#reminder that calling her 'badeline' Could Not Be More Incorrect and she deserves better

[elyvorg]

Celeste Chapter 9: When Your Self Returns The Favour

Celeste already had a solid, self-contained story that reaches a wonderfully satisfying conclusion. When I heard that a bonus chapter was on its way, I wasn't really expecting it to have much story to it, because I didn't really think there was any significantly more story that needed to be told here. It was probably a little naive of me to think that, really. Regardless of how lovely the original ending was, of course Madeline's mental illness was never gone, and so it is indeed quite possible to show her facing a new, different struggle, since life can always throw you curveballs to make things worse again.

The thing is, it would have been so easy to write this chapter such that it simply rehashed the exact same kind of conflict the main story had between Madeline and her Shadow (that's what I'll be calling Part of Her in this post, just like I did in my other one, which I recommend you read first if you haven't already). But what's really great about chapter 9 is that that's not what happens at all. What we get instead is a story which serves rather beautifully as something of a mirror image of before, while also illustrating exactly why the conclusion that was reached last time and the message of that story was so, so important.

Spoilery levels of detail incoming, obviously, for both chapter 9 and the main story. If you haven't played Celeste already, you still very much should (but maybe only watch chapter 9 unless you're insanely good at platformers).

On its surface, chapter 9 is a story about dealing with grief. And that alone is great enough, although I'm not really the one to talk about why that particular aspect of it is so good, both because I can't personally relate to this kind of struggle, and because things being a dream mean it gets quite symbolic and I'm not super well-versed in interpreting that kind of symbolism. (I'd be really interested to see other people's thoughts on that aspect, though, if any exist!) But what I love most about the chapter and am going to talk about at length here is how the grief presents a new challenge for Madeline to overcome that serves as a basis for even more of the really delightful character writing of Madeline and her Shadow that Celeste is so good at. It explores the concept of Shadows - the part of you that you repress from the surface, which is what Part of Madeline is and why I'm calling her that - in ways that I'd never really considered before, even though I love this concept enough to have thought about it a lot outside of a Celeste context as well.

Madeline's regression

So, Madeline had grown very close to Granny in the intervening years, such that when Granny passed away, Madeline completely couldn't handle it and fell apart to the point that her depression and anxiety, which she'd started to have somewhat under control, got the better of her again. The chapter itself begins when at some point, things get so bad that Madeline goes and has an elaborate, deeply psychological dream born of her desperation to convince herself that Granny isn't truly gone somehow. Granny simply being alive again would be too obviously impossible for her to be able to fool herself with, though, so instead her mind comes up with the vaguely more plausible idea that the bird was Part of Granny (who knows? Maybe it actually was! But that doesn't really matter here because this is just in Madeline's head), and that if Part of Granny is still around then maybe Granny can somehow be brought back. Her justifications change all the time throughout the dream as to what exactly she is planning to do by chasing after the bird - bring Granny back, set Granny free, save Granny. At one point her Shadow tries to ask her what her endgame is, because she very clearly doesn't actually have one. She's just being driven by a desperate desire to not give up on Granny, somehow, however that can be achieved, because in the end all Madeline wants is to not wake up back to a world with no Granny in it.

It also appears that Madeline's grief has caused her to regress somewhat in the way she's thinking of her Shadow. Last time on the Mountain, Madeline thought of her Shadow as bad and monstrous and the source of all her problems that she'd be fine if she could just get rid of. By the end she'd learned that was wrong, that her Shadow was an unremovable part of her whom she needed to accept and work with and be kind to, because after all, she's still her. Presumably she spent most of the intervening years doing just that, as you'd expect after she'd learned how important that was. But here we can see Madeline slipping back into old habits from before the Mountain: "I'm done letting her hold me back", when her Shadow shouldn't have been holding her back for a while now; "Just shut up and help me for once", when she understood in the end that her Shadow has always been trying to help her; that one bit in the tutorial, which was all from Madeline's thoughts since this is a dream, saying "And Part of You won't help (she's the worst)", when no, she isn't, you should know this, Madeline.

The reason Madeline's started doing this again seems to be about her fervently disagreeing with the way her Shadow has been trying to get them to deal with Granny's death. Based on the conversations they have about it, it seems Shadow Madeline has been trying to run away from their pain by pushing them to just get over it and move on so that they'll stop hurting. (Which is to say, even outside of the dream in which she can actually talk to her Shadow, Madeline knows there's a part of her beneath the surface that's been secretly wanting that.) It's not the healthiest approach to try and act like Granny's death doesn't hurt when it still does, but at least there is an actual reachable end goal here of having moved on. This is Shadow Madeline trying to do her job as Madeline's defence mechanism and keep her functioning!

