What happens to Sylvia at the end of Alice isn’t Dead always gets me. She doesn’t die, exactly, but she stops being herself.

Alice isn’t Dead is about organizing (about praxis) and people committing to ideas until they become something more than, or more intensely themselves. The Oracles are people who believe in fighting Thistle so much that they become powerful timeless reality-distorting entities, but they’re also cut off from the rest of humanity. You can throw yourself into a cause, even a good one, so much that it devours you. Oracles are forces for good, and in the world of the story they’re necessary, but they’re also a loss. Sometimes fighting the bad in the world takes everything you have, and the people who make those sacrifices should be honored, but it’s also unfair that they felt they had to.

“I want to feel useful,” Sylvia says. “I feel of good use,” says the Oracle. I don’t know how that’s meant to be taken, but to me it’s at least partly a tragedy. She was a kid. She didn’t need to be useful. I wish she’d gotten to go home. I wish she’d lived in a world where she felt like she could stop fighting.