Sugar Apple Fairy Tale

Episode 8

I think we all knew it before the reveal this week, but it's still horribly sad that Lady Christina died. What's more impressive from a storytelling perspective is that it's made to matter to us – if you think about it, we know precisely nothing about her as a person. The only hints of personality we get are from the duke talking about how much he loved her and Hugh recounting how Christina ate silver sugar confections in a bid to live just a little bit longer for her love. Her loss is spelled out in what it did to the one she left behind and in his desperate hope that he might someday bring her back.

While it's certainly not on the level of Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, which famously has a two-page description of a young soldier who is introduced at the start and dies at the end written so that it feels like a personal loss for the reader, it's still quite well done. The duke has been burying himself in his grief, possibly hoping to die so he won't have to be alone in a world without Christina. He had to know that sooner or later, the king would send soldiers after him if he didn't show himself in Lewiston, and maybe that's the deadline he set for himself: he'd keep trying to get an appropriate sculpture of Christina until it did. That way, he could convince himself that he was trying to go on while being assured of his imminent destruction. He never even told anyone he hired to sculpt her likeness why he was so hellbent on the fitting depiction, keeping his pain wrapped around him like his own personal shroud. He says he wants to gaze at it until a new fairy is born in her image, but I'm curious to know how much he believes that, and maybe he isn't either until Challe tells him that it's impossible.

Distilled down to its purest form, he's looking for hope. He may not even realize that until Challe takes it from him, but when Anne returns it after successfully capturing Christina's image in silver sugar and pigment, it's as if the duke's entire body lightens. Maybe he can't ever bring Christina back – and if he did birth a fairy, it'd be a sugar fairy, not a water fairy, so it might not even be her – but at least he knows someone tried to help him. Maybe that's what he was really looking for: a way to express his grief and someone to understand.

Of course, this episode also raises the horrible specter of fairy death. Anne and Challe have a touching, heartwarming reunion, and the evidence that he clearly sprinted as fast as he could to reach Anne before the earl's soldiers did is somehow even better than him driving away the wolves because now we know he's doing it of his own free will. But he's already lived over a hundred years, and we've seen how suddenly it can all end. Even more worrying is that Mithril Lid Pod is a water fairy, just like Christina, and there's no set lifespan for fey born of water. It's a whole new layer of fear that Anne certainly doesn't need. But at least she does get some closure with her mother's death – the episode ends on Pull Soul Day, with Anne sending her mother off with a beautiful sugar bouquet. And as she, Challe, and Mithril Lid Pod head out, they look very much like a family. I think that may be what all three of them needed, and after the sorrow of Christina's death, it's a lovely way to end the story arc.

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Sugar Apple Fairy Tale is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.