Stiles, ravens and World of Warcraft
aka I think I know what the hell a Stiles is
I’m a huge subscriber to the idea that there is a trio of things to be in the supernatural world of teen wolf; essentially hunters, shifters and emissaries, for lack of a better word. I’ve explained it before, but basically:
-a human with human weapons, such as the hunters, noah and melissa -a shifter that themself is the supernatural weapon, such as werecoyotes, werewolves and kitsune -a human with the ability to wield a supernatural weapon of some kind, like lydia, deaton or jennifer.
all three contain different variations on a theme. and stiles belongs to the third. I think most of us can agree that it looks like he’s part of the third category, but how?
the first clue, really, hit me way later than it should have, and that’s the remark about him playing an online game that battles mythical creatures. with how quick he was to take everything in, never doubting the facts in front of him, I believe that game was WoW. it’s also the most popular one, so in all likelyhood, that’s it. if jeff davis has known all along what stiles is, I think this was a small nod. but let’s talk about the other clues.
his name. jeff talked about stiles and his humanity way back around season 2 (note! the season of the WoW comment) and said he was more like perseus with his sword. long story short perseus was given preternatural weapons to fight medusa. mieczyslaw means sword and glory, and I think that’s a nod to that inspiration. that also fits the emissary category.
his nickname. a stiles is a set of steps or a ladder or something that helps people cross over walls and fences without letting livestock or whatever might be inside the fence out.
jeff has said very early on that stiles and lydia are two sides of the same coin. he’s been drawn to her from the beginning, and I have an idea why. it’s has less to do with a romantic relationship and more to do with bonds, which I’ll clear up later, but basically I believe her banshee status and what stiles really is is very closely connected. it’s also why she was chosen as his anchor, and why she keeps bringing him back.
stiles heals faster than humans should, especially from things like kanima poison. when him and derek were paralyzed on the sheriff station floor and derek stared at him after the “dude, I can move my toes” I don’t think it was because derek was healing slow. I think it was because stiles was healing fast. he was also the only one in the right place to affect the mountain ash to let tracy out from the clinic, because she couldn’t have broken the barrier herself. if she had, it wouldn’t have broken the way it did. he had no way of defending himself against her talons though, so instead of getting up, he feigned paralyzation and let her out. he also seemed to recuperate faster from being drugged during lydia’s party.
in fact, derek may be one of the only ones who’s truly figured out what stiles is- this because of the spark conversation with one of the twins (can’t remember which one), stiles kinetically affecting the mountain ash and repeatedly waking up those who should be dead or unwakeable.
stiles keeps talking to people who shouldn’t be able to communicate. punching poisoned derek back to life, talking to jackson while he’s OD’d on ketamine, isaac he only goes under when stiles grabs his legs, he’ll only focus when stiles is holding them and when isaac stands up, he talks to stiles directly. it should be noted that immediately after he’s awake and the weather outside stops, deaton and stiles both say things related to thunder (stiles uses the word thunderdome instead of arena, deaton says “storm in there”), but we’ll get to that later. he brings back cora and derek from the brink of death again despite it being supernaturally induced by jennifer and just recently he woke people up in the train station that he didn’t have emotional connections to.
sparks. so many sparks. stiles got fucking electrocuted at the same time as kira to the point where his bat was magnetic and he still walked out of there. he connects lydia over a radio, there are lights flickering when he’s angry and when the nogitsune takes over.
stiles has died three times. the ice baths, the car crash and the nogitsune slicing his stomach open.
