A kinda Analysis of Eberwolf and what reason they might have for joining the rebel side
Team RED, a.k.a Raine, Eberwolf, Darius, a.k.a undercover traitors who all rank top in their respective covens. We got two epsidoes surrounding Raine and how they are doing what they are doing because they hate the system and think forcing people into covens against their will is wrong. Raine has strong beliefs. With Darius no episodes are centered around him, but he has played enough of a secondary role in certain episodes that we can piece together his motivation. He was mentored by a previous Golden Guard. He had a lot of respect, admiration, love for his mentor. Like all the Grimwalkers before, his mentor eventually went against Belos and was killed. To make Darius head of the abomination coven Belos must either not remember who mentored Dairus, or believe he was trained to be 100% loyal to the Emperor. One more thing Belos is wrong about.
Now we have Eberwolf. We do not really know much about Eberowolf. Is Eberwolf a bipedal demon or a best demon? What does Eberwolf’s language of grunts mean? What is Eberwolfs backstory and reason for doing what Eberwolf is doing? What is Eberwolf’s gender/pro-nouns? We really do not know. Now any definitive answer to any of these will probably come in the form of quick short sentence answers/translations from Raine/Darius to questions Eda/Luz asks regarding Eber, as they all race to fight the day of unity. Until we get that I want to make some theories based on what we have of Eberwolf already
So the beast keeping coven flag and sigil is of Eberwolf and these high-bread chicken pig things But in the field Eberwolf seems to commonly employ another type of Beast: ratworms.
Maybe Eberwolf lives on a farm or a ranch and has herds of different beasts. That would certainly make sense for the head of the beast keeping coven. But lets focus on Eber’s Ratworms for now. The one on top came with Eberwolf to a televised event, to represent the track. It is small, pudgy, has large red eyes, but is honestly cute to look at. Join the Beast keeping coven you will get to ride and work with cute and awesome beast like this one...right?... Well let’s look at the one bellow, that came with Eberwolf on an actual mission. It’s scared up, blind in one eye, has a broken tooth and is missing a chunk of ear. Poor thing has seen some really bad times.
Who did this to the poor beast? Another ratworm? No. Rats are incredibly social animals and generally act buddy buddy inside the pack. I cannot imagine worms exhibiting this amount of competitive hostility towards one another either. And even if you want to argue with me that these high-bread fusions may exhibit more aggression and territorial behavior than either of its human world counterparts, those are not teeth marks on its skin. How would another ratworm be able to cut it up like this without claws or hands capable of wielding a blade? It wasn’t another ratworm.
Did Eberwolf do this? Did Eberwolf beat and scar the beasts in an effort to assert themselves as Alpha and force the lower beasts to do their bidding? No. In Keeping up A Fearences we get our first look at beast keeping through Gwendolyn Clawthorne. We see that gaining control/aid of the creatures does not involve any kind of aggression or a fight. There are simple spells to alert them and bring them to your side. Also if the fact this one is wearing a collar is not enough to convince you of Eber and its relationship, then take a look at this...
Eberwolf wasn’t caught by Raine and Eda’s doom song. They purposely ran into it to try an dig their pet out. Eberwolf loves these beasts more than their own life. They would not hurt any of them like that.
You know who that poor ratworm’s scars look likes? Hunter’s.
And after hallow minds I am no longer holding onto any illusion of a belief that any of Hunter’s scars are from training accidents, standing to close to the crossfire, or mixing things up with criminals. They all come from Belos.
Belos who is a puritan witch hunter and regards all life on the boiling isles as vile, unworthy, and needing to be purged. Belos who has killed countless beings with human faces. Belos who has killed, recreated, then re-killed his own brother/nephews countless times. If he can do all that, then it is no stretch at all to believe that he would maim or purposely endanger demons. Of course someone like Eberwolf, who see’s such value in these creatures and has so much love for them (again they raced to potential death to try and help their pet) would hate that and be opposed to all of this. But if Eberwolf tried to fight Belos openly and directly they would lose, become petrified, and then there would be be no one left to protect their beasts. Eberwolf may be animalistic but as we have seen they are capable of reason, schemes, sticking to a plan, and playing the long game; as any secret rebel would have to be. I am sure they want to save the isles beast from Belos’s hate, but they are smart enough to do it right. To get in close, act subtle, find others like them, and form a plan for when the time is right...
