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What I’m going to talk about now spawned from this part of a comment I’ve received on my fic “it is a strange universe.”, where Wanderer actually dies at the end of The Host: "i hate to say it, but wanderer perhaps is better off [dead], she wouldve been a tortured soul and as you have explored in the past, i don't personally believe that such an ethically driven being could comfortably live at the expense of another person for a very long and happy time. "
I think it’s important to start saying that Wanderer is very much an ordinary soul when it comes to ethics and temperament; she’s kind, “selfless”, and pacific. If Wanda cannot comfortably live at the expense of another person, then no soul can.
What is pivotal here is the use of “person” and the question it brings: “what constitutes a person”? When Wanda sees the humans mutilating souls and freaks out, Jeb tells her that what they’re doing is no worse than what the souls do (erasing/repressing them), but Wanda does not agree. What this means is: Wanderer, and other souls, do not see their erasure/repression of hosts as murder, and do not classify their situation as one of suffering.
An important point to make is that, though Meyer’s worldbuilding (which makes souls nearly become their hosts AND broadly adopt the culture and way of life of these hosts) makes it hard to pinpoint specific characteristics of this species and how its organized and why it does the things it does, we do have hints (like what I pointed out above), which can lead us to conclusions like: souls are parasitic by nature and it makes sense that they would not see acting on this nature as evil, as much as humans do not usually see eating a cow as evil.
We find it horrifying in part because they are taking over sentient beings (and also because it’s set on Earth and it’s us) but sentience is only as important as it makes itself to be; just as we have our limits (it’s ok to eat a cow as long as you give it the best life possible and it does not suffer), the souls also have theirs (it’s ok to use hosts as long as you mostly preserve their way of living and they are not in pain).
A world where we have been taken over, suppressed, and literally replaced by parasites is horrifying. But on the broad scheme of things, it is not more horrifying than orphaning and capturing baby orcas for amusement parks. They live in huge family groups, in the wild. These groups have different hunting techniques that are passed down through the generations, which are being lost as pods in the wild are affected. What’s so different between us and them?
All of this to say: souls are horrifying because they are crossing our lines in the sand. Wanda was horrified then because the humans had crossed hers. I think it’s important to understand all this, where Wanda is coming from, because she is, after all, our protagonist.
But: we are humans, so of course we’ll have human perspectives. The intended audience of this book is not “aliens”. Wanderer’s journey is one of switching to the side of the humans and learning she is wrong. The thing about lines in the sand is that each moment of our lives where we learn something new surges up like the tide and erases those lines. We have to keep redrawing them, and each time they’re redrawn a bit differently. Which brings me to: most people don’t condone that treatment of orcas, and a lot dedicate their lives to stopping it and trying to fix the damage that has been done. A lot of people do see eating cows as evil. People learn, and sometimes it makes them change their minds.
Which brings us to: what exactly made Wanderer change her alien mind? What was the tide, for her?
Let’s put a pin on this and talk about the Fire World for a second.
The Fire World issue is something I suppose Meyer had intended to deal with in the sequel, what with Burns showing up at the end. It all boils down to: the souls realized the Fire World hosts were feeding on sentient beings by burning them alive; this created a huge discussion between the souls, because part of them were horrified at this cruelty and demanded that souls abandon the Fire World, while others argued that souls had made their home there and it wasn’t fair to relocate them, and a solution that allowed the Fire hosts to feed without harming anyone could be found.
The Fire World issue is one of the hints of soul morality we have, and part of why it’s very, very important is that it shows up very early in the book; waiting until Wanda had that conversation with Jeb would be waiting too long to show us the souls’ lines in the sand. But that is only part of why it’s so important. Remember this.
Another interesting thing about the Fire World issue: the character of Burns Living Flowers. It isn’t likely, after Wanderer and the Seeker, that Meyer was introducing a third soul with an ‘awake’ host; Burns’ connection to the Fire World is his marking characteristic, and it makes is very likely that the reason he changed his mind was his experiences there. This is conjecture and theorizing because we know nothing about Burns, but: Burns is important because he (I theorize!) connected some very important dots.
