Sable is surprisingly shallow
This is a post to examine Sable more deeply and get away from the surface level "goth mommy" and "should have been Julian" posts. Because Sable is on her own a very interesting character albeit a confusing one the deeper you go.
By her own admission Sable herself is not a goth and with the information we're given she is right, Goth as a subculture developed in the 1980s out of the United Kingdom derived for the already existing Punk culture which itself is derived from Rock. We arn't told what type of music Sable listens to in her lore but if Sable herself is denying the label it's probably a safe bet it isn't Goth Rock. She gets labeled Goth most likely from her choice of dress which is until her cosmetics release a black dress which is close to goth fashion which is often fashioned after the English Victorian era. The problem with labeling this Goth is Goth fashion also overlaps with Metal fashion especially Power and Symphonic Metal fashion quite a bit, with metal fashion taking inspiration from the medieval time period and more apt for Sable, pagan imagery. I'm not saying Sable is a metalhead but it's possible? The more important point I'm making there are other subcultures the dress the way Sable does that arn't Goth.
So if Sable isn't goth what is she? Well it would be easy to label her Emo which is another music subculture adjacent with Goth and with her dark outlook on life being "Death comes for us all so better to confront it" it does seem to align with Emo culture. The other thing to ask is like Mikaela is she a pagan/witch? This may change when her tome comes out but my current answer with what we're given is no, Sable is not a witch. It's possible for Sable to be some type of pagan still but she is specifically not a witch. All we know is Sable likes a lot of occult symbology and is obsessed with Death, this is very different from Mikaela who clearly is influenced by Wicca.
Wicca is itself influenced from older pagan traditions believing in the Horned God and Triple Goddess who seem to be inspired by Cernunnos and Hecate from Celtic and Greek mythology respectively and is a type of paganism very closely aligned with nature worship. This is where Mikaela and Sable differ drastically, they both love Halloween but for completely different reasons. Mikaela loves the older meaning of Halloween or it's other name Samhain which is a festival to celebrate the end of the harvest season and welcoming the darker part of the year, meanwhile Sable seems to love the newer meanings of Halloween of death, horror, fear and the undead.
This is where Sable's character starts to fall apart a little bit because her entire belief system seems to be centered around being as edgy as possible but she doesn't actually practice anything like Mikaela she just talks about how much she likes edgy stuff on a podcast. This kind of leads me to believe she's not even a pagan of any kind, she just likes the aesthetic and is more just Emo and a massive horror fan but again this could change with the tome. This isn't the only thing supporting the idea she doesn't actually believe what she suggests she does.
Sable's current story ends with her looking for Mikaela having felt guilt for her disappearance after pushing her to write a story about The Unknown thinking it was The Unknown that took Mikaela. Instead what she finds is the Entity welcoming her into the realm with black fog filling the Greenville Theater. We're told Sable enters the realm with enthusiasm happy to face off against brutal killers and horrors with her best friend for all eternity and this is where for now her story ends but also where it starts getting interesting.
You see we have more information to glean from Sable's perks which are perhaps the most telling thing about her. All 3 are related to the basement which we are told are more or less the heart of the entity in the trial, this is where you're closest to it. More than this is Sable's invocation perk, Weaving Spiders which as we know a Spider is the closest thing to the visage to the entity that we have knowledge of. Given this one could be forgiven for thinking Sable is perhaps even praying to the entity for favor just as The Plague does with Corrupt Intervention. This would imply Sable is a worse person than even Yun-Jin or Jonah for as bad as they are they don't actively throw in with the Entity but then we have her quotes from her perks.
"I call upon the spirits of the night, to aid us in our desperate flight!" — Sable
"I'm getting out of here, if it's the last thing I do." — Sable
So it doesn't seem like Sable is actually aligned with the Entity but don't ask me who they're actually invoking, could be anyone from Arachne to Anansi to The Morrigan because she doesn't do anything spiritual until she reaches the realm. It also doesn't seem like Sable actually likes the realm as much as she thought she might if she wants to leave but she's still doing through the lens of doing it the edgiest way possible by using the basement to her advantage. Hopefully her tome massively fleshes out her character because it feels like what we have now is all style no substance.
Comments
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I know the post reads probably weird with me saying she's interesting to start and calling her shallow by the end so to clarify what I meant is the contradictions in her character run deep and those are interesting because it feels like Sable has an image of herself she wants to put out but she never really seems to back it up with her actions so figuring out who Sable really is is interesting but right now all we've been given is the image Sable wants to put out and her actual character as yet to be fleshed out.
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it was worth reading all of that
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If the tome doesn't improve the base lore, then she has hands down the second worst Survivor lore, with only Kate surpassing her.
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Why can't cool characters just be cool characters without having to examine every fiber of their being? She looks cool, and I doubt in a game like DBD more than a handful of people will care about anything more than what she looks like.
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Now this was deep, I have a lot to think about today 😀
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