Toffee in Eda's role is quite and interesting choice, it really took me by surprise
I would love to hear about what inspired you to decide that, and what do see they have in common
As someone whose favorite character of all time is Toffee and also as someone who’s studied him, his psychology, motivations, etc. for over nine years, I’m actually really excited to share my thought process for putting Toffee in Eda’s role
On the surface, their personalities completely clash. Eda is highly sarcastic with a big personality and much more extroverted and eccentric than the quiet, subdued, stoic, Toffee. The reason he resonated so strong in the role is because they are complete parallels narratively.
A big issue with Star vs compared to The Owl House is the way the show is framed. In Star vs, our protagonist is Star, a member of the Butterfly family. The Butterfly family are, objectively, violent, oppressive, genocidal colonialists who subjugate and impoverish monsterkind ever since they stole their land. This is in sharp contrast to The Owl House, where Belos is an invasive colonialist who wants to commit genocide against the witches and demons of the Boiling Isles, and he is the villain.
Toffee, despite his wrongdoings against Marco and Star (aka children) specifically and own personal issues with his ego, is rooted completely and entirely in fighting against his oppressors: The Butterfly Family. I could go into how the show frames him as a villain in general is really really awful but that’s a side tangent. The monsters in Star vs are mostly passive towards their oppression, but Toffee is one of the only ones actively fighting his own oppression. This thematically ties him to Eda above every other character in Star Vs by far to me, a criminal outlaw whose main crime is refusing to conform to an oppressive system and actively fights against it (especially in latter seasons), who is also extremely skilled and powerful in magic (Toffee is a historian and a scholar who was able to swiftly defeat the entirety of the MHC without any effort on his part, so he for sure would deserve the Most Powerful Witch On The Boiling Isles title).
Going to address this before it comes up as well, but Toffee hating magic isn’t some “haha, gotcha!” either. The way magic works in Star vs is fundamentally different than in the Boiling Isles. The Butterfly family hoards and abuses magic to oppress, control, and commit atrocities and maintain their power. The Boiling Isles’s magic is intrinsically tied into the witches’ and demons’ culture and biology and is something all of them have. They’re different types of magic, he doesn’t hate magic as a baseline in every universe, it’s just the magic used to literally kill his people.
Their thematic parallels are what mainly convinced us on Toffee being the clear Eda tie in, but there’s other less important things as well:
Toffee can corrupt magic like Eda is shown to be able to do. It’s something unique to him that no one else is able to do.
More silly, but the whole detaching and reattaching limbs thing is another commonality.
With Solaria as our (very obvious) Belos, Eclipsa feels more significant in a role that fits her narratively rather than just a personality swap. And there’s another character in The Owl House that follows Eclipsa way better imo.
Also, I think the au is way more interesting if personalities are at least somewhat different instead of direct matches—otherwise, it’s just telling the same story with different character designs. Figuring out how one character with a different personality from another character could end up in the same narrative position as them is a lot of fun, and are some of the aspects of this au that were most excited to share!
