Commissioned art from Jim Campbell himself! The scene is from Wirt's dream of Beatrice in the Distillatoria comic, which was alluded to but not shown ;)
wirt from otgw really is one of the best written teenage characters ever i think. like. he's 15-16-ish and wants people to take him seriously SO badly, but he also struggles to take responsibility for most things. he's dripping with anxiety. he overcomplicates everything in his mind but sometimes he has lapses of impulse. he can be surprisingly blunt when he's angry. he can't help but hate his little half-brother (and stepdad) out of spite and it takes both of them nearly dying for him to start working through those feelings. he's really creative but he keeps his interests in poetry and the clarinet a secret because he thinks it's fucking embarrassing. he reads real estate magazines and knows a lot about architecture and interior design, which is such a random little detail but i love it. he's self-conscious and lowkey suicidial and always assumes the worst in other people's view of him, but BASICALLY EVERYONE BACK HOME LIKES HIM, including the girl he has a massive crush on, and he just can't see it because he never makes an effort to reach out. every minor stepback feels like the end of the world to him. he has no idea who he is or what he wants.
It's always funny when I see over the garden wall art that's even just a touch more naturalistic than the og animation bc when I see Greg with legs it looks SO unnerving. what do you mean he's got legs, he's just a lil guy w a torso
Very surface level and "it's not that deep", but I just rewatched Over the Garden Wall as I do every November, and on this watch-through something new occurred to me.
Wirt does eventually fill the roles the townspeople tried to force him into.
Of course, the whole scene in the tavern with all the townspeople happily accepting their one-note personalities and trying to convince Wirt to do the same was just part of the Unknown being a conglomeration of folktales, and of course Wirt didn't fit a folktale archetype because he isn't actually a folktale character. This isn't about that.
All I was thinking about was, although he more or less accepts the second role offered to him, The Pilgrim, on a wandering quest to find his way home, they weren't too far off in trying to cast him as The Young Lover. They just had the details wrong.
While Wirt's "quest" at that point was just getting him and Greg home, it is later revealed that the whole quest started with him bungling an attempt to confess his feelings for a girl. Wirt's original "quest", the one he prepared for with a costume and a mixtape, was just to confess his feelings for Sarah. Travelling through an unknown fairytale land was not on the agenda until he had already messed that up. So, the "quest" he chose in the first place was "the Young Lover". In his mind, that quest was over once he entered the Unknown, however it did immediately resume upon getting himself and Greg home, so one could argue the Pilgrimage home was part of resuming his first quest.
And as for, "Lover, sing us your love song!" he also eventually does that, just not with Sarah. Because I can think of nothing else to call his duet with Lorna. Of course, this might not have been diegetic as it's played over a montage, but there is no arguing that the Wirt and Lorna duet is not "Wirt's love song", whether or not he sang it aloud or just in his head.
Maybe it's the Unknown slowly reducing the people trapped into it into storybook characters, and if Wirt had stayed there too long he would have fully become one of the roles forced on him, (that is, if he escaped the Beast) or maybe I'm thinking about this too much.
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