Goodbye, Lara

Episode 9

Light plays a special role in fairy tales, and especially in those of Hans Christian Andersen. The most famous example is, of course, The Little Match Girl, a purportedly heartwarming story about a little girl freezing to death on the street. (Like with Andersen's mermaid, he maintained that the Match Girl dying was a happy ending, because she got to go to Heaven. This is a very Victorian mindset; see Christina Rossetti's many dead baby poems, Dickens' Little Nell, etc.) Generally speaking, light is equated with hope, and in Goodbye, Lara, that seems to be the same case – Lara's light will bring back the merfolk. It's a hope Lisa has been living with for centuries, and one that keeps her moving forward.

But light can also be destructive – fire both warms and decimates, for example. Who's to say that Lara's light is going to be good for everyone? Folklorist Maria Tatar notes that “for Andersen, brightness and illumination are signals for spirited imaginative activity,” and for most people in modern Japan, the return, or mere existence, of mermaids certainly fits that bill. Luca and Mari are the exceptions, knowing about Lara and just accepting it. For more people, Lisa's fate in the freak show feels like the only avenue forward – and let's not forget that Kota burned down the building to rescue Lisa, once again harnessing the power of light. Lara's light may be similarly two-faced: rescuing her family but destroying something else at the same time.

That two-fold nature of light dovetails with Lara's attempt to figure out what “true love” means. She knows her time is running out, so she's gotten very desperate, hence her attempt to force things to move forward more quickly with Luca. Interestingly, the act that triggers the heart knife is an attempted kiss that Luca rejects. Folklore is positively littered with unwanted or nonconsensual kisses, with Sleeping Beauty being the most famous example. (And it's a whole lot worse in the Italian variant Sun, Moon, and Talia.) Usually it's princesses who have kisses forced on them, so the story is mixing things up here in terms of gender roles – the princess is the aggressor and the prince is not interested. This plays well with the ways Luca and his sibling defy gender norms while also acknowledging that mermaids are often used as trans symbols. But it also raises the question of what Lara's true love needs to entail, because all that's required may be that she feel it. It's not the eighteenth century anymore, after all. Heteronormative expectations perhaps can be set by the wayside.

It's also worth noting the many appearances of white birds in this episode. At the end of Andersen's tale, the Mermaid turns into a spirit of the air, so birds and mermaids are basically in opposition to each other. There are at least three cases where there are exactly six white birds on the screen, a reference to Lara and her sisters, as well as one of the more common numbers of brothers in variants of The Wild Swans. Lara riding in a swan boat is a fun mix of two tale types, but also a link between Lara's story and Lisa's – at least if we're going with my theory that Lisa is Elisa from The Wild Swans. But even if we discount that, the whole birds as spirits of the air piece is hard to ignore – as is the link to Andersen's The Ugly Duckling, who is, quite famously, a cygnet rather than a duckling, transforming from despised creature to a beautiful and valued swan. Is Lara's value likewise tied to her appearance? I think there's a case to be made there, as the original prince wanted her to be a beautiful woman rather than a monstrous fish creature, while Lisa wants her to be a beautiful mermaid rather than a hideous human. Everyone has an opinion about how Lara looks, and that ties directly to her quest for true love – because someone has to love her for her, not her mermaid or human qualities. And maybe that's what motivates the heart knife to try to eat Luca when he, like the prince before him, seems to reject Lara's kiss.

Lara's light is transforming the world around her. I'm not sure that everyone can see it, although it'd be hard to miss Grace bursting from her tank and Mari's window. But not all transformations are beautiful to all people. Maybe true love is similarly divisive.

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Recommended Reading: Firebird by Mercedes Lackey, a retelling of a Russian folktale about transformation and true love.

Goodbye, Lara is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.