#elder hexside squad | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sage-nebula · 4 years

Text

re: Amity, Luz, & Lilith

I’m just going to go ahead and make this post now to save some time in case things don’t go like a lot of the fandom seems to be expecting them to in upcoming episodes. And the main point of this post is:

Turning on the Empire / Emperor’s Coven / Lilith is probably going to be extremely difficult for Amity.

Many people seem to think that Amity is going to drop Lilith and the Coven as soon as she learns that they’re enemies of Luz, but I really don’t think it’s going to be that simple. (And I also think that’s the meta reason why Amity is benched for these two episodes; there’s simply not enough time to give her the attention she needs with everything else going on.) In fact, I think the upcoming arc is going to prove to be very rough on Amity psychologically, and I think that for several reasons.

1.) Amity has around fourteen years of brainwashing and deprogramming to break through.

As we saw in “Agony of a Witch,” the Empire operates through dogma that is put out not only by the Emperor’s Coven, but is also taught through dedicated instruction in the school system. (e.g. Hexside only let students study what would lead them to joining a single coven until very recently, and though he claims to be apolitical, President Bump clearly has to adhere to Empire standards in pretty much every way.) The propaganda is so steady and strong that we see that Willow and Gus are both very happily brainwashed, completely believing that witches “did magic wrong” until the Emperor came and dominated them. What this means is that anyone who is going to turn against the Empire is going to have to fight through programming that has been instilled in them since birth. Eda managed to fight it off, but her fear that Luz will succumb to it is why she was so afraid of letting Luz go to Hexside. And Luz hasn’t succumbed to it and doesn’t believe it, but that’s because she’s human, only recently arrived, and has Eda as her teacher. From what we see, pretty much every other student (except perhaps the detention squad) live and breathe the Empire dogma because it’s all they’ve ever known.

Now, both Willow and Gus wanted to help Luz cure Eda despite the fact that they, too, are brainwashed. But that doesn’t mean that they think that the Emperor or Emperor’s Coven is bad, and furthermore, while they have the same brainwashing that Amity does, they’re still a bit different from her in that they don’t seem to have any real desire to join the Emperor’s Coven. They think it’s cool, but with how much they love their current tracks, it seems more likely they’d want to join Plant or Illusion covens. So for Willow and Gus, while they still have programming to break free from, that’s all they have to break free from. It will still be incredibly hard, and I can definitely see them taking a “well, Lilith might be bad, but that doesn’t mean the Emperor is!” tack at first, but that’s all they would personally have to contend with. Amity, on the other hand . . .

2.) Amity looks up to Lilith with what looks like hero worship, and has set her entire future / identity around joining the Emperor’s Coven.

Despite Lilith using Amity to cheat during her duel against Luz, Amity still has a poster of Lilith up on her wall. She screams at Luz in the duel episode that joining the Emperor’s Coven is her future. All of her hopes, dreams, goals, and efforts center around this dream of hers, and while we don’t know exactly how long she has held that dream, we can surmise that she’s held it for a long time. Speaking from personal experience, when you hold a dream near and dear to your heart and spend most of your waking hours working to achieve it, it becomes part of your identity. You imagine it for yourself so strongly that you can’t see yourself doing anything else. That Amity forgave Lilith for using her to cheat during that duel, and that she still looks up to her and has that poster of her on her wall (her “shut up” seemed more like she felt judged for being bedridden by the poster of Lilith), speaks volumes to just how important this is to her. Amity felt humiliated during that duel, but she put all the blame on Luz and none of it on Lilith despite the fact that Luz had nothing to do with Lilith putting that power sticker on her. Lilith was the real reason Amity was humiliated that day, but it was easier for her to blame Luz because Luz wasn’t part of the identity that Amity formed for herself, so that’s what she did. And I’m not talking about “easier” as in “she doesn’t want to put the work in” (because Amity always wants to put the work in to everything), but “easier” as in “the psyche tends to protect itself however possible and will automatically take the route of least psychological damage, which is why denial is one of the earliest, if not the very first, stages of grief, for instance.”

Because here’s the thing: When you make something part of your identity, anything that threatens to damage or take that away from you deals severe psychological damage. When a star athlete is injured to the point where they can never play again, or a career track musician loses their hearing, or an artist loses their sight, it’s devastating. Not because they’re disabled, but because the identity they built for themselves—athlete, artist, musician—is now something they can no longer be, at least not in the same way. When something becomes an integral part of your identity and is then taken away, you wonder, “If I’m not [x], then what am I?” There’s always an answer, and that answer is usually “you are a human person and you shouldn’t wrap your identity around your future/current career,” but the fact is that while that’s the logical answer, people aren’t logical creatures, by and large. We’re emotional ones. And the emotion in that moment is, “I don’t know who I am / I’m nobody / I’m nothing / I don’t know what to do.”

