it’s me bee day!!!! I got myself some little treats from some artists on Etsy - a froggo pin from FaunaForestShop, a clown pin I’ve been Yearning for (and also the sticker!) from Mushydoodle, and a really pretty Deet pin from Gingerbouf!!! :-)
my partner and I sitting in focused silence for 40 minutes with nothing but the sound of us furiously typing up TOH analysis posts after watching the new episode
ohh man, this is something I’ve always loved about TOH but it’s really hitting now… I’ve had a longstanding interest in the developmental history of gods, deities and their archetypes throughout human culture, and it fascinates me how, some cultures (talking about western culture here since I’m not a voice for anything else) have gods who are vast, powerful, otherworldly embodiments of the forces of nature here on Earth, and others have gods who embody the basic structures of civilization: agriculture, building, hunting, relationships, etc. in a lot of cases it’s a mix of both, and sometimes a transition from the former to the latter.
and you can observe the evolution of humanity’s shift from hunter-gatherer living to modern civilization through it - the shift in archetypal gods is a mirror to what we collectively prioritize and focus on for our survival throughout history. and in western cultures, particularly in Greek mythology which served as a basis for our philosophy and intellectual fixations, the natural gods tend to get demonized by the narratives: they were chaotic, ravenous, violent, emotionless, beastly things who ruled over the Earth in its early, primordial days, and had to be usurped, overthrown, and locked away - and literally referred to as titans in the terminology.
in essence, they were dethroned by the civilization gods, but I think the resentment towards the natural gods is more of a developed retrospective: it’s a lingering, psychological fear of what it was like to live as a part of nature, part of the food cycle - because being an animal living in the wild must have been fuckin terrifying, and being able to build houses and towns and farm longlasting food and forge families was like. a sigh of RELIEF. them civilization gods are pretty great from that angle. but the western mind tends to pathologize this: to portray natural gods as purely destructive forces, denying the fact that we worship them because they are gods of the Earth, forgers of the land, the givers of life.
because even now, the Titan’s dead, decomposed corpse is giving life to the people of the Boiling Isles - it’s the very land theylive on. and it’s obvious that it cares for them, the same as King cares deeply for his family - it gives them magic, wants to communicate with them, and tries to protect them from. violent colonizers and the same self righteously invented propaganda that he uses against witches applies to nature, too, and the gods that embody that nature - the titan trappers describing titans as being endlessly hungry, monstrous, destructive, mindless beasts, is a similar energy to western culture labelling archaic, primordial titans as cruel gods who had to be imprisoned for the greater good.
and I just… really love The Owl House for diving further into this narrative. there are stories about how big, violent forces (capitalism, militarism, missionary Christianity, colonialism etc) target, destroy and exploit an element of nature that has been painted by them as evil or demonic, and TOH really adds to that conversation with how deep its story runs. and I love how deeply rooted in a desire for compassion for and connection with those natural forces it feels, because everything that has happened to the titans sounds like a fucking tragedy.the more I learn about the horrors the titan race have been through, the more I can see myself as a Boiling Isles citizen yearning for a world still in connection with them, thriving alongside them.
it’s a story of loss, and grief, and mourning a past way of life - an estranged bond with something bigger than us, that nurtured us and tended to us in that strange, amoral way nature does. and TOH points to exactly the kind of hateful groups and mentalities who have perpetrated this tragedy, reminding us that this way of life is not an inherent fault of humanity’s, nor is it a punishment for our ignorance, but rather the direct result of intentional, planned action made by those who sought to profit and gain power from it. but it really moves my little animal heart, too - it speaks to the part of us that are still wild, are still untamed, are still one with the terrifying masses of flesh and claws that are the titans: but are still worthy of being seen from multiple angles, and be celebrated and honoured, too. because even hurricanes can be forces of creation, and even volcanic eruptions create new land
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