#how did i misspell lucy in the draft title i'm dying

[lilliankillthisman]

Lucy Ellingson Posting

OK so after posting this I physically couldn’t stop myself from going back and reading the chapter where Lucy confronts Paul, Stolen Away 2.4

And WOW these chapters are perfect presentations of Lucy’s character progression. And I don’t mean that as “these are good examples of how she used to be compared to how she is now”, I mean “Wildbow has written these chapters as deliberate mirrors to showcase her development”, and I am absolutely obsessed with it, because Lucy has genuinely become the person she wanted be in 2.4. Yes, she’s gone from an honestly cool, put-together but isolated and insecure 13 year old learning about magic and struggling with keeping secrets, to an absurdly cool practitioner, with close friends beyond Verona and Avery, who she supports and who support her back, with a tentative but really, really positive relationship with her mum, but more than that she’s now a very literal hero.

The most obvious counterpart scenes in these chapters are with Paul and Anthem, that I’ve already mentioned - Lucy confronts a shitty dad who doesn’t look after his kids and abdicates responsibility when they’re struggling. The change that instantly strikes you is how much more badass Lucy is now - instead of chasing a guy out of a convenience store and (however magically) stabbing his car, she’s chasing a warmage while transformed into a beam of light before stabbing straight through the road and setting his car on fire with mystic runes. But she’s also far more in line with her ambition to a person who unabashedly stands up for what’s right; compare:

“Remember what I said at lunchtime?” Lucy asked, quiet.

“About needing to cut loose,” Lucy said.  “And needing backup when I do something stupid.”

with:

“Someone please tell me I can do something about this,” Lucy said, quiet.  “And that the council won’t get mad at me, or that people won’t try to stop me.”

“Lucy,” her mom said.

“If you can,” Toadswallow croaked, as he led Liberty toward a side street.  “If you can’t, that’s fine too.”

It hurt too much.

“Lucy, you really shouldn’t-” her mom started.

She knows this isn’t the sensible action, but the reason she’s doing it isn’t because she feels like acting out; it’s because she knows she’s right, and that’s why she’s ignoring Toadswallow and Jasmine instead of asking for support. That’s not to say her confronting Paul isn’t a brilliant moment or that it wasn’t incredibly impressive when it happened (it’s one of my absolute fave moments from Lucy), it’s just that she is now much more what she wanted to be back then. The other change, though, is even more important in terms of her self-perception. She’s no longer lashing out for herself, she’s taking drastic action for the sake of her friend. That’s been key to Lucy the whole time; she’s wanted to do right by her friends, and she’s finally managing that instead of just managing to keep her head above water in her own life.

However, reading the whole of both chapters gets you a more subtle, extremely touching parallel outside the drama. I hadn’t realised it was in 2.4, but this is the first time we find Lucy’s motif of being bulletproof. It’s just as striking as I remembered it:

She moved to her bedroom, and picked her clothes with a similar mindset.  She hadn’t said as much out loud to even Verona or her mom, but her mindset when it came to picking clothes was that she wanted her things to be bulletproof.  Not in the literal sense, but in the sense that it had no weak points, gave her critics nothing.  No fading, no rips, no tears, no stains.  The material was often from the higher-end athletic brands, because it was hardier and tended to hold up better over time.  Anyone who pointed and laughed at stuff branded with the Vikare swoop or the Dassler waves just looked like an idiot.

She settled on a hooded top that stopped just past the ribs.  White, sleeveless, moisture-wicking, with the Mission Canada logo on the breast.  She put it on, then immediately removed it, changing bras, before pulling it on again, so she wouldn’t be flashing hot red through the hole of the sleeve.  Her pants were looser, black, with slits all down the sides and inside of each leg, to let the air flow.  She dug sandals out of her closet and slipped them on.

Hair… clothes… the stuff she needed to put in her bag.  She included a spare umbrella, because she wanted to be triply sure she didn’t get her hair wet.  She weighed everything against the day to come.

Against the mundane day to come.

