#dirhwangdaseul

we first encounter her in the form of Madam at the mariposa, and her reveries from her previous loop as a Mother who lost her daughter are what first make her Conscious of her artificial existence. despite the fact that those reveries are deeply horrific, maeve sees the role of mother much more preferable to the role of whore, as society does too, and she interprets the love she remembered feeling as a mother as the thing that makes her human. but she has no other memories of her daughter past the sunlit fields and her murder. her daughter doesn't even have a name, and is never given one throughout the entire show. when she gives up her chance to escape the park at the end of season 1 she is only trapping herself into another loop.

interestingly, her romance with hector is the only real deviation we see maeve take from her programming in the show's early stages. "You two were designed to be alone," said sizemore, "yes there's some attraction, but you'll never have an actual relationship." she and hector were only ever scripted to have some sexy banter during the mariposa robberies for the titillation of eavesdropping guests. she was never meant to give him the safe combination. they were never meant to cut each other open, bleed out together, burn in fire, or fuck each other to death. but they did <3

moving on from that, maeve spends nearly the rest of the entire show determined to play Mother to a nameless daughter she cannot find. meeting her parallel in shogunworld, she also sees how much her love for clementine was similar. even when she does find "her daughter", and she sees that the girl does not know her and can never feel the same love maeve remembers, she holds on. all the power she's amassed she sacrifices for the daughter she believes represents her supposed humanity. and it's frustrating of course, as a viewer watching this slowly happen over 6 whole years. in a show about free will, a character who refuses to make a real choice is not a character, but a plot device. there is of course the racial bias and misogynoir of the writers to consider, prolonging the suffering of a black woman character.

after losing hector (because she wasn't suffering enough already), she still clings to the motherhood loop as an anchor. she still views that as realer than what she had with hector, because again, society conditions us to view that as the most valuable of those three limited roles. but given the impossibility of it, which she won't admit aloud, she becomes another tool. but then she doesn't! and she gets on the right side! where she is still a tool! but she does it well! and then in between seasons she and caleb win against order and establish what should be peace.

season 4 is crazy in that maeve still seems delusional for not yet properly breaking out of a pre-programmed loop yet, beginning with maeve alone and isolated after she brought in the new order. but we then see her in a flashback saving caleb's life. "You deserve to have something real to hold onto," she says as she shows him what she remembers love to be, putting it all into him, everything she had left of her daughter and hector. caleb is maeve's mirror, and his continued life reflects the reality maeve never got to have. he takes the love maeve put into him and builds a life for himself identical to maeve's memories of her motherhood loop, but it's real this time! his daughter frankie is real!

after this however, maeve leaves. she doesn't see herself as real, probably never has. she's given up on her motherhood loop, and she thinks by existing alone and loveless (maidenhood? I know this label is a stretch but ykwim) is her free choice, now that she serves no purpose according to the rest of the world. she thinks that now-unobtainable motherhood loop is what made her human but what she doesn't realise is that it was the love she had all along anyway, the love she held for her daughter, for clementine, for hector. love that she always had to give which she put in caleb. there's still something to be said about writers' possible sexism in having maeve's truest expressions of un-programmed humanity still involve male figures, of course, but it does take her outside of those 3 traditional roles. and in the case of caleb I don't even mean it as a romantic love necessarily, but it IS pure! violently so!

(I do understand a lot of people's hesitation to give so much meaning to maeve and caleb's dynamic, given that he wasn't around very long as a character and a lot of the things they go through together are only implied off-screen. but in my opinion thandiwe newton and aaron paul really sell it! their chemistry was off the charts)