#amy gumm aesthetic

[snowballthekitteninwonderland]

This is for like, the maaaaybe other 10??? 7??? People who even know this series. And I will most likely still be The Black Sheep™, of this niche fandom, first of all, bc I envision the character both design wise and writing wise completely different from canon, and second, most importantly, bc oh boy.....Amy Gumm, how I hate your canon yet you have such a special place in my heart.... it Dorothy Must Die books have 1 hater that's me, if Amy Gunn has 1 fan that's me.....

I've always had a love-hate relationship with these books. Even when I first read 'em back when I was 15 I was raging constantly at the terrible writing, infantile edginess, rice paper like "deep dark" aesthetic, yet the concept itself was so good, I kept raging and also making my own version alongside it in fury. "no, you author!!! Dorothy shouldn't be the original Dorothy But Now Turned Evil Just Bc™ (and also constantly demonizing femininity and sexyness while at it was and is disgusting and pure hypocrisy bc you yourself are idolizing the color pink, but only doing so via a traditionally masculine lens and demonizing it's feminity), it should be her own abusive mother or at least have her face!! Make Amy all a-ok with committing murder but the moment she faces her she's terrified bc her mother is Her Personal Monster™, make her bi (or better yet, a comphet lesbian) and let her explore her orientation, make her love interest Ozma, the only character that had no ulterior motive towards her and make EdgyBoy n. 173374919172737289 her platonic friend where she can find comfort in as they had similar experiences with abusive mothers gdi", and many more things. God I absolutely despise the ending, it was the rotten cherry on top of a trash ice cream.

But I love Amy. I will always do. She reminds me of my own mom so much, their personalities couldn't be more different, but some of the emotions and experiences she describes within the pages echo so much of the tales she's told me of her youth, of her rage and frustration and fear and depression in her abuse filled past. I wanna give her an ending where she reclaims her autonomy from the emotional chains that bind her.

Also design wise I always pictured everything as some ever so slightly edgy looking cartoon a la old black & white animated shorts. or idk, Cuphead mixed with Bendy. hence the cartoonish like style.

[almost-an-aesthetic]

Amy Gumm from Dorothy Must Die moodboard

[amazingalexdreamsshesnotonfire]

[flying-mochis]

Dorothy from Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

[amyistheonlysaneone]

DOROTHY MUST DIE

Dorothy only wanted to be loved Levena only wanted to be loved Amy had magic talent locked in herself Cinder had magic talent locked in herself Nox refused to admit he fell in love Kia refused to admit he fell in love Seriously dorothy and cinder both total outcasts would probably get along really well ( crossover crossover crossover)

[exemplarybehaviour]

I finished Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige last night. It's a story about Amy Gumm, a modern teenager from Kansas, being swept up in a tornado and dumped into a dystopian version of the Land of Oz, where Dorothy is a cruel dictator. This is a premise that could either be pretty good or extremely Cringe(tm), and to the book is....... okay. Just okay. A review:

The World Overall, I think the worldbuilding was sort of middling-average compared to other YA novels. There's tons of details thrown in, but they're not particularly cohesive, and they rely heavily on the reader having familiarity with at least the Wizard of Oz movie. Here's some talking points:

So as a full disclosure, I absolutely loved the Oz books growing up, and I tried my best not to be upset that characters I loved as a kid were... uh... basically boiled down to very one-dimensional villains. I think the worldbuilding details draw enough from the original books to reward Oz fans, as long as you're okay with everything being sort of off.

A lot of major worldbuilding details are also the ones you see over and over from similar retellings, which are sort of extrapolated from the movie. Dorothy still has her magic shoes, which are ruby red, and the flying monkeys are important players. What sets this book apart, imho, is that Paige does draw strongly on book canon. While it's pitched as "parts of the story we weren't told," this Dorothy is one who moved permanently to Oz with her aunt and uncle and was made a princess, just like in the books. Some other plot twists that I won't list to avoid spoilers are also consistent with canon.