She tries incredibly hard with her appearance and presentation, and it’s clear that her classmates’ opinions and her teachers’ unfairness are getting to her - she’s struggling emotionally day-to-day, and more than that she’s struggling alone. She isn’t just hiding the practice from Jasmine, she’s hiding the problems in her normal life too.

Now we come to 18.7, and the contrast getting ready here is incredible. I think this is a deliberate callback to 2.4 - the drawn-out, detailed description of every outfit choice, the fact that it’s armour for the day/challenge to come, even the fact that in both chapters she overhears her mum talking with someone about how cool she is. But instead of her making herself bulletproof visually for the “mundane day to come” all alone, her friend and mother are helping her protect herself from violent magical danger:

Lucy handed Liberty the brassy-gold metallic marker.

Chainmail hooded sweater, runes on her neck and arms.

“Thank you for trusting me to do this,” Liberty said.  “And for the nice dinner.  It’s been a bit lonely.”

Liberty left, and Lucy’s mom came in.

“Is there enough done by Liberty, or is it clear enough for you to finish that up?” she asked her mom.

The development in her relationships and her deepened bonds and support from her mother are wonderful to see, and the payoff is made practical later - her defences hold up (just) to Slaygarrrr who Slavishly Slays, probably the most physically imposing Other she’s faced. But while rambling to my sister-in-law about this chapter and how great the character development was, she said something that made my head rattle around: this is a Homeric arming scene. And it is! In-depth descriptions of her arming and armouring herself, going into the background of special items, constant references to metal, mail and metallic-coloured decoration make this more than just her getting ready, or a call-back to 2.4; this is her being presented as an actual warrior hero. She’s moved on from worrying about school and being 13, but rather than moving on to become a mature adult like her mum or aunt in 2.4, she’s become exactly what she wanted to be - someone who takes to the battlefield to protect people.

My biggest but also most tentative takeaway from all this is that Lucy is going to beat Anthem. I think it’s going to work. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but I think in a few days we’re going to get a really satisfying resolution not just to the Tedd family drama that’s been building for a dozen arcs, but to Lucy’s arc of becoming someone who can throw down and protect her friends.  Because Wildbow is screaming at us that sure, a lot of things in Pale suck, but as a coming-of-age story it’s overwhelmingly about things getting better and our protagonists becoming more amazing in a way that we’ve never got to see in his other works. 

That theme of things getting better, by the way, brings us to another contrast between the two chapters: the Others. It’s been a long, long time since I read the Hungry Choir arc and I had completely forgotten how fucked up they are, but I’d also forgotten they come to Lucy’s home.

The sound of high voices filled the house, all at once.  Seven waifs stood in her upstairs hallway.

Five boys, two girls.  The waif closest to Lucy was a black girl, nine or so, her hair in two braids, and she had one hand at her mouth, teeth digging and chewing at her own fingertips, which were in ruined tatters.  The waif’s shoulders flinched inward as she bit through a part of her middle finger, a fresh trickle of blood running down to her elbow.  The ruined fingers of the girl’s other hand clutched at a dress with tiny flowers in a repeating pattern.

Six sets of hands seized her from behind, grabbing at her arms, the back of her collar, the back of her top.  She could feel the fingers of the one waif at her arm, grooves cut into fingertip by teeth and filled in with scabs and scars, the edges rough.  Another had ragged long fingernails, painted canary yellow where the paint hadn’t chipped.  Others were just small hands, incredibly strong.

In 2.4, the Others Lucy deals with violate her home and her privacy, they threaten her, they grab her. They leave her shaken and terrified. And now in 18.7, we have... Flopsy and Lewdtube. The cutest, most polite goblins you ever did see. They come to Lucy’s house... for dinner with her mother, who’s fine with them.

I don’t think the choice of friendly Others here, and their placement in this specific chapter is an accident; I think they were made specifically to be childish so that they form a more obvious counterpart to the Hungry Choir. This is WIldbow showing that it isn’t just Lucy who has changed, the world/people/Others around her have changed for the better too. That isn’t a coincidence - in befriending Liberty, and in helping to defeat the Hungry Choir, she has changed the world around her for the better. I’ve believed for a while that we’re going to get a happy ending to Pale and a happy ending for the trio, and it’s exactly because of things like this.