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giselles-dumping-hat · 1 day ago

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i tried to write a short analysis and it turned into this sorry

i've posted about it before but i just keep thinking about how sirius's conflict revolves so much around being the 'only one,' the only one who knows, the only one who saw what happened, and his resentment towards others both because he sees it as us vs them ("they" are all part of the ignorant and malicious humanity that took everything from him) and because he resents the fact that "they" (who he sees as the reason everything happened) get to live in peace due to either not knowing or not caring while also expecting him to be less hostile towards them. i think he sees it as, essentially, his right to be a jerk towards "them" who hurt him and continue to hurt him, which is honestly not even necessarily a wrong position to have, but his problem is that he projects it onto people who are totally innocent or even victims themselves, like claire.

it's because he sees "them" as a mob that he fails to conceive of other people as truly having inner worlds, instead seeing them as largely random actors. he is easily baffled by the actions of others, and doesn't usually think about or consider their inner worlds, instead just getting indignant and perpetually being completely unable to understand their actions. it's a defense mechanism, because his life and the actions of others in it must seem really bizarre and scary and random, with little recourse for really rationally explaining everything that happened to him, he just gave up and concluded everyone else is an irrational actor whose actions cannot truly be explained or comprehended, so he, to an extent, stopped trying to empathize with others because there didn't seem to be a point. everyone is just bizarre, random, and scary. he latched onto dorothy because, yes, she did save him which provoked a strong emotional response from him, but also, he could view her as 1. someone who shared his exact pain, and 2. a rational actor in a sea of people who just do evil things for no reason.

but this is deeply isolating. i imagine he must feel truly alone, and it really truly seems to hurt him that he has to live as the only one who understands all that's terrible that happened. he has no one to tell, nobody to truly seek comfort from, and can be easily driven to fear. i think part of why he gets upset with claire is not just because the fact that she was more sheltered from the things that hurt the both of them (didn't see the witch hunts, had her memories erased of her past, though she has been through a plethora of other shit, the stuff they would specifically relate to each other on is stuff that claire was somewhat sheltered from) and that it bothers him that she gets to, in his mind, live more carefree, but also, because when you care about someone, you want them to understand you, you want to be able to share your pain with them, and i think he feels hurt because he feels like he can't. i remember him saying something like "i was a fool to put my hope in her" after she mentions "patricia" in her sleep, which i think shows that it goes deeper than just jealousy of her being able to smile, but also, there's a genuine desire to be understood by someone he grew up with and cares about, as if he feels that connection is almost there but not quite and it frustrates him. and he knows it's unfair to her - he can step back and realize that there is a distinction between "them" and those like claire, but his mind is just so clouded most of the time that it's a hard distinction to make...

something that ends up being important for him to understand is that 1. being upbeat doesn't mean you don't suffer, 2. someone can still be in pain even if the pain is not the same as yours, and 3. his inability to connect with claire is not because any fault on her part, but because he keeps pushing her away. and i think that's all definitely important - no, claire does not have to have been through the exact same thing for her suffering to be meaningful, no, her smiling doesn't mean she hasn't been through shit, and regardless of how much someone else has suffered, you can still connect with them. his arc is about being able to let his guard down, and even if he still isn't fully able to see into other's worlds, realize people aren't evil, and finally stop pushing away the connection he wishes he had. some of this i think he already knew intuitively from the start, but there is perhaps a difference between knowing something and learning it.

i think this is all important, of course. but part of what i think is a tragedy in the story of witch's heart is that, i still think that hidden desire to have someone who can truly understand not just on a conceptual level but from the level of firsthand experience is a valid one, and it's really isolating and makes it feel like the world is against you when it seems like nobody else could possibly understand. while i think "claire did not have to have gone through the exact same thing as me for me to connect with her" was something he needed to learn, there's a tragic irony to the fact that sirius was never alone in his suffering to begin with.

of course, there is the fact that there were many witch hunt victims, and there were probably dozens of relatives of dead "witches" that felt much the same as him. but i think, more than that, is that someone who went through most of the same things was with him the whole time, and he just... never knew.

the duality of sirius vs noel is really interesting to me. it's said sirius copes by running away, but i don't think that's necessarily true when it comes to his emotions. i think it's true in the sense that he runs away (figuratively, occasionally literally) from other people, but i think part of sirius's problem is that he is so stooped in his own emotions that it's hard to see anything else. his worldview is defined by a defensive, afraid, "us vs. them," he sees the way he interacts with the world as forever marked by the fact that not only did he suffer, but he's the only one who knows/understands that suffering.

when it comes to "running away" in an emotional sense, i think it's noel who does that. noel would rather bury the tragedy in a ditch and leave it there, pretending it never happened and he was never affected. i mean, that's kind of noel's whole deal, trying to make it so the tragedy wasn't so, running away from pain. while he does this literally with the timeloop, he does it figuratively with the past that he can't change - the more you look, the more it seems he avoids his past like the plague, except for when he's thinking about the happy parts with claire (or, occasionally, with his mother). as opposed to many of the other characters, there's never actually a single moment of reflection on the ways he was hurt. he rarely talks about the past (outside the good parts) unless he really has to. he remembers, sure, in bonus stage his backstory seems to occur to him in a series of extended flashbacks instead of being induced via a crystal, but he doesn't really... reflect, or think about it, he just gets upset and then doesn't talk or think about it again. there's only one moment really close to him actually reflecting on anything (that one monologue in i think noel's route that's super vague), but even that's obscuring what happened. even as he reeks of someone in pain, he finds various ways to obscure it - not acknowledging it, telling himself he's doing it because he's just trying to be a moral actor, taking his worship of claire at face value and never interrogating it ("i don't feel this way because i was really hurt and latched onto her, i feel this way because she is actually just perfect") etc...

