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that-ari-blogger · 8 months ago

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Amity's Fate (Escaping Expulsion)

Found family stories are fun, aren't they? They have become a dime a dozen in recent years, and I think that that's a good thing.

Family comes in varying forms, and The Owl House explores that as a core tenet. Lilith is surrounded by the theme. Belos and The Golden Guard feature it as a secondary characteristic. Luz can't escape the theme. Even Kikimora's arc deals with it.

Odalia is the main antagonist for this idea. It's her entire deal. And the way in which she acts as that familial final boss is fascinating to me.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD (The Owl House, Rise of the Guardians, One Piece, Critical Role: Campaign 1)

What makes someone "important"?

In fiction, this is rather easy to tell. A character is important if they have a significant effect on the plot, and this is usually rewarded with time in the spotlight. Most often, the most important character in the plot is the one the reader will see the most. Obviously, there are exceptions, but this is a general rule.

But in terms of real life, what exactly is it that makes someone important? And how do you define "important"?

You could argue that inventors hold this title, or entrepreneurs, or politicians, as they define the overarching structure of your world. But I would say that my friends and family have more of an influence on my personal daily life. They are the ones who have made me into who I am today.

Maybe the most important person to you is your significant other, or a teacher, or someone random on a bus who accidentally reshaped your entire worldview six years ago.

Importance of plot and importance in reality are two different things, and my take on Odalia is a weird twist on that. Odalia is important to the plot because she is completely unimportant to Amity.

The arcs surrounding Odalia, those of her children and husband, revolve around them realising that they have better parts of their lives than her. Amity, for example, spends a decent chunk of the series learning that she doesn't need Odalia in her life and that Luz and co. are a much bigger influence on her than her mother's teachings.

Essentially, Odalia is only important because people think she is. Once they realise, she fades from relevance. I think that's a really cool writing decision.

When Odalia and Alastor were introduced, back in Understanding Willow, the choice was made to obscure their character designs to silhouettes because who these people were wasn't important, and the episode focused on what they had done.

But now, the audience is treated to their full appearances, and I'd like to take that apart.

Alastor is a mess. He hasn't been bothered to get into formal attire for a business meeting, either because he doesn't own a suit or because he doesn't care. Judging by the fact he lives in a mansion, I am inclined to believe the latter. He is covered in stains from his research and wears a set of goggles to lean into the professorial atmosphere. Combine that with the unkempt hair and his design is drawing heavy inspiration from Victor Frankenstein, something I will come back to in detail in a later post.

Odalia is Amity's final evolution. Everything about her is Amity taken to the extreme. She has the same nail polish, earrings (although her earrings change between shots), and hair colour, but the hair is more tidy. Her outfit is also more regal and more purple. She is what Amity will become; a path laid out for her. It is almost as if she has sculpted Amity in her image.

Odalia's design also reminds me a lot of Mrs Tweedy from Chicken Run for reasons I cannot articulate.

Upon looking at Amity and her parents, it is obvious that Amity and her mother are related, but Alador seems like the odd one out, right? Except for two things.

Amity's hair is her means of expression in the story. When she dyes it different colours, it is an outward manifestation of her internal development. When it is left to its own devices, she has naturally brownish red hair, similar but not exactly the same as Alador.

Amity is her own person who bears a ton of similarity to her father figure. But someone, most likely herself at the behest of Odalia, has made a concerted effort to cover that up.

The other element of Amity's design that links to her father's is something nobody can cover up. Amity has her father's eyes.

Rise of the Guardians is an egregiously underrated film that I love. It deals purpose and finding joy, but its pivotal scene is relevant to the discussion of Amity and Alador.

"You have big eyes." "Yes! Big eyes, very big, because they are full of wonder That is my centre. It is what I was born with: eyes that have always seen the wonder in everything! Eyes that see lights in the trees, and magic in the air - this wonder is what I put into the world!... It is my centre. What is yours?"

Santa Claus in Rise of The Guardians is a character who relies imagination and creativity, and there is a difference in the film between born gifts and who a person chooses to be. Santa was born seeing the world differently, and he used that to create and preserve that imagination in others.

Amity and Alador both see the world in the same way. They both look at the world and see what could be. They are intelligent, but less in the restrictive, linear ideal of "being a good student", they are more inventors, and Odalia has taken that intelligence and confined it.

That, is where the final element of Odalia and Alador's character designs comes into play, their expressions.

Alador looks tired all of the time. He isn't happy at all in this episode, and he only smiles twice. His entire demeanor tells you that he doesn't want to be wherever he is.

Odalia, however, alternates between arrogant superiority and scheming gremlin, and that reveals her personality as much as her actions. Odalia believes herself superior to others and is having fun with that confidence.

Amity is presented with both of these parental figures as options for her to develop into. The series is offering a good and a bad option, but then it does something clever and takes another rout. Amity becomes her own person, informed by her father, but unique in her own way.

To my point of Odalia's practical irrelevance, it's notable that all of Odalia's influence on her daughter is impermanent. It's her clothing, hairstyle, and expression, all of which Amity drops like a stone when she starts to achieve her autonomy.

Speaking of autonomy, this episode actually has stuff happening in it.

Starting with a side note. Gus barely reacts to the threat of execution and looks more horrified by being expelled. Everyone else in this scene looks and sounds equally upset by both, with the exception of Amity's relief at the second option. But Gus doesn't make a noise and just looks surprised by incoming death, as if it's a class he doesn't particularly want to go to, but has no choice in the matter. Does that concern anyone else?