The dots are: “The Fire World hosts are horrifying and monstrous for surviving off the murder of sentient beings" and “souls are horrifying and monstrous for surviving at the expense of sentient beings, even if it’s not precisely murder.”
Let’s put a pin on this too and talk about Meyer, her worldbuilding, and her plot for a second.
The Host isn’t about the possibility of interplanetary war, an exploration of possible alien ethics, or a struggle for survival. At its core, The Host is very narrowly about Wanda and her journey: how she finds different types of love, family, a home, and what she cares about enough that she is willing to die for it. (In the book, Wanda’s suicide is never called a suicide; she “has to go” or “leave”, and the most explicit we get is Mel saying “I can’t bear to be the death of you”. For the narrative, Wanda does not commit suicide, but dies for a good cause, and overall her (near) death is framed in a saintly, martyr-like way—being brought back at the end is her reward.)
Though Wanda comments on how alike and interchangeable and connected souls are, she herself is very individualistic, and since the book is in first person, the narration and thus the readers become biased as well. We care a lot about what Wanda cares about, and Wanda cares in a very individualistic way.
Did you ever notice that beyond “we did not have the right to take your world from you” (in PT, singular ‘you’) during Walter’s funeral, the book has nary one deep comment on the actions of souls as a whole?
Again, it’s important to understand that Wanderer comes from an alien perspective, bust also that this book is about her journey and her learning, and on this journey, she never thinks about things like: how wide and brutal is the constant expansion of their galactical empire or the veritable genocide they’ve committed against at least eleven planets’ worth of life and culture (Wanda’s nine, plus the Fire World and the Dolphins) or how FUCKED UP it is (IT’S FUCKED UP!!!!!) that souls (yes, as a whole and individually! Yes, even Wanda! Or even particularly Wanda!!!) are constantly not only personally responsible for suppressing a life but also personal and active upholders of these genocides.
To use my earlier comparison: the hunting techniques of Orcas that have been lost will never be recovered. To use a much more complex and unapologetic comparison: the languages, religions, customs, and cultures that have been murdered by colonialism and its consequences will never be recovered.
“Christ, Fran,” you say, a bit shocked, “are you really bringing THAT into a discussion about a silly Meyer romance sci-fi book?”
Yes. It’s impossible to talk about people being taken over and suppressed, cultures being lost, or to literally use the word genocide without recognizing that this is a mirror to some very real and important situations in our world, both that have happened and that are happening. I cannot in good conscience talk about Orcas without talking about actual real life Native people. We’ve seen just how well Meyer dealt with this stuff in Twilight; she’s made a bed and I guess I’m going to have to goddamn well lie in it if she won’t.
I am drawing these parallels; we cannot pretend they aren’t there. This is how we understand the actions of souls.
(I don’t think Meyer meant to make this story a commentary on colonialism and the struggles of Native people any more than she meant to talk about, uh, literally anything interesting her sci-fi worldbuilding could generate outside of how it is build to characterize and explore Wanda as a character. The thing about the world, though, is that it’s impossible to separate things like that. The bed, Meyer!!!!! Lie in it!!!!!!)
BUT giving the Sea Weeds back to themselves would be as simple as not taking any new hosts as new Sea Weeds are born; to keep the planet under soul control requires a constant effort to keep suppressing its population, as any being born that is not immediately suppressed will simply grow its own conscience. Every soul that occupies a host is actively helping this effort.
Again, my point is: none of this is addressed or ever commented on, by Wanda or by the narrative as a whole.
The book is about Wanda as an individual (and not about any broader matter like soul morality or very real world issues this sci-fi is mirroring (oops, has Meyer fallen into that hole where sci-fi talks about real world issues with its imagined species and scenarios without recognizing the actual real world issues it’s talking about? Yes.)) and the big themes of this story, Meyer’s said, are “love in all its different forms” and “the matter of taking one’s body for granted”.
Let’s finally unpin that first thought!
What I asked about three hundred paragraphs ago was: what exactly made Wanda change her mind? We have two moments: the moment she chose to try and find Mel’s family instead of leaping to the next host and washing her hands off his, and the moment she decided to save the Seeker and Mel. Two absolutely pivotal moments in the story. What happened?
The answer is: that commenter is wrong.
When it comes to canon, “such an ethically-driven being as Wanda cannot live at the expense of another person for a very long or happy time” is not true, which is precisely why the book has its cookie-cutter happy ending.
Remember that point about none of this being addressed? This being these broader matters like, oh, galactical empire, genocide eleven times over on a planetary scale, how every soul is a personal upkeep-er of this status quo, etc.? Wanda never thinks about or addresses any of this.
Wanda regrets taking Walt’s world from him as a specific person. This book is about love and Wanda’s focus is very narrowed around those she loves.
The correct answer is: Wanda cannot live at the expense of Melanie Stryder for a very long or happy time, because she loves her. She can occupy Petal’s body with no heavy conscience, the same way she’s never even passingly expressed regret or guilt for the eight hosts she occupied and killed before coming to Earth.
The correct answer is: in that first moment, Wanda didn’t go after Jamie and Jared because she understood the grief she caused them by taking their sister or because she understood she had to right her wrong and the three should be reunited, but because she grew to love them, and in that split second, she could not bear the thought of not seeing them. In that second moment, Wanda didn’t decide to save Mel because she understood that what she was doing to Mel, what all souls do to hosts, was monstrous and should be stopped, even if it was at the cost of her life, or that humans deserved to know how to free each other in case they were caught so they would be spared this monstrous fate, but because she loved Mel specifically, and because she wanted to save the Seeker, another soul, and also because Wanderer, despite all her supposed characterization as a kind and selfless person, is selfish.
(Meyer, you gave her a bizarrely low sense of self-worth and self-esteem. That is not selflessness. But the book doesn’t recognize that; the narrative sees her as selfless to a fault and acts as if it’s true. Guess I’m the one who’s gonna lie in that bed again.)
“Dude,” you say, out of patience after reading all of this shit because it’s arrived at a conclusion you can poke a hole in immediately, “during the trial scene, the humans do talk about Wanda being put in a different host, and she is very adamant about the fact she doesn’t want that. You just said Wanda only cared because she loved Mel specifically… but that means she wouldn’t have had an issue with being put in another host! She does care about the crimes of her people! She would rather die than keep occupying hosts even in other planets! How does that make her selfish??”
Know when I said the narrative sees her and presents her as selfless to a fault, even though when you get to the bottom of it, it isn’t true? That’s what you’re doing right now, with the way you’ve taken a statement and decided it means something, instead of narrowing your eyes at that statement, knocking aside what it seems to ‘obviously’ mean, and trying to find its meaning in the broader context of the plot of the book and Wanda’s characterization.
“Fran,” you say, “you’re talking to yourself. You’re the one who wrote that.”
Shut up and let me talk.
The factual statement here is: “Wanda would rather die than keep occupying hosts, even in other planets.” It’s true! She would rather die, a fact nobody can contest because she tried. But “this means she does care about the crimes of her people and that she is selfless” are the seemingly ‘obvious’ conclusions we are knocking aside.
Wanda doesn’t care about the crimes of her people and doesn’t think about her own crimes (broad matters aren’t addressed, Wanda’s own past eight hosts get no regret, etc.) and this is something we have already settled. The fact that she would rather die than continue occupying hosts isn’t an argument against it because of what makes Wanda make this decision and why Wanda makes this decision.
This is what makes Wanda makes this decision: the Seeker is captured.
This is the context: Wanda, despite all her learning, still doesn’t see what souls do to hosts as violent or as something akin to murder. Wanda cannot bear the thought of the Seeker being killed and this rates above the Seeker’s crime of taking over Lacey.
Wanda doesn’t think once about Lacey, the Seeker’s host, who will die for good if the Seeker is shot; she doesn’t think of how the humans have full fucking rights to decide what punishment the Seeker deserves for the terror she wrought them, for shooting Brandt, and for killing Wes; she doesn’t even think about how the Seeker might deserve to live for the simple fact she is a living being, as some people think.
Wanda 1. abhors violence and 2. can’t bear the thought of the Seeker dying while Wanda hates her, because it feels like the Seeker is dying because of her hate.
This is why Wanda makes this decision: Wanda doesn’t want to feel guilty or responsible for the Seeker’s murder.
That’s the thing that spurs her on! Not “the Seeker deserves to live” but “I don’t want her death to be on me and it’d feel like it was.” And this is why I say Wanda is selfish.
You know, after an entire motherfucking book living with Mel, meeting Mel’s family, supposedly learning her mistakes and becoming a better person, Wanda still puts way more effort into saving the Seeker than she ever did into finding a solution to save Mel (None effort was how much effort she put into saving Mel. It does not exist.) Her decision to save the Seeker leads to saving Mel, but she doesn’t do it for Mel, or even because she realizes she can immensely help the humans save themselves or each other in case they are caught.
Actually, Wanda feels awful about teaching the humans how to get souls out of their brains. It is a heavy price she is willing to pay, if it allows her to save the Seeker and because it allows her to make demands of the humans that will keep the souls they extract safe. Wanda is still not thinking in terms of what is fair to the humans, what they need to survive, what she owes them as someone who perpetrated horrors against them: she feels awful about “arming them” with this knowledge.
She is thinking of how to save the souls.
“Alright,” you say, pinching the bridge of your nose. “So Wanda saves the Seeker for a selfish reason. But everyone is selfish. She still saved a life—doesn’t that still make her a good person?”
You’re right, a lot of people do good things for selfish reasons, and they are still good things, and selfish thoughts are very common. They don’t make us monsters. What matters is that nothing follows Wanda’s selfish thoughts; they are the entirety of her reasoning. She doesn’t think that the Seeker deserves to live or the humans deserve to know how to save themselves while recognizing that a part of her is doing this because she doesn’t want the guilt of Seeker’s murder in her hands.
“Alright,” you say after a pause. “But Wanda still didn’t want to occupy a new host, she would still rather die than do that, so…”
It’s also for a selfish reason.
Remember how none of the big picture stuff is ever addressed and how Wanda never expresses guilt or regret over her other eight hosts? Or to any host that isn’t specifically Mel, whom she loves?
This is Wanda’s reason for preferring death over trying to find a new host: Will I have to go through all this again? I don’t want to be a parasite.
Well, there you have it.
Okay, I will allow something: this does mean Wanda’s opinion of what souls do to hosts changed. She might not see it as something as awful as physical violence or torture, but she also doesn’t think it’s alright anymore. But, again, her reasoning is NOT that no possible-host, human or bat or flower or bear, deserves to suffer what she will do to them, or that even if they find her a body whose host is too suppressed to ever wake up (which is the solution they get to in the end) it would STILL be a cruel act to take over that body, she would STILL only be alive because Petals suffered. No! Wanda’s reasoning all revolves around herself.
I don’t want to be a parasite -> I don’t want to feel guilty about choosing to live when I’m parasitic by nature and cannot not live at the expense of another being. She even completes this with: I don’t want to open my eyes as a Flower, knowing that centuries have passed and all my friends are dead.
(Keep in mind that Jeb was arguing against Wanda leaving them because he recognized just how much she was helping them. Wanda got them life-saving medicine; her going on raids severely upped the quality of their food; she at least once protected them from Seekers and stopped what could have led to not only the deaths of Jared, Ian, and Kyle, but also the start of a goddamn witch-hunt for humans in the area. With the humans, Wanda was very concretely helping them fight against what her and her people had done to them. She refuses to think of an alternative that would allow her to stay and keep helping them because she doesn’t want to feel guilty.)
