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juushikaThis is Ginger.
You wouldn't expect it, but I don't empathize with Rose's story, her wolf. I do with her outlook on life, her skew away from humans, towards animals and nature. I flirt with the belief that nature harbors something like fairies, something like gods, powerful forces which are not supernatural but are far enough beyond our comprehension that we give them that label. I believe that if they exist, they are as lovely as they are dangerous. But perhaps that's just it: I want to believe in those things but despite my interest and best efforts, I don't—and so/because they've never had an impact on me. They aren't real to me, they aren't wolves to me, and so for all that I may identify with Rose, I don't identify with her story.
Ginger is different. We are hugely dissimilar—me reclusive, pessimistic; she proactive and vivacious. But her wolf is a little girl, a would-be friend, and that I understand: that what changes us, what presents a danger to us, may come not even in sheep's clothing but may truly be our peers and companions; that friendship—that basic human interaction—can be an apocalypse: a revealing, a transformation, an end of the world. That I get.
Apocalypse is a word I choose carefully because I think there's no better description than that: a revelation, a great disaster, "a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception" according to Wikipedia—cataclysmic, transformative knowledge.
Because at the same time, I don't think that the wolf is ... bad.
Well, the wolf is bad, of course. It leaves each girl in ruins. The boy asked yesterday if the wolves were death, and the grandmother's house an aspect of the afterlife—and I don't think they are precisely that, but they may just as destructive. They are discoveries of the dark aspects—of the things we love, of the people we interact with, of the world, of society, of friendship, of sex, of imagination. They are the discovery that all of these things can destroy us.
But life is pain, highness. (Anyone who says differently is selling something.) These days we view "apocalypse" more as cataclysm and less as revelation, but it's as much of one as the other. Knowledge is powerful, learning is painful, but in the same way as a fruit in the garden: the temptation is so strong that we must stray from the path—for we would not be who we are if we did not seek it out.
Ruby
Sexual violence is rarely portrayed well in media, and that means that I'd prefer average creators leave the topic well enough alone, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed. In an examination of female apocalypses, sexual violence isn't gratuitous—it is perfectly at home, because that is the world we live in.
But Ruby's wolf is also, ironically, life: the progression from childhood to adolescence, despite illness and morality. Her wolf is the death that comes with that life: the death of childhood, the dangers of adolescence, delinquency and smoking and sex. Is it dangerous to connotate sexual awakening with punishment? Yes. But is it unrealistic? No.
So on one hand, her story may be the most theatrical, the most predictable, the most shallow and cliché: gothic girl in a gloomy forest in a horror retelling of Red Riding Hood; classic grunge image of a decaying playground; a dangerous man, that sexy bad boy, and the threat he poses to a young woman. But Ruby's story has subtler aspects—her awareness of her own morality, her surprising discovery of her approaching maturity, and the lockers, the gymnasium, at her grandmother's house—which give her story depth and a greater setting, making it not titillating but realistic. This is what adolescence can be, for a girl in this world: as full of death as it is life.
Anonymous asked: What is The Path?
The Path is an indie game developed by Tale of Tales. (They also produce The Endless Forest, another bizarre and fantastic game which I recommend.) It sells for ten dollars and runs on PC and Mac.
In short, The Path a dark retelling of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. You play as a family of six girls who one at a time leave to walk to Grandmother's house. Stay on the path, and you'll get there safe and sound—and fail the level. Leave the path, and you'll enter a dark and sprawling forest marked by decaying landmarks and collectible items. Each girl has a wolf somewhere in the forest—discovering the wolf is considered a success and will take you to Grandmother's house, where you enter first person and walk through a nightmarish, surreal procession of rooms and hallways.
The controls are simple: you walk and can run in short bursts; to interact with an object, let off the controls and the girl will move on her own. The visuals are highly stylized, from hand-drawn brush to vivid colors to dark and gloomy woods. Each girl has a distinct personality and story, but nothing about the game is explicit: you get out just as much as you put in. Run to the end and you'll miss half the point; wander the woods, pick the flowers, pay attention to each strange girl, and you'll come away with a haunting, thought-provoking tale.
