(The Owl House)Eda's love for apple blood. This is a 1500-word essay on this topic.

Eda loves apple blood. This fact has been shown multiple times throughout the show. It was never directly stated why she cares for the drink to a point of possible addiction, as it appears to be early on in the show. Many believe it to be alcoholic in nature. It was confirmed to be both. There is reason to believe that this drink is connected to love.

Unless one is paying close attention to details in the background in <*u> I was a Teenage Abomination<*/u>” and season 1 episode 15 <*u> Understanding Willow<*/u>, for most of the series it was assumed to be an adult beverage, Eda has a lot of reasons to drink but is she just a high functioning alcoholic? She never seems drunk, even though she starts the day with a giant mug of it. In the morning she told Luz not to bother her until she had her apple blood(season 1 episode 2: <*u>Witches before Wizards.<*/u>, 2:40),” Something that would lead to the belief that it is alcoholic or highly caffeinated. In season 2 episode 3: <*u>Echoes of the Past<*/u>, in which Luz says this: “Well, uh... wanna head back? This is all so cool, but Eda's probably on her third cup of apple blood by now, and the last time, it was real hard getting her off the roof. (9:15)” This points away from the theory that it was a caffeine-based drink. It also goes against the theory of Eda being a high functioning alcoholic as at only three drinks she’s a mess, this will be looked into later.

A point showing that she is in no way chemically dependent on the drink comes from season 2 episode 1: Separate Tides. She didn’t seem upset when she told Lilith this: “No apple blood. I spent the money on griffin eggs for Luz. There's not a lot she can digest here, so I make sure to have her favorites around. (6:25)” She simply decided not to get the drink, just to make sure that Luz has her favorite foods, shows not only that she's a good adopted mother, but that Luz’s happiness is more important than the drink, I will come back to this point shortly. Another example of her lack of addiction to the drink is in season 2 episode 1 <*u>Keeping up a – Fear- inces,<*/u> she ran out of the drink, but she was just annoyed by it but got over it immediately, and then started talking to Luz(3:02). That is an interesting contrast to in the scene sited from <*u>Witches before Wizards<*/u>),” where Eda seemed to be unwilling to talk to the human until she had her drink.

With all of this in mind, what is apple blood and why does Eda like it so much? It was seen being drunk by Willow and Gus at Hexside, Willow had it with her lunch in season 1 episode 3 <*u> I was a Teenage Abomination<*/u>” and Gus has a box of the drink in season 1 episode 15 <*u> Understanding Willow.<*/u>

It is to believe to be the reason for Eda’s love of the drink comes from the first time she had the drink in season 2 episode 15 <*u>Them’s the Breaks, Kid<*/u>. Raine gave her the drink during their first lunch at Hexside in exchange for a box of a “gool aid” which they both dislike(19:50). This leads to the belief that she likes the drink for a psychological reason. She associates the drink with Raine. It is apparent that she never got over their breakup. The fact that she still has feelings for them is shown on numerous occasions, I would like to focus on the events in season 2 episode 8, <*u> Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Hooty’s Door.<*/u> In that episode, Hooty gives Eda cookies laced with sleeping nettles, a plant that when ingested, not only puts someone into a deep sleep but heightens their dreams. This made it so Eda was faced to relive multiple ways the owl beast destroyed her life. She was more upset and frustrated with herself when she was reliving Raine’s breakup (9:40) than reliving the owl beast permanently wounding her father(9:13). It is possible that she was more distraught due to emotions accumulating as she witnessed hurting her father first. Even that cannot explain the differences in her reactions. One was pure terror while the other was desperation. She begged the memory of her past self to let Raine in and tell them about the curse. She also got very frustrated and stressed when Raine broke up with her, as it caused the curse to manifest. It was stated in previous episodes that the curse responds to those emotions(season 2 episode 4: <*u> Keeping up A-fear-ances<*/u>, 19:48).

The fact that she, consciously or not links apple blood to Raine, makes it so she links it with love. This is like the effects shown in the Pavlov dog experiment*1. The chances of Eda ever having a serious relationship with anyone but them is extraordinary slim as they met in the episode <*u>Them’s the Breaks, Kid<*/u> and were children and Eda said that “they were inseparable”(20:01). The fact that they were dating when they were in their late teens during the flashback mentioned in <*u> Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Hooty’s Door.<*/u> where Eda stopped opening up to everyone, this significantly lessens the chances of her forming a romantic bond with anyone, thus making her only form of romantic love that she ever received was from Raine. At the beginning of the show, Eda had no strong relationships of any kind with anyone besides King, thus she needed to use the blood as artificial love to keep her going. As she met Luz and felt and accepted the love of King and Luz, and to a lesser extent Luz’s friends. The need for the drink lessoned so when she also had her sister back and couldn’t afford apple blood and her kid’s favorite foods, she did what a good mother would do and put her kid first,(season 2 episode 1<*u>separate Tides,<*/u>(6:25), she wasn’t too upset by it because even though she didn’t have Raine’s romantic love she had plenty of familial love.

This transfer of love made it so in when she was out of the drink, in season 2 episode 4 <*u> Keeping up A-fear-ances<*/u> she was able to get on with her day and talk to Luz because she already had real love as opposed to in season 1 episode 2: <*u>Witches before Wizards.<*/u>), where she couldn’t talk to Luz until she felt the Raine’s Pavlov’s love from the apple blood.

Despite having a family, she does still love and miss Raine, leading to the roof incidents previously mentioned in episode <*u>Echoes of the Past<*/u> how they had difficulty getting her off the roof if she drank too much apple blood. As previously stated, she associates her love for Raine with the drink. It is also obvious that she still loves them dearly. When one is alone emotions are often strongest and for many people suppressed feelings come to the surface when alone, often ruminating over past mistakes or regrets. In the flashback of them breaking up in <*u> Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Hooty’s Door,<*/u> she truly regrets what she did, or didn’t do, to cause them to break up with her. If she were to have too much of the drink that she associates with them while alone, she would probably feel the need to reminisce over them and roofs seem to be a common place for that in media. It is also probable that when in that mind frame, she would fantasize about what could have been, leaving her an emotional mess if left uninterrupted can lead to Eda acting in frustration with anyone that would try to bring her back to her non-love-flavored reality, making the normally defiant Eda, hard to bring inside and calm down.

Love is a powerful emotion that most if not all people require some degree of it, be it familial, platonic, or romantic. Since Eda did not have a true source of love in her life for at least half of it, she merged the feelings with the drink. It got to the point where it was an addiction that she needed to feed with the drink. As the series progressed and she developed a parental bond with King and Luz she became less reliant on it, while still using it to fill the void where romantic love should be.

*1 The Pavlov dog experiment was performed to test the theory of conditioning. This is the of subconsciously linking two separate stimuli. He did this by having a metronome play while he feeds the dogs. He did that until they associated the sound of the metronome with the thought of food making the dogs salivate, without the presence of food. Pavlov then took it to the next level and conditioned the dogs to associate the sound of a bell with the sound of the metronome to the food.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

I don't have any other essays at the moment, but I do have stories for The Owl House, along with other shows. Here's a link to a google doc that has all of my work displayed in an orderly fashion. link

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~~Ben Ray