#saphy

Inferiority issues

I kinda covered some of Miriam’s inferiority issues already in my previous ramble about Kiwi: specifically, how she begins to get somewhere with this and feel less inferior and more inspired to try her best when she sees that Kiwi isn’t perfect and is actually a bit like her too in this regard. But what I didn’t talk about there was why she feels that way in the first place, because this was clearly never just about Kiwi outclassing her on this particular adventure. Kiwi’s presence may have brought that out of her more (at first), but this was always a deeper, underlying problem Miriam had in general.

There’s almost certainly a specific reason that can be pointed to as to why this is, and just like with Kiwi, it’s about her parents.

Miriam’s parents left her with her grandma before she could remember, and Saphy used to tell her they’d come back for her one day, except they never did. Miriam admits that even though it’s kind of ridiculous, she used to sort of hope that if she made herself into someone heroic and famous, her parents would realise what a mistake they made leaving her and come back. Which, though she doesn’t put this part into words, ultimately boils down to the fact that she feels (or, at least, felt) like her parents abandoned her because she wasn’t good enough in the first place.

This is obviously irrational – geez, she was a baby when they left her, her parents couldn’t possibly have known how “good” or not she’d grow up to be. This clearly has nothing to do with the kind of person Miriam ever was and is really just about her parents being people who didn’t want to raise a kid. Miriam herself has even figured out by now that this is irrational of her – but it seems like she wasn’t aware of that when she was younger. Growing up with that looming over her entire sense of worth as a person is going to leave a psychological mark, no matter how irrational she knows it is now.

(Saphy kind of made a big mistake by telling Miriam at first that her parents would come back for her sometime. That just resulted in Miriam feeling like she was doing something wrong every day they didn’t. There’s no way Saphy would have done that on purpose, though; she must have believed, to begin with, that Miriam’s parents (which included Saphy’s own kid!) really were going to come back… until it became very clear that, oh dear, no, they weren’t.)

Because of all this, Miriam is just constantly assuming she’s not good enough at all times, even when it makes no rational kind of sense to think that the problem could be with her, or that anyone else would be thinking that. She even expects to be judged and looked down on by Saphy and Kiwi, the two people who most obviously would never do that to her.

When she’s heading back home at the end of Act 5, Miriam says Saphy would never be disappointed in her, and then corrects herself to “she’d never show it”. Despite how consistently supportive Saphy always tries to be to her, Miriam is so insecure that part of her imagines her grandma is judging her and thinking less of her and is just too nice to say it. Nooo, Miriam.

And when Miriam plays the Act 5 Overseer song the first time, she’s all insecure and assuming Kiwi will judge her skills and think she sucks because they’re a proper musician, unlike her. This is Kiwi, who’s barely capable of thinking a bad thing about anyone, but somehow Miriam expects she’d be an exception to this. Plus, her playing actually sounds lovely and isn’t bad at all! But when it doesn’t work, she immediately assumes it’s because she played it badly, rather than that the song was simply never going to work in that form in the first place. (This is delightfully similar to how the Overseer song in Act 4 fails the first time and Kiwi takes it to be their fault rather than realising there must be another factor at play.)

At least Miriam does show a little progress in this area as their adventure continues. When she broke Kiwi out of the Rulle jail and told them afterwards that she was pretty awesome and heroic, I felt kinda bad for her. Kiwi is the one person who would have agreed that it was awesome of her and made her feel good about herself! …except that they were unconscious the whole time and never got to see her heroics.

Still, this doesn’t seem to bother Miriam too much, and she was capable of admitting in the first place that she did an awesome thing. Seems like she’s coming to realise by this point that she actually is pretty good at bailing Kiwi out of tight spots right when they need it most. She’s an important part of this saving-the-world partnership!

Getting mad about it

Until Miriam starts making progress and feeling perhaps a little bit less inferior, though, her main method of coping with these sorts of feelings appears to be to not-very-healthily turn them into anger on the surface.

