Headscratchers / Song of the Sea

• So exactly why is it that selkies would have an urge to go back to the sea? They become seals and then what? Is it possible to hold in the urge to return to the sea for the entirety of their lives?
  • It seems to be a thing in selkie folklore; inevitably, the selkie will find her seal skin and return to the ocean, whether she really misses the sea or is happy with her family. Besides, if her husband forcefully kept her cloak from her, would you really expect her to willingly stay with him if she found a way out?
• Did the movie ever explain why exactly Bronagh had to leave so abruptly? I assume it had something to do with protecting Saoirse from Macha (maybe 1.5 Selkies would attract her attention?), but I don't recall the movie ever really addressing it.
  • No, it never directly explains it. Judging by the way white streaks were appearing in her hair which happens to her daughter when she become ill, the pregnancy was going badly, so Bronagh needed to assume her seal form to give birth, and afterwards was too weak to transform back; by the time she could she probably thought it was best to stay gone.
    • Maybe the reason she didn't come back is she actually died in childbirth. Maybe that was only her spirit at the end there. Though none of the other spirits brought by Saoirse's song were *dead*, exactly, I don't think...
    • I was confused when she reappears at the end, the family strangely holds off asking her stay (though her son does pop the question later) and plead her not to take Saoirse rather than plead for ''both' of them to stay', until I realized it's implied they had an understanding that Bronagh cannot reside in the human world anymore.
  • Ok, so this is one of those " my grandma told me" things and I haven't really found anything else to back it up, but here it goes. In some tales where a selkie loves a mortal just as much as they love them, there is still an agreement that must be made by the laws of their people. The couple is obligated to produce 2 children, 1 selkie, 1 mortal, or as I heard it, "1 to be raised in her ways and 1 to be raised in his". That being said there was no mention of having to abandon them after that I can remember...so still stumped.
  • For this kind of folklore, I'd say your grandmother is as notable a source as any. Besides, that fits in almost perfectly with what the film depicts.
  • One version of the original folklore says that a Selkie can only stay with a human for seven years before returning to the sea and leaving forever. Given that Ben was about four when Bronagh left, I can easily buy that she'd hit that limit.
    • Alternatively, what if the movie's version of the lore sets the limit at six years? Then, it would also explain why Saoirse fell ill right after her sixth birthday.
• Why didn't Bronagh ever do anything against Macha, instead leaving it up to her daughter to sing the song and save the faeries?
  • This troper wondered the same thing. Maybe she just sucked at singing.
  • It's possible she of course meant to but she put it off because singing would mean leaving her family. Then the pregnancy went wrong and she resorted to diving into the ocean to give her daughter a safer birth. Some speculate that Bronagh died in childbirth in the sea and that was only her spirit bading them goodbye.
  • Or stopping Macha was an event with some sort of cosmic prescheduled event that Bronagh thought she'd be there for until that became impossible.
• Finding release from the bottom of a jar is a great metaphor and it would certainly play to the situation, but why is Conor so widely seen as having a drinking problem? He is seen going for precisely one drink throughout the entire movie, on the anniversary of his wife's death which is understandable (probably also one of the only nights of the year where he has someone else around to look after the kids allowing him to go to the main land), and even in this single instance it doesn't look like he even half finished his pint. Afterwards his behavior is unchanged and even when we encounter him alone at the end of the film he's clutching a picture of his wife and not a bottle. It's easy to see why the character could be a drunk given his situation, almost too easy, but from what we see, I can't think of any evidence to suggest he actually is.
  • Tomm Moore mentions in the commentary that he actually didn't like the cliche of seeing Conor explicitly drink his beer. He mentions that they animated Conor's gesture as pushing away the bottle, in Moore's words "no, not for me," as if he's too grieved to even take a sip. If anything, the "drinking problem" is more or less downplayed on-screen.
  • It doesn't seem downplayed to me, it seems completely non existent given what we see. I don't recall any of the other characters warning him away from it. The closest is his mother saying it's best not to remember that night instead of don't go drinking.
    • Wrong. Connor IS an alcoholic until Saiorse plays the magic conch flute. The bright lights magic sprinkles float past the bar and THEN he pushes the drink away. Up until that point he had drunk some, as Guinness is properly served with an overflowing head.
    • Then again, he could just be trying to keep it out of sight of the kids: it's implied that the family is only barely holding together without Bronagh's calming influence.
