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swan_tower) wrote2017-02-28 01:47 pm
Elfquest Re-Read, Captives of Blue Mountain: Winnowill
(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)
I can’t think of any character in this entire series who more strongly merits their own post, with the possible exception of Two-Edge.
Winnowill is a villain, and the story makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. When we see Strongbow being psychically tortured at the end of The Forbidden Grove, his tormentor is shown only as a silhouette — but the fact that she speaks telepathically tells us she’s an elf. And in case you had any doubt as to whether you should still give her the benefit of the doubt, her sending gets its own special mark, a malevolent red and black star. It takes the characters a while to confirm that she’s the great danger Savah warned Suntop about, but the reader knows from the start.
But saying that she’s a straight-up villain doesn’t mean she’s inherently evil, in the “dyed in the wool” sense. From Lord Voll we get tantalizing hints about the Winnowill of the past — I would have loved to see a short-run series of backstory about the early days of the Gliders. She was probably ambitious from the start, and likely somewhat manipulative, but those aren’t the same thing as the unrelenting malice she exhibits in the present day. No, her spirit has been warped over the millennia: by the isolation and ossification of the Gliders, by the lack of any real purpose to her endless life, and by whatever happened to her when she vanished underground for a time. If memory serves, that’s when she met the troll by whom she conceived Two-Edge, but whether she herself suffered any trauma or was only ever the inflicter of same, I don’t recall.
Everything that’s wrong with Winnowill is, for lack of a better term, a human problem. By that I mean she’s not supernaturally corrupted or anything like that; her flaws are the same flaws real people have in the real world. Arrogance. Hunger for power. Lack of empathy. A desire to cause pain, simply because it demonstrates her power and it’s the only thing she finds interesting anymore. Where magic comes in is with the suggestion that she could be fixed . . . if she wanted to be. But when it comes to a choice between allowing Leetah to change her and stepping to her almost-guaranteed death, Winnowill chooses death. I find myself sorely tempted to request Winnowill fanfic next Yuletide, because I think it would be fascinating to see the inside of her mind.
That impulse surprises me because, although I very much like Winnowill’s role in this volume, overall I find she demonstrates the same problem exhibited by villains in many other stories: the more the plot focuses on her, the less interesting I find the result. She’s great here, okay in Siege at Blue Mountain and The Secret of Two-Edge, largely unnecessary in Kings of the Broken Wheel (Rayek’s own choices are far more compelling), and then she just . . . keeps going. It’s partly a function of the otherwise intriguing worldbuilding twist that killing her would accomplish jack, and might make things worse: then they’d have to contend with her spirit, which would be no less dangerous and a lot more difficult to hit. As I recall from later canon, she does wind up dead and Rayek has to serve as her prison, but I don’t think the problem she represents ever got resolved; nobody manages to de-toxify her spirit. I really wish they would, because there’s a point at which she starts to feel like a drag on the story to me.
Before that point, though, she’s a fantastic villain. I love her conversation with Leetah, when she tries to use the secret of the Wolfriders’ heritage as a lever to force them out of Blue Mountain before they can threaten her control of the place. Her menagerie of pet humans is incredibly twisted. And Two-Edge — well. He may wind up getting his own post; we’ll see.
I also have to make mention of Winnowill as a specifically female villain. Taken in isolation, her gender and behavior might bother me a lot, because she’s very much the stereotype of the femme fatale: beautiful, seductive, manipulative, and so on. In fairness, I should say the fact that I don’t have a problem with that probably owes something to the age at which I read this story; I was a lot less critical about that sort of thing when I was twelve. But I also think it owes a lot to the larger context of the story as a whole, because Winnowill is only one female character, in a cast that features a broad array of contrasting figures. Leetah as Winnowill’s “dark sister” is particularly noteworthy — there’s a whole metaphorical layer there about how we associate “dark” with “evil,” but Winnowill is the pale one of the pair — but also Dewshine and Aroree and Moonshade and Clearbrook and Nightfall in this volume, many others in the series as a whole. We don’t have to excise the femme fatale from our narrative lexicon; we just have to make sure she isn’t the only option on offer.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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Because it feels like they wrote themselves into a corner.
Maybe that's Suntop's destiny to face...
ETA: Because I don't remember if she was implied or shown in Rebels or Jink, I can hope they solved the issue?
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She doesn't appear in either of those arcs that I saw. (I read them off the website about a month ago.) There is a whole mess of magical bad karma at the site that used to be Blue Mountain, but it doesn't seem to be Winnowill specifically so much as the imprint of all the deaths and destruction that occurred there.
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I'd sum up the corner as: Winnowill doesn't want to be healed, and while we have every reason to think Leetah could force it on her anyway, that resolution wouldn't be satisfying. (Not to mention how it would run counter to Leetah learning that she shouldn't force her gifts on people without their permission.) So to really make it work, you have to come up with a story where Winnowill asks for and accepts healing . . . but the very nature of her problem makes that impossible. The only version of Winnowill that would do that is the one that doesn't need it anymore.