In this scenario, Amity’s not being disabled in any way, and she could find a new dream or goal . . . but considering the fact that you’re either a criminal or in a coven, and that the only coven that allows you to use all forms of magic is the Emperor’s Coven, her options in the Boiling Isles are pretty limited. And even if they weren’t, again, this is something that Amity has decided on so firmly for herself that the mere idea that she was made to look foolish in front of the Emperor’s Coven at the covention led to her screaming at Luz about it. If being embarrassed in front of the Coven, something that won’t bar her from her desired future, is enough to make her freak out that much, how hard will it be for her to throw the entire thing away? To realize that her dream, something she’s worked toward her entire life, is actually something awful, something undesirable?

Lilith is someone she sees as a hero even now, even still, and so I think turning her back on Lilith will be very difficult, though not impossible. (As in, I think she’d try to find excuses for why Lilith capturing Eda is justifiable, and the only way to truly shatter the pedestal she has Lilith on is to actively witness Lilith trying to murder Luz, because murder is a line Amity can’t justify.) But turning her back on the Coven and Empire completely? When Amity has worked toward this and given everything she has to this for years? Yeah, it’s possible, but it’s going to be pretty emotionally devastating, particularly considering . . .

3.) She has emotionally abusive parents who have probably pushed her toward this goal since Day One.

I think it would really be selling Amity short to say that her idolization of Lilith and her desire to join the Emperor’s Coven isn’t something that she decided upon / truly wanted for herself. Amity deserves agency, and I think she exercised that agency by choosing who her idol is / willingly working toward her own dream.

But considering how obsessed with status her parents are, I think it’s also entirely possible that they taught Amity from a young age that she should work to join the Emperor’s Coven, particularly if the elder Blight siblings didn’t show the aptitude for it (because let’s be honest, they don’t have the right attitude for it). Joining the Emperor’s Coven gives you status that no other coven in the Boiling Isles can grant you, and I’m sure that having one’s child grow up to join the Emperor’s Coven would look favorably upon the parents. We don’t know what Amity’s parents do or what coven they’re in (though I doubt it’s the Emperor’s Coven, given that the only person with a face or name in the Coven that we know of so far is Lilith), but I’m sure that if they themselves weren’t able to join the Emperor’s Coven, they would absolutely want the status that one of their children joining would bring them. And so I’m sure that as soon as Amity was old enough to understand the concept, her parents impressed upon her that the Emperor’s Coven was the best one and therefore the one she should strive to join, and she soaked that in just as she did the Empire dogma that was spoonfed to her (and everyone else on the Boiling Isles) from birth.

And what this means is that realizing that the Emperor’s Coven is not at all what she thought it was and is not an achievable or actually desirable dream means not only disintegrating part of what she built into her own identity, but also going against her emotionally abusive parents if this is what they want from her (and while it’s speculation, I feel like it’s reasonably based speculation that it is what they want from her). We know that while Amity doesn’t always agree with her parents, ultimately she’s afraid of them and going against them is difficult. This is why she allowed them to force her to cut off her friendship with Willow. Amity has disobeyed her parents in recent episodes by trying to mend things with Willow and ditching Boscha and the others, but there’s a huge difference from that and “actually, I’m not going to do this thing to bring you tons of status.” One will definitely piss off her parents more than the other and it’s not hard to see which one.

So, in conclusion . . .

I think Amity has a very hard road ahead of her, and it’s not going to be fixed as easily as “Luz is very cute and I like her a lot so FUCK the empire lol.” Like that’s great as a meme and the Power of Love is a heck of a power, but I think that the reality of what the Empire / Emperor’s Coven is is going to be a crisis of identity for Amity more than it is just about any other character, and while she’s absolutely crushing on Luz in a big way, there’s more than one way the word “crush” can be used with regards to a character and this is not going to be an easy road for Amity. So don’t be surprised if she doesn’t drop all of her ambitions and dreams the moment Luz says “they’re evil,” or if she tries to make excuses for why they’re not that bad and it’s a misunderstanding and she hasn’t actually been working to join the Evil League of Evil for her entire life. I have confidence that Amity will make the right decision and be all right in the end, but it’s undoubtedly going to be a bumpy road and it will take her some time to fully navigate it.

#the owl house #the owl house spoilers #toh spoilers #amity blight #meta #like i think even if she was there for the duel in the previous episode and saw Lilith trying to kill Luz #obviously she'd hate Lilith for that bc Lilith is literally trying to murder an innocent person #but also it'd be an incredibly hard and devastating blow to take #and she would also probably work double-time to justify why it doesn't mean the entire EC is evil #bc having Lilith's pedestal be shattered is bad enough - losing the entire thing in one swoop would shatter everything #she's believed in her entire life and that is NOT an easy thing to handle #esp for a girl who is at oldest 14 like #I feel for Amity I really do #i think things will get much harder for her before they get better #but i do think they'll get better #eventually

12 notes · View notes