By Cali Rebecca Sylvers
The novels More Perfect by Temi Oh and The Orphan Witch by Paige Crutcher are similar in many ways. For one, the main character plays the role of saving all of the other characters, whether by their own volition or by the will of other characters. In More Perfect, Orpheus is selected to save other characters from a technologically advanced, dystopian society that feeds on the capitalistic values and instant-gratification desires that many people have. In Orphan Witch, Persephone is powerful, and the only woman who can break a curse that limits the life of her family along with other witches who live with Persephone’s cousins on the islands.
Additionally, in both stories, there are characters who are overwhelmed by intense emotions. While More Perfect uses a tidal wave engineered by a terrorist group to metaphorically talk about this mental distress, The Orphan Witch also uses water as the main metaphor. However, in The Orphan Witch the water is emancipated from anarchistic (or, in a different lens, terrorist-like) ideas. Instead, the metaphor explores how overwhelming emotions can be used in witchcraft along with other schools of magical practice.
I myself have often experienced intense emotions, like tidal waves. Like Oh and Crutcher’s characters, I looked to the system (and to family) to feel better about myself. Oh’s brainwave technology, and Crutcher’s interpretation of how witchcraft works, are both tools that might have inspired me to control intense fear and sadness. In The Orphan Witch, Persephone finds her family and feels less alone. This is less toxic than Oh’s brain implants, in my opinion, because magick itself comes naturally to me and, besides social media, I don’t know anything about technology.
In More Perfect, Moremi is overwhelmed by such intense emotions. “And I remember that when I lived in the city I was bone-deep lonely. And not just that, so sad it made me sick” (Oh, Temi, page 448). A terrorist attack causes a literal tidal wave that kills Moremi’s mother. This is both literal and a metaphor for emotional distress and mental illness. The technological implant may be able to save Moremi from her own depression - but will it also enslave her to an unbalanced, tyrannical world? The psychiatric system, to me, is helpful like the brain app gives Moremi connection. However, when it becomes coercive, it does way too much harm than good.
One example of this is injections. During one of my many stays in the psych ward, I was in the cafeteria enjoying ice cream. The nurse - one who I really liked - pulled me aside and we went up to my room. The next second - I don’t know why, but I know the doctor didn’t order it - she is telling me to be quiet and she is pulling out a needle. She gives me an injection - in my lower back, mind me - of some oppressive antipsychotic drug. The oppressive forces in Oh and Crutcher’s stories are similar to this: the internet, and witchcraft, can bring connection, love, and happiness, but wielded in the hand of someone a little too power hungry, and it becomes tyrannical.
In The Orphan Witch, Persephone teleports to a magical library for the lost and falls in love with the man cursed to be its librarian - Dorian. Of course, it is cliche that Persephone falls in love with Dorian, but story plots like this - while cliche - attract readers and make money for the author of the novel. I won’t dive too deep into this love story, but both novels had it. In Oh’s story, Moremi and Orpheus get married despite (or because) of the technology. In the end it is tragic, because Orpheus dies to save humanity. Persephone, too, dies to save her witchy cousins from a curse. Selfless love is a theme that is constant in both novels, although in More Perfect Moremi loses Orpheus forever, and in The Orphan Witch, Persephone gets to live with Dorian in an alternate world, alone with him, forever.
In her insightful novel, Crutcher writes, “...Hyacinth had never struck Persephone as someone who didn’t fit into her own world, unlike Persephone who didn’t fit in anywhere” (Cruutcher, page 23), using the desire to fit in to draw her main character into the white savior trope role that she plays. While the novel does not explicitly talk about race - most of the characters in More Perfect are African American - one character being asked to save everyone else and die while at it is problematic. Why? Because in the real world, expecting that kind of sacrifice is unfair. Persephone is very willing to die for her friends, but in the real world this is delusional.
In More Perfect, other characters (again, check your lenses: anarchists saving people from a fascist dystopia, or terrorists on a hate-fueled crime spree?) expect Orpheus to make a technological virus to destroy the Panopticon, an internet implant put in all of the characters’ brains. The rebellious characters are imprisoned and literally put to sleep. However, they are not killed. They are merely trapped in an eternal dream. Orpheus, one of the main characters, used to design dreams. He explored a maze in dreams that must be a part of the collective unconscious. However, this ends up being a place in dreams that Orpheus is trapped in forever. How strange and unfortunate!