(The back of the book says Amy has read all of the books. This is not true, because if she HAD read the books, she would be about 80% less confused. A lot of the "things the book didn't tell us!!" is just... in the sequel books, lol.)

While Paige does draw a lot on the movie as Aesthetics (sometimes to a comical point-- Dorothy basically just wears a Sexy Dorothy Halloween costume the entire time), there are some neat background details from the books. The magic picture is in use, for example, and there's a joke about the Shaggyman requesting a pantry full of canned beans. On the other hand, if you are Oz-savvy, you'll spend a lot of time wondering where other plot-important items are, like Glinda's book or the magic belt. However, the stuff that's all original feels sort of.... tacky? Like something a tween would make up on the spot if asked to describe what they think a magical royal ball would look like? Like that.

I can't really gauge if these details will make sense to non-Oz fans as they're presented. For example, there's a pretty unnecessary Oz geography lesson that explains what the different regions of Oz are pretty late in the game, and then... also doesn't really explain how Oz is organized either.

The magic system is never explained, but it also functions in a way that it definitely seems like it should be. All of the magic Amy does is just her concentrating and making things happen, but spells other people do often require tools. I didn't really care about this, but I can see it annoying some people.

While the beginning part of the book spends some time letting you see the horrible state of the land of Oz, there's kind of this.... lack of explanation of how Oz works as a country or as a culture. The People Are Being Abused is all you really know.

The Writing The writing in this book is competent but not really... you know... great. It's from Amy's POV so it's meant to be the words of a sarcastic teenager, but the sentence structure is often repetitive and Amy's "sarcasm" is rarely funny or charming. Paige goes into long descriptions of places and what people look like doing magic (raising their hands dramatically and shooting glowing light, etc), and all of this is generally worded like describing a scene in a movie. You know Dorothy's room has pink shag carpeting, but you don't know how it feels under your feet. You know Jellia Jamb smells bad because [SPOILERS], but you don't read about Amy's eyes stinging or stomach rolling. Things like that. The book's structure was kind of wonky, and I really felt like it would have benefitted from another draft with the aid of an editor. Plot-important details are often brought up way too late in the game, and sometimes characters are introduced as if they'll be important, only to vanish again for the rest of the book. Characters have infuriating conversations where they refuse to explain things to Amy just yet, and Amy's reactions to this are so bland it gives the reader the impression that the writer doesn't want to explain it, rather than an intentional narrative choice to keep Amy frustrated and wary. Also, Paige kept doing this thing that drove me bonkers where she'd write something like "I picked up the tray" without ever having described or hinted there was a tray present. The tray? What tray??? Finally: this is the first book in a series, and it's written with the knowledge that more books will be coming. It's not a self-contained story. That's fine as long as you know what you're getting into, but it was one of the biggest complaints I saw on GoodReaders and Amazon reviews. Basically, if you're not into the book, there's no reward in making yourself finish it. If you are into the book, congratulations! There's more! The Characters I think the characters are both the biggest strength of this book and also its biggest flaw. On the one hand, if you want a book where Oz characters are twisted to campy, evil caricatures of themselves, this book absolutely delivers. Dorothy is self-obsessed and petty and Oz's biggest mean girl. The Tin Woodman is now made of knives and melts people. The Scarecrow is a mad scientist. The Lion eats people. I never got the impression these character were supposed to be anything more than cartoonishly evil, and they are. I feel like this is the biggest draw of the book, which is why I'm calling this one of the book's biggest strengths. (These characters also very one-dimensional, so if you wanted a nuanced take on good characters going bad.... well, this isn't the book for you. There's some hints this MIGHT happen in future books, but Paige is going to have to up her writing game to make it work.) The "good guy" characters Amy meets are... well, I'm not really impressed with any of them. They're largely static and don't have much depth to them. I don't understand why some of them exist. For example, what was the point of Indigo, who Amy barely ever thinks about again? What's the point of Glamora? Glamora is Glinda's twin sister and she's working against her, and while we get hints that Glamora is a complex character under all her glamour.... this is never really demonstrated. In fact, Glamora and the rest of the witches mostly disappear for the last arc of the novel. Why did we spend so much time with them? (The answer the last the question is that this book is NOT a self-contained story, but the beginning of a series.) Finally, the reason why I can't give this book more than a "meh" rating is Amy herself. She just... doesn't really feel like a cohesive character. In the first thirty or so pages of the book, we learn about Amy's background. She's a seventeen year old social outcast. Her dad left her and her mom and started a new family, and Amy is still hung up over it. Her mom is depressed and has several addictions, and Amy feels like she has to care for her mom instead of the