I adore it, obviously. The controls can be a bit finicky and it has an indie game budget which occasionally reflects in the graphics, but it's priced accordingly. Such an unusual game isn't for everyone, but it's a strange and haunting piece of art, and one of my favorite fairy tale retellings in any medium.
In many ways, Carmen is my least favorite—not just because I dislike her character (which I do), but because she's the most poorly executed of the bunch. In part, it's that her story is redundant: Ruby's is a much more successful exploration of sexual violence, making Carmen's little more than a poor echo. In part, it's that her story could be much better with a different focus.
Carmen's character is built around sexual appeal as a means of creating personal appeal as a means of finding companionship. On one hand, she's intensely focused on how her sexual appeal makes her desirable and accessible to others; on the other, she's convinced—and I would say afraid—that she stands alone.
In her encounter with the wolf, she takes his hat, she assumes appearance, she acts and he reacts; yet she is dependent on his reaction and, despite the appearance of power in her proactivity, is therefore weak. On her walk to her grandmother's house, Carmen's body posture is dejected and exhausted (whereas there other girls often seem to be in pain). I think there's potential here for a story about the futility of personal manipulation as a means of social manipulation—about how creating yourself for the consumption of others only leaves you, well, consumed. And that story doesn't have to be another pointless iteration of the falsehood that women with sexual appetites will be devoured by them; it could be different, more general, more true: creating ourselves for others destroys us.
Carmen pt 2: Grandma's house
But Carmen's grandmother's house is a transparent metaphor for personal destruction as a result of sexual violence. It's a pity, too, because it has some of my favorite imagery—it's vivid and ingenious and frightening. But it's blatantly skewed towards a single interpretation, and that interpretation does nothing for me. It overshadows the more complex, interesting potential aspects in Carmen's story; it also fails to ring true.
There is no sexual violence in the woodsman. Especially compared to Ruby's wolf, he is powerless, asexual; his hat is taken, he is responsive, there's no sense that he does anything at all to Carmen other than consume what she's created for his consumption. His role in the creation > consumption > exhaustion cycle is anonymous, almost passive, and above all he doesn't matter. It's not about him, but about her; not about what he does, but what she doesn't get; the creation/consumption cycle continues until her exhaustion precisely because she never gets what she wants in return: companionship.
If Carmen should have any wolf, it should be herself—or the blank face of an anonymous, ever-hungry, never satisfied audience.
Instead it's the woodsman, leaving his mark in axes and wood panels and tree stumps, and it doesn't ring true for me. It's beautiful, yes. Frightening. But its meaning is empty and out of place.
That's okay. With so many characters and such ambitious creative goals, a bit of failure is bound to happen.
In Robin, I saved the best for last. And so saved perhaps the hardest to talk about for—well I wrote this at three in the morning.
Robin is the storybook ideal, the expected image of Little Red Riding Hood—red-capped and young and innocent, a little girl with her basket alone in the woods.
The thing is, that ideal has never been realized. I'd probably make a mess of things if I tried to break out my limited studies of the fairy tale to write a pseudo-essay at three a.m., but: over so many tellings and retellings, nothing about Red Riding Hood's tale is simple. She has never been just a helpless little girl, the wolf has never been just a wolf, even when she's a little girl and he's a wolf.
She is a little girl. This time, the wolf is a wolf (or something close enough.) But Robin is self-aware—she's conscious of her own childish playfulness, vivacity, and naïvity. This doesn't make her wise, but: wisdom begins with it the realization that you know nothing.
It's a fluid paradox: to be vibrantly alive, knowing death, not understanding death; to enter into danger not in search of death but in search of life. That paradox appeared in Ruby's story, but Ruby's is—for all her stylized trappings—a realistic and identifiable representation of adolescence. Robin's self-awareness pushes the boundaries of realism; her story more than breaks them, exceeding the game's fantastical dream-logic, slipping into Carter-esque, wild, vivid, lush symbolism.
