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ncfan-1 · 6 years

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So, just who is Eclipsa Butterfly?

I’ve binge-watched all the episodes of Star vs. The Forces of Evil over the course of about ten days or so, and since I’ve caught up, I thought I’d write something about the character I actually decided to watch the show for: Eclipsa Butterfly, Queen of my heart Queen of Darkness. This is basically my collection of observations, extrapolations, and theories for the future. Eclipsa Butterfly is thus far a very ambiguous character, but I do have an idea of where the show might go with her, and I’m open to other possibilities, so long as she’s treated with complexity.

[TW: brief discussion of disordered eating, “And I must scream”-style imprisonment, racism, xenophobia, discussion of child abuse, brainwashing]

My observations

The Tapestry, and what we learned from it

- The depictions of Eclipsa and her monster lover have them look very sinister, but given that we’ve seen that Mewni is not above propaganda (see the storybook in ‘Mewnipendence Day’), that they are depicted looking so sinister may well be a result of the bigotry of the royal court, and designed to prejudice future generations against Eclipsa.

- So, Eclipsa left her Mewman husband to be with a monster. We know from ‘Game of Flags’ that the Queens of Mewni have the ability to divorce their husbands—or, at least, they do now. We don’t know if they had that right during Eclipsa’s time, but let’s assume they did. We don’t know if Eclipsa divorced her first husband. There’s nothing that says she did, and nothing that says she didn’t. It’s unknown whether children of a divorced king and queen would still be in line for the throne after the divorce, or if the queen’s children by any future husband would take precedence. For that matter, we don’t actually know if being born in wedlock is a requirement for the child of a queen to be eligible to inherit the throne.

The fact that the tapestry says that Eclipsa fled from Mewni suggests that she probably didn’t have time to divorce her Mewman husband. Her union with her lover was, then, adulterous. Interestingly, though, Eclipsa is always seen wearing a ring—and in the tapestry, she and her lover wear matching rings. A bigamous second marriage, perhaps? Maybe, maybe not, since we know that what we see in the tapestry isn’t necessarily a reliable depiction of reality. (It’s also worth noting that if Eclipsa and her lover/possible second husband are depicted wearing matching rings in the tapestry, it’s probably not meant to portray the relationship in a more respectable light—quite the opposite, really. Given how very, very racist Mewnian society is, portraying Eclipsa as having married her monster lover was basically code for what an aberration she was.)

- We don’t know when Eclipsa met her lover/possible second husband, when and how their relationship developed. Did she meet him before or after her first husband? Did they have a relationship before she was married? If so, did they try to break things off after she married her first husband, only to have that not work out? Who knows, at this point.

- Eclipsa has to have had at least one daughter by her Mewman husband. It’s possible that if she didn’t the Mewnian government in future times might lie about the present queen being directly descended from Eclipsa, because they just want as little attention paid to Eclipsa as possible, but Glossaryck refers to Eclipsa as Moon’s great-x grandmother, rather than great-x aunt, and in front of an audience that would likely be in on any cover up. Something tells me that Glossaryck would likely have little regard for a cover up of this nature, anyways.

So Eclipsa had at least one daughter by her Mewman husband. We don’t know how old her daughter was when she ran off, if she was a child or an adult. In leaving Mewni, Eclipsa left her daughter with the heavy burden of ruling, but we don’t know if she was doing this to a girl or a woman. Either way, she’s leaving her daughter in the lurch, and that’s not cool—there would likely be some questions of whether or not Eclipsa’s leaving really counted as an abdication, and her successor would have to go out of her way to differentiate herself from her mother, whether that was really what she wanted or not—but one is significantly less cool than the other.

- We don’t know if Eclipsa did or did not take the wand, the spell book, and Glossaryck with her when she left. If she didn’t, that may suggest a number of things. It may suggest that she considered her leaving an abdication of the throne, and that she was leaving her heir with what were her rightful heirlooms (Well, Glossaryck isn’t an heirloom since a person can’t be an heirloom, but you get my drift). It may suggest that she just didn’t want people coming after her to get that stuff back, or that she didn’t think she’d need them. It may suggest a combination of these things, or something else entirely. If Eclipsa did take the wand, the spell book, and Glossaryck with her when she left, that might suggest a lack of regard for her child and her kingdom, or a more focused ill intent. Since the wand and the spell book are heirlooms of the royal house and both powerful artifacts, you could even argue that taking them and allowing them to potentially fall into the hands of monsters might be viewed as treason. Personally, I’m inclined to believe that Eclipsa didn’t take the wand and the spell book with her, for reasons I’ll get into later.

- Ditching Mewni to be with her monster lover suggest a number of things about Eclipsa, both positive and negative. The positive: She was able to shake off the institutionalized racism that she was raised with. The negative: It suggests a lack of care for her kingdom and her subjects, that she was irresponsible and self-centered. But the thing about self-centeredness is that whether it’s healthy or not depends on the degree of self-centeredness involved. We all need to be self-centered to a certain degree in order to take care of ourselves properly: there has to be a point at which we draw the line and put our needs before someone else’s. It’s only at extreme highs and lows that it becomes a force for destruction. You can definitely see where Eclipsa took it to an extreme high. She prioritized her own needs over the needs of her kingdom, to the point that she abandoned her kingdom. That’s selfish. But it’s not necessarily evil. And we really know very little about the exact circumstances of her fleeing.

- A final note. It’s an interesting word, ‘fled.’ I don’t know if they just used that one because it fit better with the rhyme, but it potentially suggests that Eclipsa was forced out of Mewni, rather than leaving of her own accord. Maybe she left because she couldn’t stay. Maybe she left her heir behind because she wasn’t allowed to take her with her. Something else that got buried in the historical record, perhaps? There’s a lot about her flight from Mewni that hasn’t been answered.

Baby and Glossaryck on Eclipsa

Baby and Glossaryck both weigh in on Eclipsa during the second season. They are both people who A) knew Eclipsa personally, and B) are not part of the Magical High Commission, who played judge, jury and executioner when crystallizing her. And what do they have to say?

