. That open-mindedness is also what seems to be missing from the conversations about modern science, and what causes some to refuse the idea of our generally accepted values not being entirely objective or apolitical.

The open mind that is focused on observation and ready to be guided and transformed is also a trademark quality of a child - and, incidentally, “a child” is something a scientist is compared to quite a lot in conversations around scientific ethics. When in colonial era, “subpar” observations of non-White peoples were consistently dismissed as “childish”, these days “childishness” is being rehabilitated as a redeeming quality of scientific inquiry. A curious researcher is as passionate and innocent as a toddler, and, like the kid in the story of the king’s new dress, speaks the words of pure truth, unobscured by fear or preconception. Because of that, they are supposedly free of the logical fallacies of a layman, and reside beyond any ethical criticism. If we phrase the question as “Why would anyone want to keep the truth hidden?”, the answer would obviously paint any challenge to scientific inquiry as an attempt to exploit populist sentiments for personal gain.

Is that a fair and honest wording of the question at hand, however? At the end of the day, the ethical quandary lies not in the value of factual truth, but in the means of obtaining it, the way we process and internalize it, and how it interacts with our personal biases, societal structures, and how our long and complicated history has shaped our understanding of which knowledge holds value and which may be dismissed.

Maisie’s character offers us a subtle double subversion of the ingenuine and lackluster ideology of modern science. She is a challenger to the conservative ruler, and she is a passionate, curious child - but her characterization and values counteract the absolutist scientific drive by being focused on the communal and world-wide well-being instead. Maisie is a child - which means she is not only learning about the world, but also being taught what it means to live in it, how to co-exist with every other breathing, feeling being, and what a truly great life might look like, to her and her fellow people. This exposes a fatal flaw in the “scientist as a child” line of thinking: it disregards a vital aspect of what it means, to look at the world with a fresh eye and to explore one’s place within it.

Observation vs. Interrogation

Something I have tried to emphasize throughout this essay is the difference between passive reception and active inquiry - and it is a crucial part of Maisie’s characterization. Her talent is in mindful observation of the world around her. Not once does she poke a beast to see what it will do, not once does she try to test the boundaries of Red’s good intentions towards her human charges. Maisie simply meets what is already in front of her with an open, clear mind and an honest heart - and that allows her to see much more than any other character we meet. The radical messaging of The Sea Beast is that it is not only enough to take in what is already available - no, sometimes doing that without any preconceived notion of how things are leads you to truly revolutionary realizations. You may learn much more about the nature of the world by simply sitting down and listening to what it has to say - instead of tearing into it, hungry for more, and making it your enemy.

That is fully incompatible with the spirit of empirical and experimental inquiry that imbues the modern scientific method. Philosophically, metaphysically, that spirit may almost come across as insecurity: constant doubt in an anxious search of the undoubtable, because it is too intimidating, or too embarrassing, to put faith into one’s informal observation, to have trust in what the world is willing to tell you plainly. There is no way our senses, logical fallacies, the appearances of nature itself wouldn’t lie to us; so we will test and prod and experiment, we will push until we unearth the core of an objective truth that we will never have to doubt again - supposedly. Empiricism is a great methodical expression of ultimate existential distrust - and it has its place. But when we let it define it our very mode of engagement with the world, we seem to lose more than what we gain.

If you read Bessel Van Der Kolk’s famous book The Body Keeps the Score, you will find the following paragraphs in Chapter 2:

“…I heard a presentation by Steven Maier of the University of Colorado, who had collaborated with Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. His topic was learned helplessness in animals. Maier and Seligman had repeatedly administered painful electric shocks to dogs who were trapped in locked cages. They called this condition ‘inescapable shock’. Being a dog lover, I realized that I could never have done such research myself, but I was curious about how this cruelty would affect the animals.

“After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open - they just lay there, whimpering and defecating. The mere opportunity to escape does not necessarily make traumatized animals, or people, take the road to freedom. Like Maier and Seligman’s dogs, many traumatized people simply give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know.”

What is the purpose of this excerpt? Obviously, it is to provide a specific and evocative metaphor for the workings of a traumatized brain; it is offered anecdotally with the hope that the reader will internalize it as a strong and telling illustration of PTSD. The modern body of scientific knowledge is riddled with just that: a concise and witty report at the end of methodical experimentation, aimed to convince us its findings are the absolute truth unearthed, perfected, purified for our enjoyment and future reference; a convenient short-cut to the very gist of life.

In that, science has effectively re-invented the folk fables depicting archetypal animals going about their lives. Except what’s being mythologized is real, tangible suffering that took place in our world, was knowingly, purposefully inflicted by human hand on a feeling body with the goal to squeeze absolute knowledge out of it. Formulating the notion of “learned helplessness” is not enough: what we need is methodically extracted data that involves actively adding to the number of traumatized beings on this already suffering earth.

We will never outgrow our need for the world’s wisdom - but somewhere along the way, we stopped trusting ourselves enough to receive what is given willingly. We do not want to be guided and taught - we want to study, test and verify. We will not be passive observers, at home in nature. We will dig and cut and saw and dilute and drill, we will burrow into the very marrow of life, pierce through to the most intimate corners of it - and we will violate as many natural freedoms as we must on our way. Because nothing is ever enough. We need to go deeper; we need to go further. We need to know; and we need to grow. Expand endlessly, because we have not reached our true destiny until there is a tangible measure of our worth. More precision. More knowledge. More land. More invention. More progress. More product. More capital.

The core of insatiability - because it was never mere “curiosity” - is shared. Science and knowledge can be loving - but love means complexity, love means heart, love means non-duality and other-centeredness.

Dr Sarukkai quotes E. Baumgarten, who suggests: “Curiosity bears a close relationship to <…> care and concern. Curiosity is rooted linguistically in the other-regarding activities of “care” and “cure” <…>. In human interactions, this element of care makes curiosity not a morbid one but one which is an important part of friendship. Moreover, curiosity is necessary for deepening one’s friendship.”

Considering that in the context of natural study and inquiry, Dr Sarukkai argues: “The ambiguity present in any positive rendering of curiosity is but a natural consequence of the ambiguity present in the concept of curiosity. <…> If curiosity towards nature is a fundamental impulse for science, then how is this curiosity related to the notion of care towards nature? On the contrary, curiosity in science often manifests itself in the most extreme forms of exploitation of nature.”

From the philosophical standpoint, “curiosity” appears to be as vague of a label as “love”-the feeling is - and so it cannot be the ultimate motivation of any inquiry. Our desire to know demands examination. It is not enough to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge; and it is not enough to claim that “pure” science is fundamentally neutral and should not be hindered. Every single aspect of our lives is defined by the dizzyingly nuanced human condition; if we are searching for something that would do a disservice to humanity’s place on earth, the obvious choice seems to be anything that tries to simplify the complex web of ethics, consequences and responsibilities our every major choice exists within.

Man vs. Nature

Returning to the specific moment in history we find the characters of The Sea Beast in, let’s do a quick overview of everything implied in the historical allusions.

Time period: late 16th-early 17th century Europe. The rehabilitation of curiosity is underway, but not yet complete. The human civilization is teetering at the edge of rapid expansion. The Imperialist is an omen of future conquest, as well as a metaphor for the soon-to-be-transformed relationship with nature: no longer a dangerous and unknown opponent but a force that may be subdued with advanced machinery.

The Red Bluster’s execution would be the turning point of human history, an ultimate victory of civilization over the dangerous, unconquered mystery of the wild. It’s vital to note the color symbolism obvious in the movie: Red’s hide matching the sails of The Inevitable, which the crew uses to attract a beast’s attention and lure it away from a more vulnerable, weaker vessel. That implies a specific role Red plays in the beast vs. human war: just like The Inevitable, she is the most feared warrior, and just like it, she may protect her weaker comrades by getting the attacker focused on her. She is basically the patron and protector of the ocean, and is the last beast that needs to be slain before the Crown’s ships may travel beyond the Dregmorr sea.

The plot’s resolution prevents colonial expansion and rapid exploitation of the natural resource. That is done through diverting the ultimate conquest of the dangers of nature. The Sea Beast subtly and masterfully exposes the connection between the two: how positioning civilization as opposed to nature implies that one most dominate the other; how domination implies entitlement, that a warrior must bring home spoils earned in battle; how crowning a specific civilization the masters of the natural world creates a hierarchical mentality that can and will justify further exploitation of foreign lands, cultures, peoples. De-colonial pursuit cannot be separate from re-conceptualizing our relationship with the world around us and challenging our sense of entitlement to its resource - be it the raw resource of the earth or the knowledge hidden in an animal’s body.

The narrative of the movie paints the Hunters as ultimately sympathetic - despite the acts of violence they have committed against nature. The current generation of them is caught in a war they didn’t start; the previous generations were lied to, manipulated into dying for a cause that didn’t truly serve them. And at the end of the day, even when they engage with nature violently, they still do it on equal terms with their opponent.

The ultimate capture of the Red Bluster happens when Captain Crow is fully consumed by his need for vengeance and seeks the service of Gwen Batterbie - a fascinating mix of a witch and an inventor archetype. He is warned against that, against the too high of a price he’ll have to pay - and against breaking the Hunter’s Code, betraying the true ways of his predecessors. Still, he goes through with it - and obtains a poison, and a way to deliver it.

When Crow asks Gwen Batterbie about what he will have to give her in return, she replies: “I take everything”. That seems to me another dark omen of what is to come, on the scale of the entire planet. Crow is consumed by his pursuit for the sake of pursuit: driven by the insatiability of grief, he will not give up his hunt for Red and is ready to sacrifice everything just to come out triumphant. A weapon is forged: advanced, poisonous, deadly; and man is ready to use it, at any cost, if that will leave him the victor of the existential war. The poison will destroy nature’s last line of defense; it will seep into the ocean water. And it will not stop. The war will be won; everything else will be lost.

The Hunters are given the benefit of empathy, their loss and existential fear natural enough when contrasted with the Crown’s methodical, cold, manipulative expansion at the price of human lives and the natural world. However, the ultimate resolution comes when the “Man vs. Nature” narrative is broken for good, and the peaceful co-existence that needs no losses at either side is embraced.

There is a condition to that peace, though: leaving the beasts alone. No longer venturing into the waters that are their rightful home. Instead, choosing to respect every living being’s right to their land, life and privacy, as an ultimate challenge to the prevalent anthropo- and eurocentric entitlement.

The world was not made for humans; the world was made for everything that inhabits it, without exception. No one person, no one people, no one species is entitled to more than what is already there: the free and willing gifts of the natural world, and a chance to make the most of the life given to them.

As we build and enhance our cultures and societies, we explore infinite possibilities of what that life may look like. We do not need to be restrictive; we do not need to invent one sole image of it and claim it the perfect truth of our purpose. As we explore and play, experiment and understand, what seems crucial is that we remember that we are at home here. There is no use to our ambitious search if at the end of it we cannot come home and feel that we belong “in the family of things”. There is a safe, familiar shore for us - and it is humble, but not docile, to build a happy life upon it, and to let the unfamiliar shores house countless other lives that do not need our interference.

The world is good at setting its boundaries; modern post-industrial civilization is just awful at respecting them. Wherever there is resistance, defensive action of a foreign people or a non-human animal, it is so easy for us to disregard it as irrelevant or ignorant, unaware of the gifts we bear and they dare refuse.

It is good to stop and let go. Kind, respectful, passive observation is not only gentle - it is profoundly existentially fruitful. In an attempt to possess everything, we might very well end up with nothing. By recognizing what is given to us, generously, every day, we gain something greater, something invaluable: a chance to truly live in a world that is ours.

A beast slain is a symbol that permeates our consciousness: an old expression of a great, incomprehensible danger overpowered by heroic might. Today, more and more stories reclaim and subvert it, reflecting our shared yearning for everything that was lost in humanity’s fight against the world.

The Sea Beast is a vital wake-up call, reminding us: it will never be enough to “pierce the darkness” with the intent of kind friendship. Preservation of the world means the end of our entitlement to its secrets. It will require that we measure our every step and its consequence for everything we’re used to disregarding: animal life and suffering, plant life and its right to inconvenience us, the land itself, not always useful to us, yet always vital to our world’s very existence. Understanding cannot be the end goal; it must, always, be a tool for compassion. And for that, the pursuit of it must not violate the foundation of compassion.

To live a great life, we must learn how to exist in a state of great love; and a great love is not always about us.

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This is my belated welcome into 2023!! I have high hopes for it despite the world giving me few reasons to feel hopeful lmao. I wish the same to you all: persevere out of spite and see the most important parts of your life slide right into places they belong, so that the rest of it might become just a bit more manageable ❤

Now, to housekeeping! Last time I talked at you I mentioned taking a break from regular posting, and then went quiet for over a month. I intend to break back into the habit of things and aim for monthly essays going forward! There is a big big post I am working on at the moment, a lot of research went into it and I am coming out of writing it a changed person, so yeah it is something I care about a great deal :- ) It’s a bit experimental, and most of the essays I write won’t have the same amount of academic research behind them because mostly I just like developing very specific thoughts more or less independently (Ralph Waldo Emerson would be so proud of me.), but whenever inspiration strikes I would like to go feral like that again… Which is a part of the reason why I’m switching to a monthly schedule! I would like to give myself enough time to really dig into things when that feels right.

This is a bit of a personal ramble but I also hope it gets you a little bit hyped up for what’s to come! As a little teaser, if you have a couple of hours on your rest day and you don’t really feel like doing anything, go watch Sea Beast ; ) I promise it is an absolute treat. And if you’re here for that Centaurworld codependency narrative essay I promised, that is coming at the end of February! So please stick around.

Okay!!! Yeah! I feel a bit less neglectful now. Big experimental thingy coming sometime on the 27th-28th! See you then, and take care of yourselves!!! <3

Content warnings:

• discussions of trauma

• discussions of parental abuse

• mention of partner abuse

• discussions of war

• mention of death & murder

(As I delve into the topic of age regression as a trauma response, I would appreciate a lot of respect, care and consideration in how everyone approaches it in their minds and any potential discussions 🙏🏻 Thank you!)

Have you all heard of Centaurworld? The zany colorful animated musical series about a war horse getting isekai’d from a dark PG-13 anime world into a whimsical and wacky cartoonland populated by centaurs with weird magics and tendencies for bodily function humor?

It’s a real dang treat, and while there is a lot of criticism over the writing and pacing of the second season floating around, the show still offers an amazingly impactful trauma narrative (and incredible soundtrack).

The way the show explores that central theme is something I’ve been very passionate about for a good while, so it is about time I rambled about it at length! Let’s dive in :)

Horse’s Journey

(Like Hero’s Journey, but cooler.)

The heart of Centaurworld’s story is, very openly, Horse’s trauma recovery, and it’s done in a way I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. I’m used to watching a character slowly unravel in front of me, reach a tipping point, hit the rock bottom and from there have a life-saving breakthrough that leads them back to love, hope and self-acceptance. I know this trope, I love this trope, and for me there can never be enough of raw, unbridled anguish culminating in rich emotional payoff.

That is not Horse’s case, however. We do not see her fall deeper and deeper into the pit of obvious anguish, because Horse’s defense mechanism is extreme stoicism. The real angst starts once Horse is actually forced to get better, and, well, that is fun!

Our character starts off holding her resilience above anything else and seeing it as her most important quality, and that is understandable. Prior to ending up in Centaurworld, Horse was stuck in a land consumed by unending all-out war; therefore, she was in constant survival mode, with no space for emotional processing and no chance of actual recovery. Another motivation for her to remain resilient is Horse’s relationship with her Rider. The two are pretty openly trauma-bonded, they rely on each other to stay alive, and so Horse feels the need to remain collected, unfazed and ready to face the most dreadful of situations - all for her closest friend’s sake.

Horse does go through an “unraveling” arc of her own, but it’s not one of descending deeper and deeper into unhealthy coping mechanisms. Instead, Horse is forced out of the environment that held her trapped in survival mode and is basically shoe-horned into developing a healthier outlook - and that disturbs our hero more than anything else.

We see Horse go through different stages of trauma recovery, some of which are very normal (having breakdowns and incorporating new and alien perspectives of the world) and some of which are highly fantastical and bizzare, like acquiring a magical talking tail and having her body physically transform into a more soft and cartoonish one.

Regardless of whether the transformation is physical or internal, every step represents a change in her that feeds into Horse’s growing identity crisis. She is only used to conceiving of herself as a survivor, fully defined by her circumstance and her role in the relationship with Rider. She is a dramatic and cool PG-13 character, that is the narrative of her life Horse has constructed in her head, under the influence of her environment and background. To have that story challenged and to have herself grow into something different is life-shattering. A happier, healthier, healing existence seems to be an anti-thesis to everything Horse was taught to be, and, paradoxically, healing feels like it threatens Horse more than the dangers of her original world.

So, fascinatingly, her arc is not one of accumulating mental breakdown forcing eventual personal growth. Instead, it is the stages of her healing, just how different she has become over the course of her journey, that result in a rock-bottom moment. Recovery grabs Horse by the scruff of her neck and drags her through the thankless ordeal of facing her feelings, making new connections and outgrowing a narrow stoic image of herself, and that terrifies her.

All of that is expressed through Horse’s “cartoonification” over the course of the show. The writing hints at it as being something like a “second puberty” (which is great news for everyone who sensed some trans undertones in Horse’ arc). The closer she gets to becoming a part of Centaurworld, the more similar she becomes to its inhabitants, with their soft bouncy designs, over-the-top emotions and weird magic. But, unlike the rest of The Herd she joins, Horse develops those traits much later in her life and in a very short, condensed period of time. And that works great as a trauma allegory!

As we learn as the plot progresses, Centaurworld was once connected to the human realm. The reason why the portal between them is closed is connected to the war that has turned the human world into the barren, dark land we see at the start of the show. Were there no war and were Centaurworld still connected to the human world, Horse would have technically had the option to go through these experiences earlier in life - but the circumstance of her adolescence locked her out of that. So instead, she had to adapt to an environment that required survival skills instead of providing a young being with safety and security. Therefore, Horse had the gradual process of coming into adulthood completely neglected. (There is also the factor that she was never expected to be anything more than, well, a horse. It was Centaurworld specifically that gave her the ability to communicate with others and outgrow a very narrow externally enforced role.)