I want to point out that Amity doesn't ever look afraid of her mother. She reacts to the execution gaff similarly to everyone except Gus, but to everything else, she just looks sad. This isn't a physically abusive relationship, but an emotionally abusive one. Amity spends the entirety of this episode feeling trapped.

"Luz, was it? Please, this isn't personal. I actually appreciate your tenacity. We're just trying to teach our daughter a valuable lesson in business."

Once again, this is the end result that Odalia has set out for Amity, complete uncaring ambition.

Now, I am not skilled in the art of business, I know that one line from A Muppets Christmas Carrol and that's about it. But I think Luz's response to Odalia is pretty neat.

"How does this teach anything? We're still gonna be friends with her. I'm calling applesauce on this business baloney!"

I do have to thank the writers of The Owl House for making Luz's dialect so incomprehensibly Luz, because it makes navigating the transcript (link) so much easier.

Anyway, as Luz points out, Odalia is just petty here. She is seeking revenge against her daughter for messing up her business promotion and is leveraging her unrivaled power to do so. She's not as uncaring as she thinks, and to her credit, she realises this in the moment.

But, Odalia is still cruel and entitled, being self aware doesn't diminish her villainy, and so she offers Amity' position to Luz. She has a mould, and she doesn't particularly care who fills it, just that it is filled. Odalia is another villain in this series who represents that theme of constraint.

Luz's dialect is actually important in this scene, because it positions her as a thematic opposite to Odalia. Luz doesn't care about the rules of "polite conversation" and will say whatever nonsense comes to her head if it gets the point across. Luz is free in her verbal expression, and Odalia restricts that of her family to barely a word.

However, Luz doesn't confront Odalia on a thematic level. The themes of the story are expressed through Luz's sheer presence, but in this situation, she isn't actively trying to prove the superiority of her worldview. Instead, she applies more of a Monkey D. Luffy approach.

For those who haven't read One Piece, Monkey D. Luffy (Third from the left) is a character who wants to be the freest man in the world. His antagonist is the World Government, who is restrictive and oppressive, and Luffy exists to oppose abuse of authority and injustice.

Luffy doesn't actively do this. He doesn't really care about the theming of his own story, it just happens around him. Repeatedly in the series, most notably in Enies Lobby and Arlong Park, Luffy declares comes into conflict with villainous powers who thematically oppose him. But, he doesn't confront them because of that theme, but because they hurt his friends.

Luz does the same thing across The Owl House, taking on Belos and Lilith in season one because she doesn't like how they treat Eda, and taking on Odalia here because she doesn't like how she treats Amity.

If you look closely, she actually does it twice in this very episode.

"Luz, you don't have to do that." "Yes, I do. Willow and Gus don't deserve this."

Luz gives in and takes up Odalia's offer to protect her friends, not because Odalia is nebulously villainous.

Back to Amity, she doesn't get as many actual lines in this episode as usual, but she is very much present in every scene she shows up in. From the silence, to the expressions, to the frustrated growling at every hinderance. Her worlds are colliding, and she can't keep everything under control.

This hits a breaking point with the confrontation.

"No, you're gonna listen to me for once. Luz, Willow and Gus are my friends! They're nice to each other, they listen to each other. They make me think about the kind of person I really want to be!"

Let's talk about Taryon Darrington.

Critical Role is a D&D live play that is currently in its third campaign. Halfway through the first campaign, the audience and players were introduced to the character of Taryon Darington, an artificer and human disaster in the most positive of ways.

I genuinely love Taryon, and have an entire post in the works dedicated to him and his significance for TTRPG culture as a whole, so I won't dwell too much here. Suffice to say this: Taryon's parental situation is similar to Amity's, in that his father viewed all of the Darington estate as means to an end, without the care and affection necessary to actually raise a family. When Taryon confronted him, he gave a speech remarkably similar to Amity's in Escaping Expulsion.

"In my year of travel, I didn't just dilly-dally around the world having fun. I was learning about the world and about life and about family. I was learning from these fine people what it means to really be a family, and care about each other. I learned from Grog and Vax what it means to be a man, and to be a father. I learned from Pike what it means to be a caring mother. I learned from Keyleth what a real sister is like, one who loves you and cares for you. I learned from Vex what a best friend is like. These are things you never gave us, growing up. I even learned from Percival, the type of man I would want to marry one day."

This is a speech of separation. It says officially that Howaardt (Taryon's father) has no bearing on his actions, and that Taryon will go about his life without a care for the foolishness of his father's actions. It is claiming autonomy, and it is pointing out that Howaardt was only important to Taryon because he told him so, in reality, the connection was minimal.

Amity's little speech is the same. She is proclaiming that she doesn't need Odalia's fake affection and conditional acceptance. She wants to be around her friends, as they make her into a better person. Amity is more influenced by the actions of those she surrounds herself with than her mother.

Most of all, Amity is influenced by Luz and the example she sets. Light, do not faulter.

That's some good found family storytelling, right there.

Final Thoughts

Odalia and Amity's story will continue until the end of the series, but it really ends with season two's penultimate episode, which I will get to.

I wanted to do a whole thing on how purple is associated with wealth because of sea snails (its more complicated than that), but I couldn't figure out a way of putting it in the post and relating it to the abominations and Amity's hair dye later on in the series.

I didn't talk about Eda and Lilith discovering more nuanced glyph magic, and that's because... I don't like the writing in those scenes. This episode is really good overall, but the dialogue in Lilith and Eda's scenes doesn't sit right with me, it feels too simple, like it's trying too hard to be turned into memes. But that's just my opinion.

Next week, I am looking at Echoes of the Past, so stick around if that interests you.

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