- Baby is completely neutral on the topic of Eclipsa. When she compares Star to Eclipsa, she’s not citing an affinity for dark magic, just raw power levels. Baby implies only that Eclipsa was both undisciplined with her magic and exceptionally powerful at the time of her evaluation, and that she may have made a display similar to Star’s tree. All the negative implications of this comparison come from Moon and River, who never knew Eclipsa, and only know her from a (probably at least somewhat biased) historical account of her. They’re both horrified. Moon doesn’t say anything. River does, and what does he say? “Monster lover.” That’s it. That’s the first thing that comes into his head when he’s horrified that his daughter has been compared to Eclipsa. Nothing about dark magic, nothing about her being some power-hungry tyrant. Just that she fell in love with a monster.

- Glossaryck feels that Eclipsa’s chapter and the magic contained therein may be dangerous to Star, but he never says anything negative about Eclipsa herself. Instead, he tells Moon that Eclipsa was the only Queen of Mewni who was content to let him do his job when training her heir and didn’t try to meddle in her daughter’s training. This may suggest that Eclipsa trusted him a great deal. She may also have realized on her own why he trained her daughter differently than she did him. She may simply have been indifferent on the matter.

(I am personally of the opinion that Glossaryck needs to be questioned and challenged a bit more than he is, but that is neither here nor there.)

Eclipsa’s Chapter, and the magic contained therein

- Eclipsa’s chapter is sealed with a lock that apparently only Glossaryck can open. The concern is that the spells inside might “taint” its reader, though Glossaryck is pretty unclear by what he means by “taint.” We’ve seen the immediate effect reading the chapter had on Marco and Ludo; it certainly is… interesting. Equally interesting is the lack of effect it had on Star. Marco and Ludo both get pulled up into some kind of demonic vortex, and Star gets nothing. Why it affected them like that, we don’t exactly know. A commonality between them may be an inclination towards darkness in both Ludo and Marco; remember Monster Arm?

@ignissa suggested that what happened to Marco and Ludo when they tried to read the chapter may be the result of some sort of security system placed on the chapter, one that Eclipsa herself might have put in place. If so, why would she do that, and why did the security system zap Marco and Ludo, but not Star?

Well, Glossaryck himself says he thinks the chapter’s spells could be dangerous to Star. He might have broached the subject with Eclipsa, and though he probably wouldn’t have been able to convince her that her spells were inherently dangerous (see Eclipsa’s miffed reaction when a young Moon calls her chapter “Forbidden”), Glossaryck might have been able to convince Eclipsa of the danger of her chapter falling into the wrong hands. There’s probably some pretty potent spells in her chapter; what if an enemy of the Butterfly family obtained access to it? (This theory assumes that Eclipsa even cared about that. She might not have. She’s so blasé; it’s hard to tell.)

So, the security system is designed to allow the reader to read Eclipsa’s chapter only if they are a member of the Butterfly family, and everyone else gets zapped and dragged up into the vortex, control over their bodies taken away from them. The fact that Glossaryck knows a spell that can reverse the effects with no apparent ill effects on the victim lends a certain amount of credence to this theory. When he sees what happened to Marco, he treats it as nothing more than an inconvenience, rather than something dangerous.

Let’s say I’m wrong. Let’s say that what happened to Marco and Ludo wasn’t the result of any kind of security system, but that Eclipsa’s chapter really is just that corrupting, and that it affects some people differently than it does others. It didn’t affect Star that way. Star didn’t go mad with power; she thought the chapter was boring. We see her use Eclipsa’s All-Seeing Eye spell later, and shenanigans ensue from that, but this suggests that the chapter’s capacity to corrupt is rooted in mundane temptations—the temptation of knowledge. It’s not intrinsically evil. It all depends on what you do with it.

The All-Seeing Eye

In ‘Bon-Bon the Birthday Clown,’ we see a spell of Eclipsa’s design used for the first time: the All-Seeing Eye. This spell allows the user to spy on presumably anyone they want to. I say “presumably” because ‘Deep Dive’ shows us that the spell is strong enough to allow Marco, who had no training in magic, to see all the way to the Realm of Magic; I’m guessing the spell is probably powerful enough to make a mockery of most security measures designed to block spying spells.

Such a spell would have been useful to a queen, especially a queen who likely would have been unpopular with the royal court due to her… eccentricities. We don’t know why Eclipsa created it, if it was originally intended for surveillance and reconnaissance or if she created it for pettier reasons. Either way, it Eclipsa has a serious disregard for other people’s privacy.

The spell, by itself, is a neutral force. Yes, when Star used it to spy on Marco and Jackie on their date, she became very envious and unconsciously used magic to sabotage Jackie’s skateboard. But I don’t think the All-Seeing Eye is to blame for that. The same result could have been achieved by more mundane eavesdropping. The root cause of the trouble was Star’s feelings of envy and jealousy, and that doesn’t seem like something the All-Seeing Eye created, or even exacerbated.

The spell even seems to have positive applications as a search-and-rescue spell as evidenced in ‘Raid the Cave’ and ‘Deep Dive.’ Dark magic, it seems, is not necessarily evil magic; again, it depends on how you use it. And on that—given Glossaryck’s surprised reaction when Star pushed through the membrane to try to get to him, I’d say Eclipsa’s only use for the spell was not so benign.

A meeting with Moon

‘Moon the Undaunted’ gave us a lot of material to chew on.

- It’s established that Eclipsa took the throne at a young age after her mother’s death, likely when she was still a child, if her comment that she wasn’t much older than Moon and the fact that Moon looks to be about fourteen in this episode is anything to go on. If I had to guess, I’d say she was somewhere between fourteen and sixteen. In spite of this, her first assumption, before the implications of it sink in, is that Moon is too young to be the new Queen. She seems to recognize that her own situation was not a normal one.

- Eclipsa tears up when she talks about her mother. It suggests that they were quite close, or that at the very least, her passing was painful to her, even if they weren’t outstandingly close.

- The woman gets de-crystallized temporarily, and the first thing she does is demand a candy bar from the vending machine. When she manages to free her arm from the crystal, she grabs the candy bar even though the wand was right there, and Moon was so shocked that Eclipsa probably could have swiped the wand if she’d really wanted to. We don’t know why she didn’t. It could be that she was simply too hungry, which leads us to our next point…

- SHE WAS CONSCIOUS IN THERE. Seriously, she has to have been! She may not have known how much time had passed, but there’s no other explanation for how she could have known what was in the vending machine. The pizza guy Rhombulus crystallized was conscious, too; he knew he’d been trapped. This is horrifying; imagine being trapped in crystal, conscious, able to see the world around you, still able to feel hunger, but unable to speak or move, even to blink your eyes. (The crystal was in contact with her eyeballs. It was probably pretty deep in her ears, too. Excuse me, I’m gonna have to stop this point here before my skin crawls right off my body.)

