sleepy river nymph 🪷🫧

Our literal introduction to Guinevere is this close up of her stomach. She’s holding her hands so gently over it, exactly the way a pregnant mother would caress her belly. Her wound is very specifically her lower stomach.

Exactly where her womb would be.

The intestines falling out of her are even reminiscent of an umbilical cord. The blood pooling around her thighs specifically calls birth and menstrual blood to mind: representative of Guinevere as a mother, but also calling to mind the violence and horror that often comes with womanhood.

These frames around a character when they’re being introduced are like their introduction into a fairytale. It portrays them with atmospheres and symbols that are important to their characters.

The show goes even further to establish the significance of her stomach wound, even including it in the thumbnail and her vinyl figure:

This makes it pretty clear to me that her open stomach has more relevance to the story/her character than just being a shocking moment.

I know others have pointed this out, but the tips of Guinevere’s hair are black. The same color as Olivia’s, before it turned white (presumably due to the trauma of her mother’s death).

The final nail in the coffin for me is the human brain we see inside of Gwen on the scan:

I think that this is Olivia’s mother’s brain. I think she was planning to leave, which prompted Mr. Park to kill her somehow. Putting her brain in this android is a way to ‘bring her back’.

This explains why she doesn’t look like the other Gwens – she’s different. She’s actually conscious. It also explains Olivia’s obsession with “fixing” her: she will never be able to make this ‘thing’ back into her mother. She also may be trying to overcome her trauma in some way, controlling it.