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The Owl House And Restorative Justice

At the end of Season 1 of The Owl House, it is revealed that Lilith, the main overarching antagonist of that season, was the one to curse her sister Eda, one of the protagonists, to win a tournament when they were teenagers. This information causes Eda to fly into a screaming rage and attack Lilith, and understandably so.

Eda’s curse is essentially a chronic illness, one that, in Eda’s own words, has ruined her life, being the reason she’s considered a social outcast and why, before meeting King and Luz, she hadn’t gotten close to anyone in years. In season 2, it’s revealed that the curse is why she pushed away her partner Raine to the point that they broke it off with her, and that during a particularly bad flareup, she accidentally maimed her own father, leaving him half blind and with permanent nerve damage to his hands, making him unable to continue working as a Palisman carver. The curse has ruled Eda’s life for decades now, so to Eda, this is the ultimate betrayal.

In the first episode of Season 2, Lilith has defected from the Emperor’s Coven, split the curse between Eda and herself to mitigate the symptoms for her sister, and has moved in with Eda at the Owl House. While Lilith herself still feels guilty and feels she has to make it up to Eda, everyone else, Eda included, has seemingly either forgiven her or chosen to look past it. Eda even makes fun of her for feeling bad about cursing her, and Lilith’s guilt is seemingly absent for the rest of the series. 

The response to this was… Less than stellar, shall we say. A lot of people were angry, saying Lilith got away with her crimes without even a slap on the wrist, and that Eda’s forgiveness of her was far too sudden.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of critique. Amity spent years bullying Willow after her parents forced her to break off their friendship, and when she began trying to mend that relationship, the response from fans was that Willow should have been a lot more angry at Amity, and that they went back to being besties far too soon. I’ve even seen this criticism leveled at Hunter for the things he did while working for Belos, at Vee for impersonating Luz for months to trick her mother, and at Luz for hiding the fact that she helped Philip find the Collector from her friends. And it does seem strange for the show to keep tripping on this same point again and again.

Except, it’s not really. Because I think that, when viewing this show from a different angle, those supposed flaws are actually symptoms of something very important to understand – The Owl House operates on a system of crime and punishment that is very different from our world’s.

More specifically, our world mostly utilizes retributive justice. The world of The Owl House utilizes restorative justice.

So first, what do those terms mean? Broadly, they’re two different forms of handling interpersonal disputes, or dealing with crime. 

Retributive justice is the one our current justice system uses, where the focus is primarily on punishing the perpetrator. Retributive justice can mean detention, suspension, expulsion, jail time, monetary fines, some kinds of community service, exile, or in more severe cases, corporal punishment or the death penalty. It’s the lens most people view the world through, where if someone hurts you, hurting them back is the correct response.

Restorative justice is a very different approach, where you instead focus on helping the victim recover from what happened, and rehabilitating the perpetrator to prevent this from happening again. Restorative justice can look like verbal or written apologies, monetary compensation for costs and trauma, therapy for both victim and perpetrator, education for the perpetrator, mediation between victim and perpetrator, a restraining order, etc. 

When viewed through a retributive lens, The Owl House lets its characters get away with a lot of shit. Lilith cursing Eda, Hunter rounding up Palismen knowing they’ll be killed, Amity tormenting Willow for years, it’s all stuff that, in a retributive environment, they should be punished for, and they’re just not. Eda is only genuinely angry at Lilith for two scenes, Amity and Willow fix their relationship very quickly once Amity starts making amends, and Hunter isn’t punished at all. 

However, I believe the story of The Owl House is best viewed not through a retributive lens, but through a restorative lens.

Let’s look at the Lilith-example again. Lilith’s offense was cursing Eda, which she did because she wanted to win a spot in the Emperor’s Coven. Knowing Eda was better than her, she cast a curse on her, thinking it would only last for a day. But when the time came, Eda forfeited the match, soon after which she transformed into the Owl Beast and was pelted with rocks until she ran. The curse turned out to be very permanent, and Lilith spent the next 20 years trying to fix her mistake by working for Belos to try to capture Eda, since he promised to heal her curse. 

However, when she finally succeeded, Belos went back on his promise. Instead of healing Eda, he ordered her to be publicly executed. When Lilith protested, Belos essentially told her to shut up, that it was the Titan’s will, and left her there. 

So, having realized her method of fixing her mistake has gone real bad, Lilith sneaks down to the Conformatorium to free Eda herself, but arrives too late and finds Luz instead. After a brief fight they end up teaming up, and Lilith leads Luz to the elevator, but they are captured by Belos and Lilith is thrown into the cage with Eda. There, she restores Eda’s partially petrified body, and after fleeing with her, Luz and King, uses a spell to split Eda’s curse evenly between their two bodies.