The other main character, Moremi, is in love with Orpheus. I briefly discussed this earlier in this essay, and am returning to it in order to examine their impact on the plot. Together, Moremi and Orpheus guide the dystopian society addled with too much technology to a more balanced world. In the world at the end of the novel, the internet implant is allowed but not required, and every day there is an hour where the internet is turned off to honor those who saw the merit in living an analogue life. Does this insert a savior complex theme, or was it just a silly love story written so people would buy and read Oh’s book? I think that the idea of loving and losing is a universal trope that people experience - sadly - often, and this is explored in Oh’s book’s plot.
In the end, the characters get what the author thinks is better: “A better world. A solution to the problem of other minds. A solution to the problem of other minds. We don’t believe that other people are as conscious as ourselves. That their inner lives are as vital as ours. Slavery, genocide, war…wouldn’t [the technology] change what it meant to be human forever? To feel another consciousness?” (Oh, Temi, page 464). Oh explores the difference with her technological implant forcing empathy on the world her characters live in, and the invisible line that fluxes between empathic bliss and brutal tyranny. You cannot force empathy. You also do not need the technology of an advanced society to have enough empathy to end hatred and war. Think of The Orphan Witch - all Crutcher’s characters need is a little bit of magic and a lot of desire to be connected to family.
In both novels, oppression wars against the characters (Persephone and her cousins; Moremi and Orpheus). Temi Oh writes, “I believe it now. This is a war for our minds. It feels almost impossible to fight, let alone win. The Panoptican doesn’t feel unstoppable or irresistible, it seems inevitable. But it’s not true. We get to decide the way that history turns out too….Now that we understand that what they’re offering isn’t freedom. Freedom to think as they direct us to, dream what they allow us too” (Oh, Temi, page 456). This is an anarchist world view. Society, capitalism, the government - they tell us what to buy, what to think, and in Oh’s novel, they even tell us what to dream. People who think differently are squashed by the government and imprisoned directly inside their own minds. This is problematic because racism, classism, and other streams of oppression decide what the characters are allowed to think, feel, and dream.
“So maybe we don’t want their world. Maybe we don’t want drones and to merge brains. Maybe we don’t want your cars and oil spills” (Oh, Temi, page 393). Oh asks her readers to resist such societal pressures. “You still have the traumatized look of someone who’s just been turned off” (Oh, Temi, page 366), Raffi, one of the anarchists, said to Moremi. People plugged into capitalism, social media and other manipulative forces of society are blinded to their true identities. This is a tidal wave of oppression.
In Orphan Witch, as well, the desire to fit in is weaponized.
“‘Are you my family?’ Hyacinth tilted her head. ‘Yes,’” (Crutcher, Paige, page 52). Persephone lived for thirty years feeling alone and even monstrous. Suddenly there are cousins telling her that she is magical and that she alone has the power to save these people who are suddenly Persephone’s family. Hyacinth and Moira are supposedly her cousins, and they need her to tap into sacrificial magick to free all of the characters from a magical prison. In the end, this becomes Peresphone’s path, and in breaking the curse she becomes a sort of Goddess living alone with the love of her life, Dorian. Alone in this world, Persephone watches over the cousins she came to love as well as the other people who visit and live on Wile Isle.
“Did you ever scry for your mom? Like you looked for me?” (Crutcher, Paige, page 94) Persephone asks. Both novels use a desire for emotional connection to control the characters. Moremi loses her mother and the technological implant her society offers promises to destroy her loneliness forever. In The Orphan Witch, witchcraft plays the same role. Emotional connection - all human beings have an inherent need for this - is monopolized on.
Is it problematic for your friends to expect you to save them, or is such pressure a gift in disguise. I am a devout Christian, and I do believe that Jesus did have such a gift - and He willingly sacrificed Himself. However powerful Persephone or Moremi and Orpheus were, though, they were not God, and such pressure easily destroyed Orpheus and could have (in other ways) destroyed Persephone and the other characters in her world. While the characters were heroic, both novels comment on salvation and the world’s need for heroes.
