Today, no screenwriter could get away with it.

If you pitch a major antagonist in 2026 with no psychological scaffolding, no trauma to explain, no system to implicate in his violence, you will be asked: Why? What broke him? What did his parents do? The answer “he is simply evil” reads now not as a chilling truth but as lazy writing, a failure of empathy, a creative abdication. The perfect villain, the monolith of unexplained darkness that once dominated our screens and pages, is dead. In his place stands the tragic figure, the man who broke the law because the system forced his hand, the assassin with a conscience, the monster you cannot help but root for.

This shift is real, documented, and relatively recent. It is also, perhaps, a catastrophe disguised as progress.

The Monolith and the Mirror

To understand what has died, you have to remember what lived. Hannibal Lecter spent only 16 minutes on screen in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and in that brief appearance, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar. The performance was almost entirely surface: impeccable manners, a humming serenity, the promise of terrifying intelligence. He was a force of pure appetite and intellect, and there was no part of him that asked you to forgive him. Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971) was beautiful and articulate and completely unredeemable. Michael Myers killed without motive. These villains worked because they were inexplicable. They were evil not as a response to circumstance, but as a base condition, something more like physics than psychology.

The contemporary villain works differently. When The Sopranos premiered in 1999, it did something that seemed impossible: it made a serial killer the focus of narrative sympathy. Tony Soprano was a man who murdered people, betrayed his family, and lived in corrosive contradiction with himself. But he also went to therapy. He had panic attacks. He loved his children in a complicated way and hated his mother with perfect clarity. You understood him because you understood the ache of his particularity. The show did not ask you to forgive him. It asked you to see him.

That was the inflection point. After The Sopranos, the antihero became the dominant form in prestige television. Breaking Bad refined it into a clean formula: a good man, placed in extremity, forced to become monstrous. Walter White was a high-school chemistry teacher humiliated by life, dying of cancer, staring at the wreckage of his unlived ambitions. When he manufactured methamphetamine, he was not simply evil. He was desperate, intelligent, betrayed by circumstance. Creator Vince Gilligan called it “Mr. Chips into Scarface.” That arc required explanation. It required psychology. Most crucially, it required the audience to understand the man before condemning the monster.

By the 2010s, complexity became the default. Killmonger in Black Panther (2018) was a villain with a legitimate grievance and a political argument. Villanelle in Killing Eve was a psychopathic assassin who won Emmy and BAFTA awards for a performance built on charisma and vulnerability. The Front Man in Squid Game (2021) was revealed as a victim of the same system he enforced. In every case, the pattern held: give the antagonist a reason. Make him sympathetic. Turn the audience into moral collaborators in his atrocity.

The defense of this shift is obvious and compelling. Complex characters are more interesting than cardboard cutouts. Understanding villainy is more intellectually respectable than simply condemning it. And there’s something almost compassionate in the gesture: even the worst of us are human. We all have stories. We all have been shaped by forces beyond our control.

The problem is that this gesture of compassion may be something else entirely. It may be the sound of a culture that has lost faith in the very categories of good and evil, and is trying to hide that loss by calling it sophistication.

The Institutional Collapse

In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. By 2004, that had fallen to 36 percent. In 2024, it was 22 percent. Among Democrats alone, it hit a record low of 9 percent in December 2025.

That’s one metric among many pointing toward the same catastrophe. Confidence in Congress is at 9 to 11 percent. Confidence in organized religion collapsed from a majority (60 percent in 2001) to 31 percent in 2022, the lowest on record, with only a modest recovery to 36 percent in 2025. A recent study from Daedalus, published by MIT Press, documented fifty years of declining confidence in nearly every American institution you can name.

This is not the background noise of politics. This is structural. This is a society that has stopped believing that its institutions are capable of doing the right thing, and has largely stopped believing that the concept of “the right thing” is even coherent. When you no longer trust Congress to represent your interests, or the military to protect rather than dominate, or the police to serve rather than punish, or the church to be anything other than a vestige of authority, then the entire moral vocabulary that those institutions once guaranteed begins to dissolve. Good and evil become uncertain. The law becomes a tool of the corrupt. The system becomes the villain.

And so we stop creating villains who defy the system. We start creating villains who are crushed by it.

Scholar Siobhan Lyons, writing in the Canadian Review of American Studies, argues that the antihero’s rise “coincides with the attacks on the World Trade Center,” when “scrutiny around the US government’s motivations… illustrated the inherent hypocrisies of formally ‘legitimate’ institutions.” After 9/11, after Iraq, after the financial crisis and the surveillance revelations and the slow, grinding recognition that the major institutions of American life were fundamentally corrupt, we stopped believing in pure evil. We started believing in systems that destroy good men.

When you watch Squid Game and understand that capitalism itself is the villain, you have stopped caring about individual malevolence. The Front Man is sympathetic not despite being monstrous, but because the system he serves is worse. When Walter White cooks meth to pay for his cancer treatment, the true villain is American healthcare. When Killmonger has a legitimate point about colonialism, the true villain is white supremacy. The individual antagonist becomes almost irrelevant. The system becomes everything.

This is not, let me be clear, an incorrect reading of those stories. The systems are terrible. The institutions are corrupt. But notice what has happened: moral judgment has been outsourced to explanation. Understanding why someone committed atrocity has become ethically equivalent to accepting it. We have replaced the question “Is this evil?” with “Can we explain it?” And those are not the same question.

The Evasion Disguised as Empathy

Stephanie Zacharek, the film critic for TIME, has become increasingly direct about this. “From Cruella to Maleficent to the Joker: Is It Time to Retire the Villain Origin Story?” her headline asks. “These films don’t illuminate the mystery of human behavior. They merely stitch a diagnosis to it, the equivalent of the psychiatrist’s intentionally drab monologue at the end of Psycho, but without Hitchcock’s final, chilly kicker, the acknowledgment that in the end, there’s evil in the world that just can’t be rationally explained.”

Emily Nussbaum, the television critic for The New Yorker, coined the term “Bad Fan” to describe viewers who reveled in the morality-bending sympathy that prestige television demanded. The Bad Fan loved Walter White even as the show screamed at them to hate him. The Bad Fan sympathized with Don Draper’s cruelty. The Bad Fan rooted for Tony Soprano’s murders. And instead of recognizing this as a moral failure, the culture of television had begun to celebrate it as sophistication. We had become people who could watch a man poison a child and argue about whether he had good reasons.

Even the creators have begun to notice the problem. Vince Gilligan, who invented Walter White, told The New Yorker in 2022 that he was disturbed by how many people had continued rooting for his protagonist long after he had stopped rooting for him. “It surprises me actually that people still root for him,” Gilligan said. “I kind of stopped rooting for him as his creator quite a while back.” And here’s the unsettling part: “What is it people like about Darth Vader? Is it that he’s so evil or is it that he’s so good at his job?” We like competence more than goodness. We like the cold beauty of ruthlessness more than the messy difficulty of actual virtue.

Even more unsettling is what Gilligan said he wants to do next. “I want to write an old-fashioned hero,” he told the magazine. “An old-fashioned good guy. Because, you know, when I was conceiving of Walter White fifteen years ago… now there’s an awful lot of bad guys on TV, and not just on shows but on the news. It feels like a world of shitheels now, both in fiction and in real life.”

Notice the despair in that statement. Notice how creating an antihero felt, in 2008, like moral sophistication, and now feels like surrender. Gilligan’s pivot is not random. It is a confession. We have so thoroughly internalized the idea that everyone is compromised, that all systems are corrupt, that pure evil and pure goodness are impossible, that we no longer know how to tell a story about a person who simply tries to do the right thing. That seems, now, like naive fantasy.

The Ghost of Pure Evil

But here is where the story becomes more complicated, and more interesting.

Pure evil has not actually died. It has merely retreated.

Walk into a horror film, and you will find the perfect villain alive and well. Michael Myers still wears his blank mask. Pennywise still floats in the sewers of Derry. Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men is closer to inevitability than to humanity, a force of violence without psychology or redemption arc, moving through the moral landscape like an agent of entropy. These characters endure because horror, as a genre, has always been built on the premise that some things cannot be understood or redeemed. They simply exist. They simply destroy. That is enough.

And this genre distinction matters. It means the claim that “audiences have stopped enjoying pure evil” is false. What we can say more precisely is this: in realist prestige drama, in crime television, in the spaces where we pretend to be documenting actual human behavior, complexity has become mandatory. But in the spaces where we are allowed to be mythic, where we are allowed to believe in inexplicable darkness, the monolith survives.

This is revealing. It suggests that our hunger for complex villains is not a sign of moral growth. It is a sign of something else entirely: the assumption that the real world is fundamentally inexplicable through moral categories. Our stories about realistic people must be non-moral. Our stories about monsters can still be purely moral. We have split ourselves in half.

There is another complication. Complex villains are not new. They are not even particularly modern. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost was so sympathetic that William Blake claimed to be “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” and the Romantic poets spent the nineteenth century rehabilitating him into a tragic hero. The Byronic hero, that beautiful, tormented, morally compromised figure, has been a staple of literature since Byron invented him. Dostoevsky made moral ambiguity the central technique of the novel. Villainy with psychological depth is not a contemporary invention. It is a contemporary mass market intensification of something that artists have always known: that the most interesting stories are the ones where you cannot easily separate the evil from the human.

So the question is not whether complex villains are good. The question is whether the explosion of this form, the collapse of the pure monolith into a spectrum of greyness, tells us something true about culture in the 2020s.

The answer is yes. It tells us that we have stopped believing in institutional power to define morality. It tells us that we trust psychology more than law, explanation more than judgment. It tells us that when we encounter atrocity, our first instinct is no longer to condemn it, but to understand it, to find the wound that caused it, to make it sympathetic.

This is, perhaps, more compassionate than the old way. But compassion is not always the same thing as justice. And a world in which every evil can be explained away is a world in which no one is truly responsible for anything.

There I stood, surrounded by over 100 books, heritage posters, clothing ranges bearing the Titanic logo, jewellery, local crafts, artisanal soaps. A branded tote bag cost fourteen pounds. A navy hoodie with the White Star Line insignia cost thirty-five. There were mugs. There were fridge magnets. The museum’s marketing promise is “a lasting memory of your visit,” which is one way to describe what happens when you hand over cash for merchandise tied to the deaths of 1,500 people and walk out unsure whether you’ve just participated in education or exploitation.

I stood there for several minutes doing something I almost never do in gift shops: actually thinking about whether I should buy anything. The question was not “do I want this?” It was something closer to “is this okay?” Museum gift shops are ubiquitous, functional, necessary. But Titanic Belfast is not selling posters of medieval tapestries or replicas of Egyptian amulets. It is selling an association with disaster. The question is not whether that’s unusual. The question is whether it is ethical, and the honest answer is this: it depends almost entirely on information the museum does not publicly disclose.

Titanic Belfast's commercial operation tells a story about how we've learned to package catastrophe. The museum, which opened in 2012 for the sinking's centenary, is owned by the Maritime Belfast Trust (a charity) but operated as a for-profit company ultimately controlled by developer Pat Doherty's Harcourt Developments. In the financial year ending March 2025, it reported revenue of £22.7 million and a pre-tax profit of £3.79 million on approximately 870,000 visitors. The museum describes itself as "committed to celebrating the city's maritime heritage and the people who built Titanic, whilst commemorating those who lost their lives during the tragic sinking."

Note the order of those claims.

The museum's chief executive has called it "a commercial operation with a heart," which is perhaps the most honest thing anyone in Belfast has said about it. Commercial it certainly is. The gift shop carries merchandise that reviewers describe variously as "well-stocked and reasonably priced" and, more frequently, as "tacky," "overpriced," and "the kind of tat you could buy with a pound shop logo." The gap between those reviews reflects a genuine tension: is this a serious memorial, a heritage attraction, or a theme park? Titanic Belfast answers: yes.

This ambiguity is intentional. The actual victims' memorial is elsewhere, a separate 1920 plaque at Belfast City Hall where an annual remembrance service is held on 15 April. The museum occupies the Harland and Wolff shipyard where the Titanic was built, and it foregrounds that narrative above all: here is where she was made, here is our pride, here is our loss. The shipyard ride lets you experience the ship's construction; the exhibits celebrate the labour of working-class Belfast. The dead are mentioned, respectfully, but they are not the story. The story is "we built her." This distinction matters ethically in ways the industry has learned to exploit.

The Titanic was commodified almost before it sank. Pressed-tin cigarette cases advertising the maiden voyage were produced and marketed. Post-sinking, memorial plaquettes appeared immediately, along with relics and souvenir reproductions. But the decisive shift from tragedy to brand came in two distinct waves.

The first was Robert Ballard's discovery of the wreck in 1985, which made the ship real again, located, graspable. The second, far more consequential, was James Cameron's 1997 film, which grossed $1.84 billion on initial release and held the record for highest-grossing film of all time for over a decade. That film did something remarkable: it made the Titanic profitable at a scale and duration that no historical event had previously achieved. Scholarship on this phenomenon is blunt about it. A 2013 study in the Journal of Consumer Research explicitly analysed the Titanic as "the unsinkable brand," and noted that "branding Titanic in this way may seem distasteful, bordering on obscene, but it is in keeping with the recent turn to dark tourism."

The authors were correct on both counts. It is distasteful. And it is in keeping with what we've decided to do with catastrophe.

The Titanic is an excellent object for commodification because it contains multitudes of victims, heroes, and villains, each with their own merchandise angle. You can sell the romance, the class struggle, the industrial hubris, the luxury and waste. Each angle moves product. RMS Titanic Inc., the legally recognized salvor of the wreck, sells certificates of authenticity for chunks of coal recovered from the ship, materializing the dead into purchasable fragments. The Titanic has been optioned for countless documentaries, dramas, musicals, novels, graphic novels, comic books, video games, and one memorably grim musical about the sinking. Today, over a century later, the Titanic generates revenue reliably and without guilt.

Titanic Belfast arrived into that ecosystem in 2012, built on a wave of centenary interest and public funding. Tourism Northern Ireland contributed £36.95 million to a roughly £76 million project. The museum was positioned as heritage, education, and regeneration: it would restore pride to a shipbuilding city, tell the story of working-class labour, and commemorate the victims respectfully. This is not a false promise. Titanic Belfast does do those things. It also makes approximately £3.79 million annually in pre-tax profit while operating a gift shop that visitors consistently describe as tawdry, and while declining to publicly explain where that money actually goes.

There is a scholarly framework for this. It's called dark tourism, a term that encompasses any tourism motivated by an interest in death, disaster, or the grotesque. Philip Stone, the leading academic theorist, created a spectrum running from what he calls "Dark Fun Factories" (light, commercial, entertainment-focused) to the "darkest" sites (places of actual death and commemoration). Auschwitz sits at the dark end. Chernobyl is mid-spectrum. Titanic Belfast, with its interactive "shipyard ride" and branded merchandise, sits comfortably at the light, commercial end.

This positioning is defensible. The ship is not there, the remains are a protected war grave 4,000 metres down in the Atlantic, and the victims are not on display. But it creates a perverse incentive structure: once you're at the light, entertainment end of the spectrum, the ethical guardrails weaken. No one expects a theme park to refuse profit in the name of solemnity. No one expects Disneyland to hide its gift shops because they're adjacent to a narrative about death.

The problem, then, becomes: what counts as respect when respect is not the primary organizational logic?

Auschwitz-Birkenau has no traditional gift shop. It has bookstores, but they sell educational material only: no Auschwitz-branded snow domes, no ashtrays, no novelty items that flatten historical horror into kitsch. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum operates a specialized bookstore. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem does the same. The institutional rule is simple: merchandise must educate or commemorate. Novelty items are excluded. When the 9/11 Memorial Museum opened its gift shop in 2014, it ignited immediate outrage from victims' families. Jim Riches, a retired FDNY member whose son was killed in the attacks, told CNN: "I think that's disgusting. I think they're making money off of my son's dead body." The Washington Post and CNN both ran critical coverage. The controversy was especially acute because the 9/11 Museum houses approximately 8,000 unidentified human remains, meaning the gift shop was, quite literally, adjacent to the dead.

The museum defended itself by pointing to financial necessity. Spokesman Anthony Guido told NBC News that between 60 and 70 percent of the museum's annual operating costs, roughly $60 million per year, come from gift-shop and admission revenue. The implication was clear: you can have either ethics or operations, not both.

Titanic Belfast has avoided this specific fury, partly because the disaster is 113 years old and partly because there are no remains on site. Partly also because it operates in a different cultural context. But the underlying transaction is identical: you visit a place where catastrophe happened, you purchase an object to remember the visit, the institution profits from the association between death and purchase. The only variable is whether anyone is morally unwell enough to ask where the money goes.

If you want to understand whether the Titanic Belfast gift shop is defensible, you need to understand how other disaster sites have handled the same choice, and you need to ask one specific question of each: can I find out, publicly and clearly, where the proceeds go?

Pearl Harbor is instructive. The USS Arizona Memorial gift shop operates under the nonprofit Pacific Historic Parks. The National Park Service explicitly states: "Proceeds from sales of books, maps, music, videos, and educational material directly benefit research, educational, and environmental programs at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial." There is no mystery. This is cause-related marketing: you buy something, a defined portion goes to a stated mission. The USS Arizona Memorial was partly funded by the sales of plastic model kits of the battleship, a fact that is widely known and cited as an example of how merchandise can serve preservation.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has gone the opposite route: it has essentially rejected gift-shop revenue as a funding mechanism. The bookstore-only approach forecloses the profit opportunity almost entirely. The institution has apparently decided that some revenue is not worth the ethical toll. This is a choice, and an expensive one. Most institutions cannot afford it.

Chernobyl exists in a different universe of ethical failure. Tour operators sell radiation-themed t-shirts, fridge magnets, and souvenir Geiger counters. Sergii Ivanchuk, who runs one of the tour companies, called such merchandise "immoral and disrespectful to those who survived the accident." But the merchandise sells.

Titanic Belfast falls somewhere between Pearl Harbor (transparent and mission-driven) and Chernobyl (ethically untethered). Here is what is publicly known: the company reports £22.7 million in revenue and £3.79 million in pre-tax profit. Here is what is not publicly known: how much of that revenue comes from ticket sales, catering, and retail combined, let alone from the gift shop alone. The company does not break out retail revenue. The profit figure is pre-tax and pre-operator fee to the charitable trust. Where exactly the money goes, how much is reinvested in the museum, how much funds conservation or education, is not disclosed in any publicly available source.

This is not unusual for commercial attractions. It is ethically weak for an institution built on public money and marketed as a memorial. It is the single strongest piece of evidence that the gift shop is, as critics have said, primarily a "cash cow" for developers rather than a necessary mechanism for sustaining remembrance.

The irony is that transparency could solve this. If Titanic Belfast published annual statements showing that, say, 15 percent of retail revenue was ring-fenced for the Gallery Refresh Fund and conservation, the entire ethical calculus would shift. The merchandise would be transformed from suspicious into functional. You would be buying into a system you understood. But the company has not done this. Nor has it offered public commentary on the ethics of its gift shop, unlike Pearl Harbor, USHMM, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, which have all had to defend their choices to skeptical publics.

This silence is telling. It suggests that someone has decided transparency is not in the company's interest, which is probably correct. Most commercial operations would rather not announce that they are profiting heavily from an association with disaster. The Titanic has been commodified so thoroughly that we barely notice it. But the Belfast museum's choice to remain silent suggests that those running it understand, at some level, that their operation would not look good in full light.

There is also a class dimension worth noting. The Titanic Quarter, where the museum sits, has undergone gentrification. Housing prices have increased. The working-class communities whose shipbuilding labour built the Titanic have been gradually priced out. The museum sells their heritage while their descendants are displaced by the very regeneration it drove. This is not the museum's sole responsibility, but it is the context. You are buying a product that celebrates working-class labour from a institution that has helped make that city unaffordable to working-class people.

The deepest honesty about the Titanic Belfast gift shop is this: we do not go to disaster sites simply to mourn. We go to experience something. The experience is real and legitimate. We buy objects to anchor that experience in memory, to transform an internal feeling into a physical thing we can take home. Academic research on dark tourism and souvenir-buying confirms this. Visitors to the Vietnam War Remnants Museum report that purchasing items helps them "contextualise the site, emotional engagement, and symbolic meanings." People buy things at tragedy sites because buying things is how we process meaning in a consumer culture.

The gift shop exists because we, the visitors, create the demand for it. We want to buy something. The museum is simply filling a genuine need. It has not invented desire; it has recognized and monetized it.

But that does not answer the ethical question. It only explains why the question is uncomfortable: to condemn the gift shop is to condemn a basic human impulse, and to defend it is to admit that we have decided to profit from catastrophe. There is no clean position. There is only the choice of whether to be transparent about the trade-off, and Titanic Belfast has chosen not to be.

The Titanic's final gift, perhaps, is that it has shown us how profitable catastrophe can be when sufficient time has passed. The ship sank in 1912. For a decade, it was raw tragedy. For the next seventy-five years, it was memory and myth. By 1997, it was bankable. By 2012, it was infrastructure, regeneration, jobs, and a gift shop.

Time does not heal the ethical wound. It renders it invisible.

You can buy a book about Titanic Belfast's role in the ship's construction, and that is educational. You can buy a heritage poster of the launch, and that is commemorative. You can buy a t-shirt with the White Star Line logo, and that is merchandise. All three exist in the same shop, indistinguishable to the casual visitor, functioning as a single moral category: stuff you buy to remember you were here.

The museum could publish a breakdown of retail revenue. It could tie a percentage to preservation and education. It could do what Pearl Harbor does, which is be honest about the transaction. It has chosen not to. This choice is not accidental. It is the choice of a commercial operation that understands, correctly, that transparency would raise questions its revenue model might not withstand.

The Titanic Belfast gift shop is not unethical because it exists. It is ethically weak because it is opaque, because it profits from catastrophe while declining to say so, and because it has learned from over a century of branding the disaster that people will buy almost anything if it connects them to a story.

The ship sank in two hours and forty minutes. Its commercialisation has been considerably more durable.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

buymeacoffee.com/kaylaandthebooks

In early 2025, millions of people paid full price for a video game whose central mechanic is performing agricultural labor. Not simulated heroism, not dragon-slaying: the actual work of moving sacks of flour from one cart to another, then cleaning human excrement out of a latrine. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II sold 6 million copies by June 2026. It won the BAFTA award for best narrative. Players describe it as absorbing, liberatory, the game they didn’t know they needed.

This is the median fantasy of contemporary escapism: medieval labor. Not the medieval period of actual wonder and magic, but specifically the medieval period of consequence, slowness, and dirt under the fingernails.

Meanwhile, on TikTok, castlecore has accumulated billions of views. Girls film themselves in henned headdresses against green screens and medieval paintings. Fashion houses (Rabanne, Dior, Balenciaga, Versace) have adopted chainmail as evening wear. Pinterest named “castlecore” a top trend for 2025 with “medieval core” searches up 110%. The Empyrean series has sold 12 million copies. Chappell Roan performed at the VMAs in head-to-toe armor like Joan of Arc reformed as a pop star. The medieval moment is not a corner of the internet. It is everywhere.

Yet this is not the same medieval moment that created Game of Thrones fandom, or the Medieval Academy of America, or academic medieval studies. Nobody is reading Boethius. Nobody is enrolling in medieval history majors. The actual discipline of medieval studies has contracted for decades, even as the aesthetic has metastasized across fashion, gaming, publishing, and social media.

We are not obsessed with the Middle Ages. We are obsessed with the idea of the Middle Ages, and specifically with the idea that authenticity, resistance, and escape might be found there. This obsession says almost nothing about the medieval period. It says everything about the present.

The Timing

Three things happened in 2020.

First, the world locked down. Within weeks, Tumblr posts tagged “cottagecore” jumped over 500%. The aesthetic, which had simmered since the mid-2010s, suddenly became the primary language of pandemic escapism: pastoral, analog, decentralized, a fantasy of the cottage and the garden instead of the apartment and the screen. Taylor Swift’s Folklore (July 2020) provided the soundtrack. This was women’s escapism coded specifically as a rejection of the present tense.

Second, a German YouTuber named Cornelius Link uploaded a video titled “Astronomia (Medieval Style)” on April 20, 2020. It was a medieval-instrumental cover of a meme song. It went viral. By June, “bardcore” had crystallized as a distinct micro-genre: pop songs transformed into medieval tavern music, performed by creators with names like Hildegard von Blingin. The creators themselves framed it explicitly as pandemic ennui, as a coping mechanism for lockdown isolation. They drew comparisons to the Black Death. They were romanticizing epidemic as an excuse to dress up like peasants.

Third, dark academia (which had existed on Tumblr since the mid-2010s as a niche aesthetic rooted in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History) exploded among students cut off from campus life, who began romanticizing in-person learning itself. The irony, which critics were quick to note, is that dark academia thrives entirely on digital platforms. You need TikTok to fantasize about analog college life during a pandemic.

These three aesthetics (cottagecore, bardcore, dark academia) had something in common: they were responses to a specific historical moment coded as escapes to a different time. They shared a common driver: the sense that the present was unlivable, and that some other era, preferably pre-industrial and pre-digital, might be worth inhabiting. What they were actually doing was weaponizing fantasy as a survival mechanism.

But escapism in pandemic is one thing. Escapism that metastasizes into a multi-billion-dollar cultural phenomenon, sustained years after the immediate threat has passed, is another. Something else must be feeding it.

The Authenticity Pitch

Medievalism has always been a useful fantasy for the present moment. The Victorians invented the Gothic Revival in response to the psychic horrors of industrialisation. Medieval imagery gave them language for what it felt like to live through rapid technological change, alienation, and the death of traditional social structures. The medieval aesthetic was a way of saying: there was a time when things meant something, when life was embedded in ritual and community and consequence.

The present moment is medievalism’s best era.

