you will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out

Elendira changes outfits more than any other character in the series. She's got a different look for practically every new scene she's in! When taken together, they communicate not just a cohesive personal style but also a wealth of fascinating little hints about her intentions, motivations, priorities and psychological state.

Because Elendira is not just chic, she is practical and deliberate in her style choices. She oscillates and negotiates between these two extremes according to the circumstances she's in. Her outfits are more flamboyant when she's on her airships — or around allies like Legato — than when she's going out to fight. Which is honestly a breath of fresh air for a female character. We've all seen those depictions of women in fight scenes wearing, like, stiletto heels, tiny, tight club dresses and long hair all over the place? Not so miss Crimsonnail. But she still retains a diva touch with her signature pillbox caps and boyar-style hats.

In terms of silhouettes she seems to favor bold, geometric lines, layering in a way that effectively hides her body armor. She understands her own body, sometimes feminizing it with light coats and blazers that flare out at the hem to show off her waist. At other times she opts to obscure every shape with huge rectangular coats. She wears sensible boots with no heel to them — she's tall enough already, and heels just aren't practical, especially on a planet covered with sand! Even the length of her hair is played with and tells the viewer something about her. When she makes her grand first appearance, she seems to be going for about as fem a look as she ever does — emphasizing her figure (which blows Meryl's mind, so you can tell she succeeded) and leaving her hair long and flowing. She is making an ENTRANCE, she is here to make short work of Legato and she does it in style. She is in control here, she has her airship, she feels untouchable. In other scenes, however, her hair is usually up, partially braided away or tucked under a hat.

You can even read meaning into her lipstick; when we see her at her most blank and despondent, she's not wearing any. And it gradually rubs off of her lips during her fight with Livio. Oh God, the progression of her appearance during that fight. She starts out buttoned up, hair up, cap on, dark lipstick on. And the more serious the fight gets — the more she realizes she's actually in danger for once — the more her image starts to fall apart. She throws her coat aside. Then her hat. By then time she dies, nothing is left of Elendira the Crimsonnail but her body armor and her own deadly weapon piercing through it all. Her lipstick has smudged away. Her hair is down, mussed up and hanging all around her face as she cries in disbelief and says her final words.

And then we never see her face again. Once she is dead, it's fully or partially obscured from every angle. As far as creative choices go, I interpret that as a kindness. Because yes, Elendira died like she lived — intensely and desperately, in a blaze of strength and glory — but she didn't want to die like that. In her own eyes it wasn't an end that suited her, and so we, the audience, don't get to see her in her disgrace. For Elendira, her appearance is part of the protective walls she built around herself throughout a life that can't have been easy or kind. She chose to wear beautiful armor, just like she chose the dramatic, apocalyptic finality of Knives' grand plan. She clawed at anything pretty she could find in a world that is all sand and ruins and grief.

So yeah, it would be important not to put all your love in one person. That kind of codependence is bad even while you are both alive, tbh. But if you love many, they will help carry you through your grief over the loss of one. And it will hurt, for a while. But eventually you’ll have the good memories to cherish and new people to love.

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

How should Christians concerned for the environment read these passages? I know this isn't your speciality, but you're well-read on theology and I value your opinions so I want to hear what you have so say.

Ooh, thanks for the question! (And for valuing my opinion.) These topics themselves may not be my specialty, but Biblical interpretation is my bread and butter. And actually terraforming in Isaiah is one of my minor interests! As always, this came out...too long.

In short, I think that we should read these verses not as presenting a natural sort of wilderness, but an unnatural and chaotic space that occurs as the result of sin. Without looking at the verses or their context, my immediate thought was that it's not good to have cities become deserted and be taken over by wild animals. God creates a hospitable place for human life and this is the warning that that can be undone. These verses are really about demonstrating God's power over creation, and their context is more political than environmental. We can also compare this to images of redemption, where the land rejoices and blossoms and supports life. That's the real dichotomy in these images, is land bringing death or land giving life. These verses also aren't really about the environment, but I think it is possible to draw a fairly direct line to care for the environment here if you want to come on a longer journey with me.