From a restorative justice point of view, Lilith has done pretty much everything she reasonably could do to fix things. She’s denounced the Emperor’s Coven, returned Owlbert to Luz, helped Luz find the elevator to the execution platform, saved Eda from petrification, apologized to Eda, and while there’s no way for her to cure Eda’s curse entirely, she took on half of the curse at great expense to her own health, in order to ease Eda’s symptoms. 

Eda isn’t angry anymore because in her eyes, Lilith has already fixed things with her. Punishing her more at this point is pointless. What more could Lilith do, really? What other lessons could she learn? The only thing that punishment would bring at this point would be more suffering. 

Let’s look at another example: Amity and Willow.

Amity’s offense was breaking off her friendship with Willow because she was a late-bloomer, bullying her for years, and allowing her friends to do so too. Willow is left with horrible self-esteem issues because of this, and combined with her failing grades, turned her into a horribly shy and withdrawn wallflower (no pun intended). After she’s moved to the plant track she starts actually getting better, but Amity and Boscha especially continue to torment her. While Amity’s bullying of Willow does peter out over time, Willow is clearly still extremely resentful of her. In an attempt to make Willow forget their friendship, Amity accidentally sets most of Willow’s memories on fire, leaving her confused, amnesiac, and unable to grasp basic concepts like that chairs are for sitting in.

Luz pushed Amity into fixing Willow’s brain by going into her mind together and piecing her memories back together. There, the Inner Willow revealed what happened to Luz and the audience.

At this point, Amity shows her that her parents were actually the ones who forced her to end the friendship because they didn’t think Willow was a suitably powerful or influential friend, threatening to make sure Willow would never get accepted into Hexside if Amity didn’t force her to leave. Amity then apologizes to Willow for going along with it, and for the bullying, and vows to make sure her friends never mess with Willow again. 

Willow accepts her apology, but also makes it clear that, while it’s a start, she’s not yet ready to accept Amity in her life again. Restorative justice has not been fully attained, because to Willow, Amity hasn’t fixed everything – Boscha and her squad are still bullying her, and still consider Amity one of them. This changes two episodes later, when Amity tells Boscha to grow the fuck up when she starts bullying Willow again, and joins her and Luz’s Grudgby team despite her personal issues to get Boscha to back off. Willow doesn’t make a grand gesture of forgiveness in this episode, but it is after this point where the two become comfortable around eachother again. 

Did Willow forgive Amity too quickly for years of trauma? Maybe. If she had chosen to continue keeping Amity at a distance I certainly wouldn’t have blamed her. But in the end, Amity fixed the mess she caused as best she could, and has proven herself to want to be a better person, to want to be Willow’s friend again. She worked hard to prove herself to be a person worth trusting, and Willow decided to give that trust a chance again.

And while they did become friends again, that friendship was clearly still affected by what happened, which led to bumps that the two of them had to work through. Like in Labyrinth Runners, where Amity’s overprotectiveness over Willow makes Willow feel like Amity thinks she’s incompetent, and still only sees her as the helpless person she used to be. 

Willow continuing to be mad at Amity and punishing her for what she did wouldn’t be an unreasonable reaction, but it wouldn’t have fixed anything. It would certainly have an impact on Amity, seeing her former best friend rejecting her attempts to make up for what she did, but the hurt on both sides would have continued festering, because deep down, Willow missed Amity too. 

In Hunter’s case, there’s the question of whether he can even be held responsible for his actions. The Palisman-kidnapping in specific was explicitly done under duress – if he failed he would face verbal and physical abuse, and be threatened with his nightmare scenario: getting thrown out of the Emperor’s Coven. 

And that’s not an empty threat either. Hunter has no magic, and Belos has drilled it into him that witches without magic have no future. Without the Emperor’s Coven, his only future prospects would be starving to death on the streets or wasting away in prison. Either way, Hunter would be alone, without family or friends, without a job or job prospects, without anyone to turn to for help. Any child would be terrified of that. Hunter wasn’t always acting on direct orders – in fact he defied direct orders to stay in his room in Eclipse Lake to go look for Titan’s Blood, and then again in Hollow Mind to arrest the rebels. But he made those choices based on the idea that Belos wouldn’t want him if he was a failure, and that he needed a chance to prove that he could still be useful.

