The tragedy of a doomed family.

If I had to explain Moira to someone, that would be the first thing that would come to my mind. There are much more surrounding the whole story: destiny, death, rebellion... Different takes on life and a complex array of characters and ideas.

But at the end, it all comes down to family.

How Elefseus lost every family member he had to one country (He believes it to be Arcadia, even if it is not) and that, together with the meddling of a certain god, broke him in every sense.

How the family unknown to him (Isadora and Leontius) still wants to see him and yet the events end up with what small hope he had in the world to regain a warm home pierced by his own weapon.

How the hate that Thanatos feels towards his Mother and his desire to overcome her make him become the same "evil" he so deeply hates.

How Scorpius got crushed by his inferiority complex towards his brother and that made him use anything and everything to show the world that everyone was wrong from the start. That his brother was no better than him.

At the end, it is about how families matter in bad and good ways and how they were brutally broken by the events through the story.

It also follows the themes of a lot of old Greek plays - how fate is inescapable, and you have to accept it to know peace. Just as Misia was satisfied with her life, unlike how Elef struggled and suffered to the very end. And it's got a lot of the same irony as, say, Oedipus, in that a dark prophecy was told of a royal birth, and the royal family tried to avoid it by sending their child away, only to have everything play just as destiny dictated.

Those kinds of stories are meant to be cathartic in their sorrowful nature, but I've always just kind of been disappointed by them. When the message of a story is presented like you can't change your fate, and that your own story is not something within your control and is instead in the hands of some distant god, it's all just a huge downer to think about. It begs questions like, does free will truly exist? I gotta say, I'm not a fan of those kinds of questions.

Which isn't to say that Moira disappoints me, of course. And it also doesn't mean that this is the only message to be taken away from Moira. It's just a connection with related tragedies that's worth noting, I guess.