In More Perfect, the government needs checks and balances in order to ensure that it didn’t force people to dream dreams they did not want. That world needed heroes to tell the government that it couldn’t enforce a form of Facebook to be implanted in all people’s minds/ In Orphan Witch, there was a curse so powerful that inevitably a hero was needed to break it. While it is good if someone wants to become a hero (I often desire this), worldly heroes should not be expected to give up their lives for other people - for the government, for society, or even for family. Heroes should be able to help their family without losing their own stability or their own emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being.
One thing that I found interesting about Crutcher’s magical world is the conversation on spiritual psychosis. Persephone “decided if this was her hallucination, if she had indeed tipped over the point of sanity into the realm of magical madness, she might as well go all in” (Crutcher, Paige, page 106). This commentates on mental illness. While I believe that magick and psychic abilities are very real, there is a thin line between tapping into real magick and being pushed into an intense psychosis. As a woman who has experienced mental illness, such mental states could create such torment. I think that you can experience both - I, in fact, have.
Persephone walks between worlds and conjures the element of spirit. I do not fully remember what it is like to be stuck in psychosis - delusional, tormented by voices, and incredibly afraid. Persephone’s own power sometimes threatens to overwhelm her and to take her to that place. Family support, however, helps keep Persephone from that place. It is the same thing in the real world. Your friends and family can and will save you, even when you do not want them to do so.
Paige Crutcher elucidates that “the truth is that she has every right to her feelings. All I can do is forget the dark and focus on the light” (Cutcher, Paige, page 147). The witches in Crutcher’s novel encourage Persephone to channel her power for good. Her cousins teach her how to control her own power, and stop her from spiraling out of control and into madness. Dorian tells Persephone that she teleported into the “wrong world.” Sometimes madness can make you feel like you are in the wrong world - whether physically because of uncontrolled power or because of an oppressive world that takes away the rights of those people who are different. Moremi’s sister does not want to get the Panoptican implant, but people who don’t have the implant have less rights and are even not allowed to go to college.
In this way, More Perfect’s government controls its citizens. In such a society, tidal waves of depression are unavoidable if your hopes and dreams are taken away from you and replaced with an empty promise - a blank slate, brainwashed mind that conforms to every rule and idea. You are not allowed to engineer your own dreams, or worse, you are forever trapped in the dreams the government wants for you. While Oh’s society is a huge exaggeration, I believe that the real world we live in is very close to this brand of oppression. You don’t have to look any farther than Facebook or Instagram, but you can look at capitalism and coffee shops. You can look at churches and racism and whatever spiritual conformity the world is subconsciously offering ravished citizens.
Are you being asked to drink the wine? Are you being asked to silence yourself when topics of sexuality come up? Are you told that because you cannot be normal, the world will never accept you? Is your neurodiverse mind squashed, told to never come out? Lie about who you love; lie about where your mind can go. Just fit in.
Both novels are talking about this: normalcy. Normalcy is very problematic because, even though this might be a cliche, nobody is normal. Everyone has urges and problems. Nobody thinks exactly the same. Nobody is always happy and never anxious. Not everyone believes in God and most peoples’ dreams are vastly different from other peoples’ dreams. More Perfect weaponizes this, and The Orphan Witch analyzes this.
In More Perfect, the agreed-upon norm is to have a device installed in the character’s brain. Is such a surgery traumatic, or a life-saving procedure? Could such technology allow the characters to feel more intensely? Can it be a tool to fight mental illness?
“‘Dreams should be private,’ they chant. ‘Dreams should be free” (Oh, Temi, page 280). So, even if the technology can be therapeutic, it can also be a tool for neo-Nazis. I believe that Temi Oh’s story is similar to a narrative I understand all too well: coercive psychiatry/ Medication helps, but forced medication is cruel and unusual punishment for being different. In the novel, Moremi is pressured to get the technology implant. Some characters are encouraged to merge minds. When one character dies, her mind enters her lover’s mind and the two women live in one body.
I find this extremely problematic because two people in one body would be a nightmare. It would be like only partially existing, and never truly being free. The owners of the technology attempt to convince all of society to merge minds. Could this be a way to destroy hate and war forever? Merged minds are empathic. But merged minds are not truly free, and I believe Oh comments that pressure to artificially connect is not true connection. In such a false empathy, there is no room for healthy boundaries nor the freedom to be one person in one body.
