Identity, Co-dependency and Fixation in "Centaurworld"
A dive into the show's narrative foil trifecta and a LOT of personal musings and grumblings on the concept of co-dependency
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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.
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.)