Character Analysis of Semmelweis
Regarding Gender Perspectives
A Series of Dusks is a story about the character Semmelweis, in which after the events of Echoes in The Mountain, she reaches for her final hope of salvation during her stay in Vienna. Battling the Storm, the Infection but most importantly herself.
A Brief Presentation of Semmelweis
For the sake of simplicity and objectivity, who Semmelweis is can be divided into 3 instances of herself. Prior to the events of Series of Dusks, After to the Events of Series of Dusks and Bella. I'm gonna tackle each one them following the start.
Echoes in The Mountain presents us with a interesting start for Semmelweis conflict. When she finds the mirror that once belonged to Lorelei and incites the incantation behind it, we learn that Semmelweis isn't able to cast incantations. Now, if she's a human like the most of her team believes, why would she even try? This is another piece of foreshadowing for one of the reveals made in Echoes. Semmelweis is a mixed arcanist with no capability of casting Arcane Skills. We accompany her through the story as she tries to understand a strange melody that only herself can hear, as she puts up with many aggressions towards Arcanists while seemingly seeing no issue in them. We are also presented by the story another one of Semmelweis's big themes, her hallucinations and mental illnesses. (But I'll be tackling that perspective in another day)
There's many more important events that happen in Echoes for Semmelweis but we're going to jump from section to section a little. After the scene with the mirror the next part of the story takes us to when Semmelweis was diagnosed with The Beyond Disease, a disease with an insanely high mortality rate and that slowly makes the holder of such disease more and more debilitated both mentally and physically. In the last scene of Echoes, Semmelweis reveals to Emil that she was always an arcanist, and we see a little glimpse of her and Emil's true perspectives on Arcanists. While Emil reveals that he doesn't in fact hate Arcanists and despite having many ingrained problematic thoughts about them, he still sees them as people and wants to help them, while Semmelweis contrasting this revelation shows that despite herself being an arcanist she never harnessed much empathy for "those of her kind" as she calls it.
This shows how Semmelweis sees herself, her identity as something utterly useless and problematic, she doesn't see herself as arcanist or mixed, she lacks the capability of using arcane skills and everyone around her thinks she's a human. But she also doesn't see herself as part of the humans, because of the disease that was only capable of infecting her because of the little arcanist blood that she had. Semmelweis refuses to accept herself in any of these realities, not arcanist enough, not human enough. A common concept that mixed characters face but an even more prominent one in Semmelweis.
And then, she arrives in Vienna...
Before discussing specific events of Series of Dusks I'm going to get a little bit on another topic, disphoria. If you don't feel comfortable with discussing it you may leave now because a good chuck of the analysis will be about that.
Disphoria mainly when it's related to the body is common to start being experienced by transgender people in adolescence, the period where your body starts changing and affecting much more the gender and the perception of self. Now the Beyond Disease carried by Semmelweis provides similar effects. Changing her appearance and her body in order to make her more and more similar to the one that infected her, as well as changing how her mind functions, making her more angry and lose her focus more and more quickly, finally the Beyond Disease poses a problem, the perception of others that will affect her, only Arcanists can have the Beyond Disease, and so the view of people that once considered her a human and respected her could switch because of this disease.
The story of Series of Dusks is about accepting who you are, what you are, and that you're never going to be what others wanted you to. Because ultimately you can only ever be yourself, and denying that will get you killed.
So we start Series of Dusks in Semmelweis last months to live, she needs to find a cure, a salvation for the disease that is overtaking her, and each character that she encounters in Series of Dusks is either something she wants to be or something she doesn't want to be. The characters that Semmelweis finds are all authentic and live in the way they believe is the correct way, all of the characters she finds in Vienna are telling her one message, from before and after SoD, "accept yourself" the only path to survival is embrace your reflection is to accept what you are.
So let's start with the first character she encounters after leaving the apartment she was with Emil.
Kakania is the character that will first of all attack and kidnap Semmelweis, and that directly tells Semmelweis the many problems of her disease, Kakania isn't a very good psychiatrist, but from her analysis she can notice Schizophrenia, Anxiety, and insomnia. She's passionate about the things she loves and can't stop talking about them, a person who understands who she is and what she likes.
After her exchange with Kakania, Semmelweis moves onto the next part of her story, where she finds an "old friend".
Valentina is for Semmelweis the representation of everything she rejects about herself, she is freedom, she is what she wants and whenever she wants, bound by no one, Valentina explicitly doesn't care about the perception of others towards her, something that does still affects Semmelweis and while Semmelweis despises what Valentina is, that is exactly the key for her to accept herself. Kakania tells Semmelweis her problems directly while Valentina shows Semmelweis that she can embrace herself in order to be who she truly is. Here we have a very important scene that marks the story and that made me originally start connecting many dots about Semmelweis and Transgender Experiences.
After an exchange of words, Semmelweis and Valentina come to a conclusion, if the Beyond Disease changes everything about you, it also changes your capability of using Arcanum. So Val offers to help Semmelweis with unleashing her arcane skill, the way they do that is by making Semmelweis... Change clothes, making Semmelweis look confident and pretty essentially but also much more than that, make Semmelweis feel comfortable, make her stop worrying if the incantation will work or not, and only after Semmelweis stops thinking and stops worrying over it, is that she is capable of unleashing an arcane skill, something that always affected her view of herself, that made her deny her existence as a mixed arcanist because of how she couldn't cast skills had just been surpassed by her.