Ending up in a safer environment conductive to healing later in life, Horse is unused to it, disorientated, and has all the arrested development catch up with her at dizzying speeds, like the snap of an elastic band that’s finally been released. She has one emotional experience after another, and what they require of her is not stoicism, resilience or heroics but vulnerability. As one of the songs states, “Those war tactics you know, they got no utility, / Not in this world”. What she has to apply herself in are the much less glorious things, normal and uncomfortable: everything that comes with being a living person with imperfect feelings and a few messy but involved connections with others.

Horse is having a child-like arc both in the meaning that she is sort of a newborn to the whole “healthier environment” thing, finding herself in a coming-of-age period of acquiring all these new overwhelming experiences, and in the meaning that the very expressions of her healing are very “childish”, making her more at home in the zany bright rainbow “haha fart joke” world of centaurs. That is awesome, because it’s a very rare representation of maturity: Horse is catching up on her emotional development by seemingly descending further into childish silliness.

This fun take on “child-like maturity” is echoed in other characters’ arc, more specifically in my favorite duo: Durpleton and his age-regressed adopted son Stabby.

Durpleton’s Re-parenting Arc

Durpleton’s whole character is a fascinating case. He is goofy-looking, sensitive and very child-like in his manner of speech, and has all the makings of what in a different show would be an uncomfortably ableist comic relief trope.

Basically every member of The Herd appears caricaturistic in some way, but the show’s approach to each one of them is very pointedly genuine and heartfelt. The characters never shed their cartoonishly exaggerated traits, but the viewer gradually becomes aware of the fact that this exaggeration is not meant to be mocking: instead, it’s just the zany centaur-like expression of heavy trauma, deep-seeded self-consciousness, overwhelming anxiety and so on.

But even among the colorfully quirky cast of characters that is The Herd, Durpleton is still a bit of an oddity. On top of appearing a bit out-of-this-world and hard to understand, he may come across as naive, and is probably the only one whose “cartoonishness” gets expressed as explicitly child-like. His canon age being 47 is something that startled a lot of fans, which I’m guessing is at least in part because that implies similar ages for the rest of the herd, and we are unused to seeing a show centered around middle-aged characters; but I have certainly seen someone express confusion over Durpleton’s general demeanor in the light of that. It seems that he was unconsciously infanitlized by a portion of the audience, despite having very obviously adult anatomy.

It’s important that the show itself never made Durpleton’s child-like behaviour a point of ridicule, and none of the characters (including Horse, who is new to the friend group and would’ve lacked the necessary context) ever seem confused by the fact that Durpleton isn’t “acting his age”. The lines establishing exactly how old he is are humorous, but not in the way one would expect. If anything, they are mostly playing on the prevalent parental dynamics within The Herd and how they interact with the characters’ generally very similar ages.

That interaction between age and parenting is very relevant to Durpleton’s arc. As Wammawink watches him and Stabby settle into their familial dynamic over the course of season 2, she gets emotional about her figurative child raising a son of his own. That’s noteworthy, because that sets a specific “mark” of maturity for the characters.

Obviously, adulthood does not look the same for everyone, and you do not have to make child-rearing a part or an indication of your maturity. One can be an adult without being a parent. But in Durpleton’s case, the journey is one of reaching a point at which he is ready to provide care to someone on top of receiving it from Wammawink. That challenges the focus on a person’s age as something that determines when they are supposed to become “independent” from their caregivers, materially as well as emotionally, and instead focuses on the unique path of personal healing that opens the possibility of new relationship dynamics. And, quite beautifully, what that healing looks like here is Durpleton becoming a nurturing parent to himself.

When watching the first season of Centaurworld, my partner and I were absolutely blown away by Episode 4: “What You Need”. The premise of it is fairly ridiculous when it comes to Durpleton’s part. The Herd journeys to the Tree shamans that grant gifts - not the ones their visitors wish for, but the ones they truly need. Unlike the rest, Durpleton knows what he needs immediately. He is struggling with his talking farts, which he adresses as “Father”. His fart-dad is harsh, mean and critical towards him, and Durpleton’s wish is for him to be nice and nurturing instead.

At the end, his need-wish is recognized and granted - and there is a lot of meaning to that.

The reason why my partner and I were so excited about the episode is that we are both very passionate about the concept of re-parenting: a way of healing the wounds of inadequate upbringing by learning to become a parent to yourself and your inner child; the kind of parent who is patient, compassionate and knows how to show up for our most vulnerable hurting parts. The idea isn’t just to compensate for the love one didn’t receive from their caregiver (though that on itself can be very healing and important). The focus is on the fact that the way our caregivers treat us in childhood becomes unconsciously and subconsciously internalized and affects how we interact with, see and treat ourselves. If our needs were met with dismissal and our outburts were criticized, we are unlikely to honour our limits or be compassionate to our emotions. Re-parenting aims to rewire the way our brains have learned to react to our needs and hurts, and to help us develop a new way to handle the challenging and challenged parts of our psyche and our everyday life.

Durpleton obviously has a loving caretaker in Wammawink, but as early as Episode 4 of the first season it becomes obvious that his youngest years were spent in a critical and abusive environment. In making his request to the Tree shamans, Durpleton shows a great degree of awareness and maturity. He probably wishes his birth family were different, he would probably want his actual father to be nicer to him. But he understands what he needs, above all of those things: he needs to be kinder to himself, and to show himself the care required to heal from his childhood trauma. He needs to tranform the part of him that has absorbed the messaging of his childhood and created a version of his father in his own psyche, so that now that Durpleton’s free of his abusive family, he can also become free of the things they made him believe about himself.

Season 2 gives us even more insight into Durpleton’s past, and that provides a lot of crucial context to his child-like manner. Our lad grew up in a house that, among other things, would not allow him to be a kid: to make noise, to play with toys, to be expressive and unrestrained. He wasn’t given the warmth and love and guidance that a child needs, and wasn’t allowed the freedom to do child-like things. The culmination of his conflict with his abusive father is Durpleton failing to “control his farts”, his father lashing out, throwing away his hand-made toy, and Durpleton running out to get it as his parents drive away, fully abandoning him for not living up to their expectations.

The toy is then revealed to be a little figure of his father giving him words of love and affirmation. The metaphor here is obvious: Durpleton was given a choice to either stay in a loveless environment and make peace with the fact that he would never receive parental affection or be allowed to express himself, or he could hold onto his childhood and his hope to one day be loved - but that meant losing his biological family and home.

All of that provides a strikingly tragic context to the whole “uncontrollable farts that trigger parent-induced self-loathing” thing. And at the end, what we see in the adult Durpleton is him tending to his unloved and traumatized inner child’s needs. For him, much like for Horse, thrown into a war-torn world without a chance at a peaceful childhood, trauma recovery looks like childishness. To become truly “mature”, Durpleton needs to allow himself to be “immature”, express all his previously repressed tendencies and overcome body shame - something children notably aren’t that burdened with.

Durpleton’s child-like behaviour is a sign of healing and a mark of a grown, knowledgeable person who understands himself and chooses to do a very smart, brave and adult thing: to be kind to himself and be a good parent to his inner child. Through that, he becomes ready to be a caregiver to Stabby, and even though his traumatic experience makes Durpleton’s parenting flawed in its own special way, he is still “mature” enough to eventually own up to that.

Stabby’s Age Regression

Stabby’s arc is therefore directly tied to Durpletons: who would make a better caregiver to an age-regressing 43 years old lizard minotaur than a 47 years old centaur who is both extremely mature (i.e. possessing emotional intelligence and finding himself in a good and stable place with his trauma) and joyfully immature, not forcing himself to act “appropriate” to his age?

Stabby is also a direct narrative foil to Horse: both of them only knew the war waged in the human world their entire lives, and they fought on the opposite sides of it without really choosing either. Stabby was created by the Nowhere King and controlled by his hatred; Horse was, you know, a horse, raised and trained by humans for the specific goal of helping them. At the end, Horse’s bond with Rider makes the fight more personal, but her and Stabby’s origin is strikingly similar.

Much like Horse, Stabby is thrown into Centaurworld suddenly and unprepared and is force-adopted by The Herd and Durpleton specifically. Much like Horse, he resists the absorption into the group for a while and refuses to make himself vulnerable. Then, quite tellingly, it is a variation on “Rider’s Lullaby” that seems to soften Stabby into his new situation and accept the notion of being cared for.

And, finally, much like Horse, Stabby goes through a physical transformation that makes him more “Centaurworld”: cuddly, round, soft and cartoony.

The transformation goes further than Horse’s, though, and basically makes him a child. The show depicts age-regression in a way similar to how we understand it in our world and culture: a response to extreme stress and trauma, and a coping mechanism that allows us healing and recovery. Stabby needs a parent figure he finds in Durpleton, and he needs to allow himself to be a child - something he was probably never given, considering that he was magically crafted rather than born.

That seems to be the main mechanism of Centaurworld’s magic overall: those who are new to it never have it work how they want, and more often than not it affects them in ways that feel like a horrifying attack on who they are. The reason for that is that Centaurworld is here to soften your hard edges and exaggerate your struggle into cartoonishly caricaturistic expressions; and those expressions may be quirky and weird, but they do mean that your inclinations, symptoms and authentic traits are no longer repressed to your detriment. Through that, Centaurworld gives you healing. And healing can challenge our entire sense of identity, if all that we’re used to defining ourselves by is our trauma and the way we’ve been coping with it.

Neither Horse nor Stabby intially want to become happier, because what that happiness looks like is dreadful, it’s antithetical to everything they’re used to associating with safety and survival. But they need that happiness - and so Centaurworld forces them into an identity crisis breakdown. At least they have a great support group through that.

Stabby’s age regression arc is, perhaps, the culmination of the theme of child-like healing that we’ve observed through Horse’s cartoonification and Durpleton’s forever-childishness and ongoing re-parenting. This really cements the fact that Centaurworld’s magic is in making your trauma responses into something “unsightly”, something an average viewer may find way too weird to actually continue observing, because, well, the show is wacky.

But all those “unsightly” expressions actually do is give your authentic needs and coping mechanisms some breathing room. Defenses get pulled down, and raw and unabridged hurting need comes pouring out in an extremely intimate display we would normally be asked to keep to ourselves - but there is space for it in Centaurworld, and there is space for it in a truly connected, compassionate, loving and accepting found family friend group.

Redefining Recovery

I’ve talked about “child-like” behaviour a lot here; but then again, how would we even define childishness?

The “childish” label is something that gets thrown around in a derogatory fashion to point out that someone struggles with communication, emotional regulation or emotional intelligence, gets “hung up” on things someone else wouldn’t, so on and so forth. It doesn’t really accomplish much, other than shaming people for not having had the chance to safely and healthily grow into a secure relationship with themselves and others. Sometimes, it seems to shame people for having strong feelings at all.

Such use of the word implies that the way a child reacts to hurt is inherently irrational and ignorant, like the trick is to become smart enough to know what the “correct” way to behave is. That shifts the focus to an individual person’s supposed skill and away from what actually makes children more vulnerable and more likely to react in big ways: their unique needs, the amount of support they require to truly feel safe and alright and to know that the pain is going to pass.

An average child is more reactive than an average adult not because they purely haven’t had enough time to learn to how handle their pain: on top of all the complex brain chemestry and development yada yada, it is also because they’ve yet to receive the formative experience of being guided through it in a supportive, compassionate and kind way. If a person was not given that experience in early childhood, they may still struggle with feeling okay and secure in later years. That is not because they are not “skilled” enough in being a grown-up; it’s because the security some of us were given and sometimes take for granted was not available to them, and so the challenge of dealing with certain things is much greater.

Of course, sometimes early trauma, struggle or neglect can make someone “grow up fast” and develop an appearance of resilience prematurely as a means of survival. That is a narrative presented to us a lot: someone becoming “mature” and “serious” early because they had to put up with more than their peers. That narrative is troubling to me, because it equates “maturity” with independence, resilience and strife, as if the most “adult” thing we can do is push through all our pain, never expect any kindness or accommodation from the world and let out trauma fester under the surface. An approach like that is not much different from Horse’s conviction that the way to survive is to be a “mean, lean killing machine”, and that gaining weight and becoming softer as a sign of healing makes her less fit for the challenges of a dangerous an scary world.

Centaurworld’s narrative is important, because the show challenges this idea of stoicism as a mark of maturity. It shows that the people most equipped for dealing with their hardships are those that allow themselves to be taken care of, to be messy and emotional and vulnerable and child-like. We see Horse go through a “second puberty” because her trauma didn’t accelerate her development and growth - it stifled her, it made her less accustomed to the essential experience of friendship, fun, safety and communication.

A severely traumatized person is dealt a shitty lot. They have to push themselves to “outgrow” their vulnerability in order to survive, and then later in life they have to go through the painful and horrifying process of unpacking their preconceptions about themself and the world so that they could actually give themself a chance to “grow up safely”. They have to do that at a point where most people around them have already had a chance to experience trust, safety and supportive relationships. Centaurworld may not fully reflect the raw grittiness of that journey, but it does show just how challenging it is, to have to question everything that has once made up one’s identity.

At the same time, having to conciously reflect on one’s life and experiences and unearth the secret golden nuggets of “who I am”, “what I want from life”, “what my needs are”, “what good communication looks like to me”, “what relationships I really value” leads to a lot of precious self-awareness and authenticity. And if in the process of our recovery we truly commit to being kind to ourselves and honest about our needs, we can liberate ourselves from some of the arbitrary societal limitations - like the pressure to act the way considered most “appropriate” or “mature”.

Centaurworld reflects this idea by functionally redefining what we mean by “recovery”. The language we use often seems to imply that a fully recovered person should generally function the same way as anybody else. An “abnormal” behaviour or emotional reaction is expected to fully dissipate - and that is the point at which we have to check if we’re still truly concerned with the struggling person’s well-being and healing, whether we’re asking for realistic things from them and what we ourselves are ready to contribute to help maintain a compassionate and safe environment.

It is my humble opinion that we cannot put a moral label on an internal emotional experience, and the external pressure to fully dissipate that experience will hardly be helpful. The purpose of recovery, healing and therapy shouldn’t be “to become like everybody else”: instead, it should be about learning who you are, what you need and how you can communicate that to your loved ones in a way that leaves space for open compassionate conversation.

It is unrealistic to expect recovery to mean a complete disappearance of trauma. Because of that, the process of healing is going to look different to every person - and at times, it’s gonna’ look weird. That is something Centaurworld shows in a goofy and exaggerated but ultimately affectionate way, by parading a colorful cast of characters each one of which is struggling with their own genuine challenge and is a bit of a freak about it. Healing becomes synonymous with easing into a more honest and gentle lifestyle, into vulnerability and child-like liberation and authenticity. The issues are still present and expressed in ways that sometimes inconvenience the character and their friend group, but what matters is that at the end, they are all genuinely compassionate towards each other and understand the roots of each other's struggles.

That seems healthy, good and convincing to me. People you love will have big emotions and “weird” symptoms at times. People you love will inconvenience you. The best thing both of you can do is be compassionate to each other and yourselves, and work out the best ways you two can interact from that place of unwavering love and compassion.

The Lullaby

I would like to leave you with a little mystery that I cannot quite figure out.

One of the Centaurworld’s leitmotifs is lullabies. “Rider’s Lullaby” opens the show as not only the first song but the first spoken word. It gets reprises and variations throughout the two seasons: Horse sings it as she wishes for Rider’s safety, sings it again to Wammawink to comfort her past self, and Durpleton sings his own version of it to Stabby.

Another lullaby repeating throughout the show is the Nowhere King’s theme, ominously luring characters to their demise.

The finale of the show is titled “The Last Lullaby”. The climax of it gives us two final reprises to both of the songs: as the Nowhere King turned back to Elktaur is killed by the woman he abused, and as Horse and Rider are finally reunited for good at the end of a life-long war.

The lullaby motif clearly appeals to the theme of childhood and inner child healing central to the show. Rider’s, Horse’s and Durpleton’s lullabies are meant to reach the vulnerable and scared part of a loved one, soothe and comfort it. The final reprise of that song is more triumphant and celebratory, signifying that the vulnerable part does not need to be afraid anymore.

When it comes to the Nowhere King’s lullaby, I am at a bit of a loss. Is it meant to be lulling rather than soothing, rocking the hurting, raw and aware part to oblivious sleep, so that the trauma projections can flourish and then be successfully exploited?.. I’m not quite sure, and I would love to hear any thoughts about how you think it relates to the inner child! Please share your thoughts if you feel so inclined ( :

Thank you for sticking around till the end of the post! You are my personal hero 🎉 I hope you had fun, and if anything didn’t sit right with you, please feel free to reach out!

As I was writing this, I realized I really wanted to talk about Centaurworld’s codependency narrative as well; there wasn’t much space for it here, so it will probably appear in a smaller essay in the future! Be sure to subscribe if you’re interested in reading it :- )

Other than that, though, I’m running a bit low on future post ideas, so I might take a little break from the (roughly) bi-weekly updates to brainstorm. We shall see!

For now, take care, thank you for checking this out!! If you like this lil’ analysis, please share & subscribe for more!

Have a good weekend, friends!

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Content warnings:

• discussions of Christianity and Christian/religious trauma, mentions of “sin”;

• discussions of homophobia and transphobia with focus on religious bigotry;

• mention of misgendering (very brief), alussions to bodily/gender dysphoria;

• references to misogyny;

• mentions of anti-Semitism and the alt-right;

• eye imagery;

• existentially troubling concepts; Demiurge myth.

Note: As I give an overview of Gnosticism as a religion/school of thought, I touch up on the incredibly sensitive topic of its relationship with Judaism and the history of Christianity’s separation from the latter. I will try my best to be honest and conscientious in the process, but if the topic may be disconcerting to you, please take care.

