This article contains spoilers for Harold Halibut.
Harold Halibutis a completely unique game. That’s mostly because of its stop-motion animation graphics which makes it look unlike anything ever made before, but a significant portion of its strangeness stems from its choice to pair its titular everyman hero off with a bipedal fish.
Part Of Your World
I saw The Shape of Water, which set a precedent for awomanloving a dude who was just a fish. But, when men fall in love with fish, it’s usually because the non-fish part of their body is beautiful. Fictional men are usually too shallow to ever love a fish that doesn’t look like a lady on the top half. Harold Halibut takes a different tack. In Slow Bros’ game, a mancanlove a fish; and a genderless, triangle-headed, not-human-in-any-parts fish, at that.
To be clear, the team at Slow Bros. don’t say whether Harold’s love for Weeoo is romantic or sexual, if it’s either at all. They never kiss, and our Noah Baumbach-looking lead puppet shows more physical affection to Jeanne Moreau — the scientist who serves as his maternal figure on the Fedora I — when he tells her he plans to stay behind when the ship takes off than he ever does to Weeoo.
Still, at the end of the game, Harold decides to stay with Weeoo and the Flumylym. You believe that he would want to; you see how much Weeoo has come to mean to him and, if you’ve seen a movie like Avatar or Tarzan, it isn’t surprising that the visitor to a culture would decide to stay because they find it more fulfilling than their own. It’s a familiar storytelling trope.
Run To Them, Harold
But it isn’t executed perfectly in Harold Halibut. It kind of feels like Slow Bros. wasn’t sure if they should actually define Harold’s relationship with Weeoo. So you come away confused whether he’s staying because he loves them romantically or just because he’s finally found a friend who fully understands him.
When Harold thinks that he’s going to leave the planet after saying goodbye to Weeoo, he walks sadly away from the Flumylym village — in a cool, funkily soundtracked third-person slo-mo sequence — only to change his mind and return. It feels like the “grand gesture” moment we expect from a romantic story. It’s Adam running across New York to help Hannah with her mental illness in the season two finale of Girls, or Julia Roberts chasing Dermot Mulroney across Chicago in My Best Friend’s Wedding. It’s an expression of the big kind of love that everyone wants to feel.
Harold And Weeoo In Harold Halibut
Harold and Weeoo’s reunion doesn’t end on a kiss-in-the-rain high, though. When he returns to them and says that he’s going to stay, Weeoo is happy and excited, but the moment is oddly muted for how pivotal it is for Harold’s arc. Weeoo entering Harold’s life wakes him up and pulls him out of the rut of his normal routine on the station, but it can be hard to see why he feels so connected to them otherwise.
Part of the reason Harold Halibut struggles a bit to get the Harold-Weeoo relationship over the finish line is that we clearly see that other people on Fedora I care about Harold very much. He isn’t a loner who never had a friend; he has a bunch of them. Moreau clearly loves him like a son, and his ex Sunny still cares about him, too. He has an extended side quest delivering mail for Buddy the postman, and Buddy becomes a pal, too. His life on Fedora I seems too good for his need for Weeoo to fully land. In the end, I believe that he would want to stay with Weeoo. But I don’t fully believe that he would want to leave everyone on the Fedora I behind.
