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:
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:
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.
This defines and shapes not only the employment and work process, but the overall education system we are subject to, as well.
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.
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.
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.
As the result, a false binary of “standard vs outcast” is created instead of an organic spectrum of performance, socializing and functioning.
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.
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.