I keep mentioning Carter. She's Angela Carter, author of The Bloody Chamber, a short story collection containing a number of Little Red Riding Hood retellings (and a few for Beauty and the Beast, which isn't too different a tale). One of them became the film A Company of Wolves. Her stories are lush and violent and by turning expectations of the tale on its head, they bring to life the themes that were always there: Red Riding Hood as proactive, the wolf as seductive, their encounter as sexual, as destructive, as formative, as creative; the many possible forms of the wolf, the blurred line between the identities of Red Riding Hood and the wolf.
And so I mention her because The Path does many of the same things: it uses lush and violent imagery, it reverses expectations, it has shifting wolves creating apocalypses for willing girls—and Robin's story is the most vivid and literal of all. So in one way it's the pinnacle, the most terrifying and exhilarating, the hood dyed the most vibrant red. But in another it's an outlier: where the other girls are varying levels of realistic, Robin is largely composed of symbols: she is life, aware of death; her wolf is death, embraced by life; her grandmother's house is the brutal encounter of the two, birthday parties and destroyed rooms, a crib and an empty bird's nest.
I've never been good at discussing Carter, despite multiple attempts; I have similar difficulties with Robin's story. I have adjectives, but they can't describe or contain something so lush. I have pictures, but they don't give you the sound, the motion, the wolf's growls or his pounding run. I have explanations and interpretations, but this is just the thing: this story pulls from something so vast, and does so with such complexity and ambiguity, that trying to say what it means is a fool's errand at worst and an essay at best. (But Juu, aren't you writing one of those? Maybe, but not the one it deserves.)
Perhaps that's what art is, or the hallmark at least of this piece of it: it may use words, but it is bigger than them.
(There is so much more I could say about Little Red Riding Hood, but I'm not sure if you'd want to hear. There's endless retellings, Perrault and Grimm but also the versions that predate it; popular knowledge and allusions and feminist retellings—Carter has some of my favorite of those, of course: The Bloody Chamber and The Company of Wolves are both remarkable. Orenstein's Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked is an accessible survey of that history. Windling writes a different one, with a fantastic list of retellings. As mentioned, Beauty and the Beast is not far from Little Red Riding Hood: the tricked girl, the half-human beast, the creative/destructive relationship between the two, the blurred boundary of girl and beast. The wolf is as much werewolf as he is wolf (or man), and so there's werewolf mythology, the transformative powers of bites and full moons. There's legends of beasts like La Bête du Gévaudan. Caitlín R. Keirnan does my favorite work uniting Wolf and Beast and Bête—The Red Tree touches on it, but my favorites are in To Charles Fort, With Love. There's other beasts, wolves and dogs, ghosts and gods; there's Black Dog of the British Isles, portending death. There's Churchill's Black Dog, a metaphor for major depressive disorder. There's Nick Drake's Black Eyed Dog.
Which is all to say that this story is one I return to often, in my media and my metaphors, in my writing and my thoughts. That's why I am breaking down this game, this time through—because the game deserves a careful eye, but also because this story consumes me. I am seduced by the transformative power of the wolf, I have a black-eyed dog calling at my door. I have a lot to say about it, sometimes lists of adjectives, sometimes lists of links; all of it probably out of place after months of cute cuddly Pokémon, but there you go.)
I'm not quite done with this game, not yet.
The Girl in White
We're getting into heavy spoiler land: consider yourself warned.
I said to myself while playing, "She can do anything!" But that's not true, that's not what I meant. What I meant is that she can find everything. She knows the wood and all its secrets, she can run freely from theatre to playground, but she has so little control over what goes on within it. She can interact with almost nothing. When they enter the woods, she can interact with the girls—she can lead them from place to place, even lead them back to the path.
But she cannot make them walk it.
I've been thinking about the culpability of the girl in white because as she hugs these girls and leads them by the hand, she certainly seems to have some. But playing as her, walking through the dark and rainy woods which she knows so well, banishes that. She can do so little.