- So, we see the corruption on Eclipsa’s arms, the tainted veins and blackened flesh (Yes, I know there are some potentially very unfortunate implications to the latter being treated as a sign of evil; I’m not especially equipped to unpack these implications, but I know they’re there). This does suggest that she’s been involved in some seriously shady stuff, that she’s been making forays into dark magic. But the thing about that is we don’t know precisely what it is she’s done.

Of the three spells associated with Eclipsa, the All-Seeing Eye is the only one we can say with certainty is a spell of her creation. Moon admits in ‘Stranger Danger’ that she has never read Eclipsa’s chapter, so we don’t even know if the Darkest Spell is one of hers; it may be something she came across while doing research. The fact that Eclipsa could recite the Darkest Spell’s long incantation from memory suggests that she’s used it at least once—and her hesitation to teach it to Moon, if it wasn’t an attempt to manipulate her, suggests that she regretted using it afterwards. But the Darkest Spell is the only verifiably dark spell we’ve seen; it’s perfectly likely that there are others that could produce the corruption we see on Eclipsa’s arms.

It’s possible also that the mere act of creating her dark magic spells could have been enough to trigger the corruption. There’s probably some seriously shady stuff that goes into researching for them and perfecting them. Eclipsa might not have needed to ever use them with regularity to get the results we saw.

- Eclipsa expresses sympathy at Moon’s admission of feeling overwhelmed with having to adopt the responsibilities of a ruler, and with being unable to choose between two boys she likes. Specifically, she says “I know how you feel,” which, as with a lot of things about Eclipsa, leaves a lot of room open for interpretation.

If it was the latter or both together, this suggests that Eclipsa’s relationship with her Mewman husband may not have been so cut-and-dry as a loveless arranged marriage. She may have truly loved both of the men in her life, or, at the very least, even if she didn’t love her Mewman husband, she cared for him (and their child, possibly) enough that the decision to leave him wasn’t an easy one.

- Asides from being sympathetic to Moon’s plight, Eclipsa is also quite honest with Moon. She spells out clearly hat passing on the Darkest Spell requires a contract, that the strength of a contract between two Butterfly queens is potentially stronger than Rhombulus’s magic, and that what she wants in return is her freedom. She asks Moon if this is really what she wants, giving her a chance to back out if she is unsure. The only thing Eclipsa may have been dishonest about is why she wants her freedom; I have no doubt she’s very hungry after three hundred years, but even my most charitable interpretation of Eclipsa as a person tells me that she probably didn’t just want to get out of that crystal to eat sweets. Whatever Moon might later allege, unless there was a lot more going on here than was apparent, Eclipsa did not deceive, manipulate, pressure, or coerce Moon into accepting the contract in any way. Moon walked into this with her eyes open.

Eclipsa, Queen of Darkness: Nature Lover?

Just a short section, but I note that every one of Eclipsa’s interactions with nature have been positive. She likes to feed the birds. She enjoyed visiting the rose garden before she fled Mewni, enough so that she risked capture to see it again and later, a good view of the garden is enough to make her excuse her wretched surroundings at the end of ‘Stranger Danger.’ Omnitraxus says he’s pretty sure Eclipsa is a pescetarian, and while, given the context of this assertion I’m not sure if we can trust it, if he’s right, we know that the only meat Eclipsa eats is fish. It could just be that the castle grounds offers a highly-sanitized version of nature—we’ve never seen her out in the woods, for instance—but it’s interesting to think about.

A Queen Must Have Poise

- One thing very consistent about Eclipsa’s personality is that it’s very difficult to faze her. She tends to underreact to things that would evoke much stronger reactions in just about everyone else.

- When surrounded by the royal guard and attacked by Omnitraxus, Eclipsa’s only reaction is to, quite pleasantly, ask Moon how using the Darkest Spell worked out for her.

- When threatened with recrystallization, she doesn’t beg or plead. She meets her judges with quiet resolve, and apparently feels calm enough right after Star managed to secure a trial for her to suggest a location for her “tower arrest.”

- Outwardly, Eclipsa appears to be completely unperturbed by the wretched condition of the room she’s been confined to. She even brushes off the fact that there are very large, very hostile-looking insects crawling all over her bed, even though all of this illustrates just how committed Moon and the rest of the Magical High Commission aren’t to giving her anything resembling a fair hearing.

- She responds to Marco’s suspicion and hostility with tolerant amusement. Not for one second does Eclipsa seem to feel threatened by Marco, calling him adorable and joking about him worrying about catching “evil cooties.” He does seem to give her a bit of a start at first, but more out of surprise than indignation or distress.

- The only thing that really seems to faze Eclipsa is the revelation that she was trapped in that crystal for three hundred years, and even then, she recovers enough that a few seconds later she can go back to eating her Snookers bar.

- Whether Eclipsa’s nonchalant attitude is a natural part of her personality or it’s because she has a plan and (she thinks) she’s holding all the cards is impossible to tell at this point.

So how old is she, anyways?

One of the many things about Eclipsa that at this point is at best unclear is just how old she was when she was crystallized. When she takes her hair down, she doesn’t look to be more than about five to ten years older than Star, but that’s really not feasible. For one thing, she has the voice of a woman much older than a woman in her mid-twenties (Esmé Bianco is currently thirty-five). We know that Eclipsa had at least two children, and that there was probably a period of several years between her fleeing Mewni and being crystallized. So how old is she?

We don’t know. Something that complicates the issue is that Eclipsa has a very ageless look to her, one that goes even beyond the art style of the show. She looks more like a life-sized porcelain doll than a person, with all the attendant agelessness and creepiness you’d expect. Even Moon looks older than her, and Moon likely isn’t even forty. We just don’t know. Maybe we’ll get more information about this in the future, but I doubt it. As far as Eclipsa-related revelations go, this show’s got bigger fish to fry.

