And a short break from endless screaming to talk about Star vs. the Forces of Evil, which has been the stress relief show of the week. I have a lot of feelings, especially about Moon and the whole Mewni mythology.
Moon
One of the first things I noticed in Pageturner was how vulnerable Queen Moon actually is around Glossaryck. I mean, it makes sense, he taught her and all her ancestors, but there was something especially fragile about Moon in that moment. She seemed almost… attention seeking, or like she was looking for some form of reassurance from Glossaryck.
Plus, the Butterfly family is pretty clearly Messed Up. Game of Flags demonstrated that much. They’re certainly not very affectionate, which could easily leave an cautious, soft-hearted, bookworm like baby Moon with some serious parental issues.
Her parents are basically an issue all to themselves, after all. They’re presumably dead by the time of the show, and based on the tapestries in the Grandma Room Moon took the Queendom before she was out of her teens. In the comic a younger-than-Star (and identified as preteen by Star herself) Princess Moon seems to be left to her own devices, with the wand and the spellbook besides. Her parents are either very hands off, or possibly not even there at all.
Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that she’s so easily upset by Glossaryck’s criticisms, and why he had to take such a direct and straightforward tack with her. He was probably the closest thing she had to a mentor and parental figure for a good portion of her childhood, and someone like Moon isn’t going to respond very well to riddles and diversions. A Glossaryck Adventure like the ones Star gets could have easily spoiled introverted young Moon’s faith in him entirely. Even assuming Glossaryck managed to rein it in a little for Moon’s sake, he still couldn’t have been the easiest mentor for her.
(In fact, I have to wonder about Glossaryck’s relationship with Mewni royalty in general. He and the wand are the two stable factors in their family history. He’s seen at least a thousand years of them, taught generation after generation for years of their lives, been highly involved in the teenage years of queen after queen after queen. He has to have a lot of strategies up his sleeve after all those years.)
Another thing that’s very interesting are the parallels between Marco and Moon, especially in light of the recent comic. Marco says he has very absent parents, and right after that we see totally unattended-with-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction Moon. We see them both as the more cautious, protective members of their respective friend groups. Moon’s sputtering about Dirt being a good guy, really, has shades of denial about it, like she knew he was bad news but didn’t want to admit it, similar to Marco’s many insecurities. We know that they both crave validation, and for the same reason take on responsibility easily. Marco mentions he’d love to be Queen, since it means having your whole life planned out for you, meanwhile Moon seems to have embraced it from the very beginning. That combination of desperate to please, duty burdened insecurity is basically a recipe for disaster.
Now, a short diversion into Mewnian history.
The Butterflys
We know they’re a very old family, with an unexplained amount of cosmic power. They seem to be markedly different from normal mewmans, with their cheek symbols and ability to wield awe-inspiring magic with minimal casualties. Plus the whole “could end the universe” thing is pretty notable. They’re definitely not a lineage to be trifled with, which is why it’s fortunate that they haven’t tried to go on any intergalactic pan-dimensional conquering sprees. In fact, they seem pretty happy just oppressing Mewni and doing their thing from there. Moon’s extended family suggests that they are, to some extent, hampered by their own arrogance, indulgence, dysfunction, and infighting but still deadly if you give them a common enemy. The Queens are certainly a force to be reckoned with, and Glossaryck serves to insure that each queen is more or less well trained for the job and can be given a good scolding when they falter.
Anyone looking to attack them would have to be really, really sneaky about it, either by exploiting a weak link or getting inside the family. And what better weak link is there than a young princess, possessing unmatchable power but still young enough to not know how to use it?
I wouldn’t be surprised if princesses other than Star or young Moon were targeted. For enemies of the crown, the heir at ages fourteen to sixteen is the closest they’re going to get to a soft target. And unlike self confident brawler Star, Moon was a quiet, gentle kind of kid. Clearly willing to make friends, forgiving and maybe even a little shy. The list of people lining up to take a swing at reserved little Moon was probably a lot longer than Star’s roster of enemies, and based on the Mudmen, a good bit smarter too.
(Taking into consideration that young Queens and solitary Princesses are the Butterflys’ one weak spot, I have a lot more feelings about the similarly young looking Solaria as well.)
It must have taken a lot of blows for the very sweet young Moon we meet in the comics to become Moon the Undaunted.
Toffee
I didn’t want this to turn into a Toffee essay but it sort of did, whoops.
We know Toffee has been fighting the royal family for a while. He’s connected to Eclipsa somehow, he fought Moon, he showed emotion at the reenactment of the Great Monster Massacre, he knew about the Whispering Spell. He’s got a History with them.
It would be silly to assume Star and Moon are the only two young royals he’s gone after, or that he’s limited to just one strategy. It’s impossible to tell how many attacks he orchestrated, or schemes he put in place, how much research he’s done and how many plans he’s made in the eight generations between Moon and Eclipsa.
I do think it’s safe to say that he didn’t limit himself to simple attack based plots. That’s so not him. The man (lizard) looks like he thrives on planning. He’s reassuringly calm, manipulative, very, very clever… exactly the sort of person young Moon could easily admire.
(One of the things about Marco that I don’t think gets mentioned a lot is that he’s very, very corruptible. Monster arm, Eclipsa’s chapter, the boy gets influenced by malign powers far too easily. It’s very thematically probable that Moon shared his dispensation towards being slowly talked into things.)
I mean, Moon and Glossaryck aren’t very compatible personality-wise, and Moon still cracked like an egg around her old mentor. We know Moon played flags when she was younger, despite it not really seeming like her style. She did “lots of things” she doesn’t want Star doing. Aunt Etheria straight up accuses River of corrupting the Butterfly family tree. That seems like a weird thing for someone to say about ice cold, calm and collected Queen Moon, unless she wasn’t always so untouchable.
Her interactions with Dirt prove that she wasn’t interested in romance at a young age. She wanted friends, and her talk with Glossaryck suggests that she wanted and still wants grown-up approval. Toffee is pretty much the most grownup grownup to ever be grown. He’s cool, collected, seems nonthreatening at first. I don’t ship it because honestly I think that after a few thousand years Toffee finds it impossible to take any Butterfly seriously (knowing their great grandmas tends to spoil a romance) but I do think that they could have been close, that Moon’s easygoing personality and apparent need for adult affection would have made her prime candidate for some patented Toffee Manipulation.
(Which honestly explains a lot of her smothering of Star. If Moon was desperate for advice and reassurance as a young woman, if she felt abandoned by her parents and wide open to be emotionally influenced by bad guys, it makes sense that she would go overboard and be overprotective and restricting with her own daughter.)
Think about it. Moon needed someone to help her, to be frank and upfront and give sound advice about being the best leader and ruler she can be. Toffee literally has centuries of Butterfly experience, knows exactly what makes them tick, and is a lot more suave and approachable than Glossaryck. He would have been the ultimate mentor figure for someone like her, aside from the whole monster thing and honestly I suspect Moon would have been willing to forgive that in return for wellread political experience.
Toffee could have worked his way into her confidence, dispensed lots of advice and soothing words, and when he was close enough to her and the throne done… something. Something unforgivable. And gentle, book reading, easily swayed Moon snapped and finally showed everyone what she was made of, once and for all, leaving Toffee to flee and wait for the next weak link in the Mewnian chain, figure out a new strategy to get… whatever it is he wants.
And Moon would have been left alone, like all the Queens before her, left with only Glossaryck and her own self to rely on, and a dynasty to carry on.
A Middleground 