#Kaisa isolated herself because of insecurity. Johanna did it because of duty (keeping herself and a daughter afloat seemingly by her own)

[the-hilda-librarians-wife]

Going buckwild at the way Hilda The Series portrays adulthood and loneliness. Kaisa has no one to go to to ask for help getting the due book back, even though all it would take was someone she could minimally ask to knock on an elderly lady’s door and ask for a favour; she’s in the library after hours, is shown to have no allies aside from the woman who raised her and who she lost contact with. Johanna is only ever seen working or caring for Hilda, and her lack of a life aside from those two activities is pointed out by her own daughter when she thinks that this is going so far as to affect their relationship. The bell keeper lives alone in a small cabin on the edge of town, barely within city limits and away from everyone, a house barely even inhabitable and clearly only a place to sleep and eat. He works a solitary job and he’s the only one in the town still working it, meaning he’s probably overworked and forced to pull inhumanly long shifts. Victoria hyperfocused so hard on her projects that whatever friends she had before - and she must have had some from college time at least - lost contact with her, and she never made any other connections in Trolberg, anything that would tie her to the city and it’s inhabitants and make it so it wasn’t worth it to live by herself at the top of a hill. Even when that was over, she still chose to isolate herself somewhere abandoned and keep what was essentially another machine she’d built as her source of company, something she could understand and control instead of an unpredictable human being. Gerda works a job she likes but is shown to be disregarded by the person she works the most around, her abilities and intellect thrown aside for the good of someone she has to bear because of a hierarchy she was forced to accept in order to keep working. She’s appreciated by the town, but other than the main characters, we don’t see anyone paying her any mind when they don’t need something from her.

Meanwhile no kid has ever been alone in Trolberg. The mean kids are a group, the good kids are a group, even the gloomy teenage girls are a group. One of nightmare inducing entities, but a group nonetheless. All children in that world seem to operate on a ‘no man left behind’ code, looking out for each other even if they aren’t exactly fans of one another, helping even grown ups without asking why and working together. And this logic seems to extend to the adults who work around children too; especially the Raven Leader, who we see that through the children works as a vital part of the community and a way through which it comes together.

This isn’t very articulate but do you see the point? Do you see how clever that is? That a show about growing up has these themes? You can be magical, kind, strong, intelligent, competent, but none of that will make you truly happy if you don’t keep the most important thing from childhood? If you don’t keep your friendships, your bonds, something to tie you down to your reality and your community? The adults in the show all made their choices, and it’s okay to want to be alone, we all need it and some more than others (this is coming from someone who needs it a lot), but isolating yourself completely is the one thing that will make growing pains truly painful. I’m just so emotional over it. It’s so subtle and so clever considering the whole Mountain King plot that Hilda is willing to change species because she feels detached from her main relationships and surroundings. I love this show so much.