I mostly wrote this because whenever I got into Eberwolf’s tag I either get discourse over what their gender/pronouns are (LOL) or it’s actually full of posts that are more about Raine, Raeda, or Darius. Do not get me wrong, all three are awesome and I love them. But Eberwolf is awesome too and deserves more love. Final theory Eda is a rebel because she does not like being controlled. Raine is a rebel because of their beliefs. Darius is a rebel in memory of a fallen loved one. Eberwolf is a rebel to protect the pets/beasts they love and do not want to see be abused/brought to a end.
Okay Wow , like Wow the last time an episode of a kids cartoon scared me this much... well okay it was when I first watched gravity falls “Northwest Mansion Mystery.... Hollow Minds may have been worse in than that. Everything Scary in NMM was so far steeped in “Cartoon” that you have to laugh at just how absurd the whole trama inducing situation was. A 100 year old ghost comes back for revenge over not getting a party invite? Stuffed animals coming to life and giving you a death message? People turning into tree’s? None of it could ever happen in real life. As people have pointed out though while Belos’s “magic spells” are fake, the way he lies, cons, plots, abuses, pretends to care for everybody but secretly cares for no one... its all realistic to the way Puritan Witch Hunters treated people back in Salem time. Its all realistic to how Dictators and tyrants treat people now.
Lets talk about Belos Pretending to care for a second. It is seeded throughout the show that while he is he main villain, he won’t be the Final Boss, His plans aren’t all his, and while he cannot talk to the Titan, he is talking to some powerful being who the crew will have to deal with one he gives out (more on the Collector later). His ability to swing from “Kindly Grandpa” to “Merciless Dictator’ is really unsettling. Hunter clearly suffers from pressure and PTSD, but their will be times where Belos acts really loving and fond of Hunter. the only time we see him strike at Hunter, he 1 misses and 2 acts like striking at him was an accident. When his VA tweeted about Belos being “misunderstood” I started to consider the possibility that his “curse” was also a metaphor for a condiion like involuntary muscle movements or schizophrenia, and because he is a puritan he refuses to take the potions to fix it. Also in Coven day Parade when he told the coven members that he struggles with Insecurities over his face but that their love for him gave him confidence , then took his mask off and showed them his face. You have to wonder if he does have any real fondness for these people. You know by now he wants to get rid of magic, but does he believe doing so will help these people, does he want to take them to the human realm with him to live “cleaner” “more worthy lives” as mundanes? And there is the whole lost brother, and grimwalker clone thing that suggested how lonely he is.
Does he truly love Hunter? His people? His brother? We get the answers in this episode. No. No. Yes, but also no. I had a lot of trouble making out any of the paintings in the deeper levels of Belo’s subconscious, and didn’t at first notice the ones of Caleb (I am going to assume that is his Brothers real name.). But I looked through the posts some other fans made, and I think we have enough to already piece together two’s backstory. Spoilers under the cut.
Okay so Caleb is the older Brother. He and Hunter look near identical (there ears and scars are the only diffrence). Caleb took care of Phillip a lot and the two were very close. Kid Phillip’s mask and sword are toys Caleb made for him. Growing up they both hated witches and witchcraft. Maybe in childhood their family’s crops did bad one year, or someone they loved got sick, and the church told them it was the “evil workings of a witch”. Regardless they went to the trials/burning’s for fun. They would play that they were witch hunters as kids and it was the profession they went into as adults. It was also likely their mission when they came to the demon realm. I cannot tell if both Phillip and Caleb experimented on themselves with gliphs and other forms of magic. I think Phillip might have been the only one to absorb palismans. If Caleb did anything to himself he made it through the... changes much more smoothly than Phillip. Caleb loved and tried to take care of cursed Phillip
Caleb originally hated witches, and was right there with Phillip on tricking, hunting, and getting rid of them. Heck he may have been the one who taught Phillip to... but then he went through a change in character. He started spending time with a wild witch whom I am guessing was A.) a Clawthorne, and B.) most definitely someone he was originally trying to catch. She foiled his plans and it became a chase, battle, dance thing. Caleb started seeing magic, the isles, and witch craft in a different light, and eventually love happened between him and Miss Clawthorne. Caleb tried to talk to Phillip about it, explain his new relationship,and how they were wrong. Phillip did not react well and was not accepting of his brothers 180 change. When Miss Clawthorne got pregnant Caleb left Phillip for good (or from his point of view until Phillip could accept his new family) and went with her. This opens up the idea that the reason Belos treated Lilith and Eda so badly, took such joy in hunting Eda, breaking Lilith, and forcing the two to fight wasn’t just because Lilith broke his nose in deadwardian times. He likely associates them with the witches who took Caleb away from him (Caleb’s own wife and child) and was taking revenge on them for it.
