Mabel Martin is played by Maybell Marten. She is one of the two main protagonists of Mabel. Please be warned that this page discusses heavy themes of abuse.
Season One[]
Mabel does not appear in a large part of season one, but we do learn several details about her life. Her father's name was Thomas, and her mother's name was Lily; Thomas never got to meet Mabel, and Lily died when she was four, leaving her to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Sally Martin, her grandmother, abused her throughout her entire life. Mabel's only allies in her youth were the Court, who she was able to communicate with, and the House, which cared about her more than anything else. Mabel grew up "half feral and half faeral,"[1] showing a connection to Fairy Hill from a very young age. Luna Thorne lived in her mirror, and while they were close when Mabel was a child, Luna and Mabel began to fight after an incident in the garden of the Martin home, when Mabel was bitten by a fox.[2] She doesn't remember a large portion of her childhood.
She was sent off to El Segundo Academy around the age of twelve and placed in the care of one Aurora Silver.[3] She was subsequently abused heavily once again--though the details are not revealed within the show's canon, the audience does learn Mabel was put through a series of experiments, including being fed poison and presumably being harmed with iron, to which she is incredibly allergic. The tapes these experiments are recorded on refer to her as Subject 7825. At some unknown point, Mabel is captured and held captive in the Underhill.
Anna Limón begins to call Mabel around November of 2016[4], and eventually drags herself into the Underhill to get Mabel back. Mabel herself is heard from for the first time in episode seven, where she continuously attempts to call Anna back. At the end of season one, Anna goes into the Underworld and meets Mabel physically for the first time.
Season Two[]
Anna returns to the House, with Mabel trapped in the walls, only able to properly communicate by making the lights buzz. Anna then decides to drink poison, swapping herself and Mabel, with Anna now stuck in the Underhill full-time.
In the last episode of season two, Anna solves a series of riddles and manages to find her way back to Mabel, leaving Mabel in the house and herself in the Underhill again.[5]
Season Three[]
Mabel is unused to the human world as a whole, and struggles with being back. She's furious at Anna for both switching their places without permission and for leaving her alone in the house that had trapped her for so long; she alternates between screaming at Anna to leave her alone and being terrified. She says that she isn't a person anymore and makes several points that look towards her being some form of changeling, though the creators of the podcast have confirmed that Mabel is many things and cannot be defined simply by one term. It is revealed in the first episode of this season that Mabel's voice actress is Maybell Marten.[6]
Mabel screams at Anna for trying to be the sacrificial lamb and/or a self-loathing martyr. She begins to refer to the other woman as Saint Anna and fights with one of Anna's friends when they call, worried about her. She then breaks every mirror in the Martin home.
As she rages, Mabel tells Anna about Sally and Luna, and says that she has no pity within her for either of them. Following Anna's journey in Pilgrimage, Mabel attempts to visit the cemetery Sally is buried in in order to call Anna's friend again, before realizing that she had never actually left the House at all--it has trapped her once again, pretending to be the outside world. During this time, Mabel realizes the Court has replaced Anna with a changeling double.[7]
She gets to the garden and gives the House a piece of her arm in order to keep herself bound to it, then finds a piece of her own hair in the garden--and with it, Anna's double. The double chases Mabel around and attempts to get her to fall in love with her, thus abandoning Anna to the Underhill. It does not work, and Mabel eventually climbs a tree before dropping a match onto her. In the ensuing corrupted version of hide-and-seek, Mabel manages to kill Anna's double by strangling her.[8]
Anna returns after Mabel gives a piece of her arm to the House and Mabel almost kills her, thinking it's the double attempting to trick her again. However, the two girls work it out and manage to finally kiss. Then they fight about one of them having to leave. They hear the King's voice and Anna orders the House to let them both out, revealing that Anna is now the god of the place. Anna calls Mabel endless; then they go get the piece of arm Mabel had torn off in order to get Anna back up to the House. Anna's skin on her hand burns off and Mabel is half on fire at all times.
They then decide the best course of action is to murder the king.[9]
Season Four[]
The double, now calling herself Veratrine, comes back, and comes with the girls as they attempt to challenge the King. After Anna fails the first time, Mabel explains to her the Rules of the place after they run back to the House. Mabel gets eaten by the House, and after Anna gets her back by tearing herself open, they go on an adventure involving Sally's old grandfather clock, Mabel's collection of owl pellets, finding a drawing of Lily's bedroom, and Anna finally telling Mabel she loves her. After Mabel stops being dumbstruck over that, they break into Lily's room and find a datura seedling, which makes them believe the cycle is starting once again. They then go on to find Mabel's childhood diary, which allows them to understand that there needs to be a ritual involved with challenging the king. Mabel gets Vera not to run away and they head back to the Underhill, where they find Luna Thorne possessing a faerie. Anna and Mabel have another fight when Mabel calls herself more of a faerie than a human. Mabel gets really upset due to the fact that she listens to literally everything Anna says with no way to stop; she compares Anna to Sally. Anna then explains that she came to the Martin house after she'd "cut the cord" on the visions of another girl she saw throughout college--that girl, of course, being Mabel.
