#i feel like there is a lot of potential for winnie in this show

[blueycarpenter]

little star

Ever since Cairo submitted her midterm assignment, things haven't been the same between you two.

fandom: MILLER'S GIRL (2024) content: x reader a/n: i had posted this on a previous account, in case it looks familiar

Cairo hadn’t been herself lately. You two had talked for hours for the past couple of weeks. You had grown closer and more intimate with each other. Then, all of the sudden, everything changed.

Cairo wasn’t around anymore. She never called or wrote. It was ever since she turned in her midterm assignment for Mr. Miller that ties had been cut. Due to her tight deadlines, you two had agreed not to see each other until after she had finished the midterm, but it had been 3 days since the due date… She had been a ghost.

You called Winnie that morning—the dawn of the 4th day after. She explained the discord that had accumulated and how Cairo had taken the beating to heart. But she was the strongest person you had ever met. She couldn’t be broken.

Could she?

Winnie had said a lot of things. 

Cairo was emotional. Cairo was resentful. Cairo was heartbroken. Cairo was alive, at least.

No more alive than the works she’d create from a blinking cursor, the lead of a pencil, or the ink of a pen, though. She’d masterminded such beauty that reflected nothing but the world around her. Though when she had unlatched the door to let the monsters in, the rain poured and the lightning struck. 

You weren’t as talented a writer as she was, but who could be? Between those paragraphs of literacy and media was blood. It was a rich kind of blood that lured you to Cairo Sweet in the first place. It was reckless and mysterious, but you’d never felt more grounded before you laid eyes on her. Heard her speak… Learned her heart… And you missed that more than everything.

Was there Sweet to her name anymore? Or was there just Cairo? 

Winnie said Cairo had been alone. She said she had wanted to be alone.

But alone meant misery and displacement. Defeat and loneliness. Longing and torture. And Cairo didn’t deserve that. You didn’t care what she’d done or what she didn’t do. She was your north star. She shone brighter than anything you’d ever known, and therefore, nothing could ever change that.

So, you showed up to her house after that 6 AM phone call with Winnie Black. You needed to see her. Not just because you missed her more than anything, but because you couldn’t bear the thought of her discouraging her potential and honesty. Not in her wondrous existence.

Cairo didn’t fear anything, you’d learned, so you let yourself in and found her sitting in the darkness of her room, three cigarette butts on the floor and her journal open on the bed. Through the shadows, you found the top of her head over the other side of the bed. “Cairo?”

She didn’t move a muscle, but she did answer. “If you’ve come to talk, don’t bother. I’ve heard enough, and the sincerity I’ve expressed has been more than society is willing to tolerate. Honesty is feared by many. It’s tragic and hateful, yet it’s a quality that etiquette claims to be most valuable.” Then, she managed a wry scoff. “Hypocrites.” 

“Cairo, I don’t care what happened,” you replied. “I haven’t heard from you in days. I just missed you, and I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

She actually gave a laugh this time. “Aren’t I?”

As convincing as she may seem to other people, you had learned her better than most, because you had to figure her out the hard way, through phone calls and communication of words, not expressions. You didn’t have to see her face to determine how she truly felt. You could hear it. Dare you say, you could feel it. 

There was a tear in her voice as she spoke. And it led you rounding the bed to find her knees up, while she stared at the wall ahead. Those beautiful eyes were slow, like shards of obsidian as they raised to meet yours without a blink.

“Y/N…”

You dropped to your knees and pulled her into a hug. She didn’t reciprocate, but you held her for everything you were worth. You rested your cheek against her head, your fingers gently pulling the small tangles from her hair and your other hand corralling her back, clutching her shirt like she was going to disappear into the darkness. “Cairo, listen to me…” you whispered. Her warm breath filtered through your shirt. “I don’t care what anyone says. About you… About me… About anything… You are the greatest soul anyone could ever dream of having in their school, in their class, in their life, in anything.”

A warm, damp feeling found its way to your collarbone, and you knew it was tears. And all of the sudden, her weight was recognizable against your embrace. She felt so small in your arms that didn’t even hold all of her. It was the first time you realized just how petite she was for an 18 year-old girl with an extraordinary personality. “You know, to me… you’re above everything in this world. I’ve only seen people wander the earth, dreaming of what it’d be like to fly, but you… you fly, Cairo. You’re that star in the sky everyone dreams of being.” Your chest ached from how serious those words coming from your heart were. You then lifted your head to place a loving kiss to hers, because just holding her wasn’t enough anymore. 

Cairo sniffled, but didn’t say anything. However, she had managed to unbend her legs to hold you against her. And when you gently pulled away to have her look up at you and you, down at her, the wet streaks against her cheeks shimmered in the halflight.

You wiped them away and gave her a small smile. “Beautiful…” You kissed her forehead. “Magical…” You kissed her cheek. “Wonderful, you are.” The next place you were dying to heal with your lips caught your eyes, though it was merely small motions of your irises. Instead, you brushed her hair aside and pressed your foreheads together. Her eyes shut and for a moment, she looked peaceful as you finished with, “Yes, you are…”

She opened her eyes, now only tainted with a thin gloss. But then she managed the smallest, sweetest smile you’d ever seen. Her Cairo Sweet smile. “Thank you,” she said, her voice only a little above a whisper, mostly steady but with the slightest crack.

“It’s true,” you whispered back. Seeing her small smile was enough for you to give her your own, though yours was out of admiration, pride, and love. She truly was a star. 

She was your little star.

Then, her smile faded and she glanced away. It was almost shy, which surprised you. “Y/N?” Her voice grew a little stronger.

“Mm-hmm?” Whatever she wanted was hers.

“Kiss me.”

There was no hesitation as you granted her wish. Little did she know though, it was your wish too. You had wished upon a star, because that was the old saying. Wishing on a star was a chance that didn’t come often, especially when that one star was a shooting star. Yet, it hadn’t passed you up, and there was no way in hell you were going to pass it up.

Cairo’s lips were soft, but you could tell there were stories imprinted on them. They weren’t ex-stories, per se, but they were mysteries that you wondered how hard they would be to solve. How many pages would you have to read to uncover them? How much would she have to write to reveal them?

Only time would tell. But every journey starts somewhere.

And the best had a star to guide them.

[joelswritingmistress]

Last Halloween: Chapter 3

Summary: After a tragedy involving Joel happened on Halloween one year prior, the town now shuns him while ignoring the details of the now closed case. You are seemingly the only one to offer empathy to a man the town is making out to be a monster.

Warning: Angst, mild language

Pairing: Joel Miller x f!reader

"He's coming?" Your friend Jessie asked, practically letting her jaw drop to the floor as she adjusted her cowboy hat in the mirror.

"Shh." You put a finger to your lips and pulled on a pair of black spandex for your cat costume. "I don't want to tell Winnie or Chris." You knew they would give you a hard time, but Jessie was a little more open minded.

"Okay, okay." She pretended to zip her lip. "I won't say anything."

"Thank you." You tossed on a black shirt with lacy sleeves before grabbing the cat mask. After Jessie checked herself out once more in the bathroom mirror, you reached for your keys. "Let's boogie," you whispered.

The ride over was focused on Joel talk, and you didn't particularly mind. You were kind of itching to talk about him.

"Are you into him?" Jessie asked.

You weren't a good liar so you were honest, despite the potential backlash. After that motorcycle ride it was like a switch had been flipped inside of you.

"Yeah. I mean, I think so."

"Wow." She giggled, "It's so.. random. Not judging. I just.. wow. Why?"

"Why?" You shrugged as you drove. "He gave me a ride on his motorcycle earlier and-"

"Wait, what?" She grabbed your forearm without even realizing it.

You laughed. "We rode around town and then he drove me back to pick up my car at the junkyard. That's why I was so late getting home."

"How old is he?"

"I'm not sure."

"He's a least ten years older than us. Probably more."

You shrugged again. "I'm just feeling things out. I really just want him to have a friend." You turned to look at Jessie for a quick second. "Ya know?"

"Oh, I know." She chuckled. "A friend with benefits."

You laughed and swatted at her. "Cut it out."

"Just let me know what color bridesmaid dress I should wear."

You rolled your eyes with a grin and the two of you had another laugh.

The sign for the tavern came into view by the road side and you pulled into the parking lot, allowing your car to merge in with all the others. You both reached for your purses in the back seat and then headed toward the door that led inside.

On your walk up you heard someone call out your name and turned to see the man in the plastic scarecrow mask. Joel. Seeing him there alleviated any anxiety that lingered on the chance of him not showing up. He *had* showed up, and you knew how big of a step that was for him.

"Hey!" You greeted him with a hug and he partially lifted the mask as your roommate began to introduce herself. A moment later, the three of you were walking inside, welcomed by the beat of the old time seasonal song, Midnight Monsters Hop.

"I'm gunna go get a drink," Chrissy shouted, using her thumb to motion toward the bar that was overflowing with ghouls, ghosts and everything in between.

"Okay." You gave a thumbs up and looked to Joel. "Want a drink?"

He nodded, "Yeah, sure."

You reached back behind you for his hand and felt that similar electricity from before when he took it.

Up at the bar you flagged down the bartender.

"I'll do a vodka soda and.."

"A Bud Lite," Joel added, reaching into his wallet. Like his habit at the coffee shop, he paid with cash despite your attempts to try to pay for the round.

You looked at one another and without saying a word, you tapped your glasses together and then took a sip from your drinks. Joel hesitantly lifted his mask partway. You felt so bad for his inability to be free.

When another old Halloween song came on by The Dead Kennedys, you pulled Joel with you into a crowd of people who had begun to dance along to the rock music.

The beat was fast and upbeat. Without thinking you shoved Joel playfully with a grin with one hand to his chest and then closed the gap again and began to dance right next to him.

A moment later he was following your lead. He was having fun. You were having fun. The dim lighting in the bar was intersected by strobes of oranges, greens and purples, highlighting your every move.

When Joel really began to relax you could see it in his body language. He was dancing around, grabbing your hand to twirl you and being less cautious about lifting his mask to take a sip from his beer.

The rock music never seemed to let up. You needed a break from dancing as sweat began to make your face glisten. You eyed an old photobooth in the back corner of the bar and reached for Joel's free hand again, towing him with you.

When you pushed your way through a pale, white curtain you pulled him down into a seated position beside you and inserted a five dollar bill into the money slot beneath the camera screen.

With the first 3-2-1 countdown on the screen, you both kept your masks on and you stuck out your tongue. For the second photo, Joel lifted his mask so it sat on the top of his head and he managed a half smile. For picture number three, Jessie came out of nowhere, leaping into the booth for a photobomb and then exiting just as quickly.

You were laughing. Joel was laughing. You were both genuinely enjoying the night. Seconds later, the pictures developed and you took a copy while handing one over to Joel.

He kept his mask up as you pulled him back out into the bar where you resumed dancing. The energy was fiery. You loved every minute of it. More so, you loved seeing Joel at ease and having fun. Prior to recently you had never even seen him smile.

That night, in the freaky, flashing strobe lights, things felt perfect - as perfect as they had felt on the back of Joel's bike a few hours earlier. You knew this was manifesting into one of those nights - the type of night you looked back on that was on the border of magical, at least the type of magical that existed in real life.

