Hilda’s Trolls: Otherness and Racism
It’s been awhile since we talked about Hilda. Since that essay, another season has come out on Netflix, as well as a movie. It’s time we circled back, I think, to the cute urban fantasy world of Hilda. We previously talked about Hilda and her relationship with Other-Than-Human persons, where the concept of personhood and the importance of this being bestowed to other creatures was emphasised. I’ll put a link to that video in the description. What that video didn’t spend as much time talking about is when the relationship with other-than-human was not an equal relationship of positivity. This was an important aspect of the Hilda movie, Hilda and the Mountain King.
Today, I wanted to spend some time talking about Otherness in Hilda, but this time not about the positive community side. There is another reading of Hilda that’s possible, one that explores conceptions of in-groups and out-groups, and readings about racism and race relations.
Supernatural creatures being used as a metaphor for racism and race-relations in urban fantasy is not exactly unique to Hilda. It’s explored in great detail in many books, movies and television shows, including Carnival Row and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Hilda is also taking this stance in their positioning of the Supernatural Other as primarily against the human population. In fact, we can have a different reading of our previous video essay. Previously, we talked about how Hilda solved all the problems of Other-than-Humans with compassion because she saw them as persons. In a different reading that takes race-relations into account, we can see this, rather, as the human – or the stand-in for the white population – needing to understand and connection with the racial other better and see them as inherent people despite their cultural otherness.
While the conversation about the racial other could be brought to pretty much any of the Supernatural Others in the show, today we’re going to focus on trolls. This is for two primary reasons: the first being that trolls are the most central Supernatural Other throughout the entirety of the show; and the second, trolls make up the primary antagonists in the Hilda movie, the Mountain King.
In fact, the primary antagonist for most of Hilda are the trolls. We see this in the very first episode, when Hilda is chased back to her country-home by a troll. This first interaction is also the first time we see that trolls hate the sound of ringing bells. Hilda puts a bell over the nose of a troll that has turned to rock simply to let her know when the troll begins to stir. After the troll chasing Hilda when it does stir, Hilda realises that the bell is causing the troll distress and removes the bell. The troll recognises the act of kindness and leaves Hilda alone at this point.
This first troll interaction sets up the way Hilda solves problems in the world – something looks scary and like the only solution is either to run or fight, yet she finds a third way, one through compassion. We see initially how Hilda is the hug-solver, typically creating solutions through the art of empathy and compassion, which we talked much more extensively about already.
When Hilda and her mother move away from the countryside and into Trolberg, trolls become more firmly separated from their human counterparts. The entire town of Trolberg is the demonstration of how trolls are the inherent other – the large wall around the town was built to keep trolls out, and the watchtowers are armed with large bells to keep the trolls at bay.
Trollberg is the built establishment of the inherent separation of humans from Trolls – the embodiment of Us vs Them. The high walls are what helps to build the separation. Inhabitants have little way of looking out to the fields surrounding them, to feel somehow a part of the same landscape which surrounds the town as the town itself. It becomes a focus of town vs countryside, humans vs supernatural other. This is even hinted at in the first few episodes when Hilda and her mom are living in the supernatural-other filled countryside. Hilda becomes aware that the countryside is not a place for humans – she doesn’t fit there because she is not a supernatural other. The mountain beasts, the elves, and the trolls all make a point to demonstrate their presence in the world above hers. The first time we see other humans than just Hilda and her mom is when we are in Trolberg.
There are small scenes or an occasional episode where trolls come back, and Hilda still manages to solve some problems through the all-powerful-hug solution. Her and her friends successfully keep a troll child from harm before they’re able to return it to its mother. But in each of these instances, the trolls place is outside the walls, and the humans within the walls – the maintenance of the binary difference between human and other, the us vs. them.
In season two of Hilda, this inherent separation between the two worlds gets a lot more extreme. As was pointed out in that first episode, Trolls hate the sounds of bells. The walls of Trolberg are built with giant bells in the watchtower – not to warn the residents of an incoming attack, but rather as an offensive manoeuvre to keep the trolls from coming closer to the city walls. Eric Ahlberg, the leader of the Safety Patrol, uses the bells as a way to purposely provoke the trolls to demonstrate the inherent difference between the trolls and the humans of Trolberg – capitalising on the Us/Them dynamic established by the history of the city. The second season and the movie, the Mountain King, focuses on the dynamics between the humans and the trolls surrounding the city.
It's pretty obvious pretty quickly that the trolls in Hilda are the stand-in for Otherness, most notably the foreign Other and/or the racial Other. The first problem that is slowly being established in the second series is the migration of the trolls – their bodies coming closer and closer to the city is an ever-present threat to the city’s inhabitants, even if the trolls haven’t actually done anything yet. Conversation about migration and immigration is implied through the presentation. Other aspects of the troll representation is fairly heavy-handed in their presentation – including in the Mountain King movie the anti-troll propaganda film being played for the children at their school.
If we’re talking about trolls as the Other – especially the racial Other – it’s helpful to start by comparing the presentation here as it is in other pieces of popular culture. By doing so, we can see in greater detail what it is that Hilda is saying about the racial Other, and how the explicit voices about these differences compare to the implicit voice.
