cutting out the rot: a DLTFI ending analysis/theory ᭄᭡ ͏ ͏ ͏
spoilers for don't let the forest in by c.g. drews below but here are my thoughts on the ending!
avid succulent enthusiast here. it took me a while, but i read the last chapter as the aftershock of cutting the rot out of a leaf. i think andrew and thomas are both alive in the end, and that even though it was likely thomas who was cut open by andrew, it ultimately doesn't matter whose heart was cut out, because andrew realized two versions of the story at the same time.
hear me out here. first i'll go over how we can understand what happened to them/how their bodies survived what they did, and then i'll talk about why this happened as it relates to the plot/worldbuilding.
plants can gain rotten spots both on their leaves and in their roots, and as we know andrew is quite literally a forest at the end (i'm assuming that the monsters and thomas and dove being dead are all real, though this is debatable ofc). root rot is basically considered irreversible, but leaf rot on the other hand can be fought off if you just find the rotten, brown, mushy spot and cut it out. rip to my long-gone aloe vera that i've done this many times to.
there's that line about being rotten to the core -- "You'll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be." said once by each of them. and then the response: "...all I'll find is that we match."
the vegetation in this book is STUBBORN. that's why i'm applying succulent logic instead of normal vegetation logic. andrew and thomas are both alive and capable of speech and teasing here, even though andrew's got roots out his stomach and thomas' chest is cut open (the ending of chapter 33 more clearly implies that it was his heart that was lost). this is because they've both, in their own ways, cut out the rot from within their leaves. andrew has stopped resisting the truth about dove's death that existed within him all along. thomas has relinquished his guilt, accepting the natural event that was the tree branch snapping. in a way, their injuries here are symbols of them being alive alive alive (quoting the book) -- they literally mark where the turning point is in both of their grief.
and most importantly, this ugliness — the worst of their grief, the forest, this nightmare as a whole — isn’t irreversible. sure it’ll probably callus over into something hollow and even missing, but now they know how to deal with monsters.
how does both of them surviving work plot-wise? well, the reason they could both survive this is because they keep switching places throughout the narrative. andrew normally writes thomas as a prince (pg. 97, when they bury the fairy prince), and features himself with moth wings (ex. pg. 32; the drawing of andrew's story about cutting out his heart shows the heart being removed from a boy with moth wings).
however, andrew's final story, written to defeat the whole forest, frames himself as the prince. he describes "the october boy" as having freckles, but there are hints to both thomas and andrew having freckles. thomas' sketch of the boy with roses in his eyes has "a constellation of freckles" (45) and a scribbled-out mouth, and we learn later that thomas saves drawing andrew's mouth for last, or doesn't at all (276; the portrait of thomas, andrew, and dove). i personally can't come up with a way to explain both of them being "the october boy," but maybe someone better than me can. maybe it was just bc this took place in october.
my bottom line is: whatever force reads through andrew's stories and translates them into reality realized that both the prince with the rotten heart and the boy with freckles could be thomas or andrew. as andrew cut out thomas' heart, both versions of his story are realized at the same time: the one where he was the prince, and the one where he was the boy with moth wings. this is because andrew's descriptions were open-ended enough and convoluted enough when combined with past stories of his that even magic entities couldn't be sure who was who. there's something to be said here about codependency def.
TL;DR: andrew and thomas surviving can be explained through succulents' logic of rot and stubbornness despite it. these boys were so desperate to protect each other and switch places that they both said fuck you to the medical reality of their bodies.
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