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They were the threshold that wanderers wandered into, and their actions led to doom, escape or intermediate torture.Īdelaide was one threshold. Adelaide and the Woodsman didn’t have anything to keep them from getting lost they were drawn into the Beast’s domain because they were completely in the midst of it. These motivations grounded the denizens of the Unknown. The other denizens of the wood were beyond the Beast’s power for varying reasons: Beatrice wants to help her family, the Teacher and her father were sincerely committed to housing and educating children the frogs simple-mindedly enjoyed their little civilization as the millionaires were transfixed by their lonely manias Lorna and the Inn’s people threw themselves into their work to keep thoughts of disorder and absence of meaning at bay while the “people” of Pottsfield are beyond worry or expectation due to having already arrived at their final destination. To do this he exerted his influence on the two true sources of succor in the wood: Adelaide of the Wood and the Woodsman. To dash away hope, the Beast needed to make it foolish. Even his body is a expression of collective dismay. Experiencing hopelessness and the sneering sense of abandon that comes with it caused the dejected to become forfeit to the Beast because hopelessness is what the Beast is. The kids were imperiled once one of them lost hope in escaping their ordeal.
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When his would be victims have something to go on for, the Beast cannot claim them the children were safe during their trip to Adelaide not because of their path, but because they believed their path led somewhere. The Beast is the embodiment of resignation his power was over the hopeless and those too tired to continue. The Beast may be a liar and a fiend, but he is no way equal to the Abrahamic Satan. One such unsatisfying interpretation making the rounds- that the Beast is Satan- is a huge example of the over simplicity of the fan theories shared so far. Over the Garden Wall is much more than that. This beautiful complexity is done a disservice by the rather two dimensional interpretations people have been giving it the show and its setting are much more than one kid’s dream picked up by another kid while in a coma, nor is it a LOST type LIMBO or a Minority Report esque “give a fake happy ending to the protagonists who’ve BEEN DEAD THE WHOLE TIME” self contradiction. Its complex yet intuitively understood allegories give us one of the greatest fables ever created for a cartoon, and the viewer can spend weeks obsessing over how every seemingly random thing in it is tied together. 758 notes NovemThe Nature of the Beast: A Over the Garden Wall Fan Analysis