She Kills Monsters

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Scene 3

Scenes 4-6

Scenes 7-10

Scenes 11-13

Scenes 14-16

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Tree

Agnes’s family died in a tragic car accident when their vehicle crashed into a tree. In the shadow play that dramatizes the tragedy, the stage direction describes how “the tree transforms into a dragon and flies away with the broken vehicle” (9). The tree, firmly rooted in place, represents Agnes’s unchanging life, and its transformation into a dragon foreshadows the inspirational fantasy world of Tilly’s module and symbolizes Agnes’s personal journey to see beyond the strictures of social conformity.

Year after year, Agnes grows up in the most typical manner where she looks and acts like every other regular teenager in her small town. Like a tree that stays permanently in place, Agnes has little experience beyond the borders of her home. The narrator describes how “as Agnes grew and grew, she became more and more engrossed with transcending her seemingly permanent state of averageness” (8). The older she grows, the deeper the roots settle her in one place and one mindset, and the more restless she feels.

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When the tree transforms into a dragon that flies away, the change symbolizes Agnes’s willingness to leave the confines of her stationary life to explore the larger world around her. The narrator describes Agnes as “the girl who never left home, [and] finally found a way out” (9). The dragon in this instance is not necessarily a symbol for death that takes her family away. Rather, the tree-turned-dragon functions as an emblem of the power of the imagination to soar and take flight, freeing Agnes from her “average” existence and catapulting her into a self-created world that springs to life and expresses her own inner needs and emotions. By diving into Tilly’s world of fantasy, Agnes thus learns to cope with her loss and builds a new life with new friendships that honor Tilly’s memory.

Monsters and Tiamat

The titular monsters in She Kills Monsters refer to the imaginative array of creatures that Tilly and her friends battle in the game of Dungeons and Dragons. Kobolds, Bugbears, Succubi, and a Gelatinous Cube are only a few of the foes that populate New Landia, and they are direct references to the over 2,600 entries in D&D’s compendium of monsters. The monsters represent the fun, creativity, and humor of the role-playing game and how Tilly and her friends found pleasure in using magic and collaborating their skills to defeat their enemies. Tilly explains to Agnes, “[W]e play it because it’s awesome. It’s about adventures and saving the world and having magic” (76). Monsters therefore represent thrill-seeking, strategy, and overcoming worthy opponents, and the game’s dynamism highlights a player’s skill in collective imagination.

Tilly advises Agnes not to treat the game as therapy but admits that playing Dungeons and Dragons also provides a small measure of wish-fulfillment. Her module features specific monsters that symbolize the fears, threats, and anxieties that trouble her. For example, Miles the Gelatinous Cube is a projection of Tilly’s fear of losing her sister’s attention to her boyfriend, and the Succubi are doubles of the bullying girls at her school. Agnes kills these manifestations to support her sister, but the final fight centers around Agnes’s own psychological monster: Tiamat.

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Tiamat symbolizes the idea that everyone has a psychological monster to conquer. Kaliope describes the beast as “a five-headed dragon that has laid waste to generations of adventurers and civilizations since the dawn” (29). Tiamat, the shape-shifting beast who has taken Tilly’s soul, is a symbol of Agnes’s grief and the difficulty of accepting loss. Tilly reveals herself to be Tiamat, and the revelation illustrates Agnes’s struggle to “move on” from her death and the guilt and fear of leaving her sister behind. When Agnes kills the beast, the “real” Tilly rises from the dragon’s ashes, and Agnes learns that accepting death does not mean forgetting the dead, but rather keeping their spirit alive.

Packing and Moving

The play’s motif of packing and moving offers an analogy to the delicate balance of memory and forgetting that structures Agnes’s unresolved grief. At the beginning of the play, Agnes is preparing to pack up her family home and move in with her boyfriend. She spends most of the play delaying the final move because for Agnes, the physical move requires her to confront the emotional task of “moving on” from the tragedy of her family’s death, a stage that she is not ready to complete.

Agnes has not discussed her family or disturbed Tilly’s room since the tragedy, and she becomes overwhelmed by the act of packing Tilly’s possessions. Storing away Tilly’s things means confronting the reality that her sister is gone and never coming back, so Agnes keeps postponing the move, as though by delaying this change, she can also deny the reality of Tilly’s death. When Miles invites her back to their home to unpack her own boxes, Agnes claims, “I’m still not finished packing Tilly’s room” (64). In New Landia, Miles the Doppelgänger attacks Agnes, and his first words are, “Hey, baby, how ya doing? Have you finished packing the apartment just yet?” (58). Agnes’s deferral of packing thus becomes an analogy for the denial and avoidance of accepting the death of her loved ones. Only when she experiences closure at the end of the play does Agnes finally complete the move. The narrator reveals that “Agnes moved out of that old house and brought the many memories of an average life with her” (83). Packing no longer signifies burying the past and forgetting, but instead, preserving and bringing along cherished memories.