The Ambiguity Of The Wittebane Storyline Is Like. The Entire Point. We Only Know Surface-level Details

The ambiguity of the Wittebane storyline is like. The entire point. We only know surface-level details because that’s all Philip lets himself even think about. We aren’t supposed to know exactly how to feel or exactly what Philip feels about it because he does not acknowledge or express his thoughts/feelings about it. Because to do so in an honest way would mean coming to grips that it wasn’t a black and while situation like he wants to believe it was. And if that’s the case then his entire worldview, sense of purpose, and sense of self fall apart.

That’s how rationalization of bigotry happens: if you need yourself to be the hero no matter what you do, there is by necessity a disconnect between your reality and your experience/interpretation of reality. You aren’t a good person because you do good actions; instead, your actions are good no matter what they actually are because you, a Good Person™️ are doing them, and Goodness and Badness of a person are predetermined based on inherent qualities (i.e. being born human). This type of worldview requires no self-reflection, and in fact actively discourages it. (Luz questions/doubts herself consistently; Philip does not).

So of course we don’t know everything about the Wittebane story: the only person who even holds that information is Belos, and even he doesn’t acknowledge it. It doesn’t even really matter if he feels bad about killing Caleb or knows deep down that he might be in the wrong: he doesn’t let that guilt inform his actions, nor does he express it. The protagonists certainly don’t know about it, they only have his actions to go off of. And his *actions* give no hint of remorse nor do they indicate he ever intends to change course. We the audience do know a bit more than even Luz does about his backstory, and that’s because it’s for us—it fleshes out the story and drives fan discussion/interpretation, and that’s a good thing! But in this particular story the protagonists didn’t need to know everything about the antagonist’s backstory/motivations because the antagonist did not make it relevant to them. And yes, Doylist perspective and everything, this was an external writing choice made by real life people and not the character. But like. IMO it was the correct choice to make for this story!