Impulse Control Issues

- So… even Eclipsa admits that she has problems with self-control. This is the one thing about her personality that can’t be contested, because even she admits that it’s something she struggles with. I don’t doubt that she has problems with self-control in general, but I’d also like to talk about the specific thing she was referring to: that bucket full of Snookers bar wrappers.

That could be a perfectly natural reaction to spending three hundred years trapped in crystal with only a single candy bar to eat. In her place, I’m sure I’d be very hungry when I got out as well. But it looks like Eclipsa ate upwards of a dozen of those things in a very short period of time, and it makes me wonder if the writers intended to characterize her as a binge-eater. She doesn’t apparently feel much of the embarrassment that often goes along with binge-eating, but that’s not necessarily a requirement, and I don’t think that sort of embarrassment is something that Eclipsa would let others see, anyhow.

- “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back” is likely a phrase Eclipsa regards as a guiding light. “All knowledge is good knowledge” is pretty close to it in spirit. But she says it in relation to her opinion that, were she in Star’s position in ‘Sweet Dreams’, she’d let the dreams take her where they will, just to see what she’s capable of and to get some answers about what’s going on. She says it even though she knows that Star almost died that night, and could potentially die if it happened again.

Assuming we can take this at face value, it paints an interesting picture of just why Eclipsa may have gotten involved with dark magic in the first place. Power wasn’t what she was after, but knowledge. Like I said earlier, the temptations of Eclipsa’s chapter have their roots in the temptation of knowledge. It makes sense that this would be reflected in Eclipsa herself, that knowledge is simply too great a temptation for her to resist.

Combine Eclipsa’s rampant curiosity with her irresponsible, reckless nature and her struggles with self-control, and you potentially have something very dangerous. If you handed this woman Pandora’s box, she’d open it in a heartbeat. If you told her not to open it because what was inside was dangerous, that would likely only increase its allure.

The Toffee Connection

I’m hardly the first person to point out that the show hints strongly at a connection between Toffee and Eclipsa. The sheer amount of evidence pointing in that direction is pretty noteworthy, so let’s go over everything I’ve noticed.

The montage in ‘Into the Wand’ that’s triggered when Star grab’s Toffee’s finger shows images of Toffee and Eclipsa back-to-back. That we see Toffee is only to be expected; it is his finger. But by showing Eclipsa as well, the narrative creates a visual link between the two characters.

Toffee knows about the Whispering Spell. He knows what it does, judging by his smirk he knew that it would drag him into the wand, and he knows that it’s the first spell Moon taught Star—that it’s probably the first spell the Queen of Mewni teaches her heir, period. Given the nature of the Whispering Spell, you’d expect it to be a state secret, knowledge of it and its effects strictly regulated. But Toffee knows about it.

Eclipsa lived in the monster temple, possibly for several years. We learn in ‘Monster Bash’ that the temple is off-limits to the general public and that few people know of it. But Toffee knew about the temple; he would have to have known in order to guide Ludo there.

Toffee knows about Eclipsa’s chapter in the spell book. He knows what reading her chapter can sometimes do to the reader, and how to take advantage of that to possess Ludo’s body. Like the Whispering Spell, one would think that any knowledge of Eclipsa and her magic would be closely-guarded. I don’t doubt that there are stories. Eclipsa probably has a grossly exaggerated reputation, similar to the likes of Elisabeth Báthory, among the general Mewman population. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one set of parents has used her name as a boogeyman to make their children behaves themselves; “Be good, or when night falls the Queen of Darkness will come and gobble you up.” Real information about her magic is likely shared strictly on a need-to-know basis, with no one outside of the royal line of the Butterfly family qualifying and people who need to know. Even Star didn’t know about Eclipsa or her magic until Season 2, and she’s going to be Queen of Mewni someday. But Toffee knows. He seems to know more about Eclipsa’s magic than Moon does.

The skull pauldron with spades painted on it. We don’t know if the Queens’ cheek markings ever repeat. Some background Butterfly relations have had identical cheek markings, but so far, none of the major players have, not that I’ve seen. Like the first point, the narrative provides a visual link between Toffee and Eclipsa.

They share a couple of personality traits. The first is that it’s rather hard to faze either of them. I already talked about Eclipsa, but let’s talk about Toffee. A captured Marco yells at him and tries to attack him? Toffee takes it all in stride; the only thing that affects him is Marco calling him boring, and that only lasts momentarily. Star blasts his arm off? He lies on the floor, watching with mild irritation as she starts a brawl instead of negotiating for Marco’s release. Moon blasts his finger off, and despite the implications of it not regenerating, Toffee just stands back up, brushes himself off and walks off as though nothing of major importance just happened. He brushes off all of Moon’s attacks in ‘Toffee’ without even properly fighting back, like it’s not worth his time to fight back. Marco punches a hole in his chest? Nary a whimper. Toffee shares Eclipsa’s tendency to severely underreact to things that ought to evoke a much stronger reaction.

They’ve also sometimes shown an inclination to mock their adversaries, and in a rather similar way. Toffee exercises this inclination only rarely; we haven’t seen enough of Eclipsa to know if it’s something she does regularly. See Toffee’s attitude towards Moon in ‘Moon the Undaunted.’ He is mockingly polite, utterly condescending, and clearly doesn’t take her at all seriously as a threat up until the point when she vaporizes his finger. Compare this with Eclipsa’s much gentler but still utter refusal to take Marco seriously as a threat. She’s patronizing in her mocking, in an almost motherly way, treating him as though she’s indulging a very small child and calling him “adorable.”

So, Eclipsa’s signature spell right now is the All-Seeing Eye, a spell that is used to spy on people, and is such a powerful spell that an unskilled, unpracticed user of the wand (Marco) can use it to see all the way into the Realm of Magic. It’s a powerful aid for someone who wants to spy on someone else. Now, let’s look back to Season 1. Namely, ‘Mewnipendence Day.’ Usually, we have Buff Frog spying on Star and Marco, but Toffee introduces an electronic/possibly powered by magic tool to spy on them as well. What is it? A giant, floating eyeball called The All-Seeing Eye. Now, this could be an early hint of the way Eclipsa’s memory has survived in Mewni, that one of her creations survives in the public consciousness and is automatically associated with spying by both Mewmans and monsters. It’s a hint of the particular way in which her memory has lived on, through rumors and fearmongering (Though Star doesn’t seem especially bothered by the Eye, calling it a tool to let the monsters know that Mewmans are watching them, which may suggest that Eclipsa’s All-Seeing Eye is divorced in the national memory from memory of Eclipsa herself). But as later dialogue suggests, the concept of the All-Seeing Eye is a thing for monsters, too, and Toffee remarks on it as being “the most efficient way to spy on your enemies.” So Eclipsa and Toffee both consider the best way to spy on people a remote device called The All-Seeing Eye.