    • This is actually directly addressed in the movie, when Conor leaves for the pub, his mother is disapproving about what she, in her Irish mammy way, describes as him drinking his sorrows away... And Conor responds by saying it's only the anniversary of Bronagh's death(?) once per year. In other words: though his mother fears he is, Conor is not an alcoholic. He goes to have a drink with the ferryman once a year on the day he lost his wife after having spent the entire day being (partly forced to be) cheerful because it's also his daughter's birthday. Given that Conor is a lighthouse keeper whose only frequent human contact outside his children is the ferryman and he doesn't even finish his pint, it seems likely that he doesn't go out to drown his sorrows. Instead he goes out to spend some time with the dear friend who lends him some much needed emotional support.
    • Actually there is some blink and you'll miss it evidence that Conor has a drinking problem. When Ben and Saoirse arrive back at the lighthouse, and Ben runs downstairs to look for Saoirse's coat, pause it and check out the state of Conor's bedroom. There are empty bottles and cans scattered everywhere. Although maybe he only sank into drinking heavily after his mom took his children away.
• How come nobody in the movie said anything about the shell flute breaking apart after Saoirse used it to free Macha's emotions?
  • I had the impression that what broke was the jar containing Saoirse's emotion, hence why her bottom stone half changed back into her legs.
  • I thought it was just that it wasn't important after that. Remember, the shell flute breaks when Ben has hardly any time left to get his sister back to her coat before she dies, he doesn't know where they are, and when they do get her her coat back he still doesn't have the chance to even think about the flute because he has to get her singing and then there's fairies and his mother and is his sister at least going to be able to stay. It was a very full, what, hour? Two hours? By the time there's even the chance for him to think about the flute being broken it's the end of the film, and after all that it'd seem strange to suddenly have him going on about the flute of all things.
    • Except that Saoirse is shown playing the flute in a later scene when she frees the fairies. I agree that it must have been the jar that broke, even though it looks like it was the flute.
    • Saoirse wasn't playing the flute during "The Song", that was one of the faeries who was freed from the stone.
  • The shell flute might have just been a symbol of Bronaugh. Ben hated letting Saoirse play or even hold it because it was HIS memento of their mother, that he blamed her for killing. Prior to finding Saoirse, he finds out the true circumstances behind Bronaugh's "death". So when Saoirse drops the flute and breaks it, the fact that he's more concerned about Saoirse's health rather than the flute shows that Ben isn't held back by mourning Bronaugh or his grudge against Saoirse anymore. In the end, the flute is just a flute but Saoirse is his little sister.
• Why was Saoirse born a selkie, but Ben isn't one? They're both half and half.
  • A possible explanation for gender-specific features is given on Gender Equals Breed (third paragraph).
  • Another likely explanation: Ben was almost certainly born on land with Bronagh in her human form, while Saoirse was born in the sea, while Bronagh was definitely in her seal form and Saoirse presumably was a seal too until Conor lifted her out of the water.
  • Genetic traits can work that way — biracial children, for example, can appear their mother's race, their father's race, or somewhere in between, depending on what genes they get. That Ben is human and Saoirse is selkie could be no more inexplicable than the fact that Ben has blond hair and Saoirse has brown hair.
  • It's magic, it doesn't follow genetic conventions at all. If you want to rationalise, maybe there are no male selkies in this universe (there are in mythology, but they're not the focus of any particular story) or maybe there's the aforementioned contractual obligation to produce a human child and a selkie child. Maybe Saoirse is a partial reincarnation of her own mother, maybe its random luck.
    • "Not the focus of any particular story" is far from true: the Great Selkie of Sule Skerry is male and among the best known selkie stories.
• Why isn't Conor more concerned after he saves Ben from drowning? He's obviously terrified while he's searching for his son, but once he gets Ben back in the boat, it doesn't even look like he checks to see if Ben's still breathing. Instead he picks up Saoirse right away, and doesn't pick up Ben until the poor kid crawls over to him. He never even asks his son if he's okay.
  • There's only about a second between him picking up Saoirse and Ben crawling over to him; he did one right after the other. As to why he didn't show more concern, he has had a really long day. His kids were taken away, then they came back, he finds out his daughter is dying and he threw away the only thing that can save her, he has to row a boat out into a storm, then his son dives into the sea...And he wasn't exactly in high spirits before any of that.
• How did the grandmother know that Saoirse was out of bed? And later that both children had run off? She just suddenly wakes up. Is she psychic or something?
  • Seeing as being a worrywart is so integral to her character, I think waking up and worrying about her grandchildren could be something that happens all the time. It's just that these two times, she happened to be right about it.

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