It’s time for a niche (?) fave! I am so excited }:)

As a little introduction for those not in the know, We Know The Devil is a visual novel set in a Christian camp for “problematic” teens. It follows three main characters, Jupiter, Venus and Neptune, as they navigate their relationship, confront their “sinful” natures and meet the Devil.

The game is a glowing example of incredible narrative design and organic storytelling with impeccably written, poetic and deeply impactful dialogue. If the the themes of religious trauma, misogyny and homo- and transphobia are something you can handle, I strongly recommend you give it a go before reading any further: I am about to start spitting spoilers left and right, and piecing the mechanics and the plot of the novel together on your own is a unique and unforgettable experience.

Spoilers start… now! You have been warned.

The Worst Girls Trio

We Know The Devil’s characters make up Group West, alienated and isolated from the rest of the camp. Each member of the group is rejected on different (yet secretly similar) grounds.

Venus (who, if you play through the game enough times with different routes, is revealed to be a closeted trans girl not yet fully aware of her identity) is a pushover kid who cannot act the way that is expected of her to save her life.

Neptune, a brash young girl objectified by her peers, is shunned for not taking the abuse she faces quietly (and uses her bluntness as a defense, while still withholding her actual feelings and hurt).

Jupiter is a chronic people-pleaser, so terrified of stepping out of line and “ruining” things that she represses her every less-than-desirable urge - which includes her lesbian identity. Unlike the other two, she is actually generally well-liked, but in a way that cannot be internalized as anything other than silent encouragement for her to keep rejecting herself to avoid being rejected by others.

At the start of the game, the three girls are sent away to spend the night in a cabin in the woods where they are meant to “meet the Devil”. From the start, they are deeply disconcerted by the harrowing occasion, yet trying to keep their spirits somewhere above the floor level: “Hardly anyone ever dies!”

As the game progresses, though, the player finds out what Group West has known all along: the Devil is not an external force set to kill or otherwise harm them, but the unconquered “sin” within each of them, raising its head when one of them feels singled out, rejected, left behind. (Oh, Shadow themes, my beloveds.) The greatest thing they have to fear is themselves - the hidden, rejected parts of them, unwanted by everyone around them.

For Jupiter, it is her urge to be an unapologetic presence in the world. That urge is expressed in the need to touch, and for her touch to have the freedom to be openly loving or recklessly hurting.

For Neptune, it is the need to speak openly, find true honesty beyond surface bluntness; to tear through the deception that is anxiously maintained by everyone around her.

For Venus, it is her hunger for self-knowledge, for the chance to truly see herself and to face the light she keeps spotting out of the corner of her eye but never quite looking at directly.

The culmination of We Know The Devil, in every ending, is a meeting with truth. Truth of one’s identity; truth of speaking it into the world and naming it; truth of unrestrained, expressive bodily existence. The girls of Group West represent and are represented by body parts: hand, eye, lung. Hand that can either reach - or flinch away and bury its impulse. Eye that can be wide open - or closed and averted. Lungs that can exhale words of truth - or bury that truth in a person’s chest until they’re choking on it.

There is an interesting intersection with the three Enneagram personality types dominant in Bodily intelligence, too: Type One for Juniper, haunted by the fear of being inherently corrupt; Type Eight for Neptune, avoiding true vulnerability and using bluntness as a substitute; Type Nine for Venys, perpetually preoccupied with denying herself her authenticity out of fear of disturbing the order of the world. All of them are driven by instinct, and the specific expressions of it are ultimately just three faces of the same need for self-preservation. This isn’t that crucial to what we’re discussing, but it’s an interesting additional detail to the game’s narrative of the body, and I thought it was neat!

Once the truth is faced and embraced by the entire group, there is the (un)holy unity of them. Separate and disconnected parts come together in a full-body experience that does not need the safety of denial because it is ultimately self-assured, self-supported, empowered and free. No part needs to be excluded and remain in the dark, no part needs to be denied its freedom - because there is no longer use for plausible deniability. When united, the three transcend their separate physical bodies and turn into something both more powerful and more honest, embracing the metaphysical expressions of their truth and purpose, coded into their very names.

We Know The Devil depicts an astounding experience in spiritual embodiment that simultaneously embraces the physical and represents an existence beyond its limits. And considering how the characters in question are three gay women one of whom is trans, the narrative of transcending the limiting rules forced onto their physical bodies holds incredible power and potency.

There is much, much more to explore with the game’s themes, and I’m having to actively hold myself back from getting off track here. But this ^^^ gives you a general overview of its narrative around body, identity, truth and queer womanhood - which interact with some Gnostic mythos in fun and interesting ways.

Let’s take a little detour into the basics of that.

Gnosticism: Then and Now

Gnosticism appears riddled with controversy and contradictions, and I am far from being an expert on it; but mainly, it rests on the following beliefs:

• Each one of us holds a spark of divinity in us, imparted to us by a higher being: Sophia, the Divine Feminine Wisdom;

• Sophia is an aspect of The One, the Monad, the Supreme Godhead which is the unknowable source of all existence without any border;

• The material world is (somewhat alchemically) created from the plane of Wisdom as a shadow of it, and is characterized by ignorance of the true divine origin of everything;

• The material world is ruled by Yaldabaoth, Sophia’s rejected child and a distorted expression of her divine power;

• Yaldabaoth created humanity in the image of one of the aspects of the Monad; our creation was an attempt at harnessing and capturing the divine spirit and mocking it by enslaving the human race;

• Yaldabaoth is the personification of Ignorance, set on keeping us from knowing our true origin;

• The true life and spirit we are imbued with come from Sophia, and by achieving gnosis - direct participation with the divine through knowledge - we help our divine sparks reunite with her, help Sophia retrieve her power and return to her full divine perfection. Through that, we leave the mortal body behind, breaking free from the prison of material existence.

As you can see, this sort of philosophy radically re-imagines some of the core beliefs of Christianity, while also doubling down on some of its aspects generally considered toxic and traumatizing: the vilification of the body, for one. It is also a bit of a nightmare for people prone to existential crises when interpreted very literally.

But the fact that Gnosticism prioritizes self-knowledge over compliance and seems to center the Divine Feminine have made it a sort of a healing haven for some of the people brought up in Christianity and traumatized by it. So far, I’ve heard about quite a few LGBTQ+ folks who turned to Gnosticism as a way to celebrate their self-exploration and liberation from externally enforced dogma.

Gnosticism was always rejected by mainstream Christianity as a direct and inconsolable challenge to it, and so ex-Christians turning to it as a way to find closure to the trauma of their upbringing makes perfect sense. At the same time, Gnosticism is considered to have formed during the process of separation of Christianity from Judaism, and Gnostics were still positioning themselves as a Christian sect. As the result, the core Gnostic texts contain many strong and unforgiving references to specifically “the Jewish God”, which has led to Gnosticism being labeled as “the Greatest case of metaphysical anti-Semitism” by Greshom Scholem, an Israeli scholar.

Considering how some alt-right groups and individuals get involved with “esoteric” belief systems and use them to enable their violent bigotry, all of this is… quite uncomfortable. I am yet to hear anyone address this discomfort when publically exploring the Gnostic myth of the Demiurge. That is the main reason I am bringing all of this up: to openly acknowledge the things that seem to often linger in the realm of the implied but too convoluted to get into. Let’s keep the dangerous implications in mind as we continue.

A lot of the people recovering from Christian trauma through participation in Gnostic philosophy seem to practice a form of… Reform Gnosticism, almost. Some seek to remedy the “body-soul” divide and the demonization of the physical. They may reclaim Gnosticism as a path of nondualism (“I am one with God”), when historically some expressions of it were rather radically dualist (the material existence as fully separate from God).

The host of the podcast “Discourse of the Stranger” uses Gnosticism as a way to challenge cisheteronormativity, patriarchy, White supremacy, ableism and other forms of the oppressive status quo. They find empowerment in independent self-knowledge that challenges the rhetoric maintained by power-hungry “rulers”.

Generally, among the “Reform” Gnostics a lot of focus seems to be on the re-centering and “redemption” of the Feminine. This is interesting, because the gender politics of Gnosticism seem far from clean-cut and straight-forward, at least to me; we will get into those in just a moment.

With the loaded aspects of Gnosticism acknowledged, I would like to reiterate the key points of what makes it appealing to recovering Christians and to LGBTQ+ people specifically: emphasis on independent self-knowledge, rejection of religious dogma, challenge to a very clear gender hierarchy established in the Book of Genesis. These, alongside with the concept of divine human spirit that is greater than the body, are going to be relevant as we discuss the narrative of We Know The Devil in the context of Gnostic mythos.

Gnostic Gender Politics

A good thing to keep in mind about Gnosticism is that it is, at the core, essentialist, operating from the idea that there are inherent Feminine and Masculine energies defining the workings of divine planes. In Gnosticism, “true” creation can only occur from the union of the two - which puts the Godhead in an interesting position. In the core Gnostic texts the Monad seems to alternate between:

• being referred to by “it” pronoun and described as something unknowable and not in any way personified,

• being pictured as a sort of bigender personification of the “Mother-Father” union,

• and being referred to as masculine, down to the use of “Father” as a conventional term for the original creator.

The latter interpretation puts a bit of a problematic micro-spin on Sophia’s story, too. According to the Gnostic creation myth, the reason Yaldabaoth was not a true expression of Sophia’s divinity but a distorted one is that she did not operate in union with her “male counterpart” and didn’t “ask for her Father’s consent” before creating life the same way the Monad did. God forbid women do anything.

All of this creates an interesting duality in the role Sophia takes, depending on whether she’s interacting with the human race or being considered as a part of the broader pantheon.

From the perspective of human creation and history, Sophia is the closest thing we have to a genuine divine guide and patron. She is involved with the first humans: she indirectly imbues Adam with life and later visits him, awakening him from the slumber of ignorance. She is embodied in Eve, becoming the original expression of Femininity and womanhood on the material plane. In the world ruled by the Demiruge, where humans are trapped in forced oblivion, Sophia, Wisdom, is the voice of divinity speaking to us and helping us retrieve the knowledge of our origin. The Divine Feminine personified in her is a symbol of truth, belonging and liberation, counteracting the rules, limitations and rejection of dogmatic teachings.

In the greater cosmology, however, Sophia is a bit of a “fallen angel”. Her proximity with humanity and involvement with their spiritual journey are all the result of her “misconduct” and loss of divine perfection.

We carry the sparks of Sophia’s spirit in us, and her divinity is trapped in our bodies, down on Earth. By beckoning us back to self-knowledge, she restores herself to her full power, so that she may reside beside the rest of Aeons in the divine realm of Pleroma once again. Of course, in that we ourselves rejoin Pleroma as well - the most essential spiritual parts of us. We, or, at least, our consciousness, are her, so the jounery back to our origin is supposed to be a truly blissful one. The whole thing is an almost warm metaphor for spiritual awakening: it’s not about parting from something, it’s about coming home to what is basically our divine mother.

But the whole story of Sophia falling from her perfection and facing the pain and embarrassment of getting her spirit trapped in mortal bodies, all because she didn’t ask for her Father’s permission and created without the involvement of her Masculine partner - all of that sort of takes away from her girlboss status a bit. In a way, she is almost Eve 2, trapping all of humanity in an imperfect world because she didn’t listen to the Big God Dad well enough.

So, as you can see, the gender politics here are very contradictory and muddled. One might argue that the myth is very clearly symbolic, showing the alchemy-like relationship between thought and wisdom, wisdom and ignorance, etc., - but the essentialist gendered coding does still count for something.

But hey, the good news is that the original woman was a physical manifestation of the most godlike part of the original man!

Eve was born as an attempt by Yaldabaoth to extract the divine spirit Adam had been imbued with out of his body - and, cut out of his side, Eve-Sophia stepped into the material world as the strongest and purest expression of divine wisdom yet. Soon enough, Sophia had to separate herself from Eve, leaving the first woman just as mortal and ignorant as Adam - but the fact still stands that womanhood is pretty much synonymous with divinity in the Gnostic creation myth. And since Gnostics saw the temptation by the Serpent as a divine act of coercing humans out of ignorance (because, duh, fruit of knowledge), Eve is also considered a liberator to humanity, not the one to have doomed us. So, even with all the contradiction present, Gnostics are certainly winning the feminism game when compared to mainstream Christians.

Sophia’s role in the “temptation” is a very exciting one, too. To lead Eve and Adam to gnosis, Sophia lets her spirit possess the Serpent and has it urge Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit. Ultimately, Sophia takes the place of Lucifer - which works quite well with the “fall from divinity on the grounds of pridefulness” parallel, too, so something definitely juicy is happening here. But, most importantly, what was traditionally thought of as the Devil’s temptation is presented as a call from the Divine Feminine to reunite with the truth of oneself.

This idea echoes strongly in We Know The Devil, to the point where one has to wonder if it was intentional.

All Hail Our Devil Mom

In the True Ending of the visual novel, Group West refuse to alienate and reject either one of them as the most “sinful” - and through that break the rules of the game in which someone has to be “worse” for yourself to remain redeemable. Without God there to condemn one of them to full and crushing rejection, the Devil steps in.

The Devil talks to them on the radio in a sweet, loving voice, telling them they are missed. Telling them they have a home to come back to. Telling them there is space for three there, and that means: all of them, all of each and every one of them, without the need to hold anything back, to deny themselves even a shred of their truth.

As they try to make their choice - Jupiter horrified, Neptune loudly defiant and reckless and Venus quietly enthralled by the promise of authenticity, - the first two keep referring to the Devil with the “he” pronoun. Venus, however, says something that goes unnoticed and unacknowledged by the rest:

“She sounds nice”.

Our trans character senses something the cis ones do not pick up on, identifies something in the Devil’s voice that makes her recognize this entity as someone similar to herself.

That was the first thing to tip me off and make me go “Oh shit, is the whole story Gnostic?”. The way the Devil is pictured seems to resonate with the image of Sophia as the tempter and the liberator, the Divine Feminine energy imbuing all bodies, including AMAB ones. Running with this narrative, the game seems to play with the idea of Sophia getting recast by mainstream Christianity as a masculine entity, “Lucifer”, and basically getting culturally misgendered. Because women are insidious and corrupt enough to be the weak link and the Devil’s tools, but not important and powerful enough to be the Devil themself, I guess? Anyway.

When connected to the Gnostic mythos, a lot of the game’s themes and motifs gain additional rich context. The Devil missing her human children and calling for them to come back to her, like Sophia must be missing all the divine sparks, reinforces the idea that the characters are truly of the Devil, and the most “sinful” parts of them are actually evidence of their cosmic belonging. The fact that the Devil is someone who talks to the girls while also being something in them, the fact that each one of them may become the Devil at any given night, draws a very direct parallel to Sophia’s spirit present in all humans and tells us that the characters’ “sin” is the truest part of themselves, subject to repression lest it liberate them from the constraints of Christianity.

“Camp, country, Earth” are all pictured as a suffocating, cruel trap, very much in line with Gnostic existentialism - but that is meant to represent the constraints of hateful and self-hating human culture and Christian trauma. The cosmic, planetary motif of the girls’ names and essences connects Group West to something beyond it, imbuing them with spirit and truth that is at home somewhere else, somewhere natural and free.

Finally, there is their relationship with the body - and there is a lot to unpack there.

Body Transcendent

As a queer and very pointedly trans story, We Know The Devil handles the theme of the body with a lot of complexity. The Gnostic rejection of the physical is certainly not echoed one for one.

Much like when Sophia-Eve escaped Adam’s body as a raw and transcendental expression of the Divine Feminine, Venus escapes her own flesh to take on a form that is obviously feminine while also being completely trans-human: a biblically accurate angel, all wings and eyes and blinding light.

In the ultimate climactic resolution of We Know The Devil, Jupiter, Venus and Neptune are (re)united as a sort of an Unholy Trinity polycule.

They do not necessarily leave the material world as Gnostics intended - but they reform it, freeing everyone else of the shackles of their limited, tortured bodies as well. The Devil a.k.a. Sophia, Godhood, Divinity, is not found in a different realm - but in each other, in the direct and powerful embodiment of a queer relationship, in openness and truth and power of standing beside each other.

And, once again, the rejection of the body is not reinforced. The bodily symbolism permeates the girls’ characterization, in their assigned body parts and (perhaps) in the related Enneagram types - so the body was never something alien and wrong. The goal is not to leave the material behind but to ascend to a truer, more divine version of it; the true body is a shared, transcendent one. The purpose of awakening to one’s spiritual truth is to embody a part of the whole instead of remaining separate, trapped and isolated, a dead mockery of one’s essence.

That’s what the subtle Gnostic coding seems to convey. In the bodily union of queer women existing freely and unapologetically, the characters return to their essence and get to exist as something powerful: a truly divine version of themselves.

TL;DR: Thank you, women.

I said I was going to have fun with this one, and lo and behold! Had a real blast. God I literally adore WKTD so much.

Thank you for sticking around till the end of the post! If you enjoyed it, please consider letting me know? I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts :)

For the next post (coming roughly in two weeks), I’ll probably blab about Centaurworld and its narrative of child-like maturity; very yummy. Make sure to join if you like stories about trauma recovery!

Have a lovely day and weekend, friends, and take care!

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Content warnings:

• parental death; general death and murder; fires

• allusions to racism, specifically systemic racism towards BIPOC; disucssion of colonisation

• mentions of prisons, references to unjust incarceration of people of color

…I swear I’m not doing this ⬇

on purpose. It’s just sort of happening on its own.

As I was watching Wendell & Wild with my beloved fiance on our Halloween night and heard the words “a challenger to the status quo” spoken by one of the characters, Siobhan (sweet, sweet Siobhan), internally I went, “No way. Is this actually going to be the next ‘Character VS Status Quo’ series installation?”

And, well, it’s not - because the narrative of Wendell & Wild proposes an entirely different angle to the juicy Tower symbolism altogether. It simply wouldn’t fit in with the rest - and it’s really fascinating to me just how different the spirit behind it is.