Towards the beginning, her jealousy of Kiwi outclassing her in the hero department can get pretty overtly bitter at times. And then in Xiatian, Miriam spends a lot of it being super mad about Audrey showing them up and making them look useless at every turn. (She can probably let herself be more extreme with her anger in this instance because Audrey is not on her side; it’s just natural to be angry at an enemy, right?) She gets perhaps a liiittle too gleeful about the possibility of only-semi-accidentally poisoning Audrey, too.

Along similar lines to this, Miriam also has a bit of a tendency to turn to violence as the first option when solving problems, even when Kiwi keeps trying to suggest a more peaceful approach. It says a lot about her compared to Audrey that she does defer to Kiwi and let them try diplomacy when they bring it up, despite this making her feel yet again like Kiwi’s better than her – but it’s still notable that violence is usually Miriam’s go-to solution to begin with.

During one of the conversations with her in Mohabumi, Miriam mentions that her specialisation in magic is blowing stuff up. When Kiwi is shocked at how violent that is, Miriam protests that that’s just what her magic does. Apparently she didn’t actually choose this specialisation. Another witch in Mohabumi explains that all witches have individual differences in their powers and that nobody really knows why – but I’m willing to bet that Miriam’s particularly explodey powers are a manifestation of all of her suppressed emotional frustration at herself and her place in the world.

This might be why she finds dancing to be so helpful! She’s finally found some physical outlet for everything she’s stressed about and bottling up, a way that she can let it out through action rather than words, but without being violent and risking anyone getting hurt.

Towards the end of the story, especially after the dancing and the self-reflection (more on that in a moment), most of Miriam’s angry outbursts get directed towards herself instead. This still isn’t healthy yet, but it is something of an improvement in that she’s starting to realise what her actual problems are, even if she’s then bitterly beating herself up for them. She also keeps using her anger to mask the more vulnerable emotions that she’s finding it very scary to admit to, because being angry feels familiar and is easier than openly showing how scared she is. Without that, she might not have been able to admit to so much of her vulnerability in the first place.

I like to think that, post-ending, having come to like herself a lot more and make progress on all of her issues and having a best friend in Kiwi, Miriam’s speciality in magic shifts and becomes something less destructive and more creative. It would be a lovely sign of her growth!

(…Though, knowing Miriam, that’d first manifest in her suddenly not being as good at blowing stuff up as she’s supposed to be and not understanding why and feeling like a failure again, nooo, Miriam. At least Kiwi and her grandma would be there for her to encourage her to try new things and discover what else she’s good at.)

Being an outsider

Once Miriam stops feeling quite so bitterly jealous of Kiwi and the two of them begin to feel like a proper team, things stop being so much about her trying to prove herself. Her arc shifts into being more about her self-discovery and reflection on her place in the world.

This is especially because of the places they head next, of course. Experiencing Rulle’s prejudice against witches must have reminded Miriam that being a witch is seen as weird and different and possibly bad. This is something she’d probably always felt at least a little bit while living as one of only two witches in Delphi, but being in Rulle would have brought those feelings right to the surface.

Then they head to Chaandesh, where witches come from, where she should fit in…  but even before she gets there, she seems to be subconsciously expecting to not belong. On the boat on the way there, she talks about how she knew this place existed but that it never even crossed her mind to visit, describing it as “like a special club, that I wasn’t invited to”. Sure enough, the witches of Mohabumi have all these complicated uses for magic and lives built around it in a way that’s nothing like what she’s used to, and it just feels alien to her.

This feeds into her inferiority issues, too; being different from what witches apparently “should” be like just makes her feel messed-up and broken. While struggling with her new broom, she laments that to the locals she must look like “the failure witch who can’t even do basic witch things”. (Yet it’s incredibly impressive that she can get the crappy tourist broom to fly at all, and she gets it working passably well before much longer – again, she’s beating herself up completely undeservedly when she’s actually doing great.)