Selfish: check. Individualistic: check. Low sense of self-worth: check, because her selfish reasoning made her arrive at the conclusion that her very nature (being parasitic) is something bad.
The reason Wanda is capable of being perfectly happy at the end of the book is because of all those things. She can live at the expense of Petals because she doesn’t love her; she doesn’t have to feel guilty about taking a new host because she tried not to and the humans brought her back so it’s not her fault; she doesn’t have to feel guilty about what she did to Mel because, well, they love each other, don’t they, and Mel forgave her, didn’t she?
(Now, Wanderer in “welcome home.” isn’t quite like that; she isn’t so selfish, the Seeker situation sparks her decision to save Mel (instead of sparking her decision to save the Seeker and I guess I’ll save Mel too lmao), and at the end, she does not live guilt-free in Petals’ body and that is something I want to address in the sequel.)
“Dude,” you say, “you’re fucking right,” and then you pause. Apprehension fills your chest. “What… what about that Fire World conversation you pinned? How does that tie into all this? I think we, uh, got into a pretty tied up conclusion here.”
Ah, Fire World.
You’re right, this isn’t over.
Remember what I said about Burns, that he’s important because he (might have) connected some very important dots? “The Fire World inhabitants are horrifying and monstrous for surviving off the murder of sentient beings” and “souls are horrifying and monstrous for surviving at the expense of sentient beings”? This relates to the second reason the Fire World is important that I asked you to keep in mind.
The importance of Fire World is: Wanda is very self-centered and never thinks about or addresses broader issues. The Fire World is a broader issue.
The discussion about the Fire World doesn’t happen at an individual level, because it’s about how everyone, for years, burned Flowers alive and fed on them and how horrifying that is. Wanda’s decision is only about herself (“I don’t want to feel guilty->so I will kill myself->so I won’t have to deal with that guilt”), but the discussions about Fire World seek collective accountability (“the Flowers don’t deserve this torture->so we must find a solution that all of us will follow->so that the issue will be fixed.)
Wanda not addressing broader issues is actually a major fucking deal in the book once you start thinking about it.
There is no recognition of the crimes of her people as a whole as the ever expanding, genocidal, galactic empire they form, and thus no recognition that they should stop, reparations should be made, and that they, like they are doing in the Fire World, need to come up with an alternative to this way of living. There is an erasure of soul society as an entity, as a whole, and a lack of recognition that Wanda is just one among many in a huge fucking system, that Wanda’s personal crimes are awful but that she must also account for the crimes of her people and a monstrous system she has majorly fucking benefited from and personally upheld.
The importance of the Fire World is that it shows just how stupid and meaningless it is for Wanda to say she doesn’t want to be a parasite and for her to kill herself. She’s a parasite by nature, by biology, and it is NOT an inherently bad thing! The crux of the matter—what Wanda should have been thinking instead—is that she is stuck in a system that has sough no alternative that would allow her to live in a way that wouldn’t be at the expense of someone else, even though they are technologically and medically advanced enough that they could find a solution. Her options are: living at the expense of Mel, living at the expense of someone else, or exiting the game altogether, because the system she lives in is monstrous and allows for no other option.
The crux of the matter is: you can’t win the game by not playing. Wanda can’t make reparations for these crimes and work to make things better, even if it means having to choose the lesser of two evils, if she’s dead.
"i hate to say it, but wanderer perhaps is better off [dead]”
The question is: better off how? For a selfish Wanda who can actually be perfectly happy occupying Petals as a host, feeling tortured is a non-issue. If we’re talking about a Wanderer who actually learns and addresses all these things we’ve been talking about, one who feels monstrous because of the things she and her people have done, and who genuinely just does not want to hurt anyone else…
Then her feeling monstrous or tortured still doesn’t matter at all.
Someone who has done the things she’s done doesn’t have the luxury of thinking they are so tortured they can’t bear to live. You have to live with the horror. You have bear it like the weight it is, no matter how torturously heavy, because that’s what everyone you’ve hurt has to do, and you have a fucking responsibility to try and fix things. You do not get to decide to exit a game you broke because you feel bad about breaking it, and just make another fucking mistake, leaving the game broken and the other players to rot.