In the past he took revenge on Caleb. Caleb did not die from a curse; Phillip killed him. And it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t some talk that went wrong.It wasn’t a confused gliph combo resulting in a deadly explosion. Caleb didn’t accidental fall on to a titan’s vein after Phillip shoved him in an argument, leading to Phillip braking down in regret. Phillip went after his brother, and ambushed him and his wife. He started a fire, he pulled a knife on him. Caleb still tried to reason with him and get him to stop, but to no use. Miss Clawthorne tried to save her husband but couldn’t and had to leave his body behind and flee to protect their unborn child. Phillip kept his brother’s skeleton to make into clones (Caleb’s wife could not even bury her husband).
It seems like Grimwalkers aren’t necissarly made to be key sacrifices or instruments in Belos plans. Rather he makes them out of a desire to recreate the bond he and Caleb had when they first came to the isles. Hunter is like the 17th GrimWalker Belos has made. The other 16 all looked slightly different from Hunter, and their original ages may have been older than his. Important the other 16 were not failed protospells that stopped working or disappeared at some point because Belos had not yet perfected whatever he had to do to create them. Every single one of them eventually becomes fascinated by wild magic or comes to care about the isle residents and decided they want to stop what they and Belos are doing, just like Caleb did. Belos then kills them too. He has killed so many the collector even jokes about it being a game to him. Belos assures the collector “It hurts every time he chooses to betray me”. Note he is speaking in present tense, not past tense. This is something he has come to accept will happen each time, and he will always kill them and start over. He tried to keep Hunter shut up in the castle and away from wild magic books to delay the inevitable, maybe because Hunter is the closest looking to Caleb yet. But he knew and accepted that it would come to this. He took Luz and Hunter to all those rooms because he was collecting junk for the traps. The last room he takes them to is the golden guard grave yard where he has constructed monuments not to each guards life, but to when he killed them. Belos makes the grimwalkers for companionship, but once they challenge him he ends them and forgets anything else they ever did for him. He tried to have Hunter devoured by the mindscape with no hesitation. He told Luz with no remorse “I’ll just make another one”. Hunter was a favorite toy, but still a disposable toy.
Alright let me steady my hand, an lets move on to Belos and the Collector. So the collector is the entity Belos communicates with I guessed that back in Elsewhere and else when. Back then what surprised me was that Belos had apparently acted on his own a really long time before meeting the collector. Good-bye theory that Belos was just an innocent and curious child whom some dark being corrupted. Now what surprises me is that Belos knows he is talking with the Collector and not the Titan. I really thought he genuinely believed he was carrying out the will of this realms version of God or if not him than atleast a remorseful angel. Belos is one talented lair and I both hate him and now relate to all the witches he fooled. Belos is only misunderstood by the coven members. He knows exactly what he is doing and he has NO good side.
I also think I put together What the collector gets out of helping Belos... Belos is putting all of the Isles residents into a collection for him. The 9 covens, 9 categories. The seals, stamps of ownership. Wild witches who refuse the seals are petrified and brought into the collection as large paperweights. At the center of this all we have the 9 most talented witches, a grimwalker creation, and a human from a time long past, the prized jewels of the collection. But wait? According to this episode Belos doesn’t just want to drain the citizens of the isles of their “evil magic”, he wants to kill them all. Why would the collector let Belos get rid of his collection. Becasue the Collector is, physically speaking, a young child who is board with his current toys. He will allow Belos to get rid of them if he can replace them with new, more fun, toys. I think this is where the portal comes in. Belos may not want to invade the human realm, but the collector does. His one human is old and not likely to last much longer, so he will need another one, better yet what if he makes an entire collection of human toys.
Will Belos not be the most dangerous villain of this story? Will he die before it ends, making the Collector the final boss Luz and Co will need to defeat to stop the Day of Unity? I have long since theorized, and I still do. Will Belos be killed by the Collector once he has outlived his usefulness? Possibly. Belos may even know this is a probable end to him. If so I doubt he cares, He lives to hunt and eliminate witches. As long the witches all go Belos would probably allow the Collector to kill him, with at most a last request to have his body taken back to the human realm to be buried.