It was everything. The music, the lighting, the look on Joel's face as his eyes found yours and never left. You were two giddy children that night and it felt so damn good. Never in a million years did you think you'd be able to get him out of his shell.

A break in the song left the two of you breathing heavy with smiles.

"Want another drink?" He shouted.

"Sure." You smiled, and a ringing stuck in your ears with the brief absence of loud music. The next song quickly picked up and Joel smiled, squeezed your hand and then made his way through the crowd.

"Another round, please," you heard him order.

Your eyes were on him as he stood there by the bar. You still smiled. He was contagious; perhaps the definition of a diamond in the rough. Joel Miller was.. dreamy.

"Hey killer." A voice interrupted your temporary euphoria. It wasn't directed at you. It was directed at Joel. Your daydream was suddenly interrupted when you saw a man approach him as he waited for your drinks. "You're in here dancing and having a good time. Where's Johnny? Hmm?" The guy shoved him now and you ran to Joel's defense.

"Enough!" The bartender scolded but the guy went on.

"You kill a local legend and you think you can just move on?" The guy shouted.

"Stop!" You intervened, standing with Joel as others began to turn in your direction.

"Oh, you even got a girl, that's great," mocked the stranger. "You know what Johnny's girl does on and off every week? She cries. Because you killed him!"

Joel tossed a twenty on the bar, left the drinks and stormed out of the establishment. You chased after him, bursting outside and shouted his name when a car whizzed by and almost hit him on the Main Street road.

"Joel!" You shouted and hurried the rest of the way to him. "Joel, stop!"

"I can't do this!" He shouted, "You just don't get it!"

"I know." You shook your head. "Joel, I'm sorry."

"I'm not your little fucking project," Joel went on.

"I know that, Joel." You shook your head, feeling the first sting of tears in your eyes. "I just.. I like you. I was having fun with you."

"I don't belong here. Not in this town. Not anymore! Nothing is going to change that."

"It's not fair," you went on, "I know-"

"You don't know anything!" He waved his hands wildly to the sides. "You don't know how I feel every single day."

"I know I don't," you agreed, "But I want to be here for you. I want to help you. Be your friend."

"What and relive this shit show of a night almost daily with me?" He made a face and shook his head.

"This night hasn't been a shit show," you argued. "Up until two seconds ago this was one of the enjoyable nights I can remember. It started back at the junk yard and on the bike-"

"Well, I'm glad I could give you a thrill ride," Joel said in a snarky fashion that cut you a little deep.

"Joel.." you shook your head. "I enjoy your company." You extended both of your arms in his direction with your palms up.

He looked at them but distanced himself further back a few steps. "Just.. go back to your normal life and stay away from me."

He scoffed turned away from you, storming off into the darkness as you still held your arms out in front of you. Despite having just formally met him, a single tear left each of your eyes.

"Joel!" You called. "Joel, please.."

He didn't turn back around. It broke off a piece of your heart when he disappeared around the corner of the building without so much as looking back.

CLICK HERE FOR CHAPTER 4

@untamedheart81 @amy172

[governmentintelligence]

less a theory and more drawing connections

i literally dont know whats compelling me to make this post, but i was watching the game theory on indigo park/uniquegeese's reaction to the game theory on indigo park, and when unique mentioned that there's stuff people haven't caught on to or mentioned....

spoilers, i guess? and i have links to all the timestamps in youtube videos im using linked on the images themselves.

I thought a bit about the lloyd's limo's sign that's in storage. and the lloyd statue that's in storage.

(ID: screenshot from Youtube of backstage space Mane Stage in Indigo Park, with gold statue of Lloyd amids storage boxes with his hand outstretched and holding a microphone)

the lloyd statue very clearly looks like it used to be where rambley is now. holding isaac indigo's hand at the entrance.

that implies that the rambley statue isn't the original, and that lloyd used to be the one holding isaac's hand.

(ID: screenshot from Youtube playthrough showing golden statue of Isaac Indigo holding Rambley the Ractoon's hand and waving his other, mimicing the Disney partner's statue)

similarly, in the intro cut scene historical footage of isaac on the park's opening day, a mural of lloyd is on the wall at the entrance. when the player character visits the park, the mural in that location is of rambley.

you can really see it highlighted in this screenshot from the intro scene, as the camera zooms out from the historical footage and shows the present day indigo park website.

(ID: screenshot from Youtube playthrough of intro cutscene. Two monitors sit on desk, one showing black and white footage of Isaac Indigo speaking in front of Indigo Park's entrance on opening day, with Lloyd mural behind him. Second monitor shows website for booking Indigo Park stay with an image of the park's entrance on the website, showing that the mural behind Isaac now has Rambley.)

now, there are a few other allusions to rambley having taken over after lloyd. the painting of them both shaking hands is really reminiscent of the painting in disney's winnie the pooh ride, showing owl shaking hands with mr toad while mr toad passes along the deed to the ride. that painting is an allusion to how the winnie the pooh ride replaced the ride "mr toad's wild ride," so passing the deed is literally passing along the baton.

another is the player character's comment when you view the lloyd plush — "I feel like as a kid, Indigo used Lloyd a lot more."

what i feel is more foreshadowing to why the change between lloyd and rambley was made, however, comes from this sign that's also in the mane stage's backstage. it's sideways and the screengrab isn't the best, but it reads "Lloyd's Limos".

(ID: screenshot from Youtube playthrough, where a dirty sign reading "Lloyd's Limos" can be read between the bars of a metal frame shelf)

the idea of a limo ride immediately reminded me of Disney's California Adventure's infamous Superstar Limo which, to make a long story short, sucked ass. it was such a monumental failure of a ride for quite a few reasons and i'd recommend Defunctland's video on why it all went tits up, but the tl;dr for our purposes is just that it sucked. it was not received well by park attendees and was closed in less than a year after opening.

the comparison makes me really curious to know just what kind of ride lloyd's limos was, but knowing that lloyd had a ride that then flopped feels as if he was the main mascot until he flopped. similar to superstar limo, the entirety of california adventures was received pretty poorly upon opening.

maybe a similar expansion or rebranding was done at indigo park, while lloyd was losing popularity, and that's what prompted the switch? and maybe there's now a return to retro happening for indigo fans, as suggested by the retro lloyd plush (but not of other characters)?

either way, i feel like i haven't seen a lot of people point out the Lloyd's Limos sign and its potential ties to the old Superstar Limo ride, but i do feel like that's hugely intentional. same as the handshake painting's clear nod forward the owl and mr toad painting at the parks. im interested in seeing how these similarities might be foreshadowing or otherwise connected to the lore!!

[agentnico]

Top 10 WORST Movies of 2023

For every good movie there’s always a dozen stinkers, and 2023 brought out a lot of turkeys, and I’m not referring to all the poor birds that ended up in our bellies this Christmas season. It’s become a tradition for me every year to do a top 10 best and worst movies of the year list, and I tend to leave the top 10 best list till later as I catch up will the awards potentials, however with the bad list I get right on into it. There are of course many bad movies this year I didn’t see, as I don’t actively seek out to watch the bad ones, but I have heard that these following haven’t been the best: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, The Marvels, Indiana Jones 5, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, Expend4bles, Children of the Corn, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey…… damn, a lot of films got a bad rep this year. Yet I have 10 other ones that I’ve seen that I thought were crap. Don’t worry if a film you loved ends up on this list, it will simply mean your opinion is wrong and your have to live with that. With that in mind, here’s my humble list of the shit-fest Hollywood had to offer in 2023…

10) ANT-MAN & THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA - Everything that is wrong with the current state of Marvel is exhibited on full display here. Lacking a sense of direction and exploiting the idea of the multiverse just for the sake of it, the movie is a dud. It feels like whilst trying to focus on going bigger and bolder, the movie lost the sense of fun that elevated the earlier instalments in the tiny hero’s franchise. Paul Rudd is still as charming and likeable as ever, however the introduction of Kang as the next MCU Big Bad is pointless seeing as this big baddie can be defeated by a bunch of ants. Don’t make no difference now anyway with Jonathan Majors losing the court case, but who in the first place thought “oh yeah, Kang is a badass who killed many Avengers, but a giant head of Corey Stoll should weaken him no problem”. Look, there’s no sugarcoating it - this movie is bad. Also, Bill Murray appears in this because…?

9) THE BEANIE BUBBLE - Zack Galifianakis without any facial hair is truly a sight to behold, but that’s not enough to make this fluffy yet bland behind-the-scenes look at the famous Beanie Babies toys even remotely interesting. It’s as if this film can’t bear (thank you) to show the creepier side of these toys, as this should have been a more darker and messed up tale, especially with the lightly implied institutional sexism. Oh well, that’s that then.

8) WE HAVE A GHOST - If ever there was a movie that fit more to the phrase “Netflix & Chill��� then this is it, as you will be too busy banging your partner or your sock than caring about a silent speechless David Harbour creeping about Casper-like and being all quiet and mysterious. To be fair he’s the only redeemable quality as the rest of the movie is a mishmash hodgepodge of genres that is neither funny, nor effective in its family drama dynamic. At least seeing Jennifer Coolidge jump out a window was mildly amusing. Mildly. Anyway, where’s that sock?

7) THE OLD WAY - It is truly fascinating that after starring in over 100 films, this is Nicolas Cage’s first ever western. Aside from that mind boggling revelation, this movie comes out with less than a bang. I don’t know, I was hoping for something a bit more mad, especially with Cage’s involvement. Heck, in the movie’s opening sequence Nicolas Cage is introduced with a sprawling Poirot-like moustache, and immediately I assumed that I am in for something ridiculous. However following that scene the movie cuts to 20 years later, and with that both the moustache and the hope for something exciting or weird is diminished to singular unseen atoms.

6) FOOL’S PARADISE - The directorial debut from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Charlie Day (who also writes and stars), misfiring Hollywood satire Fool’s Paradise wastes a strong ensemble cast that also includes Adrien Brody, Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman, Kate Beckinsale, Ken Jeong, Common, John Malkovich and the late Ray Liotta. Look, in a way I feel bad about including this film on this list, as you can tell this is a true passion project for Day and one that has good intentions by attempting to go back to the old-school slapstick Charlie Chaplin-era of comedy, with a lighthearted satire on the way the film industry works. In this case the result is neither sweet nor funny enough, and as such it’s an unfortunate misfire, but easily the most disappointing inclusion on this list.

5) GHOSTED - Adrien Brody’s crappy French accent in this movie I could have forgiven, if only I have not seen John Wick: Chapter 4 a couple of weeks prior where I experienced the most delightful Parisian mouthing of Bill Skarsgard’s villain, so now Brody’s French-ish slur sticks out like a sore thumb. What else sticks out is that Ghosted feels like a film from the early 2000s, featuring every cliche of the genre and with a romantic pairing of Chris Evans and Ana de Armas whom share zero chemistry. Their kissing scenes reminded me of that Andrew Garfield/Emma Stone SNL sketch where they don’t know how to kiss on camera, only in this case it’s unintentional. Also featuring a slew of pointless cameos, and I do mean pointless, this is a throwaway campy spy-action flick that is destined to be forgotten.

4) THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER - Billed as the true sequel to William Friedkin’s original horror masterpiece, it really shouldn’t have strived for that. Ellen Burstyn’s return is a waste. For those excited to see her, she’s only in 3 or 4 scenes total, and the creative choices made with her character are such a disservice to the original movie. Without spoiling, it’s a choice that seems to be inspired by the modern woke culture, with Burstyn’s Chris having being studying the art of exorcism ever since the events that transpired with her daughter, and then when questioned about why she herself did not partake in her daughter’s exorcism she blames the patriarchy. The choice of bringing her into this narrative and then what happens to her…it’s basically taking a classic character and making them dumb. I must say though that the only actual shocking moment in the movie comes in a scene involving her character, and though that moment itself is memorable, the build up towards it is so stupid. Also, with the return of Burstyn it comes as no surprise within the movie when a certain other character pops in for a cameo. Does it add anything to the movie’s story? No, it’s just there for cheap fan service. As for the movie itself, the horror hardly works. It’s not scary at all and you really shouldn’t believe in this one.

3) THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE - Yeah, I know, my inclusion of this film on the list will rattle some feathers, but I don’t care, as for any of you pricks out there thinking that stupid ���Peaches” song deserves an Academy Award nomination, you guys are stupid and must be high on some very powerful shrooms. If so, I hope you’re having a great trip, but the fact stands that this movie is bad. Simply doing fan service for the sake of fan service don’t make for a good narrative. Me and my friend were bored throughout, as this movie is 100% for kids. There are nostalgic elements to it all, but I do believe that Illumination and Nintendo should have followed more in The Lego Movie’s footsteps and targeted the film for audiences of all ages, due to the fact that many who grew up with Mario are now adults themselves.

2) LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND - So much wasted potential. A long drawn-out slow shuffle to Nowheresville. A movie that offers so many ideas, plot points, and thread lines that are never answered or go anywhere. In Leave the World Behind things are truly happening under the motto “just because” and “why the hell not” and it makes the viewing experience immensely frustrating. Especially when the movie is nearly 2 and a half hours long and the anticlimactic abrupt ending is a slap to your face for wasting your time. Oh, and if I weren’t a fan of the Friends show before, now more so than ever.

1) 65 - Right ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to ask you all so kindly to rise up from your seats and give a humongous round of applause to 65 - the 2023 film to exhibit qualities of a top contender of the worst movie of this year. Look, I’m disappointed as you are. Adam Driver fighting dino-dinos’?! You’d be a madman to not want to see that! However here’s 65′s first mistake: there actually aren’t that many dinosaurs, let alone fights with them. I know right, I can sense the resounding aura of you, my kind audience, in unison thinking “what the f***?”. Exactly, what the fudge indeed. No, instead what we get is a couple of somewhat thrilling dinosaurs interactions, but overall the movie is just Adam Driver and this little girl walking. Just walking. Walking and whistling. Bunch of jackasses.

That’s it - we did it! Now I can happily forget I ever watched any of these and mentally prepare for what wonders of stupidity 2024 will bring to the big screen. As for my Best Movies of 2023 list, don’t worry, it’s a-coming. Still need to watch The Boy and the Heron and Poor Things and then all will be revealed…

[deathsplaything]

A Good Neighbor Indeed || Alistair, Daiyu, & Winnifred

LOCATION: The Sugar Pot TIMING: Late February PARTIES: Alistair (@deathsplaything), Daiyu (@bountyhaunter), & Winnifred (NPC) SUMMARY: Winnifred calls upon Daiyu for an interview for her to join the inner circle of the Good Neighbors. Alistair plays witness. CONTENT WARNINGS: Abuse (mentioned)

After a long day at the Sugar Pot, Alistair wanted nothing more than to curl up on their couch and take a nap. That’s not what the day had in store for them, however. No, Winnifred wanted Alistair to oversee a meeting between them and a potential recruit for the Keep; Daiyu. She was a proven hunter and had brought in a lot of people and creatures over the last few months. Over the years he’d known Winnifred, Alistair knew there was very little when it came to dissuading her from a decision she’s already made. After they’d closed the shop for the day, Alistair waved their goodbyes to Melody and crew, letting out a deep sigh as they waited for Winnifred to show up. 

Brutus was off in the corner on his bed, looking up at his owner with his big brown eyes, tail wagging as Alistair knelt beside their dog and began to pet them. Brutus was always good for centering him. “Let’s make sure this goes smoothly.” They told their dog, who earned a lick on his nose. “Al! Darling!” A voice rang out, grabbing their attention to the front of the store. “Winnie!” Alistair responded with a smile. “Glad you’ve made it.” They outstretched their arms, and the woman quickly enveloped her old friend in a big hug. Winnifred Williams if nothing else was big on hugs. 

“Daiyu should be here any minute,” Winnifred told Alistair as soon as she’d released them from the hug. “She’s a damn good ranger, been bringing in people left and right since she joined.” Alistair heard tapping, indicating that Winnifred was tapping away on her phone. “I’ll be doing the talking, but I want you to be paying attention to her from Brutus’s point of view. See if there’s any slipups, ‘kay?” Alistair wanted to protest but knew better than to do so. “On my honor, Winnie.” They responded with a mini salute, then took the seat closest to Brutus’s bed. “Ready for some work?” He spoke to his dog, who panted in response. “Good.” 

Winnifred walked over to the seats in the corner of the shop and sat down next to Alistair, waiting for the girl to make her appearance, one leg crossed over the other as she continued to tap away on her phone, looking up every so often at the front door to keep an eye out. “Volkovs are a big deal, you know?” She spoke idly, drawing Alistair’s attention over to her. “She’d be good to have on the inside.” Alistair shrugged a shoulder and hummed boredly in response. “If you say so,” he muttered, hand still petting their dog.

To do something good. It was a notion that should fit a hunter like a glove, except the Volkovs had long ago corrupted themselves — but Daiyu had always been a bleeding heart compared to them. Back when she’d still cried freely and with a certain level of regularity, she’d wept over spilled blood like another child might over spilled milk. But she’d hardened under the hard hand of her father and grown into something, surely. Whatever that was she couldn’t tell you, but it was spiked and hard enough to have made it here.

But the child inside is hard to kill, especially when repressed from an early age. And so the childish desire is still there — to do something good. It was another hunter who’d suggested it to her, dragged into a corner of The 3 Daggers, saying something about a well-paying gig. Steady. Better than this shit, something that’ll give you actual purpose. And wasn’t that what she wanted on top of the autonomy she’d been gathering? Purpose. To not just feel like something spiked and hard and ruinous.

So since her arrival in Wicked’s Rest she’d been going on patrols with unassuming humans, which had felt useless but … nice. The humans were so sweet in their wish to do something in the town, so set on helping their community. Daiyu didn’t fully understand it, but she liked it. She’d not gotten paid for those outings, but when she’d knocked out a werewolf and hand-delivered it to what she assumed to be another hunter, she’d collected a small stipend. The same went for some other beasts. She hadn’t asked questions after realizing there wasn’t any space for questions, had taken her money and moved on. As was the way for a bounty hunter. Now, however, she was a bounty hunter with a returning client! 

The invitation to meet with Winnifred Williams (double-double-u in Daiyu’s mind) outside one of the meetings had been met with a yes from her end. She wasn’t sure what it’d be about, wasn’t sure what to expect from the teashop (different from the basement that smelled distantly of cabbage) but adventure was always met with nothing but determination. And so she arrived, only two minutes late, at the Sugar Pot. She gave a knock, glanced inside and pushed the door open. “Hi,” she said, taking stock of the three individuals in the shop. One was a dog. This was a good sign. “Good evening, Winnifred! And hi, I’m Daiyu.” They said this to the stranger, not the dog — it was supposedly polite to greet humans before dogs, even if she was of the opinion that dogs reigned supreme. “Th– I appreciate the invite. What’s up?” What’s up, what a stupid way of voicing her curiosity. She remained standing, eyes flicking to the dog. She resisted the urge to ask their name. “I hope all’s good.”

Alistair listened as the door opened, and they slumped back in their seat a bit more as they realized there was truly no getting out of this. As soon as Daiyu entered the store, Alistair began to look through his dog’s eyes. They stood perfectly still, and the dog looked around the room as he usually would, though fixated on Daiyu as she came closer. “Fuirich,” Alistair spoke to their dog in a calm tone, which caused Brutus to continue sitting at Alistair’s feet, though his tail was wagging a mile a minute to express his happiness at the sight of a new person. 

“Daiyu, good to see you!” Winnifred exclaimed, waving happily at the woman with a large smile plastered over her face. “This is Alistair. They’re one of my excellent friends.” She reached over and pinched at Alistair’s cheek, which caused them to flinch and push the hand away on instinct. They made a face but quickly corrected it into an uncomfortable smile. They had a job to do, so they kept silent, nodding their head as they were introduced. 

“What’s up?” Winnifred responded with a giddy expression. “What’s up I want to congratulate you on being so awesome!” She waved her hands in front of herself, then let out a little “Woo!” Alistair slipped further down in their seat, embarrassed for her. “How would you feel about getting to know a little more about our organization? Maybe a bit of a promotion, so to speak?” Winnifred wiggled her brows playfully, patting the seat across from her. “Sit! I want to talk with you!” She looked to Alistair, who was carefully watching the girl through their dog’s eyes. “Would you make us some of that wonderful earl grey you make?” She pleaded to the redhead, who broke the connection with Brutus, to stand up. “Fine.” They grumped, pushing themselves up from their seat and over to the counter.

Winnifred was a woman of great fervor, Daiyu had learned. Personable and excitable and so very devoted to her cause, pushing into personal boundaries with little thought. She wasn’t used to these kind of people — her own people were the distant and cold type, touch mostly used as a means of control. She’d always been considered fiery among her kin, but here she felt as frozen as the rest of her family.

“Good to see you too,” she said, giving a smile. It wasn’t bad, she found. To be around someone so energetic, so glad to see her. It was a little infectious, even if also unfamiliar. Daiyu wondered how many people just went through life like this, exclaiming everything as if it was the most exciting thing. Living for their community, driven to keep them all safe. It seemed like a nice existence. Even if her house smelled of cabbage. 

And so as Winnifred went on about how awesome she was, she wasn’t sure how to stand. Daiyu could feel her cheeks growing round with the slight, true smile that sneaked on her lips, even if she thought it was a little cringe. “That’s … awesome, that you think that way. I’m always down for more.” The Good Neighbors didn’t fit her. It was all in the name: she wasn’t good. She was barely even a neighbor, with her nomadic way of life and how she struggled to really invest in the people around her. But she liked the idealistic, ignorant humans. She liked the flow of money, too. And so she sat down, gave a small nod to Alistair and looked at the woman. “So, what more is there to know?” There always was more to know. Information, too, was used as a means of control. “I’m all ears.”

Winnifred’s eyes seemed to twinkle in delight as Daiyu seemed to get on board with what the woman was throwing her way. “Excellent! Well for one, I’m happy to see how devoted to the cause you are,” she began, scrolling through her phone as she looked through a document. “You’ve one of the highest catch rates of the organization, not to mention your own reputation from your family!” Winnifred waved a hand, not wanting to get too ahead of herself. 

Alistair continued to watch Daiyu, noticing how she seemed to be receptive to Winnifred’s words. Man, they weren’t built for this. They were supposed to just get the person and be on their way. But Winnifred, as she does, saw potential in Alistair whether they wanted it to be there or not. She saw a friend who because they played their cards right, was doomed to follow the woman wherever she went. They hated it. They liked it. They hated that he kind of liked it.

