Lets get Existential with the Goblin King
The Muppet reproduction discourse resulted in me making an offhand reference to why Jaereth the Goblin King isn’t a potential origin for Muppets on Earth. Specifically, I stated that he is a rogue memetic construct, something that some people would wrongly call a tulpa (I say wrongly because apparently tulpa is an appropriated term that does not mean “idea that has become a real thing” in its original context).
WARNING: STUFF’S GONNA GET “GRANT MORRISON-Y”
The universe of Labyrinth resists literal reading because it dives head-on into being an emotional tale. As a child, Jaereth frightened me, because I was a savvy little kid when it came to tropes, but Jaeteth broke rules and did things for reasons I couldn’t grok at the time, so he was a nightmare.
Pictured: Terror incarnate.
I begin with two initial suppostions 1) the Labyrinth and its creatures spring from Sarah’s imagination and 2) this does not mean that they aren’t real.
Attempting to codify this beyond its fairytale/dream logic construction is, I believe a mistake, and its not necessary to the issue at hand, which is that Jaereth is a figment of Sarah’s imagination that has literally run away with her. Or at least her little brother.
Pictured: Chekov’s teenage girl’s bedroom.
Jaereth is a fantasy figure like all of Sarah’s other impediments and guides in the Labyrinth. I wager he’s one of the more recent ones, or he’s started to change recently, because this is a coming of age story, and he’s the foci of Sarah’s early explorations of adult fantasy themes. I mean, its David Bowie. Also the whole codpiece situation, and the dance scene, and so forth…
The story is very much about Sarah crossing the child-adult threshold but holding onto the ideals and wonder of childhood. The Labyrinth isn’t very subtle about this, as she’s punished every time she’s childish, but aided by the things that are childlike. This is a passing fantasy, one that Sarah will grow through experiencing, and one she’ll largely leave behind.
And that’s what Jaereth can’t abide, because he’s the figure in the dream that knows they’ll die when you wake up.
Jaereth has no actual power over Sarah (that’s the whole point), because he’s her creation, whether literal or figurative, internal reality or external reality, she’s the godhead from which everything he is flows, and unlike the rest of the toys and pets and scraps of poetry floating around in there, he knows what he is.
That’s the missing part of the puzzle that made him terrifying to my childhood self, his motivation. He’s putting on a show, making sure she keeps her focus on him. If he can make the boy into a goblin and take him forever, she’ll never be able to stop thinking about him and her impending adulthood won’t destroy him. It might even put the idea of him in other people’s heads, if your chosen take is more supernatural than fanciful.
If she falls into this fantasy world with him, becomes his queen, more’s the better.
Even so, he can only use Sarah’s own power to accomplish these tasks. His control of his own actions might be incomplete, even marginal, and may be nothing more than the intrusive thoughts of a god who is unaware of their own status. He confesses this:
*Everything*! Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for *you*!
He conforms to her reactions, he does what she expects him to do. If he were a real thing invoked form the play she’s memorizing, you’d think the canon of that interpretation would give him some bulwark against her revisions, but whatever reality this runaway memeplex started in, she’s his reality now. Because try as he might, its not his story.
He’s just the bad guy, one woven together from a puppet and a play and probably a sexy rock star, one given feelings and impulses and ambitions so that they can be thwarted on the heroine’s coming of age quest. But unlike the macabre-but-happy muppet-monsters that surround him, he’s got a human’s understanding of his nature, as he is made in their image. He’s a character that has a life of his own, and he has his own ideas about where to run.
Which sounds really familiar to me as a writer, and may be one of the most on-the-nose instances of “write what you know” I’ve seen.
He is, in essence, a Lucifer-figure, rebelling against his god out of fear of being replaced. A rebellion that lasts only until the authoress of the tale recognizes her own hand on the pen, remembers her own (at least situational) omnipotence, and ends the tale.
I am not here stating that I believe that “it’s all a dream” is a correct or even good interpretation of the plot. For there to be any tension, Toby has to be in actual peril. And the exact nature of what caused the events isn’t really important. What is important is their purpose, which is providing Sarah with an externalized experience of her own internal struggle.
So, in short, as a limited rogue thought-form, Jaereth could not create the Muppets, nor ferry them from another reality to the one they share with human beings. He is not the demiurge of their reality.
Sarah, maybe. But she doesn’t really seem like the demiurge type.