The narrative likes to link Eclipsa and Toffee visually, they share a couple of very specific personality traits, and they have a geographical connection through the monster temple. On top of that, Toffee knows a lot of stuff about the royal family’s magic that he has no business knowing.

Now, we don’t know how long Toffee’s been around. It’s entirely possible he’s been around for a long time, and he’s been working towards toppling Mewman hegemony for centuries. If so, it’s possible that he’s discovered some of this on his own, that he’s infiltrated the royal castle or that he paid someone off to bring him as much information as they could. But Eclipsa’s magic is just too closely guarded. There are only three people who could tell him about that: Glossaryck, the Queen of Mewni, or her heir.

Toffee is likely connected to the Butterfly family somehow, and it is likely through that connection that he knows about the Whispering Spell, and Eclipsa’s magic. I’m inclined to think that this connection is through Eclipsa herself, if only because out of all the past Queens of Mewni whom we know about, she’s the only one who seems at all likely to have told a monster these things.

I don’t know exactly what the nature of their relationship was. They could have been friends. Toffee could have been Eclipsa’s protégé, or her adopted child. It could have been some combination of the three. Depending on their ages relative to each other, it could have been Toffee in the mentoring role. Whatever kind of relationship they had, if they had one, it was close enough for Eclipsa to have taken Toffee into her confidence. To what end, I’m not sure. I have a few ideas, but nothing I’m sure of.

So, is Eclipsa evil? We don’t know… and neither do the people who crystallized her

- We’ve established a few things about Eclipsa’s character. We know that she is self-centered, in that she tends to focus on herself rather than focus on others, to a likely damaging extent. We know that she is irresponsible and reckless. We know that she is very curious, and that her curiosity, combined with her irresponsibility and recklessness, can potentially lead her to make dangerous decisions. But is she evil?

Well, we don’t know about that yet. Primarily because the people who made the decision to imprison her in crystal for all eternity don’t know if Eclipsa’s evil, either.

- Imprisoning someone in crystal for all eternity, conscious and aware, is not a decision anyone should make lightly, even if the person who is going to be crystallized is so evil and/or so dangerous that this is your only real recourse (And if killing them is, for whatever reason, not an option; I somehow doubt that the MHC abstains from capital punishment on principle). But when Star demands to know what Eclipsa actually did that would warrant trapping her in crystal for all eternity, look at the excuses the MHC gives her:

- Rhombulus has apparently mixed Eclipsa up with a former Queen of Mewni who literally ate babies (One wonders whether Bubipsa was crystallized). Otherwise, it’s a safe bet that he crystallized her because his gut told him Eclipsa was evil. The same way his gut told him Star was evil. The same way his gut told him the pizza guy was evil. Heck, when the MHC was examining Star for “contamination” in ‘Stranger Danger’, he seriously tried to crystallize Star for reading a sign off of the wall at Omnitraxus’s behest that said “I am evil.” I’m pretty sure that’s entrapment, guys. Rhombulus crystallizes first and asks questions never. If someone else told him Eclipsa was evil, he probably wouldn’t question it.

- Omnitraxus, as mentioned earlier, cites Eclipsa being a pescetarian and says he once overheard Eclipsa calling Rhombulus “annoying.” He enables Rhombulus’s attempt to crystallize Star during the “examination.”

- Hekapoo says she saw Eclipsa double-dip in the ranch bowl once. She apparently also considers moles as being a possible sign of evil. *Looks at my mole-covered arms, and the moles on my face* Welp, I guess I’m pure evil!

- Moon talks about Eclipsa being “very convincing” and alleges that she can “get into your head and make you do things you don’t want to do.” On one level, it makes it sound like Eclipsa has magic that can possess unwilling innocents. But A) Moon openly admits that she has never read Eclipsa’s chapter, so she has no idea what was in there (Star has read it, and was underwhelmed), and B) this doesn’t square at all with what we saw of Moon and Eclipsa’s interactions in ‘Moon the Undaunted’, so unless Moon was lying about what happened there, this makes no sense (And if she’s lying, why would she lie? Not to make Eclipsa look better, surely. If Moon is lying about what went down between her and Eclipsa, it’s because something about the truth incriminates Moon herself). It suggests one of two things. One, is that Moon is reciting folktales and gossip she’s heard about Eclipsa instead of historical fact. Two, is that if One isn’t true, then this sounds an awful lot like this is Moon’s rationalization for trying to kill Toffee. It sounds like she may not be able to handle thinking of herself as a killer, and that she pushed the blame off onto Eclipsa so she wouldn’t have to confront that part of herself. Remember that Eclipsa didn’t exactly seem eager to tell Moon what the incantation for the Darkest Spell was; she asked first if that was really what Moon wanted. But Moon mentally rewrote history to make things easier for herself.

- (We don’t know what Lekmet’s justifications would have been, were he still alive. I wonder about that, myself.)

- So, the MHC has nothing on Eclipsa Butterfly. There is no verifiable account of Eclipsa using some horrible dark spell that would justify crystallizing her. She wasn’t some depraved, power-hungry tyrant who committed atrocities against her people. She likely didn’t wage war against Mewni. She almost certainly didn’t take the wand and the spell book with her when she fled Mewni, because Mewmans would probably regard taking two such powerful artifacts with her when she went to live with monsters, allowing those two powerful artifacts to potentially fall into the hands of monsters, as a form of treason. You had better believe that Moon would cite that as a reason for crystallizing her if she had actually done something like that.

These are the things Eclipsa is confirmed as having done. She fell in love with a monster. She “fled” Mewni, abandoning her husband and daughter and likely forfeiting all rights to the throne. She almost certainly committed adultery. She probably screwed around with dark magic, but we don’t know what kind of dark magic. She has a blatant disregard for other people’s privacy. These things are bad. These things do not justify imprisoning someone for all eternity.

