DESMOND GATES - MALEVOLENT'S LILITH

One of my favorite pieces of media right now is an audiodrama called Malevolent, and within Malevolent there’s a unique interpretation of Lilith that I really love. Malevolent is Lovecraftian in nature as it’s based on the aftermath of a Call of Cthulhu campaign, but its interpretation of Lilith is very different from Lovecraft’s iteration of Lilith, who was inspired by the demon. While she’s different from both other Liliths, she does share some similarities that I think are cool!

The Lilith in Malevolent is the daughter of a god, and Lilith herself is one too. A lot of her character arc surrounds her struggles with her father, meaning being a daughter is central to her character rather than motherhood. Her dad wants to end the world and create a new world in his image with the risk of destroying everything forever, and Lilith wants to stop him from doing that to preserve the world that currently exists. The way she does this is by using a human, Arthur, as a lure to capture her father’s fascination. Arthur’s parents were cultists of Lilith and they sacrifice themselves to her / she kills them, but she spares baby Arthur. I thought this was a really interesting twist on the demon Lilith, for where she kills babies, the Lilith from Malevolent protects them. 

Most of Arthur’s character arc surrounds the fact that he accidentally let his daughter drown when she was young. He carries very heavy and deep guilt over this throughout the series, and one of the reasons Lilith is so hard on him throughout is the protectiveness she seems to feel over his daughter. She’s one of the only characters who isn’t afraid to throw it in Arthur’s face and to make sure he remembers the pain he’s caused without downplaying it or being gentle, while also trying to help him move past it. Arthur wrote a song for his daughter and he plays it for Lilith, and she calls him out on writing the song for himself rather than his child. She sits with him and coaches him through writing a version that’s truly for his daughter, which is one of the most important scenes towards the end of the series, allowing Arthur’s love for his daughter to be portrayed as light instead of heavy grief. Once again, this is unique from the demon because it shows Lilith as a protector of children rather than harmful to them.

In Rebecca Lesses’ article about Lilith, she says liliths were accused of “haunting people in dreams at night or visions of the day.” Lilith in Malevolent is heavily associated with dreams, as one of her powers involves being able to cause people horrific nightmares. She’s first introduced as a splinter of herself, a fragment of her soul named Mr. Scratch, and he seems to be particularly the parts of her that are associated with darkness and nightmares. He enters Arthur’s dreams to create a nightmare, causing Arthur to relive a bunch of painful memories and interact with previous characters that Arthur feels guilt over. Scratch does this in order to cause Arthur to sleepwalk and unlock Scratch, who was chained up in a room. Scratch gets returned to Lilith at some point, and Lilith uses this nightmare trick again later in the series to try and manipulate people to sleepwalk once again to get her something she needs. 

One of the biggest differences with the Lilith in Malevolent is that her sexuality is never an aspect of her character. There are no references to her being seductive or sexual, which is how both the demon and the Lovecraftian version of Lilith are portrayed. Where in other places Lilith is a sexual creature, a seducer of men, and a reason for them to be lured in or unfaithful, none of that is true of this Lilith. The demonic Lilith is sometimes portrayed as trying to fight for equality between men and women, which means stepping out of the typical role of a woman. While the Lilith in Malevolent doesn’t do the same thing, she does have her own interesting things going on with her gender presentation. As I mentioned before there is a fragment of her soul that becomes separated from her and that fraction presents as masculine, going by “Mr. Scratch” and seeming to use he/him pronouns, while Lilith uses she/her once she’s whole again. Lilith also possesses a man towards the end of the series as her own body is destroyed, and while she has the option to shapeshift back to her typical form, she chooses to stay as this southern man for the rest of the series. 

Lilith shapeshifts a few times throughout the series, and the most notable time she does this is during season five, where she pretends to be an owl that Arthur lovingly names Alexander, and once again he/him pronouns are used. Lilith follows Arthur as an owl so she doesn’t get caught, and keeps an eye on him and watches out for him to some degree as an owl. Though, she isn’t really trying to keep him safe as much as she’s trying to stop him from getting something for her father. I think you could still make the argument though that she’s taken on the form of an owl to act as a protector. Even though it seems like she’s being antagonistic as an owl, you later learn everything she’s doing seems to be for the greater good, and for a better cause than Arthur. I was excited to learn that the demon Lilith also has ties to owls, though it seems like those owls were meant more as negative omens, ways to tie her to darkness and death. I think her being an owl in Malevolent could be argued that way, but she feels more like a protector, and one who’s even seen as friendly and as a welcomed relief at first.

I added my own interpretation of Malevolent Lilith to this post because I love drawing her. I like giving her a mix of masculine, feminine, owl, and humanoid features, as do most people in the fandom. Since Malevolent is audio only, it's fun to see how each person interprets the characters!