Good and Evil, and a large bird named Gregor

Last night, it was just the two younger kids and me for Friday night pizza and movie night.  My wife was with my oldest son at his hockey tournament game (where I am hanging out today).

The kids chose a movie called The School for Good and Evil.  They saw it a year or two ago, I believe, but thought last night was a good time to watch it again.  It is based on a novel I haven't read, so I am not sure how closely the movie does or does not follow the book.

I was thinking through some of the themes of the movie as we were watching it, specifically this notion of Good and Evil and how to tell which is which.  That was one of the premises of the story, is that one 'knew' whether one was Good or Evil (or an "Ever" or "Never", as the students in each school were called) by which School you ended up in.  The Schoolmaster never made a mistake, it was assumed, and so you could just tell an Ever or a Never by their school, and their corresponding appearance.

This concept or assumption will be challenged throughout the story, with things not remaining so Black and White and appearances not necessarily corresponding to the underlying reality of the nature of the Being or situation.

This was an interesting theme based on some of the things I have been writing, and as you might guess, my mind went to Pharazon since he has been so prominent lately.  In recent posts, we have gone from looking at the Evil that Pharazon and the Numenoreans did during the 2nd Age and which ultimately broke the world, to wondering just why that Evil was done, to exploring the potential that these various parties may already be on the path to restoration.  Again, I don't know if that is true, but the story has captured my imagination for the time being.

In the process of having this on my mind, a fairly recognizable sync came into the movie.

Gregor is a character in the story who is in the school of Good.  He is actually the son of Prince Charming, if I remember correctly.  The only problem is that he isn't good at anything they are testing for, and frankly doesn't want to be there anyway.  His dream is to run a Grocery Store, not learn magical arts and how to be a good fairy tale character.

Anyway, his ineptitude causes him to fail 3 times.  The rule at the school is that if you fail 3 times you are not only expelled from the school, but transformed into another Being and trapped there at the school forever.  One of the hints that even on the Good side, something is amiss.

We see Gregor painfully disappear after his 3rd fail, but we do not see what he transforms into at that time.

Later, one of the protagonists, Agatha, a Reader who was transported to this school by mistake in her opinion, makes a wish usingWishing Fish, with her simple wish being that everyone can go home.  The numerous Wishing Fish actually at that time transform back into a little girl, who reveals that she was one of the student who failed 100 years ago and was thus transformed into the form of these Wishing Fish.

Immediately after this, a giant, scary looking bird flies out of the forest and lands in the lake where Agatha is.  It looks like a vulture made out of bones, sinew, and feathers - at least that was my first impression.  It turns out the bird is a species called Stymph (I will get to that in just a second).  Agatha is terrified as well, but then notices something peculiar about the bird.  Upon close inspection, she sees that this Stymph is none other than Gregor!

She tells Gregor that she will try and help him, but at that time Tedros, who is the son of King Arthur and thus in the Good school, rushes in to save everybody by killing Gregor with Excalibur.

Agatha is clearly mortified, while everyone can't understand her reaction because they assume that this was a good thing that Tedros did, saving her from the Stymph.  Here is the clip.

In a later conversation, Tedros will defend his actions by saying that the Stymph was Evil because he looked Evil - that is all he needed to know about the Being to both judge it and then kill it.  And by doing so, and approaching Evil in this way, he obviously did a terrible thing by killing poor Gregor.

Anyway, going back to the scene, as I am watching this really large vulture-like bird named Gregor, I thought to myself "Didn't William Tychonievich have a dream about a Vulture named Gregor?"  I remembered this because I had just written in my post on Boromir's Belt that it is possible that the Vulture from his dreams represented Pharazon.  I also left comments on William's post with this thought.  And here I was looking at a bird that resembled a vulture (to me) as I had been thinking of Pharazon, Good and Evil, etc.

I went over to William's blog, and searched for "Gregor", but nothing came up.  I had forgotten at that point that I had literally included the name in my Boromir post, so I then searched for vulture, I think, and found what I was looking for.

The name of the Vulture from his dream is Odessa Grigorievna.  So, Gregor was definitely involved, but just as the last name of this character.  Grigorievna is the Russian, female version of Gregor or Gregory.  

So this was interesting and had my attention, obviously.

I then looked up Stymph to see if that was an actual thing, and if so, what it meant.  I searched for Stymph, and after wading through a few movie-specific fan sites relative to the character, I found out, per Wikipedia, that Stymph is short of Stymphalian birds and that there are a thing from Greek mythology.

Stymphalian birds were large, man-eating birds who inhabited a swamp in Stymphalia, and so the name was a reference to this swamp.

Wait, did I just say Swamp?  

Yes, I did.  

Swamps have come up before in the form of Thomas B. Marsh and, ultimately, Peter, who I equated with this Marshy Being.  I arrived at this point by combining Leo's callout of Thomas B. Marsh on his own blog with William's references to his pokemon Swamp-creature Pokelogan on his.  And I can't remember all of the steps, but eventually arrived at Thomas B. Marsh as the reincarnated Peter.  It was a strange journey to get there, but somehow still holds in my mind and makes sense, even as WWE started to factor into that storyline and add on the additional identity of Gim Githil, the first father of the Eldar.

So then I had the strangest thought.  Could Pharazon have come back eventually - after several other roles, including Boromir - as... Peter?

Peter?

That is where my mind went.  Peter could be the same Being as Pharazon.  But it seemed kind of strange, obviously, and I ended up just letting the matter drop for the evening and didn't really think about it much more.

This morning, however, it worked on me a bit more, and I remembered this little detail of 'fail 3 times and you get transformed'.  Who else 'failed' 3 times?  Oh yeah, Peter.  He was told, in New Testament tradition, that he would deny Jesus 3 times before the cock crowed, and ended up doing so.

That was interesting.  In the movie, Gregor is the only person we see failing 3 times and turning into this Stymph creature.

There was another interesting detail, though, that I noted just as I was pulling up the clip above.  Gregor will land not on dry ground around Agatha, but rather on the lake itself.  He will then begin to walk toward her, which can give the optical illusion that he is actually walking on water.  Go back and check out the beginning of the clip above at the beginning and see if you see it also.  The camera makes sure to zoom in on Gregor's feet and show him walking "on" the water for several steps to reach where Agatha is.

This seemed interesting.  I mean, not interesting if Peter wasn't already on my mind relative to this bird.  It wouldn't have stood out at all.  But since I was already strangely thinking about this, it seemed to stand out quite dramatically that Gregor was, visually, walking on water.  And we know that is a theme with Peter.

Anyway, what does this mean?  I am not sure, other than I now have this strange thought in my head that Peter is the same Being that was Pharazon.  The strange implication is that since we have Peter as Gim Githil, that Gim Githil, the first father of the Elves, would have as Pharazon launched an assault on his own people on Eressea, unknowingly.  And Sauron's machinations would have driven the whole scenario.

Surprisingly, there are words from Doug that would support this narrative, of Gim Githil-as-Pharazon (one of the Fathers of the Elves) attacking his own people.  They also support that there was something seriously wrong with these people - they were sick in some way.  But I will get into that in a follow-up post.  Whether those words are reliable, I don't know, and even if they are, I am not sure they have to support this notion, but they do at least leave room to explore it.  

As of 24 hours ago I wouldn't have considered Pharazon as a candidate for Peter (or Gim Githil), but I am thinking that now it is at the very least a possibility.