#heres my long awaited essay on Eda

[kameonerd566]

Getting Vibes about Eda’s Curse

Okay so I might be kinda going out on a limb here BUT I am getting vibes that Eda's curse can be interpreted to represent having a mental illness, especially one with elements of schizophrenia. I can only speak from my experiance and I know everyone has different experiences with the ways mental illness affects people but here's my take (feel free to ignore this post if you don't agree, I am only speaking from my experiences with this. If anyone has information about mental illnesses that I am misinformed about please let me know kindly, it is very scary for me to be opening up about these experiences online as I seldom speak about them to people I know in real life). Also I would just like to say that I am in no way trying to give advice on what to do if someone is having a psychotic episode, I am merely using my own experiences as source to connect with the show to back up my claims. Spoilers ahead!!

Okay so, we are first introduced to Eda's curse in The Intruder. Now that we know she is more prone to transforming into the owl beast when she uses too much magic it is fairly obvious that putting the forcefield around the house to protect it from the rain wiped her out. She then notices she is feeling pretty drained so she tries to get some sleep. In my experience, sleep was a cure-all of sorts for the person in my life (whom I shall simply call Person in my explanation) who struggles with psychosis. When they get too stressed, they can go into a state of psychosis where they don't know what is actually going on in real life because they are in a sort of hyper realistic dream-state. If they are able to calm down enough fall asleep, however, the stress levels decrease and the chances of going into psychosis become near zero (at least for a little while). The creators of owl house, weather intentionally or not, seem to have used this same "sleep cures all" approach with Eda and how she manages her curse.

Eda was not able to get to sleep right away and we then see the owl beast roaming throughout the house and then bam: we have the potion. The mysterious potion Eda drinks immediately jumped out at me as a potential metaphor for prescription drugs. There are many drugs out there to help with mental illness, which I do not know enough about to really dive into specefics but basically, in my experience, when person is struggling to grasp reality, they take magic pill and bam: they come back to reality temporarily enough to tell us how to help them and then they calm down enough to sleep. This is very similar to how King and Luz feed Eda the potion, and then she instantly comes back to reality by transforming back to herself. She also seems to have no memory of what she did when she was the owl beast, which is just like when Person comes back from psychosis not knowing what they were doing in the real world.

Another part of the show that jumped out at me to suggest this metaphor is in the episode Escape of the Pailsman when King messes with her and brings her to the park. I don't vibe with how King treated her in her owl beast state but at the end of the day this IS a kids show so there's gonna be some comic relief. Anyways, in my experience, being in public with someone struggling to stay in reality is very difficult and definitely draws a lot of attention, like how waltzing around a playground with an owl beast would cause attention. Animal control *could* be interested as like medical people scooping her off the street to take her to a home or hospital but the part that really jumped out at me was when King got through to her by doing his angry squeak. I have also done similar things to get through to Person when the drugs aren't working, I will try and ground them back to reality with something that will get their attention, just like King did. Maybe I'm reading too much into this and maybe my experiences are just uncanilly similar to the shows plot BUT I think it is definitely interesting to analyze and I'm gonna keep doing it for the rest of the show.

One last thing that really sealed the deal for me was in one of the latest episodes when Luz and King have to give Eda a bunch of portions and then the camera goes black and we fade in with Eda's hand on Luz's face. Eda's reaction to coming back to the real world and her confusion and embarrassment at touching Luz's face like that was again (at least to me) showing that she did not know what was going on in the real world when she was the owl beast and that what she saw while in her beast form (or in her psychosis) was the memory of her sister cursing her and she was reaching out to find out who she was not realizing that in the real world she was actually just reaching for Luz. If that isn't a textbook example of psychosis than I don't know what is (no really,, I literally don't but I DO know that when person was in psychosis, they would tell me things that seemed to make no sense because they were about what they were experiencing in her psychosis and that dictated what they said and did at those times. After they came to, they were able to explain what they thought was happening at those times and we could piece together when and why those things occurred because just like how Eda touched Luz thinking she was someone else while I'm her owl beast form).

Also, joining the emperors coven could symbolize joining a group home of sorts, where Eda will be "cured" but most likely made into a hollow drone of the emperors army. I have little to no experience with group homes but I have seen the inside of a mental hospital a few times (only from the visitors side, however, so I imagine there's a hell of a lot more that I don't know about) and from what I've seen most of the people in there are so heavily drugged that they seem almost hollow. Its really heartbreaking to watch your loved one be so hollow and I think a lot of plot points are pointing to Eda becoming a hollow drone under the emperors command especially because of how heartbreaking that would be. If that's the way the show goes I would be VERY excited to see some light shed on the conditions that mentally ill people are kept in because I have heard MANY horror stories about how often times those in charge fail to see them as people and adhere are to their needs. There is so much injustice in the mental health system it makes my skin crawl and if a kids show was to shed light on that injustice it would earn my eternal gratitude.

Additionally, a lot of the language Eda uses to talk about her curse are almost word for word things I have heard Person use to refer to their mental illness, specifically the psychosis aspect of it. Most notably is "I'm going away for a bit and I don't know if I'm going to be able to bounce back this time" As a child, when person needed to go to the hospital people would tell me they needed to "go away for a bit" and when Person would refer to getting better after an episode they would almost always refer to getting better again as "bouncing back." Now I know these are fairly common phrases but considering the context of the show and of my experiences I feel that it is honestly more fuel to the fire of my hypothesis. Additionally, when Luz asks Eda if she needs her to stay home and take care of her in Escape of the Pailsman, Eda responds with "Kid, I've had this curse longer than you've been alive" and proceeds to reassure her that she can handle it. That scene was especially important to me because I have been in Luz's shoes MANY a time and that is exactly what I would say to Person if I noticed they were struggling. The way Eda responds is almost verbatim what people would tell me about Person when I would voice concern about my ability to help them.

Additionally, with the emperors coven, we will have two options for Eda's curse story arc: either she will be cured and still be the bad ass we know and love OR she will live with the curse, as it is a part of her, and still be the bad ass we love. When characters are introduced with curses and the like, it's pretty harmful to audiences that resonate with that to have the solution be to just get rid of the curse because we can't do that in real life. So I'm hoping the writers will take the better path and have her keep the curse but find a better way to manage it. I think that will make sense with the characterization of Eda this far, since she never really mentions wanting to be free from the curse she only ever mentions dealing with it. Personally, Eda this far has filled me with so much hope that I can be a kick ass functional adult even if I end up with the same illness as Person and that is something that has brought me SO much comfort. But I know that because I look up to Eda so much because I want to interpret her this was this theory might be a little far fetched; I might be self projecting a little too much. But regardless, I am so excited to see what will happen next in this series c: