Goodbye, Lara

Episode 5

Holy crap, did Lara just inadvertently kill her sister's minion? If she did, it would be perfectly in line with Hans Christian Andersen's brand of punishment – throughout his tales, people suffer horrible deaths or death-adjacent states, from Inger to Elisa, who only wanted to turn her brothers back into humans from swans. And of course we can't forget Lara's original, who felt like she was stepping on knives when she walked and had her tongue cut out. Kota is more in line with Inger from The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (1857) in that he's being punished for his unsavory acts. Inger wasted food out of vanity (although the story tells us she also enjoyed pulling wings off of flies); Kota seeks to straight up murder someone…and he looks pretty happy about it. To Lisa and Kota, Mari and her family are no more than Inger's flies, dumb creatures inferior to themselves. That Kota is forced downward, much as Inger is dragged down to Hell, seems to link him to the tale even further – especially when you consider that at the end of The Little Mermaid, the mermaid goes up.

That's not the only link to The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf this week, though. Lara is told to get a job by Mari's grandmother, because, well, she's costing the family a lot. After twenty-odd unsuccessful interviews, Lara finally finds her dream job at a bakery. She's desperate to bake cakes, but she has to learn to respect the process before she can. This is her walking on knives moment: every move she makes is upsetting to her personally (doing dishes) or results in near-disaster or full-on disaster, like the muffins/cupcakes she burns. All she wants to do is bake and earn money, but this is her first job. Like learning to walk or how to communicate without her voice, Lara's in a frustrating position where nothing is working the way she wants it to.

So how does this link back to Inger's story? Because Lara isn't respecting the process/food the way she ought to – or at least, the way that her boss thinks she ought to. She doesn't understand how important steps and ingredients are; she wants to throw those down to get across the mud puddle of her earnest desire for cake. She's definitely not horrible like Inger is, but she's making similar mistakes.

What's important is that Lara learns. Even though she's ready to give up after the Muffin Incident, she takes a step back and thinks. It's not enough to just love eating cake. She has to love the process of creating them and all the hard work it takes. Her love of pastry wasn't true love in that sense; she only loved the surface – like the prince only loved the idea of her and was repulsed when he saw her real form. When Lara decides not to quit, when she makes the conscious choice to keep going, she's outdoing the prince and Inger both, because she's seen the truth and decided it's worth it. She's learned the value of her situation. And in the context of her quest for a nebulous “true love,” she's taken a step towards understanding what love is. Her prior experiences are romantic love and familial love. She's learning about a different kind of love with Mari (platonic love, at least for now) – and she's just seen how love can turn dark with Lisa sending Kota to destroy Mari and her family. But that's an important thing to understand as well, because love isn't always sweetness and light. It's multifaceted, and that, to me, is what Goodbye, Lara seems to be invested in showing both its heroine and its audience.

Kota may not be dead, although it's really not looking good for him, and even if he was pushed down into the water, we've seen that merfolk can't breathe in human form. If he is, Lara didn't kill him on purpose; she doesn't even know that the stone whale in the sky moved. But he, Lisa, and Grace all seem to lack a basic understanding of “love” in its many forms, and that makes Kota's actions and Lara's very different, even if they have similar outcomes.

Love can be used to hurt someone. Lara learned this from her prince, and I hope she doesn't have to relearn that lesson from her sister.

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Recommended Reading: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis. Davis' novel uses Scandinavian folklore and Andersen's literary fairy tales to support a tale about life and opera in upstate New York.

Goodbye, Lara is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.