But Madeline can't stand the fact that a part of her wants to be okay with the fact that Granny's gone, so instead she lashes out at her Shadow again while trying to run away from her pain in the complete opposite direction, by running away from the very idea of Granny being truly gone in the first place. This is considerably more unhealthy than Shadow Madeline's approach, because doing so is straight-up not possible. Every reminder that Granny really is gone and there's nothing Madeline can do about it (symbolised, I assume, by the bird flying away from her and not wanting her to catch it) is just going to bring her pain back up to the surface and make things even worse as she tries harder and harder to deny it (she totally can catch that bird anyway, just you watch her give herself a tutorial on exactly how to do so). Partway through the chapter, the environment around her begins to distort and crumble, which I imagine is a representation of the damaging levels to which Madeline is trying to force herself to keep denying reality even as it becomes more and more obvious that she simply can’t change Granny's fate. Shadow Madeline's approach may not have been completely ideal, but Madeline's approach is far more decidedly not the right way to deal with this and is just making everything considerably worse.

Shadow Madeline's growth

So I know that in my previous Celeste post I linked at the beginning, I made a big point of how your Shadow is the weaker part of you. But chapter 9 made me realise something I’d never really thought about before: that that's not necessarily true! "The weaker part of you" is not inherently the definition of a Shadow; a Shadow simply the part of you that you suppress from the surface. That usually constitutes the weaker part of someone, since most people are usually trying to be strong on the surface, doing their best to overcome their problems and get through things in spite of the part of them that feels like they just can't. But that doesn't always have to be the case. In this chapter, Madeline is consciously thinking and acting in a way that is ultimately her being unable to deal with this and trying to take the easy way out. On the surface, she's being weak. But beneath that, her inner strength is still there - which is to say, in this context, her Shadow is still able to be strong. Not perfectly strong, because she was still pushing a bit too much to just move on while ignoring how much it hurts, but she is being stronger than Madeline by trying to move on in the first place.

And it's only thanks to the more positive outlook and behaviour that her Shadow has developed, because of the kindness with which Madeline learned to treat her on the Mountain, that she can be this way now. Madeline may have regressed somewhat in the progress she made on the Mountain, but Shadow Madeline very much has not. It is so lovely to see how much she's still holding onto what she learned back then. She's a lot more willingly open about how scared and unnerved she is by where Madeline is going with this, because she knows that it's okay to be scared and that voicing that won't make Madeline ashamed of her or try to push her away any more. There's no more need for her to cover that up by being biting and cruel about Madeline's recklessness. It's not quite that Shadow Madeline has completely stopped with the negative self-talk that she used to be an embodiment of; right at the beginning, there's some brief hints of that - "you didn't even go to the funeral"; "sorry won't bring her back", representing the ways Madeline has been harsh on herself for falling apart. But very quickly, Shadow Madeline seems to remember that that isn't helpful and quits with it for the rest of the chapter.

Quite possibly this is because Madeline immediately leaps into her reckless crusade of denial, and Shadow Madeline realises that she needs to help her. Last time, on the Mountain, she was still on some level trying to do her job as Madeline's defence mechanism and keep her safe, but Madeline's lifetime of pushing her away and ignoring her made Shadow Madeline convinced that simply talking to her about it would never work, and so she needed to resort to force. This only made things worse, because Madeline is so stubborn that she'd only ever respond to that by pushing back even harder in the opposite direction and exacerbating the clash between them even more. But this time, Shadow Madeline knows that, so on no level is she ever trying to force Madeline to stop. She says it herself: "I'm not forcing you. I'm asking you." Madeline's spent long enough in the intervening years making an effort to listen to her Shadow's thoughts and not shut her away, and so Shadow Madeline is now completely able to trust that Madeline will eventually listen to her now as well. All she needs to do is be patient and keep gently trying to persuade her. There's one point during their second conversation where she seems to be about to get angry and forceful like she did so often last time, but then she catches herself, breathes, and continues more calmly, because she knows that anger won't make Madeline listen to her.

On the Mountain, trying to persuade Madeline to stop was not necessarily the right thing to do. Climbing the Mountain was reckless and dangerous, but it was actually possible and Madeline did have a fairly healthy reason to want it, to prove to herself that she could achieve great things and get emotionally stronger. On the other hand, running away from a loved one's death by convincing herself she can bring them back somehow if she just tries hard enough is not healthy and not possible and she does need to be stopped from doing this. Last time, Shadow Madeline was trying to stop Madeline partly out of genuinely wanting to protect her, but also a lot out of her own hidden fear of being left behind if Madeline made it. She was mostly just telling herself she was the pragmatic part of Madeline to cover up the fact that she felt scared and useless and Madeline probably didn't need her after all. However, this time, she's trying to get Madeline to stop this for no reason other than to help her, and she's going about it in a diplomatic, non-aggressive way that she knows will eventually work. Shadow Madeline really is being the pragmatic part of her now!