Also, I am not too well-versed in the topic of animation, but cannot in good consciousness progress with this entire thing before giving the movie a big and enthusiastic “WAHOO” for the outstanding stop-motion cinematography.

Just… check this out.

So cool.

If this piqued your curiosity and you want to go enjoy 1h 45m of visual goodness, really wild off-the-wall story and a lot of gritty commentary on the routine crimes of the American state and society against BIPOC, go do that now, because this essay will be dripping with spoilers.

With that out of the way, let us dig in!

Underworld, Surface World

The story line of Wendell and Wild is quite saturated and convoluted, throwing one world-building element at the viewer after another, but at the end, what the movie is about is quite obvious. It’s about destroying what does not serve people and building/restoring things inspired by love, joy and community; and it is about family.

That narrative is built on the parallels between the town of Rust Bank and Hell, or, okay, “the Underworld”. Rust Bank is run down, claimed by Klax Korp, represented by Irmgard and Lane Klaxons who will start fires, murder people, bribe priests - in short, do anything to make sure the town is decrepit and poor and the land is abandoned, and is therefore free to build their dream prison on. Right alongside a Catholic school that will supply the Klaxons with juvenile prisoners, no less.

Ahem.

Klax Korp is being held back by the town council, but still has a choke-hold on the community, using bribes and threats of violence to avoid consequences for their highly illegal and inhumane actions.

At the same time in the Underworld, Wendell and Wild, the only two remaining children of the great demon Buffalo Belzer, are bitter and bored, stuck endlessly working on their father’s balding scalp while harboring great dreams of building their own fair for the danged souls, one that would put their father’s rides to shame.

Down in Hell, the urge to build better things and the family drama are simply and uncomplicatedly conflated. In the surface world, parents are just as much of a prominent and essential force in the (un)changing community and in their children’s lives: sometimes encouraging, sometimes stifling, sometimes tragically absent.

Our protagonist, Kat, mourns the death of her parents who once were an intrinsic part of a different Rust Bank - thriving, colorful, happy and warm. She blames herself for the accident that took their lives and gets pushed into isolation and desperation by her grief, trauma, bullying and lack of guidance.

Marianna, a single Latina mother of a transgender boy, is fighting tooth and nail to have her son respected and her community safe. She struggles to balance her drive to put herself on the line, to protect her child by reforming the corrupt world he lives in, with the need to keep food on the table.

Siobhan (sweet, sweet Siobhan) is lied to by her parents, the Klaxons, and deluded into believing their private prisons would be a place of healing and rebound. She has to learn that their “love” for her is conditional and fully dependent on her readiness to play along, and as soon as she tries to undermine their criminal enterprise, she becomes nothing but another person for them to get rid of.

What’s interesting is that in the Underworld, the conflict is quite simple and straightforward: Belzer is stuck in his ways and unsupportive, as well as overprotective, having lost all of his other children to a demon hunter up on the surface. What he needs is to break out of the status quo of keeping his children under his thumb and keeping the fair the way it’s been for eternity - and once he and his sons reconcile their pretty simple differences, a better life can be built: glorious amusement parks, a happy reunited family, all the works.

When it comes to the human world represented in Rust Bank, however, the conflict is much more complex. People (the rich, self-serving people, to be more specific) are more stubborn than demons, and, ironically, won’t as easily reconnect with their hearts by simply being reminded of the values of family.

And even more so: breaking old things and building new ones isn’t as wonderfully liberating up on the surface, either. Rather, it’s harrowing - because the self-serving people don’t build out of the need to create and self-actualize. They build to line their pockets, at the expense of everything truly valuable and right.

Not “Standard” But “Stalemate”

Status quo in the human world and in Rust Bank specifically is far from a more or less straightforward system of control, set to quench any new, challenging voice, a.k.a. the system we have seen in other narratives so far. Instead of a rigid externally imposed standard, it is a tense stalemate. The marginalized, exploited people are pushing against devastating change, trying to preserve whatever is left of what matters most to them.

They’re fighting to tip the scale, too, to make things better, not just keep them from getting worse: Marianna is desperately trying to find evidence that the fire that took countless lives was, indeed, started by Klax Korp, she is desperate to bring them to justice. But at the end, their chances are slim, and the only thing they can count on is at least keeping their line of defense.

The town council blocks the Klaxons at their meetings year after year, refusing them their prison. It’s not easy, staying in Rust Bank, trying to honor their lost community members by at the very least not letting the people who killed them reach their vile goals - but they struggle, and stand their ground, and for years, this stalemate maintained at the price of tireless, invisible work of the marginalized at least helped them prevent things getting worse.

Lack of change in the case of Rust Bank is not a result of comfortable stagnation: it is the only remaining chance to make sure the horrible, destructive development started and pushed by Klax Korp does not claim whatever is left of the community. The status quo is the only available alternative to the devastating momentum of corporate greed, bigotry and rotten and corrupt judicial system.

So when Wendell and Wild show up and start swinging the scale left and right like a seesaw, that breaks the status quo in ways that can turn out to be beautifully liberating - or, just as easily, hopelessly disheartening. And because they are driven by vision, and up on the surface, vision is a costly thing, the easiest choice for them is to be bribed by Klax Korp and ensure that the broken stalemate will end in victory for greed and exploitation.

In the human world, if there is a possibility of change, a shift in balance, it seems that the rich and powerful will always have a way to harness that and use it for their goals - because a wider status quo is at play, one that dictates that without money, your vision or values mean nothing. Most of the time, the best thing marginalized people get to hope for is things staying just the way they are - which bars them from any hope of victory or improvement.

At the end, the only thing that can push against the gaining momentum of thoughtless destruction is direct, radical action, fight started and inspired by those parents that truly care for their children and are ready to stand in front of demolition equipment to secure a worthwhile future for them.

Tower, Reversed

Our main character, Kat, was given a gift of future vision. Once Klaxons force the town council vote and finally get the permission to build their prison, Kat sees the future in which Klax Korp’s tractors level whatever is left of Rust Bank, knocking down the water tower, drowning the town.

As Kat and her partners in direct action make their final stand, break Klax Korp’s equipment, make their reanimated goons scatter, the future changes. The vision rewinds; the toppled tower rises back up; the tractors drive out of view, leaving Rust Bank alone. The crumbling is reversed - and devastating change is prevented, so that natural healing and restoration may finally begin.

Wendell & Wild calls attention to a truth that is crucial to understand when discussing status quo and rigid standard:

The natural instinct for those of us finding the rigid structure suffocating is to see it crumble, to find catharsis in the destruction. But true healing lies in restoration, reclamation, rebuilding, the world rising back up, allowing itself to go back to its true ways. Positive transformative change can be a return to the past, not a rejection or out-growing of it - and oftentimes, it should be.

That sentiment must ring especially true to the colonized land of Americas, yearning to rise back to their Indigenous sovereignty, flourishing and freedom. That’s what Raúl’s mural represents: going back to the roots, reclaiming Indigenous power and freeing the land from people seeking to exploit and devastate it.

That’s an important thing to remember as we call for abolition of everything that oppresses us: past the abolition, what is necessary are growth and recovery. We must put our energy to building, restoring the natural world and the natural communal bond, letting a truer world flourish again after countless centuries of its suppression.

Family: Lost and Found

The familial theme is never irrelevant through the story: the movement of liberation and restoration is one of keeping legacy alive, and keeping future generations protected and thriving. But, once again, when familial hurt comes into play, it is much easier resolved in the hellish Underworld, between literal demons.

It only takes Belzer one look at the mural to reconsider his entire relationship with his children - something that is a bit funny to watch, with how quickened the pacing is, but that itself does sort of offer an interesting contrast to the Klaxons, to whom their own child joining the protest line isn’t enough of a wake-up call.

Family - the broadest, purest concept of it - brings together a greater demon and a demon hunter, not necessarily reconciling their differences, but creating a point of solidarity and grounds to relate to each other, reconnect with their values and make sure individuals, generations and familial relationships are not hurt in their squabble. But to Siobhan’s parents, the well-being and safety of their child matter less than their own ambition - and that is the main thing that separates them from the rest of the cast, leaving them no chance to have the same absurdly rapid change of heart. The meaning of family, community and making sure the younger generation inherits a better future is lost on people overcome with self-serving greed. That is what makes them dangerous: the Klaxons will gladly ensure the world burns in their wake, as long as they can enjoy it while they’re still alive.

Wendell and Wild curiously combines an absurd and comical demonic summoning plot line with gritty social and political commentary that does not nurse a hope that the powerful and ruthless of the world can be reached through appealing to their humanity. It is only the fantastical Underworld plot that can be resolved easily - the human world will have to struggle more, push harder to ensure the future does not get buried under the rubble.

As a personal note, I will say that I am a deep believer into shared humanity as the ultimate tool of the world’s healing. At the same time, it would be a mistake not to recognize the urgency of preserving whatever is left of our world at the moment, and the essential work done by people on the front line of resistance, sparking direct action, unafraid of a protest transgressing the boundaries of strictly “non-violent”. When the rich and the state commit violent atrocities against the oppressed population, counter-violence is simply a question of self-preservation, and protecting one’s children and home.

Ultimately, it seems to me that Wendell & Wild is an ode to resistance, a recognition of the persistent and inglorious work of at least keeping the destructive forces at bay, a celebration of emboldened fight against it - and a reminder of what the true purpose of that fight is. The heart of it lies not in the liberated destruction: instead, it is a struggle for a chance to return home, let the home return to its people, rise in its past natural glory, and be warm, safe, connected and communal, once again.

Thank you for sticking around! Next essay is probably We Know The Devil time. Probably. I am sort of ungovernable these days, and I wish the same to you.

Have a lovely day, friends, and take care!

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I’ve been having many realizations lately, connecting with some neglected parts of myself. In the conversations I’ve been having with them, I learned this: “My heart wants accordance & reverberation”.

Today, I recognized a more specific facet of what that means:

My heart yearns for resonance when it finds the bravery to share its pain.

I find myself in the unfortunate situation of holding heavy feelings that few others want to shoulder the full weight of. It is easier for my family to not talk or think about them, and to keep things just as they are: for the sake of the most vulnerable of us, youngest and oldest. So nothing really changes for the rest of them, because that would be too much. Too much pain, too much trouble, too much change, too many difficult and awful conversations.

It is easier for most people to dismiss whatever concerns I raise when that pain becomes relevant - because the subject of it is so deeply sensitive that one must feel like they are already in the right regarding it, or the implications are far too overwhelming to really consider.

Where that leaves me is feeling on the outside of the world, isolated and alone.

I am not great at expressing the full strength of my feelings. That can probably be blamed on the circumstances of my upbringing, the overpowering explosive personalities that left little space for my own. It never feels right for me to do the same, to “explode” at people, accuse, yell, hurt openly and messily, get ugly with it.

Mostly, I am grateful for that: I want to be a compassionate and understanding presence in others’ lives. What that means, though, is that every word in conversations that need to happen for the sake of my heart gets filtered through my brain, weighed and polished with the purpose to communicate: “I am not attacking you, I hold respect for you and understand where you are coming from, please do the same in return”. That is a good way to have conversations, honestly: it has done great things for my relationships. But in many instances, people mistake my readiness to remain “civil” as an invitation to a weighted intellectual discussion - when what’s happening is me desperately trying to communicate my deep-running pain and dread. I don’t want to “converse” - I want to be heard, and for my feelings to have space that isn’t compromised.

I feel utterly disconnected from the world because the world will not pause for my suffering. I feel like I’ve been yelling constantly in an attempt to have my pain acknowledged, and that never happens unless it is already convenient for people to do so. Unless they already agree. Unless they do not feel like it has to concern them or their way of living. Unless they can feel like they’ve done well enough by giving me passing compassion, because my pain is something of a general fact of life, something to feel really sad about for a moment, then get up and move on with one’s day.

Isn’t what I’m feeling something we all feel? Don’t we all want to know we have a true, strong presence in other people’s lives, enough to make them pause, stop the everyday flow of their lives and sacrifice some of their time, energy, maybe a bit of their heart to the good cause of truly showing us compassion?

My heart wants to make ripples. My heart wants to know it is a droplet in an ocean, and when it moves, the droplets next to it pick up the momentum passed to them, like a relay race, and make waves. I want the hearts of humanity to move together in shared pain and joy, and more than anything else, I want to be a part of that.

Right now, all I feel is isolation - because what I want is disruption to the commonly accepted way of things. I want the force of my heartbreak to bring everything to a halt, and in the aftermath of it, I want people to consider every horrible, disconcerting, inconvenient implication. I want to matter enough to deserve that inconvenience.

It might be a lot to ask, but I do not want to believe that it is too much - because then, the world is far too lonely of a place for any of us to be in.

We all deserve compassion, and gods know there is a lot of pain in the world. Empathy burnout is so horribly real. But maybe we don’t even have to feel every other person’s pain all the time; what we absolutely should do, however, is listen to what others need from us to feel safe and understood.

Thinking about the Status Quo series, I am now realizing just how much I apparently relate to every discarded outcast floating on the outside of what is accepted and being forced to fight for recognition or resign to forever remaining expelled from life itself. Chicory, isolated in her seemingly unique suffering and believing there is no place for her in the world that seems better off untouched by her heartbreak, remaining set in its ways, undisturbed, and in that supposedly safe. Mirabel, denied her inherent power over her environment, continuously pushed to the shadows, into the background, and refusing to remain there; blamed for the disruption she brings, for “hurting” something she is a part of by bringing attention to how it hurts her and those dear to her. (Jumping ahead,) Eda Clawthorne, refusing to compromise herself, but in that resigning to decades of isolation, unaware that she has a place to belong or perhaps too tired to have to fight for it.

This series, ultimately, is self-serving. Self-caring. Self-loving? Apparently, I desperately want for myself what I celebrate in the narratives I discuss:

“At the end, one individual is unlikely to feel enabled to challenge the status quo. But if they happen to express their pain, publicly, the full unapologetic scale of it, that can create a possibility of conversation. For the rest of us, the task is to find enough bravery to be honest and vulnerable and compassionate to them and ourselves and every other living thing, and through that hopefully cultivate meaningful change that will absolutely benefit every single one of us.”

“So at the end, that is the cure. <…> Reconnecting with the objective reality and all it holds: our connection, our compassion and care for each other, our place in our community and the unconditional love we are all endlessly capable of giving each other on the grounds of our shared humanity. Redefining our values: what we actually seek to preserve, and whether systems of control are worth maintaining if they end up hurting us and what we genuinely care about. Moving past the illusion that the status quo is the only way for things we love to be protected, and seeing what sort of world we can build together, with every one of us heard, empowered and endlessly reassured of their inherent right to exist as a part of the collective, and to be cared for.“

More than anything, I just want to belong. And belonging means value of my experience, inalienable. Belonging means having the power to affect my environment, because it is for me just as much as it is for everyone else. Belonging means a shockwave of pain originating from my heart that actually touches other people, with no option for them to dive out of the way. I want to hold others’ hands, a huge net of bodies, and I want our shared love to roll through us. I want us to affect each other. I want to be one of the people with the power to affect.

Maybe the reason trauma is isolating is not just that it’s an experience one can rarely talk about, and one that is rarely shared by others. Maybe a huge part of what makes it so very lonely is the fact that it makes you, by default, a disruptor. A challenger to the status quo. (I did watch “Wendell & Wild”; gonna’ see if any thoughts roll around in regards to that.)

And people rarely like disruption. Most would much rather disregard your experience altogether than let it bother and transform them. The easiest choice, always, is to refuse you your place.

I don’t think anyone gets to truly do that, though. They weren’t the ones to put me here, and they don’t get to decide it’s my time to go.

Hoping one’s life turns out the way a fictional narrative does can become a dangerous form of escapism; but I do really, really hope for the Revelation. The sudden clarity and understanding that I always belonged, and no one can ever deny that. And I want to believe that, just like every status quo challenger, I am not truly isolated in my pain. I do not wish suffering upon others; but I hope the disconnect and lack of compassion I feel is something that affects all of us and exposes something that is missing in the very fabric of our consciousness and society. I hope my pain exposes something universal.

I hope that it is impossible for me to hurt without the rest of the world hurting; I hope I am not somehow magically excluded from the overlapping web of human connections. I really hope that I am not truly alone.

It’s Halloween! Thinning of the veil and all. Maybe the ghosts that should pass between planes of existence are our own hurts travelling to other people’s hearts and reminding us of our inherent connection to one another.

So, have a spooky and connected night, friends. Open the doors to the disturbing spirits, maybe just for tonight. See how that goes.

Content warnings:

• familial tension and conflict;

• mentions of forced immigration & refugee experience, generational trauma;

• discussions of rejection and alienation of the mentally ill, discussions of OCD, obsessions and compulsions

It is time for the third entry of the Status Quo series! “Encanto” is a pretty obvious choice; too obvious, perhaps. I can only hope that considering it in the context of the previous two posts will provide a sufficiently ✨fresh✨ angle.

I’m gonna’ be very frank with you all and admit that I am only just figuring the whole “media analysis blog” format out, so I’m not quite sure what level of exposition to provide every time. Should I just assume people would not read about a piece of media they are not already familiar with? Or should I try to promote some of my favourite stories by luring people in with enticing titles, then yelling at them excitedly? Lots to ponder!

For now, though, I am going to go with my gut and assume that for D*sney feature films, basic context is available and absorbable by osmosis, so there will be much less plot recap in this one.

Let’s get started!

Disclaimer: We’re Diverting From The Intro So Much

(Feel free to skip this part if you do not care much for apologism or are only here for this one essay and not the whole series, power to you.)

“Fern, you literally started this all by ragging on capitalism and now you’re planning to talk about a family-centered narrative,” I know, but I promise it all sort of makes sense. Let’s think of the narratives we discuss as less thematically identical and more in terms of them sharing a “flavour”, and their subjects having similarly working internal structures and mechanisms. The philosophy behind metaphor the way it was conceived of by pantheistic Romantics is that all things, at the core, are the same. And that is not to say that a family story is actually an intentional metaphor for the humanity overall, but I do mean to imply that where human relationships, however distorted, are present, same values must be upheld, and same challenges will arise if we fail to do so. Much like “Chicory: A Colorful Tale”, “Encanto” deals with the themes of generational trauma, expectation, performance and identity, and an individual’s place within the community. The way these two very different narratives echo each other is quite fascinating, and can certainly inform our understanding of each individual one.