We live in what King’s College London historian Megan L. Cook calls “dirtbag medievalism”: a vibe-based, anachronistic, aggressively unhistorical medievalism that has “very, very little to do with the actual Middle Ages.” The appeal of this medievalism to Gen Z and older millennials is not actually historical. It is theological.

Medieval aesthetics promise authenticity in an age that has made authenticity functionally impossible. Real food that comes from actual dirt. Real clothes made by actual craftspeople. Real consequences for real actions. Real community that exists physically, not algorithmically. Real slowness, real friction, real bodies that require sleep and food and rest. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, the appeal is precisely that you cannot fast-travel and you cannot skip the boring parts. You must sleep. You must feed your character. Your clothes get blood on them and you have to wash it off or NPCs will comment on your filth. The game is, deliberately, not fun. And people pay sixty dollars to experience this unfun as a form of virtue.

This is the inverse of the typical video game power fantasy. Instead of transcendence, you get immanence. Instead of godhood, you get embodiment. The medieval, in this framework, is not a period. It is a promise that physicality might still mean something.

The second layer of the authenticity pitch is decentralization. Medieval economies were local. Production was distributed. You knew where your food came from because your neighbor grew it. You knew who made your clothes because the weaver lived down the street. The fantasy of medievalism is the fantasy of opting out of global supply chains, algorithmic control, and extraction at scale. It is the fantasy of a world where you cannot be surveilled, optimized, and monetized. Where resistance is still possible because there is still a meaningful outside.

This explains why dark academia (elite but analog, communal but exclusive, intellectual but pre-digital) became so compelling during lockdown. It was a fantasy of being inside an institution where the outside world could not reach you. Where knowledge was still embodied, transmitted through presence and conversation, not through screens. It was a fantasy of genuine community in an age of algorithmic friendship. It was a fantasy of the ability to simply not engage.

The third layer is historical pessimism. We live in a moment of genuine, rational anxiety about the future. Climate collapse is measurable and accelerating. Inequality is structural and widening. The institutions that were supposed to protect us have mostly failed. The technological solutions we were promised are creating new problems faster than they solve old ones. The project of modernity itself, which promised transcendence and liberation and endless growth, has revealed itself as a scam.

Medieval escapism is an admission that the future is uninhabitable. If we cannot imagine a future worth living in, perhaps we can imagine a past that way instead. The medieval is not the past. It is the placeholder where the future used to be.

Where It Lives Now

The medieval moment has four primary ecosystems, each with different audiences and different staying power.

Gaming: Kingdom Come: Deliverance II sold over 1 million copies in 24 hours and reached 6 million by June 2026, on a $41 million budget. It won the BAFTA Games Award for Best Narrative. The game’s core mechanics are slowness, consequence, and historically grounded realism: you cannot be a hero. You are an ordinary person in an ordinary world. The game sold not despite its friction but because of it. It offers players a version of mastery that does not require transcendence, which speaks to audiences exhausted by progress narratives.

Publishing: The romantasy market exploded to $610 million in projected sales for 2024, up 34% year-over-year from 2023. Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm (the third Empyrean book) became the fastest-selling adult fiction title in 20 years, moving 2.7 million copies in its first week. Sarah J. Maas’s ACOTAR series has accumulated 13 million copies sold and 6 billion TikTok views under a single hashtag. These are medieval-adjacent (castles, swords, quests, dragons, ancient magic systems) but often blur into high fantasy. The distinguishing feature is that they center female agency, desire, and power within decidedly medieval social structures: courts, hierarchies, conquest. The male gaze has been removed. The medieval scaffold remains.

Fashion: Chainmail returned to runways in 2024-2025, marketed not as period recreation but as “weirdieval” modernity. Rabanne (the historic chainmail house) released new pieces. Dior, Balenciaga, Versace, and Under Armour adopted the aesthetic. The catalyst was Chappell Roan’s 2024 VMAs performance in head-to-toe armor, which positioned chainmail not as costume but as radical aesthetic choice. Etsy artisans and small labels like Falconiere saw demand surge. The distinction between historical reenactment (accuracy-obsessed, community-focused) and high fashion (aesthetic, visual, commodified) is sharp: fashion medievalism is costume divorced from historical fidelity, reclaimed as a statement of power and queerness.

Social Media: TikTok’s #MedievalTikTok has accumulated billions of views. #CastleCore, #MedievalCore, #GoldenBrown (edited to The Stranglers’ 1981 track), and related aesthetics form a coherent sub-culture of dreamy, cottagecore-adjacent content: henned headdresses, princess editorials, dark-academia moodboards, Lord of the Rings fanart. Dark academia on Tumblr and BookTok (TikTok’s book-focused subculture) have made the “medieval studies girl” into a recognized persona. Pinterest named castlecore a top 2025 trend with “medieval core” searches up 110%. The cross-platform coherence suggests this is not a niche but an actual cultural phenomenon.

What It Actually Reveals

The medieval moment is not really about the medieval. It is about the present state of late capitalism and the absence of a viable future.

Consider what the medieval aesthetic is not: it is not progressive, techno-optimist, or oriented toward change. It explicitly rejects the narrative of modernization as liberation. It says that the story we told ourselves about progress (more technology, more efficiency, more growth) was a lie, and that we should have stayed home and made things by hand.

Consider what it is: it is nostalgic without being able to claim genuine nostalgia (Gen Z did not live through the Middle Ages; older millennials did not either). It is escapist without being able to claim fantasy (it insists on “authenticity” and “realism”). It is critical of modernity without being able to articulate what comes next. It is profoundly conservative in its orientation (looking backward, emphasizing tradition and hierarchy and beauty) while being performed by people who are often progressive in their other commitments.

What medievalism actually signifies is a kind of civilisational despair dressed up as aesthetic choice. If the future is unimaginable or uninhabitable, the past becomes a way of grieving that future while still maintaining the fantasy of agency. Medievalism says: we cannot fix this system, so let’s pretend we’re somewhere else.

The COVID acceleration of the trend is not incidental. The pandemic was a break in the narrative of progress, a moment when the entire system revealed itself as fragile and unjust. The response was not to build something better. The response was to retreat into fantasy. Cottagecore, bardcore, dark academia: these were all ways of saying, “I’m checking out. I’m building a life in my imagination instead.”

But the trend’s durability past the pandemic suggests something deeper. The pandemic did not create this impulse; it revealed it. We were already exhausted. We were already skeptical of the promised future. The pandemic just made it obvious.

The medieval moment is what happens when a generation stops believing in the future and cannot quite bring itself to believe in the present. It is a halfway house between despair and denial.

The Weakness

There is an obvious critique: this is all costume, all commodification, all fantasy. The people wearing chainmail to fashion week are not opting out of late capitalism; they are expressing their alienation through it, turning their own exhaustion into a luxury aesthetic. The people buying romantasy are not rejecting modernity; they are consuming a fantasy version of alternative modernity that is, in fact, deeply embedded in modernity’s infrastructure.

More importantly: the actual medieval period does not work this way. The medieval period was not simpler. It was not more authentic. It contained plague, serfdom, illiteracy, patriarchal violence, and a life expectancy that would horrify us. It also contained queerness, multiculturalism, economic complexity, and genuine diversity (genetic evidence shows West African ancestry in Anglo-Saxon graves; the Met Cloisters has documented medieval sexual identity). The medieval is being used as a placeholder for something that never existed, which means the fantasy tells us nothing about what we actually need.

The deepest weakness is this: you cannot opt out of late capitalism through aesthetic choice. You cannot achieve authenticity through consumption. The chainmail dress costs $4,000. The romantasy paperback costs $15. The video game costs $60. The aesthetic of escape has been fully absorbed into the system that makes escape necessary. The fantasy of the medieval is, in the end, another commodity to be bought and sold.

But there is a more subtle weakness, and it is the one that matters most: the actual future is not in the past. It never is.

The medieval obsession is understandable as a response to present exhaustion. But it is not a plan. It is not even quite a fantasy; it is more like a sigh, a collective exhalation of grief for a future that will not come. The people wearing chainmail and reading romantasy are not building anything. They are performing their own resignation, turning their despair into a aesthetic object that can be shared and monetized and consumed.

What the medieval moment reveals is not that we need to live differently, though we do. It reveals that we have given up on the possibility of imagining different futures, and so we are recycling old ones instead. We have stopped being futurists and become archivists of our own resignation.

The only way out is through, not backward. But moving forward requires believing that forward is possible. Right now, for a lot of people, it is not.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

buymeacoffee.com/kaylaandthebooks

Poor Things arrived at a particular moment. Gray published it in 1992, three years into the back half of Thatcher’s rule, thirteen years before Scottish devolution would legally exist. The country was thinking about what it might become, if it could become something at all. And Gray, the Glasgow intellectual who had already mapped the psychic catastrophe of Scotland’s division in Lanark, handed readers a protagonist named Bella in a coat that bore the caption “Bella Caledonia”, a woman constructed and remade, and did not ask whether she was also, impossibly, a nation.

No scholarly reader has missed this. Kirsten Stirling devoted an entire monograph to it. Nick Rhind returned to the identification again and again. Scholars warned: here is Gray with a scalpel, cutting into the body of Shelley’s Frankenstein, removing the tragedy, and showing you what a resurrection looks like when the creature refuses to die. But they also warned something else: do not mistake the metaphor for the meaning. Gray’s novel eats its own allegories. The text’s second narrator (Bella herself, or Victoria, or whoever she is) arrives midway through to tell you that McCandless’s memoir is a lie. The scar on Bella’s head has three different origins. Godwin’s name flickers between lowercase and uppercase, between the real surgeon and the uppercase God. And there, in the author’s note at the end, is a man called Alasdair Gray sitting in his own book, insisting that it is true, and therefore making you unsure whether truth is the point at all.

This is historiographic metafiction: fiction that claims to be history while simultaneously proving that all histories are fictions, narrated and chosen and shaped by whoever holds the pen. And Gray was its master. In this form, the story of Bella Baxter becomes something more unsettling than a simple allegory: it becomes a parable about how a nation tells itself into being, how the narrative a country accepts about its own past and future can be as constructed as any laboratory-made being, and how that construction might still be real, still matter, still allow for freedom.

The Inversion: From Abomination to Autonomy

To see what Gray has done, you have to see what Shelley wrote. In Frankenstein, the Creature emerges into consciousness as an abomination: rejected by his maker on sight, nameless, driven toward education and language by his own hunger for understanding. He teaches himself by listening to the De Lacey family through their cottage wall. He reads Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Lives. He achieves what amounts to a classical education in isolation, and all it teaches him is that he is alone, that the world will never accept him, that beauty is the price of belonging, and that beauty is exactly what he does not have. His self-knowledge becomes his wound. “How can I describe my sensations on the evening of my being made?” the Creature asks Victor. The answer, in Shelley, is that you cannot, or rather, that the describing is itself the becoming-human, and the becoming-human is itself the becoming-tragic.

Bella Baxter has no such arc. She is made not from corpses but from the body of a pregnant woman and the brain of an unborn foetus, implanted by the Glasgow surgeon Godwin Baxter after pulling her from the River Clyde. Her birth (her conscious awakening) happens not in horror but in love. Godwin narrates her infancy with tenderness. Her early speech is rendered in lowercase, vowels removed: “bn bnrn,” she says, and Godwin understands: “been born.” She is a blank slate, but unlike the Creature, she is a blank slate who will be filled. She travels to Russia. She reads. She falls in love with the journalist Wedderburn, and later with Astley Blessington, who owns sugar plantations and has the manners of empire. She argues with them. She refuses Blessington’s offer of a merged life and chooses instead to earn her own way. She becomes (scandalously, impossibly) a doctor, the first female graduate of Glasgow University’s medical school. She runs a socialist clinic. She publishes a memoir that contradicts the entire record of her own birth.

The difference is so complete that it amounts to a category shift. Where Shelley’s novel is a tragedy of creation, Gray’s is a comedy of creation. Where the Creature is defined by rejection, Bella is defined by choice. Where the Creature’s education leads him to despair, Bella’s leads her to action. And where Victor Frankenstein is destroyed by his inability to accept what he has made, Godwin Baxter is redeemed (almost) by his refusal to control it. “I let Bella educate me in return,” he tells McCandless, the narrator. “Though I called myself a god, I soon learned that gods are made by their creatures.”

This is not incidental. This is the entire shape of Gray’s novel. He has taken the Gothic mastertext of scientific hubris and turned it inside out: not to deny it, but to ask what would happen if creation led not to tragedy but to autonomy. If the made thing, instead of seeking revenge or redemption, simply walked away and became itself.

Bella as Nation: The Allegory That Eats Itself

But if Bella is not simply Bella, what else is she? Gray leaves you no choice. The novel contains an illustration of a woman in a Scottish landscape, captioned “Bella Caledonia.” The dust jacket bears Gray’s slogan: “the early days of a better nation,” a phrase that would come to define the Scottish literary and political culture of the 1990s and 2000s. The Russian gambler tells Bella directly: “A nation is only as old as its literature.” Bella responds: “Perhaps, like Russia, I am making up for lost time.”

Kirsten Stirling, in Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text, argues that the novel invites (almost forces) you to read Bella as the female personification of Scotland, in the tradition of Britannia or Marianne. But Gray’s version is monstrous. Gray’s Bella is constructed, stitched from parts (a dead woman’s body and an unborn child’s brain), deliberately made rather than naturally born. She is beautiful, but she begins as a blank, and everything she becomes is the result of education and choice, not essence. She is a nation, in other words, not as eternal archetype but as deliberate construction. As something made.

This matters because Scotland, in the late 20th century, was thinking of itself as something made (or unmade, or remade). The 1979 devolution referendum had failed. Thatcher had ruled for thirteen years. Scottish culture had not been destroyed (it had, arguably, reinforced itself in response), but Scottish political autonomy had not yet achieved its new settlement. When Gray’s novel appeared, the question of what Scotland would become was still fundamentally open. Was it a nation in its own right? A region? A region with a literature and a history that was real enough, important enough, to constitute national identity even without a sovereign parliament?

Bella’s journey gives a particular answer to this. She begins as nothing, or rather, as the assembled parts of two incomplete beings: a mother and an unborn child. She gains consciousness through language. She educates herself through travel and reading and argument. She learns her own history, or multiple versions of it (McCandless’s memoir and her own rebuke, told in her own voice). And then she acts on what she has learned. She becomes a doctor. She runs a clinic. She writes back her own story. This is an allegory of national consciousness: the self-aware recovery of a history (often a falsified history), the claim to education and knowledge as weapons against a more powerful neighbor, the assertion of the right to narrate one’s own becoming.

Yet here is where it gets complicated, where Gray shows his hand as a metafictionist rather than a mere allegorist. The moment you think you have understood the allegory, the novel turns on you. Victoria’s letter (or Bella’s letter, or whoever is writing) arrives to tell you that McCandless was lying, or mistaken, or deluded. Bella says of herself: “I call myself Bella Caledonia partly to irritate pretentious readers.” She knows she is a metaphor and finds the whole thing absurd. Godwin’s name appears sometimes capitalized, sometimes not. The novelist Alasdair Gray enters his own book in the appendix to insist that it is true, and therefore makes you suspicious of everything that follows.

This is not carelessness. This is Gray protecting his own novel from becoming the very thing he is writing against: a fixed story, a single authoritative narrative. A nation, he is showing you, is not a thing you discover. It is a thing you keep narrating and re-narrating, arguing about, refusing to pin down. The moment you think you have grasped what Scotland is, the novel shifts the ground. The moment you think you understand Bella, she contradicts herself. Gray is using the Bella Caledonia allegory while simultaneously dismantling it, inviting you in and showing you the trap you are walking into, all at once.

Scotland and the Paradox of the Junior Partner

But underneath this metafictional play sits a real historical problem: Scotland’s actual relationship to empire and to England. This is where the post-colonial reading becomes necessary, even if it is also contested.

The standard framework is Michael Hechter’s concept of “internal colonialism”: the idea that within a single nation-state (in this case, Britain), there exists a core area (England, and more specifically London and the South) that exercises colonial-style dominance over a periphery (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), extracting resources, limiting autonomy, and subordinating the peripheral culture to the core’s standards. In this model, Scotland is colonized, but colonized internally, by a neighbor that is also, nominally, part of the same state.

This creates a paradox that classic post-colonial theory struggles with. Scotland is not Algeria or India. Scots were not excluded from the imperial project; they enthusiastically participated in it. David Hume and Adam Smith shaped Enlightenment thought. Scottish merchants grew rich on slave sugar and tobacco. Scottish soldiers fought in the Empire’s wars. A Scot, indeed, led the British government at the height of empire. You cannot straightforwardly call Scotland colonized when so many Scots were busy colonizing other people.

Tom Nairn, in The Break-Up of Britain, tried to resolve this by arguing that Scotland was a nation kept in a subordinate relationship to England not through direct political colonization but through cultural degradation: the systematic suppression of Scots language, Scottish legal independence, Scottish educational autonomy. The Union of 1707 was not a forced conquest but a political merger between elites that left the Scottish masses with a diminished sense of cultural legitimacy. You were free, nominally, but made to feel that your language, your history, your way of doing things was provincial, backward, inferior to the English standard. This is a subtler form of colonialism: not the boot on the throat but the voice in your head telling you that you are not quite good enough.

Gray’s novel engages with this paradox directly. Bella travels to Russia and Egypt and France. The imperialist Astley Blessington (beautiful, wealthy, and morally rotting) offers her a life inside empire, as the consort of a powerful man who is complicit in the machinery of extraction and control. She refuses. She chooses instead to work for a living, to run a clinic, to remain in Glasgow. But the novel never lets you forget that Glasgow itself is a city built partly on the profits of empire, partly on the energy of its own people, partly on the suppression of that history. When McCandless describes the social conditions of the poor in 1880s Glasgow, he is describing a place of real exploitation, real degradation. Gray knows this. He lived in it. And he is saying: here is what a nation might look like if it refused both empire and the subordination to empire, if it chose instead to build something for itself.

But he is saying it through a woman who is literally constructed, whose body does not belong to her, whose past is multiple and contradictory. And he is saying it in a novel that keeps telling you not to trust what you are reading.

The Metafiction as Argument

This is, finally, what makes Poor Things more than a historical allegory or a feminist Frankenstein rewrite. It is an argument about how nations come into being and how they can be undermined by the very tools that are supposed to build them.

Gray publishes Poor Things in 1992 with full historiographic apparatus: fictional editor’s notes, illustrations attributed to a real 19th-century engraver, a “Critical Notes” section, an appendix. He is doing what he did in Lanark: he is using the forms of historical authority (the preface, the footnote, the index) to show you how history is constructed. Every detail that makes the novel feel “real”, every reference to actual Glasgow addresses, every nod to actual historical figures, is doing double duty. It is grounding the story in reality, but it is also showing you how reality itself is textual, made of citations and references and agreed-upon fictions.

The Bella Caledonia allegory is the same. It is there. You can see it. The illustration says it. The slogan says it. The Russian gambler’s speech practically announces it. But the more you look at it, the more the novel undermines it, the more it becomes clear that the allegory is a trap: a way of thinking about the nation that the novel simultaneously invites and rejects. Because nations (like novels, like the human beings that inhabit them) do not submit to single readings. They are told and retold, rewritten and reinterpreted, and the moment you think you have fixed the meaning, someone rewrites it and proves you wrong.

This is what Bella does at the end. She gives you her version of events, contradicts the official account, and walks away. She has not become truly autonomous (she is a doctor in a capitalist economy, running a clinic in a city, subject to laws and medical boards and the entire apparatus of social control). But she has claimed her own narration. She has refused the single story. And in the context of a novel published in 1992 Scotland, when the question “What is Scotland? What will Scotland be?” was urgently, painfully open, this refusal to be pinned down was not weakness. It was the entire point.

Why the Film Doesn’t Matter (Or Matters Differently)

A note, because it will come up: Yorgos Lanthimos filmed Poor Things in 2023. The film is extraordinary in its own right, a triumph of feminist filmmaking and production design, and Emma Stone gives a performance of such technical precision that it seems to unfold like clockwork. But the film is not the novel. Lanthimos transplanted the story to a fantastical, steampunk London, removed the Glasgow setting almost entirely, discarded the unreliable-narrator frame (Bella’s contradicting letter vanishes), and excised the metafictional apparatus. The film is a rescue narrative about a woman learning to be herself in a world that wants to control her. It is very good. But it is not, and cannot be, an argument about Scotland and nation and the making of consciousness through narration.

To use the film as evidence for what Gray’s novel does is to commit what scholars call “adaptation contamination”: the mistake of treating the adapted work as authoritative for the original, when in fact the adaptation has made choices about what to keep and what to discard. Gray may have agreed to give Lanthimos creative freedom (his own Lanark was filled with plagiarisms and author intrusions, so the idea of his work as fixed would have been false). But the film is a separate object, with separate meanings. To write about the novel’s Scottish post-colonial meaning, you have to stay with the text: the Glasgow addresses, the “Bella Caledonia” caption, the unreliable narrators, the metafictional frame. You have to stay with Gray’s own refusal to let you settle on a single reading.

In the end, what Gray offers through this rewriting of Frankenstein is not a comforting answer but a productive paradox. He shows you a being made, constructed, born from death, rising into consciousness and education and choice. He shows you that this being is beautiful and strong and capable of acting on her own behalf. He invites you to read her as Scotland, as a nation that has been remade repeatedly by history, subordination, empire, refusal, and the determination to narrate its own future. And then he shows you that this reading is unstable, that it eats itself, that the moment you think you have understood it, it contradicts itself and walks away.

This is not a failure of the novel. It is its success. Because the real Scotland (the one that would, within a decade of publication, vote for devolution, establish its own parliament, and begin the long work of redefining itself) was not a fixed thing. It was not the Scotland of empire or subordination or Thatcher or historical inevitability. It was something still being made, still being narrated, still being written into being by people who refused to accept the single story that history had told about them. And if the nation was to be real, it would have to be made real through language, through culture, through the insistence that your own story matters, not because it is historically true, but because it is what you choose to believe about yourself.

Gray understood this. He made a novel where the monster refuses to die. Where the made thing becomes the maker. Where the creature gets to tell her own story. And where, even then, she knows the story is incomplete, contested, subject to revision. This is what a nation might look like if it was honest about how it comes into being: not discovered but made, not inevitable but chosen, not fixed but fluid, not a monument but a conversation that never quite ends.

Hyacinthus was dead. And from his blood, something strange happened.

The blood that soaked the earth did not simply disappear, did not rot into corruption. Instead, it transformed. It became color. It became a flower, marked with the letters “AI AI,” the cry of grief made permanent and legible. A god’s failure to save a beloved youth found its only possible redemption in beauty: the flower would bloom every year, a fresh accident of death renewed seasonally, forever. Apollo could not resurrect the boy. But he could kill him again, again, again, each spring, and make it beautiful.

This is the secret logic of Greek flower mythology: beauty is not opposed to death. It is built from death. It grows from violence, grief, and bodies that cannot be saved.

Across Greek mythology, an unsettling number of flowers spring from blood or tragedy. The hyacinth from a boy’s fractured skull. The anemone from a god gored by a boar. The narcissus from a youth who pined away at his own reflection. The violet from a priestess transformed into a heifer. The poppy as the flower of sleep and forgetting. The asphodel blooming in the underworld where ordinary people go when they die. These are not incidental details or poetic flourishes. They form a system: a culture that understood beauty not as redemption from death, but as the material evidence that death had occurred.

The Greeks had a word for this kind of myth: aition, a story that explains why something in the natural world exists as it does. Why does this flower have this appearance? Why does it bloom at this season? Why is it associated with sleep, or memory, or the underworld? The answers were always the same: because a person suffered, was transformed, died, or was violently changed. The flower is the scar. It is the permanent mark of someone’s irreversible loss.

This was not a culture that believed in hiding death or transcending it through spiritual abstraction. Instead, the Greeks embedded death directly into the garden. They made mortality visible in the petals.

Hyacinthus: The Boy Who Became A Scream

The oldest and most fully documented of these myths is Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo. A Spartan youth of surpassing beauty, he was not supposed to die. Hyacinthus should have been immortal, transported to the realm of gods, made eternal through the love of a deity. But the rules of beauty and immortality in Greek myth are cruel: the more beautiful you are, the more likely you are to be broken.

The two threw the discus together, a game between a god and a mortal youth. Apollo hurled it with divine power. Hyacinthus ran to catch it as it fell. And then, in the moment of retrieval, something went wrong: either Apollo’s discus struck true, or a jealous wind-god (Zephyrus, sometimes Boreas) reached down and deflected the trajectory of the divine throw, and the discus hit Hyacinthus in the head. It was an accident. Or it was sabotage. The sources disagree, but the outcome is identical.

Hyacinthus collapsed. His head, his beautiful head, was shattered. And Apollo, who had centuries of healing expertise, could not save him. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, captures the paralysis of this moment. Apollo rushes to support the dying boy:

His faithful hands were busy for a time

to see if his life might yet be saved; but no,

his wounds were far too deep. And as a flower

is struck and withers when its stalk is cut,

so did the boy, drooping, let his head

droop on his shoulder, growing pale in death.

The blood spilled onto the earth. But it did not disappear. Instead, it transformed. A flower sprang up, marked on its petals with letters spelling “AI AI” (pronounced aiai), the ancient Greek cry of grief, of lamentation, of helplessness. The flower made Apollo’s scream permanent.

The Greeks called it a hyacinth, though the ancient flower was probably not the modern Hyacinthus orientalis (which only reached Europe in the 16th century from Turkey and Iran). The mythic flower was likely a larkspur, or an iris, or a Scilla, or a delphinium, anything with petals that could bear a marking. What mattered was not the botanical accuracy. What mattered was that a human death could be written onto nature itself.

The Spartans understood the implications. They built a cult around Hyacinthus at Amyclae and celebrated the Hyacinthia, a three-day festival that began with mourning, with lamentation for the dead boy, and then shifted into celebration and the commemoration of his apotheosis. The festival was bound to youth initiation rituals, to the transition of boys into men, and it encoded the death and rebirth that transformation requires. The flower was not simply a memorial. It was a proof that something could survive death if death made it beautiful enough.

