part 2 to my mindscape theory post! This post deals with the mindscapes in the Owl House
First up we have ‘Understanding Willow’, where Amity screws up and she and Luz have to fix it and be gay!
In the episode, the problem starts with photo memories. Willow’s memories, to be exact. The memories are pulled out of her brain with magic tweezers, and she suffers no ill effects…right up until Amity commits memory arson to keep her friendship with Willow a secret.
When Amity burns the photos, Willow physically feels the effects of her memories burning (cough like Stan cough). Her body temperature rises, to the point where actual steam starts coming out of her ears. She gets way clumsier as well. Like the memory-eraser gun from Gravity Falls, this suggests that things that affect memory physically harm your brain. And much like Fiddleford, as the rest of Willow’s memories catch on fire her mental state devolves to the point where she can’t even do basic tasks correctly or remember her best friends. The destruction of the photo memories affecting Willow like that also suggests that those things still have a connection to the person’s brain despite being separated.
Now to fix this, Luz has to go into Willow’s actual mindscape. Amity goes with her, and they land in a forest with memory-pictures set into the trees. It’s colorful, light, airy and stable: it doesn’t glitch or have no color like Stan’s and it’s not damaged in any way (minus the fires). This is pretty much what we’d expect from a young girl who hasn’t had many traumatic experiences yet. More on that in a minute, though.
The trees are a part of Willow’s mindscape for several reasons. First, she’s a plant witch. She lives plants. Makes sense she’d have a forest for a mindscape. Second, trees can represent stability and protection. Willow is very physically strong. She is extremely protective of those she loves. Between an anxiety-ridden Gus, a guilt-ridden (for no reason, I might add) Luz, an Amity who always wants to prove herself and Hunter, she is the most emotionally and mentally stable of her main friend group. This is further reflected in ‘For The Future’ where Willow finally breaks down and admits how much she misses her dads and how stressed she is as the leader. Before that, she refuses to break. To Willow, her friends are counting on her to be the reliable one, so she can’t fall. She has to be the tree they can lean against.
(Obviously this isn’t a long-term sustainable way to think: you can’t pour water from an empty pitcher. You’ve gotta let yourself take breaks and Willow doesn’t. Other people have to remind her, ‘hey, it’s okay for you to let your feelings out’.)
On to the memories: Willow’s memories present themselves as snapshots. In the memory of her on the swings with her dads, all that an invader sees on the surface is a still moment that turns into a sort of video. In this, the memories are more like windows than doors. You have to climb through the window in order to access the whole memory, as opposed to opening a door. I’m unsure why this is, exactly, but it may be why memory photos are memory photos: because again, they’re directly tied to the memories themselves.
Inner Willow! This is interesting to me. After all, we didn’t see an Inner Stan. Inner Willow can’t burn the memories by herself, but Amity’s actions inadvertently help her burn every memory, good and bad, of Willow and Amity’s friendship. Perhaps this means that the fiery form Inner Willow takes is a physical representation of the betrayal she felt when Amity ended their friendship. Once Amity apologizes and promises to do better and be better, Inner Willow calms down. She (partly) forgives Amity, and Lumity is left alone to fix the last of the burned memories. Willow is aware of what they did after she wakes up, another difference from GF. Why?
I have a theory that an Inner Self is simply a memory self that was able to escape the memory they came from due to high emotion. It would make sense for Inner Willow to have come from a memory where the betrayal and sadness and anger let her escape. Even though she was asleep just like Stan was, Willow still knows what happened because her Inner Self was free and Stan doesn’t know what happened to him because his wasn’t.
Keep the Inner Self thing in mind, it’ll be important in a sec.
On to Emperor Belos, or as I like to call him, Emperor Bitch-face. Spoilers for Hollow Mind ahead!
So Belos’ initial mindscape that Luz and Hunter wind up in is not like either Willow’s or Stan’s. It’s an art gallery, displaying modified memories as art pieces. Like Willow’s, these pictures imply that to see the memory in full one has to climb through the painting (and we see later that Luz and Hunter do have to do so) and like Stan’s, the mindscape itself just looks extremely stifling. There’s an even heavier oppressiveness to the air in Belos’ mindscape. It’s not the same as the weight of Stan’s depression, it’s more like ‘I have control here, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You are mine.’ The memories are of course from Belos’ point of view, which is why they’re modified: Luz in particular sees a memory of the failed Pertification Ceremony in Season 1, from Belos’ view of “I defeated them and graciously let them live.”
Soon enough, two ‘Inner Selves’ appear. One is a masked child Philip, and one is the adult Belos Hunter and Luz know. They both think the adult is the true Inner Belos and the kid is Belos’ sense of guilt/innocence. But ‘Inner Belos’ is actually the souls of all the Palismen Belos has consumed, and the kid is Inner Belos trying to get the teens’ guards down. This says a lot about the level of power an Inner Self has: they can change shape easily. Although, that may be unique to Belos. We know he can change shape in the physical realm due to the Palismen he’s eaten, so maybe that is reflected in his Inner Self’s ability to do the same.
Given that Inner Belos’ first form came from his childhood, it stands to reason to assume that the memory the Inner Self came from was something to do with that. Perhaps when Phillip killed his brother, that created a memory with really intense emotions and either then or whenever Belos got reminded of that memory, Inner Belos busted out.
Later, Luz and Hunter then fall through into his real mindscape. Now it’s more like Willow’s mind: a forest with memory pictures in each tree. But this forest is even more oppressive than the gallery above. The trees are twisted and dead and gray, there’s cobwebs everywhere and there is little to no color and no visible escape. It’s actually almost a perfect blend of Willow’s and Stan’s mindscapes, as a damaged forest. I think this reflects how low Belos has sunk. He is rottenly evil, and that rot has made its home in his mind. Even as he thinks himself a hero, his real mindscape shows the truth.
The fact that there is a false mindscape projected over the true one either proves that Belos has a lot of control over his mindscape OR is a reflection of the layers of lies he’s told. He may be so wrapped up in the narrative he’s constructed that he genuinely believes his own lies. I mean, given how he was going on and on about ‘trying to save Caleb’s/Luz’s soul’ and how the Titan said ‘he needs to be the hero in his own story’ and how he kept making Caleb over and over again just to get it right, that second option isn’t far off.