At times, I will probably have to use broad generalizing terms for the ease of drawing parallels between the different narratives we’re discussing and relating them to our socio-political realities. I hope that will not be seen as me simplifying or clinically dissecting a deeply emotional and complex family-centered story: my intention is, always, to bring the same close intimate emotional vulnerability into conversations about impersonal and depersonalizing structures.

Finally, if you’ve read the introduction post, you might remember me specifically stating that the character challenging the status quo will often hold a disabled identity. We have confirmation that one of the Madrigal Outcasts, Bruno, was written with intentional OCD coding. That is certainly relevant to the narrative and plays a huge role in Bruno’s relationship with the rest of the family.

When it comes to Mirabel, things get trickier: when in some stories, “a person without magic in a magical world” creates a lack of accessibility that can ring true to lived disabled experiences, that is not Mirabel’s case. Her unique position is defined by having been expected to be “exceptional”, yet failing to. Still, considering the place it lands her in: isolated, disregarded and seemingly perceived as completely worthless by people who anticipated a standard of performance from her, - her story still holds a lot of relevant motifs. As we consider the movie’s narrative, I will also suggest a parallel between her experience and an average experience of an autistic person, which was a fun little discovery for me!

The Madrigal Family

Let’s start with an overview of the family dynamic on the whole.

We meet the Madrigals pretty early on, on the third generation, which gives us full insight into where the core values of the family took root and how they transformed over time. The “founding” family matriarch is still present, and every generation can communicate with one another directly - except there are obvious and significant obstacles to that.

As a family, the Madrigals are fully defined by their Miracle, embodied in the Candle and imbuing the house and (almost) every family member with magic. In Alma’s understanding, those gifts are not simply gifted - they are earned, through dedication and selfless contribution to the community’s well-being. That tightly entrenched belief permeates the shared consciousness of the entire family, shaping their ideas of themselves, the world and their worth - and at the end, the Madrigals seem largely fixated on their place in the community, their public image and the standard they are expected to live up to.

“Encanto’s” combination of setting and narrative choices is very fascinating. Intentionally set in Colombia and reflecting Colombian culture, it simultaneously seems to harness an immigrant family perspective. The co-director of the movie, Charise Castro Smith, is Cuban-American, and has openly talked about how the heart of the narrative is strongly inspired by her relationship with her own grandmother, and the character of Alma is derived from the women in her own personal life. We see Alma being forced to leave her home with her newborn children; we see her husband sacrifice everything to give his family (and community) a chance to find safety, and to thrive. We see the pressure Alma, her children and grandchildren feel: the need to do something worthwhile with the precious gift of life they were given. The Madrigals and the people they led to safety are a community of refugees - subconsciously feeling like their right to safety is conditional, and like they have to work hard to hold onto their place of refuge.

Mirabel’s Character: Newcomer Perspective

Mirabel enters her environment when the status quo seems to be gaining an increasingly strong foothold. The third generation brings more and more Madrigals, more and more magical talents, and on the surface level, the family and its community seem to be flourishing.

In hindsight, we know of the already existing inner conflict and Bruno’s difficult predicament, the past tension between him and the rest of the family; but it is probably easy enough for characters to dismiss, because what the Madrigals and specifically Alma are preoccupied most with - the magic of the Candle - does not seem obviously threatened by this strained relationship.

As the surface-level signs all seem to be pointing towards the family’s growing prosperity, Mirabel’s “failed” Gift ceremony brings this growth to a sudden, unexpected halt. The unease and upheaval in the wake of it are understandable: the Madrigals have identified with their magical Gifts so strongly the latter have become an extension of their personal worth. That over-identification probably affects Alma’s grandchildren the most, too: being triplets, Pepa, Julieta and Bruno all received their Gifts at the same time, and their ceremony was the first in the Madrigal history. They weren’t brought up with the expectation to grow into a powerful and unique magic identity. In the triplets’ case, they were given the chance to be “special” before they ever became “gifted”.

With the precedent set, however, Alma’s affection towards her grandchildren is left basically with no chance of being unobstructed by expectation - not because she does not care for them beyond what they can offer, but because now, the initially loving formula (“A gift as special as you”) becomes a way for these tiny kids to measure their worth. This message of conditional “specialness” probably isn’t something they fully process on a conscious level, seeing how excited, albeit nervous, baby Mirabel seems on the day of her ceremony. But it’s undeniably there - and exposed with shocking force when she does not receive a Gift of her own. When there is an external, tangible proof and validation of one’s worth, it’s far too hard to divorce one’s self-perception and sense of identity from it.

And yet, Mirabel boldly tries to do so.

Mirabel’s arrival into the family and the unexpected course of her life offer a challenge to the status quo by asking important, essential questions: “What are we worth to each other without exceptional talents? What happens to the family if the magic ever weakens? How do we treat each other when one of us cannot contribute what is expected of them?” Her inclusion into the family is an invitation to reconnect with the truth of their care for each other outside of the framework of “work and dedication” as the only viable expression of love and gratitude. It’s a silent call to resolve the growing disparity and devastating intra- and interpersonal issues brewing under the surface. But the Madrigals, and Alma specifically, have come to associate the Candle and its magic with safety - so the “failed” ceremony is more than just a challenged expectation. On the most basic, unconscious level, it is perceived as a threat - and in a tragically ironic plot development, Alma’s desperation to make sure the threat is diverted only furthers the cracks in the family foundation and makes them more and more vulnerable.

It is against the backdrop of growing dread and hypervigilance, anxious fretting and family members driving themselves to break-down, burnout and self-sacrifice, that Mirabel takes upon the task to answer the questions the adults seem to have neglected out of fear, focusing on keeping things the way they are instead.

It’s interesting that Mirabel herself starts off ignorant of the degree of her family’s suffering and sacrifice and perceives everyone’s preoccupation with upholding the status quo as a personal rejection and neglect (quite understandably). So when she sets out on the task to help her family, it is her finding a way to make herself useful: it seems to be much more about self-determination than it is about meeting other people’s needs. We cannot blame her for that, of course: she is a teenager struggling under the weight of failed expectations, in an environment that is constructed in a way that keeps her from finding a healthy sense of identity. If anything, Mirabel’s ambition to prove herself is reflective of the entire family’s attitude: their service and dedication are “advertised” as community-oriented, but at the end, they are much more about the individual, one’s unique contribution and unique usefulness, since they are inseparably tangled up with every Madrigal’s sense of worth, self and their identity.

When Mirabel tries to answer the difficult questions of her worth and what it means, to be a family - something she by definition cannot figure out on her own, - she represents an automatic challenge to the status quo, but does not necessarily seek to challenge it herself. Still, her perspective is a “newcomer” one: she finds herself on the outside of the “gift → work” system, yet desperately tries to insert herself into it, to feel included. Not having an expected role to easily slide into, she tries to be creative, to “invent” her external worth - and that means exploring the mechanisms of something the rest of her family just takes at face value. The unconscious “gifted = special” and “magical = worthy” beliefs get beckoned into the floodlights of conscious self-exploration, with Mirabel being forced to examine these ideas in an attempt to squeeze her way into the narrow and rigid system.

Our society has a whole plethora of pre-existing expectations, rules and conditions: some productive, some neutral, some oppressive. An average allistic or just generally neurotypical person picks up on the cues of what is expected of them naturally and unconsciously, which eases their integration into the society - but creates the danger of absorbing unconscious thought patterns without any awareness of them, and not all of those patterns are going to be kind to ourselves or others, for example. An autistic person, however, is acutely aware of the fact that they do not “fit in”, and often has to meticulously study the internal mechanisms of the society in order to successfully pass as its member. The effects of such masking are devastating, and with that, we can once again observe how an inflexible social standard and a system that lacks human compassion get exposed by the intense suffering of the most vulnerable groups - and that calls attention to something that must be affecting and hurting all of us, on some level we might not even be aware of most of the time.

Then, once again, Mirabel is not aware enough of the standard being harmful at the start: she is much more focused on finding her unique place within it, while also obviously accumulating resentment. Her conflicting feelings are obvious when it comes to Antonio and his ceremony. She is both happy for him and suffering from this interpreted confirmation that the problem isn’t with the magic: it’s with her. Her relationship with the Miracle is complex, too: it seems to be what she calls out to bitterly, asking to finally be “blessed” - and at the same time, this force that seems to have for some reason excluded and neglected her is still what imbues her family house and makes it a home, alive, safe and warm. It is still something that she treasures, alongside the rest of her family members, something that symbolizes their care for one another and promises them safety; something that remains after her grandfather, who she never met but whose love she must still intensely feel.

When she overhears Alma talk to herself, learns that her Abuela knows the magic is fading, Mirabel’s response is not bitter vindication - it is compassionate grief, and determination to set things right. Instead of exposing Alma to prove she wasn’t making what she’d seen up, Mirabel decides to save the magic instead. The most genuine goal is, of course, to save her family - because the two have truly become inseparable in everyone’s minds.

On top of that, her ultimately loving act gets burdened with the underlying desire to find her own place, be the person who makes everything alright again. Quite paradoxically, our newcomer, the natural challenge to the status quo, is still operating within its values and almost seeks to uphold it.

That changes once Mirabel starts paying closer attention to her family in an attempt to understand the magic she has been excluded from more. In that, she reconnects with her real values, the most loving core of her actions - and starts prioritizing her sisters’ well-being over the status and image of her family, and by association even the magic itself. That is when her perspective becomes an actual, real challenge - and when she starts getting blamed for the unrest she is supposedly causing.

This position creates a striking parallel with the Madrigal family’s “Original Reject”: Mirabel’s Tío Bruno.

Bruno’s Character: Bearer of the Curse

Bruno’s place in the family is a fascinating one. In a way, he set the precedent for what Gifts were actually welcome, and was the first sign of the status quo setting in and gaining a tight grasp on the Madrigals and their community.

The very nature of Bruno’s Gift was antithetical to Alma’s determination to keep things controlled and within the realm of desired. He would consistently make others face the uncomfortable truth that bad things always have the possibility of happening. His prophecies would get interpreted as sentences, which stripped others of a sense of control over their futures - something that was deeply disconcerting to survivors of life-shattering events, and activated the defensive responses rooted in generational trauma.

It’s interesting that everyone in Bruno’s life tended to interpret him as almost reveling in their discomfort, as evident in his titular song. That completely overlooks not only Bruno’s suffering over how his Gift affected his family relationships, but also his very obvious, very intense OCD*.

(*I have heard the commentary on how certain details, like superstitious belief or Dolores’ squeaks, getting interpreted as signs of neurodivergency overlooks the fact that they are just casual parts of the culture. This video on Dolores’ autistic coding is a great example of a conscientious breakdown that accounts for the cultural background, while also highlighting how the character stands out against their surroundings, and how a casual cultural trait can become “absorbed” into their neurodivergent patterns and reinforced by them.

Moreover, being superstitious on its own is not evident of OCD: plenty of people would like to avoid opening their umbrella inside, for example. But constantly repeated compulsions that permeate a person’s daily experience and make it almost impossible to move through life without fixating on trying to prevent a terrifying future are the telltale mark. The specific expressions of Bruno’s obsessions and compulsions can be shaped by and sourced from his cultural experience, and cultural belief can become integrated into the specific workings of his psyche.)

Bruno is clearly not enjoying getting haunted with thoughts and signs of a terrifying future. He is obsessively trying to ward off devastating possibilities - something that could have very likely been shaped by the trauma he unwillingly triggers in everyone around him.

Bruno’s personal suffering and fear, however, go unacknowledged. His Gift causes others discomfort, and we can only guess his OCD would, as well - and at the end, others’ distress at the possibilities he brings up is greater than whatever compassion they could summon towards him. Eventually, they lose sight of that compassion entirely, letting their dread turn to frustration and unconsciously justifying their anger by assuming Bruno enjoys tormenting everyone around him: otherwise why would he continue sharing every horrible thing he foresees?

It’s crucial to keep in mind that Bruno’s Gift is also fundamentally misunderstood by his family. Triggered by the idea of a lack of control, they are resistant to the prophecies, too afraid of the image of a future set in stone, of a tragedy they would not be able to prevent. That knee-jerk emotional reaction is so intense they will not listen to his insight, won’t understand what he’s actually trying to say: that his vision is a possibility, and one past which many other possibilities exist, as well.

Let’s look at a few of the genuine prophecies he’s shared. The case with Dolores is the most simple, straightforward one: she did suffer a period of “unrequited” love, with the man she fell for being “just out of reach”. The prophecy wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t a sentence, because life does not simply stop at a certain event: things can evolve and change past them.

But the status quo mentality is resistant to change - and the downside of that is the inability to imagine a world of possibilities past an undesirable outcome. So Dolores was left to believe that that is all her life was going to be - without being able to internalize the notion that everything just might change at a later point.

It’s also important to point out that her love life predicament was fully rooted in the status quo: she was kept from Mariano by family expectations. Bruno was predicting the path her life would take under the specific circumstance that was being actively reinforced by his family, and the inevitability of Dolores’ heartbreak was not written in the stars but determined by her family life and dynamic. If the Madrigals allowed Bruno to question the way of things, the entire hurdle could just as easily have been avoided.

The same happens with Isabela’s prophecy. It’s strikingly telling that she undeniably interpreted his vision of a happy future as a sentence of its own. Note the leitmotif used in her part of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, when she sings:

“He told me that the life of my dreams
Would be promised, and someday be mine
He told me that my power would grow
Like the grapes that thrive on the vine”

It surfaces again in “What Else Can I Do?”, specifically when Mirabel sings:

“You just seem like your life's been a dream
Since the moment you opened your eyes”

The leitmotif seems indicative of deceptive appearances, perceived effortless and natural perfection that is later revealed to be a carefully constructed and suffocating front, managed at the price of one’s authenticity. The use of the leitmotif seems to imply that Isabela assumed the life “promised” to her by others and presented as something she is supposed to desire would not actually be the authentic freedom she craves.

And here, the ambiguous nature of Bruno’s prophecies strikes again. There are so many ways the wording of the prophecy can be interpreted. Maybe there is an implied contrast between a life “promised” and a life that is authentically Isabela’s, with the latter eventually replacing the former. If that is the case, Bruno could be trying to offer Isabela hope that one day, the pressures she is trapped under will fall away, and she will truly live her genuine dreams. Or perhaps the wording accommodates an intricate dance of meanings, of appearances and truth, and, just like Dolores, Isabela had to confront the objective reality of an undesirable situation, then move through it and discover that happiness is still possible, and things never have to stay set in stone.

Finally, the vision Bruno has about the family’s future, magic, Casita and Mirabel is the culmination of this subtle and complicated conflict between what he actually means and what his family fearfully assumes because of their obsession with things remaining fixed and stable.

The tragedy of Bruno’s situation is that, having lived with his future vision for a long time, he is perfectly aware of how it works - but no one else can bear to listen to him long enough for him to explain.

In the previously linked video on Dolores’ neurodivergent coding, the reviewer suggests that the Gifts are not only reflective of Madrigals’ personalities and inclinations, but are also meant to help them navigate personal challenges, including neurodivergence. In Bruno’s case, the ability to have a deep and intimate understanding that nothing is guaranteed to happen a certain way, and even if it does, we can always move past and beyond that without necessarily losing what is precious to us, could help him counteract an obsession that his entire family are doomed to inescapable overwhelming tragedy unless he preforms a compulsion (knocking on wood). His prophecies being, at the core, very open-ended and ultimately reassuring could aid his well-being greatly - except everyone else seems to take them bluntly and at face value, taking away Bruno’s chance to cope with future fears and isolating him in the process.

That seems reflective of a way that a person struggling with a morbid mental disorder can have perfect understanding of the source of their ruminations, intrusive thoughts, tendencies, obsessions, so on, but ends up completely misunderstood and emotionally rejected by their surroundings. That misunderstanding and rejection deal a harsh blow to whatever security they might’ve worked up in an attempt to remember that their mental illness is not them, does not define them, and the thoughts haunting them do not need to be trusted.

Oh, Bruno.

One great example of tragically ironic miscommunication around Bruno’s Gift that reinforces his isolation is the story of Pepa’s wedding. From what we can gather, Bruno expected his sister to know and understand the workings of his prophecies and the unique and complicated position he was taking in the family. And on her wedding day, he attempted to cope with the general rejection by leaning into his Outcast role as a way to free his sister of the responsibility to maintain a “perfect” front. It seems he was almost trying to have some morbid fun with it and invite Pepa in on the joke, signaling to her, “Hey, if this has to happen, might as well be Bruno’s fault again, right?”. As he directly states in the final song, it was an act of love and care: offering himself up as a scapegoat, as long as between the two of them, Pepa knows why he did this, and understands that he isn’t actually a walking bad omen excited to ruin her special day.

But by that point, Pepa has been fully conditioned into the general fixation on standard and appearance. It no longer feels external, imposed by someone else’s expectation, and is instead something she has internalized, so “failing” at keeping up a maintained front feels like an attack at and injury to Pepa’s own values and sense of self.

Let’s briefly look at these lines from “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” that go back to back:

[Pepa:]
It was my wedding day

[Félix:]
It was our wedding day

Note the difference in pronouns used: for Félix, the wedding is about their union, while for Pepa, it is a day that is about her - not in the sense that Félix is not important, but in the sense that the ceremony reflects onto Pepa’s character. She is less preoccupied with making it a day on which she is happy, and more with making it a day on which she seems happy, collected and content; she is a Madrigal, it is her wedding, the community’s eyes are on her, so she has to uphold the family image.