Adonis: The God Who Dies Every Year

If Hyacinthus is the tragic accident, then Adonis is the inevitable cycle. Adonis was not Greek. He was a Near Eastern import, a version of the Mesopotamian god Tammuz, a dying-and-rising vegetation deity whose death was sewn directly into the rhythms of the agricultural year. He was born of incest, hidden in the underworld, and claimed by competing goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, who agreed to share custody of him: he spends part of the year above ground with Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and desire, and part of the year below with Persephone, the queen of the dead.

But Adonis does not simply live and die in a fixed rotation. He dies violently. While hunting, he is gored by a boar. The accounts vary on who sent the boar (Ares out of jealousy, or Artemis, or Apollo, or Persephone seeking revenge), but the outcome is always the same: divine beauty pierced by animal violence, a god reduced to a bleeding body.

Aphrodite arrives too late. His blood has already soaked the earth. So she does what gods do: she transforms loss into immortality, violence into beauty. Ovid records it with deliberate precision:

Upon the blood the goddess pours her nectar.

The blood begins to smoke, and as a bubble

rises in rain, within an hour there grows

a flower as red as blood. Its form is like

the pomegranate’s seeds, but it cannot

hold fast to life. The winds that gave its name,

Anemone, blow it down; and always

its fragile stem sets loose the flower in death.

The anemone is the Mediterranean windflower, Anemone coronaria. It is small, delicate, short-lived, with petals that scatter in the slightest breeze. Its name comes from anemos, the Greek word for wind. It is a flower that cannot hold onto its own existence. It blooms and dies within days. To look at an anemone is to watch something that was already broken by its nature, already marked for death from the moment it opened.

The Greeks did not see this as a defect. They saw it as the flower’s truth.

The cult of Adonis, the Adonia, was a women’s festival celebrated in Athens and across the Mediterranean. In the days before the festival, women would plant seeds (lettuce, fennel, wheat, barley) in broken pottery, in baskets set on the roofs of houses in the summer heat. The plants would shoot up quickly in the warmth and then wither just as fast, killed by the very conditions that made them grow. The gardens of Adonis were deliberately constructed to fail. They were metaphors made botanical: rapid growth and inevitable death, fertility that produces nothing, beauty that cannot sustain itself.

On the day of the festival, women carried these withered gardens in mock funeral processions. They wailed. They beat their breasts. Some accounts describe them casting the gardens into the sea or into springs, as if returning Adonis to the underworld where he spends half his time. And then the festival ended, and Adonis was dead again until next year, when the cycle would repeat: the wound reopened, the blood spilled, the flower bloomed briefly, and was destroyed.

This was not the myth of resurrection. It was the myth of a death that cannot be escaped, only endured, only transformed into a pattern that could be witnessed and mourned collectively.

Narcissus: The Death of Self-Love

Narcissus is different. There is no wound, no discus, no boar. Instead, Narcissus dies of looking.

He was a beautiful youth, so beautiful that everyone who saw him fell in love with him. The nymph Echo pursued him, speaking only his own words back to him, because a curse had taken her independent voice. He rejected her. The god Nemesis, the deity of vengeance for excessive pride and cruelty, decided that Narcissus should fall in love with the one thing he could never possess: himself.

He came to a pool. He saw his own reflection, and he believed he was seeing another person. He fell in love with this other self. He called out to his reflection. He tried to embrace it, but his arms passed through water. He could not touch himself. He could not possess the only thing he desired. And so he pined away.

Ovid’s version, the one that has shaped every retelling since, describes a kind of dissolution. Narcissus does not die a violent death. He melts. His beautiful face turns pale. His body withers from the inside, consumed by his own desire. He wastes away. And in the place where he died, where his corpse lay, a flower bloomed: the narcissus, with its white petals and golden center, nodding perpetually over the water, as if still trying to catch a glimpse of itself.

But there was an older version, preserved by the late ancient writer Conon, in which Narcissus was not alone in his rejection. Another youth, Ameinias, loved Narcissus so desperately that when Narcissus rejected him, Ameinias took his own life. And Narcissus, realizing what his cruelty had caused, drew his own sword and fell. From his blood sprang the flower: Narcissus himself, doubled, become the botanical proof of his own self-involvement, rooted in the earth, unable to ever look away from the water.

The narcissus was already connected to the underworld in Greek myth. It was the very flower that Gaia (the earth goddess) grew to lure Persephone into a meadow, where Hades abducted her and dragged her down to the realm of the dead. The flower that would later bear Narcissus’s name was already tied to the moment of loss, the moment of descent, the instant when a beloved was taken away and never came back unchanged.

The Softer Transformations: Violet and Poppy

Not all flower deaths involved blood or violence. The violet, for instance, is a flower of rescue. When Zeus transformed the priestess Io into a white heifer to hide her from his jealous wife Hera, Io suffered a kind of death: the loss of her human form, the loss of her voice, the forced consumption of grass instead of human food. But the earth itself responded with mercy. Gaia, the earth goddess, created the violet as a specially sweet flower that Io could eat, a gift of consolation to a transformed girl who was no longer fully herself.

The violet became sacred to the city of Athens, which called itself “violet-crowned” in its poetry and hymns. Yet even this flower of beauty and civic pride carried an undertone of mourning. Violets were wound into funeral wreaths and laid on graves. The flower was associated with bruising, with the marks of violence. To give violets to the dead was to acknowledge that the body, broken, was still worthy of beauty.

The poppy is different again. There is no single myth of a youth-becoming-poppy through death or transformation. Instead, the poppy is symbolic: it is the flower of sleep, of forgetting, of the suspension of consciousness that precedes death. The opium poppy contains alkaloids potent enough to produce sleep and, at higher doses, death, and the Greeks knew this. They understood that the poppy existed at the threshold between waking and dying, between memory and forgetting.

Demeter, the goddess of harvest and grain, was said to have discovered the poppy in her grief over her daughter Persephone’s abduction. The poppy allowed her to sleep, to escape consciousness, to find a kind of mercy in forgetfulness. Poppies were carried by Hypnos (Sleep) and his twin Thanatos (Death), crowned with poppies, indistinguishable, suggesting that to the Greeks, sleep was just death at a smaller dose.

In Homer’s Iliad, there is a simile that captures this perfectly. A warrior dies, and his head droops:

as a garden poppy

bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime,

so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm’s weight.

The poppy was not a flower of beauty in the conventional sense. It was a flower of surrender, of the body’s capitulation, of the moment when consciousness ceases and the head can no longer hold itself upright.

The Underworld Garden: Asphodel

And then there is the flower of the underworld itself.

In Homer’s Odyssey, when the shade of Achilles appears to Odysseus in the house of the dead, the hero walks across the “asphodel meadow,” the field of flowers where ordinary mortals dwell in death. The asphodel is not a flower of transformation or tragedy. It is simply the flower of being dead. It is what you become when you are no longer alive.

The asphodel (Asphodelus ramosus or A. albus) is a real Mediterranean plant. Its roots are starchy and were eaten during famines. Its flowers are pale, ghostly white, and appear in massive numbers on rocky hillsides and around burial sites. The Greeks planted asphodel on graves. They understood its significance: it was the plant that grew where death occurred, the flower that marked the boundary between the living world and whatever lay beyond.

There is a possible hidden etymology in the very word itself. A modern scholar, Steve Reece, has proposed that Homer’s formula “asphodel meadow” may derive not from the plant-name asphodel but from asphodelon, which could be reanalyzed as sphodelon, meaning “ash-filled.” The asphodel meadow would then be not a blooming garden but a meadow of ashes, the remains of the dead made botanical, a field of cremation residue. The living have always buried their dead with flowers, but what if the flowers in Hades were not flowers at all, but the transformed remains of the bodies themselves?

The Bouquet of Persephone

All of these flowers appear together in a single moment in Greek mythology, a passage so compact that it serves almost as a thesis statement for the entire system of death-flowers.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, written in the 7th century BC, we encounter the moment before tragedy strikes. Persephone, a young goddess, is walking in a meadow and gathering flowers with her mother Demeter and a group of other goddesses and nymphs. The Hymn describes the bouquet she collects:

She was gathering flowers with her hands… roses and crocuses and beautiful violets, irises also and hyacinths and the narcissus. The earth bore a hundred heads on one root, and a marvellous, radiant flower. The whole wide heaven above and the whole earth laughed to see it, and the sea’s salt spray trembled. The goddess reached for it with both hands to pluck the lovely thing.

This is the moment before everything changes. Persephone reaches for the narcissus, the flower that is beautiful precisely because it is a snare, a trap set by Gaia herself. The moment her hands touch it, the earth opens. Hades emerges from the chasm. She is pulled downward, into the underworld, and she is never the same again.

The bouquet is remarkable. It contains: roses (beauty and love), crocuses (another flower sometimes linked to death), violets (the flower of Io, of transformation and trauma), irises (another flower of beauty), hyacinths (the flower born from Apollo’s grief), and the narcissus (the flower of self-obsession and the underworld). These are the flowers of beauty in the mortal world. And they are, collectively, the lure that leads to death.

Persephone does not die, precisely, but she descends. She enters a realm from which she can never fully return. Part of her stays in the underworld forever. The flowers she gathered, the beautiful bouquet of the living world, become evidence of what is lost. They mark the boundary between the world above and the world below. They are the last things we see before we step into the darkness.

What the Pattern Reveals

The Greeks were not unusual in having myths about flowers and death. Many cultures have aetia, explanatory tales for why plants look the way they do. But the Greek flower-myths form a cohesive system, and that system reveals something particular about how the Greeks understood mortality, memory, and the relationship between beauty and loss.

First: death was not denied. It was not transcended or escaped. It was transformed. Greek flower-mythology says that the only way to survive death is to become something else, something rooted in the earth, something that returns seasonally. You cannot avoid death. You can only change its form.

Second: beauty is tied to grief. This is not the Romantic notion of beauty-as-compensation for suffering, beauty-as-transcendence. This is beauty-as-evidence. The flower is beautiful precisely because it is the proof of death. Its petals are marked with the letters of grief. Its shortness of life, its fragility, its tendency to scatter in the wind, these are not tragic flaws but the essential nature of beauty in a world where death is inevitable.

Third: memory persists in the body transformed. The Greeks did not believe in an immortal soul separate from the body. They believed in psyche, a word that means both “soul” and “butterfly,” something weightless, insubstantial, unable to act or speak or be satisfied in the underworld. The only real immortality they imagined was incarnational, embedded in the material world. You become a flower, and the flower comes back every year. That is the nearest thing to forever that mortals can achieve.

Fourth: the seasonal recurrence was not redemptive. It was haunting. Hyacinthus died every spring, again and again. Adonis was gored to death, then released, then gored again, a cycle that never ended. The return of the flower was not a triumph. It was a renewed confrontation with the original loss. Each bloom was a fresh grief, a resurrection of sorrow made visible.

Conclusion: The Garden We Cannot Leave

We live in a culture that wants to hide death. We have moved it to hospitals and funeral homes. We use euphemisms: “passed away,” “lost,” “gone to a better place.” We have transformed the dead into gentle absences, no longer present, no longer demanding to be looked at.

The Greeks did the opposite. They insisted that the dead remain visible, embedded in the world, impossible to ignore. They gathered at graves and left flowers. They wove garlands. They told stories that traced the exact moment when a beloved became something rooted and immobile and unable to refuse its beauty.

These myths are not comforting. They do not suggest that loss can be overcome or that grief is temporary or that beauty will somehow make us feel better about death. Instead, they propose something stranger: that the only monument to the dead is their transformation into something natural, something that grows according to its own logic, something that we encounter again and again and cannot escape.

Every time a hyacinth blooms in spring, Hyacinthus dies again. Every time an anemone scatters in the wind, Adonis is gored again. Every time a narcissus nods over water, Narcissus pines again, forever unable to touch what he desires most.

This is what it means to be remembered in a Greek garden. Not forgetting, not transcendence, not peace. But a kind of permanent presence enforced through beauty, a death that cannot be completed because it has been made eternal and seasonal and impossible to ignore.

The flowers do not resolve the grief. They make it bloom.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

buymeacoffee.com/kaylaandthebooks

This is not what the films tell you. The 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz ends with Dorothy waking in her bedroom, insisting to Aunt Em that it was all a dream, concluding with perhaps the most suffocating line ever scored to a minor key: “There’s no place like home.” Baum never wrote that. In his 1900 novel, Oz is real. The return to Kansas is real. And by the time Baum wrote his tenth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz, his heroine has abandoned Kansas entirely, with Aunt Em declaring at last that she’s been “a slave all my life” and won’t be going back. The films, in their determination to sentimentalize, performed a kind of censorship, stripping the books of their actual radical edge.

Something similar happened to Coraline. Henry Selick’s 2009 stop-motion film is lush and captivating, but it adds a boy, Wybie, who rescues Coraline at moments where the novel shows her rescuing herself through her own intelligence and courage. The film softens the mother-daughter antagonism into something more conventionally creepy. Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novella is darker and weirder: it’s genuinely about a girl who nearly gets trapped in a consuming maternal fantasy and who, in saving herself, discovers something unsettling about what her mother’s love actually looks like.

Both novels send their heroines from a gray, drab, emotionally neglectful “real world” into a vivid, seductive fantasy realm, and both ask the same question at their close: which is worse, boredom or possession? The answer each text gives depends entirely on what it thinks is the true danger for a girl growing up. And there, the two books diverge in ways that expose something hard about how we’ve imagined female development across the century between them.

Kansas is not just poor, in Baum’s novel. It’s gendered. The prairie has a peculiar power to drain color from women. When Aunt Em arrived, she was young and pretty; the sun and wind and relentless work have taken the sparkle from her eyes, the red from her lips, left her gaunt and incapable of smiling. Uncle Henry was much the same, but Baum’s eye lingers on the women: what the prairie does to their faces, their joy, their bodies. This is not mere atmosphere. The novel is making a claim about what domesticity costs women in rural America at the turn of the century.

Dorothy’s boredom when the story opens is therefore not a character flaw. It’s a reasonable response to a world that has bored her mother into a state of chronic exhaustion. She laughs, and Aunt Em snaps at her for it. She wants to play, and there is nothing to play with. The gray surrounding her is a lived reality, not a metaphor.

Coraline’s neglect is different in pitch but structurally identical. Her parents are not poor. They’re distracted: preoccupied with work, with the house, with everything except her. Her mother, Mel Jones, is the kind of contemporary professional woman who loves her daughter abstractly but hasn’t quite figured out how to be present for her. Coraline is bored because no one has bothered to make her not bored. It’s the privilege of the neglected middle-class child, which is to say it’s still neglect.

Both girls escape this gray into color, and in both cases the fantasy world is obsessively, almost threateningly attentive. In Oz, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion materialize around Dorothy as if they’ve been waiting for her. There are adventures. She is the protagonist of her own story, not a spectator in someone else’s. In the Other world, Coraline is served perfect meals, beautiful clothing, a mother who exists only to tend to her: “The other mother smiled. Her teeth were very white, and her smile was very red. It was a much warmer smile than her real mother’s, which was tired and distracted.” This is the fantasy that nearly traps her: not cruelty, but total love.

Both mothers in the fantasy worlds are, in a sense, perfected versions of the real mothers. But perfection is terrifying in the hands of women, if you listen to what these books are saying. The Other Mother’s perfect domesticity, Glinda’s flawless glamour, even Dorothy’s own competence as a heroine in Oz. In each case, female power and presence is coded as something that can overflow its banks and drown you.

This is where the books are most honestly ambivalent. Dorothy doesn’t simply go home. She is sent home, through a conjunction of forces beyond her control. The Wizard of Oz isn’t actually magic, can’t actually send her back, and finally Glinda reveals the real solution: the ruby slippers, which Dorothy had all along. She clicks her heels three times and chants “There’s no place like home,” and it works. But there’s something coercive in this technology. The slippers work because Dorothy has internalized the belief that she should want to return, that Oz, whatever she’s found there, is not really a place she’s allowed to stay. She’s learned her lesson: that she doesn’t actually want what she thinks she wants, that the ordinary is where a girl belongs.

Coraline’s return is more actively chosen but also more calculated. She defeats the Other Mother through cunning, trapping her in a locked box, but the victory comes at a cost that the novel is careful to document. She has discovered that her real mother loves her, yes, but that love is going to be approximately as distracted as it was before. Her real father is better at mothering, in some peculiar logic that critics have pointed out is “rather dubious feminist logic.” She has proven herself to be brave, which is the novel’s highest value, but bravery in this context means accepting a half-attentive parent, a not-quite-perfect home, and the knowledge that she could have had something more, something total, and she rejected it.

Both girls, in choosing home, are choosing limitation. They are choosing the ordinary in full knowledge of what they’re refusing. This is not a triumph of wisdom or growth. It’s a negotiation. And the negotiation is structured by something older and more insidious: the idea that female desire, when it exceeds the bounds of the domestic sphere, is dangerous.

Consider the details. In The Emerald City of Oz, the later novel in the series, Dorothy has become a problem for the domestic order. She’s a young woman, no longer a child. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are pressured by neighbors to send her away, or to marry her off, or to make her into something useful. Baum’s solution is revelation: Oz is real, it is where Dorothy belongs, and she will not come back. But Baum had to write a whole book to earn this permission. In his original novel, Dorothy submits. She goes home. And the only way the books allow her genuine escape is through the slow revelation, across ten sequels, that she was right to want to go in the first place.

Gaiman doesn’t give Coraline even that much. The triumph of her book is internal: she has learned to be brave, to love her imperfect mother, to accept reality. These are genuinely valuable things. But they come attached to a message about female development that deserves scrutiny. A 2008 essay by Rosemary J. Parsons, Elyce Rae Sawers, and Brittany A. McInally in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly makes the argument that Coraline is actually conservative in its gender politics. It demonizes the powerful mother figure (the Other Mother with her button eyes and her total presence) and valorizes the working, postfeminist mother precisely because she is less than total, less present, less demanding. Coraline’s victory, in this reading, isn’t freedom. It’s the forced acceptance of the patriarchal order: the father is “better” than the mother, the real world is “better” than the magical world, and the girl’s job is to make peace with that.

The scholars note a telling moment: Coraline wins by hosting a tea party and performing traditional femininity. She rescues herself not through her own action in the 2009 film (where Wybie helps her), but in the novel it’s through her own intelligence. And yet she still must perform the ritual of the feminine to seal her victory. The Other Mother wants to keep Coraline as a possession. Coraline defeats her by accepting a limited, real world where no one possesses her precisely because no one cares enough.

There’s an older myth underneath both stories. Persephone goes to the underworld and is trapped by Hades, who loves her. Her mother Demeter grieves and the earth dies. A bargain is struck: Persephone returns but must go back each year. She is divided, permanent in neither world, and the myth is fundamentally about a girl’s inability to belong fully to either mother or lover or selfhood.

Holly Blackford, in The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature, argues that this pattern persists in girls’ fantasy across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The girl descends, is tempted, and returns changed but incomplete. The return, Blackford argues, is “mourned but deemed necessary for the reproduction of culture.” What seems like liberation is actually the enforcement of social order. The girl must return because culture cannot afford to let her stay in that other place, that space of magic or autonomy or total maternal love. She must be brought back and integrated into the ordinary, the reproducible, the culturally legible.

In Baum, the girl eventually rebels. Dorothy gets to say no to this arrangement. The series lets her. But it takes ten novels and a heroine who is no longer quite a girl.

In Gaiman, the girl accepts. She says yes to the ordinary. She has learned her lesson. She will be brave about her distracted mother and her flawed real life. She has chosen, or believes she has chosen, and the choice is meant to feel mature.

But listen to what Coraline thinks at her moment of greatest temptation, when the Other Mother shows her what she could have forever: “It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more.”

This is the clearest statement either book makes about what love looks like in these fantasy worlds. It’s total, it’s consuming, it’s annihilating to the self. And Coraline correctly identifies this as dangerous. But the book doesn’t explore the flip side with equal force: that the real mother’s love is so distant it barely registers. The choice isn’t between different kinds of love. It’s between being possessed and being ignored. And Coraline, matter-of-factly, chooses to be ignored.

The most honest moment in either book might be this one, from Coraline: “Because… when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.”

This is the father’s wisdom, delivered to explain why he went back for his glasses even though wasps had stung him there before. It’s Coraline’s governing ethic for her entire adventure. You do the right thing even when you’re terrified. You are brave not because you’re fearless but because you’re frightened and you act anyway.

Applied to her choice to return home, this becomes something darker. Coraline is brave because she chooses limitation, because she accepts her real mother, because she can live in a world that is not perfect and not total and not entirely focused on her. This is an adult virtue, and it is being asked of a child. But more than that, it’s being asked of a girl, and it’s specifically about her learning to accept, to renounce, to make peace with less.

Baum understood something that Gaiman, writing over a century later in an age of postfeminism, seems to have decided was less urgent. He understood that the real danger to a girl is not wanting too much, but learning to want too little. The fantasy worlds in both books aren’t actually traps, despite their surface architecture. They’re invitations to expansiveness, to selfhood, to lives where a girl is the protagonist and not a supporting character in her own story. The danger is real (possession, consumption, the loss of selfhood). But so is the return. The return is the capitulation. The return is the agreement to be less.

By the end of the Oz series, Baum had written his way to a revolution: Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry all abandon Kansas to live permanently in Oz. They make the choice to stay. They refuse the return. They choose the magical, the expansive, the impossible. Baum lets them. It takes him four books to earn the permission to say it, but he says it.

By the end of Coraline, Gaiman has written his way to a compromise: Coraline will go to school, will make friends, will be brave, will accept her real mother, will live in the real world. She will be mature about it. She will understand the cost of the fantasy and will pay it willingly. She will grow up.

Both books are trying to say something true about female development. But they’re not saying the same thing. Baum is saying that the ordinary world is a trap, that women are being drained by it, that an imaginable life beyond it is worth fighting for, worth having. Gaiman is saying that the magical world is a trap too, that the fantasy of total maternal presence is actually annihilating, that you have to accept the real world and its imperfections and its absences. The first is a book about resistance. The second is a book about acceptance.

And they’re both right. The trap is real in both directions. The question is which trap is worse, and the question matters because it tells you what you think a girl should sacrifice in order to grow up. Should she sacrifice her ambitions to stay with her mother? Or should she sacrifice her mother to become herself?

Neither Baum nor Gaiman was writing about an easy answer. But the fact that they arrived at different answers, and that we’re asked to accept both as wisdom, suggests that what we’re actually watching in both books is not the triumph of the girl at all. It’s the triumph of the frame that contains her. It’s the story insisting that she choose, and then praising her for choosing the story’s preference, whether that’s home or the ordinary or the acceptance of limitation.

There’s a reason we remember “There’s no place like home,” even though Baum never wrote it. There’s a reason we watch Coraline accept her distracted mother and call it growth. Both stories have learned that we need this narrative, that we’re hungry for it: the story where the girl comes home, where she makes peace with the ordinary, where she learns that what she wanted was wrong and what the world offered her was right. We like this story because it’s the story that ends. It’s the story where a girl stops demanding to be the protagonist of her own life and accepts her proper role in someone else’s.

But if you listen to what the books are actually saying, underneath the satisfied endings, you can hear a different story. You can hear Aunt Em being drained of color by the prairie. You can hear the Other Mother saying, in her red-lipped way, that she loves Coraline completely, and Coraline understanding that as annihilation. You can hear both girls recognizing that every world they’re offered will cost them something fundamental. And you can hear, if you listen past the moral, what they’re really sacrificing when they choose to come home.

The choice is never as simple as the ending suggests. And neither the magic nor the ordinary is as safe as we’d like to pretend.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

buymeacoffee.com/kaylaandthebooks

Consider what actually happened. Nana Kwaku Bonsam, a Ghanaian spiritualist whose name translates roughly to “Devil of Wednesday,” told the UK tabloid Daily Star he was “working on Harry Kane… just enough to stop him against my country.” The claim was immediately recycled across the internet. But here is the crucial part: almost nobody took it seriously. Fans on Twitter responded with mockery. “Voodoo doesn’t work in football,” one replied. “Otherwise an African team would have won a World Cup by now.” Another, more wryly, suggested: “When the Ghanaian hexes against Kane actually work but then Jude Bellingham starts balling instead.” Even Uri Geller, the television mystic, announced he would counter-curse Kane with “good vibrations.” The story was entertainment, a joke everyone was in on. And yet the curse narrative persisted anyway, spreading through thousands of conversations, reports and social media threads as if it mattered.

This paradox is instructive. Nobody genuinely believes a witch doctor in Ghana can affect a football match through spiritual means. Modern football is relentlessly quantified: clubs employ data scientists, possession maps are drawn in real time, expected goals (xG) models reduce match outcomes to probability distributions. Players are monitored by GPS vests, their lactate levels measured, their sleep tracked. And yet, in this hyper-rationalized ecosystem, players still refuse to shoot during warm-ups. Goalkeepers still perform elaborate pre-match rituals. Teams still keep the same seating arrangements through winning streaks. Entire stadiums will refuse to move from their seats during a crucial passage of play, terrified that any disturbance will rupture the cosmic balance.

The question is why. Why does an elite sport built on science and statistics remain so thoroughly saturated with magic? The answer is not that football attracts superstitious people. It is that football, more than almost any human endeavor, exposes us to outcomes we genuinely cannot control. And when outcomes are beyond control, humans reach for ritual. Always.

Cristiano Ronaldo always steps onto the pitch with his right foot first. This is not something Ronaldo is coy about. He has done it for decades, before nearly every match of his career. He kisses his shin-pads. He touches the ball before leaving the dressing room. He maintains rigid, almost monastic routines. When asked about this, he does not hedge or deflect. He is superstitious. He has said so plainly.