Looking deeper, I always think the first task is to contextualize the verse. As you said, these are all messages of judgement. I'm going to look at Isaiah 34 most closely, because it's proximity to Isaiah 35 is really interesting. So we have 11-15, which describes pretty normal wilderness, for the most part. The animals that will live there are the hawks, hedgehogs, owls, ravens will live there, and there will be no people there, which at this point mostly just sounds like a place I'd like to visit. Then we get nettles, thorns, jackals, goat-demons and Lilith, which is less appealing.

As an aside, Lilith here should just be interpreted as some kind of demon or a foreign goddess, which is what she was at the time this was written. The idea of Lilith as the first wife of Adam comes much later in Jewish thought and isn't part of the tradition we share with Jews. I don't think Christians ought to consider ourselves as having access to that interpretation. As for "goat-demon," I've also seen that translated as wild goat; it seems to be one of the many words in this passage that we just aren't sure about, like "hedgehog." (Hawk, hedgehog, and owl here are actually all words we can't identify.) Lilith and the goat-demons are also just kind of malevolent creatures that ancient Israelites believed lived in the wilderness, so it's honestly still pretty typical wilderness.

Looking back though we can see that God isn't just "rewilding" Edom. (And if God were-- well, my feelings on the pitfalls of rewilding are for another post.) Earlier in 34, the mountains will flow with the blood of the slaughtered, the host of heaven will rot away, and the streams of Edom will be turned into pitch and the soil into sulfur. There's really no good word in English for these streams, which are wadis, and are only streams when there's heavy rain. (Readers in the American southwest may be familiar with arroyos, which are very similar. For you in England and me in Missouri, there's really no comparable natural feature.) For the wadis to dry up, we're talking about drought, and then fire, to get pitch and sulfur. But what we're really talking about is the judgement and power of God.

This isn't nature "healing" after humans leave, this is destruction, this is ruin, this is death. "There too the buzzards shall gather, each one with its mate" (34:15b). Isaiah is writing this (this is from First Isaiah, which is still attributed to Isaiah ben Amoz) in the devastation of the Assyrian captivity. It's not specifically about creation care or our failures thereof causing this. Victor Zinkuratire, one of the contributing writers to the Global Bible Commentary (2004), writes "This is poetic language and the desert might as well be a theological description of all the damage physico-ecological, social and spiritual that arrogant and greedy human beings cause. This is the kind of desert that many African countries are in today." So one answer to how do we read this for the environment is don't; read it about politics and warfare, and understand that it's not saying war will return the earth to some kind of nature preserve.

Ultimately, this passage is about judgement (and then hope, in Isaiah 35) in the face of geopolitical strife. Isaiah contains a lot of really direct political admonishments, down to criticizing treaties that nations drew to defend against Assyria that failed (Isaiah's verdict: You should have trusted God, not generals). Isaiah is not predicting climate change, and I want to make that clear.

With that said, I do think we can see pretty clear parallels to climate change in the text. Jumping out of Isaiah, back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Israelites have pretty clear responsibilities to the land, which will "vomit" them out if they make it unclean (Lev 18:28, Deut 12:29). (This is of course related to the purity code, but obviously I'm not suggesting that homosexuality is what's going to cause this.) The ancient Israelite had a strong sense that sin corrupted the land (Num. 35:33-34, Isa 24:5-7, Ezek 22:24, Ezra 9:11 are all recommended by my study Bible as references here). I think Christians who are concerned for the environment need to really grasp that there is a way in which that is literally true and need to see the way that sin has real consequences.

The sin of greed is destroying the earth. We know that civilizational collapse is possible from climate change. We said really often in my Law and Narrative class that we are not punished for our sins, but we are punished by our sins. As an American, I can say that we've learned this again and again with ecological disasters that we've caused, like the Dustbowl and wild boars and devastating monocultures. BUT irresponsible agricultural practice and its consequences is really more Levitical than Isaian.

Anyway, one final thought is the transition into Isaiah 35. After all of this destruction, we turn to redemption and the very first words of redemption are "The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with singing" (35:1). In redemption, both the land and humanity thrive. So when we see places overrun with wild animals as a message of judgement in scripture, we can think of that as something being out of balance, or the tension being off. Scripture does not affirm an anti-human environmentalism, we have a place in the world. I prefer to think of that place as stewardship rather than dominion, but even reading Genesis as giving us dominion over the earth, we have a responsibility to be the sort of just and merciful ruler that God is and not to take more than the land can bear.

Resources:

The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV, 2010)

The Global Bible Commentary, Daniel Patte, 2004