Where that lands Bruno, though, is that Pepa does not care about what is a genuine prophecy or not, and cannot appreciate him putting himself on the line to relieve her of responsibility. Avoiding responsibility would not be enough for her; instead, she needs things and herself to actually be perfect, and by stepping up, Bruno accidentally makes himself her scapegoat instead of the rest of the community’s.

The nature of Bruno’s rejection is that his family cannot bear to have something pointed out to them when it is at odds with their standard of perfection and presentation. Everyone acknowledges that Bruno’s Gift isn’t curses or hexes but prophecies - and yet, everyone hates to hear him speak as if he is manifesting the unpleasant and uncomfortable truth, not simply acknowledging the possibility of things going wrong sometimes. (Which is doubly sad in the context of Bruno’s OCD, since a lot of obsessions can center around the fear of unwilling or unconscious manifestation.)

In their trauma-induced fear and anger, the Madrigals fall prey to irrational thinking patterns: possibility becomes sentence, prophecy becomes manifestation, a soothsayer becomes a curse-worker. It is understandable and natural for them to recoil: prophecies require them to consider the possibility of their life changing, and that scares them more than anything else - so the easiest reaction is to avoid what troubles them on such a deep level altogether.

That’s how Bruno becomes an Outcast, and eventually internalizes that role himself. When his Gift becomes in some way toxic to his baby niece, when he realizes his prophecy may hurt her, he does not see a way to separate himself from his ability. If he needs to put distance between Mirabel and his Gift, that can only mean putting distance between himself and the rest of the family.

Finally meeting Mirabel gives Bruno a chance to reconsider this perception, because, much like him, she is rejected for acknowledging uncomfortable truths others would rather avoid - and she does not need any special ability to do so. That brings us to,

The Mirabel Paradox: None Power, All Fault

Mirabel is interesting in comparison to the character discussed in the previous essay: Chicory from “Chicory: A Colorful Tale”. Both of them represent a sort of “tipping point” for the growing underlying strain and overwhelm the status quo landed their respective communities in. But, unlike Chicory, Mirabel does not hold a special status or have access to a special ability; so, unlike Chicory, she also does not have the grounds to believe that the external, environmental expressions of her suffering are actually directly connected to her.

The moment the cracks show up in the movie is also the moment Mirabel comes face to face with the full weight of her anguish over the rejection she feels. It is soon enough revealed that Alma is, in fact, aware of Casita’s fracturing. But she isn’t quick to connect Mirabel to the fact, even though to the viewer the simultaneous externalizing of both Mirabel’s hurt and Casita’s weakening makes for an obvious correlation.

To the characters, though, it’s as if Mirabel is completely inconsequential and irrelevant to the family life, cannot have any power over or connection to her surroundings, just because that power and that connection are not in the realm of strictly magical.

At the same time, Mirabel gets all the blame when other family members’ hurt starts coming up to the surface. She cannot supernaturally affect the world around her, but can apparently be a powerful enough “corrupting” influence on her sisters.

In all that, however, just like Burno, Mirabel is only calling attention to what is already there - not even with the goal to expose, but simply as a way to take care of her family. She starts pursuing answers about magic because she wants to help; she does not encourage Luisa or Isabela to speak up, stand up against the pressures, challenge the older generations - she simply shows them unconditional compassion, and that gives them the rare, precious opportunity to simply be themselves. But her persistent curiosity and refusal to shy away from hard questions are antithetical to the status quo rule of “don’t think about it too hard & just go with it”.

Mirabel does, after all, offer that essential fresh “newcomer” perspective: having existed on the outside of her family life for so long, she is surprised to find out about the degree to which her sisters push themselves. That self-sacrifice is probably a point of unspoken, implied, perhaps fully unconscious solidarity between the rest of the family. Everyone else is familiar with the pressure, and so other family members’ dedication to rising to the expectation is a silent encouragement to do the same. For Mirabel, though, learning about Luisa’s burnout and exhaustion and Isabela’s fully neglected, repressed inner life and desires is a shock, a discovery that creates sudden grounds for them to relate to each other, to connect as people that are equally vulnerable, and equally in need of care and support.

Mirabel finds herself in the unfortunate position of being the most striking and constant reminder that the assumed status quo is not something that is promised, sustainable, or really everything it’s made out to be. She is concerning for others (or, more specifically, Alma) to look at, so it is easier to just push her into the background. That’s what they did with Bruno, after all - and he gave up on trying to find a place for himself in the family and let himself be trapped behind the scenes. Note the cracks he patches up from inside the walls: already there, already present, taking his constant, isolated, self-sacrificial work to mend; hidden because he agrees to remain hidden and not call attention to the things he plainly sees.

Mirabel, however, refuses to be confined to the shadows. She steps forward, hurting and impatient, she calls for something to set things right, because she clearly deserves it, she’s ready, she can prove herself if anyone gives her the time of day. As her heart cracks, the walls crack - and this time, it is on the outside, because the hurt has been brewing too long, and because Mirabel is not retreating, not giving up on her place in the light.

That is her ultimate mistake in Alma’s eyes. Mirabel purely accidentally, through the power of emotional honesty, acknowledges the most mind-numbingly terrifying truths Alma instinctively cannot bear to face. The thought of the magic being impermanent, or not controlled through tangible dedicated work to ensure it stays strong, is too much - so it cannot possibly be accepted as the truth. And so what Alma grasps for is blaming Mirabel for daring to call attention to it. Mirabel is seen as the disruption for the fact of speaking up - when in fact, she is only giving voice to the simple, even if horrifying, truth of things.

Through that, she remains tragically singled out and isolated. Alma blames her for hurting the family as if Mirabel is not part of it. At the start, she is disconnected from her family because of her perceived powerlessness, as if she could not possibly contribute anything to it. When Mirabel’s search starts uncovering the underlying issues, however, she gets blamed for her presence having too much influence on her family life. It’s especially tragic that Mirabel gets backlash for trying to insert herself back into the family and for building a real connection with her sisters. That connection and her influence on them, the connection between her state and Casita’s, ultimately reinforce the truth that she is deeply, inalienably a Madrigal, that her state and her relationship with her family members affect all of them. But with the backlash she faces, the message at the end of it is that her connection is not actually welcome, since it does not fit into the picture of how things are “supposed” to be. Even when asserting her place in her immediate circle, Mirabel is not seen as a part of it - and so it is easy to single her out and see her as the root of the problem, not one of the people suffering from it.

All of that seems like a tragically self-fulfilling version of Bruno’s original prophecy about his niece and the future of the family. Because, the way I personally see it, that prophecy was not actually meant to put Mirabel at the center of the problem and imply that she has to be the one to solve it, to “save the magic”; instead, it was much more likely a message to all of the adults around her, urging them to show up for her in her full vulnerability - and through that, show up for themselves, as well.

Love: Gifted, Not Earned

Let’s consider the nature of the Miracle. Born out of Pedro’s sacrifice, it is very clearly tied to him through the butterfly motif; it is his spirit and his love persevering, transcending death to continue keeping his family safe. The Miracle, Pedro’s gift, is just that - love, given freely, not for any accomplishment, not coaxed out of his heart through dedication. It is a gift of life that everyone inherently deserves, it is unconditional, all-encompassing love that needs nothing from the loved ones but themselves.

The implications of that permeate the language Alma uses: “gift”, something given lovingly and freely, “miracle” and “magic” - something that needs no reason or explanation, cannot be rationalized or controlled, happens sporadically and in incomprehensible, wonderful ways. And yet, paradoxically, she still tries to earn it, still seeks to control it to make sure it never leaves - because there has been too much sudden, inconsolable loss in her family’s life already.

Still, that doesn’t change the true nature of the Miracle: the love the Madrigals all share for one another. That is the source and the purpose of it, and the Gifts and the life that imbues Casita are external expressions of this miracle of deep, unconditional care.

Ironically and tragically, that same love gets twisted out of its natural shape by Alma’s fear of losing what is dearest to her.

A heart-aching symbolic representation of this is the scene in which Mirabel first sees the cracks for herself, reaches for a broken plate and cuts her hand. Imagine living in a sentient omniscient house that loves you and is moved by the desire to keep you safe; how many times did Casita prevent kids from bonking their heads or scraping their knees, or turned the stairs into a slide so that they don’t hurt themselves tumbling down them? And then, suddenly, in a moment of weakness, this safe, nurturing place loses control of itself and accidentally hurts you with its sharp, broken edges. Something that was always meant to keep Mirabel safe cannot stop itself from hurting her, because it is being torn apart by issues too horrifying to face.

That scene, among other things, establishes Mirabel’s place in the family and how the rest of them have tragically, unwillingly failed her. She is part of the family Madrigal, through and through, affecting their connections with each other and affected by them; and what the rest of the family was supposed to give her was constant, unfailing affirmation of her belonging, a vocal expression of their unconditional love. Because Mirabel is loved - otherwise, she would not have made the impact that she did.

“All Of Me”

As a general disclaimer, this is not to parrot the “Your family always loves you no matter what” sentiment, which is untrue and alienating to oh so many. But “Encanto” is, intrinsically, a story of love: how after trauma, it can get twisted to the point it turns against itself; a story of what we lose when we lose track of it, and how we can find our way back to it and each other, as long as we remember why our loved ones truly matter to us. That is represented in Casita: the warmest, most nurturing and poetic idea of a home, a place of unconditional love and care, a shelter; it’s represented in how that home fractures and crumbles under stress, heartbreakingly, and how it’s rebuilt, because the love that imbued it never went away.

As it tends to happen with Bruno’s prophecies, even when things physically, literally fall apart, it is not the end. The Tower symbolism referred to in the previous essay is very poignant here, too - except Casita is not the rigid structure of the status quo that has fallen, and is instead a representation of how much of the family’s sense of safety, security and identity was pinned onto an artificial idea of excellence. Still, though, there is the option to rebuild - and the tragedy, however unnecessary, still has valuable lessons to offer.

With the world the Madrigals have gotten used to falling apart , the flaws of the status quo finally get fully exposed; moreover, the characters now exist in the tangible material reality that persists beyond it. They are living the objective truth that life can go on beyond the one shape they’ve known it to take. And with that, they can rebuild with the new awareness of what is actually important, what has really kept them safe and close. With every stone they carry, they get in touch with what truly makes up their family home. The foundation wasn’t faulty; they don’t have to give up on what matters to them to let go of the artificial idea of it that has been hurting them. The real miracle is all of them, in their objective reality, present and loving each other. And that includes Mirabel, undeniably and fully.

The final song uses one of the movie’s central leitmotifs: “Open your eyes”. The meaning of it shifts as the narrative progresses and characters get more and more introspective insight.

First, Alma invites Mirabel to open her eyes to the light of the Candle as she tells her granddaughter the story of their family. She is inviting Mirabel into the knowledge of her inherent worth, into the idea of being “special” - and asks her to perceive her own obvious bright light. Later, Mirabel echoes the sentiment back at Alma, pleading for her to open her eyes to everything Mirabel feels capable of doing for the family, Gift or no Gift. As mentioned before, though, her determination is still fully dependent on finding some sort of tangible worth: she cannot be magical, but she can still do something great.

At the end, Alma invites Mirabel to open her eyes once again - asking what she sees. Mirabel answers: “All of me”. Her self-identification has progressed beyond a specific contribution, beyond the idea of defined worth. Just she herself is what’s important - because it was not just her actions that helped her family heal. It was the simple and natural act of her belonging, and the work others did to recognize that.

There would be nothing Mirabel could do to make Alma see the error of her ways if Alma didn’t love and care for her already. Mirabel is able to play her part in the story because she is unconditionally loved - and that truth was never going away. She was not to “deserve” that love - that is antithetical to the care one’s family owes to them. She was simply to be herself.

In “Encanto’s” narrative, the love is there, always present - and that’s what makes connection worth saving. And at the end, the journey is never one of proving one’s worth - the journey is of coming back to it, of compassion, recognizing the other’s pain, and rediscovering your love for them. Mirabel and Isabella did that for each other, and Alma did that for the rest of the family.

So at the end, that is the cure. Surpassing a limiting identity imposed on us by a rigid structure of desperate control. Reconnecting with the objective reality and all it holds: our connection, our compassion and care for each other, our place in our community and the unconditional love we are all endlessly capable of giving each other on the grounds of our shared humanity. Redefining our values: what we actually seek to preserve, and whether systems of control are worth maintaining if they end up hurting us and what we genuinely care about. Moving past the illusion that the status quo is the only way for things we love to be protected, and seeing what sort of world we can build together, with every one of us heard, empowered and endlessly reassured of their inherent right to exist as a part of the collective, and to be cared for.

I like to think of a family as something we define for ourselves, and something that can expand endlessly as we find unconditional love, acceptance and safety in our relationship with others. I would love to see entire communities operating on familial terms: with compassion and inalienable belonging at the very core of them, and always there to rediscover and come home to, whatever external challenge arises. That really sounds like a future worth striving for.

And with that, the “Character VS Status Quo” series goes on a hiatus until the rest of *drum roll* “The Owl House” gets released! I’m gonna’ go a bit feral with that one once it’s time.

Until then, there will be other lengthy rambles to fill your inboxes, so tune in next time for a breakdown of Gnostic symbolism in “We Know The Devil”! This one is for all of you victims of Catholic guilt out there. (That is unless I watch “Wendell & Wild” and realize I really need to yell about that first.)

Take care, and a have a lovely day!

Content warnings:

• struggle with mental health, depression and self-loathing; implied suicidal ideation;

• toxic/abusive teacher figure;

• pretty constant mentions of food (because of the nature of the game).

The post also contains instances of bold text.

Art by Fleur Marigold; check out their socials for more!!

Welcome back! Perhaps. Or maybe nice to meet you :-) It’s time for the second post in the “Character VS Status Quo” series! This time, we actually do media analysis, and I want to open with a real banger: “Chicory: A Colorful Tale”.

image description: a digital colored illustration of Chicory and Pizza from “Chicory: A Colorful Tale”. Chicory is giving a very excited Pizza a piggy-back ride and looking at them with an affectionate smile. end id

This 2021 video game is a coloring book adventure that deals with themes of artistic self-determination, legacy, expectation, pressure, struggle with identity and self-worth in the face of an exclusive societal role, as well as mental health, generational trauma and personal and communal Shadow-work. So very juicy. Let’s dig in!

(This one is really wordy, so buckle up! As a fair warning, I might talk in circles from time to time out of the urge to emphasize. I wish you patience, and hope you do enjoy!)

Disclaimer: Yes I Know It’s Not Technically Anti-Capitalist

In the introduction essay I posted as the very first entry, I ramble at length about the faults of capitalism and the related struggle with identity vs standard, as well as the role marginalization and specifically disability may play in that. Reading the intro is not necessary to understand the following post, but it may provide more context for some parts. I will be elaborating on any relevant aspects of the game as I go, too, but if you haven’t experienced it yet, please consider purchasing it (the game play is brilliantly accessible) or, if you want, check out this play-through by PlayFrame!

The play-through is very much a happy place for me, and the joyful and enthusiastic gushing combined with insightful commentary highlight all the best aspects of the game so well.

Back to the essay! Quite remarkably, “Chicory” is set in a world that is very directly shown to be untouched by capitalism. Things seem to operate on more socialist terms and you only gain (completely non-essential) items in exchange for services or through barter, or by trading trash you pick up, because we gotta’ reward commonfolk’s environmental efforts! In one of my most beloved bits of dialogue of all time, a couple of background characters discuss the book one of them is reading, which describes this wild and ridiculous economical theory of free markets and corporate liberties. Capitalism very literally has never been a thing, which for me makes it that much easier to get attached to the world we’re interacting with.

Still, my previous lengthy post feels relevant to the narrative even considering the setting - because the latter is still far from idealistic. Because there are rigid structures at play here, too; because there is a standard and a subsequent measure of failure, and those affect the inhabitants of the peaceful socialist Picnic profoundly. Because there are societal roles that overpower personal identities, and people (well, creatures) find themselves either crushed by the weight of responsibility or hopelessly overlooked as unimportant.

Greg Lobanov’s games often deal with the artistic plight to feel “enough”, to make oneself heard and to find a sense of belong in the world. “Chicory” is a story that is all about being an artist; and sharing your utmost self with the world is bound to come with challenges, regardless of the political and economical system you live under. I hope that me drawing parallels between what is clearly a personally meaningful narrative and a concept that is different, yet similar, would not feel like I’m doing a disservice to the game’s original message. In fact, barely any of the pieces of media I am going to discuss within this framework actually aim to talk about capitalism - but all will challenge similarly rigid and unforgiving realities by centering a disabled and/or neurodivergent character.

Speaking of the latter! It is time I introduce you to our game’s deuteragonist, named in the very title.

Chicory’s Characterization a.k.a. Don’t Meet Your Heroes(?)

The game opens with Chicory’s introduction, narrated by the player character, who is colloquially dubbed “Pizza”. We are told that Chicory is Picnic’s most recent Wielder - someone who holds the magic Brush, which is the singular source of color in this black-and-white world. (Coloring book, remember?)

There is only one Brush, getting passed on from mentor to student - and Chicory came into Wielding not so long ago. In our character’s eyes, she is the greatest one to ever have had the honor - and Pizza is certainly excited about Chicory taking over.

The event that kick-starts the plot of the game is the sudden disappearance of color, all of it, at once. Pizza, who is busy doing their janitor duties at the time, goes to check on things only to find the Brush abandoned outside of Chicory’s locked room. Being an excited and slightly overenthusiastic little dog who’s secretly waiting for a chance to express and “prove” themself, they quickly pick it up - as a “service” to Chicory, of course. (/s)

Pretty early on, Pizza encounters Corruptions: dark thorny vines and trees sprouting all over Picnic, blocking passage, draining color, emanating dark and ominous energy and attacking those who come too close. As the current apparent Wielder, Pizza is tasked with the responsibility to handle the problem, and everyone is looking to them for answers, expecting them to deliver messages, reunite loved ones, rescue lost kids - you know, player character stuff. The Brush seems to have a status attached to it that goes beyond just a glorified mural painter - a Wielder is expected to be a true pillar of the community, simply because of the fact of their exclusivity. …And also the Brush gives them magic powers that let them get to difficult areas, I guess.