And contrary to popular belief, Hunter does know right from wrong. He has a very strong moral compass, he’s just been forced to ignore it in favor of doing whatever the Emperor wants. To shut up that little voice telling him he’s doing the wrong thing, he uses what’s called a thought-terminating cliche, a statement that feels so fundamentally true that the argument need not continue. In Hunter’s case, that statement is “It’s for the greater good.” Sure, kidnapping his new friends and abducting Palismen to feed to the Emperor and threatening someone who’s been nothing but kind to him to take the portal key from her girlfriend and justifying terrorism makes his stomach feel like he swallowed a cactus and saying it out loud makes him sound like a horrible person – but it’s for the greater good. He’s doing it to serve Belos, and Belos knows what’s best. 

So by the time Hunter is out of active danger and able to rest and recover from what happened to him… what would further punishment accomplish? He already knows that he did fucked up shit while working for the EC, and he’s proven time and time again that while he’s not fighting for Belos’s approval, he’s actually a genuinely kind-hearted kid. Punishing him now would likely cause him to react very poorly, because he’s been at the wrong end of that stick so often that he’s developed severe PTSD because of it.

And if you think restorative justice is still in order – Hunter is currently hyperfixated on making sure Belos can never hurt anyone again, and for the long term, he has expressed that he wants to become a Palisman carver when he grows up. While it won’t bring back the Palismen that were killed, it will help the current Palisman population recover and reintroduce Palismen to witches who may have had to give up theirs. 

When viewed through this lens, the writing of The Owl House starts to make more sense. As a show, it is extremely forgiving towards its characters – they’re still held accountable for their actions, but as long as they’re willing to grow and learn and fix the damage they caused, they are very quickly forgiven. 

However, I do understand why these writing choices can be… controversial, so to say. Because it doesn’t feel very satisfying, does it? When someone hurts you on purpose, your first impulse would be to try to hurt them back, that’s just how people work. 

That’s the hardest thing to come to terms with when you become an advocate for prison abolition for example – you’re not just arguing for freeing a guy who got 5 years because a cop found weed in his pockets, you’re arguing for the release, and most importantly, the humanity of some of the most vile, disgusting people this planet has ever produced. Even now, when someone commits a truly awful crime and gets sent to prison for life, my first thought is “Good, I hope they rot in there.” But that’s not justice. That’s just revenge. And revenge is not something we as a society should want to build our justice system on.

It’s not satisfying to see Lilith go from using Luz as a human shield in her fight against Eda to sleeping on the couch in Eda’s house within 2 episodes. It’s not satisfying to see Willow let Amity back into her life when Amity has hurt her so badly before, or to see Hunter become romantically involved with Willow after he literally abducted her the first time they met. But that satisfaction isn’t really the point. Revenge is satisfying in the moment, but an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and if someone shows a genuine willingness to change, it’s often better to give them a chance to.

However, my final point is about what happens when this approach fails. Because not everyone is willing to change. Some people, when faced with the consequences of their actions, decide to dig their heels in and refuse to admit fault, or blame the victim(s), or use those same thought-terminating cliches that Hunter used to justify their actions, “I was just following orders” being a big one.

And thus, we come to Belos.

If Belos showed a willingness to change, a genuine one, not an attempt at manipulation, should he be given the chance to? That vengeful part of me is VERY empathetically saying no. But logically, reasonably, he should be given that chance, if only because he’s a human being and no human being deserves to be mistreated. That doesn’t mean his victims are obligated to forgive him or be around him again, in fact I think that, for the sake of Hunter’s mental health, Belos should stay as far away from him as humanly possible. But he should be given the chance to start over, to truly better himself and do something good with the rest of his life.

But Belos isn’t willing to change. 

Belos is a product of a bad environment and grew up with a cult-like mentality and hatred for witches that he had to adopt for his own safety. It’s hard to break out of that mentality, but not impossible. Case in point: Caleb. The tragedy of Belos’s character to me is that he had so many chances to change, so many people to help him make that leap, but all of the people who offered him that help ended up dead by his hands because he couldn’t handle the idea that he may have been wrong.

At this point, Belos is stuck. Changing would mean not only giving up on his life’s work, but acknowledging to himself that everything he’s done, mutilating his body, killing his brother, slaughtering thousands and installing himself as God-Emperor of a population he despises more than anything in order to facilitate a genocide, was completely pointless.

He can’t admit that to himself. Especially the thing about Caleb’s death. He’s sunk-cost-fallacied himself so far into a corner that all he can really do when faced with opposing viewpoints is dig his heels in even deeper and lash out in a rage at anyone who challenges him. Even now, when his body is literally falling apart at the seams, he’s still trying to commit witch-genocide, because it’s all he has. 