The MHC, when asked to list justifications for Eclipsa’s eternal crystallization off the top of their heads, could not say a single thing that didn’t sound completely ridiculous, or in Moon’s case sounds like a self-serving lie. But they were prepared to crystallize her anyways, based on rumor and hearsay and good, old-fashioned racism. Star had to beg them to give her a trial.

- Speaking of that trial, how likely do you suppose it is that Eclipsa’s trial is going to be anything other than a kangaroo court? Moon says she’ll allow the trial to go forward so everyone can see how evil Eclipsa is. On top of that, look at the state of the room Eclipsa was confined to. Yes, I’m going on about that again, because it’s very suggestive. Moon had Eclipsa confined to a filthy, dilapidated room whose furniture was falling apart and crawling with insects. A room in that state that also happens to be located in a condemned building. Yes, Eclipsa suggested that she be put in a room that had a view of the rose garden, but did it have to be that room?

It’s symbolic. Just as the rose tower is condemned, has been for ages, with no one who has the power to restore it expressing any interest in doing so, so too is Eclipsa condemned, having been condemned for centuries with no one who has the power to take another look at her case expressing any interest in doing so. Beyond that, it’s suggestive of just how much of a sham Eclipsa’s “trial” is likely to be. Moon can’t be bothered to order someone to do even the most cursory amount of restorative work on the room she had Eclipsa confined to. She can’t be bothered to have Eclipsa confined to living quarters that are actually fit for Mewman habitation. She can’t even be bothered to have someone find a bed that isn’t infested with insects sent up to replace the old one. She can’t be bothered to waste those kinds of resources on Eclipsa because she has no expectation of having to house Eclipsa past the date of her trial. She isn’t wasting those resources on Eclipsa because she has no expectation that Eclipsa will be found innocent, and will still be free of crystal past the date of her trial.

- Since the MHC has no idea if Eclipsa is evil or not, it’s up to us to look at the things we’ve seen from Eclipsa since she was freed.

- “I did what I had to do for me.” Eclipsa gives this as a non-answer to Star’s question of whether or not Eclipsa screwed around with dark magic. It could mean any number of things, from hiding that she has some nefarious scheme in the works to just not wanting to have to justify herself to someone who wasn’t there and doesn’t understand the sort of situation she was in. On the face of it, it’s a rather selfish statement. But it does seem that Eclipsa is self-centered to a potentially damaging degree, so it’s at least consistent.

- As shown in ‘Stranger Danger’ and ‘Sweet Dreams,’ Eclipsa seems genuinely fond of Glossaryck, though the fact that she doesn’t seem concerned about why he’s so… different is interesting. Could it be that Eclipsa’s happy he’s like this because he had damaging information about her that he can’t reveal in his present state? Could it be that she knows exactly how this happened and doesn’t need to be told? Could it be that she’s simply afraid to ask? We don’t know, just like we don’t know where she picked up the knowledge of how to calm down an overexcited Glossaryck, or just what that entails.

- “I might… corrupt him,” “Then call me a villainess,” and “If I was, I wouldn’t tell you,” are all played ambiguously. It’s clear that Star is wary of Eclipsa during that conversation, but at the same time, it’s entirely possible that she was joking or being sarcastic. She does the same finger-wiggle while saying “Then call me a villainess” as she does when joking about Marco being afraid of her “evil cooties.” Star’s excusing it could come back to haunt her later. Or it might not.

- Eclipsa saves Star and Marco from floating away in the void in ‘Sweet Dreams.’ You can argue whether this is self-interested or not. If you believe that Eclipsa’s up to something nefarious, then getting rid of Star, who is exceptionally powerful, would be to her advantage. At the same time, Star is literally the only person at all willing to give Eclipsa a chance to prove herself, and let’s be real, if Star disappeared in the middle of the night, Moon would probably zero in on Eclipsa as the culprit. This could potentially be Eclipsa’s motivation for saving Star even if she isn’t up to something nefarious. Saving Star and Marco may have arisen from self-interested motives, or it may have been just because she cares about Star and didn’t want her to float away. It might be both, or neither.

- “As long as we’re spilling secrets.” In exchange for Star telling Eclipsa a pretty big secret about herself, Eclipsa tells Star a secret of her own—namely, that she can circumvent her “tower arrest” by way of a network of secret passageways. This reciprocal gesture could have many motives. Taking Star into her confidence could be a completely cynical effort to foster Star’s trust, though to what end is open to interpretation. It could be altruistic, Eclipsa sharing a “fun” secret with someone she senses is a kindred spirit. Or it could be somewhere in-between.

- More on that secret passageway. So, we’ve established that Eclipsa’s “tower arrest” is basically nothing more than a joke. She can leave that tower whenever she wants, and presumably leave the castle whenever she wants. So why doesn’t she? There are a few possible reasons, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

She has some nefarious scheme in the works that involves staying in the castle.

She feels as though she could possibly win her trial. This is the least-likely of the options, because so far all signs have been pointing towards Eclipsa’s upcoming “trial” being a sham, a show trial, a kangaroo court, a tarring-and-feathering, a drumhead, and whatever other term you can think of that describes a complete miscarriage of justice.

Eclipsa has committed offenses justifying crystallization (As much as anything can ever justify being trapped conscious in a crystal for all eternity). She feels remorse for having committed these offenses and wants to stay to face judgment, even if her trial is likely to be nothing but a sham.

Eclipsa knows that if she fled the castle, she’d spend the rest of her life as a free woman on the run, and doesn’t want to have to deal with that.

Eclipsa thinks that everyone she knew and loved is dead. She doesn’t care if she’s recrystallized, because what’s the point of caring when everyone you knew and loved is dead?

- And then there’s the three pieces of advice Eclipsa gives Star, all of which can be interpreted in a number of different ways depending on whether you’re willing to read malice into Eclipsa’s behavior.

- The first piece of advice Eclipsa gives Star comes from ‘Stranger Danger’, before Star even knows who Eclipsa is. When Star says they shouldn’t go to the top of the rose tower to get a better view of the garden, Eclipsa replies that Star shouldn’t let the fact that the tower’s condemned stop her. No matter how you look at it, this is not good advice from a safety standpoint. If you read malice into it, it sounds like Eclipsa is trying to get Star killed. But Eclipsa likely doesn’t even know who Star is at this point, beyond the fact that she’s a Butterfly.