Taking a deep breath, Alistair crossed their arms over their chest and kept quiet as Winnifred continued to speak. “As you well know, we don’t kill our captured friends,” Winnifred explained. “Instead, we keep them in a holding block, if you will.” Her gaze watched Daiyu closely for her reaction. “We don’t kill people. Because they are people. They’re just… dangerous people. And we don’t want to let the dangerous people out among the innocent, do we?” 

She had a strange relationship with praise, as was to be expected when raised by the likes of Alexei Volkov. Praise was given for particular and creative cruelty, for an ice-cold and vicious approach, for knives sunk in backs. To be praised was to be good at what she was born to be, but it also meant something had to be rotten about her, as to be admired by such a man was surely no good sign. Daiyu felt herself halt and tense at the statement that she caught a lot, balked at the mention of family.

Her expression grew darker for a moment, like the shadow of her siblings was cast over her. Most other hunters were more tactful about these things. “Right. Well, I’m good at what I do,” she said tersely, not adding that it was because or in spite of her family. She pushed herself up in her seat, remembering that Volkovs weren’t supposed to slump. (They also didn’t collaborate with neighborhood watches, though.)

She listened to Winnifred speak, feeling as if she was being addressed like a child who needed justification. Calling shifters and whatnot people, but dangerous ones. Explaining that she was taking something like the law into her own hands. Daiyu pressed her lips together. Winnifred would do well among certain hunters. Plenty of others would spit on her for talking about these creatures as if they were humans deserving of a kind of mercy. Was it mercy? To lock them up? She wasn’t sure. She was trying to grasp what kind of person Winnifred was. A concerned human, a citizen who took matters into her own hands — or something more sinister? She looked at the other person in the room with them, trying to get what they were about. Sadly, Daiyu had never been very perceptive or understanding of others.

“Right,” she said. “No killing, just capturing. And then? You keep them there indefinitely, permanently? I am not interested in being a jailer.” She thought of the cages at home. Beasts scratching at bars, her father’s hand tense in her neck so she wouldn’t look away. There was no looking away, no matter how many miles she put between herself and Seattle. “I’m aware of the risks certain shifters and whatnot are to humans.” There remained a tenseness in her voice. “And I don’t mind taking those out of the equation. For a prize.” The money. She needed to let the money dictate what she did. She couldn’t be moved by memory or heart, by distaste or glory. She could be steely and greedy and let that be it. “What else would you want me to do?”

Alistair wasn’t sure how they felt about Daiyu’s reaction to the idea of keeping the supernatural locked up. In truth, Alistair wasn’t either. But it’s what they did to keep others alive, so they had learned to accept it. Winnifred allowed them to be taken by the necromancer for their healing, so they had learned to keep their mouth shut and their opinions to themselves. They were sure Winnifred liked it that way, though she kept that all-too-chipper exterior about her. It unnerved them. Finished making the tea, Alistair brought the two hot cups of lavender Earl Grey tea to the table and set them down for the two to grab at their leisure. “There.” They spoke curtly, keeping to their observer role rather than a talkative one.

“No killing, that’s right!” She replied with a bright smile on her face. “We keep them where they’re kept alive, and the innocent humans of our town are kept safe and away from the craziness that is our town.” Winnifred took a long sip from her drink, then made a face of pure bliss. “Ah, this is perfect, Al. Thanks!” She took another drink before putting the cup back down. “As to what you would be doing,” she began, pulling out a phone. Nondescript and simple. 

“You would be in the field finding threats.” She began, holding to phone out to her. “It’s programmed with one number, and that’s the headquarters. You call that number, report a threat, and the rest of the team dispatches whoever would be most appropriate to deal with it.” She gave a bright smile, having all of this figured out from the very beginning. “I see your drive, your tenacity! I like it and want it on my team. I want you on my team.” Winnifred was leaning toward Daiyu with a bright smile on her face. “You can help make our town safe from the supernatural. You can help make our town normal.”

She wondered what Winnifred motivations were. Daiyu wanted them to be as plain as she presented them to be — she was a protector and went to the end of the earth to protect. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? If someone did these kinds of things not out of greed or power, but because they wanted to look after their community? There were plenty of hunters who spoke of codes and morals, but she always found that they fell short. At the end of the day plenty of them reveled in the hunt and the kill. She reveled in it, even if there was a dark shame in her gut.

She wanted that Winnifred was this simple. That humans were this simple. And maybe they were — maybe humans that hadn’t been raised in a family as her own could be that simple. Even if there was something misguided about it all. Wasn’t murder mercy sometimes? Wasn’t a definitive end better than a cage? But it was hard to imagine the other as something as dark and calculating as her father. It sounded good, at face value. Misguided, maybe, but good. And who was she to judge, anyway? She took bounties from strangers not knowing what motivated them. She hardly knew what motivated her these days. 

Money. Right. Money.

Daiyu took the phone, didn’t offer the cup of tea a glance. “Alright,” she said. She could locate threats. “Sounds good. Any kind?” She turned the thing over in her hands, looked back up to Winnifred. She felt her chest grow tight as she leaned toward her. She wanted this warmth to be real and she let herself be swept up in it for a moment. The thought of being wanted, of cooperating on a team that served to protect, of not having to compete or fight tooth and nail. “I’d like to help.” She slid the phone in her pocket. “To keep the people safe. I’m in.” The tightness didn’t leave, but there was something else there too. She didn’t dare call it by its name, for optimism was always met with disappointment. “So what’s next? I’d like to see headquarters, sometime. Are there more team members to meet?” She seemed more eager now. She turned to Alistair, curious, “I assume you’re one? What is it you do?”

As Daiyu asked Winnifred if they were to locate any kind, Winnifred nodded her head. “Yep, any kind that you think disrupts the normal day-to-day goings on of this town.” She replied, clapping her hands together. Alistair struggled to keep themselves from rolling their eyes. Helping people, keeping people safe. There was none of that here. Winnifred from what he’d come to learn, was obsessed with normalcy. Anyone who disrupted that was unsafe in her mind. Alistair only did this for the free access to people. People they could use to heal those who came into their shop. 

Winnifred nodded her head enthusiastically. “Yes, I’ll be sure to schedule a whole tour for you to see the keep.” She replied, plucking up her phone and scrolling through her calendar. “I’ll schedule that with you at some point.” Her voice trailed off as she began to think of logistics. “Great! You’ll do great things with us, and the people you’ll keep safe may not know to thank you, but they’d thank you if they knew.” She gave Daiyu a bright smile before turning to Alistair as they were asked a question. 

“I’m a spellcaster,” he answered, severing the connection he used to keep an eye on Daiyu. “If they’re undead, that’s where I come in.” They explained, wanting to keep it vague. “Necromancer.” They finally said, knowing that if he were going to be working with the girl, she’d figure it out eventually. After all, they were in charge of them whether they liked it or not. “Been with Winnifred since close to the inception of her group.” Alistair wanted to frown. The idea that they were part of anything of this caliber was enough to make their skin crawl. 

“As for team members,” Winnifred piped up, saving Alistair from having to talk about themselves even more than they already had. “There are a small amount of us. There’s Alistair here, myself as the head, and a handful of others. When you get the tour of the keep, you’ll meet them. I’ll make sure everyone’s schedules align.” She smiled again, looking between the necromancer and the ranger. “Anything else that you’d like to know before letting you go? I’ll send an email of contacts you’ll need and all the logistics. Stuff poor Alistair doesn’t need to be reminded of.” 

It seemed Winnifred was hooked on the idea that the town should be a normal one, which was a bit of a hilarious thought. Daiyu had been in many a town and city over the past years, and not many were supernatural hotspots in the way Wicked’s Rest was. There really was a supernatural magnet in the earth here, or something. “Sounds logical enough,” she confirmed. She wasn’t sure how to start judging these things, as the Volkov code on who should be hunted was pretty simple: any creature. 

She was overthinking it all a bit, trying to imagine that this keep should look like when something Winnifred said caught her attention. People would thank her if they knew, people would be kept safe. Wasn’t that what hunters were supposed to do? Sure, the creatures Daiyu hunted often posed a risk for animals, but she targeted them because of their bounty’s pricetag, not because she was very concerned with strangers she kept at more than an arm’s length. Or so she figured she ought to live, at least. “Awesome. I’ll just have to imagine the thank-yous, but knowing I’ve helped is great.”

She eyed the spellcaster with a hard to define look, somewhere between awe and distaste. She sometimes worked for spellcasters, getting them the things they needed for their potions — but the whole raising people and such from the death thing was wrong. Generally speaking magic made her uncomfortable, though. “Cool,” she replied, “Makes sense. Nice to meet you, then.” She offered a grin.

As Winnifred spoke of email addresses and schedules Daiyu felt a mild urge to run. It sounded very bureaucratic. She hoped she didn’t need a desk. “Nah, everything’s clear,” she said. “If I’ve got any questions I know how to reach you. I’ll get started on my new tasks as soon as possible.” She hesitated a moment. “Thanks, for trusting me with this.”

Alistair watched Daiyu’s discomfort through Brutus’s eyes. They weren’t hurt or surprised, it was the reaction they always expected. They simply nodded their head in response. Winnifred continued to type in her phone, probably scheduling something or other, and then put her phone down with a bright smile on her face. “Welcome to the inner circle, then!” She pushed her hand out and then took Daiyu’s shaking it vigorously before dropping it and going back to her phone. “We will be in touch. We ask that you keep this the utmost secret. The last thing we need is people thinking we’re the bad guys.” She stared pointedly at Daiyu, searching for any piece of distrust in her. When she was satisfied that she’d found none, she nodded her head with a satisfied smile. 

“Well, we don’t want to keep too much of poor Alistair’s time!” She suddenly announced, clapping her hands together and causing Alistair to jump slightly at the sudden noise. Alistair made a face in response to their own fear. They severed the connection with Brutus, a wave of exhaustion hitting as soon as the spell stopped casting. Brutus seemed to relax a little as well. They hated channeling that spell for longer than necessary. Even more so, they were glad that Winnifred decided to leave before she got a new idea that the new hub of operation should be Alistair’s shop. That was something they’d never allow.  “It’s a pleasure meeting you, Daiyu,” Alistair spoke with a polite smile. Though it didn’t reach their eyes, it was hidden away behind their sunglasses. They grappled with the fact that this operation was getting bigger and bigger, but at least there was someone else who was able to take a little of the weight off of their own shoulders. The less responsibility there was for this band of vigilantes, the better they seemed to feel about it. Anything for their own bottom line, they kept reminding themselves. They just hoped that Daiyu was someone Winnifred could genuinely learn to trust.

[retrodisneydaily]

as someone trying into get into older disney, which 5 (or more) movies would you recommend? thank you!

Hi! Thanks for the question! I'll give you some suggestions here, but I suppose it depends on if you're trying to get into the animated films or the live-action films! I'm also not sure what you've seen, so I apologize if I list something you're already familiar with. I'm going to make this list based off the assumption you're approaching this with a fully clean slate!

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs -- this one might be obvious and as it's a princess movie you've likely already seen it, but I do think of it as essential viewing! you can see so much of what the Disney movies would become while watching this, and can also see the inspiration from the Silly Symphony shorts in how the film is put together! And as the very first feature length animation, it's an important part of film history! Especially if you haven't seen this in a long time, I'd recommend it.

