You cannot help but notice that the bogs seem crowded with witches these days, the forests with hags, the caverns with sorceresses. Everyone is eager to disappear to these places of literary mysticism, only to reappear at a pivotal plot point, perhaps for nefarious reasons.
You are not judging, of course. You are scarcely less eager to begin your own devolution into a dark, misunderstood archetype. You think there will be some camaraderie in it—in joining your fellow recluses, though by your nature you will, of course, never actually meet them. It is a symbolic joining only, of kindred spirits.
Still, you do not wish to be truly alone. You think you would prefer to be the sole human member of a herd of unicorns or a clutch of dragons or a pack of wolves. Because being alone is hard, except when it is easier and better than everything else you have found so far.
Better than Carl from the warehouse telling you that you look nice today, and staying to talk with you even though you made an irritated face and looked away from him. Better than him talking at you for the next half hour, even though it’s obvious you don’t want him to stay, don’t want to listen to him tell you again how, really, you’re just so much like his wife.
Meanwhile your coworkers are becoming increasingly annoyed that Carl has been here talking for so long, because you are supposed to at least look like you are doing something. But how are you expected to make him stop? You haven’t spoken a word in the last thirty minutes but Carl is still here, and nothing you have ever tried makes him leave. You once told him point blank that you didn’t want to talk to him, and he thought you were joking, and isn’t it great that you are such a chill girl, not like those other girls, except kind of like his wife, and does that black nail polish mean you’re going goth? Because he doesn’t understand that.
You would be legitimately rude to him, but while people are annoyed at you for being talked at by Carl, they like Carl, and they do not like you. Not even when you fix the problems no one else can. Perhaps especially when you fix the problems that no one else can.
And this is why you need a herd of unicorns or clutch of dragons or pack of Princess-Mononoke-style wolves, who understand that you do not belong in this bleak world of stereotype-cis-het-white males and underdeveloped side-characters and cookie-cutter villains because, really, does the motivation behind the villainy always have to be money and sex and the desire to subjugate anyone who fails to pretend to fit inside the supposedly-idyllic “ordinary” mould?
It does? Ah, you forgot you were living in the real world again, didn’t you? Forgot that all the cliches exist because the villains who made them are that unoriginal, and yet somehow they still run the world. You forgot again, just as you forgot that you will lay down tonight, not on sweet green grass adorned with moonlight, surrounded by the soft muzzles or scaled bodies or furred paws of your chosen new family, but on that mattress that was supposed to be the more ethical purchase, because it was from a local company, except they aren’t making anything locally, you discovered after the fact, and their supply chain is just as terrible to people as the mega corporations. Just as those sheets you bought—the bamboo ones that were so soft—were supposed to be better for the environment, but then you found out that “viscose” is just another word for “rayon” and your bamboo viscose sheets are just as bad as every other textile, but you comfort yourself with the knowledge that at least you only buy one set of sheets when you absolutely must, wearing them threadbare and hoping your valiant attempt to not consume is worth something.
You think the unicorns and dragons and wolves would not be so bothered. Animals, even intelligent, magical animals who have accepted you as one of their own, understand that to exist is to consume, and so they do not trouble themselves overmuch with the ethics of the matter.
You wonder if you will miss your phone when you are galloping across starlit plains, the moon’s light glinting off spiraled horns. If you will care that you never found a social media space you fit into, just like you never fit into real life, when you are soaring through the skies on the broad back of a dragon who is breathing fire. You wonder if it will bother you that your parents never really loved you, or tried to understand you, when you are stalking evil men through the forest at the side of your clawed packmates.
But mostly, worst of all, you wonder—you know—that the unicorns and dragons and wolves would never want you either. That you are not special enough—not likable or unlikable enough, privileged or downtrodden enough, intelligent or misunderstood enough—to be worthy of being accepted into their fold.
You are that most unlikable of female characters, the one readers don’t even like to dislike. The kind where “unlikable” is not even a way to say “strong” or “brash” or “unrepentant” or “unladylike enough to use the word fuck and not want to procreate”. You are unlikable in the way that you simply are not liked. You have introspected long and hard over the matter, attempting to discover the whys and hows, but in the end you do not know why you are not liked, you only know that it has always been this way, and you could pay a therapist six-hundred dollars a month to tell you that people should love you for who you are, but being told this platitude will not make anyone actually love you.
This is why you know that, were you ever fortunate enough to glimpse your herd of unicorns or clutch of dragons or pack of wolves, you would not approach them. You do not think you would survive their rejection. You must settle, you understand, for the seclusion of the bog or the forest or the cave. You must reside in exile, alone there as you are alone here, and hope that it will be a different kind of isolation, one that will hurt less, because at least in such a place the world does not see fit to present the pretense that you are not alone.
But even in one of these roles—witch, hag, sorceress—a knowing voice whispers that you would fail at that too. Because what is the purpose in the story of the bogwitch or the forest hag or the dark sorceress? To provide the hero, whom everyone likes, with a question from which to grow, or a dire warning in the nick of time, or an ill-bargained-for bit of much-needed magic.
You are not interesting enough to be the subject of a quest. No one ever takes your warnings seriously. There is nothing of magic in you.
You are not the hero or the villain. You are not the lovable or annoying side character. You are not the distantly-remembered mother/lover/sister/friend whose death off-page even now spurs the main character’s quest for vengeance.
You are not even in the story.