I have been bereft of inspiration to write much, lately. I had planned to write a review of Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan for this space, even testing recipes and making jars of watermelon rind pickles to share with my local paid subscribers. I explored the world of the free school lunches being offered to all families in our school district, even baking a damn cake out of one of the massive sweet potatoes I got in a produce box that came with our meal packs one week.
But I just … haven’t written about it.
There’s a certain inertia that’s settled over me in Month 8 of Our Pandemic Year. The creative energy that fueled those first few months of sewing and baking and writing has dried up. And that’s okay! We’ve had a rhetoric of self-care all up in our faces for most of this year and I’m coming to terms with the reality that right now, for me, self-care looks like binge-watching TV and drinking too much wine.
Some of the binge-watching I’ve been doing, though, includes watching The Owl House with my tween daughter, and I am here to tell you that it is one of the most progressive television shows I’ve seen.
The premise is this: Luz Noceda is a misfit Dominican-American teen who gets in trouble at school for being a little weird and outside of the box. When her mom sends her to “Reality Check Summer Camp,” she accidentally finds herself in another reality, adjacent to her world, called the Boiling Isles. There she meets a hawker named Eda, who has a sidekick named King (a little bone-cat who fancies himself the King of Demons). Turns out Eda is a witch — a very powerful one at that, and on the run from the shadowy Emperor — and being that Luz is both obsessed with the witches of fantasy novels and has no interest in being sent to what is, effectively, a “conformatorium” in her own world, stays in Eda’s world to learn how to be a witch.
One of the major ways that The Owl House is super progressive is its LBGTQ representation. Luz’s friend, Willow, has two dads and that’s just that. No one remarks on it, and it’s just a thing! There’s also Amity, who starts out as a minor antagonist but eventually develops a crush on Luz and asks her to Grom. Again, this is totally natural and normal and doesn’t present an existential identity crisis for either girl.
Not only does the show present normalized queer relationships, there’s also a subtext of queerness in the discourse of covens and how it is written on both Eda and Luz’s bodies.
In the Boiling Isles, much like at Hogwarts, young witches are sorted into different color-coded witchcraft tracks: plant, abomination, potions, healing, etc. There’s even a direct parody of the Harry Potter universe with a reference to the “choosy hat” that was retired from service after attacking a student. Upon graduating from their schooling, young witches must choose a coven, which will define them as adults and limit the kind of magic they can practice for the rest of their lives.
This dynamic, as articulated in Harry Potter, was summed up thusly by Jon Lovett on a recent episode of Lovett or Leave It:
I really learned from Harry Potter that human beings come from immutable groups and those groups are really important. We should divide children into groups when they’re small, and judge them in perpetuity by those groups. And not allow them to choose their groups, have the groups chosen for them by adults or by a system they can’t understand. And have it dictate the terms of their existence until the day they die. That’s what I took away.
This is precisely the dynamic that both Eda and Luz push back against in the Boiling Isles. Eda is on the run from the Emperor, who wants her to join his coven because she is so very powerful. But Eda, who doesn’t want to participate in the authoritarian coven system, resists, risking her physical freedom in the process.
When Luz starts attending Hexside High, she is dismayed to learn that she must commit to one track and learn only one kind of magic; she wants to learn *all* of the magic! On her first day at Hexside, she is placed in the Potions track by default, and her yellow-accented uniform reflects that assignment. But once she convinces the Headmaster to let her study all tracks of magic, her uniform reflects her all-inclusive fields of study while also gesturing to her overt queer identity (and Eda’s implied one, in that she also practices all forms of magic and lives at the margins as a result):
In addition to the show’s inherent embrace of queerness, it’s also inclusive when it comes to learning differences. Because Luz is a human, she wasn’t born with magical abilities like her peers at Hexside were. As such, she has to find ways to learn magic differently. Her solution is to draw the glyphs that summon the spells used by the witches.
This is a perfect example of adaptive learning, a customized solution that addresses an individual’s unique needs so that they can master the material.
To my mind, this is what really pushes the show’s progressive bona fides over the top. Not only is Luz a queer Latin@, she’s also got learning differences that she overcomes in order to achieve her dream of becoming a witch. But none of this representation is didactic or presented in a Very Special Episode-type way. It’s just part of the narrative, serving to normalize characteristics that would otherwise serve to marginalize folx.
As I sit here and reflect, I’ve actually watched a lot of life-affirming stuff with my daughter this year. First, there was the Babysitter’s Club reboot on Netflix, which also attacked important topics like trans identity and economic equality. Then there was Ted Lasso, which demonstrates the power of optimism and kindness (albeit using colorful language that had me cringing a bit). While I’m sure that all of these were scripted and shot well before These Trying Times (TM), they could not be more appropriate for this cultural moment, if only because they remind us that it’s possible to choose to be good and kind and accepting of people even if they love differently or have less money.
The first season of The Owl House is available on Disney+ and YouTube, and the second season premieres on the Disney Channel in January.