But she does do something. There's so much to the end of the game, all of it implication, all of it subtle, that I don't know if I can do it justice just now. The girl in white is a savior via violence but at the same time all she's really doing is allowing the cycle to perpetuate, allowing the girls to go back into the woods, to begin it all over again. But is that a bad thing, really? It's bad in the way that an apocalypse is bad: cataclysmic, destructive; revelatory. Necessary. And apparently unavoidable, because the only agency she has is to reset the cycle. The girl enters the wood. The girl encounters the wolf. The wolf eats the girl. This small, ghostly, girl in white cuts open the wolf. The girl comes out of the wolf. The girl enters the wood.
We've been telling this tale over and over again for centuries, after all.
In conversation with another player
I shy away from specific, literal interpretations of elements in Grandmother's house, largely as a reflection of my knowledge that my own mental landscape has as many random and symbolic associations as logical ones. But on the whole I dig this as a real world interpretation of Rose's story.
I also read Rose as socially distant; however, I read her wolf as a literal personification of nature or the natural divine, or more specifically of the power and danger in the natural divine, and rather than running from people I see her running towards that entity. So it's both interesting to see an alternate but equally substantiated interpretation, and to consider where the interpretations might overlap—for example, social isolation may trigger a search for a different connection, and therefore lead to her attachment to nature and even an attempt to personify nature; whether she was socially-isolated or self-isolated, the condition could easily trigger more social rejection and become self-perpetuating, giving her more reason to seek out this other connection. She can both be running from and running to.
I still see something concrete in what Rose finds, and think that the destination is as important as the journey, as it were—but even the destination can be representative. I see it as a literal entity, but it's also an alternative, an escape, a preoccupation that was dangerous in its own right and literally overwhelming: Rose drowned in it.
I know you didn't really invite more thoughts and opinions, but The Path theories are fun so let's have a little theory party, yay.
You wouldn't expect it, but I don't empathize with Rose's story, her wolf. I do with her outlook on life, her skew away from humans, towards animals and nature. I flirt with the belief that nature harbors something like fairies, something like gods, powerful forces which are not supernatural but are far enough beyond our comprehension that we give them that label. I believe that if they exist, they are as lovely as they are dangerous. But perhaps that's just it: I want to believe in those things but despite my interest and best efforts, I don't—and so/because they've never had an impact on me. They aren't real to me, they aren't wolves to me, and so for all that I may identify with Rose, I don't identify with her story.
Ginger is different. We are hugely dissimilar—me reclusive, pessimistic; she proactive and vivacious. But her wolf is a little girl, a would-be friend, and that I understand: that what changes us, what presents a danger to us, may come not even in sheep's clothing but may truly be our peers and companions; that friendship—that basic human interaction—can be an apocalypse: a revealing, a transformation, an end of the world. That I get.
Apocalypse is a word I choose carefully because I think there's no better description than that: a revelation, a great disaster, "a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception" according to Wikipedia—cataclysmic, transformative knowledge.
Because at the same time, I don't think that the wolf is ... bad.
Well, the wolf is bad, of course. It leaves each girl in ruins. The boy asked yesterday if the wolves were death, and the grandmother's house an aspect of the afterlife—and I don't think they are precisely that, but they may just as destructive. They are discoveries of the dark aspects—of the things we love, of the people we interact with, of the world, of society, of friendship, of sex, of imagination. They are the discovery that all of these things can destroy us.
But life is pain, highness. (Anyone who says differently is selling something.) These days we view "apocalypse" more as cataclysm and less as revelation, but it's as much of one as the other. Knowledge is powerful, learning is painful, but in the same way as a fruit in the garden: the temptation is so strong that we must stray from the path—for we would not be who we are if we did not seek it out.
Ruby
Sexual violence is rarely portrayed well in media, and that means that I'd prefer average creators leave the topic well enough alone, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed. In an examination of female apocalypses, sexual violence isn't gratuitous—it is perfectly at home, because that is the world we live in.
