The Owl House Wants You to Be Weird, Do Witchcraft
The Owl House is finally streaming on Disney+ — what better way to recover from the exhaustion of elections messaging than to watch a show about a teenage girl being swayed to the devil’s work? Showrunner Dana Terrace’s horror-comedy has a very straightforward message, made all the more impactful by airing on a network as historically conservative as Disney. We get the thesis of the show in the climax of the very first episode, conveniently laid out in a passionate speech by the main character:
So you have a different way of doing things, a different way of seeing things — that may make you weird, but it also makes you awesome, don’t you see? Us weirdos have to stick together. And nobody should be punished for who they are!
There are dozens of cartoons which set out to reassure kids it’s okay to be weird; what sets The Owl House apart is the extent to which the show not only supports, but encourages witchcraft, that most historically suspect of ‘alternative lifestyles’. The protagonist’s affirmation is as much for herself as for the weary prisoners she’s trying to call to action.
Earlier that day, Luz Noceda, optimistic but discontented high-schooler, solemnly drops her favorite fantasy book in the garbage. She’s waiting for a bus to a dull summer camp meant to help tamp down on what her mother describes as an excess of creativity. No more weirdness, she sighs, though it’s more an echo than a promise. This crisis of self-actualization is averted when she spots an owl making off with her book. She chases the bird across dimensions into the Boiling Isles: a haven for the Weird and Witchy, if not the pastoral PG fantasy she used to daydream about. This is the most fun I’ve ever had, she says, after aiding and abetting a heist and prisoner escape from the Conformatorium (an apt name for a detention center for social deviants. Like fanfiction authors, and people who eat their own eyeballs). Rather than resign herself to Reality Check Camp, Luz decides she’ll apprentice to the first, sketchy witch she meets so she can learn witchcraft.
While the low-medieval setting is definitely grosser than is typical for magical worlds, this all seems pretty familiar to Luz. A kid falls into a portal and, though they’ve got a lot of growing up to do, it’s this fish out of water that’s destined to save the world! It only takes a couple of episodes for Luz to firmly quash that self conception. Her sardonic mentor, Edalyn Clawthorne, actually laughs when she’s conned into thinking she might be a mythical hero. As Eda reproves, Luz isn’t fated to be there:
Look, kid. Everybody wants to believe they’re chosen. But if we all waited around for a prophecy to make us special, we’d die waiting. That’s why you need to choose yourself.
So she does. Luz could leave whenever she wants; Eda’s owl familiar travels back to grab ‘human trash’ every weekend, even. But every day, she makes the choice to stay and commit to the work of becoming a witch. This is a baffling goal to the other inhabitants of the Isles, as Luz physically cannot access magic as they do (with a magic bile sac, obviously). Learning to do it takes a bit of luck, but Luz manages to tap into the ambient magic of the isles through glyphs. The paper pad she uses to draw her preternaturally perfect circles on is just a plain little sketchbook, and the symbolism is clear: Luz’s magic comes from her creativity and from the years she spent on writing and art, the interests that didn’t seem to matter back on Earth.
Though Luz has always owned her weirdness, it’s only in the Isles that she’s able to succeed with it. She didn’t have any friends before, which her mom attributes to her “fantasy world holding [her] back”. Luz’s trouble at school is played for laughs, but her mother’s earnest plea to go to Reality Check camp in order to get a handle on the demands of the Human Realm indicates Luz had serious issues connecting with her peers. By contrast, she’s thriving in the Demon Realm, developing her talents away from many of the stifling norms she was subject to back on Earth and nurturing relationships with real people at last.
Of course, the Boiling Isles are still a horrorscape and the social landscape reflects that. Caring about anything out in the open means exposing a potential vulnerability. Elite student Amity Blight initially bends over backwards to hide anything her family might deem inappropriate. She’d been forced to abandon interests unfitting of her station before. As part of curating Amity’s childhood associates, her parents threatened to ruin the educational prospects of her first real friend, Willow Park. To protect her, Amity ended her most important friendship herself, seeing no alternative to putting on the airs of the kind of status-obsessed bully she used to despise.
Amity’s only respite from the strict mandate to act as ‘a Blight should’ is her secret love of the same fantasy series Luz does. Years later, it’s the shared weirdness of intense fandom as an escape which enables Amity to connect with Luz after a predictably rough start between them; they bond over reading the series together. Amity begins to reject the supercilious front that her parents and fellow elites expect her to maintain when she finally has the security of a friend who accepts her again, self-insert original characters and all. Coupled with the obvious crush she develops on Luz, when Amity publicly sides with her and Willow over the mean girl troupe she previously led, it feels parallel to coming out. While queer relationships don’t seem to be out of the norm in the Boiling Isles, there’s no question that Amity’s (embarrassing, adorable, canonically lesbian) crush stuck out to viewers. Luz is written as bisexual, and regardless of her utter obliviousness, the possibility of a burgeoning relationship between girls who might have romantic feelings for each other is still transgressive in 2020, especially because they’re witch girls.
The Owl House intentionally leans on the West’s long history of witches as heretics. Thematically, witches don’t adhere to traditional social mores of what’s good and right. In the more modern understanding of witches, this would be people, mostly women, whose social deviance is too much for the patriarchy to abide. Or, they might even actively pervert those mores, as in the older Christian perspective of them as an insurgent enemy force who need to be destroyed lest they dissolve society’s very foundations. Luz already fit the first type, as an open-minded, bisexual Latina with a penchant for fantasy and anime. Eda fits the second, looking like a stereotypical hag and criminal with her demon companion. But when Luz apprentices herself to Eda and begins to actively practice witchcraft, her character shifts from the first type to the second. It’s a social threat — a troubled young girl just about to head to conversion camp is tricked by a witch’s familiar into entering the Demon Realm, where she turns her back on her old community in order to learn arcane rituals and turn cute witch girls doe-eyed!
Most people can get behind a charming witchy show now, but witchcraft which plainly supports queerness and rebellion against an heavy-handed theocratic government hearkens back to this cultural symbolism. The Owl House summons up these associations when it sets Luz and Eda in opposition to the ruler of the Isles, Emperor Belos. Especially amid all the absurd, marginalia-inspired character designs, his image evokes biblical angels (the bizarre kind from Revelations, who might have multiple animal faces and a multitude of fiery eyes).
Belos presents himself as the only one who can speak to the Isles, a prophet whose dominion over the proper ways to use the proper types of magic is absolute. Under his rule, a witch’s entry into productive society is marked by a seal which restricts them to learning just one type of magic in a government-sanctioned coven. The sealing works as an allegory for marginalization at a broad level, from queer identities to unconventional interests. That’s why Eda, as a defiantly covenless witch who believes magic is at its best when it’s wild and free, is an outlaw — and it’s why Luz, with her keen desire to learn anything that interests her, ends up joining a class of permanently detentioned troublemakers. Though they are initially punished for wanting to dual major (just let these kids get their tuition’s worth, Principal Bump!), they ultimately end up convincing the principal of their magic school to let them study multiple tracks of magic when they prove their studies’ worth. When Luz eventually finds herself in conflict with the emperor, the escalation of stakes feels like a natural progression because right from the beginning, it’s her staunch defense of freely being who you are that’s made her a hero.
In The Owl House, weirdness and integrity are the same thing. For all that the show leans on the cultural trappings of witchcraft vs the oppressive Church, the weirdness it encourages is not contrarian: it’s just the determination to honestly be, regardless of whether that sort of being fits in with the norm. For Luz and her loved ones, the right to live their lives in peace and stay true to who they are is a fight. That’s a pretty hefty theme from a Disney show: be weird, be proud, do witchcraft.
