#toh essay

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Is Belos a Wendigo? - TOH Essay

Last night I came across a drawing of a wendigo and was struck by how similar it looked to Belos’s goop form. With a little more research, I found out that wendigos are usually depicted as extremely skinny and tall humanoid monsters with glowing eyes. Many also have deer-like antlers and skulls. These are all traits that Belos has in his goop form. 

Left: RyanStanleyArtwork; Right: JamJamTheArtMan

I decided to look deeper into the lore of the wendigo. These beasts are mainly known for their insatiable cannibalistic hunger, but I found the story of their creation especially interesting. Legend says a human becomes a wendigo either as a cumulation of extreme greed and selfishness or when a person becomes a cannibal. 

Belos has historically been a greed-driven character, a trait which only intensified when he started drawing glyphs on himself in an attempt to gain power. He doesn’t eat other humans, but I think he could still be classified as a cannibal in another way. After he made a habit of putting glyphs on himself, he started visibly becoming something inhuman. Now some strange mesh of human and magic, the only way he could fight off the side effects of his mistake was to consume palismen. And since he’s partly made of magic, eating palismen is, in a way, cannibalism. 

He did appear more or less human up until the finale of season 2, but the monstrous appearance beneath the surface would show itself whenever he went too long without a palisman meal. Consuming palismen didn’t fight the monster within him, it just helped him hide it. 

In King’s Tide, the Collector “killed” Belos by sending him flying into a wall, leaving behind a green splat. Ever since then, Belos has been unable to keep a human appearance. My theory is that while he didn’t die, his human body did. Eating palismen was enough to keep his flesh together, but with it gone he can’t hide his true appearance. He’s been a wendigo for a long time. 

And then in Thanks to Them, Belos possessed Hunter. There are lots of reasons he might have picked Hunter over anyone else. One I’d like to point out is that grimwalkers contain palistrom wood. At this point in the show, Belos is quite literally starving to death. Palistrom wood doesn’t exist in the realm he’s trapped in. And if it’s true that palismen are the only thing with the ability to subside his hunger, Hunter must have looked especially enticing. And that’s not even considering the power dynamics of finally inhabiting a human body again, especially one with so much significance to his enemies. Now, according to wendigo lore, there isn’t really a way to separate a wendigo from the human it’s possessing while keeping the host alive. I believe the current speculation among other fans is that Hunter only temporarily died because he drowned. Either way, Flapjack was able to sacrifice himself to resuscitate Hunter. 

Side note: The new scars Hunter had after being possessed are (per my theory) Belos eating away at the palistrom wood in his skin. For this reason, I don’t think Raine will have scars after being possessed by Belos. 

After making all these connections, there was one last question I had. How does one kill a wendigo? I found two different answers from a variety of sources. One is that you need to remove the heart of the wendigo, where the source of their evil lies. The other method (which came up slightly more often) was to burn it with fire. 

In the recent promo for Watching and Dreaming, the light glyph was referenced a lot. If Belos is a wendigo-inspired villain, maybe he will be affected by light glyphs the same way wendigos are affected by fire. My standing prediction based on all of this is that the light glyph itself will be what destroys Belos for good. 

Whether or not my predictions come true, I am enamored by Belos’s character design. The comparison I’ve detailed in this post is just another fascinating parallel I wanted to share with you all. I have no idea if his design was really inspired by the wendigo, but the theorizing is most of the fun anyway! 

Also if I incorrectly credited either of the artworks or if you are the owner and want me to remove it, please let me know!

[waywardsunlight]

I GOTTA SAY THIS but the way The Owl House deals with nostalgia is so interesting to me because it definitely buys into nostalgia but it also actively criticizes it. Eda’s nostalgia for her childhood, which she kind of misremembers and idealizes at times (not being aware of Lily’s struggle, seeing herself as always winning and having a great time, the idea that the facist government wasn’t a problem back then, and her relationship with Raine that she idealizes despite Raine breaking up with her because she wasn’t willing to be open with her emotions) is really interesting because there are elements of it actually being a better time in her life before Everything Went Wrong in her mind, but also she forgets that Dell wasn’t always around, that bad stuff was happening when she was a kid.

Philip is very similar but farther into that concept of Everything Was Good And Something Ruined It. In reality, he just got older and Caleb had other things he had to do and interests like starting a family so Philip just… shut down and even regressed later on because he couldn’t deal with the fact that Caleb would ‘ruin’ their lives by just growing apart due to age. Philip finds himself trying to stop Caleb from growing up which is why he always kills the Hunters when they’re teenagers/preteens. They’re just about to grow up and “betray him”, ruin that childhood nostalgia. The Hunters never work because Caleb was never who Belos wanted him to be; Caleb always grows up, always leaves.

Hunter has a bit of this with his perception of his own childhood. He views traumatic experiences and his own abuse as something he enjoys to look back on and he still loves Belos at the end of Kings Tide because he hasn’t let go of that idealized version of Belos and his own emotions where he was really happy. He copes with that trauma by remembering it fondly until he finally has to confront that Belos is just an abuser.

Finally and most important, Luz has a major amount of nostalgia for a time and place that has never existed. She has an idealized view of magic and witches, because she uses this world and these concepts to cope with the reality of late 2010s-early 2020s America, the struggle to conform to the American school system, the loss of her dad, and her struggles with her mom kind of inspire her to cope with her own fantasy which she slowly realizes isn’t an escape like she thought it was. Because no matter how many times Belos tries again with Caleb, no matter if Eda and Raine start over, no matter how much Luz wants to be in a fantasy world, nostalgia isn’t real. Everything is complicated, people don’t fit your expectations or ideal of them. There will always be struggles.

Luz realizes this and slowly lets go of the fantasy of being a hero and focuses on her love of Eda, King, and everybody else around her because that’s real, it’s now, and it’s real. Messy and complicated, but real. Raine confirms that they still love Eda, and maybe in the future they can try again, and this time Eda is going to be emotionally ready for it because she’s not in love with the fantasy of Raine, she just loves Raine. And nostalgia isn’t bad. It’s nice to think of times you felt happier but you have to understand that you’ll be happy again if you’re able to open yourself up for it.