During one of the conversations in Mohabumi, Miriam comments that she likes to think Saphy grew up here, even though she has no proof, just because it makes her happy to assume that. This kind of thing is pretty much what she does the whole time she’s in the city to combat how unfamiliar it all is: cling to the few things there that are familiar to her. She enjoys the music at the Crater only because the band’s from Delphi like her; she also mentions at one point that the only candy from here she likes is one that reminds her of her grandma’s cooking back home.

In that conversation at the Crater, she laments that she hoped she’d learn something about herself by being here, implying that she feels she actually didn’t. But the thing is, she did. She learned just how important her grandma is to her, and that their little house in the forest outside of Delphi – that’s her home, whether it’s where witches are supposed to belong or not. It just took being taken away from all that into somewhere new and strange for her to realise it.

She starts missing her home even as early as Act 3; if you talk to her during the coffee night on the pirate ship, she’ll mention having never been so far from home before and reluctantly admit that she’s feeling homesick. There’s also some very hard-to-find dialogue shortly after her broom breaks in which she admits that it was her grandma’s broom, that Saphy told her it’d be hers one day when she was old enough, and that the day that happened was probably the happiest day of her life. Aww, Miriam! No wonder she’s so upset at losing it. It must have felt like a piece of home, and of her grandma, still with her even in all these strange lands – except now even that’s gone, too.

Kiwi tells Miriam on their way out of Chaandesh that you don’t necessarily need to fit in anywhere to be happy. Which, though she can’t quite put it into those words just yet, is basically also what Miriam herself learned back there – that she’s happiest at home with her grandma where she can be herself, never mind worrying about if she “fits in” with everyone around her.

Of course, the other thing that lets being an outsider not sting so bad is having a friend there with you. Kiwi, the precious bean that they are, understands this straight away; during some of Miriam’s dialogue in Mohabumi as she’s feeling like she doesn’t belong, they try to reassure her with, “you have me!”

But Miriam’s response is just, “That’s nice.” It’s still a little difficult for her to openly admit just how much Kiwi’s company has been helping her, isn’t it.

Friendship is scary (but worth it!)

The final focus of Miriam’s character arc, of course, is these difficulties she has with friendship. This is partly influenced by the outsider issues making it harder for her to feel a connection to anyone in the first place, and partly her grumpiness born from her inferiority issues making it rarer for anybody else to want to get close to her.

But Miriam was probably kind of glad that her general grumpy attitude made people stay away from her (and might even have cultivated it on purpose for this reason) – because her bigger issue is that she’s simply afraid of getting close to people. Doing that might mean she’ll have to open up about her emotions and worries and problems, which is scary; it’s much easier to just hide everything she feels beneath that bitter angry shell forever.

As she confesses to Kiwi after the fact, Miriam’s decision to go home at the end of Act 5 was never really because she was too injured to go on. She was just scared of how close she was getting to them, and of how much talking about her feelings she’d been doing lately, and she wanted to run away from it all. It’s almost certainly no coincidence that this came shortly after the first time Miriam openly admitted that she considered Kiwi a friend.

I also think that this does have something to do with Miriam being hit by Audrey’s lightning, though. Not exactly in the sense of her being physically injured, but rather in terms of how that affected her emotionally and dug at those issues she has with intimacy. Though she was in too much pain to move, Miriam was still conscious the entire time Kiwi was carrying her down the hill. She was even still capable of speaking, barely – but she didn’t voice any kind of thanks to Kiwi for helping her out, as if she didn’t want to do so.

Being not just emotionally but very physically vulnerable and so literally relying on Kiwi for support like that had to have felt terrifying for her. She must have been so afraid of having to handle more of that kind of thing if she continued to go with them to that dangerous mountain. Miriam flinches initially at Kiwi’s goodbye hug probably not only because she’s physically injured and ouch, but also because oh god more emotional intimacy help what do???

…But then she can’t help but relax into the hug anyway, because she really does need it, even as she’s trying to cover it up by calling Kiwi’s concern for her “gross”. And also because, despite how scary it is, of course she cares about Kiwi and worries about them and is going to miss them. Most of her dialogue for the rest of this scene is all worrying about Kiwi being alone on the mountain and not wanting them to get hurt and mmsghsdgh they’re FRIENDS.