I think one starting point will be the trope of the Magical Negro, also called the Magical African-American Friend. I will using the term Magical Negro through this for two primary reasons – one being that while this trope is particularly present in popular culture from the United States, it is not uniquely present there. The second is that the term Magical Negro makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, and this is a very uncomfortable trope – it should make you feel uncomfortable. The trope of the Magical Negro is when a Black supporting character comes to the aid of a white protagonist, and often possesses some kind of magical powers or other-worldly insight. The best go-to examples of this trope is in the Green Mile and the Legend of Bagger Vance, but is definitely not limited to these movies. Some argue that the role of Whoopie Goldberg as a medium in Ghost also fulfils this role, for example.
The magic of the Black character, and actually their entire presence in the movie, is primarily present in order to help the white – and often male – protagonist. An important point of note is that these characters are not meant to demonstrate that all Black people are inherently magical and good – rather these characters are the exception, rather than the rule. They are present as a tool to the white character, rather than as a full example of the realities of Black culture.
The effect of the Magical Negro is that there is a subject matter that typically makes the audience – mostly assumed to be white – uncomfortable. The presence of the Black character typically would require some kind of confrontation with, or acknowledgement of, the detailed history of institutional racism and white supremacy that has resulted in the Black characters being where or who they are. Instead of having these conversations or confrontations, however, the movie chooses to portray these characters and situations in a position of gentle reassurance for the white protagonist.
When it comes to Hilda, we can definitely talk about Frida in this role. Frida’s ethnicity is never really discussed in Hilda, but the nature of it being a cartoon means we can actively see how she is racially different than her friends. She’s also the only one between the three of them who’s a training witch. Not all the witches in Hilda are Black – in fact, very few characters outside of Frida are Black, except for the occasional background character. However, in comparison to her two other primary characters Hilda and David, Frida is the inherently magical one. Frida’s role is always to stand next to her white friend, Hilda, and sometimes through her magical force.
There’s also the role of the trolls. While the trolls are not as obviously the racial Other as Frida – they’re far more implicitly representative of this racial Other than the explicit and not-even-metaphorical Frida. That being said, they are being treated in the show as the racial other, and therefore we will analyse them like the racial Other.
Beyond their stance as supernatural, Trolls are typically not portrayed as having any kind of inherent magic until the Mountain King movie. Mostly, they’re mystical nature is in their turning to stone when sunlight touches them, and then re-animating at night. Near the end of the second series, we start to get a glimmer of some inherent magic in their ability to go into the mountain, but it’s nothing too over the top about it all.
At the very end of the second series, Hilda and her mom meet a female troll that transforms Hilda into a troll, and puts her own daughter in Hilda’s place as a human. This is the most magical we ever see trolls, and she has a profound impact on our primary protagonist.
Hilda’s reaction to being turned into a troll scares the absolute everything out of her. She spends quite a bit of timing running away from the magical troll who originally transformed her. At first, we take this as her being freaked out by suddenly being transformed, and her intense longing to go home. But things are revealed to be a bit different when she is talking to Trundle.
After pushing for her next task, Trundle asks, “No time to chat?” Hilda is hesitant, and then Trundle continues. “Who’d want to be a troll longer than they have to be?”
Hilda clearly knows she offended, but still doesn’t exactly take it back. This is because there’s an inherent truth to what Trundle is saying.
In our other video, we talked about how Hilda liked to solve the problems of the world through compassion and the art of listening. She saw the Supernatural Other as equal in personhood to herself, and therefore treated them with respect and kindness. However, she constantly maintained her own humanness and still saw them as the Supernatural Other. Even though they are Other-Than-Human Persons, they are still Other-Than-Human in Hilda’s eyes.
More simply put, the Other is perfectly fine when they remain the Other. The Us vs Them dynamic is fine to maintain if there is no violence associated with it, but the clear lines remain the same. Otherness is something Hilda can have compassion for, but she doesn’t want to be the Other. To blur the lines between the Us and the Them – the Human and the Supernatural – is to begin to see ourselves as an Other, and this is fundamentally an issue for Hilda.
Trylla, the troll who transformed Hilda magically, used her magic purely to further Hilda’s personal experience. By doing so, she furthered Hilda’s own personal experience, while not really working toward her own goal very much. Yes, the solution of the Mountain King movie theoretically solves some of the rift between humans and trolls but the peace seems slightly off and like it may be short lived. It also doesn’t solve much of the reasons behind her initial use of the magic – that her child is a bit softer and seemingly unable to fit into the life and world of a troll. This particular dilemma for her remains unsolved and stagnant. The entire practice, therefore, only had a solution for Hilda.
Hilda on the surface has the beautiful exploration of Otherness but through compassion – fighting battles of Us vs Them through compassion and listening. Hilda solves problems through hugging rather than punching, and therefore seems like the perfect example of how to solve problems in the non-fictional world. We heal the divides of Otherness through hugging and listening rather than punching. But this is a very simplistic view of Otherness and the way it manifests in the world. It glosses over issues like institutionalised racism and more embedded bigotry.
While the trolls in Hilda are not overtly Black, their role as the racialised Other is apparent in their metaphoric role in the show. And through that, they’re trope as the Magical Negro is more overt. And like the Magical Negro, the viewer, Hilda and the residents have Trolberg do not have to confront the realities of the ostracization they have put on their supernatural neighbours.
While Hilda teaches us to embrace the Other, it does not teach us that being the Other is inherently okay. It does not teach us that the inherent separation of the Us and Them is bad – only that our views of the Them is bad. We are comforted by our ability to simply hug to solve our problems, and not needing to confront the issues we are creating. Like Hilda, when we acknowledge our own role in the issue, we can simply leave.