But Ruby's wolf is also, ironically, life: the progression from childhood to adolescence, despite illness and morality. Her wolf is the death that comes with that life: the death of childhood, the dangers of adolescence, delinquency and smoking and sex. Is it dangerous to connotate sexual awakening with punishment? Yes. But is it unrealistic? No.
So on one hand, her story may be the most theatrical, the most predictable, the most shallow and cliché: gothic girl in a gloomy forest in a horror retelling of Red Riding Hood; classic grunge image of a decaying playground; a dangerous man, that sexy bad boy, and the threat he poses to a young woman. But Ruby's story has subtler aspects—her awareness of her own morality, her surprising discovery of her approaching maturity, and the lockers, the gymnasium, at her grandmother's house—which give her story depth and a greater setting, making it not titillating but realistic. This is what adolescence can be, for a girl in this world: as full of death as it is life.
Anonymous asked: What is The Path?
The Path is an indie game developed by Tale of Tales. (They also produce The Endless Forest, another bizarre and fantastic game which I recommend.) It sells for ten dollars and runs on PC and Mac.
In short, The Path a dark retelling of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. You play as a family of six girls who one at a time leave to walk to Grandmother's house. Stay on the path, and you'll get there safe and sound—and fail the level. Leave the path, and you'll enter a dark and sprawling forest marked by decaying landmarks and collectible items. Each girl has a wolf somewhere in the forest—discovering the wolf is considered a success and will take you to Grandmother's house, where you enter first person and walk through a nightmarish, surreal procession of rooms and hallways.
The controls are simple: you walk and can run in short bursts; to interact with an object, let off the controls and the girl will move on her own. The visuals are highly stylized, from hand-drawn brush to vivid colors to dark and gloomy woods. Each girl has a distinct personality and story, but nothing about the game is explicit: you get out just as much as you put in. Run to the end and you'll miss half the point; wander the woods, pick the flowers, pay attention to each strange girl, and you'll come away with a haunting, thought-provoking tale.
I adore it, obviously. The controls can be a bit finicky and it has an indie game budget which occasionally reflects in the graphics, but it's priced accordingly. Such an unusual game isn't for everyone, but it's a strange and haunting piece of art, and one of my favorite fairy tale retellings in any medium.
In many ways, Carmen is my least favorite—not just because I dislike her character (which I do), but because she's the most poorly executed of the bunch. In part, it's that her story is redundant: Ruby's is a much more successful exploration of sexual violence, making Carmen's little more than a poor echo. In part, it's that her story could be much better with a different focus.
Carmen's character is built around sexual appeal as a means of creating personal appeal as a means of finding companionship. On one hand, she's intensely focused on how her sexual appeal makes her desirable and accessible to others; on the other, she's convinced—and I would say afraid—that she stands alone.
In her encounter with the wolf, she takes his hat, she assumes appearance, she acts and he reacts; yet she is dependent on his reaction and, despite the appearance of power in her proactivity, is therefore weak. On her walk to her grandmother's house, Carmen's body posture is dejected and exhausted (whereas there other girls often seem to be in pain). I think there's potential here for a story about the futility of personal manipulation as a means of social manipulation—about how creating yourself for the consumption of others only leaves you, well, consumed. And that story doesn't have to be another pointless iteration of the falsehood that women with sexual appetites will be devoured by them; it could be different, more general, more true: creating ourselves for others destroys us.
Carmen pt 2: Grandma's house
But Carmen's grandmother's house is a transparent metaphor for personal destruction as a result of sexual violence. It's a pity, too, because it has some of my favorite imagery—it's vivid and ingenious and frightening. But it's blatantly skewed towards a single interpretation, and that interpretation does nothing for me. It overshadows the more complex, interesting potential aspects in Carmen's story; it also fails to ring true.
There is no sexual violence in the woodsman. Especially compared to Ruby's wolf, he is powerless, asexual; his hat is taken, he is responsive, there's no sense that he does anything at all to Carmen other than consume what she's created for his consumption. His role in the creation > consumption > exhaustion cycle is anonymous, almost passive, and above all he doesn't matter. It's not about him, but about her; not about what he does, but what she doesn't get; the creation/consumption cycle continues until her exhaustion precisely because she never gets what she wants in return: companionship.
