The Nature of the Beast: A Over the Garden Wall Fan Analysis
The Nature of the Beast
A Over the Garden Wall Fan Analysis
Over the Garden Wall is a work of art. Its complex yet intuitively understood allegories give us one of the greatest fables ever created for a cartoon, and the viewer can spend weeks obsessing over how every seemingly random thing in it is tied together. This beautiful complexity is done a disservice by the rather two dimensional interpretations people have been giving it; the show and its setting are much more than one kid’s dream picked up by another kid while in a coma, nor is it a LOST type LIMBO or a Minority Report esque “give a fake happy ending to the protagonists who’ve BEEN DEAD THE WHOLE TIME” self contradiction. Over the Garden Wall is much more than that.
One such unsatisfying interpretation making the rounds- that the Beast is Satan- is a huge example of the over simplicity of the fan theories shared so far. The Beast may be a liar and a fiend, but he is no way equal to the Abrahamic Satan. The Beast is the embodiment of resignation; his power was over the hopeless and those too tired to continue. When his would be victims have something to go on for, the Beast cannot claim them; the children were safe during their trip to Adelaide not because of their path, but because they believed their path led somewhere. The kids were imperiled once one of them lost hope in escaping their ordeal. Experiencing hopelessness and the sneering sense of abandon that comes with it caused the dejected to become forfeit to the Beast because hopelessness is what the Beast is. Even his body is a expression of collective dismay.
To dash away hope, the Beast needed to make it foolish. To do this he exerted his influence on the two true sources of succor in the wood: Adelaide of the Wood and the Woodsman. The other denizens of the wood were beyond the Beast’s power for varying reasons: Beatrice wants to help her family, the Teacher and her father were sincerely committed to housing and educating children; the frogs simple-mindedly enjoyed their little civilization as the millionaires were transfixed by their lonely manias; Lorna and the Inn’s people threw themselves into their work to keep thoughts of disorder and absence of meaning at bay while the “people” of Pottsfield are beyond worry or expectation due to having already arrived at their final destination. These motivations grounded the denizens of the Unknown. Adelaide and the Woodsman didn’t have anything to keep them from getting lost; they were drawn into the Beast’s domain because they were completely in the midst of it. They were the threshold that wanderers wandered into, and their actions led to doom, escape or intermediate torture.
Adelaide was one threshold. The Beast called to her because she had come to fear the outside, and her fear had grown into reverence. She worshipped the darkness of the night because it seemed to blot out the world outside, leaving her hovel as the last surviving piece of creation. Her body and psyche stifled with decay, her spirit withered by the belief that her time was over, she refused to move on, instead closing herself off to life while clinging to the sterile desire to maintain herself by becoming dependent on those whose independence would be taken from them. Adelaide could have easily gotten assistance from the bluejay family and found a purpose for herself in their companionship if she freely helped them with their curse, but like her sister, Granny Whispers, she did not believe that anyone would take the time to willingly care for her. She had lost hope in humanity. The Beast took that hopelessness and used it to draw travelers deeper into the Unknown’s quagmire. Those who escaped were left deflated and less likely to retain the will needed to continue on.
The Woodsman’s role and his connection to the Beast were even more complicated. The show never said how the Woodsman initially came upon the Beast nor how he “lost” his daughter, but his place as a light bearing guide was definitely not his default position. Years of deforestation and being aware of the environmental conservationist movement have made us forget that loggers (let’s face it, the woodsman cut down trees for a living) were once revered for pushing back the forest. Woodsmen weren’t recluses; they were outcroppings of humanity that drove back the immeasurable wilderness one stump at a time. Those who knew how to respect nature in all its untamed glory might meet a woodsman and eye him with resentment, but for the rest, those who couldn’t survive without room and board or didn’t predict how much would lost to urban sprawl, the Woodsman would be a welcome sight.
The Woodsman would also be a welcome sight because of “his” lantern. Those versed in the horror genre know why they should hesitate before approaching a lone light in the darkness, but that trope informed disquiet goes against human instinct; with light comes people and with people comes safety. The later reveal that the lantern was in fact a phylactery of the Beast brought a new dimension to the story; the Beast would use light to draw others deeper into the darkness, drawing them away from the path and towards their death. The Woodsman eventually seized this light, saving others from being led astray but causing himself to become lost in the process. The Woodsmen couldn’t be goaded into giving up, but he could be tricked into the endless task of tending a light that blinded him to the truth.
The Woodsman guided travellers away from the threat he maintained. Unaware of this, he tried his best to take travellers out of the Beast’s domain. He would have taken the brothers if they hadn’t wrecked the mill he used to process cursed wood, but that may have been the first of many blessings in disguise.The only road he knew that assuredly led away from the Beast went through village of the dead, yet another nuance that makes the audience wonder: were those the Woodsman directed escaping the unknown, or were they being sent into the greatest unknown there is -the path into the next life?
Unable to wrest control of his lantern from the Woodsman, the Beast used him to harvest his victims and the rest lost in the unending woods. The Beast is the wood; his body is composed of the people who went astray in it and never found their way home. The Woodsman and the Beast became locked in a Sisyphyian struggle; the Woodsman led people out of the woods but he was the one inadvertently causing the worst parts of it to grow. The fuel he collected was consumed in order to create more fuel; this endless search drove him, the Beast and hapless passersby deeper into the quagmire.
In order to find a way out of the Unknown, the Woodsman and the brothers he sought to help had to stop fighting it. The Beast was in the lantern because its dim light limited people to what was in plain sight rather than experiencing a as yet unseen wider world filled with more hidden delights and opportunities than there were unseen dangers. By sticking to the known, characters were trapped in self perpetuating loss; for everything now seeable something else was lost to the surrounding darkness, and everything found in the lantern’s ever dwindling dimness could only be utilized to continue a journey that led nowhere. In contrast everything that helped the Brothers was chanced upon, and unlike how the Beast’s guidance moved people to surrender to futility or the status quo, this lack of direction resulted in a thousand little salvations that would have never been discovered had the brothers chosen a to go searching for help.
Success came serendipitously. Beatrice saved her family because she abandoned the deal she made to save them; it’s unlikely that Adelaide would have kept her word. The Woodsman was put in the position to refuse burning Greg only because Wirt burned the tree that would have sustained the lantern for a long time. Greg wasn’t looking to travel to Cloud City, but whether that realm was real or not, it gave him the ability to see his brother’s predicament and make a plan which relied on the unseen devotion that Wirt always had under his air of resentment and self doubt. These examples may seem like plot conveniences, but they ashow how there is a subtle cohesion to collective experiences, and no matter how random these experiences are, they still build on each other to shape a person.
When the lantern’s light went out, the Woodsman no longer knew where he was going, but this freed him to go down his original path of pathlessness; he returned home not because of having no place else to go, but because the wider world was freed up for him to travel as he sought fit. He was no longer bound to the duty of maintaining the lantern that “helped” him search. He could finally begin again. His daughter being there to welcome him back illustrated the illusion behind being bound to a destiny not of one’s own choosing.
The Beast was the last gasps of impudent desperation and the loss of hope. Wirt caught on to this and defeated the Beast by finding his resolve and instilling resolve back into others. When everyone decided to move on and take things as they were without giving up on life and the world around them, the Beast could no longer haunt them or anyone else. With the demise of the Beast the fantasy let itself end; everyone either went home or woke up and dragged themselves back into mundanity.
That’s how you overanalyze a cartoon. Up your game, you cliche ridden hacks. Nerd fight me, bro.
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