They make up and go challenge the King properly, Anna naming Mabel as her champion. After they win, Anna fully frees Mabel of her bonds to her, and tells Mabel she's free to leave if she wants to. She doesn't, though, and they have a very nice scene before a boy named Brandon shows up where they're walking and shoots himself in the head, the bullet ricocheting off and hitting Mabel's arm.[10]
Season Six[]
Mabel screams at Anna not to touch her or the bullet wound. Anna gets her to calm down by telling her secrets, and Mabel faints. After Anna patches her up, they get put in the attic, where Mabel seems to have a small flashback; she then tells Anna that the bullet had poisoned her without saying anything else on the matter. They have a fight. Anna gets Mabel to tell her why there are locusts in the attic--as previously mentioned, it's what Mabel ate when she was locked inside--before having another fight because Mabel misinterprets what Anna is saying. The body of the dead boy comes back and a snake jumps out from it. Anna drags a now-unconscious Mabel away. Anna solves more riddles to find that Mabel is allergic to iron and that she needs to cut out every piece of flesh the bullet touched in order for Mabel to heal.
Mabel wakes up and they go to Anna's coronation, where Aconite challenges them for the throne.[11] Using a box of SD cards that the House had given Anna (recorded torture sessions from Aurora Silver), they convince Aconite that she's not the true heir to the throne, and Anna is crowned, naming Mabel as her queen.
Anna is found at the end of the last episode of season six in the "real" world again, with no sign whatsoever of Mabel.[12]
Season Seven[]
In Eidolon and Janet's world where the seventh season takes place, Mabel has been dead for years after being force-fed glass by Sally Martin.[13] We see Mabel in flashbacks, where she spends time with Anna. They discover the King transformed into some form of shadow monster in the Underhill; later, Anna reveals to Mabel that she'd found Sally's old diary. Anna tells Mabel that Sally made a deal with Luna and tricked her in order to rebirth her brother Phillip in the form of her daughter Lily.[14]
We learn more about Mabel's past from Eidolon and Janet's research. Lolo has several redacted files from Mabel' s past, and she tells Anna about how this universe's Mabel died. When she was eleven, after the force-feeding glass incident, Mabel was sent to live with a foster family. Lily, who had been sent away to a behavior facility, returned to the Martin House on a day that Mabel was there (for some unknown reason). Lily left the House covered in Mabel's blood and promptly got into a fatal car accident. They never found Mabel's actual body, but the House was covered in her blood, and she was presumed dead.
Lolo and Janet take Anna to see Mabel's grave as, throughout the narrative, we hear from our own version of Mabel. She gets into fights with Lily-- god knows where in the timeline THAT is-- and has panic attacks, screaming for her father (the King, presumably) to help her. Back in Lolo's world, The Emissary reveals to the road trip trio that our version of Mabel has been taken back by the King, and Lolo tells Anna that trying to get her back will result in the destabilization of Eidolon and Janet's entire world. Anna does not care.[15]
In an attempt to get her back, the road trip trio go to the House and attempt to pull off a summoning game in some way similar to the Lesser Banishing Ritual. Janet is pulled into the walls of the House while trying to get Mabel out-- at the end, while Anna begs Mabel to wake up in her arms, only Mabel's voice is heard, reciting Mabel?'s lines from A Superfluity: I saw a thicket of trees break open like an egg from a limpia. I saw a girl walk into the dark woods with her mouth open and her hand outstretched towards the flaming sky. I saw a girl cut from herself the rib from which to make the world. I saw a girl thresh god out of her belly.[16]
Physical Description[]
Mabel is an indigenous Mexican woman. She is short (not over 5'3" in any universe[17]) and thin. Her hair is long & dark, and her eyes are green.[18]
The creators of the show have specifically stated that they do not care how Anna and Mabel are portrayed, so long as neither of them are portrayed as white.[19]
Canonical Appearance[]
Mabel is in or mentioned in every episode of the entire podcast.
Trivia[]
- Mabel was born on November second, All Soul's Day.
- Mabel is canonically scared of hospitals.
- Mabel is no taller than 5'3"; she's an inch shorter than Anna, so take that as you will.
- Her technical first appearance (besides her voicemail, which is in The Letters) is in The Man in the Street, where she can be heard singing "House of the Rising Sun."
- She has a major sweet tooth, and also canonically "likes to chew on leaves and petals." Absolute legend.
- Mabel enjoys the band ABBA, along with classic punk and grunge bands.
- Mabel has no godparents.
- She considers the King to be her dad, and she is the only being the King's ever loved.
- Flowers growing out of Mabel include marsh-violet, harebell, cuckoo flower, and apple blossoms.
- ↑ Episode Thirty-Two: Temporal Snake
- ↑ Episode Seven: King in the Labyrinth
- ↑ Episode Twenty-Nine: Aurora Silver is Willing to Wait
- ↑ Episode One: The Letters
- ↑ Episode Sixteen: Underworld
- ↑ Episode Seventeen: Orientation
- ↑ Episode Nineteen: La Peregrinación
- ↑ Episode Twenty-Two: Eternal Return
- ↑ Episode Twenty-Four: Coalescence
- ↑ Episode Thirty-Two: Temporal Snake
- ↑ Episode Thirty-Eight: Revelation
- ↑ Episode Forty: The Deterritorialization Of Time
- ↑ Episode Forty-Three: Seeled
- ↑ Episode Forty-Two: The Past is a Dream of Itself
- ↑ Episode Forty-Five: Daddy Issues
- ↑ Episode Forty-Eight: Saturn Devours His Children
- ↑ https://mabelpodcast.tumblr.com/post/184649814393/any-idea-how-tall-the-girls-are-mabel-gives-off
- ↑ https://mabelpodcast.tumblr.com/post/187358445383/hello-i-just-have-a-quick-question-i-just
- ↑ https://mabelpodcast.tumblr.com/post/611305735571292160/i-know-people-keep-asking-this-all-the-time-but