Cheshire’s side of this deserves its own post, because what he stands to lose feels more personal than simply being stuck away from a place he wants to go.

Cheshire’s side of this deserves its own post, because what he stands to lose feels more personal than simply being stuck away from a place he wants to go. There’s an important detail in #46: he says he originally came from Earth and was kicked through the looking glass. Wonderland is where he became Cheshire. That makes his connection to it about what he has become as much as where he belongs. At the beginning of #47, the specific change he notices is that his desire for the hunt is weakening. He connects it to spending too many days away from Wonderland. That gives the idea of him fading a much more interesting meaning for me. Something central to how he experiences the world is becoming less compelling to him. We’ve seen how much hunting matters to him. He tracks people, talks about prey, and takes pleasure in the pursuit. In #46, he explains that hunters become Cheshire. So when that desire starts to diminish, it reaches into the identity he’s been describing all along. What does that leave him with? If the drive that helped define him starts falling away, does he feel less like himself? That’s the part I want to dig into. He can still be there beside Calie and Violet while something important about being Cheshire is changing. There’s also another change happening alongside it. He has chosen to stand with Calie and protect her. That puts him at odds with what other creatures expect a Cheshire to be. In #46, his allegiance to the White Queen is used against him, and Violet raises the possibility that he is becoming something different on his own terms. Those two changes pull me in different directions. His choices around the Liddles can give him a different way to live. Losing part of his drive because he has been cut off from Wonderland feels less voluntary. I wouldn’t expect those to mean the same thing to him. That’s why his wish to return makes sense to me. The question is about preserving the self he recognizes while he is also changing through his relationships. I want to see how much of being Cheshire depends on Wonderland, and how much he gets to carry with him wherever he goes.