- The second time is in ‘Lint Catcher.’ Before we even get to the advice, we see that Eclipsa is very perceptive; she only has to listen to Star rant for a few seconds before realizing she’s talking about a boy. When Star complains that Marco thinks she can do whatever she wants just because she’s a princess, Eclipsa asks her, “Well, can’t you?” If you assume she’s being serious, it again suggests a certain degree of self-centeredness and entitlement on Eclipsa’s part (I’m not certain Eclipsa does think a princess can do whatever she wants, but Star is historically bad at interpreting tone—and I’m not that great at it myself, hence the uncertainty). No matter how you shake it, it’s bad advice, and if you assume malice on Eclipsa’s part, it looks like she’s trying to foster destructive behaviors in Star. That Star chooses to interpret Eclipsa’s advice in a (apparently; the decision is not entirely without its problems) constructive way by making Marco her squire doesn’t negate the fact that it’s bad advice on its face.

- The third piece of advice comes from ‘Sweet Dreams.’ I already talked about this one some in an earlier section, but let’s just go over it again. In Eclipsa’s opinion, Star shouldn’t try to put a stop to her sleep-dimensional-travelling, because “it’s the only way to learn what [Star’s] truly capable of” and “all knowledge is good knowledge.” This, in the face of the fact that Star and Marco probably would have died if Eclipsa hadn’t shown up when she had, and that the sleep-travelling puts Star in serious danger.

If you assume malice, Eclipsa’s reasons for giving this advice are obvious—Star could die on her own and save Eclipsa the trouble of killing her later. If you assume the advice was not given with malice, it still fits with Eclipsa’s personality. She’s shown signs of recklessness, and is shown to be very curious; again, this is not a woman you ever want to trust with Pandora’s box. Eclipsa says it’s what she’d do in Star’s place, which paints a picture of an Eclipsa without much in the way of a sense of self-preservation. An Eclipsa who gives this advice either without thinking about or without caring much about the peril involved in following it.

The primary reason Star seems to be seeking Eclipsa’s advice on this matter is because she doesn’t feel safe talking about it with her parents. River was probably joking when he went on about how the MHC would run a bunch of tests on Star and treat her like a lab animal if they knew, but again, Star is bad at reading tone, and given what the MHC nearly did to Star and Eclipsa both back in ‘Stranger Danger,’ it makes sense that Star would be wary of alerting them. As for Moon, there’s love in that relationship, but precious little trust, on either side. I don’t think Moon would let the rest of the MHC experiment on her daughter, but at the same time, she would likely regard Star’s entering Mewberty form involuntarily as highly unnatural.

By her own admission, Star doesn’t trust Eclipsa. But she doesn’t really trust her parents, either, and Eclipsa is by any measure much more open-minded than either of them. She’s honestly a lot more accepting of what Star told her (presuming Star told her the whole story, unedited) than either Moon or River would have been. This is apparently enough to make her a “safe” adult for Star to confide in—which is a sad commentary indeed on just how few adults there are in Star’s life whom she feels she can trust.

- On Eclipsa’s advice as a whole, there are a lot of ways you could interpret it. If you think she’s acting with malice, then she’s trying to lead Star down the path to destruction—literally, with that third piece of advice. She’s trying to corrupt Star by inculcating her with bad values. Another explanation, one that works whether you think Eclipsa is a villain or not, is that Eclipsa knows that her only advocate, the only person willing to stand between her and recrystallization, is this fourteen-year-old girl, so she’s going to do everything in her power to keep her sweet.

Or maybe there’s no ulterior motive. Maybe all there is to this is that Eclipsa is giving Star perfectly well-intentioned advice, but what she thinks is good advice is actually bad, because Eclipsa has no idea where the limits are, has no reasonable conception of when you should stop. It’s possible that all the dissonance and unease comes about not because Eclipsa is acting with malice, but because she is a self-centered, irresponsible, reckless person giving Star what she thinks is perfectly good advice.

People have been theorizing about how Eclipsa’s going to pose a threat to Star on a personal level. She is a foil to both Moon and especially Star in thematically important ways; it makes sense that if Eclipsa is going to be any kind of major player, her arc should be closely tied with Star’s. Maybe the only threat Eclipsa poses to Star is that since she thinks she has much better judgment than she actually possesses, she keeps giving her bad advice.

- Whether Eclipsa is properly evil or not is, at this point, a riddle for the ages. Evidence that she’s evil can easily become evidence that she’s not evil if interpreted another way. So far, she seems to be, at worst, a bit amoral, and she hasn’t been confirmed to have done anything that would warrant being imprisoned for all eternity. The main source of the belief that she’s evil seems to come from her nasty reputation, something that has likely been growing more and more exaggerated every year for the past three hundred.

- A final note before we head into the next section: we don’t know how Eclipsa’s imprisonment may have changed her. She was trapped in that crystal, conscious and aware of her surroundings but unable to speak or move, for three hundred years. That definitely sounds like the kind of thing that could take a heavy toll on someone’s mental well-being. Eclipsa may be a lot less or a lot more dangerous now than she was before she was first crystallized.

And then there was Monster Bash

- So…… ‘Monster Bash’ dropped some serious bombs on us. Let’s go over them.

- This is the episode where we find out Eclipsa lived in the monster temple, probably for several years. I say several years because it turns out that Eclipsa and her lover/possible second husband had a child. That child being Meteora Butterfly, known later as Miss Heinous, the (currently) former headmistress of St. Olga’s Reform School for Wayward Princesses. Meteora was either born in the monster temple, or her parents took her there after she was born.

- We see Meteora’s nursery secreted deep in the basement (possible sub-basement) of the monster temple. Her nursery is in a sealed-off room that appears to be accessible only through magic. Given the clubs in spade symbol that appears on the door when Meteora/Miss Heinous unintentionally activates it, it looks like only Eclipsa and Meteora may have been able to open the door—though one would hope that the father would have a way to open the door as well. The nursery is well-furnished, with a bookshelf, toy chest a crib with Meteora’s name on it, and dolls of her parents in a toy-sized Mewni royal castle.