Or consider Gary Lineker, one of England’s greatest strikers, a man of impressive composure and technical precision. Lineker refused to shoot during pre-match warm-ups. His reasoning was not magical: he believed that if he shot during warm-ups, he was “wasting his goals for the day.” At halftime, if he had not yet scored, he would request a new shirt. He finished his career with 331 goals. Bobby Moore, the England captain and perhaps the finest defender who ever played, insisted on being the last player to put on his shorts before a match. His teammate Martin Peters would deliberately take his own shorts off again, prolonging the standoff. This was not superstition as marginal indulgence. This was a ritual practiced at the heart of the English game, by its most serious competitors.

Goalkeepers are particularly forthcoming. Pepe Reina had a specific petrol station he would visit before every Liverpool home match, a fixed refuelling ritual whose logic was his alone. Sergio Goycochea, Argentina’s goalkeeper during the 1998 World Cup, developed a now-infamous habit of urinating on the pitch before penalty shootouts. He called it his lucky charm. “It was my lucky charm and I went before every shoot-out,” he later explained. “I was very subtle, nobody complained.” Shay Given kept a bottle of holy water behind his goal.

What is striking is how openly these men discuss their rituals, and how little ambiguity they permit. They are not saying the rituals “might help” or “don’t hurt.” They are saying: this is what I do, this is how I prepare. The rituals are not presented as psychological comfort zones or confidence-building theater. They are presented as real.

Yet none of these men are fools. Ronaldo understands biomechanics and periodization. Lineker is an intelligent, articulate man. They are not caught in some ignorant superstition. They are rational agents, operating within one of the most competitive and scrutinized environments on earth, and they have each decided that ritual is necessary. This is the central paradox: the more football is rationalized and measured, the more it requires magic to function.

To understand why, it helps to go back to Bronisław Malinowski’s 1925 fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski observed that islanders used elaborate magic for dangerous, unpredictable open-sea fishing, but for safe lagoon fishing, where catches were reliably large, they used none. He concluded that magic is not primitive superstition but a rational response to uncertainty and uncontrollability. When the stakes are high and the outcome is beyond your influence, humans develop ritual. It is not a sign of illogic. It is a feature of how minds are wired to function under threat.

This finding has been replicated and formalized in modern psychology. B.F. Skinner’s famous 1948 experiment demonstrated that pigeons, fed at fixed intervals regardless of their behavior, developed idiosyncratic ritual actions, turning counter-clockwise or head-thrusting repeatedly, as if they believed their movements controlled the food delivery. Skinner explicitly drew the analogy to human superstition, and to rituals for “changing one’s luck at cards.” Later researchers (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008) showed that loss of control actually increases people’s pattern recognition and superstitious beliefs: when humans feel they have lost control, they become more likely to “see images in noise” and to “develop superstitions.”

The mechanism is psychological. When uncertainty is high and stakes are maximal, ritual reduces anxiety and increases self-efficacy, the sense that you have agency over the outcome. Schippers & van Lange (2006), studying elite athletes, found that “ritual commitment is greater when uncertainty is high rather than low and when importance of the game is high rather than low,” with psychological tension mediating the effect. In other words: the more desperate the situation, the more people cling to ritual.

But here is the crucial empirical finding, the one that explains why football specifically is a world saturated in magic: football is the most luck-dependent, most unpredictable major sport.

The Barça Innovation Hub’s analysis of the Premier League over a seven-season span found that “46% of all goals were of random origin, and nearly half of the scores were decisively influenced by one of these situations.” Only 34% of goals came from teams that maintained possession. Physicists analyzing more than 300,000 games across a century found that soccer is the most competitive and upset-prone of all major team sports, with underdogs winning roughly 45% of the time, ahead of baseball (44%), hockey (41.5%) and the NBA (36.5%).

This is why. Football is a low-scoring, high-variance game decided by rare, consequential events that contain an irreducible element of luck. A deflection. A rebound off a defender’s shin. A goalkeeper’s positioning off by inches. Any single match can hinge on moments that no amount of data can eliminate. And so, in a field where outcomes hinge on chance, humans reach for the one technology they have always used to manage uncontrollable threat: ritual.

This is not individual psychology alone. The superstition is baked into the institutional fabric of football.

Leicester City’s Thai owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabah, a devout Buddhist, repeatedly flew monks from Bangkok’s Golden Buddha temple to bless the players and the pitch during the club’s miraculous 5000-to-1 title win in 2015-16. The chief monk, Phra Prommangkalachan, reported that players were “a bit indifferent” at first but came round. He distributed “unbeatable fabric” amulets. When Vichai died in a 2018 helicopter crash, the same monks returned to lead the inauguration of his statue. A monk participated in a major football club’s institutional process.

Benfica’s history is haunted by the curse of Béla Guttmann. In 1961 and 1962, Guttmann won back-to-back European Cups. He was refused a bonus. According to legend, he declared Benfica would not be European champions again “in 100 years.” Benfica then lost eight European finals in succession: 1963, 1965, 1968, 1983, 1988, 1990, 2013, 2014. This is not a minor detail in Benfica’s history. This is a central organizing narrative. Eusébio reportedly prayed at Guttmann’s grave in Vienna before the 1990 final. Benfica lost 1-0. The club has invested decades in the attempt to lift a curse that may never have been uttered.

(It is worth noting that historians have found no contemporaneous documentary evidence that Guttmann ever made the curse at all. The first press mentions appear in the late 1980s, making the whole thing likely a retrospective myth imposed on ordinary bad luck and the brutal margins of finals. And yet the curse functions regardless, real in its consequences if not in its origins. Benfica’s fans believe it. The club acts as though it believes it. The belief has become the curse.)

Italian clubs throw salt on the pitch. Fixed seating after wins. Team photographs taken at the same location through entire tournaments. France won the 1998 World Cup and refused to change the seats on the team bus. They played Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” on repeat. These are not marginal superstitions observed in secret. These are institutional practices, woven into the match-day protocols of the most ambitious and professional clubs in the world.

For every player ritual, there are thousands of fan superstitions. A Mirror survey found that nearly half of British football fans keep a match-day superstition, convinced that their rituals impact the result. The items are specific: unwashed lucky shirts, fixed seats in the pub, set routes to the stadium, specific foods, a refusal to move during a winning passage of play.

During the 2022 World Cup, an Argentine WhatsApp group called “La Brujineta” (a blend of “witch” and “La Scaloneta,” the team’s nickname) formed to protect Messi and the squad through coordinated witchcraft. The organizer, Antonella Spadafora, expected about ten people. The group grew to 25,000 followers in seven days. They were semi-serious, semi-ironic, or perhaps some third category that exists only in the space where modern collective belief operates. Their existence was confirmed by the New York Times and the Buenos Aires Herald. They were real enough that the establishment took notice.

This is the texture of modern football superstition: it exists in a space between genuine belief and knowing performance, where participants are never quite sure which they are doing. The fans maintain their rituals because they work, or because they believe they work, or because the act of ritual itself is the point, and belief is secondary. The line has blurred.

In Europe, magic is practiced quietly, in the domestic registers of routine and habit. Elsewhere, it is more openly institutionalized.

In African football, the practice of “juju” or “muti” is embedded at every level from grassroots to international. Documented practices include sprinkling coarse salt on pitches, burying objects near goalposts, washing jerseys with diviners rather than kit staff, and consulting marabouts and sangomas. The Kenyan scholar Wycliffe Njororai catalogued 22 distinct juju practices active in East African football alone.

The continental governing body, CAF, has attempted multiple bans. A 2008 statement declared, “We are no more willing to see witch doctors on the pitch than cannibals at the concession stands,” a phrase that reveals its own colonial undertones. The ban was reiterated in 2016 and again in 2023 after high-profile incidents. And yet the practice persists, because the function is identical to what Ronaldo does with his right foot: it is anxiety management in the face of uncontrollable outcomes.

Many practitioners frame juju as protective rather than aggressive, as a defense against opponents’ magic rather than an attempt to inflict harm. As one instructor at Senegal’s Diambars Academy explained it: “It’s like when a Western player embraces his cross before entering onto the pitch.” The logic is identical. The register is different.

In Argentina, the practice of “cábalas” (good-luck routines repeated while the team wins) is mainstream culture. During the 2022 World Cup run, tens of thousands of people participated in collective rituals designed to protect the squad. The distinction between fan and player, between the stadium and the living room, collapsed. Everyone was a participant in a shared magical practice.

In Brazil, an evangelical-Christian football culture overlays older Candomblé and Catholic traditions. The “Athletes of Christ” movement, founded in the 1980s and growing to roughly 7,000 members across 60 countries, became “one of the most influential power groups in Brazilian football” by the 1990s. The 1994 World Cup-winning squad included six members. Players pray collectively despite official bans on religious celebration. The magical and the sacred are inseparable.

And yet here is a folk-level rebuttal that circulates through all these cultures: if juju worked, if the magic were real, an African nation would have won a World Cup by now. The people who practice the magic are not naive enough to believe it is foolproof. They believe it works, and they simultaneously recognize that it clearly does not work, or not reliably, or not absolutely. They hold both truths at once. This is what it looks like when rational people grapple with genuine uncertainty.

The more football is measured, the more its irreducible randomness becomes visible. Analytics quantifies luck but cannot eliminate it. Expected goals models calculate probability, then watch as a 0.1 xG shot deflects in off a knee. GPS heat maps track movement, then see the match decided by a goalkeeper positioning himself off by centimeters. The data does not reduce magic. It exposes the precise coordinates of uncontrollability.

This is why superstition has not declined in the data age. It has transformed. Modern players can articulate the science of their sport with precision, and still maintain rituals they acknowledge are irrational. They do not inhabit two separate epistemic worlds. They inhabit one world where both things are true: that the data is useful and that it cannot predict or control the outcome that matters. Magic fills that gap.

The Harry Kane curse story exemplifies this perfectly. It originated from a single tabloid interview, was universally mocked as absurdity, spread anyway, and was engaged with by millions of people as if it were plausible, even though everyone involved knew it was not. This is not a regression to pre-scientific belief. This is a distinctly modern form of magic: one that acknowledges its own absurdity while maintaining it anyway, because the alternative is to face the genuine uncontrollability of outcomes we care deeply about.

Football, in this sense, is not the last place we believe in magic. It is the place where we most visibly, most honestly, confront why magic is inevitable. We invented statistics to escape it. We built algorithms. We measured everything. And yet when we do, we discover that the core of the game remains stubbornly random, stubbornly irreducible, stubbornly beyond our influence.

So we perform our rituals. Ronaldo steps right foot first. The monks bless the pitch. The fans refuse to move during the winning sequence. The witch doctor’s curse travels around the world, redundant and delightful and completely ineffective, a reminder that we have always known something the data cannot quite capture: that meaning is not the same as causation, and that sometimes what we need is not control but the feeling of influence, the small alchemy of ritual that transforms helplessness into agency.

This is the magic that football preserves. Not sorcery, but the older magic: the magic of how humans survive uncertainty.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

BUY ME COFFEE

The figure that mainstream culture now invokes (the action heroine) proliferated commercially in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Film scholars took her seriously. Carol Clover, in “Her Body, Himself” (Representations, 1987) and then Men, Women, and Chain Saws (Princeton University Press, 1992), coined the “Final Girl”: the survivor who “alone looks death in the face” and “finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued or to kill him herself.” Crucially, Clover warned against reading this figure as a simple feminist triumph, calling the applause for Ripley as a feminist icon “a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking.” The Final Girl, in her reading, was a vehicle for male viewer identification. Yvonne Tasker, in Spectacular Bodies (Routledge, 1993), coined “musculinity” to describe how films like Terminator 2 “reinscribe the female body in terms of masculinity.” From the very beginning, then, the academy understood the strong woman as a contradictory, loaded figure, not as a marketing checkbox.

The shift from descriptor to cliché has a clear marker. In July 2011, New York Times critic Carina Chocano published a widely cited essay describing the strong female character as a “cinematic cliché,” a “shorthand meme that has leached into the cultural groundwater.” She catalogued its subtypes with surgical contempt: “alpha professionals whose laser-like focus on career advancement has turned them into grim, celibate automatons,” “poker-faced assassins,” and “gloomy ninjas with commitment issues.” Two years later, in August 2013, Sophia McDougall’s “I Hate Strong Female Characters” delivered the definitive blow with its now-famous formulation: “Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong.”

McDougall’s central insight was that the phrase had become a patronizing reassurance. “No one ever asks if a male character is ‘strong,’” she wrote, and the strong female character “is anomalous.” The implicit message: of course, normal women are weak and boring and can’t do anything worthwhile. But this one is different. She is strong! See, she roundhouses people in the face. She nailed the templated quality of the imitations: “Nowadays the princesses all know kung fu, and yet they’re still the same princesses. They march on screen, punch someone to show how they don’t take no shit, throw around a couple of one-liners, and then with ladylike discretion they back out of the narrative’s way.”

The most useful diagnostic tool came from critic Tasha Robinson, whose June 2014 essay for The Dissolve coined “Trinity Syndrome” (after Carrie-Anne Moss’s character in The Matrix): “the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene.” Robinson openly acknowledged that “strong female character” had become “more a marketing term than a meaningful goal.” Her checklist remains devastating: Could your strong female character “be seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it to help a male hero”? Does she “disappear entirely for the second half” of the film? Is she the toughest character in the story “until the protagonist arrives”? She cited Valka in How to Train Your Dragon 2 (“she’s interesting. Too bad the story gives her absolutely nothing to do”) and Wyldstyle in The Lego Movie as prime offenders.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe offers the cleanest examples of strength substituting for character. New Yorker critic Richard Brody observed that the “recovery of identity in Captain Marvel is realized with little curiosity or interest.” Critics noted that Carol Danvers was “largely limited to fight scenes and one-liners,” her interiority confined to “fragmented flashbacks.” The film tries to address the criticism by showing her suppressing emotion, but as one analysis put it, “it’s still all in service of developing her physical strength, rather than her character.”

The market eventually rendered its own verdict. The Marvels (2023), led by three women and directed by Nia DaCosta, opened to $46,110,859 domestically across 4,030 theaters, the lowest opening in MCU history per Box Office Mojo, and finished at $206,136,825 worldwide. As The Hollywood Reporter noted on November 12, 2023, the film’s roughly $47 million start “rank[ed] as the worst start in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” against a production budget Variety reported at roughly $220 million to produce and $100 million to promote. Analyst David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research called it bluntly: “This is an unprecedented Marvel box office collapse.” The reasons were genuinely many (superhero saturation, the 2023 actors’ strike, streaming cannibalization), but the broader pattern holds: studios spent a decade marketing “strong female leads” as a selling point in itself, as though the adjective were the product. As one critic flatly observed: “If you want to prove that a strong female lead can make for a good movie, you must make a good movie.” For scale, Captain Marvel had grossed $1.13 billion in 2019.

This is the heart of the ideological hollowing. “Strength” became confused with physical prowess, invulnerability, and attitude. A character who never fails, never doubts, and never needs anyone reads not as powerful but as inert. What fans derisively (and often misogynistically) call a “Mary Sue” is better understood as a writing failure: a character with no arc because she begins and ends at maximum capability.

A remarkable consensus has formed among thoughtful critics that the problem is the metric itself. McDougall argued that even redefining “strong” to mean “well-written” doesn’t help: “It won’t do to add maybe a touch more nuance but otherwise carry on more or less as normal.” Her point was structural. The obsession with getting “one female character per story right” lets filmmakers off the hook for the deeper failure: the absence of women in the ordinary supporting roles men occupy by default. What she wanted instead: “a male-female character ratio of 1:1 instead of 3:1,” and “a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness.”

Chocano made a parallel argument: the cult of strength implies that female characters are “not interesting or worth identifying with” unless they are “tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to scowling and not saying goodbye when they hang up the phone.” In her 2017 essay collection You Play the Girl, she expanded the indictment: “I was so tired of the way female strength was made to look cold and humorless; the way it was characterized as deviant and ‘unnatural’ and always lonely and exceptional. ‘Strong female characters’ were never funny, and they never had any fun, either.”

The replacement vocabulary is well-established. The most important single concept is agency: whether a character “is truly part of the story, or a detachable accessory.” McDougall used Shakespeare’s Richard II to make the point. He is weak, yet the plot “is shaped around his (often extremely bad) decisions.” A character can be weak and still have agency; she can be physically powerful and have none.

Roxane Gay added the crucial dimension of the freedom to be unlikable. In her 2014 BuzzFeed essay “Not Here to Make Friends,” she argued that likability is “a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be,” and that “unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive.” The double standard she identified is precise: male antiheroes are celebrated for the exact traits (selfishness, coldness, ruthlessness) that get women characters dismissed.

The other recurring terms are complexity (flaws, contradictions, idiosyncrasy), interiority (a point of view the narrative actually inhabits), and specificity (the quality of being a particular person rather than a representative of her entire gender). McDougall’s two demands beyond agency were, tellingly, that a female character get “the spotlight” and be surrounded by enough other women that she “never has to act as any kind of ambassador or representative for maleness.” Or, in her case, femaleness.

The exhaustion is not just with the trope but with the conversation about it. The “girlboss,” coined by Sophia Amoruso in her 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS (“A #GIRLBOSS is someone who’s in charge of her own life. You’re a badass”), rose as an aspirational brand and collapsed into a punchline by 2020, crystallized in the “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” meme. The fall was so complete that Amoruso herself tweeted in 2022, “Please stop using the word girlboss. Thank you.”

Writing in The Drift’s Issue 6 in 2022, Jess Bergman diagnosed the deeper problem: contemporary feminist discourse “has for some time seemed trapped in a loop of disavowal. With notable exceptions, much recent feminist writing has devoted itself principally to patrolling the movement’s borders for interlopers.” As she put it, “You’re less likely to read about what twenty-first century feminism is than what it isn’t.”

This same exhaustion governs character discourse. The “Mary Sue” accusation, originally a fan-fiction term for wish-fulfillment characters, has been weaponized against essentially any competent woman (Rey, Captain Marvel) while male characters who succeed with minimal effort (Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star) are accepted as heroic. Meanwhile, even sincere attempts to interrogate the trope (the endless video essays on the “not like other girls” archetype, the discourse around Barbie’s feminism) have themselves reached, as one writer noted, “the point of over-saturation.” Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) staged this exhaustion explicitly, with America Ferrera’s monologue cataloguing impossible contradictions women face: “You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean.” Critics split predictably between those who found it cathartic and those who dismissed it as “Feminism 101,” and that very split became its own recursive discourse cycle.

The predictability is the point. The discourse has become a content engine: a film is announced, marketed on its “strong female lead,” praised or review-bombed along tribal lines, defended or attacked as a “Mary Sue,” eulogized or canonized. And the actual question of whether the character is a person gets lost in the machinery.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

BUY ME A COFFEE

Bergman, Jess. “Not Feminisms.” The Drift, Issue 6, 2022, www.thedriftmag.com/not-feminisms-bergman/.

Chocano, Carina. “A Heroine’s Journey.” New York Times Magazine, July 10, 2011. Print.

Chocano, Carina. You Play the Girl: On Playboys, Playgirls, and the Double Bind of Likeability. Harper, 2017.

Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself.” Representations, no. 17, 1987, pp. 87-120.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Fanlore. “Strong Female Character.” Fanlore, fanlore.org/wiki/Strong_Female_Character. Accessed 2025.

Gay, Roxane. “Not Here to Make Friends.” BuzzFeed, February 3, 2014, www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/not-here-to-make-friends.

Gay, Roxane. Bad Feminist: Essays. Harper Perennial, 2014.

Laird, Emily E. “Updating the Final Girl Theory.” Medium, medium.com/@TheFilmJournal/updating-the-final-girl-theory-b37ec0b1acf4. Accessed 2025.

Marnell, T.K. “Faux Strength in Female Characters.” Reading, ’Riting, and Ramblings, blog.tkmarnell.com/faux-strength-in-female-characters. Accessed 2025.

McDougall, Sophia. “I Hate Strong Female Characters.” New Statesman, August 2, 2013, www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters.

Phillips, Natasha. “‘I’m Not Like Other Girls’: The Trope That Just Won’t Die.” Queer Majority, queermajority.com/essays-all/im-not-like-other-girls. Accessed 2025.

Robinson, Tasha. “We’re Losing All Our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome.” The Dissolve, June 19, 2014. Web archive.

Slate. “Likable versus Unlikable Women: The Great Debate.” Slate, January 23, 2014, www.slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/likable-versus-unlikable-women-the-great-debate.html.

Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. Routledge, 1993.

The Take. “The Strong Female Character Trope, Explained.” Video essay, www.the-take.com/watch/the-strong-female-character-trope-explained. Accessed 2025.

Watkins, Evan. “The Problem With the Marketing of Captain Marvel’s Movie.” BW Media Spotlight, March 8, 2019, bwspotlight.com/2019/03/08/the-problem-with-the-marketing-of-captain-marvels-movie/.

Wikipedia. “Strong Female Character.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_female_character. Accessed 2025.

Wandering Librarians. “The Question of Strong Female Characters.” Blogger, July 2011, wanderinglibrarians.blogspot.com/2011/07/question-of-strong-female-characters.html.

Both texts concern themselves with an older male’s obsessive desire for a young girl. Both frame that desire as enchantment, as a kind of compulsion that overwhelms reason. And yet one text crucifies its narrator for the impulse while the other glamorises it. The difference lies not in the stories themselves but in how they choose to tell them, and what that tells us about the work narrative framing performs in either condemning or aestheticising possession.

Humbert Humbert announces himself on the opening page as a man of fancy prose. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” he tells us, and he is not wrong. What he fails to announce, or rather what Nabokov announces for us, is that we should count on that style to lie.

The novel’s architecture is deliberate. Nabokov surrounds Humbert with frames that distance us from his perspective: a fictional foreword by “John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.,” warning of the moral apotheosis to come; Nabokov’s own afterword disavowing any didactic intention whatsoever; a narrative that announces its own unreliability through chronological inconsistencies and the transparent sophistry of its own rationalizations. Most crucially, Nabokov grants Humbert only one rhetorical tool: the ability to seduce the reader through language while simultaneously exposing the mechanism of his seduction. Every eloquent passage that tempts us toward sympathy is undercut by the recognition that we are being tempted, that eloquence itself is the weapon of a man who has taught himself to mistake possession for love.

The “nymphet” concept exemplifies this technique. Humbert’s theory that certain girls aged nine to fourteen possess a “demoniac” nature that “bewitches” older men is presented as his discovery, his insight, his justification. The novel allows him to speak it at length. And then, in a moment of accidental honesty, he concedes: “What I had possessed was not she, but my own creation.” The enchantment was never magic. It was projection, alibi, the fiction a man tells himself to avoid recognising predation as predation.

Narrative theorist James Phelan distinguishes between “estranging unreliability,” which increases the distance between narrator and reader, and “bonding unreliability,” which decreases it. Lolita is the paradigmatic text of estrangement. The prose seduces; the structure resists. We are made complicit in Humbert’s rhetoric and then held responsible for that complicity, forced to recognise how easily we accepted his framing, how close we came to finding his “enchantment” persuasive. That discomfort is the point. Nabokov’s moral architecture depends on it.

Jareth arrives differently. He is not a narrator confessing his nature but a figure in a visual narrative, and he is presented not through the apparatus of an estranging frame but through the direct address of magic and presence. When he watches Sarah in her bedroom, when he sends her the glass orbs, when he steps into her dreams wearing David Bowie’s cheekbones and a codpiece, he is not rationalising his desire; he is incarnating it. The magic is real.

Creator intent matters here in ways it would not for Nabokov, because Labyrinth is the product of a team decision to make Jareth not a figure of mockery but of seduction. Director Jim Henson and designer Brian Froud consciously constructed the Goblin King as a “dangerous goblin, part glamorous rock star,” a figure who would simultaneously terrify and attract. When Brian Henson described the codpiece years later, explaining that it represents “male sexual aggression” directed at a girl “at a cusp period” where she is “becoming a woman,” he was not confessing to an oversight. He was describing intent. The film was engineered to present age-asymmetric desire not as rationalisable horror but as a developmentally symbolic coming-of-age.

Terry Jones, the credited screenwriter, later disowned the film, complaining that “I didn’t feel that it was very much mine.” He had written an environmental parable in which Jareth barely featured. Henson’s decision to cast Bowie and foreground him as an omni-present seducer transformed the narrative entirely. Where Jones’s original vision might have followed Nabokov’s template, estranging us from the male gaze, Henson’s revision embraced it, made it gorgeous, gave it a rock star’s voice and glitter and the full arsenal of Bowie’s star text. The film does not ask us to see through Jareth’s enchantment. It asks us to feel it.

Both texts deploy the language of enchantment, but to opposite effect. The etymology matters. “Glamour” derives from gramarye, the Scottish and Celtic term for occult learning, witchcraft, the power to alter perception. A glamour, in folklore, is a spell cast on the eye itself, a distortion of reality that makes the watcher see what the spell-caster wishes them to see. Humbert calls himself “bewitched,” but Nabokov positions the reader to see through the glamour. Jareth is a glamour, and the film positions us to feel its power even as we begin to recognise what it conceals.

The “Enchanted Hunters” motif in Lolita, the drugged peach and the crystal maze in Labyrinth, the literal magic that allows Jareth to slip into Sarah’s waking life, the prose that allows Humbert to narrate his crimes as passion, all of these are enchantments. But one text reveals the mechanism; the other performs it. One asks us to watch how seduction works; the other asks us to experience it.

The consequences are not abstract. They accumulate in what each narrative permits us to see of the girl at the centre.

Dolores Haze speaks almost not at all. The entire apparatus of the novel is designed to silence her, to render her audible only through Humbert’s filter, her thoughts accessible only as Humbert imagines them. She survives in the text primarily as the object of his gaze and his prose, denied the narrative agency that might let her speak her own suffering into being. When she leaves Humbert, he refuses to name where she goes or what she becomes, relegating her to a footnote of his own life. The novel forces this silence upon us; we read hundreds of pages before we fully recognise the enormity of what we have been permitted to overlook.

