"It Doesn't Work That Way"
Spirits and loyalty to particular villages: A Theory
I just read both No Evil bonus comics and watched the whole series several times, and I have theories. Buckle up.
Unhinged ranting below the cut, plus spoilers for both No Evil: Judgement and Ornament.
So. Multiple times spirit characters in No Evil remind humans that spirits "Don't have loyalty to a particular village just because they live near it". Vinkel says so in "Sick of McCoy", and Wrip echoes him a few episodes later in "Soft Child" that it doesn't work that way.
Except... It kinda does seem to work that way. We see in Judgement that the Black Ick was what brought most of the main cast together. Before that, they mostly lived as one spirit per village.
Kitty lived in what seemed to be a large, fairly dense town. The "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" spell is hers; she's shown using it to heal the townspeople.
They don't seem to treat her very well. Her dress is ratty and too small, and once she heals this kid they send her on her way without even saying "thank you". And look what happens when her spell doesn't work to treat the Black Ick:
This might be explained by stress, but this guy was awfully quick to scream at a child. And for what? Not knowing more spells? She's like ten here.
Paula was in a similar situation. The lumberjacks of her village take Paula with them to evaluate the trees, then stop listening when she says something they don't want to hear.
(It should be noted here that Paula was right! The trees were infected with Black Ick, which got out once they tried to cut it. Go figure!)
But that's just the kids. Surely an adult spirit would be treated with more respect?
Wrong. Just a few pages before the sequence with Paula and the lumberjacks, we see Xipe Totec and her original village. The chief doesn't like her, and is even said to have threatened her with his shotgun. Regardless, she refers to herself as "The spirit who guards this village".
Shit happens. I really encourage you to read the comic, but after it's all over Xipe Totec says this:
"Only because I am a spirit that resides near your village, it does not mean that I owe you anything."
This is the first chronological instance of the argument that spirits don't owe the local humans their loyalty. Now let's look at who else is most insistent about it.
First, Calamity. We all know Hollow treated her really badly, and that she spent some time in Blackwell Asylum. I have more thoughts on what exactly happened there and how the timeline adds up, but that's for another day.
Next, Wrip and Vinkel. The timeline I've been assembling suggests they were also in Hollow when shit went down, but let's instead look at some panels from Ornament.
Wrip happily introduces herself as the "Spirit of Salem" in this flashback. Then there's a timeskip, and she and Vinkel show up in Silver Sorrow with Niccola (all but explicit alien, btw. Ornament is wild) on a crashing blimp with a stolen artifact. Dialogue at the end of the comic and in the most recent episodes suggest she and Vinkel have been in hiding ever since, hence the name changes.
For more evidence that Wrip and Vinkel were treated badly in Salem, look at this conversation between Vinkel and Bill.
Bill is an outlier in that, unlike all the other spirits we see as kids, he seems to have had a pretty okay childhood. He lives with the village elder, who acts like his grandma, and she stresses multiple times that it's unfair to expect too much of him while he's still a kid. The village children treat him like any other kid who just happens to be a prairie chicken sometimes.
When Wrip and Vinkel meet him, they're consistently surprised that he's allowed to shapeshift at will, that he's free to wander, and that he can play with the other kids. Bill's Grandma even confirms that "Someone dear to [Vinkel] hurt him very badly" in a way she won't even tell Bill about.
Skip forward to canon. Most of the spirits are living in the same area, within walking distance of each other. Only Huey seems to be in frequent close contact with the local villages. The monkey triplets, who were noted as living in Hollow during Judgement, are no longer doing so (I believe they may have done most of the raising of the main cast. More on that later). The spirits only feel the need to intervene when Hatfield and McCoy go really far over the line. This brings us to my conclusion:
The spirits are purposefully trying to de-emphasize the "village spirit" system because it leads to spirits being treated like a commodity.
And I really can't blame them. Most of them had rough childhoods in their respective villages, then saw Amaroq get worked to the bone until he vanished. The Hatfield and McCoy villages constantly accuse them of being involved in the feud, and whatever happened in Hollow was bad.
A lot of this comes from Judgement, where the original conflict between Coyolxauqui and Tepeyollotl was how spirits should relate to humans. Exactly how much responsibility spirits have towards humanity has been an underlying theme for the entire series, and I'm eager to see it explored more.