Finally the last character Semmelweis encounters in Series of Dusks is Lorelei. This one is the most interesting and at the same time the simplest of interactions. Lorelei represents the salvation that Semmelweis is seeking, the *literal* messiah that she needs in order to ensure her survival and Semmelweis's world shatters when Lorelei doesn't offer her a cure, she doesn't offer her a way out. Much to the contrary, Lorelei directly says to Semmelweis, there isn't anything wrong with her, that isn't anything that needs to be fixed. All she needed to do, since the first time she heard that melody in Echoes, is accept who she is. Semmelweis's first arc concludes in this note, in all endings of Series of Dusks there is only one outcome for her survival, accepting herself. Accepting that both the angel and the devil that she sees in her eyes, the responsible for her predicament Valentina and the savior that holds her hand, are telling her the same thing, to embrace who she is truly is.
Another transgender experience, the one to realize that this is who you are and you HAVE to embrace yourself otherwise you will die, either taken by depression or killing yourself from the inside and becoming a husk of a person. Semmelweis needs to accept that she isn't who she's "supposed" to be, she's only herself. And that's the message that she ends with in Series of Dusks but another important piece of Semmelweis's puzzle comes in the aftermath of it, how difficult and how long it takes for you to really accept yourself, it's a process, it isn't a switch that occurs with a single event.
But before that, I have been neglecting a very important character in the story of SoD. So let's talk about Bella.
Bella is present to us after a hallucination that Semmelweis suffers that has her doctor in it. She's relieving the moment that she was diagnosed with her disease, but with some things happening different that made Semmelweis understand this is a hallucination. Bella throughout the story presents herself as Semmelweis reflection, she constantly says that she is Semmelweis, and although Semmelweis agrees rationally, she still doesn't accept that as reality, Bella is indeed her, but she is not Bella. She has, to not be Bella. Bella, like Valentina, represents what Semmelweis despises, but here she represents what Semmelweis despises the most about herself. She is the one constantly telling Semmelweis to give up, she's the one constantly telling Semmelweis go back to the comfortable life in the Foundation, to the people that think of her as human, she is the thing that wants Semmelweis to survive but at the same time wants anything but for Semmelweis to continue, because pursuing what Semmel is pursuing, is inevitably going to make her suffer, because understanding who you are, that you aren't what you were always "supposed" to represent is something painful. Bella desperately wants to not suffer.
However Bella also represents what Semmelweis denies about herself, and Bella also wants Semmel to acknowledge that, she tells Semmelweis multiple times that she is Semmelweis, they are one and the same. Even if they're constantly bickering and disagreeing in the end they're just a singular note (as Lorelei puts it)
Accepting Yourself Takes Time
Finally the last instance where we accompany Semmelweis's story is in her anectode.
Some time after the storm and the events of Series of Dusks, Semmel returns to Vienna with a new mission and here we see Bluepoch tackle another aspect of accepting yourself in their writing. Acceptance is a process, one that takes time, and that still has denial involved. For someone who is so headstrong as Semmel is, accepting your new reality of being your new self can be even more challenging. But I want to tackle the two characters who are the most important in this anectode. Pavia and Nora.
Pavia is insanely similar to Semmelweis, both assholes who take lives in their own ways, they decide their fate and they do that because they know what they want and they know who they are. The main differences with these characters being that Semmelweis bends the rules and still comforts to society to a degree, she's safe, while Pavia goes in lengths to deny the things he doesn't conform to in reality, one is aggressive and destructive, while the other is more maleable in the way they take their approach to life. Their dynamic really thrives in that difference in method while contrasting and completing their own themes, Pavia shows once again that everything in Vienna is telling Semmelweis that all she needs to do is accept herself.
And then she comes across Nora. Like Semmelweis Nora is a person who doesn't want to accept herself, her identity as a vampire that she constantly hides from everyone, because all she wanted was for her to be accepted by this ruthless society that forces her to be something she isn't or die. And Nora loses herself because of that, creating an anger and a fury towards those who hurt her just because she is the way she is. People who were her friends and the moment they find out that she's a vampire they turn on her and hurt her deeply with her biggest weakness. In the conversation she has with Semmelweis you'd expect her to hate them, to want them dead. But Nora hates herself instead, she hates what she is, she wishes and longs for being something that isn't her.
But Semmelweis shows that despite the world wanting people like them dead, they still must persevere and be themselves, otherwise there's nothing worth fighting for, there's nothing that should make yourself do things if you deny your own existence for the sake of acceptance. And for a moment we can see that Semmelweis notices their struggle is the same, the both refuse to accept themselves they need to do that otherwise they won't be able to live, Nora in a metaphorical sense and Semmelweis in a literal sense. The arc of the infected vampire starts where once stood the begging, she's now the one helping a person who can't accept herself instead of being the one who's losing their grasp on life.
The trans experience and the story that is told with the character of Semmelweis overlap in many ways, from the disphoria that could be presented on how Semmelweis feels about her nature as mixed, the journey to accept herself, and the time that it takes to heal from all of this. The constant fighting that she must do for her place in the world that Nora and Valentina also had to. Semmelweis learns to not care about what others things, and to do what she desires, to be who she wants and who she is.
Semmelweis has an abundantly clear queer reading of not belong, of having to come to terms with who you are, that you're not going to fulfill other's expectations upon you. And that to survive, you need to love yourself, your true self, not the mask you created for society to accept your existiance.