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If it was an accident on the Pinis' part, then it was unconsciously, beautifully thematic that she's introduced in the same arc which reveals that the Wolfriders alone of the elf tribes are mortal. The series isn't explicitly asking the Tuck Everlasting questions yet—that happens with Kings of the Broken Wheel—but the reader can start thinking about them because they're implicitly drawn. What do you do with the time you're given? What meaning do you find for yourself if there's no urgency, if that time is endless? Protip: living inside an empty mountain in static imitation of an alien life you never lived yourself probably isn't it.
and by whatever happened to her when she vanished underground for a time. If memory serves, that’s when she met the troll by whom she conceived Two-Edge, but whether she herself suffered any trauma or was only ever the inflicter of same, I don’t recall.
I belive that the panel of memory in which she comes across him shows them aboveground in the sun, but I'll double-check. It's in Siege at Blue Mountain; she is remembering her last relationship as she prepares to meet Rayek.
[edit] Okay, the same basic version of events appears twice in Siege, with varying detail each time. I had forgotten that she goes underground alone. What is said about that?
nobody manages to de-toxify her spirit. I really wish they would, because there’s a point at which she starts to feel like a drag on the story to me.
Also I think it would be fascinating. The image of Winnowill stepping to her (attempted) death at the end of Captives of Blue Mountain rather than permitting Leetah to heal her is an amazing encapsulation of the way people hold to trauma and damage and destructive behavior because to change would be terrifying, like becoming someone else; for Winnowill to admit the pain of what she's done is insupportable, so the only thing left is to continue on the path she's set on, justifying everything as she goes along. She says as much in Kings of the Broken Wheel when she blames the half-finished healing (attempted in both Captives and Siege) on Leetah, calling it nothing but torture. I think that is one of the reasons I am disappointed that she became a generic, irredeemable villain in later books; her earlier appearances imply not that she's not unsalvageable, but that she doesn't want to be saved. That's different and that's interesting.
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I'll get into some of this with my next post, which will be on the Gliders overall, and the notion that Winnowill isn't the only one of them with serious problems.
I had forgotten that she goes underground alone. What is said about that?
This (http://elfquest.com/read/index.php?s=OQ/OQ15&p=3) is the relevant page. It makes an interesting contrast with the references you dug up; Doylistically the Pinis probably changed their minds a bit as to how Winnowill's descent into madness happened, but from a Watsonian perspective, it shows how much Voll failed to understand her. Winnowill's twisting began long before she met that troll, when she started arranging accidents for the Gliders just so they would go on needing her gifts.
She says as much in Kings of the Broken Wheel when she blames the half-finished healing (attempted in both Captives and Siege) on Leetah, calling it nothing but torture. I think that is one of the reasons I am disappointed that she became a generic, irredeemable villain in later books; her earlier appearances imply not that she's not unsalvageable, but that she doesn't want to be saved. That's different and that's interesting.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Invidiana in Midnight Never Come was inspired in part by Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, and then again to realize she owed something to Winnowill as well. The book is of course based partly on a game I ran; in the game, Invidiana's problems weren't resolved in the Elizabethan period. So when the extended flashbacks that made up the bulk of the campaign ended and the game returned to the modern day, the PCs nearly got killed by Invidiana's modern-day incarnation, who bore them an undying grudge for restoring her heart (and therefore her conscience) but not doing anything to heal her, instead leaving her to suffer the guilt of her deeds for the next three hundred years.
The more I think about it, the more those incomplete healings to me feel like Chekhov's gun not ever quite firing. I will forgive Winnowill showing up in the Final Quest if the point of her doing so is finally to make good on that unfinished plot. Failing that, there's always Yuletide.
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Lord Voll really needed to get out more.
Doylistically the Pinis probably changed their minds a bit as to how Winnowill's descent into madness happened, but from a Watsonian perspective, it shows how much Voll failed to understand her.
I actually find that second set of flashbacks in Siege the most sympathetic reading of Winnowill the series has offered so far. It makes not just her damage, but her desperation clear: the devastated laughter of her realization that she has no place as a healer in an immortal, sterile population who will (so far as she knows) endure unchanging till the death of the planet they're bound to, her failed efforts to encourage an already disaffected Voll to take the Gliders back to the stars, her own quest for the Palace derailed by her discovery of the troll who became Two-Edge's father and her inability not to manipulate him because at least it gives her something to feel, something to do (and all of it in secret, because Voll never learns of the interloper, his murder by Winnowill or the child she bore him first). She wasn't doing so well by then, but she was not yet confirmed in her centuries of cruelty and abuse. The breaking point of Winnowill's healing is the memory of knowingly destroying her child.