One might think that, while she's waiting for Madeline to stop being stubborn and face reality, it would also be pragmatic for Shadow Madeline to keep helping her through the platforming anyway just to try and keep her safe. And I feel like she would probably want to do that, hypothetically; the second time she disappears, it's not without a "Good luck", like she's hoping that Madeline will be okay and would be offering more than well-wishes if she could. But as she says just before disappearing the first time: "I can't help you with this". Not that she won't, but that she can't, as if she's literally incapable of it, which I think really could be the case. Madeline's irrational desire to keep going with this is something that she's only clinging to on the surface - meaning that her Shadow, the repressed part of her, is not the part of her that wants to do this at all. Since this is a dream and therefore all very abstract and psychological, the part of Madeline that isn't in denial over Granny's death literally cannot help her along the abstract representation of her surface denial. Both times Shadow Madeline leaves, Madeline is barely forcing her to and it really seems more like it's the Shadow's own choice to do so. Yet it's not that she's actively trying to be unhelpful at all; she just knows that she can't do anything else in this situation.

Saving her self

But... this is all just a dream, right? Madeline's not actually in any danger from all the insane platforming, so what would her Shadow really be keeping her safe from here, anyway? At one point, Shadow Madeline mentions that she's worried about Madeline getting "lost" up here, but at that point, she's definitely aware that this is a dream because she says as much a few lines later in the same conversation - so what does getting "lost" even mean in this context, and why is Shadow Madeline so worried about it?

...Consider Theo at the end, who completely understood that Madeline's anxiety and depression had probably got so bad that she wasn't in the mood to talk to him and was totally cool about that - but he at least wanted to know she was alive. As if he'd have a reason to worry she might not be when he knew her mental illness would be giving her a hard time. And, much more tellingly, remember the part just after Madeline catches the bird the second time and it's trying to fly away again. She tells herself once more that it's totally Part of Granny and then says, "If you have to go, then... Take me with you." Take her... to the place where Granny went?

Madeline was beginning to contemplate suicide.

Maybe only in a very abstract sense at that point, but the thought process was forming.

And Shadow Madeline knew it, because it's right at that moment that she reappears in front of Madeline and desperately tells her to stop. She makes her intent very clear later in that same conversation when she says, "I just want us to survive this." Shadow Madeline is the part of Madeline that wants to keep living no matter how hard it is, the part that Madeline herself was in danger of pushing away and ignoring because she was too caught up in her grief and denial of reality. By talking Madeline out of this the way she manages to do here, Shadow Madeline is successfully doing her job as a legitimate, non-twisted defence mechanism. She literally saves their life.

There is no way Shadow Madeline would ever have been able to achieve this if they hadn't gone to Celeste Mountain in the first place and learned what they did there. Of course, then they also wouldn't have met Granny, but even without Granny, something similarly traumatic could have happened to Madeline to send her down this same kind of spiral - and in that situation, her Shadow would have done nothing but push back and be cruel and harsh on her and make everything several times worse. But not here! Which is what is so incredibly lovely about this whole chapter. Shadow Madeline was able to save Madeline only because of the newfound strength and kindness she's gained since last time, which in turn is only because of the strength and kindness Madeline started showing her, back when Madeline had been the stronger one.

One innocuous part that I love is when you die a bunch of times on the last and hardest screen, there's a small exchange where Madeline is starting to doubt if they'll ever make it, and her Shadow encourages her to keep trying and that they can do this. It's such a great reversal of how things were when they were climbing the Mountain together in chapter 7. Back then, Shadow Madeline was the one with doubts and Madeline was the one affirming that they could make it, because then her Shadow still represented the repressed part of her that didn't truly believe in herself. But now, thanks to everything Madeline learned and has been employing since last time, that underlying core of her psyche has become strong! Madeline's Shadow can genuinely believe in her now when she herself can't. Her Shadow is able to push them to keep going even when Madeline is starting to think about giving up - and that's true not only very literally in terms of the abstract dream platforming they're doing together at the end, but also in a more meaningful, overall sense in terms of their life.

And I just think this whole idea is absolutely freaking beautiful?

Be kind to your Shadow, not just because they deserve it, but because a day might come when you'll need them to be kind to you.