Once Upon An Allusion - Tumblr Posts

Willow the Swan

I'm gonna fly With the swans and show my beauty

Willow is introduced drinking a brand of vodka called The Six Swans. This is a reference to the fairy tale with the same name written by the Geimms Brothers.

This minor reference is interesting for 2 reasons:

It ties Willow and the Schnees in general to the Swans in alchemy

It works as its own allusion by combining itself with the mirror imagery the Schnee Family has

At its root the Six Swans is a story about family, parents trying to protect their children and siblings saving each other. It can easily be seen as a loose representation of Willow's abusive situation, of her fear for her kids' safety and of her passivity towards Jacques.

THE FAIRY TALE

The Six Swans is the story of a King forced to marry an Evil Witch. The Witch targets the King's 7 children (6 sons and 1 daughter) by transforming the sons into swans. In order to save them the sister is tasked with the trial to sew 6 shirts in the course of 6 years. Throughout these 6 years, though, she is not allowed to laugh or talk. While she is sewing, she is found by a King that marries her. Together they have 3 children, but the King's Evil Mother kidnaps them and blames the protagonists. The sister can't talk to defend herself and is sentenced to death by fire. However, the day of the execution is at the end of her 6 years of forced silence. Her brothers turned into Swans come flying, are freed and help their sister defending herself. As a result, the King's Evil Mother is burnt and the 7 siblings, the king and the 3 kids live happily ever after.

The Six Swans basically tells the same story twice. There are 2 families threathened by an Evil Parent and both times the Good Parent is really unable to protect the children. The protagonist as a Sister though is able to save her Brothers and this lets her overcome her passiveness, speak up and find her 3 Children again.

It is easy to see how the story can loosely apply to Willow's situation. She is a mother, who clearly loves her children, but she is unable to fight off Jacques effectively and her weakness leads to an unsafe place for the Schneeblings. All she can do is to task her own daughter with the duty to save both herself and her siblings:

Willow: You haven't come back to stay, have you?

Weiss: No.

Willow: Good.

Willow: No matter what happens, Weiss... please don't forget about your brother.

Weiss: Whitley wants nothing to do with me.

Willow: Of course not, you left him alone. With us.

In a sense, Willow herself has been turned into a swan and trapped into a glass cage:

WILLOW'S 2 MIRRORS

There's a part of me that's desperate for changes, Tired of being treated like a pawn But there's a part of me that stares back from inside the mirror Part of me that's scared I might be wrong That I can't be strong.

Like daughter, like mother. Just like Weiss, Willow too has been split in 2 by Jacques's evil mirror curse. This is made clear since her first appearance, where her 2 opposite mirrors are shown:

On the one hand she looks at her daughter's suffering through the bottle. That is symbolic of her passiveness and of how she seeked refuge into alcohol to try and escape her abuse. On the other hand she looks at herself and Weiss through the cameras she has hidden within the Schnee Mansion. This is a sign of action and hints that Willow has in herself the strength to fight back, but must find it.

Dark is when she is forced to choose who she wants to be:

Symbolically she steps in front of a mirror with her 2 sides just there for her to pick 1:

Will she choose the bottle (passiveness, silence)? Or will she choose the scroll (action, standing up)?

Luckily, she chooses the 2nd and breaks the mirror in the process:

This is also goodbye to her passive Swan form. She finally comes back into herself, as symbolized by her using her semblance to materialize a giant mama boar:

A FAMILY COMING TOGETHER

Once the Evil Witch is removed from the equation, the curse is lifted and we see both Whitley and Willow rapidly growing back into themselves.

Obviously, this is also thanks to the brave Sister who manages to defeat the Evil Parent and his evil magic:

I didn't forget you

Thanks to Weiss, the Swans can go back to being humans and the Schnees can be a family once again.

(On a side note, can we have more swans motifs for the Schnees, please? What about Swan Lake's motif for the Schnee Sisters, which gives context to Weiss's dancer's outfit and to Winter's storm of baby Nevermore? And Whitely would be a wonderful Ugly Ducklyn as he grows into himself)