- There’s also a portrait on the wall of Eclipsa holding her newborn child. This portrait portrays Eclipsa in a much less sinister light than does her royal tapestry, hinting either that the monsters who were alive at the same time as Eclipsa pre-crystallization viewed her in a more positive light than did the Mewmans, or that she had more creative control over this portrait than she did her tapestry.

- At some point, Meteora lost all her memories of her early childhood. While she was likely still a very young child when her mother was crystallized, the fact that she can remember her nursery at all suggests that she was around four or five rather than a toddler or a baby when she was separated from her parents. It’s strongly suggested that she was brainwashed, her memories removed, but by who?

It’s possible that Eclipsa did it, perhaps to convince her older daughter that Meteora was no threat to her (Or to some wicked end, if you believe Eclipsa is a villain). I don’t think it’s likely that Eclipsa is the one who wiped Meteora’s memories, though, for one simple reason: “All knowledge is good knowledge.” This is a woman who places a great deal of importance on knowledge and self-discovery. It seems to me that stripping someone of their memories is something Eclipsa would not approve of. We don’t know a great deal about what kind of parent she was to Meteora, but a great deal of care went into that nursery; I think Eclipsa probably cared enough for Meteora that she wouldn’t want Meteora to forget about her. So it’s possible that Eclipsa is the one who erased her daughter’s memories of her early childhood, but I can only imagine her doing it in the most dire of circumstances, and even then, it seems unlikely.

Another possibility would be Eclipsa’s successor as Queen of Mewni, Meteora’s probable half-sister. She likely would have had the power required to do it. She might have done it to neutralize Meteora as a threat to her throne, out of spite, or for other purposes.

The MHC are also a possibility. A caveat here is that I don’t know if any of them have the ability to strip people of their memories; memory manipulation doesn’t seem to be in their repertoire.

There is a possibility that it happened after Meteora ended up at St. Olga’s. The issue is that we don’t know when she first came to St. Olga’s, or why. It could be that she was sent there as a child, either directly after being separated from her parents or after an abortive attempt to integrate her into the royal court (This assumes that Meteora’s half-sister would have actually wanted her in her life, which she might not have; on top of the fact that Mewnian society would probably identify Meteora as an abomination, her half-sister might resent the girl her mother “replaced” her with, and this might have been enough to make her reject Meteora immediately as opposed to gradually). It could be that Meteora went there as an adult. In this scenario, we don’t know if Meteora was subjected to brainwashing by another, or if she underwent it of her own accord, perhaps because her life as Meteora Butterfly was just so difficult for her that she wanted to be someone else.

- We have no idea what happened to Eclipsa’s lover/possible second husband, but considering what happened to her and their child, whatever happened to him probably wasn’t anything good.

- Mina knew Meteora would be back one day. While Mina is at best extremely unreliable, it is strongly suggested that she was ordered by someone to wait at the monster temple for Meteora to come back, and to eliminate Meteora if she ever recovered her memories.

My take on all this?

There are a number of possible different ways Eclipsa could turn out. It could turn out that she is a straight-up villain who’s only being nice to Star to manipulate her. She could turn out to be a straight-up villain who’s being nice to Star because she genuinely cares for her. She could turn out to be a heroic character, someone who has been vilified by history. There are so many things Eclipsa could turn out to be.

Personally, my hope is that it will turn out that the great, big twist surrounding Eclipsa Butterfly… is that there is no twist. Eclipsa’s been set up to be an extremely complicated person, and if it could turn out that she is that, while not being a villain, that would be what makes me happiest. It turning out that all the bad advice she gave Star really is just because she’s a person with not-so-great judgment of what good advice is, her screwing around with dark magic being a sign of moral ambiguity but not evil, and Eclipsa being chaotic neutral in personality without being malicious would all make me very happy.

(I also think that making the only Queen of Mewni who actually realized that, hey, racism is wrong and so is oppressing the monsters of Mewni, the villain, possibly the final boss, of this show would be a serious misstep on the writers’ parts. Especially considering the way things have been going lately. Of course, I think killing Toffee off for real would be a serious misstep, too, and while I don’t think he’s gone for good, I do think his character has been criminally underexplored so far, so who knows?)

I do hope that Eclipsa doesn’t turn out to be the villain. If she must be an antagonist, I at least hope she isn’t characterized as a cackling, two-dimensional supervillain. That would just be a waste of her character, and really not in keeping with the themes of this show. If she must be an antagonist, I hope she’s written to be a complex, complicated person instead of a cardboard cut-out.

However, if she was an antagonist, if she was evil, I can’t say I’d feel terribly sorry for most of the people who’d wind up pitted against each other. If anything could turn a morally ambiguous but not evil person to full-fledged villainy, it’s what the MHC did to Eclipsa, and what they or someone else did to her daughter afterwards. If Eclipsa turns out to have not initially been malicious, but turns into a full-fledged villain over the course of Season Three, you can’t really say the MHC have anyone to blame for it but themselves. The punishment she received was grossly disproportionate to anything she’s confirmed as actually having done, and what happened to Eclipsa and Meteora both is just so grotesquely awful that if Eclipsa turns out to be a villain, even the final boss of this show, I’m going to have a hard time rooting for anyone but her. Probably the only person besides her I’d be rooting for is Star, and that depends a lot on how she reacts to it.

The one thing I’m sure about is that whatever Eclipsa, her lover, and their child deserved, it wasn’t this. Eclipsa didn’t deserve to be locked away in crystal for all eternity, conscious and aware of her surroundings but unable to interact with the world, to speak, to even blink her eyes. Her lover/possible second husband didn’t deserve to lose his lover/possible wife, be forcibly separated from their child, and quite possibly wind up imprisoned or even killed for the crime of falling in love with the Queen of Mewni. Meteora, whatever she did as Miss Heinous, didn’t deserve to be treated as an abomination, didn’t deserve to be brainwashed, and didn’t deserve to have someone assigned to kill her if she ever regained her memories. So if Eclipsa goes on a rampage, especially if she goes on one in reaction to finding out what happened to her youngest child after she was crystallized, probably the only person I’ll be rooting for is her.

#Star vs. the forces of evil #Svtfoe #Meta #Eclipsa Butterfly #Miss Heinous #Meteora Butterfly #Svtfoe Monster husband #Svtfoe Toffee #Star Butterfly

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