Mercury is the name of the one character who is two people. They chose a new name for their merged consciousness together. “‘My other body,’ they shout, their faces scrunched in agony, ‘it’s dying’” (Oh, Temi, page 281). Before merging consciousness, these characters were Zen and Kimiko (page 274). Even if I was in love with someone, I would not in any world want to share a body with her. However, it is important to look at the benefits of Temi Oh’s technological empathy.
Connecting with another person’s heart - whether real or a side affect of advanced technology - can remind people what humanity is. Empathy replaces ignorant hatred. Would such a technology end wars, genocide, racism, and hate crime? Maybe it can do those things. Maybe it also erases boundaries that allow identity to be free, though. It is laws enforcing the technology that is a problem, and if two consenting adults wanted to use it, I would, generally, be okay with it. As long as, of course, the adults aren’t pressured to use it against their will.
What about Orphan Witch? The magic of the witches in Crutcher’s novel can also positively impact humanity. Can walking to different world and making teas that balance the characters’ chakras also do something similar to More Perfect’s engineered empathy? The difference here is the magic is natural, not the result of technology. With just a little bit of practice and dedication, it would be more sustainable than brain surgery and technological empathy. I feel like Crutcher’s world does not talk about fascism in the way that Oh’s world does. Both stories would fit under the fantasy genre, but Orphan Witch is about ending a curse. More Perfect is about making a dystopian society a better place to live in. Neither one is perfect, but both comment on morality.
How do they comment on morality? I will analyze the morality of both books now. Both stories talk about transcending death, whether by technology or sorcery. While I believe that magick is a tool and a beautiful gift from God, other people have the stereotyped belief that it is evil and demonic. This is not the place to analyze theology. It is to talk about society - societal pressures, cult-like brainwashing, and the sort.
What is the place of the internet in society? It is the glue that connects us to a network that makes people feel less alone. With Oh’s panopticon technology, the technology is in the brain, and people can “log on” without a real computer. They can just look with their mind. Such technology can be glue, of course. Even normal internet, though, can be a bad thing, especially when there is too much of it. Too much screen time is bad for the mind. Too much of anything, even a good thing - this has been said so often - can be harmful, demeaning, and addictive.
Magick, as well, is a tool that can be used for good or ill. Some of the characters end up addicted to power, and cannot control said power. One of the beings that created the curse, Amara’s sister True, didn’t have as much magic as she wanted. She stole power from her sister, and then, under the influence of the power, cursed Wisle Isle. While she thought she was making the world a better place, all she really did was oppress the people who lived on the island.
This is an extreme, of course. A knife can be used to murder someone, or to cook a delicious, medicinal meal. Some of the characters use magic for ill; others for good. Salvation, even. Oh’s technology can also be used for ill. It can be used to enslave humanity, or to free it. Ask yourself which it will be? Most likely, if it is mandatory, it will cause ill-will.
In dystopian literature, mandatory salvation is always problematic. The point such stories make is that telling people what to do - even if it might make them better, happier people - is not the way to create a real utopia. Someone once told me that in the mortal plane, it is impossible to create a real, utopian society. Power of the governments will always corrupt when mortal beings are involved. So, dystopian literature analyzes this trend to try to make the world a little bit too perfect. Both Crutcher and Oh do a good job on creating characters who find a way to resist.
In conclusion, witchcraft and technology both grant us power - the characters teach the authors’ audience how to claim our power. Facebook is great - but too much is always harmful. Magick is a gift - but be wary of using it for ill gains. Both can create a problem; both can be salvation for our already broken world. Empathy, whether magical or from the internet, can take us a long way. Both novels offer a promise of hope, and they ask their audience to resist what the world is offering as salvation.
Facebook can entertain me, but save me? Magick brings me peace, but how can it ever save everybody? I will end with an adage I love: your path is good for you, but not for me. My path is good for me, but not for you. Should we let the government choose for us what to think, and even what to dream at night? I don’t think so. What do you think Crutcher and Oh are saying about today’s world’s governments? Just a little farther to the right, farther to the left, and we could be on our way to a dystopia. Are we already there? I leave you with one last question, food for thought: should dystopian (and fantasy) novels be moved to current events?
Works Cited
Oh, Temi. More Perfect. Saga Press, published in New York, America, 2023.
Crutcher, Paige. The Orphan Witch. St. Martin’s Griffin, published in New York, America, 2021.