If Carmen should have any wolf, it should be herself—or the blank face of an anonymous, ever-hungry, never satisfied audience.
Instead it's the woodsman, leaving his mark in axes and wood panels and tree stumps, and it doesn't ring true for me. It's beautiful, yes. Frightening. But its meaning is empty and out of place.
That's okay. With so many characters and such ambitious creative goals, a bit of failure is bound to happen.
In Robin, I saved the best for last. And so saved perhaps the hardest to talk about for—well I wrote this at three in the morning.
Robin is the storybook ideal, the expected image of Little Red Riding Hood—red-capped and young and innocent, a little girl with her basket alone in the woods.
The thing is, that ideal has never been realized. I'd probably make a mess of things if I tried to break out my limited studies of the fairy tale to write a pseudo-essay at three a.m., but: over so many tellings and retellings, nothing about Red Riding Hood's tale is simple. She has never been just a helpless little girl, the wolf has never been just a wolf, even when she's a little girl and he's a wolf.
She is a little girl. This time, the wolf is a wolf (or something close enough.) But Robin is self-aware—she's conscious of her own childish playfulness, vivacity, and naïvity. This doesn't make her wise, but: wisdom begins with it the realization that you know nothing.
It's a fluid paradox: to be vibrantly alive, knowing death, not understanding death; to enter into danger not in search of death but in search of life. That paradox appeared in Ruby's story, but Ruby's is—for all her stylized trappings—a realistic and identifiable representation of adolescence. Robin's self-awareness pushes the boundaries of realism; her story more than breaks them, exceeding the game's fantastical dream-logic, slipping into Carter-esque, wild, vivid, lush symbolism.
I keep mentioning Carter. She's Angela Carter, author of The Bloody Chamber, a short story collection containing a number of Little Red Riding Hood retellings (and a few for Beauty and the Beast, which isn't too different a tale). One of them became the film A Company of Wolves. Her stories are lush and violent and by turning expectations of the tale on its head, they bring to life the themes that were always there: Red Riding Hood as proactive, the wolf as seductive, their encounter as sexual, as destructive, as formative, as creative; the many possible forms of the wolf, the blurred line between the identities of Red Riding Hood and the wolf.
And so I mention her because The Path does many of the same things: it uses lush and violent imagery, it reverses expectations, it has shifting wolves creating apocalypses for willing girls—and Robin's story is the most vivid and literal of all. So in one way it's the pinnacle, the most terrifying and exhilarating, the hood dyed the most vibrant red. But in another it's an outlier: where the other girls are varying levels of realistic, Robin is largely composed of symbols: she is life, aware of death; her wolf is death, embraced by life; her grandmother's house is the brutal encounter of the two, birthday parties and destroyed rooms, a crib and an empty bird's nest.
I've never been good at discussing Carter, despite multiple attempts; I have similar difficulties with Robin's story. I have adjectives, but they can't describe or contain something so lush. I have pictures, but they don't give you the sound, the motion, the wolf's growls or his pounding run. I have explanations and interpretations, but this is just the thing: this story pulls from something so vast, and does so with such complexity and ambiguity, that trying to say what it means is a fool's errand at worst and an essay at best. (But Juu, aren't you writing one of those? Maybe, but not the one it deserves.)
Perhaps that's what art is, or the hallmark at least of this piece of it: it may use words, but it is bigger than them.