Fantasia -- not my favourite film, but another one that I do think is essential! It's truly a masterpiece in animation, and shows off Walt's imagination in a brilliant way. He was always shooting for the stars, even if things didn't always pay off or work the way he imagined (Fantasia was supposed to be always changing and growing, adding in new segments while removing the old). This film also helped to revolutionize theater sound systems, so again another important part of film history!

The Reluctant Dragon -- I discovered this one back when Disney+ first came out and I think it's a really interesting one! The title short itself leaves a bit to be desired in my opinion, but the first half of the movie is a quasi-documentary of a tour around the Walt Disney studio and teaches a lot about how the films were made! It specifically provides some previews of Dumbo and Bambi if I'm recalling correctly. Really really interesting viewing if you're into behind-the-scenes things like that!

Peter Pan -- this one is my favourite of the classic Disney era, so I have to recommend it! Not much to say here other than it's a fun film, with wonderful animation and some catchy songs! (Content advisory for elements of racism)

Mary Poppins -- another of my personal favourites, and for good reason! Julie Andrews is incredible, the songs are fun, and there's some really great work melding live-action with animation! This one was also nominated for Best Picture, and Julie Andrews won the Oscar for Best Actress! A very important film in the Disney catalogue, and one that always fills me with a warm, fuzzy feeling!

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh -- Winnie the Pooh is such a staple of pop culture nowadays, so it's fun to go back and look at his beginnings with Disney! This is another one that is good to give you warm, fuzzy feelings inside!

The Black Cauldron -- this is far from the best film that the Walt Disney studios has ever created, but I do think it's interesting and worth a watch! This is the film that almost completely bankrupt the studio and the animation department before The Little Mermaid ushered in the Disney Renaissance. I also think this film has a lot of potential (not always lived up to, unfortunately) and is a bit of a hidden gem! It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but again I think it provides for an interesting viewing experience

Thank you so much for the question, and I hope I provided good answers for you! Followers can feel free to chime in with their own thoughts as well, but honestly I feel like you can't go wrong with any of the Disney films! Especially the ones released in the Golden Age (1937-1942) and the Silver Age (1950-1967)

[breesays]

c'est comme ça / admit

I hate to admit getting better is boring

But the high cost of chaos, who can afford it?

A few months ago came upon an ace blog on Tumblr, an entry that said the person didn't want to read anymore about the "ace experience" because they were living it, and spent a lot of time assuming everyone was just like them. I, on the other hand, would love to and am actively searching out more ace experiences to read and hear about. You know what I am NOT curious about? The allo experience. That was one of my biggest problems during the very brief stint we had with a sex therapist. She was pushing "non judgemental curiosity" on my part. Por que? The allo experience, in all it's many forms and narratives, has been effectively shoved down my figurative (um and maybe literal) throat since I was a teen. From having to (over)hear hormonal peers pine pine pine to sex scenes in books ("he entered her" VOM) and movies (I'm in love with TWs) and like every TV show ever UGH, I have truly had enough. While everyone is shipping fictional characters my suspense is that I hope it WILL NOT hit that physical tipping point. Watching Wednesday I definitely felt her ambivalence about her admirers/supposed love interests. Or her being strategic about hanging out with them. I know I'm projecting, but it's so draining to have someone you're fond of look at you and also search you for MORE. I filled teenage journals to the brim with that theme.

What a thing to admit / That when someone looks at me with real love / I don't like it very much / Kinda makes me feel like I'm being crushed

I was thrilled that in the Marvel movie Shang Chi that the main characters relationship with Awkwafina's character remained platonic. THAT is what I want to see more of, hear more of.  I just finished Claire Kann's "If It Makes You Happy" and while it was not a page-turner or the kind of book that had brilliantly crafted sentences that stunned you into awed silence, it had SO many things other books did not.

A fat main character who did not care to lose weight, or have self esteem issues

A QPR - not without it's issues, but still

Polyamory - a soon-to-be college student who didn't necessarily identify as such but who knew she could be in a relationship with more than one person

That said, it wasn't easy to get into. Winnie is not a super likeable character (but also she wouldn't care that I said that) and it takes awhile for you to get the gist of allllll the relationships she has - family and friends. But this work of fiction is important for the sheer amount of representation that is not so easily stumbled upon. I can't even fully express how much that means to me, but when I get around to articulating it, I will write my own book. Thank you, Claire Kann.

Just realized that was a book review, so all that is on my GoodReads and I only write like 3 reviews a year. Why? The same reason I don't write music reviews - it's personal. What it means to me has everything to do with what I need, who I am at any given moment. It's a prescription. Doled out in strings and timbre and lyrics.

Realizing so much of my love has been platonic and somehow that was offensive. Two of them asked, "You think I'm cute, like a puppy?" (Yes?)

Thinking about dividing up my blogs - keeping breesays for the daily (ok, monthly?) life stuff, toddler life moment recording and then putting all my ace experiences on a different domain. It all intersects, sure, but there's potentially some darker themes in the ace stuff, and I don't know who wants to go there. breesays - love and light and parenting and recommendations and culture. littlespooncrimes - "People talk to me, and all their faces blur / But I got my fingers laced together and I made a little prison / And I'm locking up everyone that ever laid a finger on me" knife emoji x3

At this juncture in my life I am NOT doing a lot of exploring of that aspect of my identity. I did pre-order all the ace books. I'm listening to a lot of science podcasts on longevity, working on my meditation practice - kind of grounding myself before I go back into excavate some of this stuff. Some of it is humorous in retrospect, some of it physically pains me. I want to be able to rip open old wounds, sure, but I also want to make sure I can recover. I'm not asking for Wolverine-level regeneration, just being able to breathe through a memory and go on living life as opposed to needing 3 hours to be catatonic. See also: cold showers.

Can I recommend another book for you? Elissa Bassist's "Hysterical" - now THAT one had some sections that stunned me into silence. Also rage. And tears. But I read it on GOOGLE PLAY BOOKS so none of my goddamn notes were saved.

Sometimes I get caught up in wondering what kind of havoc I wreaked on ex-whatevers. What is it like to encounter an ace in the wild, when she doesn't know what she is? When she's faking it (but not well) and taking secret shots in your kitchen? When she would love nothing more than to be little spoon but if that was a breadcrumb to sex let's just off ourselves right now. Die inside, by suicide. No blue moons. Crush the stars they can't align.

They're OK. The rest of the world was designed with them in mind.

[dankusner]

‘Wicked: Part I’ review: Off to see the wizard, in fits and starts — but

Actor Cynthia Erivo tops the list of reasons the first part of a two-part film adaptation of the musical “Wicked” likely will extend the good fortune that has paved this story’s road from the beginning.

It’s quite a zigzag lineage:

From L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” adventures to MGM’s 1939 movie musical to Gregory Maguire’s increasingly raunchy quartet of “Wicked” bestsellers to the more acceptably edgy 2003 Broadway musical smasheroo.

The movie is directed by Jon M. Chu in a style appropriate to the material.

In other words, it’s filmed every which way.

It accommodates a little camp, a lot of “Wizard of Oz” throwbacks and plenty of Easter eggs.

“Wicked’s” insurrectionist spirit, animal-rights activism and larger anti-fascist allegory all inform the actions of two formidable female roles at the center.

The witches-in-training are buoyed by duets and power ballads, courtesy of composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, no longer best known for “Godspell” since “Wicked” came along.

Chu, who also made “Crazy Rich Asians,” “In the Heights” and the two standout “Step Up” dance movies, knows enough to get out of the way whenever Erivo takes over as Elphaba.

Erivo is aces, as we’ve known for a while now.

A huge talent in a time of triple-threat scarcity, she pours everything she has vocally and dramatically into getting this thing in the air, for at least some of its 161 minutes.

The official title is “Wicked: Part I,” and it covers Act 1 of the two-act musical’s narrative.

“Wicked: Part II” arrives on Nov. 21, 2025.

Consider the entire five hours of Chu’s two-part “Wicked” as the bonus-materials screen edition of the show, with a 364-day intermission.

Ariana Grande is good, too, as Glinda, the pampered entry-level witch and social clique bait of Shiz University, both repelled by and attracted to the intriguing magnetism and enviable sorcery of her green-toned roommate.

The emotional bond between her and Elphaba, the latter having known only cruel ostracization her entire life, emerges from a place of mutual loathing, spiced with a hint or three of sexual attraction.

(In the books, author Maguire is less coy about the multidirectional intimate lives of his characters.)

What made the Broadway “Wicked” fly was pretty simple, in the end:

A story about young women navigating a variety of social terrors and teaming up to combat a heartless patriarchy, with songs.

The Elphaba-Glinda dynamic was always the glue holding the show together.

The challenge comes in reconciling the material’s potentially irreconcilable internal differences.

“Wicked” is a show trying to give everybody a great time while activating a story about a terrible time.

It’s a dystopian tale hinging on a charlatan leader determined to hold onto power by putting his appointed scapegoats in cages (real goats, in some cases, among the talking animals under attack) while demonizing Elphaba, a powerful woman of color.

And while “Wicked” may be timely some times more than others, it’s also a mite heavy-handed.

Winnie Holzman wrote the stage version’s book and worked on the screenplay with Dana Fox (a co-writer on “Cruella”).

Because they have plenty of time and only an act’s worth of structure to deal with, the writers pull a few strands from Maguire’s books; expand the interaction between Elphaba and her favored, not-green sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), also attending Shiz; depict Elphaba’s tutoring sessions in some detail with Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh); and generally air out the pace of things.

That’s a mixed blessing.

The movie feels alternately hectic and languid, and while it’s fun to see Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard, he and Yeoh manage gravitas of differing varieties without much urgency.

“Wicked” gets its design act together once Elphaba and Glinda board a nifty steampunk train to Oz;

up until that point, director Chu often struggles for momentum.

In the much-loved tune “Popular,” for example, there’s no real build to the staging, just a lot of extra beats for mild comic shtick.

Elsewhere, Chu and his digital-effects army go nuts, turning Elphaba’s misbegotten spell on the Storm Trooper simian brigade into a protracted exercise in bloodless body-horror anguish.

It was like that on stage, too, but shorter.

I appreciate the degree to which production designer Nathan Crowley has built a lot of what we see on screen, from the mushroom huts of Munchkinland (with a touch of “The Wicker Man”) to the express train to Oz. But

did the open-air Shiz University campus really need to look like a 1990s outdoor shopping mall somewhere in San Diego?

Little of this will matter to the fan base unless they’re design majors. When Erivo and, at her best, Grande grab hold of their showcase numbers, all is well, or well enough.

But a film musical’s visual language and blending of tones has a direct relationship to the quality of the result.

How could it be otherwise?

Yet it’s a fact — a stage-to-screen adaptation’s actual quality has nothing to do with its popularity.

Take “Les Miserables,” a comparably sized musical phenom on stage, turned into a hugely successful film in 2012.

Aesthetically “Les Miz” and “Wicked” have little in common, since “Les Miz” was filmed halfway up the nostrils of its leading characters, for gritty realism, while Chu’s “Wicked” sticks as it must (to quote a lyric from the 1971 “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”) to pure imagination.

Too often, though, the magic in “Wicked” remains stubbornly unmagical.

