A Deep Dive into Eda From The Owl House
What is there about Eda the Owl Lady that still needs to be said? She’s magical, sassy, powerful, confident, rebellious, and, as Luz puts it, “Surprisingly foxy for her age.” Luz is right, too. Eda has many people who think she’s hot, both in-universe and out. When we first meet her, she’s an outlaw and the most powerful Witch on the Boiling Isles. While it looks like she’s living her best life, as the show progresses, we start to understand how lonely she is. And while she may have lost most of her power, she gained something just as valuable: the chance to open up to others again.
I’m RJ Writing Ink, and as part of my attempts to get hyped for the series finale of The Owl House, I’m deep diving into some of my favorite characters, exploring who they are and how they’ve grown over the show’s run as we head into the series finale. First, we have everyone’s favorite Witch, Eda The Owl Lady.
Man, she is awesome.
Eda, the Bad Girl, Meets Luz, the Human
Introduced in the opening minutes of the premiere, when her familiar, Owlbert, accidentally steals Luz’s prized Good Witch Azura book, Luz and Eda’s first meeting is chaotic. After realizing that she’s no longer on Earth but in another world entirely, Luz manages to impress Eda with her know-how by attracting customers to buy her Human-related junk. However, their meeting gets cut short when the cops come, and Eda has to bounce, dragging Luz along as an accessory to her crimes. After taking her back to her hideout, the titular Owl House, and introducing her to Hooty and King, Eda makes a deal with the young Human. Help them break into the Conformatorium and reclaim King’s “Crown of Power,” and she’ll send Luz back home. It’s not like Luz has a say in the matter, anyway.
While they’re on their caper, though, something unexpected happens: Luz starts to bond with the pair. Having spent her life on Earth is an outcast herself, Luz sympathizes with them after Eda admits that King’s Crown doesn’t give him any power, but since it was important to him, it was to her. As Eda put it, “us weirdoes have to stick together.” Luz takes those words to heart when she returns to save Eda and King from getting captured by the Warden and freeing several other prisoners in the process.
True to her word, Eda offers to send Luz back home, but given how that means sending her to a summer camp meant to make her act normal, she takes a different option. She offers to stay with Eda and King and serve as Eda’s apprentice, despite Eda saying that humans can’t do magic. Impressed by her resolve, though, Eda agrees. She doesn’t know it yet, but Luz coming into her life ends up becoming the best thing Eda could’ve ever hoped for.
A Rocky Start as a Teacher
Despite agreeing to teach Luz, problems arise almost right away. Despite Luz being more than eager to learn magic, Eda doesn’t share her enthusiasm. At all.
It soon becomes clear that despite her promise, Eda has yet to learn how to teach Luz to use magic. She doesn’t even know how such a thing might be possible in the first place. Thus, for the first week or so, she treats Luz less like a student and more like an errand girl to do jobs for her. This comes close to blowing up in her face when Luz grows impatient to begin her training and ends up sneaking into Hexside to learn magic there, something that Eda hates due to having to drop out when she was young. When Luz ends up getting herself banned, though, Eda can’t help but be proud of her for it.
Despite this, the magic training makes little progress until the events of “The Intruder.” When King and Luz swipe Eda’s elixir, they learn Eda’s big secret: she’s been cursed to transform into this Owl Beast, with those elixirs the only thing keeping her from permanently changing into it. It’s the reason why she’s an outcast. The show frames it like someone with a medical issue that someone has to take medication to control, which is pretty mature.
Ultimately, the incident serves as a means for Luz to figure out a way to perform magic via her glyphs, proving that humans can do magic, something that Eda can’t help but be proud of. The deadly incident ultimately brings the three closer together and gives Eda people she can trust to help her when she needs it.
Reuniting With her Sister, Moonlight Conjuring, and Enrolling Luz in Hexside
As time passes, the trio of Luz, King, and Eda go on even more adventures and grow closer together in the process. Eda reunites with her estranged sister, now head of the Emperor’s Coven, and humiliates her in the episode “Covention,” with Luz learning Eda’s past is more complicated than it seems. When the trio swap bodies for the day to see who has the worst life, they all learn that they each have their own problems that are hard to deal with. Most importantly, though, while in Eda’s body, Luz learns from an unknowing Lilith that Eda had trouble controlling her magic when they were younger, thus motivating her to reject the Coven system as a whole. And who can forget the events of the moonlight conjuring where Luz and her friends animated the Owl House and saved Eda and King?
Eventually, though, things progress to the point where Eda realizes that there’s only so much she can teach her student. Wanting the best for her but not wanting to put her in a school that destroys free-thinkers, Eda finds herself in a dilemma. Ultimately, her growing concern for Luz leads her to swallow her pride and enroll Luz at Hexside. Even if that means she has to make up for everything she did as a student.