Restorative justice doesn’t work in this case, because the perpetrator needs to be receptive to it. Logically you would assume the show would default to retributive justice, and characters like Willow and Camila do take a very vengeful glee in imagining themselves beating the snot out of Belos. But right now, the primary motivation of the Hexsquad and Hunter in particular when it comes to Belos is to end the threat he poses. As long as Belos is alive and free, he will continue to hurt and kill people, and if he can’t be talked down, he needs to be either contained or killed to prevent him from causing more harm.

The Owl House provides, in my opinion, a very nuanced take on restorative justice. It shows how it works in action, how different situations impact what it looks like, and what happens when it’s simply not an option. It’s not the most satisfying story to tell your audience, because when someone hurts our babies we want them to suffer, no matter how sorry they say they are. But in this case, I think that sacrificing that bit of audience comfort is worth it to tell the story like this.

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As Hunter puts the work in to recover and heal, looking back on Belos's 'kindness' in offering him a staff, taking him in, and providing the opportunity to be special as the Golden Guard...will be confusing and will involve seemingly conflicting emotions.

Having that treatment from his 'uncle' was the only reference point of feeling loved, while experiencing terror deeper down. This lasted for years before he met Luz and co.

He has overall spent less time in the new framework of healthy found family, than the years in the Castle.

I was looking at scenes from a couple of movies - the Black Widow movie and also Blade Runner 2049 (spoilers for both movies ahead, obviously) - as psychology references to see how two other fictional characters recalled their confusing but significant memories.

These examples carry some big concepts, one of which is that we "recall with our feelings". Not with pure impersonal logic that neatly trims away false info and discards it. If only it were that easy to dust our hands clean this way when healing from trauma.

In Black Widow, Yelena is the character who wears her heart on her sleeve the most, like Hunter naturally does. When confronted with the revelation that her happy childhood was staged, naturally Yelena feels betrayed:

(the GIF file for above was too big so lol I just screencapped a still frame from it)

But she quickly makes a conscious decision on how she wants to view those good memories, when hearing her sister Natasha saying it was all fake. This is perhaps her most important line in the movie:

She still chose to believe it had all been real. She is actively claiming the meaning that her good childhood had provided for her. Choosing what kind of lens she'd like to view those memories through. Defending that good meaning. Because her life fell apart after that good childhood came to an end. She could choose to say it was all fake, if she wanted to see it as fake.

She confronts Melina, her (staged) maternal figure who obviously isn't her biological or even a proper adoptive mother, and says: "You are my mother. You were my real mother, the closest thing I ever had to one."

When it comes to Hunter, he wouldn't find it as straightforward to acknowledge that the times when Belos was nice to him "felt real". Would he ever want to view the late Emperor as his uncle? Not via any conscious decision, I'm sure...since he's the opposite of Yelena here. Hunter's safe haven was after he escaped the Emperor's Coven, but Yelena's haven was at the start of her life, which she wished had been permanent.

Those months of summer when Hunter spent time away from Belos in the human realm must've been so special for him. But when faced with inevitable confusing flashbacks especially after Belos's death (that involve the subconscious, not conscious, part of his mind), he's still going to feel that the Emperor was a close family member whom he had an attachment with. Belos was the closest thing he ever had to family for so long.

In the Black Widow example, Yelena felt that Melina was her mother, from an early age. Around two decades later in her young adulthood, she still feels that this is the case, and consciously still wishes for that. She was lucky to be able to reconcile with Melina in the movie.

Hunter isn't as lucky. While he recovers, I don't think he can simply dismiss what it felt like to be told that he is part of a family (even if it was a lie) in such fragile formative years:

As an example, if I had first been told at age 5 by a parent that they promised to protect me, only to find out a decade later that they actually wouldn't have ever cared if I died...I would be hella confused.

Quoting a guest lecturer from my first year of therapist training, the part of our brains responsible for reasoning and logic - the prefrontal cortex - does not begin to seriously mature until our late teen years. Which is why early childhood memories can't just be viewed by our adult selves and easily trimmed away and viewed in black-or-white as truth-or-lie. Those early years are sensitive for us all, in how they shape us later in life. That inner child is still in each of us.

Blade Runner 2049's protagonist, K, has an arc that takes a different direction: he had actual false memories implanted that were not even his own, but the theme that is consistent for this post is those memories still felt real to him, and thus affected him emotionally. He felt unfulfilled and wanted something new, to feel like he had a soul, which led him on this risky quest. Sadly, he easily believed in a lie because it matched the truth he wished for. Thus, even false memories could feel real to him because he was desperate for meaning in life.

This movie has a cyberpunk dystopian setting, so it's of course more bleak. K was made to believe so strongly in those memories because he was ultimately used as just smokescreen, to keep the real person (who had those memories) well-hidden. Below, he speaks to the memory maker who formed his false memories. She is a very skilled deceiver, and successfully engineers experiences that didn't actually happen because she inserts fragments of truth here and there.