other way around and is resentful of it. This all seems like a cohesive character, right? A little cliché, but that's fine, because those are real problems real teens have. Except! Once we get to Oz, all of this is barely referenced at all. Amy never really shows interest in going home or relief in being away from home. She occasionally comments that she enjoys things that happen to her (mostly being magically flown places) and randomly states she'd like a tattoo, but she doesn't seem to have any particular goals besides ones other people lay out for her, and she doesn't have much in the way of interests or motivations. She occasionally has a few pages of being angry or frustrated by something, but this is never really written like an enduring emotion, like the writer forgets that Amy is supposed to be confused between scenes where she's actively telling other characters she feels kept in the dark. She has two moments where she risks herself to help someone else, but they happen too far apart to really feel like Amy is a particularly compassionate person rather than a character just randomly performing compassion. We never find out why Amy has to be the one to kill Dorothy, instead of one of the trained witches. It's sort of hinted that there are magical reasons it has to be Amy, but we're never given a narrative reason. Amy is upset to see people suffer, but she never really loses anything personally to Dorothy. Sure, people she likes are killed, but we never see rage or mourning from her. She's very flat and are we're never really given a personal motivation for her to agree to assassinate someone. We don't even get to see Amy do anything "special" to show off that she has that little something-something that sets her apart from others. Almost everything she plans and executes herself ends with someone dying and/or failure. She mostly seems to just do things without motivation or thinking them through. She doesn't have any skills that other characters aren't better at. Even her skill of "also being from Kansas" doesn't get her anywhere with Dorothy! Finally, I don't understand why the romantic subplot is there, except maybe because the writer was told good stories have romantic subplots. Conclusion I feel like if this book were 100-200 pages shorter, I could just say "This story is BONKERS" and call it a fun a read. As it stands, the story is bonkers, but it's stretched out enough that the writing and characterization flaws really dragged down my enjoyment of it. It was okay and I did read the whole book in only a handful of settings, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone... that being said, if the premise DOES intrigue you, I'd say read it!

[revolutionaryorderofwicked]

Dorothy Must Dies Aesthetic // Langwidere (a.k.a Lanadel)

Okay who else fell in  L O V E  with Lang?!? I don’t know what it is about her, but I just instantly was like “okay, yes, let’s go, dis my bitch, she’s my gal, I am in love”

(based off the series by @daniellempaige)

[tears-and-anaesthetic]

Book aesthetic: Dorothy Must Die

There’s no place like anywhere but here.

[daniellempaige]

How stunning is this Amy Gumm! One of my favorite things is the beautiful#fanart I have received for both #dorothymustdie and#stealingsnow! Love and thanks #Repost @kattnap ・・・ Amy Gumm// Revolutionary Order of the Wicked ((this is my take on Amy)) : #dorothymustdie #books #aesthetic #pink

[amazingalexdreamsshesnotonfire]

[flying-mochis]

Here's a Pete edit because Yeehaw

(Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige)

[flying-mochis]

Amy Gumm from Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

Someone hug her

[amazingalexdreamsshesnotonfire]

[amazingalexdreamsshesnotonfire]