South of Midnight’s Rougarou Is a Cautionary Tale of Bottling Emotions

In South of Midnight, players take control of Hazel, a woman who’s just discovered she has an assortment of innate supernatural abilities. Hazel quickly learns that she belongs to a long line of Weavers, magic-users who try to heal the world by locating sources of strong turmoil and trauma (known as Stigma) and destroying them.

Naturally, Hazel’s Weaving journey puts her front and center of some pretty dark and tragic stories. South of Midnight tackles a range of mature themes, covering everything from animal abuse to fratricide, and a whole lot in between. Most of these mature themes are tied directly to South of Midnight‘s boss fights, and the Rougarou is no exception, with his own backstory acting as a cautionary tale of the dangers of suppressing emotions.

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The Cautionary Tale of South of Midnight’s Rougarou Explained

Becoming a Rougarou

Many years before the events of South of Midnight‘s story, a young boy named Laurent lived with his mother and father in a small community surrounding a mill. Laurent’s father worked at the mill, and earned scrips for his labor, a currency that could only be used for goods among the mill’s community.

When Laurent was still very young, his mother grew ill. The mill’s foreman refused to give Laurent’s father the money he needed to treat his wife, and she quickly grew worse. The community rallied together and fellow millworkers chipped in a few scrips of their own. But no doctor would accept the scrips as payment.

Finding out that his mother was essentially destined to die, Laurent ran away from home. Finding himself in the woods alone, Laurent was finally able to let out all of the anger and turmoil that had been brewing inside him. As Laurent screamed into the darkness, his father rushed to his side. But rather than let his son express his emotions, Laurent’s father told him to push them down.

Laurent’s mother died, and his father fell into a deep depression. With his father unable to look after them, Laurent took it upon himself to find food and ensure their survival. All the while, Laurent continued to push his emotions deep down, and refused to allow himself to grieve the loss of his mother.

Laurent’s suppressed pain and anger continued to simmer until his body could hold it no longer. He confronted the mill’s foreman and blamed him for his mother’s death. The foreman didn’t take the verbal assault lightly and threatened the boy. Laurent’s father burst into the foreman’s office and, upon seeing the altercation, rushed in to protect his son. The foreman reached for the gun he kept behind his desk and shot Laurent’s father.

Still just a young boy, Laurent fell to his knees and blacked out. When he came to, Laurent saw that his hands were drenched in blood, and that his father laid motionless on the floor in front of him. At that moment, all of the deep-rooted anguish, guilt, and shame that Laurent had pushed down left his body in one long, uncontrollable scream, a scream so powerful that it turned him into a Rougarou, a giant owl-like beast with glowing yellow eyes.

In Cajun folklore, a Rougarou is a werewolf-like creature.

Living as a Rougarou

Laurent eventually transformed back into a human and, when a little older, joined a gang of bootleggers at the height of the Prohibition era. Laurent tried to live as much of a normal life as he could, which to him meant pushing down his feelings and forgetting his past. But that approach rarely works.

Laurent was quick to anger, and one wrong word would cause all the emotions he had been bottling up to spill out violently. In these moments, Laurent transformed back into a Rougarou. The deep guilt Laurent felt caused him to push away anyone who got too close, including Hazel and her mother Lacey.