@chai-coffee-cat I was going to put this in the replies to my post, but then it turned into it’s own little essay. 😆 I’m far too passionate about this show lol
Your reply to my post was that you thought the Woodsman’s daughter had been a lost soul turned to edelwood. Here’s my own reasoning of why that was never the case.
Remember at the very end of the show when we see the Woodsman sitting on the porch of his old home? And then his daughter walks out the front door and finds him there? She wouldn’t have been there to do that had she actually been an edelwood tree. The souls who were turned into trees to feed the Lantern didn’t return to flesh and blood just because the Beast’s life-force was snuffed out, so she wouldn’t have been there had she ever been an edelwood tree.
The Beast tricked the Woodsman into thinking he put his daughter’s spirit in the Lantern, similarly to how we saw the Beast try to trick Wirt. But there is a key difference. I don’t think the Woodsman’s daughter ever came close to becoming an edelwood tree like Greg. I don’t think she ever came close to being dead. I think that there was some kind of accident--possibly even orchestrated by the Beast--that made it seem like the Woodsman’s daughter died. Something where the body could not be recovered, like drowning in a swift river or falling through the ice on a pond or losing her footing at the edge of a ravine. Basically, the Beast’s ruse culminated in that trope where a person is nowhere to be found but there’s a piece of their clothing lying near a dangerous place, and the other character just assumes the worst.
So.
The Beast took advantage of the Woodsman’s desperation to have his daughter back by lying about putting her spirit in the Lantern. And then the Beast just kept feeding the Woodsman’s guilt and grief to keep him away from the home where the Beast knew his daughter actually was, safe and well (having no idea where her father was or if HE was alive, I might add). The evidence for this is in one of the Beast’s final ploys to get the Woodsman back under his control. He says, “Are you really ready to go back to that empty house?!” And we see how deeply that affects the poor Woodsman! It’s the only time we see him cry!
The Beast had manipulated the man and fed his despair to such an extent that the Woodsman couldn’t even bring himself to go back to the home he had shared with his daughter. He instead chose to roam the forests of the Unknown alone, supposedly keeping his daughter’s spirit alive (even though “her flame” never reacted with any sort of sentience). He preferred to have this one-sided relationship with an inanimate object--and this horrible arrangement with the Beast--over going back home and accepting his daughter’s death.
The ultimate tragedy in all this being that, if the Woodsman had been able to bring himself to go home before the events of ep. 10, he would have immediately found his daughter alive and well. The ultimate tragedy in all this being that he unwittingly spent years keeping the Beast alive, resulting in more lost souls turned into trees, burned into nothing.
The ultimate tragedy in all this being that “he who carries the Dark Lantern must be the Beast.”