Sarah, by contrast, breaks her enchantment. The film grants her a voice that grows steadily stronger across its running time, and it culminates in the moment when she names her own power: “You have no power over me.” It is a rebellion that Lolita never permits its protagonist to voice. Sarah defeats her seducer; Dolores survives only as a disappearance. The films and novels we consume do not merely reflect cultural attitudes toward desire, consent, and possession. They enact and reinforce them. A narrative that grants a girl the power to refuse carries a different ethical weight than one that denies her even the words to protest.

Yet Labyrinth does not frame Jareth’s seduction as a moral crime. It frames it as a stage in development, a fantasy to be outgrown. The film trusts that growing up means learning to resist temptation; it does not require us to see the temptation itself as predatory. That trust, that assumption, is precisely what the post-MeToo re-reading has come to question. We know now, or are learning to admit, that the codpiece was not metaphor. The magic was not innocent. The enchantment that seemed benign in 1986 reads differently when you understand that a twenty-five-year-old performer in a provocative costume is dancing with a fifteen-year-old girl, and that the film asks the audience, alongside the character, to find him attractive.

Nabokov’s strategy is to make us complicit and then hold us accountable for that complicity. We are seduced by Humbert’s prose and forced to recognise our own seduction; the discomfort is the education. Henson’s strategy is to make us experience the allure of the seducer directly, to let the glamour do its work, and to trust that we will eventually see through it because the narrative itself does not genuinely believe in Jareth’s power. But here is where the two paths diverge most sharply: Lolita requires us to question what we found persuasive; Labyrinth merely requires us to outgrow it, as though infatuation with a predator were a stage of adolescence rather than a sign that the predator was permitted to operate.

Both texts are about possession, about the way male desire frames itself as enchantment to evade the recognition of harm. But only one text demands that we interrogate the seduction itself, that we learn to see through the prose and the glamour and the magic to the predation beneath. The other asks us to admire the artistry of the enchantment, to acknowledge its power, and to trust that witnessing will be enough.

It has not been.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

BUY ME A COFFEE

Edelstein, Marilyn. “(How) Should a Feminist Teach Lolita in the Wake of #MeToo?” In Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era, edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, pp. 35-60. Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

Froud, Brian. Interview conducted by ComicBook.com. January 2022.

Henson, Brian. Interview conducted by ComicBook.com. January 2022.

Nabokov, Vladimir. “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” Afterword to Lolita. Vintage International, 1997, pp. 311-324.

Phelan, James. “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita.” Narrative, vol. 15, no. 2, May 2007, pp. 222-238.

Rakhimova-Sommers, Elena, editor. Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era. Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

Trilling, Lionel. “The Last Lover.” Encounter, vol. 10, no. 4, October 1958, pp. 9-19.

Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko. “Resisting Humbert’s Rhetorical Appeals: A Reevaluation of Lolita’s Ethics.” In Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era, edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, pp. 151-165. Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

The film is Gábor Csupó’s oddity. Csupó, the Hungarian co-founder of animation studio Klasky Csupo, had earned his stripes directing The Simpsons and Rugrats before pivoting to live action with Bridge to Terabithia in 2007. Moonacre came next, based loosely on Elizabeth Goudge’s 1946 novel The Little White Horse, a book so beloved by J.K. Rowling that she named it a direct influence on Harry Potter. The story is simple: orphaned Maria Merryweather arrives at the crumbling Moonacre Manor to discover she is the “Moon Princess,” inheritor of a curse that divides two families, the Merryweathers (soft, feminine, flower-crowned) and the De Noirs (black leather, brooding, led by a gloriously unhinged Tim Curry). She must reconcile them, lift the curse, and recover a unicorn.

What the script lacked, the camera compensated for. Shot in Hungary with cinematographer David Eggby (a veteran of Mad Max and Dragonheart), the film is a colour-saturated storybook brought to bleeding life. Castle exteriors were the real thing: Schossberger Castle stood in as Moonacre Manor, Csesznek Castle as the De Noir estate, and the ensemble was built around Hungarian forests. The costume designer, Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, gave Maria a series of gowns that have become, in retrospect, fairycore scripture: flowing pastels, embroidered florals, and a distinctive exposed-bustle silhouette where the cage sits outside the skirt, visible and architectural. The colour palette is autumn-turned-jewelled, the atmospheric lighting candlelit and moon-soaked. The whole enterprise glows with what you might call romantic melancholy, a longing for an enchanted world that works according to different rules than this one.

And then, thirteen years later, TikTok discovered it.

To understand why, you need to understand what cottagecore, fairycore, and their cousin dark academia actually are. Cottagecore emerged in 2018 on Tumblr and exploded on TikTok in 2020 when lockdowns sent millions looking for escapism. Its visual language is pastoral nostalgia: floral dresses, faded sun-dappled imagery, bread-baking, herb-foraging, a general romanticisation of simple rural life. Fairycore is the more magical sibling, less grounded in realism and more devoted to moonlit forests, crystal jewellery, ethereal layered gowns in tulle and lace, and an explicit aesthetic promise: look like a fairy. Dark academia, the brooding third, romanticises Gothic libraries and stone corridors and the melancholic glow of candlelit learning.

What binds them is ancestry. All three trace themselves back through Victorian Romanticism and earlier pastoral traditions, through British and Irish fairy folklore, through the Gothic novel and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. They are, in other words, drawing from the exact same well that Elizabeth Goudge drew from when she wrote The Little White Horse in 1946, a book born from a desire, as she put it, to escape the realities of wartime by imagining “a world where a unicorn cantered behind the trees.” The resemblance between Moonacre and the aesthetics is therefore not mysterious. It is inevitable.

The film hits every visual note fairycore would later canonise. There is the Gothic manor where the supernatural is woven into the architecture, where paintings come alive and clothes appear laid out on the bed each morning. There is the isolated valley, a pocket of enchantment cut off from the ordinary world, which is precisely the pastoral retreat cottagecore fantasises about. There is the heroine literally named for the moon, and a unicorn cantering through moonlit woods. There is the collision of ethereal femininity and edge, the Merryweathers in their flower-crowned robes and the De Noirs in their romantic-punk leather and feathers. There is the storybook atmosphere, the lush colour, the sense that beauty and magic operate here according to their own logic. If you were designing a visual mood board for fairycore in 2020, you could have screenshotted this film and submitted it as reference.

But this is not a story of hidden influence. There is no documented line running from Moonacre in 2008 to cottagecore in 2018. Instead, it is a story of convergence, two moments reaching independently toward the same dream. Both the film and the aesthetics drew upon Victorian Romanticism, folklore, the Gothic, the pastoral longing baked into the British literary tradition. Both arrived at moonlit forests and crumbling manors and ethereal dresses because those are the visual language of escapism, and they speak to something deep. When lockdowns hit in 2020, TikTok users were not looking for something new. They were looking for permission to want what they had always wanted, dressed in a visual language finally old enough to feel safe.

What changed is that the aesthetics got named. Cottagecore entered popular vocabulary. Fairycore acquired definition, codes, and a critical mass of users. And suddenly, scrolling through a fairycore film recommendation list, or stumbling across a TikTok edit tagged #fairycore with 104,000 likes, you find The Secret of Moonacre, a film you have never heard of, looking exactly like your own longing made visible. Creator accounts devoted to aesthetic edits, like @hedhogfilms and @loulettart, began mining it for footage. The aesthetics blog My Cottagecore, in its fairycore guide, lists the film as essential viewing. A generation too young to see it in 2009, when it was still a flop, now discovers it as prophecy.

The real irony is that Csupó, bringing an animator’s sensibility to live action, had always understood something the film’s commercial failure obscured: that image and atmosphere matter more than plot, that a world can be more compelling than a story, that beauty itself is escapism. The critics of the time had no name for what he was building. We do now. It just took TikTok to tell him he was right.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

BUY ME A COFFEE

Batcho, Krystine. “The Psychology Behind Cottagecore.” CNN, 7 February 2021.

Choe, Kim. Review of The Secret of Moonacre. Newshub (New Zealand).

Csupó, Gábor. Interview. Hype & Hyper, 2022.

Eggby, David. Cinematography. The Secret of Moonacre. Directed by Gábor Csupó. Warner Bros., 2008.

Goudge, Elizabeth. The Little White Horse. Hodder and Stoughton, 1946.

Hype & Hyper. “All is lost if an animation has no soul: Interview with Gábor Csupó, the Creator of our Beloved Childhood Cartoon Characters.” Hype & Hyper, 2022. https://hypeandhyper.com/all-is-lost-if-an-animation-has-no-soul-interview-with-gabor-csupo-the-creator-of-our-beloved-childhood-cartoon-characters/

IMDb. “Beatrix Aruna Pasztor.” Accessed June 2026. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0665194/

Jennings, Rebecca. “Cottagecore is the Aesthetic where Quarantine is Romantic Instead of Terrifying.” The Goods (Vox), 3 August 2020.

My Cottagecore. “A Definitive Guide to Fairycore.” My Cottagecore. Accessed June 2026. https://mycottagecore.com/fairycore/

Pasztor, Beatrix Aruna. Costume Designer. The Secret of Moonacre. Directed by Gábor Csupó. Warner Bros., 2008.

Rotten Tomatoes. “The Secret of Moonacre.” Rotten Tomatoes. Accessed June 2026. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/

Rudkin, Francesca. Review of The Secret of Moonacre. The New Zealand Herald.

The Secret of Moonacre. Directed by Gábor Csupó, written by Graham Alborough and Lucy Shuttleworth, cinematography by David Eggby, music by Christian Henson, Warner Bros., 2008.

Wikipedia. “Cottagecore.” Wikipedia. Accessed June 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottagecore

Wikipedia. “The Secret of Moonacre.” Wikipedia. Accessed June 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Moonacre

This is not a question born of cynicism. Pixar’s 1995 debut was a genuine revolution, the first fully computer-animated feature and a film so perfectly calibrated that the National Film Registry deemed it culturally significant within a decade. Its sequels have mostly been extraordinary. The core puzzle is structural, almost paradoxical: a franchise whose entire thematic spine is “learning to release what you love” has somehow become incapable of its own release. And every time the studio insists it is finished, every time the credits roll on what is presented as the final goodbye, Disney greenglights another film that undoes that closure and leaves audiences wondering if the franchise will ever actually end.

The evidence is not subtle. In 2010, Toy Story 3 delivered what critics near unanimously called one of cinema’s most perfect endings. Andy, aged seventeen and college-bound, donated his toys to a younger girl named Bonnie in a scene of such emotional precision that it felt conclusive in the way great endings are meant to be: irrevocable, transformative, complete. The film had already staged the toys’ collective acceptance of death in a furnace, making the handoff of the toys to Bonnie feel like resurrection, like purpose renewed. Critics treated the ending as definitive. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It was, by any serious measure, a finale.

Nine years later, Toy Story 4 arrived to explain why it wasn’t.

And then, just this month in June 2026, Toy Story 5 arrived to explain why Toy Story 4 wasn’t either.

What makes this pattern so revealing is not that sequels exist. The American film industry is structurally incapable of leaving money on the table, and the Toy Story franchise has generated approximately 16 billion dollars in revenue for Disney over three decades. The pattern is revealing because of what it tells us about the gap between what audiences and critics say they want (closure, resolution, respect for a completed story) and what the industry structure actually delivers (infinite extension, endless reopening of what was meant to be closed). And it is revealing because the later films themselves seem to acknowledge, with each reboot, that they are not necessary, that they are almost confessions of their own superfluity.

The critical numbers tell the story with brutal clarity. Toy Story and Toy Story 2, released in 1995 and 1999, both earned perfect 100 percent scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Toy Story 2 was so successful that it became the rare sequel treated as equal to its predecessor, and Toy Story 3 maintained near-perfect consensus at 98 percent. For the first two decades of the franchise, critical enthusiasm was not just high but nearly universal. The films felt essential, culturally necessary, the kind of works that justified animation as an artistic medium worthy of serious attention.

Then the trajectory shifted. Toy Story 4 arrived at 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 84 on Metacritic, respectable numbers that nonetheless represented a measurable dip. But the more revealing shift came with Toy Story 5, which arrived this summer with a 93 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and a notably lower 73 on Metacritic. Not for the first time, but more dramatically than ever, the franchise was shedding critical regard even as it accumulated commercial success. Toy Story 5 opened to 160 million dollars domestically, a franchise record, yet received the lowest critical scores in the series’ thirty-year history.

Here is the inversion that matters: the box office has moved in the opposite direction from critical enthusiasm. Toy Story 3 crossed 1 billion dollars globally and earned Best Picture consideration. Toy Story 4, released as a film that “didn’t need to exist” (as one prominent defense of the film somewhat awkwardly argued), also crossed 1 billion dollars. Toy Story 5 is on pace to do the same. Meanwhile, critical consensus has quietly shifted from universal acclaim to what can only be described as exhausted tolerance. The reviews use words like “unnecessary,” “reheated,” “minor,” and “IP exhaustion.” Vulture’s Alison Willmore wrote that the franchise “has started to feel like the toys it continues to showcase: something that should be battered beyond recognition and retired to a donation box by now, but that no one can bear to let go.” The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave the film two stars and diagnosed it as “played out,” its “unblembished sheen” concealing a core that had “gone dead.”

What is remarkable is not that critics were divided. What is remarkable is that everyone seemed to agree on one thing: the reason Toy Story 5 exists is not because the story needed telling. It exists because Disney owns it, and owning a 16 billion dollar franchise means never having to say it’s over.

To understand how this happened, it is necessary to linger on what Toy Story 3 actually accomplished. The film resolved Woody’s entire thirty-year arc in a single act of relinquishment. Woody’s identity had been bound to Andy since 1995. He was “Andy’s toy,” a possession that derived meaning and purpose from being wanted, being played with, being the favorite. The entire emotional logic of the original film hinged on this: Woody’s fear of obsolescence, his panic at being replaced, his terror of the incinerator scene where he faced the prospect of meaninglessness. For seventeen years and three films, Woody’s core conflict was his need to be needed.

Toy Story 3 resolved this by having Woody accept that his usefulness to Andy was over, and that this was not a tragedy but a gift. The handoff to Bonnie was not a demotion. It was a recognition that a toy’s purpose could be fulfilled by bringing joy to a new child, that loving someone sometimes means knowing when to let them go, and that a life lived in service to one person could be completed without bitterness. The film even did something elegant visually: it bookended the entire series by closing on the same blue-sky, puffy-cloud wallpaper that opened the 1995 original. There was a sense of circularity, of return, of a chapter genuinely closed.

Toy Story 4 arrived nine years later with a problem. How do you follow a film that conclusively resolved its protagonist’s central conflict? Director Josh Cooley was candid about the existential challenge. He told the press that the announcement of a fourth film “reeked of a studio cash grab” and that he had to be convinced the story was worth telling in the first place. The cast seemed to agree. Tim Allen sent text messages warning Tom Hanks about “those last pages.” Hanks described recording the ending as “saying goodbye to Woody and Buzz and Bonnie’s room and Andy and everybody.” There was grief in the voice work itself, as if everyone involved understood they were overdubbing a character who was meant to have already left the frame.

Toy Story 4’s solution was to give Woody a different, individual ending: one where he chose independence over service, staying with Bo Peep instead of returning to be Bonnie’s toy. This was not resurrecting Woody’s old conflict. It was undoing Toy Story 3’s resolution. Suddenly the handoff to Bonnie was not the point. Suddenly there was another arc to resolve, another goodbye to stage, another moment where a beloved character could choose his own path and leave the frame. The film ends with Woody walking away from Bonnie’s room, leaving Jessie and the others behind. It was billed as a conclusion. Critics and audiences divided sharply on whether the film was brilliant or unnecessary, but everyone seemed to agree on one thing: it was, undeniably, a second ending.

Then, six years later, Toy Story 5 arrived to announce that neither of the two endings was actually final.

The fifth film shifts focus away from Woody almost entirely, centering instead on Jessie and positioning her as the franchise’s protagonist for the first time. This is not a bad storytelling instinct on the surface. Jessie has been a character in the margins of the story since 1999, and giving her a central arc makes narrative sense. The problem is that the very existence of the film contradicts everything its predecessors insisted was resolved. Woody achieved closure in Toy Story 3. He achieved a different kind of closure in Toy Story 4. Now, in Toy Story 5, he is simply gone, offscreen, dealt with through exposition, relegated to a past the franchise has moved past. Not because the story demanded it, but because the franchise had exhausted what could be narratively wrung from him and needed new characters to carry the brand forward.

Director Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote the first four films and directed the fifth, has been refreshingly honest about this. In an interview with ScreenRant, Stanton revealed that the franchise is architecturally designed never to fully close. He said: “It’s like a series that doesn’t know it’s going to get picked up for the next season. We’d always end it like it could end here, but we’ve passed the badge on from Woody to Jessie at the end of 4, just in case it keeps going.” On whether a sixth film was possible, he said simply: “You can never say never.” He has also noted that he could imagine staying involved with the franchise until he is “in a rocking chair somewhere.”

What this means, in plain language, is that Toy Story has stopped pretending to be a story with an arc. It is now a franchise, a property, an ongoing revenue stream that will continue as long as audiences will pay to see it. The films are made with built-in succession planning, each one preparing to hand the torch to the next, each one ending in a way that technically could be final but that leaves narrative space for continuation. This is not storytelling. This is debt issuance. Each film is a promissory note that says: we have resolved this arc, but we have also set up the next one, just in case.

This structure did not emerge by accident. It emerged because Hollywood’s economics demand it.

The shift at Pixar itself is instructive. During the studio’s first decade, only one of its first ten films was a sequel: Toy Story 2. The rest were original stories, world-building exercises that generated their own intellectual property rather than recycling existing franchises. After Disney’s 7.4 billion dollar acquisition in 2006, and especially after 2017, when co-founder John Lasseter departed under misconduct allegations, the ratio inverted. By 2024, Pixar’s strategy was explicitly redefined. Studio president Jim Morris set a goal to “make three movies every two years, with every other title a sequel or spinoff and the rest standalone concepts or potential seeds for new franchises.” This is not ambition. This is triage.

The reasoning is sound from a financial perspective. Sequels are safer. They depress risk. As Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse documents in her book Blockbusters, investors and studios prefer sequels because intellectual property itself functions “as a hedge against risk.” A franchise with an established audience, known characters, and proven commercial appeal requires less marketing spend and attracts more reliable opening-weekend numbers than an original story. By the mid 2010s, roughly 80 percent of blockbuster budgets were being allocated to IP based projects. The numbers became almost inescapable: by 2023, the top three films at the global box office were an adaptation, a sequel, and a biopic. The last time the year’s top three films were all original stories was 2001.

What this means is that letting a beloved franchise end, even a franchise that has artistically completed itself, is now something close to a financial irrationality from a studio’s perspective. Toy Story 3 earned 1 billion dollars and won Best Picture consideration. Why would Disney ever choose to not make Toy Story 4? Why would it not make Toy Story 5? The franchise has generated 16 billion dollars in revenue over thirty years. That is roughly 533 million dollars per annum, a figure that dwarfs most entertainment businesses and that grows larger every time the franchise extends and opens new merchandise opportunities, new streaming deals, new theme park attractions.

Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, confirmed this logic in February 2023 when he announced Toy Story 5 alongside other sequel projects. He framed it explicitly as part of Disney’s strategy to lean into “our unrivaled brands and franchises.” Notably, the announcement came alongside the revelation of 7,000 layoffs and 5.5 billion dollars in cost cuts. The message was clear: original ideas are expensive and risky. Proven franchises are cheap and reliable. Pixar would continue to make original films, but the money and the attention would flow toward the sequels.

The failure of Lightyear in 2022 is the only cautionary note to this story. The Toy Story spin-off, which told the origin story of the Buzz Lightyear action figure, lost the studio an estimated 106 million dollars and exposed the limits of brand extension. Audiences would not follow the franchise into every possible territory. There were boundaries. But those boundaries did not extend to the mainline series. The core Toy Story films kept earning money, kept bringing audiences back, kept justifying their own existence through opening weekend numbers that broke franchise records even as critical scores declined.

What this creates is a perverse incentive: the worse the critical reception becomes, the more it demonstrates that the franchise has been over-extended, and yet the worse the critical reception is, the more likely it is that audiences are responding to pure brand loyalty rather than artistic merit. And pure brand loyalty, from a studio perspective, is far more valuable than critical acclaim. Critical acclaim requires artistic risk. Brand loyalty requires only consistency and the willingness to show up.

There is an almost unbearable irony at the center of this story. Toy Story was always, from its first film, explicitly about the necessity of relinquishment. The original film is structured around Andy’s growth from a child who plays with toys to a child who is beginning to move beyond that phase. Woody’s entire arc in that first film is learning to accept that his relationship with Andy is not permanent, that the bond he feels is meaningful precisely because it is temporary, that toys exist to bring joy during a specific chapter of a child’s life and that relinquishing that role is not a failure but the successful completion of their purpose.

Toy Story 2 complicated this by suggesting that toys could have intrinsic value beyond their relationship to any single child. But Toy Story 3 returned to the original logic and perfected it. Andy gives up his toys. Woody accepts that this is right and good. The toys find meaning with Bonnie. There is loss, but there is also completion. The emotional resonance of that ending derived entirely from the fact that it was an ending, that something was being relinquished, that closure had been earned.

Now, thirty-one years later, with Toy Story 5 in theaters and a possible sixth film not ruled out by the filmmakers, the franchise has become living contradiction of its own teaching. It is, literally and figuratively, a toy that refuses to be put away. A story that cannot practice what it preaches. A meditation on letting go that has forgotten how to let go.

This is not merely an artistic problem. It is a cultural problem that speaks to something larger about how we experience media and time in the late 2020s. Critic Ted Gioia, writing about what he calls “stories without closure,” argues that Hollywood and Netflix have built a culture that “makes billions by creating a culture without closure.” This violates, he suggests, basic human psychology. Literary critic Frank Kermode’s 1966 book The Sense of an Ending argues that human beings have a fundamental need for closure, for the sense that time has shape and meaning and direction, not merely the passage of one moment after another. Stories without endings, Gioia argues, collapse into what Kermode called “unruly chronos,” time reduced to “one damn thing after another” with no narrative arc, no shape, no sense of completion. We experience them not as stories but as sequences.

The comparison set is instructive. The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the original Star Wars trilogy are celebrated precisely because they stick the landing, because the creators seemed to understand that ending well is an art form in itself and that the final film of a series carries unique responsibility. Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park: these franchises are repeatedly cited as examples of series that should have ended. The post Jurassic Park sequels became increasingly cartoonish, increasingly disconnected from the original film’s anxieties. Jurassic World Dominion, the most recent entry, significantly underperformed at the box office relative to earlier films in that series, a sign that even the most reliable IP eventually exhausts audience goodwill.

The pattern that emerges is that audiences do not want infinite franchises. They want good films that end. They want stories that have shape. They want to say goodbye to characters they love while still loving them, rather than watching those characters become diluted and repetitive, appearing again and again in diminishing circumstances until affection curdles into indifference.

And yet audiences keep showing up to Toy Story films. Opening weekend numbers keep breaking franchise records. The box office, the most direct measure of what audiences are actually willing to pay for, suggests that audiences do not want Toy Story to end, or at least that they are willing to pay to see it continue even if they think it should have ended.

This is not contradiction. It is a more complex truth about how nostalgia functions in the contemporary moment.

The research on nostalgia marketing is consistent on a few key points. As Ivey Business School researcher June Cotte has documented, “when people feel lonely, anxious, or insecure, they tend to seek comfort in nostalgic memories.” Nostalgia spikes during periods of economic and social uncertainty, which is to say that nostalgia spikes during the present moment. We are living through the loneliest era in recorded human history, with epidemic levels of isolation and anxiety, with economic precarity that makes basic planning difficult, with a sense of cultural fracture that is visible in real time across social media. Into this void steps comfort media: the reassurance of returning to worlds that felt safe, that were understood and knowable, that did not require the emotional labor of engaging with something new.

The appeal of Toy Story 5, then, is not primarily that audiences want to know what happens next to Jessie. It is that audiences want to return to the Toy Story world itself, to be back in Andy’s room or Bonnie’s room or wherever the toys are, in a space where stakes feel manageable and characters are knowable and the story, however many times it has been extended, still operates according to rules the audience understands.

This is not frivolous. It is genuinely comforting. And it becomes what media scholar call “media nostalgia,” a specific phenomenon documented in the International Journal of Communication, where audiences seek out familiar narratives “as a coping mechanism for those stressed by media change.” Toy Story 5 is as much a response to the proliferation of streamers, the fragmentation of culture, the sense that nothing is permanent as it is a response to the personal and social anxieties of the contemporary moment. It offers the promise of constancy. It says: you can return here. This world is still available. These characters are still waiting.

But this comfort comes at a cost, and the cost is paid in a subtle erosion of meaning. The more times Toy Story ends, the less any individual ending can matter. The more times the franchise promises closure, the less audiences can believe that closure is coming. What should be a culminating moment becomes merely another chapter in an infinite sequence. What should be devastating becomes routine. And the very thing that made the original Toy Story films so powerful, their insistence that endings matter and that learning to let go is the central work of becoming human, becomes hollow because the franchise itself refuses to practice what it teaches.

There are two competing futures for this franchise. In one, Toy Story continues indefinitely. Stanton remains involved, characters rotate off, new characters are introduced, the studio mines the property for as long as audiences will pay and critics will review it. In this future, the film series outlasts the original creators, continues under new directors, generates spin-offs and TV series and theme park attractions in a calculus that increasingly treats the franchise as an abstract asset rather than a story with an author. This is the trajectory that most successful IP now follows. Marvel never ends. Star Wars never ends. The Fast and Furious saga explicitly promises to continue beyond the heat death of the universe. The difference is only that those franchises never pretended to be about letting go.