I’m going to make an assumption for the last one, but it’s not a far reach: the nogitsune changes appearance and power, right? with rhys it has shiny teeth, with the yakuza boss it had white eyes and several rows of teeth and with stiles it had.. nothing, really. I believe it takes the strongest being, the one it can use the most. the bandaged nogitsune in stiles’ mind was a mix between the yakuza boss and rhys’ burnt body, given the teeth and the bandage. so whatever the nogitsune did in stiles’ body, stiles was already capable of. and when it sliced stiles open it did so knowing what a threefold death would do to stiles’ powers. as did noshiko, which is why she was so terrified.
now, let’s talk norse mytholgy, and parallels with teen wolf that you should know of.
the norns. the norns were called urd (what once was), verdandi (what’s coming to be) and skuld (what shall be). they lived under yggdrasil, the world tree, in a well, matching allison, stiles and scott sacrificing themselves in water to the nemeton. I think allison was what was, stiles was what was becoming and scott what would become later on. around the beginnings of stiles’ nogitsune problem there were speculations that allison got out relatively free because her main fear, becoming kate, was something she’d already dealt with. she almost fell into it while hunting boyd and erica as while she grieved her mother, but she got out of it and she survived. there was also talk about scott never really dealing with his fear of becoming a monster alpha, something we saw shine through later on when he both dreamt of killing liam and when he shifted more fully during the fight with the assassin team.
the three sacrifices and self-sacrifice to the world tree: odin is closely tied to sacrifice, partially for hanging himself for a couple of days to gain knowledge. the threefold death has been presented in a lot of ways; sometimes it’s through water and fire, other times being stoned, pierced by a stake and drowning, both in relation to merlin, but it’s also very present in old norse texts. the theme of stabbing, drowning and blunt force trauma is present in those, too. remember how stiles’ three deaths are different from those jennifer performed? drowning, blunt force trauma, slicing himself open.
odin has a shit-ton of names. I can’t even begin to list them all. stiles, mieczyslaw, mischief, stilinski, bilinski... yeah.
odin speaks with the dead. here’s a parallel to the ghost riders, actually, because odin gets to the underworld by riding sleipnir, which is a horse, as some of you might already know. it’s very heavily emphasized that this is something only odin and possibly sorceresses can do.
odin gets much of his knowledge through hugin and munin, two ravens that sit on his shoulders and tell him what they’ve discovered when they’ve flown around the world. this has sometimes been interpreted as the farseeing part of shamanism, and sometimes depicted as two actual birds, but they’re a part of odin that has been present for a very long time.
odin practiced seid, a type of sorcery he was taught by freya. this is very, very female coded (most likely because of related fertility rites and the sexual components of them), and even if there were a small amount of male seid practitioners it was heavily frowned upon. stiles is one of the few younger male characters on the show that hasn’t been presented as manly eyecandy in one way or another, and on top of that his queerness has been hinted at for years. odin being queer in one way or another tends to go untouched by media using him, but he was.
there are other norse parallels, like peter and the ones he’s turned paralleling loki and loki’s children:
-hel, ruler of the realm of (most of) the dead. peter bit lydia and she became a banshee.
-jörmungandr, the serpent. it has also been in the shape of a cat. remember when we talked about how scaly kate looked like, before the werejaguar thing was confirmed? (it’s also an ouroboros.)
-fenrir, the wolf. I think you can guess the parallel here.
peter’s also very close to loki in behaviour and consequence. usually when something’s up, it’s loki’s doing, but even when it’s not he’s called in to deal with the results of whatever’s going on.
I also believe that lydia is largely drawn from freya, and that this is where the “two sides of the same coin” comes in for her and stiles. not only is freya a goddess of fertility and sorcery but she’s also a goddess of war and death. when you die in battle, you either go to freya or to odin.
so how does world of warcraft fit in, then? one of the most written about characters in wow is thrall, one of the most powerful shaman to ever have lived, whose parents died when he was young and whose birthname we didn’t know for years.
I believe stiles is a shaman, by it’s norse definition, and that this inspiration comes largely from odin himself.
and herein lies the biggest kicker- I think stiles is what will not only defeat the wild hunt, but also mr alpha nazi. because if anyone can control a hound of the hunt, it would be odin. whip or no.
and I think that the gang will all either walk out the way lydia walked in, or they’ll defeat the riders and leave through the portal on their horses. and if I’m right, stiles and lydia will be the only ones left unscathed.