As the plot progresses, we get to meet Chicory herself - and coming face to face with their idol is a rough journey for Pizza. They are occasionally oblivious, perhaps deliberately in denial, but to the player, it is obvious from the start: Chicory is deeply, overwhelmingly depressed, and struggling to an alarming degree.

She seems indifferent to the fate of the Brush, leaving it with Pizza since they've already picked it up; it’s clear she never wants to wield it herself again. She seeks isolation and distance, and with time, it becomes clear she is drowning in self-deprecation and guilt. A crucial plot point is Pizza (and us) realizing that the initial loss of color and the appearance of Corruptions are devastating external expressions of Chicory’s mental and emotional breakdown - and in her state, she is not taking that fact well, finding ultimate justification of her self-hatred in the fact that she seems to be actively harming the world around her.

During one of the Corruption encounters, Pizza gets confronted by Chicory’s Shadow, who mocks and dismisses them mercilessly and threatens to "erase" them, seeing them as "undeserving". They rush to bring it up to the real-world Chicory, and the news cause her to come completely undone. She feels that a horrible, ugly truth about her has been revealed. She is convinced that the Corruptions are entirely her fault, and that her appearing in them only proves it further.

Chicory pushes Pizza away, pleading for them to see what an awful person she is and to finally leave her alone once they do; she speaks of herself as broken and wrong, and a danger to others. She fully identifies with the Corruption and internalizes it; it is coming from her, and so she could not possibly be anything but a horrible person, and she deserves to be alone, kept isolated and severed from the world. As far as she is aware, no one else wielding the Brush ever caused anything of the sort.

Chicory’s Personality Complex: a Deeper Dive

Seeing how Chicory’s Shadow attacked Pizza and threatened them with “erasure” for not being good enough to Wield, that may be interpreted as having a troubling, heartbreaking connotation for Chicory's relationship with herself. If she is “wrong”, if she should have never wielded, does she deserve to be "erased", too?

Fortunately, no matter how hard Chicory tries to push Pizza away, claiming that everything is her fault, Pizza does not back away. In one of my favorite lines of dialogue, they exclaim: "I don't care where [the problems] came from! I can't face it all alone anymore". 

I feel like that is a very powerful and radical statement when it comes to resolving a present danger within the community. The idea of blame is fundamentally individualistic, isolating and harmful to our sense of identity. It is certainly important to take responsibility for how we affect the world; but when there is an issue that cannot be resolved by any one individual person's actions, we need to look into solutions, cooperate and uphold each other, not pin blame.

The blamed person being saddled with the entire weight of others' pain is no longer seen as themself; their understanding of themself as part of the community gets replaced by overwhelming guilt. They fully assume the identity of "the one who broke things", with the limited capability to define themself outside of the specific event or specific system. And with major, global issues that affect the entire community and need everyone's joined effort to set things right, it is rarely realistic to put the blame on just one person or institution. We will likely be dealing with a plethora of overlapping factors, including our community's history, the complexities of our mentality and relationships, and often  - our communal Shadow, the dark and stormy collective unconscious.

That is the case with Chicory. As the plot progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer that she is not the only person with a Shadow that acts within the negative space. Pizza encounters their own unconscious side, who viciously criticizes them and exposes all of their deep issues with the sense of self-worth and accomplishment, their endless desire for approval from someone they pedestal as "better" and "bolder" and more exciting and special than them. Eventually, the negative space allows us a glimpse into the mindset of Blackberry - Chicory's predecessor and mentor, a harsh, critical person that seems very ready to blame her pupil for what is happening - and who also struggles with repressed guilt at the thought of having let Chicory down, pushed her away, not having prepared her well enough.

The more insight Pizza and Chicory get into the nature of the Corruption, the more ready Chicory seems to admit that the problem might not be that she is "broken", after all. Pizza faced Chicory at her lowest moment - and still stayed and asked for her help, essentially affirming that Chicory is someone Pizza cares about unconditionally and someone they trust to have their back, to help them. It's not about Chicory's use as much as it is about the two of them belonging alongside each other, and Pizza asking to not be left alone with the predicament they're facing. And that lets Chicory breach her own self-isolation and retain a sense of identity beyond her perceived failure as a Wielder.

However, she is still extremely hard and down on herself. Right before Pizza faces Blackberry's shadow, they and Chicory have a talk at the site of Chicory's last conversation with her teacher. Pizza once again tries to convince their friend that she doesn't need to carry full responsibility for how her Wielder period turned out, but Chicory is seeing the most corrupted place they've encountered yet, sees the dark trees that sprouted the moment she had her final fight with Blackberry - and feels like the world itself is reflecting her ugliest feelings back at her. Chicory cannot help but feel at fault, cannot speak of herself as anything but weak and unworthy. She cannot do the things other people do; she cannot cope as well as others. Maybe she needed support and didn't get it, but she doesn't want to need help. The fact that she does makes her feel inherently broken, not fitting the standard of an average capable person; and either way, since she knew all of that about herself already, she should never have taken onto the immense responsibility of Wielding and risked endangering others.

What we witness here is Chicory coming up against a demanding and inhumane Standard, pushing herself to measure up to it, inevitably failing - and internalizing that failure, choosing to berate herself for being “lesser” than everyone else, than what she should have been; for having a mental illness and struggling with managing it on her own without proper support. The rigid system of Wieldership puts emphasis on Chicory’s performance over her needs and wishes, actively worsens her mental state - and then seems to offer no ways of accommodating it. And for Chicory, that is a sign of her being “broken”, and her sense of identity suffers greatly for it.

Wielder Tradition and Loss of Direction

As the game progresses, we get important insight into the tradition and history of Wielding - and find out that perhaps, the way things are now is a distorted version of the initial vision and experience of it. We visit the Wielder Temple, which helps the newly initiated explore the meaning and pitfalls of creativity: the connection it builds with the world, others, your unconscious self and “the sublime”. Art is presented as an act of deliberate and expansive connectivity - yet Chicory feels othered and unwelcome in the world. The teachings of the Temple do not seem enough to help with the current challenges, or maybe they are simply not practiced properly, with mentors failing to guide their students through this psychological rite of passage.

On an individual level, this might be interpreted as a cautionary tale against the dangers of neglecting one’s well-being for the sake of creating. But the notions of the collective, generations, history and shared suffering are inseparable from the game’s narrative; what we’re talking about here is more than one individual’s personal responsibility for their mental and physical health.

The Brush, which, as we discover, carries the Shadows of everyone who ever Wielded, represents the building weight of generational trauma;

the desire to become a Wielder often stems from an ailment shared by many (if not most) characters: a sense of personal unimportance, a loss of audible voice in a huge, loud world;

and, of course, there’s the fact that the Wielder system was put in place to stop actual wars once fought over the Brush. With the Shadow-work theme, that can be interpreted as a meditation on the ways of the world: society inventing rules meant to regulate the most survival-based parts of us, and those parts getting banished into the unconscious, then acting out destructively because of our poor handling of them, our lack of honesty and/or compassion for ourselves.

All of these narrative elements come together to paint a world in which an individual creator cannot exist and function outside of the context of history and culture and psychological journey of humanity*. Art builds a connection with yourself, but also with the world, others and the universal transcendental aspects of life. Chicory’s story is inseparable from the context of the Wielder tradition and the history of her world. The Wielder Temple as narrative tool is not only here to show what an individual should do to take care of themself: it is also meant to create the necessary background of tradition and explore how these values get passed on and transformed, illustrate how the connectivity happens through guidance and communal healing (or lack thereof).

A literal as well as symbolic expression of that is Chicory’s relationship with Blackberry - and it is through learning about Blackberry’s own Shadow that Chicory gets the insight she needs to start forgiving herself, once she realizes that what has happened is more than just her “brokenness” or “wrongness”.

Blackberry’s Character: Perfectionism and Black-and-White Thinking

From what we hear about their relationship, Blackberry was the main motivation for Chicory to mask, to hide her every "weakness" and deal with her personal challenges on her own.

Blackberry seems extremely strict, demanding and unforgiving as a teacher. On top of that, she held onto the Brush for longer than anyone is expected to: Wielders seem prone to quick burnout, after all. It's no surprise that Chicory felt pressured to appear perfect, masquerade as flawlessly collected, in control, strong and independent: Wielding had been her dream for most of her life, and she must've been terrified of giving Blackberry any reason to doubt her readiness and candidacy and to decide to hold onto the Brush a while longer instead of passing it on.

To Chicory, Blackberry's figure is an object of both deep respect and deep resentment: a form of pedestaling Pizza is prone to, as well. Chicory rightfully feels deeply hurt by her mentor, but also inherently inadequate in comparison to her, shamed by her teacher's example rather than inspired. From the start, Blackberry was an emblem of perfection and self-control that Chicory could never even hope to genuinely aspire to, and that left her feeling pathetic, unworthy, wrong.

Being told that Blackberry has a Shadow of her own, a dark, hidden, emotionally messy and conflicted side, must've been such immense help in overcoming the deep shame of being The One Person in the world who is wrong and incapable of managing her feelings. Chicory gets to see Blackberry as more than a cold, dismissive image of alienating perfection. The flawless front is finally revealed to hide emotion just as human and just as destructive.

The confrontation with Blackberry’s Shadow also demonstrates a form of absolutist black-and-white thinking.  The Shadow is stuck in a memory of Chicory and Blackberry's last conversation: Blackberry aborts the ceremony of officially passing the Brush over to her student at the last moment, and Chicory basically takes it by force and runs off with it. 

Blackberry's unconscious struggles to process that event. It is completely overwhelmed with guilt and tries to shift the blame to avoid carrying a feeling this intense. One moment, she calls herself a monster, physically transforming into one in the symbolic negative Shadow space. Next, she tears into Chicory, repeating all of the cruel things she says about her throughout the game: Chicory is weak, unprepared, unworthy, this is all her fault. Throughout all that, however, Blackberry’s Shadow retains a monstrous form, which hints at the fact that deep inside, she still feels that she has wronged her student - which is very much fair, in my opinion.

Regardless of her obvious wrongs, though, Blackberry’s guilt goes beyond manageable and self-compassionate. Just as Chicory felt she had failed so horribly she might not deserve to exist, Blackberry subconsciously experiences her own wrongdoing so intensely she starts identifying with it, not leaving herself any sense of self outside of it, no space to breathe. In her eyes, she is not a person who failed to guide their student: she is the failure itself, she is the monster, because someone has to be.

And, of course, she cannot retain her sense of self from a place of such intense self-loathing. But instead of breaking down, like Chicory, Blackberry feverishly pushes blame onto the other, to avoid feeling so unbearably awful about herself. Which isn't fair to Chicory and is borderline abusive, edging uncomfortably close to victim-blaming.

The deep and bitter irony of that is that such behavior does not help the part of Blackberry that hates herself for hurting Chicory and pushing her away.

That's the danger of black-and-white thinking, where any wrong is irredeemable and one’s identity gets fully replaced by the external expression of one's existence, with no room for compassion and nuance. You either carry the guilt and find yourself a mark on the world that is probably better erased, or give in to the urge to shift this sort of blame onto someone else, scarring them in the process.

Going back to Chicory, we can see how similar mentality progresses once she is allowed to feel okay about herself. The idea that there must be an incurable, unjustifiable Wrong in the universe that needs to be eliminated for things to go back to normal does not go away. The difference is that Chicory stops seeing herself as such wrong - and instead shifts the blame to the Brush. It gives shape to the wielder's darkest thoughts, it makes dangerous emotions tangible and makes them hurt the world - therefore, it needs to be destroyed. Only that can keep everyone safe. Having color is not worth the danger of the Corruption, which only keeps spreading.

When Chicory presents the idea of destroying the Brush to Pizza, she asks: “Would a black-and-white world really be that bad?”. As the PlayFrame duo pointed out at that moment, the choice of words is most likely deliberate, pointing towards Chicory’s absolutist mentality.

At the same time, the fact that the Brush has hurt Chicory so deeply means she also possesses a unique and personal understanding of its dangers, like any traumatized person carries intimate knowledge of what something traumatizing looks like and how it operates. There is a line between hypervigilance and awareness, and it would feel wrong to dismiss Chicory’s insight by claiming she is way too biased and cannot see the “gray areas” when it comes to the problem of the Brush.

Even more so, at the end, the Brush is destroyed - but what isn’t lost is color, and the option of self-expression.

Binary VS Spectrum; Destruction VS Transformation

The Brush’s power to dip into someone’s unconscious and bring it forward is what scares Chicory the most - but even with the Brush gone, that magic isn’t lost. Instead, it’s transformed; and so Picnic gets to keep its color, the world does not become black-and-white. Chicory was justified in her fear of the Brush - but its real danger was not in the option of creative communication, however turbulent dealing with someone’s unconscious might be.

Unconscious blame-game and black-and-white thinking, generational trauma versus the individual, the culture of an exclusive status - all of these come together to bring about the previously discussed loss of identity in a binary system. In terms of Wielding, the binary is "worthy or worthless", "capable or broken"; in the context of interpersonal conflict, it becomes "right or wrong", in the most absolute forms of them. Same treatment is extended to the natural phenomena of the world: something can be chosen as the ultimate evil, and getting rid of it will allegedly fix everything that is wrong in our lives.

What really, really excites me about this is that in the introduction essay, I suggested the idea of  a spectrum of “standard-passing” to counteract the binary of "standard vs outcast". And “Chicory: A Colorful Tale” offers you to use a magical brush and a few pleasant palettes to very literally transform a black-and-white world into a gradient of color.

Individual VS Generations

What's important to us is that the collective Shadow taking over in moments of intense self-loathing and perceived rejection, it lashing out, at the individual, others or the world, is inseparable from the history of a suffocating system. The Brush carries hurt and fear and jealousy and disappointment of every Wielder prior. Every next person saddled with it carries the immense weight of legacy and generations of unpacked baggage, adding more to it in the process. 

This is a powerful metaphor for centuries worth of unresolved familial or cultural genetic trauma that never gets properly tackled before another person is brought into the world to continue the cosmic chain. It is also a great reflection of the growing agony of our society, eroded by centuries of loss of community, inhumane political and economical systems, suppression of non-standard identity, oppressive structures targeting vulnerable groups, so on and so forth. It does feel like we are coming into a new awareness of our shared societal trauma - but the weight of it often feels overwhelming.

Going back to Chicory's character, we see not only how the rigid system inherited from previous generations rejected her, but also how it shaped Chicory's sense of identity and led her down the path of severe emotional breakdown. At one point, Chicory shares that the dream to become the Wielder consumed her life from a very young age. She didn't seek connection, she didn't do things for fun or to unwind. She worked diligently, isolated herself and constantly pushed herself to be good enough, all on top of desperately trying to hide any sign of struggle from others and by that locking herself out of getting help and support. The Wielder was an image, a title to measure up to, a standard set impossibly high - and Chicory gave up the rest of what made her life worthwhile and pinned everything onto this one goal.

At the end, it is no wonder that once she faced difficulty in her new role, Chicory could not find any identity outside of it to ground herself in, to save herself from feeling like a failure in every way: she was fully dedicated to “earning” this one thing, and lacked any other worthwhile pursuit in her life.

We cannot know if Chicory’s depression predated her ambition. She might’ve broken under the weight of legacy and generational trauma simply because they’ve grown beyond what any one person could handle. Maybe she struggled before that, and the pressures she faced exacerbated those issues to an unmanageable degree.

What we do know either way is that the system hurt her, and that there was no one to accommodate Chicory’s needs and guide her through proper self-care and mental health maintenance. Whether Chicory always needed that more than most other people does not change the fact that everyone needs it, at some point, to some degree.

Chicory’s point of view is valuable not only because she inherently deserves support and accommodation; it also exposes how deeply the system hurts every person within it. Because it was damaging to Blackberry, committed to a toxic and unrealistic standard of perfection. It made her so hopelessly stressed out by the pressure of legacy that she could barely even find a replacement for herself, and then proceeded to tear herself and Chicory apart out of the dread she felt at having failed every Wielder before her. It hurt Cardamom, Blackberry's predecessor, who struggled to the point of his work becoming unbearable by the end of it, and who probably let his desperation affect Blackberry, too. (Ask me about my Blackberry and Cardamom mini-theory, I beg.) One way or another, Wielding became an exhausting and scarring experience for all of them, and for every Wielder before them.

image description: a monochrome illustration showing a line-up of Cardamom, Blackberry, Chicory and Pizza. The first three are holding the Brush, Cardamom and Blackberry stoically, Chicory hunching over; Pizza is leaning over the Brush abandoned on the floor in surprise. end id

That's the crux of the emotional journey Chicory goes through: she starts off feeling broken and wrong for struggling, and eventually finds out that, yes, maybe she was the one to crash and burn under the weight of it all, but that weight has been accumulating over centuries, and it's been hurting every person who came in contact with it. And not one of them found a way to dissolve it, only passing it on to the next, adding their own sorrow to the baggage. That, ultimately, should give Chicory some self-compassion, and in a way, it does open her up to it; that's why at the end she is able to develop a bond with Pizza, not shut them off. 

But the "failure" identity is a hard one to kick. I'm not sure forgiving herself is at the forefront of Chicory's mind at any point of the game; I'm not sure she is that concerned with her own well-being at the climax of it. Her thoughts are fully focused on the Corruptions and the pain they bring, and she seeks to solve the problem quickly, decisively, because she is likely still struggling with a sense of responsibility. Maybe the Corruptions appearing are not just a sign of her being cosmically "wrong", but they still coincided with her breakdown and externalized it, and she still left Pizza to deal with them.

Chicory is acting from a place of urgency, exhausted from seeing constant manifestations of her depression and the trauma she starts realizing she's carrying for every previous generation. That manifestation is hurting the world, and she needs it gone. Destroying the Brush seems like the natural option to her - except, much like in “Wandersong”, another amazing game by Greg Lobanov, you cannot destroy a "negative" force without erasing the world the way we know it. Shadow is cast from an object; if you seek to be rid of it, you would also have to destroy the matter itself.