And she makes some good points about how she succeeds at implanting false memories:

Especially the last two lines, "We recall with our feelings. Anything real should be a mess."

Linking back to Hunter, it would be a tough process to learn how to make peace with his childhood with Belos. Because anything that felt real would be a mess.

And K has a similar line as Yelena did:

The running theme I spotted is the realness of confusing memories for these characters, because their inner conflicts involve questioning themselves: whether or not they were just imagining the good feelings they felt.

While we never got confirmation whether Belos used false memories or not, I'm inclined to think he didn't...in order to work more subtly and over a long period of time on Hunter as his latest grimwalker project. The deadlier lies are the ones with many bits of truth scattered throughout their intricate webs, like what the memory maker in Blade Runner 2049 could pull off.

Belos's treatment would've felt kind to Hunter at the time. As they say, how we feel about any experience we have is "what we make of it". Or how we choose to view the experience.

I think Hunter needed to believe his uncle really was kind, while maintaining his own image, in order to keep going and survive.

This tragically meant he had to believe he wasn't doing enough.

It is always scarier for an abused child to see that their parent in fact isn't loving after all/isn't a good person, compared to imposing shame upon themselves and believing they aren't good enough.

Of course, all this would've changed by the time we get to here and beyond:

Memory is subjective and our minds are so powerful that they find evidence to seemingly confirm any kind of beliefs that we form.

All three characters in this post were cogs in a machine, reduced to being pawns in a scheme...until they later had the space to decide things for themselves.

As seen in Hunter's efforts in his Golden Guard days to be good enough in the role, Yelena taking a stand to preserve the purity of an untainted childhood (even if it was staged and not organic), K defying authority to cross a line in his duties and get answers about who he was....this is how much we as humans will clamber to grasp onto a sense of personhood, to give our lives meaning and survive the best we can.

Yelena wanted to preserve the memories of her childhood as good, as a haven or a warm fuzzy bubble to look back on, because it got torn apart before she reunited with her family many years later.

Obviously Hunter can't do exactly the same i.e. preserving the entirety of his time in the Castle as "good", since he has now been able to see that Belos was a constant threat upon his life. However, he could still look back on smaller pockets of his childhood as pleasant, by isolating those specific memories.

We have two examples in canon: the way he grins when remembering the experience of being left on top of the mountain and climbing back down. And him saying that "weekends were nice" since he tasted partial freedom by being outdoors going on missions.

In fact, he would likely start out wanting to erase his childhood, view it as entirely bad and terrible to revisit, and try to force himself to forget its significance and start afresh. But this would only worsen the unpleasant emotions associated with this time of his life that he'd rather wish had not existed.

Mental health recovery is counter-intuitive: avoiding or denying emotions tend to make them grow bigger and scarier, while letting them feel seen and heard can help them along to shrink and positively transform over time. Hunter's therapist would have to provide him with psychoeducation on this so that he doesn't feel like he's grieving wrongly. It would bring him more peace if he can acknowledge both of these seemingly conflicting truths:

Factually, Belos did lie to him and betray him.

(Here's the important part) Emotionally, if the 'kindness/love' offered by Belos felt real at the time, received by Hunter's very legit need for attachment and meaning, then yes, it was real.

Both these points can coexist. Belos's love was untrue in the factual sense (we in the audience can easily see this), yet true in the emotional sense for a young child like who Hunter was. Which is what makes it hard.

Someone would ask Hunter, "Do you think he loved you?" and the answer isn't simple. Maybe it'd be something like "He didn't, but I felt like he really did." And the second half of that sentence ("but I felt like he really did") honestly doesn't need to be changed or removed, and the grief in those words should be honoured. Belos only cared about meeting Hunter's emotional needs as a means to an end, and as strange as it sounds to say this...it did help Hunter survive long enough, however mistreated he was. Because he still clung on to meaning and a purpose in his life.

The love wasn't there in the technical sense: instead it was a twisted version of Philip's love for Caleb, not any love extended towards Hunter. But this love still felt mostly real to Hunter before he fled the coven.

And I bet that even if it was for a split-second, Belos's gaslighting of "Why are you hurting me? I only wanted to help you" felt real and true to the poor kid here:

before Hunter expressed that he knew who Belos truly was as a person: a liar.

A study into The Captain and all the random stuff he does. Largely inspired by the graphs that @m0ose-idiot made about ghosts insults. I tried my best, but the data is probably not perfect.

"Bottle it up? ...no? Sorry."

I need to put him in my pocket