Twisted Wonderland - Blessings and Curses
In Twst, it’s said repeatedly that blessings and curses are virtually the same thing, but are differentiated only by how they either positively or negatively affect the person who is spelled.
This is interesting because of this, in some cases, spells meant to be blessings turn into curses, which a number of characters suffer from. Some curses can also be a blessing.
There are now at least four characters who are canonically cursed in some form, with some being more explicitly stated as cursed, others implied, and some we don’t even know what’s truly going on, so I’ll be going over everything that we do know because this magic system is mysterious and I want to know more.
Idia Shroud, the late original Ortho Shroud, STYX’s director (Idia’s father) and the late Aidne Shroud (Idia’s grandmother) have all been generationally cursed for hundreds of years since their ancestor was punished for trying to revolt against their rivals, the Jupiter Family.
Their curse manifests itself as firey blue hair and the ability to incinerate blot at such a speed that overblot is impossible.
The inability to overblot can be interpreted as a blessing, but if the Shrouds don’t produce blot/live in close proximity to blot, the curse will attack their magic force and destroy it, possibly harming their lives as well.
Because of this, the curse makes the Shrouds uniquely qualified for blot research and protecting the rest of the world from the massive phantoms created by hundreds of overblotters across history.
This curse prevents Idia from living a normal life and, as Idia has done research on himself and the family, concluded that it is the curse is unbreakable (as most curses appear to be)
Idia also confirms that Grim is cursed, except Grim’s curse seems to be so old and complex that he can’t decipher what it is. Grim does have blot resistance, and its theorized that he’s a direbeast fused with some other kind of animal and possesses almost human-like intelligence.
Idia is able to conclude that someone casted an ancient spell on Grim, but the person who did it and the purpose of the spell is unknown.
This, paired with Grim’s insatiable desire to eat blot stones produced by overblotters, hasn’t been touched upon by the plot again as of right now, but the chimera creature that resembles Grim from the prologue is an indicator that we will find out what this curse is at some point.
Next is Silver’s curse, which is different from everyone else because it was intended to be a blessing from the very start.
And it was a blessing for around 400 years…Until he woke up and started experiencing negative effects from the spell, which made it a curse.
This is more on the theorizing side since Silver’s sleeping problem is brought up only once in Book 7 and not touched on again. By the end of Book 7, his sleeping issue still isn’t talked about. Given the new guest room and chat voice lines that just dropped on JPN server, it’s implied that Silver is still struggling with his uncontrollable sleeping habit and he is not cured of his curse.
But again, we won’t know if that’s actually the case until the story continues.
People rightfully speculate that the reason behind his sleeping issue comes from his original blessing, which was to sleep until found by someone who loves him. He was in ageless sleep until he was found by Lilia, and then he started to age like a normal child but fell asleep suddenly with no explanation.
It’s stated multiple times in vignettes and once in main story that Silver has been taken to doctors for his sleeping issue and no one was able to find anything, implying that curses are virtually undetectable outside of the STYX technology Idia has access to.
The blessing met its criteria and him being awake proves that it has been broken, but the reason why he’s experiencing negative effects from something that saved his life is unknown and hopefully it’ll be explained later on. Lilia also theorizes that the spell may have fallen apart due to how unpredictably long he spent under it, but that was probably just him assuming he didn't meet the spell's criteria.
Given what we know, I theorize that, in some cases, excessive amounts of exposure to powerful magic can be harmful to people, especially humans who were spelled at such a young age.
This is how a blessing can change into a curse, it’s now a part of him whether he wants it there or not.
Maybe his body is just used to being asleep, he was like that for 400 years and has only been awake for 18 years. Maybe there’s something else at play, we don’t know.
We have enough evidence to assume that he’s part of the cursed club (also he’s twisted from Aurora who is very famously cursed lol)
But he’s in the same place as Grim where you know it’s there but you’re not entirely sure why.
Lastly, Malleus has joined the cursed club as of the end of Book 7.
The Senate “blessed” him, and their intention truly was blessing. However, the effects of the blessings have become more of a curse to Malleus.
Malleus himself even interprets himself as cursed.
He was blessed to be so powerful that no one could do him any harm, however, because of his power he was harming everyone around him, including his loved ones, which is something that kept Malleus isolated and repressed.
Because the curse hindered his ability to express emotion, he was robbed of what he actually wanted, which was the ability to be happy, sad, and being able to hug someone without the fear of hurting them.
Malleus is the best example of blessings and curses being virtually the same thing. What was a blessing in the eyes of the senate was a curse in Malleus’s perspective.
Because of what happened, Malleus’s curse isn’t ‘broken’ per se, but he can no longer physically perform the kind of magic he was able to perform when both his horns were intact.
I don’t know if there’s anything Idia, Grim and Silver can do to break the effects of their curses but we’ll have to see as the story goes on.
IN CONCLUSION, having consequences to powerful spells and an open interpretation of how magic can both save and harm someone simultaneously is a really interesting aspect of Twisted Wonderland that I hope gets expanded upon in the future.
