Finding A Conscience

Finding a Conscience

So Volume 7 definitely introduced a whole lot of symbolic elements of Penny’s Pinocchio story.

We’ve gotten a Geppetto (Pietro),

a Blue Fairy (Fria),

a symbolic ‘become a real boy’ transformation, or in this case; an affirmation beyond all doubt that Penny was a real girl all along

And the end of the volume even introduced a Montro.

However, even with all this, I recently realized that there was still a major character from Pinocchio that we still seemed to be lacking.

Jiminy Cricket. Which the more I thought about it seemed pretty odd given that Penny doesn’t seem to NEED someone to be her conscience, after all, she seems to be by far the most moral and empathetic of all the Atlas characters.

But now I’m pretty sure that was exactly the point. Because Penny is the Jiminy Cricket of this story. Rather than having a different character act as her conscience, Penny herself acts as the conscience to others. Namely, Ironwood, Winter and the rest of Atlas.

All of Penny’s scenes with Winter from Episode 7 on can pretty much be summed up as Penny playing the role of Jiminy Cricket.

Finally, this adds another layer of symbolism to Winter, and by extension Ironwood, forcing Penny to flee Atlas.

Atlas has now effectively rejected their conscience.