At the end, what needs to go is not Chicory, and it’s not the ability for creative and colorful expression, gifted to people by the world and land itself. It's the toxic and rigid system of standard and legacy built around an individual's expression.

Legacy VS Outsider

Chicory’s relationship with that legacy is fascinating, and seems to echo the sentiment I shared in the introduction post: it’s the idea of being a “crumbling brick” that brings the wall down with it. Chicory is openly resentful of the image of dead artists she is somehow supposed to honor and live up to, and her forsaking the Brush and leaving it with Pizza, who is not trained for Wielding, is a form of rebellion. She will not force herself for a moment longer, she will not continue her duties and wait for a “deserving” candidate to come along, she’s done with the very idea of “deserving”.

The initial sentiment is inconsiderate of Pizza’s feelings and well-being, with them receiving the Brush not because Chicory believes in them (something they are desperate for), but because she does not care, refuses to care, and so will not encourage them or help them or simply let them know she thinks they’ll do great. I can sort of imagine Chicory finding grim vindication in the fact that the next Wielder turned out to be her janitor, too: eat that, Blackberry and the entire Art Academy.

But the feeling behind her action is also ultimately loving at its core, compassionate to herself and others, regardless of whatever twisted way it manifests: Chicory refuses to have another person traumatized by the legacy the same way she has been.

And that’s how Picnic ends up with Pizza, who is new to the Wielder tradition, does not understand much about it at the start, never went to the Academy, did not have the sentiment of “upholding the legacy” repeated to them over and over and never received a mentor’s guidance before picking up the Brush. They enter the system as an outsider - and their new perspective and fresh insight are a blow to the status quo. They are, coincidentally, the exact things Chicory needs to understand herself and her situation better.

Chicory watches Pizza wield just as wonderfully as any acclaimed artist would - with the focus being put on their bravery, passion and open-heartedness. The Brush is something that gives them a way to express themself, to leave a mark on the world and feel like that mark is welcome. 

At the same time, Chicory sees them struggle with expectation and comparison. Even without the pressure of legacy, it is enough for Pizza to have Chicory to compare themself to.

That reveals the main issue with the way of things: the deep debilitating self-doubt that comes with the idea of taking up an exclusive place - and always having to wonder if you deserve to. And that’s what makes any perceived failure so life-shattering: it feels like it exposes you-the hoax to the rest of the world, for everyone to despise you for even daring to think you deserved the chances you were given.

Chicory and Pizza’s experiences are different, yet similar, with the same system hurting them, same expectations breaking them, same self-doubt eating away at them. At the end, that is the key to challenging the status quo: overcoming the illusion of isolation.

Because Chicory is not an isolated case, not a cosmic mistake that was never meant to exist in this world since she is not able to operate within it. And she is more than just a symptom of sickness, either. She is a sick part of the body, a part that starts hurting first - but is not the root of the ailment, and must be treated as the whole organism slowly recovers.

Healing the Outcast

The ultimate thematic resolution to “Chicory: A Colorful Tale” is the end of isolation and loneliness.

The depth of Chicory’s dread, depression and self-rejection are facilitated by her deeply held belief into her unique “brokenness” and “wrongness” when held up to the standard of the world. Blackberry’s utter failure as a teacher and a guide lands Chicory with an internalized notion that what is needed of her is to reach the standard at the cost of her own well-being. Blackberry fails to prepare Chicory for the challenge ahead because she is too terrified to admit that she herself might at times struggle and make mistakes. She never even shared her own experience with Corruptions with her student, and so Chicory was left to assume that no one before her ever messed up so badly as to bring them about. Quite a poignant metaphor for the impostor syndrome, isn’t it?

As the result of their failed teacher-student relationship, Chicory never has her sense of overwhelming pressure acknowledged and validated, because that would require Blackberry to be vulnerable and to question how sound the requirement is, instead of devotedly rising to it. Chicory starts Wielding already exhausted, already full of self-doubt and self-loathing, already used to burning the candle at both ends in a desperate attempt to hide her own inadequacy from others. At the end, it’s so easy for her to assume that she is the problem, inherently weaker, less stable and less deserving than everyone else around her.

Her bond with Pizza opens Chicory’s mind up to the idea that the struggle is shared and universal; that the problem is not with her but with the status quo everyone has been desperately upholding at the price of their own well-being, out of fear of what it would mean - to challenge a defining aspect of the culture, to ask if a colorful world is worth the personal sacrifice and whether there are better ways to achieve it.

Having suffered in isolation for so long, Chicory is pushed to make the call everyone else is too afraid to: to destroy what’s hurting her, what has been hurting everyone for so long.

But the resolution, once again, does not lie through destruction. What ends is not the Brush as a phenomenon - what ends is isolation. Things don’t get undone - the world opens up and widens. Instead of the one singular Brush, carrying the legacy and pain and fears of generations, there are countless new brushes, and with them - endless possibility for self-reinvention, for recovering your independent identity. And once everyone is allowed to openly be themselves, uncover the hidden and scary and beautiful and artistic parts of their (un)conscious and express them through art, the shared loneliness ends. 

“Chicory: A Colorful Tale” presents an experiment in mitigating this illusory divide between the individual and the collective. Isolation and feeling of separation from the world hurt the individual and the world itself. And, in a paradoxical way, being pressured to conceive of yourself in the collective context as a bearer of a specific and exclusive title that replaces your identity is exactly what can make someone feel alone and separated.

Personal expression in place of standardized expected performance, sense of self beyond one’s use and function - these can help a person understand their true place in the world and their community. They help us reconnect with our neighbor and create a world of mutual respect and flourishing collective self-expression.

Once Wielding is “de-monopolized”, there is no more need to prove one’s “worth” just to have a place and to leave a mark on the world - one of the many, many colorful marks. A sense of self that is free of societal pressure and expectation helps someone find their sense of belonging within the collective.

In “Chicory”, the status quo is exposed, challenged and transformed into true communal connection in two vital steps.

First, the faulty foundation crumbles under centuries worth of weight, in true Tower symbolism, if you are a Tarot nerd like yours truly. The crumbling is easy to blame on one person, the first brick to crack - as Chicory gets blamed, both by herself and Blackberry. That separates and isolates the person in question - but they may feel a sense of righteousness, likely bitter and spiteful, for not dropping the weight onto the next pair of shoulders. 

Still, that doesn’t do enough to heal the world: if the fault is on one person or one object, rather than the collective environment we are all creating, it’s too easy to cast them out as the faulty link and start rebuilding the same traumatizing, toxic system anew.

That’s when the second step must happen: another person must reflect the outcast’s struggle and doubt and self-loathing back at them, ultimately affirming their probably already existing suspicion that the structure wasn’t doing anyone any good to begin with. This second person reaches out, offering help, understanding, companionship. They reject the very concept of responsibility and blame, instead searching for a solution that everyone can and must be a part of and benefit from. 

In the process, the second person reveals their own fears and pain, experiences all the harshest realities of the established culture and system. The status quo can no longer be reinstalled under the (uncompassionate and discriminatory) pretense that the problem was with the outcast. It becomes abundantly clear that the toxic expectation hurts every person existing within its perimeter. The world is affected by it in ways that are not always obvious and perceivable, but the pain is there, shaping our unconscious patterns, affecting our treatment of each other as well as our self-perception. It affects people you would least expect to buckle under the weight of things, too - sometimes most drastically, considering the lengths they have to go to to appear as perfect and adjusted as they are.

An individual’s pain always deserves compassion; if the individual is isolated in it, that is the issue with the way of the world that spans more than just one person’s struggle. That means that a fundamental instinct of compassion and mutual care is missing - and we need that instinct if we want to survive and thrive. To quote a certain well-named moletaur, “None of us are comfortable until we are all comfortable”.

Status quo and a standard of personhood distance us from the possibility of that compassion and care, replacing people with images of productivity and performance and making it that much scarier to confide in others about the way the world hurts us, or to be vulnerable enough to listen when others confide in us.

At the end, one individual is unlikely to feel enabled to challenge the status quo. But if they happen to express their pain, publicly, the full unapologetic scale of it, that can create a possibility of conversation. For the rest of us, the task is to find enough bravery to be honest and vulnerable and compassionate to them and ourselves and every other living thing, and through that hopefully cultivate meaningful change that will absolutely benefit every single one of us.

image description: Chicory sitting down next to Pizza, who is brandishing a large brush and smiling excitedly, a little blush on her face along with a splatter of pain; Chicory is leaning onto her paw and looking at them with an affectionate smirk. end id

In conclusion: Chicory is the character ever. Thank you, Greg Lobanov.

Tune in next time if you want to hear all of this ^^^ again but with a SPIN! Next up: “Encanto” 🎶

Content warnings:

• passing but constant allusions to the horrors of capitalism (worker abuse, involuntary labour, etc.);

• various systems of oppression, but most prominently: ableism

Let’s talk about capitalism! Wo-o-o-o.

It seems that many people that find themselves alienated by the mainstream society end up deeply hateful of the capitalist system. In a market driven by endless pursuit of growth, competitiveness and profit over the well-being of local communities and the natural world at large, those of us already in a vulnerable position, e.g. locked into poverty due to systemic oppression, living in economically disadvantaged areas, not wealthy enough to survive gentrification, so on and so forth, - are going to be most affected by the outcome of unethical and uncompassionate business practices.

Then, the job market is not too friendly to anyone, but especially not to those of us who have to navigate life while subject to prejudice, or while pushing themselves to live up to an expectation beyond their physical and mental ability. Marginalized and especially disabled people will rarely be favoured by employers.

And finally, the way I see it, if one has to fight constant discrimination to prove they have worth as a human being, to be seen as such by their families, community and the society at large, they are usually not too thrilled about having to confront a system that adds another condition to their perceived worth, claiming we all need to be productive, or we are lazy, unmotivated and deserve to starve.

I have a thesis to run by you: capitalism rides on standard. Job descriptions, performance targets, KPI: all of those stem from a fantasy of a completely predictable, controllable production or service process that will not falter as long as you look for the right people and push them the right amount and in the right direction. I have worked two service jobs in my life so far, albeit rather briefly; both suffered from hopelessly poor management going all the way to the top. The fatal flaw was the same: unreasonable expectation in pursuit of profit, which led management to aim to deliver consistent results, unfailingly, every time, despite tech, people, weather, you name it, not always acting the desired way.

Capitalism rides on standard, mostly the standard of performance. The image of a “good worker” is implemented in us from an early age, and targets and traumatizes marginalized kids first and foremost. Standardized testing can be hell for neurodivergent students; language standards often become a tool of racism, classism and cultural oppression.

And when you are already a bit off the mark when it comes to the expected image of What A Person Should Be, the standard is bound to exclude you, and you are bound to have to fight for survival. Which is… a grim, depressing prospect, if that is the only way you can envision the rest of your life.

The experience of getting left behind, on the margins, not considered when standards get set and systems get put in place; finding yourself on the receiving end of exploitation if you can get a job at all, or environmental racism, or inaccessible or culturally inconsiderate working hours - all of this can feel deeply isolating, like you were not meant to exist within this system, like it does not want you. Or, if it does, it is only to take advantage of your lack of options to force you into unsafe and abusive working environments.

There are many factors that would make someone struggle with employment. What would often make someone unexploitable, though - even in terms of illegal practices or forced labour - is disability.

(Now is a good time to mention: this essay is written by an able-bodied individual with input by a disabled loved one; if our combined perceptions fall short of accounting for the wide spectrum of disabled experiences, or if any statement is inaccurate, comes off as too generalized or otherwise off in tone or implication, I am absolutely ready to revisit any part of this post, and would be grateful for any corrections.)

The employability/exploitability statement is not meant to ignore the fact that disabled people often have to try to push beyond their limits and subsequently exhaust themselves trying to handle inacessible jobs; but we also cannot pretend that that would be sustainable. A disabled person pretty much automatically differs from the hypotehtical employee “standard”, so “standard” work cannot always fit into their life.

Let’s go back to the idea that the capitalist worker model gets implemented in early childhood. When everything is built with a narrow and strict standard at the very core of the system, there are bound to be students that cannot adjust to it. Those will simply fall out of the equation, since there are no tools within the education process to include them.

Of course, a large percentage of the students neglected by the education system still can and will be exploited. Cannot finish school or get a degree because of your unaccommodated learning disability, unaided environmental depression, trauma, your background or family situation, cycle of poverty, so on and so forth? Welcome to the working class! You are disposable, your managers hate you, your customers hate you also, and the hours are inhumane.

But there will be an odd case or two (or, rather, somewhere between 50% to 90%) in which a person simply won’t fit in. Their energy levels will not allow them to, or the debilitating mental condition will remain untreated, or the neurodivergency and/or physical disability will render them unable to function unless specific accommodations are met - and no one is going to care enough to meet them. At the end, a disabled person is often seen as a “burden” on economy and local and global community, often requiring financial aid while not “contributing” “as much” as an able-bodied neurotypical individual.

In a humane society, that should not be a problem; and in certain political and economical systems, it ideally would not be: "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". (We can unpack how the governments that claimed to be communist failed to uphold that ideal some other time.)

In a capitalist society, however, you have to earn. And the requirements for that are not rooted in fair and reasonable expectations: competitive economy is concerned with growth and profit and substantial “talent” and “performance”, not whatever effort people would actually be happy to volunteer.

We can correctly identify the deep flaws of the disconnected, harsh and often deadly reality we live in - but righteous anger will not always heal deeply ingrained self-perceptions. And, once again, being one of the disfavoured by the mainstream society and the political, social and economical climate is lonely, hard and alientating. When fitting the standard is presented as a matter of effort, diligence, proper behavior, self-discipline and self-control, and/or inherent intelligence, it will be extremely hard for those who struggle to keep up not to internalize their struggle as something that is fundamentally wrong with them, not the system overall. 

In a capitalist society, your identity feels ultimately out of your hands. We are discouraged from entertaining the idea that it is enough to just exist, that there is enough worth to being a human person with human passions, friendships, hobbies and favorite foods to eat. We get asked: “What are you doing with your life?”, as if living in itself is not enough; as if we cannot be trusted to find meaning independently, to dedicate ourselves to what is authentic and important to us, not the omnipresent economy masquerading as progress of the human race. We are constantly defined by our achievements and our “usefulness”; and when one lacks the latter, that vacuum gets filled with either the perceived failure, or the assumed identity of a rebel: very punk and honestly often admirable, but also dangerously isolating.

Sometimes, it is a bitter mix of both.

A dear friend of mine coped with lack of accommodation for their neurodivergency and intense transphobic harassment and bullying at school by developing potent, powerful resentment for the education system and capitalist interest overall - which is absolutely their right. At one point, they told me: "If I am a brick in the wall, I want to be a crumbling one, and I want to bring the wall down with me".

My friend is bright, kind, talented, generous, artistic, spiritual, a visionary; I could come up with hundreds of labels that would offer a glimpse into the rich contribution they make to this world, by simply sharing it with the rest of us. But our society has reduced us to our role within its profit systems so ultimately that the only way they could define their place in the world was that: “a crumbling brick”. It's as if our only two options are to commit to upholding the system - or to embrace being its undoing.

Both leave us unable to claw out an existence and an identity that are not fully defined by an arbitrary impersonal lifeless construct that rules our lives.

I want to do the “rebellious failure” perspective as much justice as I can, as I am deeply compassionate to the sentiment. The way I see it, my friend’s morbid excitement to be what makes the system crumble was not pettiness or selfishness. It was insight, and a desire to share it with the rest. Because there is no strict binary, the world is not clearly divided into "standard" and "outcast". It is a complex spectrum, in which some people get close enough to "standard" in one way but find another aspect of it challenging, and in which some of us are deemed as falling “too far” out of it.

If you are too disabled or too unmotivated by the capitalist lifestyle or too Something Else, you can consider yourself fully excluded from the equation that no longer cares for you. Those who can still play along, on the other hand, are forced, in one way or another, to mold and mask the aspects of their identity and personhood that might cause them to underperform. 

The desire to bring the system down with you is not vengeful (though it has a certain right to be); instead, it is the need to expose the inherent flaws of what hurts you, and show how it harms the entirety of our society, no matter how "standard-passing" some or most of us are.

One of my favourite games, “We Know The Devil”, presents a striking and poignant narrative of LGBTQ+ identity in the context of Catholic guilt. Playing around with the concept of inherent sinfulness of humanity, “We Know The Devil” claims: in the eyes of the Catholic god, we are all “bad kids”; gay and trans people are simply “the worst of the worst”, hounded by their peers in an attempt at personal salvation - because as long as there is someone “worse” than you, you just might escape the inevitable punishment and persecution for a while longer. Very “Torches” by The Oh Hellos, I think.

Not one of the “better” bad kids is content, safe and secure, though, and that fuels their resentment of “the worst”: it is, ultimately, a deflection, a self-soothing mechanism to continue telling yourself, “You aren’t as bad as you could be; at least you’re not a sodomite”. But that is a non-life; it’s suffocating, hateful of others and yourself, tirelessly fixated on staying afloat by pushing others to the bottom. At the end, everyone wants to be free - they’re just too horrified of the price they would have to pay should they put too much trust into others, who have to allow them their freedom.

That was a deeply revolutionary and formative narrative to me. I would like to borrow the core of it and have it be the basis of my upcoming media exploration. As we consider multiple pieces of media that resonated with and excited me, I will be returning to the same angle:

• rigid structures hurt all who are subject to them indiscriminately;

• however, the most persecuted and marginalized suffer most vividly;

• they get rejected by the more privileged as an instinctive survival tactic that is, ultimately, unsuccessful and unhelpful;

• a person (in our case: character) challenging the status quo will most often hold a marginalized identity,

• and that identity, whether explicitly or not, will often be a disabled one.

A-a-and with that, my long-winded introduction is out of the way! Nice.

Stay tuned for the next part, in which I get to actual media analysis as we discuss the excellent narrative of “Chicory: A Colorful Tale”.

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