Good times. Joking aside, Eda pulls Luz aside and lets her know she has enough faith in her not to fall for the whole Coven system nonsense. As Luz learns on her first day at Hexside, Eda had tried and failed to fight against the one-track system at Hexside. Where Eda failed, Luz succeeded, convincing the school to allow students to study more than one type of magic.
Sacrificing Herself for Luz’s Sake and Losing Her Powers
Despite how much happier her life has gotten since meeting Luz, Eda’s still facing many problems. Throughout the first season, the audience learns that Eda’s elixirs are less effectively than they used to. As a result, she’s becoming more at risk of permanently changing into the Owl Beast. Despite this, and despite learning that she shouldn’t keep her condition a secret, Eda opts to do just that, not wanting to worry Luz. In addition, the Emperor’s Coven doubles its efforts to capture her, with Lilith unable to keep letting her go. Even with everything going on in her life, though, Eda feels happier than she’s felt in a long time, thanks to Luz. Before meeting her, Eda was a loner wasting her life, living on the edge of society and surviving by selling scraps. Meeting Luz and seeing her enthusiasm and passion for magic helps to break down the barriers she’s put in place ever since she got cursed. Luz becomes the daughter that Eda never had, and she’s all the better for it.
Which only makes what happens next harder to watch.
When Lilith captures Luz to lure her to the Emperor’s Castle, Eda loses it. She fights her sister with everything she has, showing how she is the strongest Witch on the Boiling Isles. However, trying to protect Luz, and the revelation that Lilith cursed her, prove to be too much for her to handle. While she manages to save Luz, she succumbs to the Owl Beast and is captured, leaving the residents of the Owl House devastated.
Ultimately, Lilith’s efforts to help her sister are for naught, with Emperor Belos reneging on his deal in favor of executing her. All he wanted was her portal to Earth; he couldn’t care less about Eda herself. This revelation makes Lilith turn on Belos and join forces to free her while Luz destroys the portal in front of Emperor Belos, with everyone escaping. Afterward, Lilith and Eda reconcile, with the former using her magic to split the curse between them, allowing Eda to return to Witch form. However, doing so costs both their magic, potentially for good. But at least they have each other now.
Coming to Grips With No Power, Conquering Her Inner Fears, and Meeting Her Mom Again
With Eda and Lilith now powerless, any respect they had on the Boiling Isles is now gone. In a reversal of roles, Luz now finds herself as the teacher, showing the Clawthorne sisters everything she knows about glyph magic. While Lilith listens to Luz’s instructions and takes the slow and methodical approach, Eda grows impatient and starts recklessly combining glyphs without thinking about the consequences. This results in Lilith having to bail her out. Unlike Luz, this prompts her to start taking her training seriously the first time.
She also tells everyone about how she found and adopted King, but more on him in his deep dive.
It’s around this time that we also learn that another that Eda and Luz have in common is issues regarding their mother. Like Luz, Eda concluded a long time ago had her mother, Gwen, was ashamed of her. In Eda’s case, it was due to her curse, prompting her to run away to Earth using the portal she discovered on the family grounds. So when Gwen shows up claiming she’s found the means to cure her, she coldly refuses to listen. When Gwen presses forward and enlists Luz’s aid, the only thing that happens is Eda going full Owl Beast alongside Lilith. Or, Raven Beast, in Lilith’s case.
While this incident wasn’t pleasant, it gave Eda a chance to confront the Owl Beast within her mind and put it in its place. As a result, she gains a measure of control over her curse that only becomes more relevant down the line.
Reuniting With Raine, Finding a New Purpose, and Unlocking Harpy Eda
While Eda tries not to let it get to her, losing her magic starts to weigh heavily on her. Coupled with the fact that Luz might have to return home and King might leave to find his father, she starts to fear that she’ll be left all alone again. There is Hooty, but that’s not much.
That’s when she runs into her ex, Raine Whispers, now the newly appointed head of the Bard Coven and, secretly, leader of a rebellion against Emperor Belos. Seeing this as the chance to do something meaningful again, Eda wholeheartedly agrees to join their fight, only for it to end with the rebels imprisoned and Raine captured by the Coven Heads, buying time for Eda to escape to her family. As it turns out, King never planned to leave; he’s changing his last name to Clawthorne, formally making himself Eda’s adopted son.