So when the extended flashbacks that made up the bulk of the campaign ended and the game returned to the modern day, the PCs nearly got killed by Invidiana's modern-day incarnation, who bore them an undying grudge for restoring her heart (and therefore her conscience) but not doing anything to heal her, instead leaving her to suffer the guilt of her deeds for the next three hundred years.
(a) That's great.
(b) May I hope that you did a better job than the Pinis with finally taking that Chekhov's gun off the wall?
Failing that, there's always Yuletide.
I hope they can do it themselves. And if so, I hope they can do it well. I really did tap out of this series after Rogue's Challenge.
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Now there's a fascinating AU: one in which she does find the palace, all those eons ago. What could Winnowill have become then?
Edit: you know, the more I think about it . . . there's room for ambiguity in that backstory. She didn't start torturing Two-Edge until after his father tried to kidnap a rockshaper and take him back to Greymung. The text presents her relationship with the troll (the wiki calls him Smelt; I don't know where the name comes from) purely as the product of Winnowill's manipulation, but I can see an interpretation where that's how she justifies it to herself afterward. Her abuse of Two-Edge is presumably the result of feeling betrayed, which would cut deeper if she'd actually had some genuine affection toward Smelt, rather than it being purely a case of "my toy stopped doing what I wanted it to." The two angles aren't mutually incompatible -- by that point in time, Winnowill's notion of love might not be too healthy -- but the notion that she actually did have feelings for Smelt works for me.
(b) May I hope that you did a better job than the Pinis with finally taking that Chekhov's gun off the wall?
They managed to heal her, yes. The details have slipped my memory, but it involved them going directly into the dreamspace of her mind and (I think) managing to re-create the spirit of the man she loved, which she had destroyed back in the Elizabethan period, so the two of them could reconcile.
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Oh, is that what he was doing! I'm now rereading the series and actually just got up to that issue of Siege earlier today, so that's good timing. :D But I think part of the problem with interpreting the flashback is that we don't really get much explanation for what's happening in the various panels. Most of the context can be filled in based on educated guesses and reading between the lines of Winnowill's narration, but I wasn't able to figure out what it was, exactly, that broke things. That helps a lot.
The panel with Winnowill curled up with baby Two-Edge is so darling. Poor kid. (Now that I'm rereading the series as an adult rather than a kid, I'm all too aware that Two-Edge is the very definition of a Tragic Mulatto character, but at least he has some in-canon reasons for being that way, other than just "the two parts of his heritage don't get along" -- though that is also part of it, based on the last few issues of the original quest.)
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I'm willing to accept it. I like it especially because it allows the first two captions here to be read ambiguously: not just Smelt's appetites, but Winnowill's own needs—to be valued, to be needed, to be loved—which in hindsight she castigates as the greed that opened her up for betrayal. That happens to you once, you make sure from then on that if anyone is going to be doing the betraying, it's you. You won't be caught like that again. You'll catch others. The less loving one will always be you.
The details have slipped my memory, but it involved them going directly into the dreamspace of her mind and (I think) managing to re-create the spirit of the man she loved, which she had destroyed back in the Elizabethan period, so the two of them could reconcile.
Go, you.
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I had to lay the two panels
Now that I'm rereading the series as an adult rather than a kid, I'm all too aware that Two-Edge is the very definition of a Tragic Mulatto character, but at least he has some in-canon reasons for being that way, other than just "the two parts of his heritage don't get along" -- though that is also part of it, based on the last few issues of the original quest.
He probably would have had social issues trying to fit into either society had Winnowill left him alone -- but yes, it's strongly indicated that his insanity is a result of her actively inducing a split in his mind.
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Especially since the preceeding pages have the lines "In elf, human, or troll, where need is present, control is simple. Learn what he wants most and give it to him. Then create another need and fulfill that." Those principles apply to Winnowill just as much as to Smelt.
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I went looking for this page because I remembered the line about "the cool lustre of pearl," but it reminded me that I had no experience of manga when I read Elfquest for the first time; and now I do. That's some visible influence.
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I was just thinking about this, and I think it helps a lot that she's not only contrasted against a number of different female characters, but a number of powerful women and female leaders, as well. Savah, Kahvi, Leetah, and later Ember are all powerful in their own way and command a respectful following among their people. So it's not only that Winnowill doesn't have to carry the weight of being the only (or one of the only) female characters in the series, but she's also not the sole model in the series for what female leadership and female power looks like.
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Heartbreakingly cute.
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So this item from the back matter of the original publication caught my eye. At least one reader at the time had questions about the relationship and its end ("It doesn't look like she's killing him in cold blood"). The Pinis' answer:
"Regarding Winnowill and Papa Two-Edge, let's just say that neither's hands are/were clean."
If he was sent to capture a rock-shaper, by the way, it looks to me like he tried to grab the Door who guarded access to Winnowill's quarters. The feathery headdress looks right.
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And yes, it makes sense to say that's the male Door.
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