The ones who can decide whether you live or die, and that is punishment, not relief, are the people you’ve hurt.
Mel did not want Wanderer to die. Jared and Jamie did not want Wanderer to die. Jeb explicitly talked about concrete things she was doing to help the humans she helped exterminate live well and be safe. For Wanda to decide to kill herself, she must decide that actively making these reparations, even if it means occupying Petals’ goddamn corpse, doesn’t matter as much as her guilt.
“So,” you say, covering your face with your hands and feeling a bit dead inside, “Wanda is a selfish genocidal asshole to whom the book hands a happy ending on a silver platter even though apparently she learns basically nothing, changes nothing, and at heart is still doing her best to protect her genocidal pals, and at best a very small group of people she’s personally invested in, instead of actually working to help those who have suffered because of her and her people?”
I know. It’s a sad, sad, awful conclusion to arrive to.
It’s not the point, though.
Truth of the matter is, this is a conclusion I arrived at after going insane and diving deep into the meat of this story, specifically focusing on the things it does not say and does not focus on and what they mean, not through the perspective of what Meyer intended to do as an author and why she chose the things she chose, but recognizing all this as part of a narrative that has implications within that narrative whether the author meant for that or not—and then how these implications interact with our protagonist’s characterization and the overall plot, and transform them. This essay is a game of connect the dots that deals with the blank spaces between the dots Meyer wrote, spaces I’m sure Meyer did not mean for anyone to connect, or even realize they could connect them to shit in the first place.
Any book is made up of worldbuilding and subplots and side characters and etc. that exist primarily to support the main thing the author wants to talk about, and Meyer’s worldbuilding is supposed to support her characterization of Wanda as kind and Wanda’s deserved journey to happiness. The fault here is not with Wanda, but with how Meyer didn’t see or didn’t care about the greater implications of how she made soul society work and what souls do and the systems they uphold and more importantly, the mirror it all is to some very serious, complex, and important real world issues; didn’t think it was relevant, that exploring it would add to the story in any useful way, or thought that the book was too big already without dealing with this.
The thing about the world is that you can’t just separate things like that, though; this stuff adds to the book whether an author means it to or not, and we’ve just spent five thousand goddamn words seeing just how badly it can fuck up a whole story and its protagonist when you turn up your nose at the fact that your decisions are mirroring extremely important issues that deserve to be addressed.
You make your bed, Meyer. See what actually lying down on it and taking responsibility for your actions and decisions as an author does when you’re not careful? It warped your entire goddamn story and made it into something awful; into literally the opposite of what you meant. You have to pay attention to what bed you’re fucking making, especially when that bed is identical to things like colonialism and genocide.
Wanda isn’t meant to be this person; you can see Wanda this way like we just did, but at her core she is NOT those things because this is a characterization born out of the fact that Meyer did not deal with some important shit she should have dealt with, and that’s on Meyer; keeping Wanda's wished-for characterization as someone kind and selfless who learns would be as easy as having her think about shit sometimes, and maybe have a more complex reasoning explaining the decisions she makes.
“Bruh,” you say faintly, because you’re curled up on the floor you’re so tired and your head hurts from reading so much in one go, “what’s, like, the actual conclusion of this huge fucking thing?”
The conclusion is: Meyer fucked up.
Also: this entire thing was an exercise in using a glaring example from The Host to talk about how important it is for authors to pay attention to what they’re writing and how they are writing it, not only because it can change their story completely, but also because they can make light of very serious issues. This is also about how easy it is for a biased story to pull us along, and how hard it is sometimes to discover the truth that is hidden under layers of things that ‘seem obvious’, and often present only in its absence. But how important it is to do it anyway.
What now?
Now we hope that going on this journey has made us better, more critical readers, and more responsible writers. Also, it was simply horrendously fun to think about these things and organize them into such a nifty essay.
Now rest your eyes and take a nap, and thank you for listening this far.