no offense, but what was the point of that cool older lady character in Spirited Away
except, you know, to make me question my sexuality at 12 during midnight rewatches as I looked at her weirdly pretty mouth and had Questions
!!!
me, falling in love with every woman I see whose purpose is to eat and be pretty:
I mean, I’m pretty sure Lin is supposed to represent what Chihiro’s future might be like if she accepted her role in the bath house and didn’t try to maintain her own identity and values. She’s not a bad person, but she’s hedonistic to exactly the extent that the bath house culture allows her to be as an employee and has no ambition beyond the system of favors, bribes, and petty intimidation between low-level workers. She’s traded her individuality and opportunity to better herself for the security of predictable exploitation and she doesn’t seem to regret it.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lin is the only other major character who looks human throughout the movie - I’m not certain she started out human, but I suspect she may have, and may have fully traded away her humanity. I do think it’s significant that she, unlike Chihiro and Haku, doesn’t reclaim her name at the end of the story.
She doesn’t want her independence or identity back. Her purpose is to eat and look pretty.
Alternate interpretation: I always thought Lin meant to be a comforting presence.
She’s the first bathhouse worker who is kind to Chihiro, helping her get her clothes and navigate her first work assignment and sneak food. One of the core themes of Spirited Away is finding your footing in a new and terrifying place, and Lin and Haku are key allies in Chihiro’s struggle to gain the skills and self-assurance she needs in order to thrive.
Lin’s human appearance helps us and Chihiro feel more sympathetic towards her . Her familiarity with the system of favors and bribes makes her appealing as a role model who can demystify Chihiro’s new environment for her. Unlike the more inhuman occupants of the bathhouse, Lin looks like someone Chihiro could become in the future, and that’s a good thing! She’s living proof that the bathhouse is not such a monstrous and scary place. Because Lin treats the bathhouse like home, Chihiro begins to see it as a home, too.
And once Chihiro starts to think of the bathhouse as her territory, she realizes that she has agency in this place as well. She uses its rules to her own advantage to free Haku and herself.
And that is the point of Chihiro’s journey in Spirited Away: it’s a metaphor for starting over in a new place and overcoming fear of the unfamiliar. After all, the frame story is Chihiro’s family moving to a new city. At the beginning of the movie, Chihiro is despondent, unhappy to be leaving her old friends behind. By the end, after making it through the spirit world, she’s taking a much more active role in helping her parents settle into their new home.
TLDR: Lin is there to be Chihiro’s friend.