#she’s so crazzyyyyyyy!! love her

[comraderoscoes]

[thelivingmemegod]

Belief in wayward children is soooo interesting to me

Spoilers for Every Heart a Doorway and Where Drowned girls go ahead

The act of believing is absolutely integral to this series. On some level: everyone knows the doors are real,

The people at the twin schools believe this to be fact, even if Whitethorn is designed to brainwash the belief out of its students and the teachers are nameless.

The principal, real and fake, both believe these doors are real, the kids on some level, believe these doors are real.

Cora starts Where Drowned Girls Go fully believing in The Doors and The Moors and the drowned gods that haunt her, she wants that haunting to stop so badly that she goes to whitethorn. There, they begin “teaching her to forget”

And yet.

She never forgets, she aches and yearns like everyone else there. She aches to feel water surround her, but she believes this is “helping” in so far as the rainbows and voices are fading and that will keep being the case as long as she stays up for air. It’s illustrated when she’s listening to Regan struggle during her “graduation”.

“Cora wouldn’t wait to be a Jack-o-lantern. Anything that meant she was still Cora in some way, and not the puppet of the Drowned Gods. She listened to Regan and she yearned, wishing with everything she had to be in the other girl’s shoes.”

Everyone aches and everyone years until they can bend themselves into the box whitethorn wants and then they can leave. Maybe.

Then Sumi shows up. The ultimate, absolute immovable object. She believes in what she wants and will bend and snap any system like perfectly tempered chocolate if it tries to change her. She knows for full blown fact how her story ends, she knows she goes home and she can extended that knowing to others, Cora included.

Cora comes to be a little more like Sumi, believing that she is more than strong enough to face down the Drowned Gods and tell them no. And she is. She makes their rainbows her own and she stops hearing their voices and plots an escape route for them all.

Cora and Sumi are good case studies on what belief can do in this world and that brings me to the reason Every Heart a Doorway is in the spoilers.

Doctor Katherine Lundy.

Kade says during the first book that Lundy thinks in stories. She thinks in beginnings, middles and endings.

Lundy is given a very high position of power, Eleanor’s right hand and the kids therapist, she uses this power well and treats her patients kindly. The kids love her, Eleanor loves her, Kade loves her and she loves them all in turn.

Everyone trusts Lundy

Everyone believes Lundy.

So when she tells the kids that lightning is more likely to strike twice in the same place than they are to find their door home, they believe her.

This is a belief Lundy carries into her grave and I think it’s a belief that dies with her.

The Wolcott twins go home after she dies, Nancy goes home shortly after everything has settled, a door from Confection opens DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THE SCHOOL at the end of Where Drowned Girls Go.

It’s easier to openly believe in an everyday nightmare then to admit you believe in a beautiful dream, so the kids took Lundy at her word and locked up any hope they had left. Especially when the only women with a counter opinion accidentally looks like a hypocrite because her door is literally still there waiting for her.

I think Lundy’s belief leaked out into the students and kept many of them there. Of course this doesn’t make her bad or a villain by any means. I think she’s a testament to words having mass, unintended affects on people. Affects so deep it can change the very world around them.

I don’t know how to end this ramble thingy but I needed to thought vomit about these books they make me crazzyyyyyyy