Brief Thoughts on Celine
I've griped a bit on here about the number of Polytrix fics in which Celine is villainized, and the good news is that this has really died down since the first months of the fandom! But something I've seen a couple of times instead is fics where Celine encourages the girls to talk things out amongst themselves. And, I'm sorry, but we get very little solid characterization for Celine but what little we do get shows that this is completely out of character for her. Celine is 100% on team "lie to your soulmates and keep secrets from them." If a character comes to her in an emotional or relationship crisis she will NOT say the right thing. Her first instinct will be to hide it and/or shove it down. We watched this happen on screen.
It feels as if parts of fandom are correctly eschewing the "evil stepmother" trope for Celine but turning around and slotting her into the "wise mentor who dispenses good advice and helps our protagonists with their relationship problems" trope and I'm sorry, but when Rumi does go to Celine for help in the movie, Celine completely fuckin' beefs it. She is the source of the relationship problems. In the movie, both Rumi and Mira are more emotionally intelligent and better communicators than Celine is, and if Rumi had listened to her instincts over Celine's advice the plot of the movie would never have happened.
This isn't meant to vague anyone in particular - I've seen this in a number of fics by different authors, and I really enjoyed the fics in question aside from this quibble, but yeah. Celine genuinely did her best by Rumi but she also set Rumi up to fail because the guidelines by which Celine lives are flawed, and this flawed outlook is one of the things this movie is critiquing. I do not think she is a good source for relationship advice.
I think there's a significant tension, in the story, between Celine's role as a character (all 3.5 minutes of her) and what we know about her in-universe. Specifically: she's a Hunter.
And "Hunter" is a bit of a misnomer. They fight demons, sure, but their actual job is connection. (Note that Rumi slices Gwi-ma in half with her extra-special powerup sword and he just re-forms ten seconds later and doesn't give a shit; the moment when Huntr/x actually beat him, none of them are holding weapons, they're hugging and embracing their love for each other and not even looking at him.) The primary duty of a Hunter is to reach out to people and make them feel less alone, to help people feel loved and safe and unashamed.
Which means the idea of a Hunter who is flat-out bad at human relationships just doesn't scan. It's nonsensical. Celine can make an entire stadium full of people feel connected but can't heal the connection between two kids right in front of her? Celine can make a whole country's worth of teenagers too loved for Gwi-Ma's shame to reach them, but actively inflicts it on a ten-year-old? If she can't even function in a single mundane human relationship, where the hell is she getting the magic to bolster millions of them?
And of course you can always just handwave it like oh it's magic, Hunter music doesn't have to have anything to do with the actual Hunter, but why would that be true? It's wildly unsatisfying from a literary perspective, it's counterintuitive character design. There's a reason Superman is drawn like a bodybuilder even though bending steel has nothing to do with his actual human muscles. If you have a character with Connection Magic while she herself is incapable of managing connection, that contrast is the point of the character, it's not something that can comfortably function as a minor side-quirk in someone who is being used for something else.
But then, of course, her entire role on screen is to instill Rumi with shame and damage her connection with Zoemira. Those are the two things we know about her: she fucked up Rumi by teaching her the wrong way to connect, and she embodied connection for an entire generation. Something has to give.
You raise some really good points! The comment about when Huntrix actually beat Gwi Ma (vs the big flashy sword fight) is something that I missed.
Thinking about it more, I think the key is that there are different kinds of connection? And perhaps there was an evolution in the sort of connection the Hunters cultivated over time. If you look at the first Hunters we see, for instance - their scale is very small. They're saving a village, and it's quite possible that the entire village might have known them. They might have had a genuine connection with the people they were saving. But the other Hunters we see are snapshots of groups throughout the 20th century, and one pattern we do see is the Hunters getting more and more... commercial? Formalized?
Given that the early and mid-20th century was a very difficult time to be Korean, I could see the likelihood of a LOT of institutional knowledge being lost to the Hunters over that time period. It would be understandable if, in response to losing mentors who knew better and facing an urgent need to strengthen the Honmoon fast, the Hunters turned towards scale. Quantity vs quality of connection. By the time we reach Celine's generation, she's enmeshed in the beginnings of full fledged commercial kpop - there's a connection there but it's intensely parasocial. And from what we see, Celine has launched Huntrix to the pinnacle of what is possible with this model, while protecting them from its worst abuses. Huntrix is absurdly popular and successful, enough so that they're approaching gold even with under this flawed paradigm. And their relationship with their fans, though parasocial, is not entirely fake - their songs are dialogues with their fans and are generally conveying feelings that they do have. They sing about what they have overcome from their pasts in Golden, even if it's not the full truth for any of them and they're all still presenting a public face/narrative for their audience.
Under that understanding, Celine's mode of connection would be more akin to inspiration. The intense fandom we see forming around actual irl kpop idols, where the actual connection is a parasocial attachment to their public face.
I think it's also notable that Celine would have been operating without any partners - without any strong connections herself - for the majority of her tenure as a Hunter. She may be uniquely poorly situation for understanding and passing on knowledge of connections because she herself had only a couple years of it, followed by one and a half decades (at the time of Rumi's training) of solitude. She was left without the support of her partners, in an intensely image-conscious industry, with a child marked by the physical manifestations of shame. Not an excuse, but possibly an explanation.
-*-
Also, I may have overstated my case a bit, because I don't think that Celine is ass at all relationships. Rumi is by and large well adjusted, and both Zoey and Mira imply that their upbringings were strained but seem to like and respect Celine. I suspect that Mira's actions (trying to communicate) are so different from her self image (short fused and difficult) partially because of Celine's guidance and presence in her life - a theory I personally find more plausible than Mira getting therapy (I do not think that Celine believes in therapy and I don't think Mira went on her own).
I think that Celine is uniquely bad about the patterns because they represent an impossibility in her belief system. Patterns mean a demon, which are all Bad, but Rumi is Good. Unable to square that, Celine denies it, and tries to remove them from her sight until she can remove them from reality. It will be Fixed and No One Has To Know. Notably, Mira and Zoey have no problems talking about their own faults and fears - Rumi clams up about her patterns specifically.
Which is to say, if Mira and Rumi were in conflict about something mundane, I think that Celine would give good advice! I think she specifically does not handle shame well - she (and Rumi) defaults to trying to hide the cause and fix it. (Though I do think that it is notable that none of the girls express shame about common things for idols to be shamed about - food, body image issues, eating politely, avoiding making a mess, etc. are all nonissues).
That said, I do think that she would give ass romantic advice.
I think that the distinction between the two types of connection is a pretty significant thing to consider here - being able to connect to people in the abstract as a pop star is very different from being able to do so on an intimate personal level.
The creators are pretty clear that Celine represents the failure of the old systems and how victims can pass those same broken systems down to later generations. Celine being a bad communicator on a personal level and the catastrophic failure of the Sunlight Sisters (because Mi-yeong’s defection from the Hunters and eventual death was a catastrophic failure of their generation no matter how you slice it) is clearly intended to be the fracture line that ultimately destroyed the trio of her generation.
Tbh in some ways I feel like the initial relationship between Rumi and Jinu only drives this home further. It’s easy for Rumi to confide in him precisely because he was initially someone she disliked and didn’t have to worry about disappointing. She was so terrified of losing her friends due to her “true nature” that she was unable to trust them and frankly started looking for acceptance somewhere else.
Obviously there’s no real basis for this but my personal theory is that Rumi’s relationship with Jinu is supposed to parallel Rumi’s mother’s relationship with Rumi’s father and hint at some of the reasons for the SLS ultimate downfall. It’s really economical storytelling if that is the case.