And whenever Erivo isn’t around to make us believe, and take the mechanics of “Wicked” to heart, “Part I” reveals what’s behind the curtain, an adequate set-up for next November’s second act.

“Wicked: Part I” — 2 stars (out of 4)

The Feminist Who Inspired the Witches of Oz The untold story of suffragist Matilda Gage, the woman behind the curtain whose life story captivated her son-in-law L. Frank Baum as he wrote his classic novel

By Evan I. Schwartz WitchesOfOz-v1.jpg Every living generation has been petrified by The Wizard of Oz. Early in the 1939 film, a cranky neighbor riding her bicycle through a tornado suddenly transforms into a witch. She soars off on her broomstick, tilting her head back and screaming with laughter as her cloak billows out behind her.

The 1900 book by L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, inspired the film’s theme of good and evil sorcery. All the witches in the story have magical powers. They can fly, materialize at will, and see all things far and near. But while the Witches of the North and South are kind and supportive, the Witches of the East and West are seen as evil. “Remember that the Witch is Wicked—tremendously Wicked—and ought to be killed,” the Great Oz bellows to Dorothy as she heads off to the west.

The backstories of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good are the subject of the upcoming movie Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel and Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s 2003 stage musical. The witch, who is unnamed in The Wizard of Oz, has a name in Wicked: Elphaba, an homage to the initials of L. Frank Baum. (His first name, which he rarely used, was Lyman.) But the real-life backstory of the witches of Oz is just as fascinating. It involves a hidden hero of the 19th-century women’s rights movement and the most powerful woman in Baum’s life: his mother-in-law, Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage.

It was likely at Gage’s urging that Baum began submitting his poems and stories to magazines. Gage even suggested putting a cyclone in a children’s story. But she was a notable figure in her own right. As one of the three principal leaders of the women’s rights movement, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage was known for her radical views and confrontational approach. At the Statue of Liberty’s unveiling in 1886, she showed up on a cattle barge with a megaphone, shouting that it was “a gigantic lie, a travesty and a mockery” to portray liberty as a woman when actual American women had so few rights.

After male critics branded Gage as satanic and a heretic, she became an expert on the subject of witch hunts. Her 1893 manifesto Woman, Church and State chronicled the five centuries between 1300 and 1800 when tens of thousands of human beings, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft and put to death by fire, hanging, torture, drowning or stoning. In one gruesome scene, she described 400 women burning at once in a French public square “for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of those persecutors and which grew in their imagination from a false belief in woman’s extraordinary wickedness.”

Moment of Metamorphosis In a still image from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy looks out the window to see her meddling neighbor transformed into the cackling Wicked Witch of the West. LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Gage died two years before the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a story that produced the most enduring image of female wickedness in American history. But Baum also introduced the world to a different kind of witch. It was the beautiful and benevolent Glinda, likely inspired by Matilda herself, who showed Dorothy that she always held the power to return home.

Born March 24, 1826, Gage grew up as Matilda Joslyn north of Syracuse, New York, the only child of Helen Leslie and Hezekiah Joslyn, the town physician. The couple gave their daughter an unusual middle name, Electa—a Greek word that meant “elected” or “chosen one.”

Hezekiah Joslyn was a freethinker who taught his daughter that wisdom comes through one’s experiences. Freethinkers of 17th-century Europe challenged church authority, demanding the end of medieval witch hunts. Many of those backing the American Revolution also called themselves freethinkers, including Thomas Paine, whose 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, helped instigate independence from England.

Gage’s parents were staunch abolitionists whose home was a station on the Underground Railroad. Escaped enslaved people hid under the floorboards of the kitchen. Gage was home-schooled in Greek, mathematics and physiology. At age 15, she set off for the Clinton Liberal Institute, a boarding school that promised an education free of religious dogma. At 18, she married Henry Gage, a merchant and store owner, and they settled in the Syracuse suburb of Fayetteville, where three of their four children were born in the 1840s. Their youngest daughter, Maud, arrived in 1861.

Haunted by injustice, Gage only grew fiercer in her thinking. She was furious at an America failing to live up to the ideal of liberty for all expressed in the Declaration of Independence. She was unable to leave her children at home to travel 60 miles to the inaugural 1848 National Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. But by 1852, when the third convention came to city hall in Syracuse, she was ready to speak her mind to the crowd of 2,000. “There will be a long moral warfare before the citadel yields,” Gage proclaimed. “In the meantime, let us take possession of the outposts. … Fear not any attempt to frown down the revolution.”

Afterward, Gage found herself locked in a war of words with religious leaders. One local minister called the convention “satanic,” while another denounced the women as “infidels.”

After the Civil War, the leaders of the movement formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, with Stanton as president, Anthony as secretary and Gage as chair of the executive committee. On Election Day, 1872, Anthony was arrested and jailed for voting. Gage was by her friend’s side for the trial in Rochester. The judge was “a small-brained, pale-faced, prim-looking man,” Gage wrote. “With remarkable forethought, he had penned his decision before hearing” the case. The resulting publicity made Susan B. Anthony a household name.

In 1876, a six-month celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence attracted nearly ten million Americans—roughly a quarter of the entire U.S. population­—to Philadelphia. The activists petitioned President Grant to make a declaration of their own at the opening ceremony. The request was denied. That wouldn’t stop the suffragists.

At the ceremony, Anthony, Gage and three other leaders lurked behind the press section. Gage clutched a three-foot scroll and marched through the crowd of 150,000 people toward the podium. She passed the document to Anthony, who then placed it into the hands of the master of ceremonies, announcing: “We present to you this Declaration of the Rights of the Women Citizens of the United States.” Before the guards could catch them, the suffragists quickly handed out printed copies of the declaration to the reporters in the crowd:

“The women of the United States, denied for one hundred years the only means of self-government—the ballot—are political slaves, with greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution, than the men of 1776. … We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.”

Afterward, the women decided to record their struggles in a book, which eventually ballooned to comprise six volumes. The mammoth undertaking took a decade to finish. Most of the labor was split between Stanton and Gage, who completed the History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I, in 1881.

The Wonderful Illustrators of Oz Artist William Denslow shared the copyright for the first Oz book and was crucial to its success. As Denslow later said, he had to “work out and invent characters, costumes and a multitude of other details.” But he and Baum soon fell out. Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo The book’s publication coincided with Maud Gage’s freshman year at Cornell, the first Ivy League university to become coeducational. Maud resided in the female dormitory, Sage College, a magnificent brick building that still stands on the Ithaca, New York, campus. One Saturday evening in February 1881, the young women of Sage were treated to a lecture by Maud’s mother on the subject of women’s suffrage. “A large audience greeted Mrs. Gage on Saturday evening,” reported the Cornell Daily Sun. “Her discourse was well received.”

Still, Maud had a difficult time at school, left out of social clubs and mocked by college boys. “Her name is Gage and she is lively,” her schoolmate Jessie Mary Boulton wrote home in a letter. “A girl scarcely dares look sideways here. I came to the conclusion long ago that Cornell is no place for lively girls.” When Boulton co-founded a new chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta, the first sorority on an Ivy League campus, Maud was not on the membership rolls. Boulton also joined the Lawn Tennis Club for ladies, again without Maud.

But fate would have its way: The 20-year-old student shared her room with a girl from Syracuse named Josie Baum, who introduced Maud to her cousin Frank, a 25-year-old bachelor, at a family party on Christmas Eve. At the time, Frank Baum was a failed chicken farmer who was writing and starring in his own touring stage plays. The two hit it off, and after a proper period of Victorian-era courtship, Baum proposed marriage.

At first, Gage called her daughter “a darned fool” for wanting to drop out of college to marry this itinerant playwright and actor, a most disreputable profession. Yet a wedding date was set for November 1882. With a string quartet playing, the wedding took place at the Greek Revival home of the Gage family. “The promises required of the bride were precisely the same as those required of the groom,” noted a local newspaper, in apparent surprise. (At the time, it was standard for the bride, but not the groom, to promise to “love and obey.”)

Now a designated New York State commemorative landmark owned and operated by the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, the Gage House serves as a museum and dialogue center hosting programs on social justice led by progressive scholars and activists. One of its advisory board members, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, called Gage “the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time.”

After the September 1884 death of her gentle and solemn husband Henry—an inspiration for the character of Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz—Gage threw herself even more fully into her work. Among many other projects, she’d been collaborating with Anthony and Stanton on the first two volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. In the mid-1880s, though, Anthony came into some money and took over the rights to the series herself, paying Gage and Stanton for their shares.

The Wonderful Illustrators of Oz John Rea Neill took over the imaginative visuals in book two. Buyenlarge/Getty Images Meanwhile, Gage was increasingly frustrated by the more conservative leanings of her fellow suffragist leaders. Anthony, in particular, had strong ties with the temperance movement, which blamed alcohol for the bad behavior of men but also had an overtly religious vision for national politics.

Gage disapproved of the alliance between the women’s suffrage movement and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which began in 1874. In 1890, Gage left the National Woman Suffrage Association and founded the Woman’s National Liberal Union, which fought for the separation of church and state and drew attention to the religious subjugation of women.

As for the young Baums, Frank and Maud rented a house in Syracuse and had the first of their four sons. The new dad brought in steady money as the superintendent and sales manager for Baum’s (pronounced Bom’s) Castorine Company, a family business that created lubricants for buggies and machinery, a firm that still operates out of Rome, New York. Despite the outfit’s success, Baum grew bored. Yet he would never forget his days selling cans of oil, making the item a must-have for the Tin Woodman, who always needs a few drips to avoid rust.

Over the Rainbow In the 1939 film, the Kansas scenes are sepia-toned, but the Oz scenes were filmed using a new process called three-strip Technicolor. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo Gage corresponded regularly with her son and two other daughters who had settled in the Dakota Territory, joining half a million other Easterners catching “Western fever.” As Baum heard about their lives, he yearned for a more adventurous one. Relocating with his family in 1888 to the new “Hub City” of Aberdeen, in what became South Dakota, he established a novelty shop on its main street called Baum’s Bazaar. The store failed in just 15 months, as Baum misjudged the clientele, focusing on frivolous toys and games and impractical items like parasols and fancy wicker. “Frank had let his tastes run riot,” wrote sister-in-law Helen, who picked up the leftover inventory for $772.54 but turned her family’s store, renamed Gage’s Bazaar, into a success by selling things people actually needed.

Around the time Baum closed the store in December 1889, Matilda Gage blew in from the East to visit. She’d stay with the Baums every winter for the rest of her life. By early spring, Gage decided that she’d be remaining for the rest of the year. She and her band of suffragists convinced legislators to hold a referendum in the new state of South Dakota on the right to vote for women.

Movers and Shakers Delegates came to Washington, D.C., from nine different countries for the first meeting of the International Council of Women in 1888. A portrait of conference leaders shows Gage seated, second from right. Susan B. Anthony is seated second from left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is seated fourth from left. LOC / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images Baum put his remaining cash into another distressed business, buying the weakest newspaper in a town that had several bigger ones. His first editorials for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer were high-minded. “The key to the success of our country is tolerance,” he wrote. “The ‘live and let live’ policy of the Americans has excited the admiration of the world.” Volunteering as secretary of Aberdeen’s Women’s Suffrage Society, Baum argued that a law giving women the vote was more likely out there, as the West was new and open-minded. Gage barnstormed the state as Baum published editorials: “We are engaged in an equal struggle,” Baum wrote. In the West, he added, “a woman delights in being useful; a young lady’s highest ambition is to become a bread-winner.”