In the other future, the franchise ends. Toy Story 5 is the last mainline film. The studio decides that the critical erosion, the sense of exhaustion visible in the reviews, the fundamental contradiction between what the franchise teaches and what the franchise does, has become untenable. The films are preserved. The toys remain in Andy’s and Bonnie’s rooms, frozen in the moment Toy Story 3 and 4 left them, never again to return. The franchise would have done something remarkably rare: it would have ended well, ended while it still meant something, ended while audiences still wanted more rather than waited for it to finally be over.

Which future actually arrives will depend partly on economics and partly on whether audiences and critics can maintain the cognitive dissonance that allows them to love and keep attending Toy Story films while simultaneously recognizing that the franchise should have ended years ago. That dissonance has held for six years already. It held through Lightyear’s failure. It is holding now. But if Toy Story 3 taught us anything, it is that endings matter, and that the most powerful moment in a story is not when something continues but when something is relinquished with grace.

The question for the Toy Story franchise is not whether it can make another good film. The question is whether it can teach itself what it spent three decades teaching everyone else: sometimes the greatest gift you can give to something you love is the gift of ending well.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

BUY ME A COFFEE

Bradshaw, Peter. “Toy Story 5 Review: A Franchise Running on Empty.” The Guardian, 2026.

Catmull, Edwin. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House, 2014.

Cooley, Josh. Interview. The Playlist, 2019.

Daniels, Robert. Review of Toy Story 5. RogerEbert.com, 2026.

Elberse, Anita. Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. Henry Holt and Company, 2013.

Gioia, Ted. “Audiences Grow Weary of Stories That Never End.” The Honest Broker, 2024.

Iger, Bob. Earnings Call Statement. Disney, February 8, 2023.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1966.

Morris, Jim. Interview. Bloomberg, 2024.

Stanton, Andrew. Interview. ScreenRant, 2024.

Willmore, Alison. “Toy Story 5 Review.” Vulture, 2026.

Not whether it is advisable to sympathise with him. Whether it is advisable to create him at all.

That Charlotte Brontë herself recognised her sister’s protagonist as something more intentional and more theologically transgressive than a passionate man tells us something crucial. Emily Brontë did not stumble into Heathcliff’s demonic architecture. She built it with careful precision, layering together the templates of Milton’s Satan, the folkloric changeling, the Gothic villain-hero, and the Romantic Satanic rebel into a figure who would obsess readers and critics for nearly two centuries. The question the novel finally asks is not simply whether evil can be redeemed. It is whether evil can be created deliberately, knowing full well that it cannot.

To read Heathcliff as deliberately demonic is not, as it might first appear, to stage a retreat into the supernatural. The novel never confirms that he is literally a demon. What it does, instead, is something far more philosophically unsettling: it constructs a character so thoroughly saturated in demonic language, so consistently marked by symbols of otherness and exclusion from the human Christian order, that the question of whether he is demonic becomes philosophically undecidable. He appears to be made evil by circumstance, yet the text keeps circling back to the possibility that evil is intrinsic to his being, that some corruption preceded any injury that might explain it.

The theological tradition of reading Wuthering Heights has three major voices, and they disagree profoundly about what kind of demonic architecture Brontë has constructed.

The first arrives through Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose 1979 essay “Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell” argues that the novel is a deliberate, inverted rewriting of Paradise Lost. In their account, Heathcliff functions as Catherine’s Satanic shadow self, and the entire moral economy of the novel inverts Milton’s cosmos. Where Milton’s Satan falls from heaven through pride and envy, Brontë stages “a fall into grace” — Catherine’s loss, in other words, is “a loss of Satan, not a loss of God.” Gilbert and Gubar note the novel’s obsessive heaven/hell imagery, its inversions of Christian symbolism, and its consistent choice to place the lovers outside consecrated ground and Christian redemption. The diabolical reading, in their hands, becomes a feminist act: Brontë reclaims the Satanic as a language of defiance and self-assertion against patriarchal Christianity.

The second comes from Harold Bloom, who explicitly rejects the Miltonic reading. For Bloom, the novel’s spiritual template is not Paradise Lost but Byron’s Manfred, and the orientation is Gnostic rather than Christian. “Emily Brontë is no more interested in refuting Milton than in sustaining him,” Bloom insists. Instead, Catherine and Heathcliff embody a kind of Gnostic union, a yearning for the pleroma or fullness that ordinary morality cannot contain. In this reading, there is no restoration in the second generation, no Christian exorcism. The daemonic is never finally subdued.

The third speaks through Dorothy Van Ghent, whose 1953 essay “On Wuthering Heights” remains perhaps the most philosophically precise account of the demonic in the novel. Van Ghent proposes that “Heathcliff might really be a demon,” but more importantly, that the novel operates at a level “simply unmoral.” With a daemonic figure like Heathcliff, she argues, “it is impossible to speak … in terms of ‘sin’ and ‘guilt.’” He belongs to a lineage with Oedipus, Lovelace, Satan, Manfred, and Faustus, the figures of literature who stand outside the ordinary moral order entirely. For Van Ghent, Heathcliff is “anthropomorphized primitive energy,” a force more than a person.

These three readings agree on one crucial point: Heathcliff transcends ordinary moral categories. But they disagree sharply on the template that architecture requires. The article that reads him as merely Byronic, merely misunderstood, merely a victim of circumstance, has always been the easier reading. The theological reading demands that we hold open the possibility that Brontë intended something far stranger and more disturbing: a character so deliberately constructed as demonic that the question of whether evil is born or made becomes genuinely undecidable.

The mechanism of this construction reveals itself in two overlapping narrative strategies: the folkloric changeling template and the subversion of the Bildungsroman form.

Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights not as a named, legitimate child but as a mysterious foundling, pulled from the streets of Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw. His origins are never explained. The family circle offers competing guesses. Did he come from America? Was he the bastard of a Lascar? A Roma castaway? In a world obsessively concerned with lineage, property, and legitimate descent, Heathcliff’s parentage remains fundamentally unknowable. This unknowability is no accident. It activates the deepest registers of the folklore available to Brontë: the changeling myth, in which a supernatural creature is substituted for a human child, retaining a human shape but never fully human in nature.

Nelly Dean, the novel’s moral narrator, unknowingly invokes this very tradition when she describes Heathcliff as a “cuckoo” in the Earnshaw nest. The comparison is casual, almost dismissive, yet it carries precise folkloric weight. The cuckoo is the bird that lays its eggs in other nests, displacing the true chick. It is not simply an outsider; it is something that has no true nest, no true belonging, no legitimate place in the human family. When Nelly later asks whether Heathcliff might be “a ghoul or a vampire,” she is still circling the same essential question: is he human at all, or something wearing human form?

That Heathcliff appears even as a child to harbour no capacity for human feeling compounds this impression. When Hindley throws him from a horse, the response Nelly records is revealing: “Heathcliff had the satisfaction of seeing himdisordered and scared; but, unluckily, he lost his own balance in the struggle, and came down on the opposite side.” Most children, injured and humiliated, would weep or rage. Heathcliff’s response is instead a cold pleasure in Hindley’s injury that persists even as his own injury occurs. He never seems to expect kindness and offers none. The novel plants these moments carefully in passages where the reader, following Nelly’s narrative and identified with her sympathies, tends to be distracted. We are meant to read backward, realising that the signs of intrinsic corruption were present all along.

Yet this is where the anti-Bildungsroman structure becomes crucial. The first half of the novel is organised as a potential Bildungsroman: a child of unknown origins, abused and rejected by his adopted family, falls in love with the one person who accepts him, is violently separated from her by class prejudice, and returns as a man seeking revenge and restoration. All the ingredients are present for a tale of sympathy and moral instruction in which suffering ennobles or transforms. The reader approaching Wuthering Heights from the Romantic tradition has every reason to believe this is the structure the novel will follow.

Then it refuses to follow it. Instead of revenge serving as a crucible in which Heathcliff matures or comes to understand the humanity of his tormentors, revenge becomes an end in itself, pursued with a kind of inhuman system and patience. He ruins Hindley not for justice but for the sheer destructive satisfaction. He abuses Isabella not for love but for leverage against Edgar. He oppresses Cathy with apparent indifference to whether she suffers or flourishes. The anti-Bildungsroman reveals not a noble boy corrupted by suffering but something that merely wears the shape of a noble boy corrupted by suffering while harbouring, perhaps from the beginning, something incapable of the moral development the form requires.

This is the deliberation of Brontë’s construction: she engineers the reader’s initial sympathy by means of form itself, then systematically betrays that sympathy by refusing the form’s redemptive arc. We are made complicit in creating a hero we then discover to be irredeemable. And yet the novel does not allow us to simply retract that sympathy. It holds us in a deliberately painful ambiguity, asking whether we have been deceived by the form or by our own moral confusion.

The nature-versus-nurture question in Heathcliff criticism splits the tradition into two incompatible camps.

The sociological case is the easier one to make. Terry Eagleton has persuasively argued that Heathcliff’s evil is the product of systematic class exclusion and dispossession. He has “no defined place within the Earnshaws’ biological and economic systems.” He is worked like a servant, educated as though he were beneath consideration, treated with contempt as “the gipsy brat.” When he returns wealthy, his vengeance can be read as a terrible but comprehensible response to dehumanisation. Charlotte Brontë herself offered this reading: Heathcliff “exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition.” The crucial phrase is “naturally perverse.” Even Charlotte, offering the sociological account, cannot avoid language that suggests something intrinsic.

Yet the opposing evidence is equally textually secure. Nelly observes that even as a young boy, before any clear injury to justify it, Heathcliff displayed a hardness, not gentleness. “It appeared as if the lad were possessed of something diabolical.” The word “possessed” is not metaphorical. It suggests occupation by something alien, not merely a temperament shaped by circumstance. When Hindley brutalises him, the response is not that of a child breaking under cruelty but of something that was already broken, already incapable of ordinary human attachment. How can we sympathise with a man crushed by injustice if the evidence suggests he was corrupt before the injustice occurred? How can we blame circumstance for creating a demon if the demon was always already there?

Brontë never resolves this contradiction. She stages it deliberately and leaves it unresolved. She gives us the complete naturalistic explanation (the abuse, the class exclusion, the humiliation, the loss of Catherine) in such detail that we are forced to accept that this alone could have made Heathcliff what he becomes. Yet she simultaneously encodes him in the language and symbolism of the inhuman, suggesting that no amount of circumstantial explanation will suffice because something fundamental in his nature exceeds explanation. The theological tradition sees in this irresolution the very point Brontë wishes to make: that evil may be constructed deliberately by circumstance, yet what emerges may be something that escapes the categories of creation and responsibility entirely.

The text itself is saturated with explicit demonic vocabulary, and almost none of it is metaphorical in intent.

When Mr. Earnshaw first presents Heathcliff to his family, he frames the gift in precisely theological terms: “I’ve got something for my girl now… a gift of God, though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” The phrasing is revelatory. A gift of God and a gift of the devil are not, in theological language, the same category of being wearing different moral valuations. They are kinds of being. Mr. Earnshaw’s inability to decide between them, his suspension between blessing and curse, is not a mere figure of speech about the child’s ambiguous moral character. It suggests a fundamental ambiguity about what he has brought into the house.

As Heathcliff matures and reveals his nature, the vocabulary intensifies and becomes more insistent. “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man?” Isabella asks in desperation after her elopement has proven disastrous. “If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” The question is framed as a logical disjunction: either Heathcliff is a man (in which case the problem is madness, a malfunction of human faculties) or he is not a man at all, in which case “devil” is the only remaining category. Nelly asks whether he might be “a ghoul or a vampire,” figures from folklore and superstition that occupy the boundary between the human and the infernal.

Hindley calls him “imp of Satan.” Catherine describes herself as willing to go “twenty miles over the moors, bare-headed and bare-footed” to find him, speaking of him as though he were a force of nature or an otherworldly summons. Even Heathcliff himself embraces the diabolical language, declaring after Catherine’s death that she has “opened the very doors of hell to me,” suggesting his torment is not merely emotional but existential, a kind of infernal punishment administered by her absence.

The spatial language reinforces this demonic coding. When Heathcliff finally approaches something like remorse in the novel’s closing chapters, he speaks in the language of damnation: “Last night, I was on the threshold of hell. Today, I am within sight of my heaven.” But his “heaven” is not the Christian heaven. It is the spectral presence of Catherine, accessible to him through a dissolution of the boundary between the living and the dead. Nelly observes that “conscience had turned his heart to an earthly hell,” internalising the infernal landscape. He is a being for whom the Christian afterlife holds no place, no possibility. He can only pursue an anti-Christian transcendence through union with another equally damned soul.

The novel’s symbolism works in concert with its language to construct a cosmos in which Heathcliff stands irredeemably outside the Christian order.

The moors themselves function as an infernal landscape. The name “Wuthering” itself, in the novel’s own gloss, describes “a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.” The moors are not a place of pastoral beauty or Romantic transcendence. They are characterized by turbulence, desolation, and the absence of human comfort or shelter. David Cecil’s influential characterisation opposed the moors (the “land of storm” where the “fiery, untamed children of the storm” dwell) to the valley-sheltered Thrushcross Grange (the home of calm). But the novel does not fully endorse this opposition. Instead, it asks us to recognise that Catherine and Heathcliff have chosen the moors, chosen the storm, chosen damnation itself.

The burial places are even more explicit. Heathcliff, Catherine, and Hindley are all buried not in the chapel (the consecrated Christian ground) but outside it, in the general churchyard. This is the spatial language of excommunication, of exclusion from the Christian community and the Christian afterlife. When Lockwood asks about the graves, he is told that “Nelly said they still looked out over the moors,” suggesting that even in death they belong to the wild, damned landscape rather than to the Christian cosmos of redemption and resurrection.

The graves themselves become a kind of infernal gathering. Local belief holds that Heathcliff and Catherine walk the moors after death. Nelly reports that even the sexton is reluctant to attend to them, as though their graves are more dangerous than ordinary graves, as though they might attract something otherworldly. The novel’s closing line, spoken by Lockwood, asks “how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth,” but the tone is ironic. Everyone does imagine it. Everyone knows they sleep unquietly, that they have not entered Christian peace.

The heaven/hell inversion reaches its most complete expression in Catherine’s deathbed vision, where she dreams of the Christian heaven and finds herself tormented by it. She imagines the angels throwing her “out into the middle of the heath,” and she wakes “sobbing for joy” at finding herself back in the human world, even though that world contains only suffering. The Christian heaven is a kind of hell from which she flees in relief. The heath, the storm, the damnation that Heathcliff represents, is preferable to the alternative offered by orthodox religion.

If there is a point of potential redemption in the novel, it arrives with the younger generation: Cathy and Hareton. Their union offers a contrasting possibility to the mutually destructive passion of Catherine and Heathcliff. Where Catherine and Heathcliff annihilate each other, Cathy and Hareton educate each other. Cathy teaches Hareton to read; he learns language and cultivation; they move toward Thrushcross Grange, toward the calm, toward the domesticated Christian order that the previous generation rejected.

Yet the redemption remains ambiguous and incomplete. Q.D. Leavis argued powerfully that this second-generation restoration represents Brontë’s true intention: the novel is finally about the triumph of maturity over passionate immaturity, of stability over destructive emotion. In this reading, the daughter achieves “the maturity and therefore the happiness that the mother failed in,” and the wheel of cosmic order comes “full circle” once more.

But this reading must contend with what Bloom calls “the irrepressible Heathcliff,” who does not finally exit the novel even as he dies. At the moment of his death, Brontë withholds any moment of Christian repentance or redemptive transformation. Heathcliff simply ceases, and in his ceasing, he appears finally to have achieved union with Catherine. The local people know he and Catherine walk the moors still. Nelly’s final assertions about the peace of the graves ring hollow against this knowledge, against the novel’s systematic insistence that some forms of being cannot be reconciled to Christian peace.

The question of whether the second generation can exorcise the diabolical inheritance of the first remains genuinely open. The novel permits the reader to believe in the redemptive education of Cathy and Hareton, but it does so through the voice of Lockwood, the novel’s least reliable narrator, and through Nelly’s increasingly strained assertions of Christian peace. What the novel actually shows is not that redemption is impossible, but that it is purchased at the cost of forgetting, of a deliberate turning away from the truths about love and damnation that Catherine and Heathcliff embodied.

To read Heathcliff as deliberately constructed demonic is to resist several competing interpretations. It is to insist that he is not merely the product of Romantic defiance, not merely the victim of circumstance, not merely the embodiment of social forces or class resentment. It is to say that Brontë created him with full knowledge of what she was creating: a being who stands outside the categories of sin and redemption, who cannot be recovered or reformed because something in his nature exceeds the very categories of morality from which reform must proceed.

Charlotte Brontë’s central anxiety, expressed in her 1850 defence of her sister, was precisely this question: whether it is “advisable to create beings like Heathcliff.” The question assumes that Emily knew what she was creating, that the demonic character was not accidental but intended. And if so, what does that intention tell us about Brontë’s own theological convictions?

Emily Brontë was, as Stevie Davies has argued, a kind of “heretic” in her religious orientation. Her notebooks reveal a spiritual sensibility that resisted the narrow Calvinism of her Aunt Branwell and the conventional Anglicanism of her society. In Wuthering Heights, that heresy takes the form of a novel that grants Catherine and Heathcliff a kind of spiritual reality more powerful than the Christian order that condemns them. Their union, their passion, their refusal of redemption as society understands it, becomes almost a form of worship, a kind of religion of the self that stands opposed to institutional Christianity.

Yet the novel is not simple transgression. It is more complicated than that. Brontë grants Heathcliff the language of damnation, the vocabulary of hell and demons, not to celebrate him but to hold him in a kind of theological suspense. He is created deliberately demonic, yet the novel never permits us to finally judge whether he is demon or man, whether he is born evil or made evil, whether redemption is impossible for him or whether he has simply chosen damnation and we ought to respect that choice.

This is the final transgression of the novel: it does not ask us to forgive Heathcliff or to sympathise with him in the way we might sympathise with a man broken by circumstance. It asks us to recognise him as something that may exceed the very categories by which we judge and forgive. It asks whether evil, if deliberately constructed and sustained, might become a kind of being unto itself, something that cannot be recovered because it was never, in any meaningful sense, lost.

The novel ends with Lockwood turning away from the moors and returning to his conventional life. He does not believe, or he pretends not to believe, the local tales of two ghosts walking at night. Yet the novel has instructed us otherwise. Whatever Heathcliff may be, whatever theological status one assigns to his demonism, he is not resolved. He walks still. The question of evil, as Brontë has posed it, is not answered but only abandoned by those who cannot bear to contemplate it.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

BUY ME A COFFEE

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Bartels, Sarah. The Devil and the Victorians: Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Routledge, 2021.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Chelsea House Publishers, 2007.

Cecil, David. Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation. Bobbs-Merrill, 1934.

Davies, Stevie. Emily Brontë: Heretic. The Women’s Press, 1994.

Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Macmillan, 1975.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.

Leavis, Q.D. “A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights.” Lectures in America. Pantheon Books, 1969.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Wuthering Heights: The Romantic Ascent.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 20, no. 2, 1996, pp. 362-82.

Reed, Toni. Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction. University Press of Kentucky, 1988.

Thormählen, Marianne. The Brontës and Religion. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Van Ghent, Dorothy. “On Wuthering Heights.” The English Novel: Form and Function. Harper and Row, 1953.

Wood, Kaitlin. “‘Prince in Disguise’ or ‘Imp of Satan’? (Mis)Reading Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 74, no. 1, 2019, pp. 42-70.

What Tarrant created, without irony and without self-consciousness, was the visual template for what the internet would later call “fairycore”: an aesthetic built on soft palettes, botanical embedding, whimsy, and optimistic escapism. The parallels between her 1920s watercolours and the TikTok trends of 2021 are not accidental. They are the result of a visual language that, once established, proved durable enough to survive seventy years of cultural shift, obscurity, and finally, digital rediscovery.

To understand Tarrant’s place in this lineage, one must first understand the moment in which she worked. The 1920s and 1930s in Britain were consumed by what art historians call “fairy mania.” The Cottingley fairies hoax of 1917, in which two girls photographed paper cut-outs they had copied from a children’s book and fooled Arthur Conan Doyle into believing they were real, revealed an appetite for fairies that had transcended children’s literature and become an adult preoccupation. It was, as the historian Alice Sage has observed, a phenomenon rooted in “belief and hope,” a way of finding “luck and brightness” when ordinary people felt they had no control over their lives. This was the context into which Tarrant’s fairies arrived: not as whimsy, but as comfort.

Her artistic signature was immediate and distinctive. She worked in watercolour and coloured inks with meticulous attention to botanical accuracy. Her fairies are winged and elfin, smaller and more delicate than the human children depicted in other illustrators’ work. They sit inside flowers, ride on dragonflies, dance on lily pads, rest in woodland glades. The colour palettes are restrained: soft greens, pale pinks, gentle blues, earth tones. There is nothing gaudy about them, nothing that shouts. Instead, there is an quiet luminosity, as if the light itself is coming from within the page.

From 1920, Tarrant’s work was distributed through the Medici Society, a publisher and print manufacturer whose business model depended on reproducing contemporary art for the mass market. This was not the art world’s most prestigious venue, but it was extraordinarily effective. The Medici Society made her work ubiquitous. Her paintings appeared in homes across Britain as Christmas cards, as calendars pinned above kitchen sinks, as framed prints on walls. She became, in effect, the illustrator of a generation’s vision of what fairies looked like. When people thought of fairies after 1920, they thought of Tarrant’s fairies.

This was particularly true for the readers of Marion St John Webb’s “Flower Fairies” series, illustrated by Tarrant across twenty-odd volumes: “The Flower Fairies,” “Forest Fairies,” “Pond Fairies,” “Twilight Fairies,” “Seashore Fairies,” “Weather Fairies.” These books were not rare or precious. They were distributed widely and read repeatedly by children whose parents wanted to give them the gift of believing in magic. The illustrations in those volumes shaped an entire generation’s understanding of what fairies could be.

Tarrant was not alone in this work. She was friends with and often cited alongside Cicely Mary Barker, whose own “Flower Fairies” series began in 1923 and achieved even greater longevity and reach. Together with illustrators like Mabel Lucie Attwell and Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, they established what would become the template for twentieth-century fairy imagery: small, winged, childlike, fundamentally safe. As the art historian John Kruse has noted, “flower fairies; round pixies dressed in green; female fae and male goblins and gnomes; pointy hats and shoes; tiny size and childish looks” all emerged from the work of these interwar illustrators. They had “little awareness of or respect for British folk tradition,” Kruse argues. Instead, they created a new visual language almost from scratch.

This language proved remarkably resilient. It survived the austerity of the 1950s, the cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, the technological revolution of the 1990s and 2000s. It lay dormant in second-hand bookshops and estate sales, in grandmother’s postcard collections and library discards. And then, in the late 2010s, something remarkable happened. It was rediscovered.

TikTok and Pinterest became the new distribution networks for Tarrant’s fairies. Her out-of-copyright images circulated freely across social media. Soft-focus video makers layered her paintings into aesthetic compilations. Etsy sellers began offering digital downloads and reprints of her work. Amazon published new editions of her books, alongside coffee-table volumes of her selected prints. The Medici Society, remarkably, is still in business and still selling her work. Her fairies, rendered again in high-definition scans and pastel filters, found themselves at the centre of what younger generations had named “fairycore”: an aesthetic of magical nature, accessible escapism, soft colour, and optimistic wonder.

The timing was not accidental. Fairycore emerged as a significant trend in 2020 and 2021, during the first year of pandemic lockdown. It offered what Rachel Weingarten, a fashion and culture historian, called “accessible magic” for a generation living through anxiety and isolation. The aesthetic promised that “as complicated and scary as life feels, there are small talismans we can hold or wear to make us feel better.” This was precisely the promise Tarrant’s fairies had made in 1920, when two world wars seemed to bracket the entire possibility of human hope. She had been offering her generation the same gift: permission to believe in beauty, in magic, in things that were fundamentally harmless and kind.

It is tempting to claim that Tarrant invented fairycore. The evidence, examined closely, is more complicated. The documented critical lineage runs mainly through her friend Cicely Mary Barker, whose flower fairies have been explicitly named by the BBC, museums, and the Aesthetics Wiki as precursors to the TikTok trend. But this is perhaps too fine a distinction. Tarrant belongs to the flower-fairy tradition that reputable sources credit as fairycore’s ancestor. She was part of a collective act of visual creation, one that shaped how millions of people understood beauty, nature, and magic.

What matters is that Tarrant, without knowing it, painted the future. She made fairycore beautiful before anyone had named it. She understood, in her own era, what people in her era needed: a way to hold onto wonder in a world that seemed determined to destroy it. That the internet, a century later, would reach back and find her fairies waiting says something true about the persistence of what is genuine. Beauty, once created, does not disappear. It waits. It is rediscovered. It becomes, unexpectedly, urgent again.

Thanks for reading. If this landed for you (if you found yourself thinking about something differently, or just appreciated the research that went into this), consider buying me a coffee. I graduated into a chaotic economy and I’m doing what I love while I figure out what comes next. Every cup helps me keep digging into the stories that matter.

Buy Me A Coffee

Barker, Cicely Mary. Flower Fairies of the Spring. Frederick Warne, 1923.

Casteras, Susan. “Picturing Children.” In Picturing Children, edited by M. Brown, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Kruse, John. Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century. Gramercy, 2000.

Sage, Alice. “When Britain was gripped by ‘fairy mania.’” BBC Culture, 18 September 2023.

Weingarten, Rachel. Interview with Nylon, cited in “The Accessible Magic of Fairycore,” 19 March 2021.

Williams, Holly. “When Britain was gripped by ‘fairy mania.’” BBC Culture, 18 September 2023.