(There is so much more I could say about Little Red Riding Hood, but I'm not sure if you'd want to hear. There's endless retellings, Perrault and Grimm but also the versions that predate it; popular knowledge and allusions and feminist retellings—Carter has some of my favorite of those, of course: The Bloody Chamber and The Company of Wolves are both remarkable. Orenstein's Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked is an accessible survey of that history. Windling writes a different one, with a fantastic list of retellings. As mentioned, Beauty and the Beast is not far from Little Red Riding Hood: the tricked girl, the half-human beast, the creative/destructive relationship between the two, the blurred boundary of girl and beast. The wolf is as much werewolf as he is wolf (or man), and so there's werewolf mythology, the transformative powers of bites and full moons. There's legends of beasts like La Bête du Gévaudan. Caitlín R. Keirnan does my favorite work uniting Wolf and Beast and Bête—The Red Tree touches on it, but my favorites are in To Charles Fort, With Love. There's other beasts, wolves and dogs, ghosts and gods; there's Black Dog of the British Isles, portending death. There's Churchill's Black Dog, a metaphor for major depressive disorder. There's Nick Drake's Black Eyed Dog.
Which is all to say that this story is one I return to often, in my media and my metaphors, in my writing and my thoughts. That's why I am breaking down this game, this time through—because the game deserves a careful eye, but also because this story consumes me. I am seduced by the transformative power of the wolf, I have a black-eyed dog calling at my door. I have a lot to say about it, sometimes lists of adjectives, sometimes lists of links; all of it probably out of place after months of cute cuddly Pokémon, but there you go.)
I'm not quite done with this game, not yet.
The Girl in White
We're getting into heavy spoiler land: consider yourself warned.
I said to myself while playing, "She can do anything!" But that's not true, that's not what I meant. What I meant is that she can find everything. She knows the wood and all its secrets, she can run freely from theatre to playground, but she has so little control over what goes on within it. She can interact with almost nothing. When they enter the woods, she can interact with the girls—she can lead them from place to place, even lead them back to the path.
But she cannot make them walk it.
I've been thinking about the culpability of the girl in white because as she hugs these girls and leads them by the hand, she certainly seems to have some. But playing as her, walking through the dark and rainy woods which she knows so well, banishes that. She can do so little.
But she does do something. There's so much to the end of the game, all of it implication, all of it subtle, that I don't know if I can do it justice just now. The girl in white is a savior via violence but at the same time all she's really doing is allowing the cycle to perpetuate, allowing the girls to go back into the woods, to begin it all over again. But is that a bad thing, really? It's bad in the way that an apocalypse is bad: cataclysmic, destructive; revelatory. Necessary. And apparently unavoidable, because the only agency she has is to reset the cycle. The girl enters the wood. The girl encounters the wolf. The wolf eats the girl. This small, ghostly, girl in white cuts open the wolf. The girl comes out of the wolf. The girl enters the wood.
We've been telling this tale over and over again for centuries, after all.
He is more than just a symbol of the dangers of sexual deception; he is the agent of change.
— "The Path of Needles or Pins: Little Red Riding Hood, Terri Windling, on the role of the wolf
In conversation with another player
I shy away from specific, literal interpretations of elements in Grandmother's house, largely as a reflection of my knowledge that my own mental landscape has as many random and symbolic associations as logical ones. But on the whole I dig this as a real world interpretation of Rose's story.
I also read Rose as socially distant; however, I read her wolf as a literal personification of nature or the natural divine, or more specifically of the power and danger in the natural divine, and rather than running from people I see her running towards that entity. So it's both interesting to see an alternate but equally substantiated interpretation, and to consider where the interpretations might overlap—for example, social isolation may trigger a search for a different connection, and therefore lead to her attachment to nature and even an attempt to personify nature; whether she was socially-isolated or self-isolated, the condition could easily trigger more social rejection and become self-perpetuating, giving her more reason to seek out this other connection. She can both be running from and running to.
I still see something concrete in what Rose finds, and think that the destination is as important as the journey, as it were—but even the destination can be representative. I see it as a literal entity, but it's also an alternative, an escape, a preoccupation that was dangerous in its own right and literally overwhelming: Rose drowned in it.
I know you didn't really invite more thoughts and opinions, but The Path theories are fun so let's have a little theory party, yay.
Little girls, this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way.
Never trust a stranger-friend;
No one knows how it will end.
As you're pretty, so be wise;
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Handsome they may be, and kind,
Gay, or charming never mind!
Now, as then, ‘tis simple truth—
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!