Despite this newfound joy, though, the stress of whatever Belos has planned starts getting to Eda, making her curse harder and harder to control. In the episode, “Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Hooty’s Door,” Hooty tries to force Eda to relax by feeding her cookies laced with sleeping nettles. The resulting psychedelic dream takes her on a trip through her memories to key traumatic moments in her life caused by her curse, like injuring her father and her breakup with Raine. Despite blaming the Owl Beast for everything, Eda realizes that she’s been using that as an excuse to justify her choices to push everyone around her away. In addition, she also realizes that the Owl Beast is less of a curse and more of a living creature that was transformed into a curse. Neither wants to be stuck together, but that’s how their lives have turned out. This leads the two to come to a mutual understanding and agree to make the most with what they have.
Besides giving Eda the ability to transform into a Harpy version of herself, I loved what this represents. Eda’s life didn’t go how she wanted it, leaving her a cynical loner with few friends. For all that she’s lost, though, Eda realizes that she still has things that make her life worth living, prompting a transformation in her. This is what Harpy Eda thematically represents: a new and unexpected path in life for her to take and one that she never would’ve gotten had she not chosen to open herself up to others again.
Reconciling With her Dad and Trying to Protect her Children
As more time passes and Eda continues to find herself opening up to more and more people in life, she faces her toughest challenge yet: reuniting with her father.
Before the accident, Eda’s father, Dell Clawthorne, was the best Palismen carver on the Boiling Isles and someone Eda adores more than anything. While Dell never blamed Eda for what happened to him or how it ended his career as a carver, Eda has never forgiven herself for it. As a result, whenever he’s tried to reach out to her, she’s been too ashamed to say anything. The events of the episode “Elsewhere and Elsewhen,” finally force Eda to confront what she sees as an unforgivable sin. After an honest heart-to-heart, though, Eda’s finally able to forgive herself and move on with her life.
It’s at this moment when the Owl House gains a form of happiness once more, though, that it’s ripped out from under them in “Hollow Mind,” and the revelation of how insane Belos truly is. Learning that the Emperor plans to wipe out all life on the Boiling Isles, Eda only has one concern: getting her kids as far away as possible. So while Luz, King, and Hooty travel to what they think is King’s homeland, Eda and Lilith grab what they can and go into hiding as the Emperor’s Coven arrives to arrest them all. The Owl House is now gone, and all Luz and King have to show for their efforts is the knowledge that King’s a Titan.
The episode “O Titan, Where Art Thou” shows Eda at might be her most desperate. While Luz keeps insisting that they must find a way to stop Belos, Eda does everything she can to keep her busy, lying to her and saying that she has a plan. This quickly falls apart, though, when Eda’s forced to admit that she has no plan. All she cares about is making sure her family’s safe from Belos.
The duel between master and student that follows is a very emotional one that neither wants to be fighting, with both of them enjoying what’s best but going about it in different ways. Before either side can do anything they might regret, they’re spirited away by the reformed rebellion, still led by Raine Whispers. And they have an actual plan.
Willing to Do What She’s Avoided All her Life
The plan the rebellion has to stop the Day of Unity and Belos’ draining spell is to sabotage it from within, which means using Eda’s curse to their advantage. Since discovering that her curse corrupts any magic Eda attempts, they plan to use it to corrode the draining spell by having Eda pose as Raine. However, to pull it off successfully, Eda must brand herself with a coven sigil. If she ever gets her magic back, she won’t be able to use all of it like before. She’s being asked to give up the freedom she’s cherished all her life to helping save everyone on the Boiling Isles, and she doesn’t hesitate to do so.
While the events of “King’s Tide” end with Raine tearing off Eda’s branded arm to save her from the draining spell might make this choice pointless, it isn’t. The fact that Eda was willing to give up the chance to use all magic forever if that meant that Luz and King could be safe shows how much she’s grown since the start of the series. She’s willing to sacrifice everything to make sure the people she cares about can live to see another day. It’s a far cry from the selfish, cynical loner that we first met at the start of the series and shows just how much Luz has come to mean to her.
What Does the Future Hold for Eda?
As I’ll keep saying throughout these deep dives, I am curious to know how Eda’s story might turn out in the finale. Will she be able to go back to the Owl House when this is all over, with her kids by her side? Will Eda be stuck with the Owl Beast for the rest of her life, or will the finale see her be freed from the curse? I don’t know, honestly.
I do know that I love Eda and the family she’s built for herself and that my only regret is that we don’t get to see more of them before the series ends. Wendie Malick played the role of Eda to perfection and gave us one of the most compelling mentor figures that Disney’s put out in recent years. Hopefully, Disney will be smart and keep using Eda and the Owl House residents for years to come.
What do you guys think about all this, though? Are you going to miss Eda, too? Let me know what you guys think in the comments, and come back tomorrow to see who I’m looking at next!
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