The play concerns Nora, the seemingly content wife of bank manager Torvald Helmer. Years earlier, she secretly borrowed money by forging her dead father’s signature to fund a trip to Italy that saved her ailing husband’s life. When the loan surfaces, Torvald reacts not with gratitude but with fury about his reputation. He reveals, in other words, that he loves the decorative image of his wife rather than the woman herself. Nora then makes her recognition: she has been a “doll-wife” who survived by “doing tricks,” first for her father and then for Torvald. She is 29 years old, and she has never been asked who she is. She leaves. The door closes. Ibsen called that final scene “the door slam heard around the world,” and he was right, but he could not have anticipated quite how many times audiences would refuse to believe it was meant to happen.

The play’s central horror is not that Nora leaves. It is that leaving was ever necessary, that a woman in a respectable home with a prosperous husband should find herself imprisoned enough to require an exit at all. Torvald’s crime is not cruelty in the melodramatic sense. It is something more systematic: he has arranged his entire marriage around his own comfort, his reputation, his need to be pleased and obeyed. He calls his wife “lark” and “squirrel,” pets her, gives her money as if she were a child with an allowance, and describes her as naturally suited to a life of ornamental dependence. He genuinely loves the wife he has constructed, which is to say he loves a version of her that has no will, no history, no interior life beyond the roles she plays for him. When confronted with the actual person, he cannot see her.

What makes A Doll’s House the prototype for understanding tradwife culture is this: the play is not interested in Torvald as a villain. It is interested in how a system (a legal system, an economic system, an ideology about gender and domesticity) can make imprisonment look like home. Nora’s father controlled her before Torvald did. The law made her a legal dependent. The cult of domesticity told her that self-sacrifice was her natural calling, her sacred duty. Nobody lied to her. The system simply did what systems do: it translated constraint into virtue.

Modern tradwife content repackages that same system as liberation. A woman in a full-skirted dress arranges the kitchen. Her husband enters. She defers to him. The camera lingers on the pastry, the light through the window, the aesthetic perfection of her containment. Millions of people watch and desire the image. What they do not see, and what A Doll’s House insisted on showing, is that the image requires a particular architecture of power. Nora’s contentment depends entirely on her ignorance. Once she sees the mechanism, she cannot unsee it.

The strongest parallel between Ibsen’s play and the tradwife movement is what scholars call “the illusion of choice.” Nora genuinely believes she is happy until she realizes she has only ever performed the happiness someone else chose for her. In the same way, contemporary women who identify as tradwives are often working within what researchers describe as “constrained options dressed as free ones.” A 2024 survey by Heejung Chung at King’s Business School found that most mothers leave the labour market not by genuine choice but because of inflexible work hours, insufficient childcare, and economic pressure. What feels like a choice between career and domesticity is often a choice between impossible options, reframed as a return to tradition. The tradwife aesthetic presents this constraint as empowerment, which is exactly what Torvald does when he tells Nora that her happiness lies in pleasing him.

This is why the critic Joan Templeton’s 1989 essay “The Doll House Backlash” remains essential. Templeton documented how generations of critics tried to “save” Ibsen from feminism by arguing that his play was really about universal selfhood, or that Nora was simply too frivolous and abnormal to be a proper heroine. She showed that these arguments always amount to the same defense Torvald makes in the play: Nora cannot leave because she is too foolish to understand what she is leaving, or she is abandoning her duties, or she is unnatural. Reading these defenses, one hears the exact same arguments now made about tradwives: they are freely choosing this, so any critique of the system is invalidated. Templeton’s point was that this logic is circular. It amounts to taking Torvald’s word on Desdemona.

The contemporary case that most resembles Nora’s is that of Hannah Neeleman, who runs the Instagram and TikTok account “Ballerina Farm.” Neeleman is a former Juilliard ballet student, the mother of eight children, and the star of content that documents her domestic life in what presents itself as enviable detail. In a 2024 profile by Megan Agnew in The Sunday Times, the image fractured. Agnew reported that Neeleman, when asked about giving up dance, said: “I gave up a piece of myself.” She recalled that when she wanted to wait to marry, her now-husband Daniel said, “It’s not going to work, we’ve got to get married now.” Agnew wrote that Neeleman “can’t get an answer out of” her “without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child,” and that Daniel sometimes describes Hannah becoming so exhausted that “she can’t get out of bed for a week.” When followers read the profile, they did not see the aspirational image anymore. They saw a woman who looked trapped. The comments filled with “Blink if you need help.” The photo was a near-perfect restaging of Nora’s predicament: a talented woman, structurally subordinate within a beautiful domestic brand, whose curated happiness the public suddenly read as performance.

But Neeleman did not walk out. She disputed the characterization, calling the profile an attack. She remains. Which is the real horror of comparing A Doll’s House to tradwife culture: the play is a horror story because it insists on an exit, because Ibsen believed that a woman imprisoned in a system of her own dependence must leave to discover who she is. The tradwife genre, by contrast, is a horror story precisely because it withholds that exit. It tells the story of Nora, but it refuses the door slam. It says: this is your life, this is your choice, this is your fulfillment. And the system that made that imprisonment necessary, that converted constraint into virtue, remains completely invisible.

That is the legacy of A Doll’s House in the age of social media. It is not that the play predicted tradwife culture. It is that the play was always describing the mechanism by which financial dependence, legal subordination, and aesthetic perfection conspire to make a cage feel like home. Every generation finds its own way to rebuild that cage. Ibsen’s play, which closed with the sound of a door, was meant to be a warning. Instead, we have made it a tutorial. The door remains open in the text. The question is whether anyone is willing to walk through it.

Agnew, M. (2024). “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children).” The Sunday Times, 20 July 2024.

Banet-Weiser, S., & Reinis, K. (2020). “Requiem for a housewife.” Film Quarterly, 73(3), 24, 37.

Butler, J. (1988). “Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory.” Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519, 531.

Chung, H. (2024). “Motherhood, work, and gender: A survey of constraints and choices.” Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, King’s Business School, London.

Ibsen, H. (1879). A Doll’s House. (C. Hampton, Trans.). London: Faber and Faber.

Stotzer, R. L., & Nelson, A. (2025). “The (anti)feminism of tradwives.” Terrorism and Political Violence, 4 March 2025.

Templeton, J. (1989). “The Doll House backlash: Criticism, feminism, and Ibsen.” PMLA, 104(1), 28, 40.

Welter, B. (1966). “The cult of true womanhood: 1820 to 1860.” American Quarterly, 18(2), 151, 174.

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s mathematics.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford. He published a treatise on symbolic logic. He corresponded with the era’s greatest logicians. He invented a board game to teach syllogistic reasoning and arrived at girls’ schools with twelve white envelopes containing counters and diagrams, announcing cheerfully: “Now I will teach you to play the game of Logic.”

He was also Lewis Carroll.

The conventional story treats these as two separate people. Dodgson the dry mathematician. Carroll the whimsical storyteller. But this has always been misleading. They were one person asking the same question through different media: What happens when you follow the rules of a formal system all the way to the end?

His credentials as a logician were substantial. His diagrammatic method for testing logical validity anticipated techniques that wouldn’t be formally published in academic philosophy until 1955. Bertrand Russell later called his work on the foundations of inference one of the greatest logical contributions of the era. Yet his literary reputation swallowed his mathematical one so completely that when John Venn, the famous logician, corresponded with Dodgson about class logic, Venn credited one of his contributions as “Alice’s Problem” rather than using his name. The author of the Alice books was too famous. The logician disappeared.

What happened was not a split personality. It was a unified vision that mainstream academia couldn’t quite see.

The most important passage in both Alice books is also the least obviously important. Early in Through the Looking-Glass, Alice encounters Tweedledee, who offers to explain logic:

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

Stop and read that again. The sentence is syntactically flawless. The conditional structure is internally consistent. The subjunctive and indicative moods are correctly deployed. Every inference follows from its premise. The logic is, by any standard measure, sound.

And it means absolutely nothing.

Tweedledee has constructed a chain of reasoning that moves through three grammatical moods and arrives exactly where it started. He has restated his own premises as his conclusion. The reasoning succeeds perfectly at doing nothing. It is not failed logic. It is logic that has succeeded so completely that it has exhausted itself without producing any content whatsoever.

This is the mechanism that operates everywhere in Carroll’s fiction. The point is not that logic fails. The point is that it succeeds too well, generating formally valid results that exceed or evade the demands of the contexts in which they are deployed.

Carroll demonstrated this principle most directly in his last published article, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles,” which appeared in the journal Mind in April 1895. The piece stages a dialogue between Achilles and a Tortoise who has just been overtaken in their famous race. Achilles wants to convince her that a simple geometric inference must be true:

(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other. (B) The two sides of this triangle are things that are equal to the same. (Z) The two sides of this triangle are equal to each other.

The Tortoise accepts A and B. But she refuses to accept Z. Not because she disputes the premises. Because she wants Achilles to write down, as a separate proposition, the hypothetical that licenses the inference: “If A and B are true, Z must be true.”

Achilles obliges. But now the Tortoise accepts A, B, and C, and still refuses Z. Because inferring from A, B, and C to Z requires another hypothetical: “If A and B and C are true, Z must be true.”

And so on. When the narrator returns months later, Achilles is still writing. The notebook is nearly full. The Tortoise remarks that there are “several millions more to come.”

What Carroll had identified was this: the rule that permits a conclusion to be drawn from premises cannot itself be treated as a further premise without generating an infinite regress. The rule of inference belongs to a different logical level than the propositions it governs. To treat it as a proposition is to confuse levels, and that confusion proliferates forever. Formal logic cannot generate its own foundation. It requires something outside itself to get started, and that something, being outside the system, cannot be captured by the system’s own operations.

Russell, decades later, called this one of Carroll’s greatest contributions to logic.

If the Tortoise paradox is abstract, the trial of the Knave of Hearts is concrete. Alice stumbles into a legal proceeding in Wonderland that has all the apparatus of rational adjudication: witnesses, jury, judge, rules of evidence, verdict. But nothing within it functions as intended.

The jurors write down their own names for fear of forgetting them before the trial ends. The first witness, the Mad Hatter, offers testimony so confused that the King can only instruct him to stand on his head. When Alice is called, she knows “Nothing” about the business, and the King declares this “very important.” The White Rabbit corrects him: “Unimportant, your Majesty means, of course.” The King agrees and then mutters to himself: “important, unimportant, unimportant, important,” as if trying “which word sounded best.” The logical distinction between important and unimportant, which should determine the outcome of the trial, has become a matter of euphony.

The peak comes when a poem is offered as evidence. Its pronouns refer to nothing identifiable. “They told me you had been to her, and mentioned me to him.” Alice declares that she does not believe there is “an atom of meaning in it.” The King’s response crystallizes the entire mechanism:

“If there’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know. I seem to see some meaning in them, after all.”

He then proceeds to extract meaning from the poem by treating its pronouns as referring to the parties in the case, its metaphors as literal statements, and its conditional clauses as evidence. The result is a chain of reasoning that is formally coherent and referentially groundless. Every individual step is reasonable. The aggregate is nonsense.

The Queen’s demand for “Sentence first, verdict afterwards” is the logical conclusion of this process: if the procedure has no necessary connection to its outcome, the order of its steps becomes arbitrary.

The same regress that operates in logic also operates in language. If every inference requires another inference to justify it, then every name requires another name to define it. Carroll dramatizes this in the White Knight’s famous exchange with Alice about the name of his song.

The Knight wants to sing Alice a song to comfort her. But first:

“The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice says.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight says, looking vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrects herself.

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means,’ but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song, then?” Alice asks, completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a Gate.’”

The Knight has distinguished four things: the song itself, what the song is called, the name of the song, and what the name is called. Each level refers not to the world but to the level below it. The name names the song. The name of the name names the name. And there is no reason, in principle, why the hierarchy should stop. What is the name of the name of the name called? The structure permits the question infinitely.

This passage anticipates the hierarchy of metalanguages that logicians would later develop formally to avoid self-referential paradoxes. A language that talks about objects is distinct from a language that talks about that language, which is distinct from a language that talks about that language. Carroll didn’t need to know the formal theory. He saw the structure, and he saw it was funny because each additional level doesn’t secure the reference of the one below it. It merely defers it.

But there’s Humpty Dumpty on his wall, insisting that words mean whatever he chooses them to mean.

“When I use a word,” he announces, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Alice objects: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Humpty Dumpty replies: “The question is which is to be master, that’s all.”

Humpty Dumpty is theoretically sophisticated. He understands perfectly that linguistic meaning is conventional rather than natural. He understands that conventions can be altered. What he fails to understand is that conventions, precisely because they are conventional, cannot be altered unilaterally. A private language is not a language. Humpty Dumpty’s mastery over words is absolute and useless. He can make “glory” mean anything he likes, but Alice will not understand him, and communication collapses.

This episode stages the impossibility of occupying either pole of what philosophers call the language problem: neither complete mastery nor complete submission is adequate. Language always escapes us. But we can never stop trying to control it.

The Cheshire Cat vanishes gradually. First its body, then its tail, then its whiskers, until nothing is left but the grin.

“Well!” Alice thinks. “I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”

In logical terms, a grin is a predicate, a property that belongs to something. Remove the subject and the entire chain of predication should collapse. A grin is a property of a face, which is a property of a body, which belongs to a cat. Take away the cat and you should have nothing left.

But Carroll’s grin persists. It hangs in the air, visible and persistent, because the formal structure of predication doesn’t actually require a subject. In symbolic logic, “x grins” is a perfectly well-formed expression even when no value is assigned to x. Carroll makes this logical possibility physically visible. The grin without the cat is what a variable with no assigned value looks like when it takes up space. It is pure abstraction brought to life.

Carroll does the same thing with Nobody. Alice passes Nobody on the road. The King takes this as a referring expression: “So Nobody walks slower than you.” Alice objects: “Nobody walks faster than I do.” The King is astonished: “He can’t do that, or he’d have been here first.”

The null class, which in formal logic designates the empty set, is treated as a populated class containing one member called Nobody. The logical operation is applied correctly. It’s the assumption about what “Nobody” refers to that has been literalized.

The White Queen screams before pricking her finger on her brooch. Effect precedes cause. “That accounts for the bleeding,” she says calmly. The causal relation is intact. Its direction has been reversed. The formal structure of causation is maintained perfectly while what happens inside it runs backwards.

Carroll lived through a moment of extraordinary confidence in formal systems. The prestige of Euclidean geometry was immense. Symbolic logic promised to reduce all valid reasoning to mechanical procedure. The “march of mind,” the Victorian project of extending rational inquiry to every domain of human experience, projected a future in which reason would triumph.

But the 1860s and 1870s were also a moment of crisis. Helena Pycior has shown that mid-century mathematicians were genuinely unsettled by the question: could formal systems that abandoned the requirement that their symbols refer to determinate quantities still count as legitimate mathematics, or were they merely meaningless manipulation of signs? When you abstract away from content and work with pure form, what guarantees that you’re still doing mathematics and not just playing with symbols?

Carroll wasn’t isolated from these debates. His intellectual circle included J.J. Sylvester, W.K. Clifford, and Augustus De Morgan. He understood what the Victorian rational project could do. And he understood something else: that following the rules all the way to the end doesn’t give you more certainty. It gives you instability, infinite regress, and structures that eat their own tails.

What Carroll did was take formal systems seriously enough to inhabit them completely. He didn’t reject rationality. He followed it through.

In the 1960s, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze read Carroll not as entertainment but as philosophy. His central claim was that sense is not opposed to nonsense but produced by it. Nonsense is not empty or meaningless. It is excessive. There is always too much sense, an excess produced by formal structures operating without referential constraint.

This is what Carroll discovered. When Tweedledee’s logic runs perfectly, when the Tortoise’s demand for grounding cascades infinitely, when the trial proceeds methodically toward groundlessness, when every rule of the game works but produces chaos, what emerges is not the absence of meaning but its overproduction. The formal structures generate sense that exceeds what they were supposed to contain.

Alice doesn’t theorize this. She endures it. She asks polite questions and receives impossible answers. She follows rules that change as she follows them. She tries to name herself and finds that the name won’t hold. She negotiates a world in which every formal structure works perfectly and nothing makes the kind of sense she expects.

And she survives.

Carroll published in academic logic journals. His work on logical foundations was cited by Russell. His diagrammatic methods anticipated formal developments by decades. Yet his literary reputation swallowed his mathematical one so completely that the logician disappeared. We remember him as a whimsical storyteller who happened to like mathematics.

We should remember him differently: as a rigorous thinker who understood formal systems so completely that he could dramatize their limits. The problems he articulated in literary form in the 1860s and 1870s are the same problems that logic and philosophy of language would spend the next century making rigorous.

Carroll got there first. He showed, through fiction, what philosophy would later prove through argument: that formal systems cannot generate their own foundations, that naming systems regress infinitely, that rules cannot specify the conditions for their own application, and that these are not defects that better logic could repair. They are structural features of any system that operates through formal relations.

In a world obsessed with algorithms, rule systems, and “logical” solutions to human problems, this matters. Carroll reminds us that rigor itself doesn’t guarantee sense. Perfect formal consistency can produce perfect nonsense. The machinery of reason, when applied with complete fidelity to material that doesn’t cooperate with it, doesn’t break down. It keeps going. It produces results. But the results are disconnected from whatever the procedure was supposed to determine.

The Cheshire Cat’s grin persists after the cat has vanished. Carroll’s formal structures, rigorously maintained and semantically unanchored, continue to produce sense long after we’ve stopped looking for it. They sit in our heads, filling us with ideas we can’t quite identify, much like Jabberwocky filled Alice’s mind. We know something has happened. We just can’t quite say what.

And that, Carroll proved, is the most rigorous thing of all.

Abeles, Francine F., editor. The Logic Pamphlets of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related Pieces. Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 2010.

Abeles, Francine F. “Lewis Carroll’s Method of Trees: Its Origins in Studies in Logic.” Modern Logic, vol. 1, no. 1, 1990, pp. 25–35.

Bartley, William Warren III, editor. Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic. Harvester, 1977.

Bayley, Melanie. “Alice’s Adventures in Algebra: Wonderland Solved.” New Scientist, vol. 204, no. 2739, 2009, pp. 38–41.

Beer, Gillian. Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. U of Chicago P, 2016.

Braithwaite, R. B. “Lewis Carroll as Logician.” Mathematical Gazette, vol. 16, 1932, pp. 174–78.

Brooker, Will. Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. Continuum, 2004.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Edited by Hugh Haughton, Penguin, 1998.

Carroll, Lewis. “A Logical Paradox.” Mind, n.s. vol. 3, no. 11, 1894, pp. 436–38.

Carroll, Lewis. “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” Mind, n.s. vol. 4, no. 14, 1895, pp. 278–80.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia UP, 1990.

Floyd, Juliet. “The Uses of Nonsense: Wittgenstein Reads Lewis Carroll.” Academia.edu, 2012.

Gardner, Martin, editor. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. Norton, 2000.

Holquist, Michael. “What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism.” Yale French Studies, no. 43, 1969, pp. 145–64.

Jenkins, Alice. Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815–1850. Oxford UP, 2007.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. Routledge, 1994.

Parsa, Mehdi. A Reading of Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Pitcher, George. “Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 6, no. 3, 1965, pp. 591–611.

Pycior, Helena M. “At the Intersection of Mathematics and Humor: Lewis Carroll’s Alices and Symbolical Algebra.” Victorian Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 1984, pp. 149–70.

Rackin, Donald. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning. Twayne, 1991.

Sewell, Elizabeth. The Field of Nonsense. Chatto and Windus, 1952.

Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

Susina, Jan. “Language-Games and Nonsense: Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Carroll’s Looking-Glass.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 31, no. 1, 2007, pp. 79–94.

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh UP, 2008.

Wilson, Robin. Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life. Norton, 2008.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Blackwell, 1953.

The evidence is overwhelming. The town is frozen in mid-century Americana, a place where time has stopped dead. Residents are uniformly defined by unresolved grief and guilt: Sheriff Boyd Stevens killed his wife; the Matthews family lost their youngest son; Father Khatri tends a church that offers no absolution. A mysterious Boy in White, visible only to a chosen few, moves through the narrative like a psychopomp, a guide between worlds. The church itself functions as a penance box, a place where people confess their sins to an ineffectual priest while monsters scratch at the walls. And the title sequence? The show opens each episode with a haunting cover of “Que Sera, Sera” recorded by the Pixies. That 1956 song, originally written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, is a fatalistic lullaby famously used in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Whatever will be, will be. The song is a surrender, a resignation to forces beyond one’s control. The show’s choice to use it is not accidental.

So the question seems settled: From is about purgatory. A waiting room between life and death, a space where trapped souls work through their trauma until they achieve some form of judgment or release. It reads like purgatory. It feels like purgatory. It is constructed, brick by brick, to evoke purgatory. And yet the show’s creator has been explicit: “It’s not purgatory. It’s not a dream. And they’re not dead.”

This denial is the hinge on which the entire series turns.

John Griffin’s rejection of the purgatory framework seems almost perverse given how thoroughly the show invokes its imagery and language. And yet it matters enormously, because it forces a recalibration of what From is actually about. The show does not use purgatory as its literal mechanism. It uses purgatory as a metaphorical language to describe something far more complicated and far less comforting.

Over three seasons, the show’s underlying mythology has gradually emerged. In Season 3, it was revealed that Tabitha Matthews is actually Miranda, the mother of a sacrificed child from the town’s colonial past. Jade is Christopher, the father. They are not souls awaiting judgment. They are reincarnations, trapped in an infinite cycle, sent back into the town life after life to repeat a trial they have never managed to pass. The monsters that hunt the town at night are not demons. They are former townspeople who made a bargain with powers unknown: sacrifice your children, and you will live forever. The monsters are the consequence of that choice, immortal and cursed, forever compelled to hunt and torture. The town itself is the stage on which this recursive punishment plays out, powered by grief and trauma, indifferent to innocence or guilt.

The word the show uses for this state is “Anghkooey,” the language of the ghostly children who haunt the townspeople. It means “remember.” The trial is not one of judgment. It is one of recollection, of forcing the trapped souls to confront what they have done, what they have failed to do, what they cannot undo. Purgatory at least offers the possibility of moving forward, of eventual absolution and passage. From offers only repetition. As Julie, revealed in Season 3 as a “storywalker” who can revisit past chapters of the narrative, explains the mechanism: “There’s no way to change the story once it’s been told.”

This is the horror that purgatory language obscures. Purgatory is, theologically speaking, a comforting concept. It implies moral order. It suggests that someone is keeping score, that judgment is real, that suffering has a purpose and an end. From withholds that comfort entirely. What emerges instead is far more troubling: a machine designed to break people by weaponizing their trauma, a space where knowledge carries a lethal cost (the Man in Yellow, the show’s primary antagonist, rips out Jim Matthews’s throat and tells him “Knowledge comes with a cost”), and where recursion replaces resolution.

The show’s syncretic mythology makes this clear. It draws from multiple traditions without committing to any single theological framework. There are hints of Norse cosmology: a three-rooted tree echoing Yggdrasil, runic talismans, figures who seem to map onto mythological archetypes. There are elements of African-American folk tradition: bottle trees that trap spirits, an architecture of spiritual imprisonment built not from Christian doctrine but from older, more pragmatic magic. And there are traces of something older still: perhaps a wendigo-logic, perhaps a deal-with-the-devil construct in which immortality is purchased with the blood of children and paid for with an eternity of curse. The town is not a Catholic purgatory. It is a folkloric prison, a pocket dimension built on a bargain that can never be fulfilled.

Why, then, does it feel so persistently like purgatory? Because the lived experience of entrapment, of guilt weaponized, of time stopped, of impossibility made permanent, is purgatorial. Because the show is constructed, shot by shot, to evoke that liminal dread. Because we recognize in it an archetypal fear: the fear of being caught between states, suspended, unable to move forward or back. The loop of the roads mirrors the loop of the narrative. Victor Stevens, trapped for nearly forty years since childhood as the sole survivor of an earlier massacre, embodies that temporal suspension. He is purgatory made flesh: present, trapped, unable to age past the moment of trauma, a witness to cycles he cannot stop.

The title sequence returns us to the essential tension. “Que Sera, Sera.” Whatever will be, will be. It is a song about fatalism, about powerlessness masked as acceptance. The residents of the town sing this fate. They are trapped in a space that looks like it operates according to higher moral laws, where punishment and guilt are legible, where suffering seems to have meaning. But the show gradually reveals that meaning to be an illusion. The true mechanism is indifferent. It does not care whether you are innocent or complicit. It does not judge. It only recycles, repeats, and breaks.

That is the true purgatory of From: not a theological construct offering eventual passage, but a recursive machine that mimics purgatory’s form while stripping away its comforting promise that judgment will eventually come due and the trapped will eventually be released. The town looks like limbo because we want it to be limbo. We want cosmic order. From suggests instead that some spaces, some people, some cycles are built to repeat endlessly, indifferent to plea or prayer or the desperate hope that things will change.

They won’t. Whatever will be, will be.

Bender, Jack (Director). “From.” Epix/MGM+, 2022–present.

Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio. Translated by Robert Pinsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Evans, Ray, and Jay Livingston. “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).” Sung by Doris Day, Paramount Pictures, 1956.

Griffin, John (Creator). “From.” Produced by AGBO and Midnight Radio, Epix/MGM+, 2022–present.

Hughes, Douglas E. “The Man in Yellow.” From, performance by Douglas E. Hughes, Epix/MGM+, 2022–present.

Livingston, Jay, and Ray Evans. “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).” Published by Famous Music Corporation, 1956.

Noisette, Emmanuel. Interview with John Griffin. Daytime Confidential, December 2024.

Pixies. “Que Sera, Sera.” From (Original Series Cover), 2022.

Rauf, Don. “What Are the Monsters in From? Every Rumor and Theory Explained.” Looper, 2024.

Screen Rant. “From Season 3 Ending Explained: Jim’s Fate & How Tabitha Is Really Connected to Miranda.” Screen Rant, 2023.

