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mmikmmik2 · 4 years

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Season one of Infinity Train is an exemplar of the “kid goes through a portal and has fantasy adventures that help them grow as a person and cope better with their normal life once they return to it” genre, but there are already lots of great stories like that. Seasons two and three elevate the show by telling a good story in their own right while also turning a piercing eye on that premise itself.

If the kid goes back to the “real” world at the end of the story, why should we care about anything that came before? Do any of those characters actually matter?

All of the examples of this kind of genre that I can think of give some kind of answer to this question (except maybe Mirrormask, but given his past works, I see that more as Neil Gaiman being comfortable with the ambiguity rather than the narrative being too weak to consider the question.)

Labyrinth sort of answers that... they don’t? We enjoy the characters of the magical fantasy world, but ultimately it’s only Sarah’s story. We care about them because they’re fun and charming, but their narrative role is to help her character grow. They’re strongly implied to be her fantasy, both literally and in the sense of their narrative role. Labyrinth is about Sarah’s relationship with fantasy and imagination (and her real family). Mirrormask kind of lands in a similar “the world is Helena’s fantasy” area, though that story is imo more ambiguous about the relationship between Helena and the fantasy world. We should care about the stories of Labyrinth and Mirrormask because we care about Sarah and Helena and their struggles, not because those worlds are so deep and meaningful.

Coraline’s fantasy world is explicitly a fabrication; some of its inhabitants are worthy of sympathy, but the story is really about Coraline vs the bell-dame, who is very real and very dangerous. We care about the fantasy world because it reflects her battle against a fantastical serial child murderer.

The fantasy worlds of Spirited Away and Over the Garden Wall are both just about explicitly real. IIRC, we don’t really get “proof” that these protagonists have grown up based on them doing something impressive in the real world, like Labyrinth showed us Sarah making peace with her baby brother... the dramatic climax and ultimate triumphs are all in the fantasy world itself. And imo, characters like Haku or Beatrice are more fleshed out than any of the fantasy characters that are previously mentioned. Chihiro made a meaningful difference in the bathhouse by helping people and moving hearts. Wirt and Greg did meaningful things in the Unknown, most importantly defeating the Beast. We as audience members feel that the fantasy characters persist beyond the departure of the mundane characters, so their choices and situations are important.

Infinity Train dances between all these options - the train is explicitly within universe intentionally designed to be the former type of setting, where everything exists to serve the protagonist’s development. But the narrative refuses to apply that kind of morality, because denizens are (within the setting and within the narrative structure) real and complete people who can grow or change and have important feelings and internal lives of their own.

It dips its toe into this kind of narrative in season one. See Tulip coaxing One-One into letting the turtle denizens be even if they don’t fit into what the train is supposed to be like, and Tulip’s refusal to abandon Atticus even though her personal journey is “done”. We are told it is a personal growth train that is clearly trying to help Tulip overcome her problems in her mundane life (as though it is trying to be one of the former stories), but we also see Tulip leaving a lasting mark by saving Atticus and convincing Amelia to stand down, preventing further Steward raids from ripping denizens’ worlds apart (more like the latter stories).

But season two kicks the meta-narrative commentary into high gear. It argues that a person who has truly experienced meaningful personal growth would never treat their friends as sidekicks on their self-improvement quest. Jesse almost breaks the train trying to save Lake - metaphorically saying “if your fantasy setting doesn’t value the fantasy characters as people, it breaks!” I don’t think Inftrain is condemning the kinds of stories I perceive Labyrinth or Mirrormask to be, but I think it argues the same point that I did - their fantasy worlds are only meaningful to the extent they affect the protagonist, and their capacity for meaningful storytelling is narrowed by the “unreality” of the fantasy characters and fantasy setting. Also interestingly, the story breaks the “rules” of lots of portal fantasy by following Lake (and the Cat, and One-One) after their encounter with Tulip. It follows up on the fun fantasy characters after their adventures with the human protagonist and expands on them far beyond how they related to Tulip.

Then season three makes the case that these kinds of portal fantasies could even be harmful to experience. That trauma can lead people in the wrong directions. That the isolation from the “real” world could make them feel alienated from it and disinterested in returning. That colorful fantasy characters could be difficult to relate to and easy to dehumanize.

(Tangentially: these kind of meta-narrative thoughts are why I personally don’t think The Owl House can possibly have a satisfying ending unless Luz is able to move between both worlds at the end of the series. All of the meaningful commentary about education and neurodiversity falls apart if either Luz leaves this place where she finally fits in and excels academically because it’s not “real”, or if she is unable to live happily in the human world as though she ultimately could never have belonged there.)

#infinity train #the owl house

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