This inclusive spirit was often found in Baum’s early editorials. But on November 4, 1890, everything he advocated was shot down in the election. Baum had written a clever poem endorsing the town of Huron as the new state’s capital. The voters chose Pierre. And at the end of the day, the male voters of South Dakota broke 2 to 1 against the right of women to vote. Aberdeen had also just faced a drought and massive crop failure that crushed its economy. Failing farmers and merchants were heading back East or on to other boomtowns out West, leaving Baum with worthless credit slips and unpaid expenses.

That drought was felt even more harshly 150 miles away at Standing Rock, the Sioux reservation, where the community of several thousand began to suffer from starvation. As part of a well-documented propaganda campaign fueled by the U.S. military, newswire reports warned that an uprising and massacre of the people of Aberdeen was coming. At first Baum tried keeping his readers cool and sensible about this “false and senseless scare.” On November 29, he wrote: “According to the popular rumor, the Indians were expected to drop in on us any day the last week. But as our scalps are still in healthy condition, it is needless for us to remark that we are yet alive.”

Baum lambasted his rival newspapers for printing the worst of the propaganda and racism in order to sell newspapers. “Probably papers who have so injured the state by their flashy headlines of Indian uprisings did not think of the results of such action beyond the extra sale of a few copies of their sheets,” Baum continued in his November 29 editorial.

When U.S. officials ordered the arrest of Chief Sitting Bull in mid-December, newspapers all over the country reported that violence was likely to break out. Baum got caught up in the issue. “A man in the East can read the papers and light a cigar and say there is no danger,” he wrote, “but put that man and his family on the east bank of the Missouri, opposite Sitting Bull’s camp … he will draw a different picture.”

After police invaded Sitting Bull’s camp on December 15 and shot him as he was trying to escape, wire reports went out far and wide, and Baum printed the headline on December 20: “Expect an Attack at Any Moment. Sitting Bull’s Death to Be Avenged by a Massacre of Whites in the Near Future.” In this same issue, Baum printed his first of two racist editorials. Dehumanizing the Native Americans as “whining curs” and “miserable wretches,” he called for “the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” On December 29, as many as 300 Sioux men, women and children camping by a creek called Wounded Knee were shot dead by U.S. soldiers. Baum’s editorials put him on the wrong side of history.

There’s no known written record of Gage’s response to this incident. She was living with the Baums at the time, so any exchanges she had with Frank would have happened face-to-face. But his editorials were certainly at odds with her own views. She had the utmost respect for Indigenous communities. After paying several visits to an Iroquois Confederation north of Syracuse, she had concluded that the sexes there were “nearly equal,” and “never was justice more perfect, never civilization higher.” In 1893, she would become an honorary member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation and, at the ceremony, receive the name of Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi, roughly translated as She Who Holds the Sky.

By January 1891, Baum seemed to have lost almost everything, including his integrity. His newspaper business collapsed. At the age of 34, he had no job, no career, no prospects, only a damaged reputation.

That spring, the Baum family moved to Chicago, where Frank got a job working for the city’s Evening Post. In this new chapter of his life, he accompanied his mother-in-law to lectures, séances and other gatherings. In September 1892, he became a member of a group called the Theosophical Society. Founded in New York City, the society was led by the Russian mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky. Matilda, a freethinker like her father, had joined the society at a conference in Rochester, New York, in March 1885. The brew of Theosophical beliefs appealed to Gage—the ancient wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism, combined with other mystical ideas like mediumship and telepathy—and all of it with an emphasis on universal human rights and living a life of nonviolence in both word and deed. A mission statement published by the group’s founders in 1882 defined Theosophy as “a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed or color.” Gage called Theosophy the “crown blessing” of her life.

Baum was especially interested in Theosophy’s description of the astral plane, a world of emotion and illusion where one’s “astral body” could go for a supernatural experience reached through mental powers. An 1895 book called The Astral Plane: Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena would become so popular in the family that three copies would circulate among the Baum and Gage households.

In 1893, Gage published Woman, Church and State, her most influential work. Gage called it “a book with a revolution in it.” The 450-page volume put forth the provocative view that church and state had been suppressing women for centuries. The book was banned by her nemesis, Anthony Comstock, a U.S. postal inspector and the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who called it “salacious” and declared he would bring criminal proceedings against any person who placed it in a public school or sent it through the U.S. mail.

Gage cited passages from the King James Bible, such as “though shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18), showing the link between the preaching of religion and accusations of witchcraft. She traced this misogyny back to the Garden of Eden with the tale of Eve, the trickster serpent and the forbidden fruit. “A system of religion was adopted which taught the greater sinfulness of women,” she asserted, “and the persecution for witchcraft became chiefly directed against women.”

As this view gained traction within the church, Gage wrote, “a witch was held to be a woman who had deliberately sold herself to the evil one.” Anything could be used as evidence of witchcraft—possessing rare knowledge, having an unusual “witch mark,” suffering from mental illness, owning black cats, the use of herbs for healing, performing black magic, or having an ability to float or swim. But “those condemned as sorcerers and witches, as ‘heretics,’ were in reality the most advanced thinkers of the christian ages,” Gage wrote.

She was especially moved by an 1883 gathering in Salem, Massachusetts, for descendants of Rebecca Nurse, one of the best-known women put to death in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Nurse was a 70-year-old woman with eight children and, as Gage wrote, “a church member of unsullied reputation and devout habit; but all these considerations did not prevent her accusation … and she was hung by the neck till she was dead.”

Gage was promoting her new book when she visited the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a spectacular world’s fair in Chicago. Her son-in-law was covering the sprawling event as a reporter, and he wrote about the light pouring through the walls of windows of the white buildings, so bright that people purchased colored eyeshades from vendors. This detail would later reappear in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where all the residents of the Emerald City wear green eyeshades. “Because if you did not wear spectacles the brightness and glory of the Emerald City would blind you,” Baum would write in the novel. Indeed, the Oz novel’s illustrations would be sketched by William Wallace Denslow, who was drawing splendorous images of the fair’s fanciful architecture for another Chicago paper.

One day, Gage visited the exposition’s Woman’s Building and encountered statues immortalizing her old colleagues Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Seeing the statues only increased her ire at her old colleagues for aligning with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She also felt undervalued as a writer, and she harbored suspicions that Anthony had taken funds from a joint account to pay her own exorbitant travel expenses. “They have stabbed me in reputation, and Susan, at least, has stolen money from me,” she wrote in a July 1893 letter to her son, Thomas. “They are traitors, also, to woman’s highest needs.”

Lady Liberty A military salute at the Statue of Liberty’s 1886 dedication. From a nearby barge, Gage shouted through a megaphone about the lack of liberty for American women. Library of Congress Gage herself was falling into poverty. The cost of publishing and promoting her new book had exceeded its earnings, and she was now in debt. “I like an active life and one with freedom from money troubles,” Gage wrote. “I like to be independent in every way. But fate or Karma is against me.”

In February of 1895, Gage came across a writing contest in the children’s magazine The Youth’s Companion offering a prize of $500 for the best original story. The rich sum (equivalent to more than $18,000 today) seized her attention, and she considered her daughter Helen and son-in-law Frank the family’s best writers. While there are no known records of her in-person conversations with Frank, she likely shared the same ideas she sent Helen in a letter. “Keep in mind it is not a child’s paper but a paper for youth and the older members of the family,” she wrote. “The moral tone and literary character of these stories must be exceptional.”

She encouraged them to write “not narration or passages from history, but stories,” which she defined as tales with “a dramatic arc from the beginning to the end.” Gage went so far as to suggest a topic: “If you could get up a series of adventures or a Dakota blizzard adventure where a heroic teacher saves children’s lives.” Or, she added, “bring in a cyclone,” perhaps recalling a true twister story of a house rising off its foundation that Helen had written in the Syracuse Weekly Express in 1887. Above all, Gage added, create “fiction which comes with a moral, without however any attempt to sermonize.”

There’s no evidence that Baum entered that particular contest, but around that time, he began a new routine. He’d moved on to a new day job as a traveling salesmen of fine china for Pitkin & Brooks. Every evening, especially when he was away at hotels, he’d write down ideas in a journal. Soon, Baum began submitting his tales and poems to newspapers and magazines. At first, Baum kept track of his rejection letters in a journal called his “Record of Failure,” a title that could have described his whole business career, too.

But in early 1896, Baum started receiving acceptance letters for his short stories. In January 1896, the Chicago Times-Herald published a story of his titled “Who Called Perry?” In February, the same paper published his story “Yesterday at the Exposition,” which imagined a world’s fair in Chicago nearly 200 years in the future. His first national magazine story was called “The Extravagance of Dan” and published in the National magazine in May 1897.

Devastation at Wounded Knee Sioux bodies wrapped in blankets at Chief Spotted Elk’s camp, soon after the U.S. Army killed as many as 300 Sioux. Baum’s editorials were part of the wave of fearmongering surrounding the massacre. Trager and Kuhn, LOC Once his submissions started getting accepted, the stories kept coming, typically turning real life into the poetic. With both earnings and confidence rising, Baum expanded his vision to two successful books for children, Mother Goose in Prose (1897), a collection of short stories based on traditional nursery rhymes, and Father Goose: His Book (1899), a series of original nonsense poems. In October 1899, he got a story called “Aunt Hulda’s Good Time” into the magazine first suggested by his mother-in-law, the prestigious Youth’s Companion.

For the first time, the Baums were able to afford a stately home, a Victorian on Humboldt Boulevard wired with electric lights and featuring a covered front porch where Baum would tell stories to his sons and the neighborhood children. He maintained a close relationship with his mother-in-law. “Frank came in and kissed me goodbye, as he always does,” wrote Gage. “He is very kind to me.”

Gage was staying with the Baums in Chicago when she was confined to bed with pain in her lungs, throat and stomach. “We all must die, and I pray to go quickly when I leave,” she wrote in an 1897 letter. “I would a thousand times prefer Black Death to long-term paralysis. … The real suffering comes from lack of knowledge of real things—the spiritual.”

In Washington, D.C., thousands of activists were gathering for a convention to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Seneca Falls conference. Unable to attend, Gage penned a final speech that was read aloud at the convention by a friend. Gage proclaimed what she called “the femininity of the divine” and shared her belief that one day “the feminine will soon be fully restored to its rightful place in creation.”

Gage also wrote messages to her loved ones and colleagues as part of her last will and testament. “I am one of those that are set for the redeeming of the Earth,” Gage wrote to Baum. “I am to live on the plane that shall be above all things that dishearten. … When I receive instructions from those who are in the Invisible, I will receive them willingly, with a desire to put them into practice to the extent of my spirit light and potency.”

Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage died on March 18, 1898. Her four-paragraph obituary in the New York Times reported her death was caused by “apoplexy,” an old medical term for a stroke but also meaning a state of extreme rage.

Following a small ceremony for her mother in Chicago, Maud left her husband behind with their four sons and transported the urn of her mother’s remains east, to be interred by the old house in Fayetteville alongside her father’s grave.