(Can we also talk about how great it is that Miriam has this major personal conflict based around her fear of emotional intimacy, and it’s presented as entirely platonic? Emotional intimacy with another person is not inherently romantic, and fear of it is a fun thing to explore in characters that doesn’t deserve to be restricted to only romantic plots. I love that this game’s writer understands this!)

Back in apocalyptic-Langtree, after confessing to the real reason she left, Miriam insists in her self-hatred that this means she left for “no good reason”. But really, this was just as good a reason as if it had been about her being injured. She needed to leave because of the struggles she was going through – just emotional rather than physical ones. That’s still important, too! It’s not her fault that she finds this kind of thing hard. In no way was she callously leaving Kiwi to go risk their life on a mountain just because she didn’t care.

Really, Miriam probably needed this time out to reflect on things. It let her realise that, actually, she would rather face up to all that scary intimate emotional stuff than leave Kiwi to tackle such dangerous ordeals alone. No matter how frightening it is, getting to be there for her best friend when they might need her is absolutely worth it. Her growing friendship with Kiwi and selfless desire to help them gave her the courage to finally face up to all these icky feely feelings of hers that she’d just been hiding from this whole time. They are friends.

Seeing Miriam join in with the Wandersong – and not just begrudgingly singing along, but really putting her whole heart into it – is a wonderful sign of how much she’s grown. The Miriam at the beginning of the story would never have done that. She’s become a lot more willing to openly express herself, to express emotions that aren’t just bitterness and anger, even in ways that aren’t specifically about her friendship with Kiwi, and it’s lovely.

Similarly, during the credits, Miriam’s default face has changed into something not quite so grumpy-looking. She’s still not exactly smiling, but she’s no longer so angry at everything because of her issues with herself, nor is she putting up such a prickly protective shell to push others away.

In the very last scene of the credits, Kiwi thanks Miriam for saving the world with them, much like you’d expect them to – saving the world and being a hero was what they most wanted out of this adventure, and they couldn’t have done it without her help. But then Miriam answers it with, simply, “Thanks for being my friend.” She knows that, in the end, that’s been the most important part of all of this for her, even more so than getting to save the world.

Saphy is good

Another thing I really loved in the end credits was learning that the real reason Saphy sent Miriam on a quest to save the world, and told Kiwi to go with her, is simply because she wanted her granddaughter to make a friend before the world ended. She wasn’t even expecting Miriam to succeed and save the world – not because she didn’t believe in her, but because she just didn’t really think it was likely to be possible at all. But that’s okay! More important than that is that her granddaughter doesn’t die lonely and friendless as the world ends. She always knew that this was what mattered most.

And of course Saphy couldn’t just tell Miriam that she wanted her to go and make a friend. Miriam would have been all “psh, that’s dumb” and flatly refused to try (because really she’s terrified of getting close to someone and opening up about her insecurities and there’s no way she’d have ever made herself do that on purpose). So Saphy had to lie to her and tell her it was about saving the world in order for her to go on the quest at all.

…Which, unfortunately, led to Miriam thinking that that was what her grandmother expected of her. And so she ended up thinking that she was a failure and not good enough for even her grandma, both when Saphy suddenly recruits some random singing dope who’s apparently better at this than her, and then when Miriam comes home near the end having not quite saved the world. Which is kind of heartbreaking, but I don’t know what else Saphy could really have done to avoid it. At least Miriam knows by the end that her grandma isn’t and never was disappointed in her at all.

Saphy’s “I like this one” when meeting Kiwi and deciding they should travel with Miriam is so very good. It’s not about Kiwi having the ability to save the world (even though it turns out they actually do), but about Kiwi being the exact kind of wholesome ray of sunshine that Miriam needed to gradually coax her to open up and trust them and consider them a friend. Saphy could see that about them right away. She knew exactly what she was doing when she told the two of them to travel together.

(Can Saphy also adopt Kiwi, please? As I discussed a lot in their post, they really need a decent parent figure in their life.)