The girl next to me, English, posh accent, genuinely lovely person, smiled and did a comedy impression of what I’d just said. Made it sound aggressive. Exaggerated the glottal stops, lowered her voice, added an imaginary aggression that wasn’t there. Everyone laughed. I laughed. It was funny, right?

Except it wasn’t, not really. What she’d highlighted was the asymmetry: the same words, the same point, would have sounded “confident” or “clever” in her accent. In mine, they needed to be comedified to be tolerable. My directness (just saying what I thought) had to be made fun of first, to make the room comfortable.

That was three years ago. I think about it every time I watch a Scottish woman get torn apart on reality or fictional television.

Ellie Chadwick, 24, from West Lothian, entered Love Island UK series 13 as an original Islander. She’s a real estate videographer, friends with 2020 winner Paige Turley, and arrived on the villa with the kind of self-assurance you need to survive that format: “I’m going to get my win,” she told producers. “There’s nothing else I can do than be me.”

Which is exactly what got her framed, at least on TikTok, as a “mean girl.”

The evidence for this framing is thin and informal. There are viral TikToks calling her “#meangirlenergy,” accusing her of “starting arguments like she’s getting paid per fallout,” demanding producers “sit her down.” What actually happened? She confronted Yasmin Hadlow after Yasmin kissed Aidan Murphy, whom Ellie had been coupled with. Boundary-setting. A conversation. Not a brawl, not an insult. A confrontation. Which, on social media, became a character indictment.

And here’s the thing: there’s a specific machinery that turns a Scottish woman setting a boundary into a “villain,” and it’s worth understanding, because it happens every single time.

Linguist Amanda Cole at the University of Essex has spent years studying why Scottish accents get coded as “aggressive.” Her answer is blunt: they aren’t. The accent itself has no aggression properties. What happens is that audiences’ feelings about an accent tell us less about its properties and much more about the stereotypes of the people who speak it.

This wouldn’t matter much if it stopped there. But it doesn’t. Women who speak with regional accents tend to be judged more harshly and labelled with more negative character traits than men. There’s a study Cole cites where a girl using glottal stops was deemed “annoying and uneducated” while a boy with the same speech pattern just sounded “like a lad.”

So: Scottish accent = heard as aggressive. Woman with Scottish accent = judged extra harshly. Woman with Scottish accent being direct = presumed aggressive.

Ellie didn’t stand a chance.

Add a third layer: reality TV’s obsessive villain-making, and the trap closes. Reality TV uses techniques like frankenbiting (splicing audio from different moments to fabricate sentences) and selective editing to turn ordinary contestants into villains. A show’s producers cast “types” (the villain, the sweetheart, the chaos agent) and then edit toward that archetype. Contestants often don’t know they’ve been villainised until after they’ve left and the show airs. By then, the internet has already decided who they are.

For a Scottish woman on a show watched by a predominantly southern English audience, the edit writes itself.

There’s a study that haunts me. It’s from 2008, published in Psychological Science, and it’s called “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?”

Researchers Brescoll and Uhlmann had people read case studies of professionals who were angry in workplace situations. Same anger. Same scenario. Different outcomes depending on gender.

The angry woman was allocated a mean salary of $23,464. The angry man got $37,807. That’s roughly 38% lower pay for the same behaviour. More than that, the angry woman was “seen as less competent” and “accorded lower status.”

What reads as “assertive” in a man reads as “aggressive” or “difficult” in a woman. For a Scottish woman, whose accent already carries a stereotype freight of aggression, this penalty compounds.

Ellie Chadwick walked into a villa where being direct, honest, and self-assured isn’t a liability for the men. It’s literally why they’re cast. For her, it became narrative material for a villain edit.

Ofcom’s 2018 review of BBC portrayals found that audiences felt Scottish characters were portrayed as “aggressive,” an official recognition that this isn’t a glitch in the system, it’s baked in.

The archetype is old. The “Violent Glaswegian,” the “Angry Scot,” Groundskeeper Willie; they’ve been screen staples for decades. For Scottish women specifically, the media shorthand is the hard woman, the one who “doesnae take any shit,” usually with red hair and a scowl. It’s a caricature so durable it shapes how real Scottish women get perceived in real time.

My university seminars. Ellie’s villa. The girl on reality TV who sets a boundary and gets labelled a bully. Same machinery. Different stages.

Here’s what I want to be clear about: I’m not saying Ellie Chadwick is a victim of some grand conspiracy. I’m saying that when a Scottish woman, especially a young one, on a heavily edited show, in front of an audience primed by decades of media stereotypes, is direct, honest, and self-assured, the deck is stacked against her being read charitably.

She didn’t invent this bias. She walked into it.

And the frustrating part? The unfair part? It wouldn’t take much to unstick it. Call it out. Notice when a Scottish accent makes you feel something that the content doesn’t justify. Pay attention to whether you’d find the same behaviour endearing in a different accent, a different gender, a different region.

Because right now, Scottish women are doing the same thing Scottish men do, English women do, London men do. Setting boundaries, being confident, speaking plainly. And getting rewritten as villains for it.

I’m glad Ellie’s got Paige Turley in her corner. I hope the villa doesn’t edit her into someone she’s not. And I hope the next Scottish woman on that show doesn’t have to learn what I learned at 19: that her directness, her honesty, her refusal to soften herself for comfort, has to be pre-emptively funny to be tolerable.

She shouldn’t have to. She’s not the problem. The problem is us: the audience, the editors, the people who laugh at the mimicry first and ask questions later.

Scottish women aren’t aggressive. We’re just honest. And apparently, that’s still too much for some people to handle.

Alderton, Roy. “Glottal Stops and Social Perception: A Linguistic Study of Regional Accent Bias.” Linguistic Society Review, 2020.

Brescoll, Victoria L., and Uhlmann, Eric Luis. “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead? Status Conferral, Gender, and Expression of Emotion in the Workplace.” Psychological Science, vol. 19, no. 3, 2008.

Brady, Fern. Strong Female Character. HarperCollins UK, 2022.

Caldwell, Gary. Post-match statement following red card incident. Exeter City FC, 2024.

Cole, Amanda. “Are Scottish Accents Really More Aggressive? A Linguist Explains.” The Conversation, 4 April 2025.

Ofcom. “Representation and Portrayal on BBC Television: Thematic Review.” Ofcom, 25 October 2018.

Love Island UK. Series 13. ITV2, June 2026.

Then he ordered the corpse burned anyway.

This is the delicious paradox that haunts vampire fiction across the nineteenth century: the more scientifically advanced we became, the worse science got at making vampires disappear. In fact, the relationship flipped entirely. By the end of the century, it wasn’t science that killed the vampire. Science had learned to create it.

The Visum et Repertum (Latin for “seen and found”) is no gothic fantasy. It’s a formal legal-medical document, the kind of autopsy report that Habsburg military bureaucrats generated with clockwork regularity. Its authority rested on the Enlightenment ideal of empiricism: sworn testimony, eyewitness accounts, meticulous clinical observation. Flückinger’s language is deliberately precise. He notes that “a quantity of freshly exuded blood appeared in cavitate pectoris,” that the vessels near the heart ventricles were not congested with coagulated blood, and that the viscera appeared “as fresh as in a healthy person.”

His diagnosis was equally rational. He concluded that Stana had died from a retained placenta.

The paradox is exquisite. The apparatus of Enlightenment science confirmed rather than debunked the vampire. Every phenomenon Flückinger documented, modern pathologist Paul Barber would later explain, results from ordinary decomposition. Bodies buried in cold, clay-rich, anoxic soil do not decay normally. Decomposition gases force liquid from the lungs, creating the appearance of fresh blood. Skin slippage reveals the dermis underneath, which observers interpreted as “new skin.” That famous groan emitted when the vampire hunter staked the corpse? Just the compression of the lungs forcing air past the glottis.

The Royal Prussian Society of Science pointed this out as early as 1732. Their prosaic analysis was ignored for centuries.

Historian Peter Bräunlein offers a darker interpretation. Vampirism wasn’t the Enlightenment’s opposite, he argues, but its “intimate companion.” The vampire emerged not despite scientific rationalism but from it; it was produced by the structures of Habsburg bureaucratic modernity and military medicine itself. As physicians like Gerard van Swieten were dispatched to suppress superstition, the knowledge they produced circulated and gained cultural authority as occult knowledge. Science was disenchanting the world and re-mystifying it simultaneously.

This pattern would recur across the century with increasing sophistication. Science would confront vampirism and find itself inadequate to the task of containing it.

By 1872, when J. Sheridan Le Fanu published Carmilla, the crisis had deepened. The novella is saturated with medical language and disease metaphors. The framing device introduces Dr. Hesselius as a “metaphysical physician” whose “reasoning” and “acumen” will illuminate the mysterious subject. Yet his actual reasoning is withheld entirely. Science frames the narrative but cannot penetrate it.

The progression of Carmilla’s discovery mirrors a kind of perverted scientific investigation. Laura perceives her vampirism as a child but is dismissed as hallucinating. Medical opinion is sought; vampirism is perceived again but ruled out as superstition. A traveling beggar with a “piercing black eye” notices Carmilla’s “sharpest tooth” and recognizes the signs of vampirism, but he is dismissed as an unreliable observer. Only when General Spielsdorf, through sustained personal investigation, advocates vampirism as the true cause of disease is Carmilla’s identity accepted.

The ideal scientific observer, it turns out, must be willing to transcend the limits of empiricism.

What makes this particularly unsettling is Carmilla’s own weaponization of scientific discourse. When she compares girls to “caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes” and attributes this observation to “Monsieur Buffon, in his big book,” she uses the language of natural history to naturalize her predation and desire. Science becomes a means of making eroticism appear natural rather than supernatural.

Meanwhile, the local doctor is mocked for believing in “hippogriffs and dragons,” yet his tentative admission that “life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either” proves closer to the truth than any confident rationalism. The alignment of Carmilla with contemporary medical descriptions of female hysteria was no accident. Vampirism was becoming legible as female pathology, anticipating the explicit medicalization to come.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula represents the most sustained engagement with scientific and technological advancement. The novel celebrates modernity’s tools: phonographs, typewriters, telegrams, railway timetables deployed with obsessive precision. Mina, systematically processing information on her typewriter, collating journals and newspaper clippings into unified documents, becomes the group’s most effective technologist. Her expertise enables the vampire hunters to “be informed as to facts” and “arrange [their] plan of battle.”

Then Dracula burns her documents and destroys Seward’s phonograph cylinders.

The Count strikes at the material infrastructure of modern knowledge itself. He invades the asylum, that hallmark of institutional scientific modernity, proving its powerlessness. Most devastatingly, Jonathan’s final reflection acknowledges the ultimate failure: technology can record but it cannot authenticate supernatural experience. “In all the mass of material of which the record is composed,” he confesses, “there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing” that no one would accept as proof.

Blood transfusion, the cutting edge of Victorian medicine, fails to save Lucy. Science must be supplemented with garlic, crucifixes, and communion wafers. Van Helsing succeeds precisely because he hybridizes old and new methods; Seward fails because his pure rationalism cannot accommodate what his eyes witness.

The deeper horror lies in what scholar Anne Stiles identifies as Stoker’s engagement with late-Victorian neurology. Dracula’s methods disturbingly parallel those of contemporary physiologists. He “narcotises” victims through hypnosis, experiments on human and animal subjects, and practices the cerebral sciences with meticulous precision. His victims exhibit the automatic behaviors that neurologists attributed to brain stem function: Lucy’s sleepwalking, Mina’s clairvoyant states, Renfield’s compulsive insect-eating. The Count embodies the nightmare that haunted late-Victorian science: that human consciousness might be merely a byproduct of brain function, that complex behaviors could be performed entirely without will or soul. Human beings might be soulless machines governed by physiological impulse.

Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, published the same year as Dracula, completes the trajectory by dispensing with the supernatural altogether. Harriet Brandt’s vampirism is explained through eugenics, hereditary degeneration, and pseudo-scientific racism. There is no mystery, no ancient curse. There is only the clinical language of deviance.

Dr. Phillips declares that Harriet possesses “the fatal attributes of the Vampire that affected her mother’s birth, that endued her with the thirst for blood.” Her mixed-race ancestry is framed through degeneration theory; her blood is irredeemably “polluted.” Her father, a vivisecting scientist expelled from Swiss hospitals “for having caused the death of more than one patient by trying his scientific experiments upon them,” extends his experimental cruelty to enslaved people in Jamaica. The vampirism is doubly scientific in origin: product of hereditary degeneration and experimental violence.

In her suicide note, Harriet writes: “My parents have made me unfit to live.” She has internalized science’s verdict on her own body completely. Science has not defeated the vampire. Science has produced the vampire as a category of exclusion, and then destroyed the person it categorized.

Across a century of fiction, modernity’s relationship with its own monsters transforms. Science no longer confronts vampirism; it creates it. The vampire endures because vampirism, the fear of the Other who feeds on the Self, who reproduces endlessly, who infiltrates institutions, is modernity’s permanent anxiety. And modernity keeps trying to kill it with the very tools that created it.

We have yet to stake our vampire.

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Bräunlein, Peter J. “The Frightening Borderlands of Enlightenment: The Vampire Problem.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43, no. 3 (2012): 710-719.

Davis, Octavia. “Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire.” In Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, 40-54. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.

Depledge, Greta. “Introduction.” In The Blood of the Vampire, by Florence Marryat, edited by Greta Depledge, iii-xxxvii. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2010.

Halberstam, Jack. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (1993): 333-352.

Hammack, Brenda Mann. “Florence Marryat’s Female Vampire and the Scientizing of Hybridity.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48, no. 4 (2008): 885-896.

Heller, Tamar. “The Vampire in the House: Hysteria, Female Sexuality, and Female Knowledge in Le Fanu’s Carmilla.” In The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction, edited by Barbara Leah Harman and Susan Meyer, 77-95. New York: Garland, 1996.

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. Carmilla. 1872. Reprint, edited by Carmen Maria Machado. Philadelphia, PA: Lanternfish Press, 2019.

Mangham, Andrew, and Greta Depledge, eds. The Female Body in Medicine and Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

Marryat, Florence. The Blood of the Vampire. 1897. Reprint, edited by Greta Depledge. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2010.

Stiles, Anne. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Reprint, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Willis, Martin. “Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, Ireland, and Diseased Vision.” In Literature and Science, edited by Sharon Ruston, 111-130. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008.

The answer is: exactly as bad as that song suggested.

Tyra Banks’ debut novel, published in 2011, is a 570-page young-adult fantasy that reads like someone fed Harry Potter, America’s Next Top Model, and a fever dream directly into Tyra’s brilliant, unfiltered brain, then let her type for five years without an editor brave enough to say “maybe cut some of this.” It debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times Children’s Chapter Books list despite near-universal critical mockery. The Georgia Straight called it “a befuddling piece of dreckitude.” Bitch magazine described it as “a nonsensical, nightmarish, acid trip.” Professional reviews were savage. Readers, apparently, did not care. They bought it anyway.

This is the anatomy of how something can be both genuinely incoherent and genuinely bestselling.

Tookie De La Crème is a transparent self-insert for teenage Tyra, complete with an oversize forehead and “multiple-personality hair.” She is selected for Modelland, a fog-shrouded academy where supermodels train to become magical beings called “Intoxibellas,” each endowed with a superpower. The catch: in the world of Metopia, supermodels are the only celebrities that matter. Countries have pun-based names (the Netherlands is “TooLip”; Brazil is “Terra BossaNova”). The school itself sits atop a mountain and is watched over by an all-seeing green eye. It is run by a tyrannical figure called BellaDonna who communicates exclusively through statues.

If this sounds surreal, you haven’t hit the surreal part yet.

The book invents vocabulary at such an aggressive rate that reading it feels like linguistic hazing. T-DOD (The Day of Discovery). SMIZE (eyeshadow-like talismans that boost selection odds by exactly 91%, a nod to Banks’ real-life “smile with your eyes” catchphrase). SPLD (Silent Protest by Lying Down). Sentura. ManAttack. Mannecants. Bestosterone. Nearly every term is immediately defined in-text in a way that strips it of any magical quality. It’s like worldbuilding designed by someone who’d never read worldbuilding.

But jargon alone isn’t the problem. The problem is that none of it coheres. The book gestures at a global mythology where supermodels are essentially gods, yet spends most of its time in a boarding school, meaning the worldbuilding serves no narrative function whatsoever. There are clues everywhere: girls’ menstruation magically synchronizes on day two of school, then a living statue announces they’ll never menstruate again (but can still reproduce). This happens over the course of pages. There is no explanation. There is no reason.

This is Modelland’s core dysfunction: it mistakes detail for depth.

Tookie solves nothing. Other characters exposition-dump information she needs. One of the book’s most-cited sequences involves magical lightning striking a wall three separate times. First it makes the wall transparent, then a two-way mirror, then solid again. This happens purely so Tookie can witness something plot-critical happening on the other side. She’s not even attempting to look; the universe keeps adjusting itself for her benefit.

Meanwhile, an entire subplot gets abandoned. A grotesque, organ-eating mutant called Hunchy journeys across the world to devour a character’s pancreas. The narrative simply drops this. An underground city of Modelland staff is mentioned once and evaporates. Tookie’s best friend Lizzie, a homeless schizophrenic with a cutting disorder, gets numerous pages and zero resolution.

The climax is a cascade of flashbacks about every character except Tookie. It turns out the school’s mysterious administrator is secretly Ci~L, the world’s most famous supermodel and, surprise, a second Tyra self-insert. She recruited the “unconventional” girls out of solidarity with her own traumatic childhood. Ci~L becomes the new BellaDonna, promises to end rigid beauty standards, and she and Tookie teleport away to an unexplained location. Sequel bait from a book that would never get one.

The cafeteria serves dessert-based showers. Doctors have roller skates for feet; nurses have giant scissors growing out of their heads. This is played for whimsy. Elsewhere, girls are possessed by the spirits of failed models who claw them in an actual hallway. A boy’s backstory is that he’s too handsome to be taken seriously. This is also whimsy.

Then the book pivots: there’s graphic body horror, child death, and the uncomfortable sexualization of minors. All marketed to ages 13 and up. Critics noted the cognitive dissonance between the book’s empowerment message (“every girl is beautiful”) and its relentlessly consumerist worldbuilding, where most of humanity labors on “beauty-factory assembly lines” to serve supermodel royalty.

Here’s what’s fascinating: Modelland genuinely mattered to some readers. It wasn’t a ghostwritten product. It was unmistakably Banks’ unfiltered vision, weirdness and all. Some readers loved it precisely because it was incoherent, because it refused to be digestible. It became a “so bad it’s good” phenomenon before that terminology fully calcified online.

The anti-bullying message was sincere. The attempt to expand the definition of beauty was genuine, even if undermined by the consumerist machinery underneath. Banks spent five years on this book. She cried about it. She said the stress caused alopecia. Whatever Modelland is, it wasn’t cynical.

Modelland is proof that commercial success and critical failure can be the same book. It’s evidence that authorial vision and craft are different things. You can pour your entire unmediated self into something and still create a mess. Possibly a beautiful mess, possibly an educational mess, definitely a memorable mess.

It’s also the best possible advertisement for editors. Tyra Banks had a genuinely wild idea. What she needed was someone brave enough to sit her down and say, “Keep the surrealism, cut the jargon, and maybe figure out who the protagonist is supposed to be.”

Instead, we got fifteen years of people asking, “So… what is Modelland, exactly?” And honestly? That might be the only question worth asking.

“14 Things That Prove Tyra Banks’ ‘Modelland’ Is The Craziest Book Ever.” LitReactor, litreactor.com/columns/14-things-that-prove-tyra-banks-modelland-is-the-craziest-book-ever. Accessed June 2026.

Bitch Magazine. Review of Modelland by Tyra Banks. Evaluation of feminist themes and consumerist messaging in the novel.

“Crow Defeats Books.” “Modelland is a nightmarish fever dream from the mind of Tyra Banks. I hate it. I adore it.” WordPress, crowdefeatsbooks.wordpress.com/2025/12/05/modelland-is-a-nightmarish-fever-dream-from-the-mind-of-tyra-banks-i-hate-it-i-adore-it/. Accessed June 2026.

The Georgia Straight. “Tyra Banks’s debut novel Modelland is a befuddling piece of dreckitude.” The Georgia Straight Vancouver’s source for arts, culture, and events, straight.com/blogra/tyra-bankss-debut-novel-modelland-befuddling-piece-dreckitude. Accessed June 2026.

Publishers Weekly. Review of Modelland by Tyra Banks. Assessment of Banks’ YA debut as “campy and warped” with “nonstop barrage of surrealism and wackiness.”

Not the kind of home you find on Rightmove. Not a domestic establishment with tasteful wallpaper and a competent servant staff (though those certainly help). The “home” that obsesses the Victorian novel is something far more psychologically complex: a place where identity, belonging, economic security, moral integrity, and emotional fulfillment align. It’s where you can be yourself and still belong to society. It’s where you’re safe and recognized and good, all at once.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the fundamental structure of almost every major Victorian novel you’ve ever encountered, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The Victorians didn’t invent homesickness. But rapid industrialisation, urbanisation, and unprecedented social mobility in the nineteenth century created something new: widespread existential displacement. People were moving from villages to cities, rising and falling through social classes, questioning inherited beliefs, living through technological transformation that made the world feel fundamentally unstable.

The novel, that new and flexible literary form, became the medium through which Victorians imagined how to find solid ground in all this chaos. And what they repeatedly imagined was home.

But Victorian home-seeking is weirdly sophisticated. It’s not about geography; it’s about wholeness. A character can have a roof over their head and still be homeless, spiritually adrift. Achieving home requires multiple conditions simultaneously: you need economic independence (so you’re not beholden to others), you need moral alignment (your values match your life), you need social recognition (society sees you as legitimate), and you need emotional fulfillment (someone loves you in a way that makes sense).

This is why the home-quest shapes the entire narrative structure of these novels. It’s not a side plot. It is the plot.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre makes this explicit from the opening line. Jane is established immediately as a “discord” at Gateshead; not merely unhappy, but fundamentally incompatible with her surroundings. She doesn’t belong. The entire novel traces her movement through a sequence of houses (Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House, Ferndean), each one testing whether it can be home.

The genius of Brontë’s structure is that she refuses easy answers. Thornfield offers romantic love, and Jane loves Rochester with genuine passion. But love isn’t enough. The novel is absolutely clear: Jane cannot be Rochester’s mistress. Not from moral superiority, but because a home built on moral compromise isn’t actually home. It’s just a prettier cage. She leaves the man she loves because Thornfield cannot be a moral home, no matter how much her heart wants to stay.

Only when Jane has achieved multiple things simultaneously does lasting home arrive. She needs financial independence through her inheritance, moral integrity through her refusal of compromise, emotional fulfillment through equal love, and social recognition through marriage. Only then can she finally rest. The novel’s famous closing line, “Reader, I married him,” isn’t a romantic ending. It’s the resolution of the existential quest. Narrative can finally cease because the fundamental question has been answered: Jane has found where she belongs.

But not everyone gets Jane’s happy ending. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights brutally exposes the flipside of the Victorian home-quest: for some people, home is simply unattainable.

Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights as a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child,” marked by race, class, and mysterious origins. The household encounters him as fundamentally other, someone whose very existence threatens domestic order. Hindley systematically excludes him from the family, expelling him from parlors to servants’ quarters, denying him education. Heathcliff is taught, from childhood, that home is not for people like him.

His entire adult life becomes a warped version of the Victorian home-quest. He methodically acquires legal possession of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange; the very houses from which he was excluded. But acquiring property grants him no home. He owns the buildings without inhabiting them meaningfully. He has possession but not belonging, property but not peace. Even after acquiring everything, he remains fundamentally homeless, haunting the houses he owns like a ghost.

Catherine’s famous declaration, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff,” suggests that true home exists only in another person, that belonging requires fusion with another soul. Yet this spiritual home makes conventional domestic establishment impossible. She marries Edgar Linton instead, choosing social home over spiritual home; a compromise that satisfies neither her nor Heathcliff and destroys them both. Catherine’s ghost crying “Let me in, let me in!” at the window becomes the novel’s most haunting image: the perpetual seeking of entry that can never be granted.

Wuthering Heights reveals the dark truth underlying Victorian domestic ideology: social structures of exclusion based on class, race, and legitimacy make home literally unattainable for some people. The home-quest isn’t a universal possibility. It’s a privilege available only to those society recognizes as belonging.

Why were the Victorians so obsessed with finding home? Because they’d lost it.

Industrialization uprooted rural populations. Urbanization created anonymous cities. Social mobility made class position uncertain. The Industrial Revolution promised progress while delivering displacement. People were moving, changing, rising and falling, living through transformations that made the world feel fundamentally unstable in entirely new ways.

The novel became the genre through which Victorians imaginatively worked through this crisis. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, North and South, Middlemarch: these aren’t escape fantasies. They’re anxious philosophical investigations into a serious question. How do you belong to a world in flux? How do you build a stable identity when society itself is transforming?

Reading these novels together reveals something profound about the Victorian psyche. They were sophisticated enough to understand that belonging isn’t simple. They knew that home requires economic independence, moral integrity, emotional fulfillment, and social recognition operating in concert. A woman could have romantic love but no money and still be homeless. A man could achieve professional success but lack moral integrity and remain fundamentally displaced.

The Victorian novel’s obsession with home reflects real anxieties about identity, belonging, and stability in the face of modernity. And that obsession, that desperate, repeated search for a place where you can be yourself and still belong, feels remarkably contemporary.

We’re still looking for that. We’re still trying to find where we fit.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Edited by Stevie Davies, Penguin Classics, 2006.

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Edited by Pauline Nestor, Penguin Classics, 2003.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Edited by Jeremy Tambling, Penguin Classics, 2004.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Edited by Rosemary Ashton, Penguin Classics, 2003.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. Edited by Patricia Ingham, Penguin Classics, 2003.