while sirius cannot let go and stews in the fact that he cannot let go, noel cannot let go but pretends he can and then tries to pretend he's not a product of his environment. sirius seeks relief, for someone else to get it, but noel would never want anyone to get it, never want anyone to look, and he seeks to get as far from it as possible. sirius wants to seek comfort and is frustrated he feels he can't - noel never even tries to seek comfort. sirius can't get over being in pain, noel is like seemingly deeply afraid of being in emotional pain (or the appearance of being in pain). well, at least for himself - i think he's okay with emotional pain when he can paint it like "oh, this hurts me but it's good for other people," but when it's just pain about what happened to him/in his life, he turns away.

and it kind of goes to show how the two operate differently in differing but similar circumstances. i see it as indulgence of the self vs avoidance of the self. it makes sense, right? if society is evil and wants to hurt you and you can't trust anyone but yourself, only your own perspective is truly sane, so you have your perspective take up a lot of space in your head and in the lives of those you interact with, but if your self is beaten down to essentially nothing and you cannot even tell who you are, your perspective cannot be trusted and should be shrunken away from, both in your own mind and in the lives of others, especially because you've found a convenient other person whose perspective is better than yours and can take the place of your own, faulty one.

the deep irony of this is is that, sirius spends a lifetime thinking he's the only one, and noel spends a lifetime thinking sirius would never desire connection with him.

sirius never knows of noel's suffering - even wilardo's conclusion only has noel reveal some parts that are the parts that sirius would not be able to relate to him on - and as such, spends so much time thinking he is alone in his suffering when someone who understands is right next to him, and noel never knows of how sirius truly feels about him, and as such, shrinks away from interacting with him entirely.

i don't know if there's any evidence for this, maybe there's not, but i can't help but feel on some level, that noel must want others to understand, must want comfort. but he cannot, will not see it, because to desire comfort is to indulge the pain to begin with. i just think he's that kind of person - he wants to be by claire's side, but he won't say it, he wants sirius to care about him, but he won't say it, so it might also follow that he wants comfort, but won't say it.

i think this kind of gets at the heart of why i like sirinoel. there is an understanding there, one so obvious, that neither of them could see. they're like, kind of an inherent tragedy to me, that they both had the capacity for understanding what happened that they both needed, but one is too rejecting of others, and the other is to rejecting of interacting with his own pain. the one who would've been able to reach out never does, even though the other needs it, because noel's the one who would never share his pain. sirius pushes everyone away, including noel to some extent, because he doesn't know noel understands, and noel pushes sirius away precisely because of the source of the pain that causes him to be able to understand. and this tragedy feels like it runs so deep - two orphaned, lonely children, in a world that hurt them, that could have spent that whole time recovering together but never did - a connection that never happened. emotions that could have connected but instead kept running in opposite directions - that's the kind of doomed yaoi bullshit i love. there is that catharsis for both of them - there is that person that can understand - but because of their viewpoints, particularly, noel's viewpoint of avoiding his pain (and of thinking sirius doesn't like him), that catharsis is left unmet, unresolved.

what's sad is that it's not for lack of care on either party. they both really care about each other... but that care is never able to get them to the point of true understanding they could have. their pain, running in parallel, so similar, yet both isolating themselves from others...

they are in some ways, polar opposites, and in other ways, exactly the same. (to be honest, the same can be said for most main 5 duos in witch's heart lol. i deadass want to make venn diagrams for every main 5 pair bc comparing and contrasting these bitches is like the core of what makes their dynamics so. delicious.) and in the end, sirius is able to find some recourse for his feelings - he is able to start to feel better without ever truly finding that understanding, able to learn that true understanding is not necessary, but instead it's connection that helps - but it feels sad that that understanding is still ultimately left not having happened, that that story of someone so much like him in what he went through... will never be told. left unspoken. it kind of haunts the story for me and i love it

this is somewhat a post for another day and it's really only a matter of time until i make a post analyzing noel/claire's relationship too, but cycling back to claire, i think the three of them all kind of need each other... claire needs the family she lost, that cares about her, sirius needs connection but also understanding, noel needs love and understanding as well... but there's something so ironic knowing a lot of sirius's and noel's character arcs and conflicts could have been so easily avoided if noel had told him, or if after the massacre, noel had explained what happened, his part in it. it's tragic misunderstanding and miscommunication - or further, lack of any communication that just gets to me. that's a lot of the tragedy in witch's heart - there's so many small tweaks you could make to the story that would've avoided so many problems. some part of witch's heart is the dramatic irony of the tragedies that didn't need to happen, but still did. and this in particular draws me in to sirinoel. the invisible, unresolved, understanding.

#this might just be the best witchs heart analysis ever written #woagh #witchs heart #fav^3

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