Pottsfield, led by the rumbling patriarchal voice of Enoch, evokes Judaism-our heroes’ punishment is temporary (as there’s not really an “eternal damnation” in Jewish belief), and the skeletal bodies of Pottsfield’s residents lay waiting in the ground until their leader enlists someone to resurrect them. While there’s very little on the nose depiction (indeed, I’d wager to say at least some of it is unintentional but no less applicable), each place draws from varies afterlife mythos or religious traditions. And at the same time, each place that the brothers visit is a potential “final” resting place that they reject in their quest to return home. All the characters Wirt and Greg meet are missing something, be it a memory, an item, or another being. It’s very explicitly a stage of transition, wandering and wanting. I’ve been somewhat beaten to the punch on the basics here: this post gives a good rundown of the Unknown as a semi-real, purgatorial kind of landscape that both exists in its own right and also reflects the brothers’ oscillation between life and death: the half-full moon, the autumnal season shifting into winter, and so on. In the “real” world, he’s so fixated on painting himself as the “nice guy” who had the girl swept away from him that he turns blinders on to Sara’s fairly evident (for teenagers) desire to get closer. And Wirt is immature: that couch introspection I mentioned lacks any actual introspecting, indulging in how rejected he feels rather than, say, his self-isolating tendencies or general passivity. It’s a common lowball lobbed at millennials that they don’t become adults but rather taller children. On the other hand, it forces us to divorce age from the concept of maturity.
On the one hand, it’s something of a nudge at the precocious crushes that litter the TV landscape, where writers find themselves hamstrung between marketable tween protagonists and that sweet, sweet romantic trope box-checking (the problem being less that real kids that age aren’t wrestling with romantic and possibly sexual feelings and more that their TV counterparts are written with an aggressive unwillingness to acknowledge those frustrations in the name of molding tiny adults). At first glance, there’s quite a muddy aesthetic going on in OtGW: both Wirt and Greg are wearing 19th century Germanic clothing, speaking like modern Americans but without any of the accompanying technology (which later still we find is only as current as cassette tapes and house phones-fitting enough, since the millennial generation begins in the 80s), and Wirt lays himself down for a couch therapy session like a regular Woody Allen (though perhaps that reference can now be better filled by Hannah or any of the myriad mumblecore protagonists of the modern age).īut it’s not so much carelessness as a deliberate attempt to put us in the mindset of what it means to be of the “millennial” generation, both glutted with more technological and communicative advancement than any other time period and caught up in the trappings of the past-from the aesthetics of the hipster generation (it would be unkind if not unfair to crush this gem beneath the label of “twee,” but there certainly are a number of well-waxed moustaches) to the resurging echoes of the civil rights era.