The Holy Grail of Eris

Episode 9

It's hard to blame Connie for slapping Scarlett's father. He put politics above his daughter ten years ago and suggested that she be used as a means to foil a plot, a suggestion that ultimately led to her death and damnation. Scarlett Castiel wasn't “the wickedest woman of the age,” but her father might be the wickedest man from a certain perspective. He went into orchestrating his child's death with his eyes wide open. “But politics” will only get you so far.

There's a short story in Pearl Buck's 1933 collection The Good Wife and Other Stories called “The Communist.” Set during the Nanjing Incident of 1927, the tale follows a nameless teenage girl as she is swept up in the Communist Revolution and romances a Russian soldier named Piotr. In the end, he abandons her to go spread the word of Communism elsewhere, and when Nanjing is retaken by the British and Americans, all of the communists are rounded up. The girl, despite the pleading of her parents, refuses to renounce it, and in the end is executed. As she is led to the scaffold, she begins to sing, and the story's final line is, “See what a staunch Communist this little one is! Ah, she must be a bad one! She goes to her death singing!”

She is not a bad one. She's a child who was taken advantage of by someone she trusted, a girl who made one mistake and was damned for it. This nameless girl is Scarlett, she's Lily Orlamunde, she's Deborah Darkian, and the crowd that decides how bad she must be is the society these three women live in. Scarlett was seventeen years old - a child. She didn't do anything wrong. Her mother didn't do anything wrong. If anyone is to be blamed, it's her father, who not only “couldn't help himself” when it came to sleeping with his politically appointed wife, but also later sentenced his child to death. Maybe his reasons were sound. Maybe he regretted what he did. But in the end, he's still to blame, still the one who allowed people to believe in his child's vileness and a perfidy that didn't exist. The true villains still live, their plans unthwarted.

If Scarlett metaphorically went to her death singing, it was all she could do. Like Lily sneering at her in her jail cell before trying to redeem her name, like Deborah spiraling into death from addiction, all Scarlett could do was the best she could. She held her head up until they cut it off.

The parallels between Buck's story and the events of The Holy Grail of Eris are important. They both speak to the disposable nature of girls in society. Scarlett is a victim who has been blamed for her own death for ten years while her killers sat on the throne and in their plush mansions. I don't doubt that Duke Castiel regrets what he did, but the real horror is that doing it didn't actually solve anything. The plot is still in motion. If it's going to be stopped, someone will have to do what they should have done ten years ago and actually get to the root of the problem. And in what must be seen as a very important development, if the adult men aren't going to do it, it will be up to another girl: Constance Grail.

I do feel bad for Duke Castiel. He clearly loved his daughter and regrets what he did, maybe to the point where he's been struggling with his decision for a decade. The scene where he holds her ashes and cries is heartbreaking, and I think he really did think he had to sacrifice her. But he failed, and her death ultimately meant nothing. If there's a “true” tragedy in this story, it's that Scarlett died for nothing.

Going to death singing doesn't make it better. Making sure that needless deaths don't happen in the first place is what needs to be done. It's too late for Scarlett and Lily, but Connie and the women around her will make sure that no one else meets the same fate.

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The Holy Grail of Eris is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.