38 pages • 1-hour read
A Snake Falls to Earth
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Themes
Found Family
Content Warning: This section contains references to colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
Cottonmouth society in the Reflecting World kicks children out of their family homes at a relatively young age. These children rarely stick together when leaving home (111), but this doesn’t mean that cottonmouths like Oli are completely individualistic; Oli thrives when he finds a home and friends. Consequently, cottonmouths like Oli rely on found family to fill their need for belonging and companionship. Oli stumbles across the bottomless lake by taking the path to anywhere-you-please—a magical path that finds people when they are in need. When Oli walks the path, he is dreaming of a place to call home, and the path takes Oli to the place where he will meet his friends. These friendships are just as vital to Oli’s sense of home as his tent (and later his house) is.
Found family is also vital for Ami, the Dallas toad person. Ami doesn’t have any biological family around. The only people to help him when he becomes sick are Oli and Brightest. If it weren’t for his friends, Ami and the Dallas toads would die. Oli’s “fork in the road” in Chapter 11 is a decision between finding his biological siblings and dropping everything to help Ami. He chooses the latter, showing the power of the bonds of found family.
Found family consists of connections outside of biological relation to others. The theme of found family therefore shares many similarities with Little Badger’s view on climate change and the natural world. For example, the Dallas toads on Earth cannot save themselves; they require creatures only distantly related to them to save them. In other words, both themes reflect an appreciation for the interconnectedness of people and all other species. The two themes rely on the same understanding of the world, which coincides with the Indigenous Futurism in Little Badger’s work. The importance of found family and cooperation across species, families, and cultures runs counter to the individualism that Western society often stresses.
The Importance of Stories
Little Badger uses stories within her novel as ways for characters to learn, grow, or express their emotions. When Nina tells the story of Fearless in Chapter 14, she uses it to vent her frustration with her mother’s absence along with her worry about her mother’s safety. Fearless is a coyote who loses her mother to a monster and is left with a locket that contains a recording of her mother’s lullaby. If she ever opens the locket and listens to the lullaby, it will disappear forever. Nina concludes the story by saying, “She learned how to survive without her mother’s voice in the world” and then begins crying (135).
The St0ryte11er application is vital to the events of the novel, and its name emphasizes the importance of stories. Nina uses the app as a private video diary, watches the content of others telling stories from their day-to-day life, and wants to use its storytelling capacities to save the Dallas toads. When this fails, Nina uses it to document stories about the recovery of Texas and its ecosystems in the wake of the hurricane. The app is equal parts entertainment and storytelling. Mockingbird also uses the app while disguised as the millionaire Dave from the channel “Thou Own Dave.” She tells the story of the Dallas toads to the content creator’s massive audience, donating a small part of his wealth to help the toads.
Rosita’s historia also demonstrates the nature and significance of storytelling. The Spanish word historia can mean “story” or “history.” Though this initially confuses Nina, it implies the distinction isn’t as important as readers might think. Rosita’s historia is both story and history: It preserves history and provides entertainment. Similarly, Oli shares an anecdote about bison people in the Reflecting World that corresponds to important parts of real-world history—the mass hunting of bison to starve Indigenous people. Though the story is only tangential to the novel’s plot, it conveys the story/history meaning of historia that Little Badger begins the novel with.
Climate Change and the Natural World
All other events and themes in A Snake Falls to Earth revolve around climate change and its effects on the two worlds. Nina frequently expresses anxiety about what is going to happen to the world. She tells her mother she is worried that everything will get worse: “[T]he droughts, heat, and storms. The vortex freezes. All that” (74). Her mother promises they’ll survive it, but Nina continues to worry. Nina’s grandmother has lived long enough to watch the climate change drastically and says that “a human body shouldn’t live through it” (259). The hurricanes have gotten worse over the years, to the point where they decimate homes and destroy sanctuaries for endangered species.
To Nina, it seems like the situation will only get worse. In Chapter 3, the news brings “prophesies of disease and pain” for the future (25). Nina’s fears are likely familiar to many readers and bring present-day concerns about the state of the natural world into a fantasy novel. Here, however, climate change affects not only Earth but the Reflecting World. Brightest says that the worlds are “connected by the living” (260), meaning that while the Reflecting World doesn’t experience climate change, its inhabitants still suffer its consequences. Little Badger uses the connection between the worlds to suggest that everybody, everywhere is affected by climate change, even if they don’t feel its physical effects.
The threat of climate change underscores the importance of both found family and storytelling. Without friends that care about him like family, Ami would never recover, and the Dallas toads would go extinct. Climate change also poses a deadly threat to Nina’s grandmother’s house, which the human characters cannot overcome without the help of the animal people (just as the animal people cannot save Ami without Nina). Little Badger uses the theme of climate change to show that its effects can only be dealt with through cooperation and trust. Similarly, the storytelling network Nina forms over the St0ryte11er app helps to tell a whole and complete story about the hurricane, including the inequitable response by the government and the recovery of animals in the wake of the storm (291). This shows the significance of storytelling in dealing with the effects of climate change.
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