And Toto, Too During the 1910s, the Baums lived in Hollywood—in a house called Ozcot, with a dog named Toto. Baum designed an emerald- green lighting system for the dining room. Courtesy of Matilda Joslyn Gage Center This is when the magic happened. The story “moved right in and took possession,” Baum later said. The inspiration came at the twilight of a winter’s day when he saw his sons and their friends returning home from playing in the snow. “It came to me right out of the blue,” he said. “I shooed the children away.” Word paintings came out through his pencil onto scraps of paper: A gray prairie. A terrifying twister. A mystical land ruled by both good and wicked witches. A trio of comical characters who join a girl on her quest, a journey to a magical city of emeralds controlled by a mysterious wizard. “The story really seemed to write itself,” he told his publisher. Yet at first, Baum hadn’t settled on a name for his main character.

In June 1898, Maud’s brother and wife welcomed a girl they named Dorothy. Maud enjoyed visiting them in Bloomington, Illinois, that summer, but the baby became ill and started running fevers. On November 11, only 5 months old, Dorothy Louise Gage died. She was “a perfectly beautiful baby,” Maud mourned. “I could have taken her for my very own and loved her devotedly.” In Baum’s writings, the girl from Kansas took on the name Dorothy, with a last name, Gale, that was perhaps a double reference to the gale-force cyclone and the family name of Gage.

His mother-in-law also lived on through the story. She’d believed strongly in mental manifestation, insisting that people could accomplish anything through the power of their minds. When Helen’s daughter Leslie fell ill in 1895, Gage had prescribed positive thought energy: “Take five minutes three or four times a day to think of health and when you go to bed at night keep saying to yourself ‘I am well.’ Grandma knows by experience that a great deal of good comes from concentration of thought.” As a woman who spent her whole life urging women to have confidence in themselves, Gage would have been pleased to see her views taking on a central role in the story of Oz. Dorothy’s silver shoes (in the movie ruby slippers) are not magical in themselves. It’s only after a lesson from Glinda on the power of thought that their magic can work. As the good witch Glinda tells Dorothy: “All you have to do is to knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry you wherever you wish to go.”

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‘Wicked’: Witches Get Stuff Done. Also Cynthia Erivo Is God

It was a wonderful day in Oz when the Wicked Witch of the West died, or so you’d think from the celebratory mood of the residents of Munchkinland.

Every man, woman and child were whooping with joy, crying tears of relief, tearing down terrifying posters of the green-hued tyrant like they’d been liberated from the second coming of Stalin.

Thank god that a young woman from the exotic, faraway paradise known as “Kansas” found that lethal bucket of H2O!

Rejoice, you petite friends of Dorothy.

The reign of terror had finally come to end.

Yet there was one voice that did not add to the deafening chorus of “Ding dong!”

Her name was Glinda, and in terms of witches, she was very much on the good side.

Descending upon the throng in her giant pink bubble, the sorceress with the kind heart and three-octave range agreed that a new day was dawning in Oz.

So why the slight tinge of sorrow in her announcement?

A voice from the crowd spoke up:

Didn’t you know her, Glinda?

Is it true you were her [gasp] friend?!

Well, ok, yes, the good witch admitted.

She did room with her at school, so very, very long ago.

And the lady in the tall, pointy black hat wasn’t always so, y’know, wicked.

But perhaps this is a backstory best told in song….

When author Gregory Maguire first suggested in his 1995 novel Wicked that the enemy of Dorothy, so memorably depicted in The Wizard of Oz, might not have been a villain so much as a victim, it was a clever stab at a revisionist I.P. history.

Not until Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s juggernaut of a musical entered, stage left, onto Broadway eight years later did the idea that maybe, just maybe, we’ve completely misjudged this iconic character enter the mainstream.

Now, in a world where virtually every theater kid can belt out a passable version of “Popular,” more folks know Oz’s Public Enemy No. 1 as a gravity-defying antihero than a monster with Margaret Hamilton’s cackle.

Fans have been patiently waiting for the screen version of Wicked for decades now, and it’s safe to say that their faith will be rewarded.

It’s also obvious that as much as this is still a tale of two witches, each blessed with equally beautiful voices, there’s a very clear standout here that’s lifting this occasionally leaden jazz-hands-extravaganza up to higher ground.

From the moment Elphaba entered the world, the tiny, green-skinned baby was viewed as a freak.

Yet even as a child (Karis Musangole), she displayed wit, intelligence, empathy, and supernatural talents that suggested was different in more ways than one.

Still, the college-age Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is merely a chaperone for her younger paraplegic sister/apple of dad’s eye, Nessarose (Marissa Bode).

When the family arrives at Shiz University to drop Nessa off, however, Elphaba’s impulsive, angry use of her gifts attracts the attention of the institution’s expert in magic, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).

She senses an alpha witch in the making.

So even though Elphaba is not officially enrolled, Morrible wants to train her.

All she needs is a place to stay.

Luckily, some try-hard newbie in pink has been bragging about how she has a single suite.

Bingo!

They can be roommates.

Never mind that Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba hate each other, and the last thing this entitled goody-two-glitter-shoes wants is some outsider outshining her and living in her space.

“Something’s wrong,” Glinda trills, concerned. “I didn’t get my way.”

The two have to make the best of a horrible situation, and the frenemy dynamic is already well-established before the good witch’s human-sideye sidekicks, played by Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James, purposefully unload a humiliating black hat on Elphaba.

Eventually, the super-popular Glinda decides to give her roomie an unsolicited makeover.

[Editor’s note: Don’t be offended by her frank analysis, just think of it as a personality dialysis.]

She also helps turn Elphaba’s Elaine-Benes-at-a-wedding dance during a school function into the hottest new foxtrot in Oz.

Soon, the pair are inseparable.

Meanwhile, over in Emerald City:

The Wizard — you remember him, all-powerful dictator, really just a blustery grifter, pay no attention to him when he’s behind the curtain — has heard there’s a student over at Shiz who has the potential to read a rare spellbook and turn it into a weapon.

Elphaba is invited for a personal visit.

She takes Glinda along for the trip.

And once both witches-in-training are in the presence of His Wizardness (Jeff Goldblum), it becomes apparent that they each have to make a choice about what side of the rainbow they will respectively end up on.

Jonathan Bailey in ‘Wicked.’ Giles Keyte/Universal Picturesnormal

There are, of course, a number of other factors happening over, under and through Wicked‘s main good-vs.-bad plotline, including the arrival of a handsome party-boy prince named Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) who causes a hormonal uproar at school;

Nessarose falling for a suitor (Ethan Slater), who has eyes for Glinda;

and bigotry against talking animals, including Peter Dinklage’s scholarly goat, that eventually devolves to mass deportation and is as allegorically heavy-handed as it is eerily, nightmarishly timely.

Director Jon M. Chu has dabbled in everything from mid-level franchise entries (G.I. Joe: Retaliation) to crowd-pleasing rom-coms (Crazy Rich Asians), but he has a thing for musicals, with both two Step Up movies and a dizzying take on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights under his belt.

The bigger set pieces seem to be a better fit for his more-is-more sensibility, which is why a comparatively minor showstopper like “Dancing Through Life” gets an acrobatic, Busby Berkeley-style staging, complete with rotating ladder wheels, and a mostly solo hit like “Popular” feels like it’s over before it’s really begun.

Not that you really need elaborate bells and whistles for that number — it’s all about who’s singing it and if they’re nailing the right wink-nudge spin of the lyrics, which is why you cast Ariana Grande.

The singer has made no secret that she’s been pining to play this role for close to a decade, and you get the sense that she shares Glinda’s need to prove herself, if not the character’s grating self-centeredness.

If Grande occasionally seems a little stiff doing the physical comedy bits and relies on the 1939’s version’s fluttering high notes as a punch line a tad too much, she’s completely at home belting out a theater-kid perennial like this one.

The woman has incomparable pipes.

She’s also a charitable screen partner, knowing when to goose scenes with Erivo for effect and when to cede the spotlight so her counterpart can shine that much brighter.

They’re an extremely complimentary team.

Just not exactly, shall we say, an equal one.

This is the part where we risk damning the bulk of Wicked with faint praise in favor of lavishing over-the-moon accolades on one performer in particular.

And to be sure, this high-fidelity screen adaptation has its perks outside of a single above-the-title star.

Witches get stuff done.

There are Easter eggs for both longtime fans of classic film and the original-cast run, and though IMDb may have already given away the “secret” cameos, we’ll just say that there’s a nice passing of the torch here. It has the sort of manic, let’s-put-on-a-show energy that makes for good musical theater, even if it never gets close to Freed-Unit levels of inspiration and verve that you associate with the golden age of screen musicals.

The powers that be have dropped the “Part 1” from the title, but it’s still been bifurcated, for better or worse, so prepare to end on a cliffhanger and report back to the theater next November for Part 2.

The first chapter may feel stronger as part of a whole rather than an opening half.

But much like the story within the movie itself, there’s someone who clearly has something extra-special she’s bringing to the party, and draws you deep into Wicked‘s emotional orbit regardless of whether or not you know the lyrics to “I’m Not That Girl” by heart.

Cynthia Erivo has already established herself as a singer, a stage performer and a screen presence extraordinaire, whether she’s a supporting-role dynamo or the best part of an otherwise so-so project.

What she’s doing here with Elphaba is, quite simply, magical.

Erivo can go big, filling up a frame with sound and fury when needed.

But she can also give you so much by simply moving her eyes, slightly adjusting her jaw, tilting her head back in a way that suggests pride, or unexpected joy, or a rage that’s on the verge of spilling over.

It’s hard to think of a recent turn in a big look-at-me studio movie, much less a brash movie musical, that manages to be so simultaneously buoyant and grounding.

It’s not so much that Wicked doesn’t rise to meet her.

It’s more like Erivo keeps soaring higher and higher above it.

This is why it makes a cockeyed sense to break Wicked into two distinct parts, even if a year-long intermission will likely break whatever spell the film casts on those who aren’t already true believers.

But it also means we end with “Defying Gravity,” the Act 1 swan song that separates the musical-theater dilettantes from the legends.

(Had the O.G. wicked witch Idina Menzel not recorded “Let It Go,” this would be the first thing you’d bring up in terms of her go-for-broke chops.)

In so many ways, Erivo seems built to take on a song like this, not just in terms of hitting the notes but showing the way the song takes the character’s arc to the next logical step.

It is not just the song in which Elphaba breaks bad, but the one in which she finally breaks free.

And when Erivo nails that moment and rides into Oz’s history books on a broomstick, for a split second you feel like there’s no place you’d rather be than riding alongside her.

Not even home.

An illustration of the characters in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and their author

A Critic at Large

The Man Behind the Curtain

L. Frank Baum and the winding road to “The Wizard of Oz.” By John Updike

When “The Wizard of Oz” premièred, in the summer of 1939, The New Yorker’s film critic was unimpressed.

The movie “displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity,” Russell Maloney wrote; it was, in short, a “stinkeroo.”

But audiences disagreed, and, in the intervening decades, the movie has largely eclipsed its source material, a children’s book written by a former travelling china salesman named L. Frank Baum.

In 2000, when the book turned a hundred, John Updike revisited the story and its author, whose path to success was almost as winding as the yellow brick road.

Baum’s literary inventions have extended deep into this century, albeit with new plots and characters.

Friday marks the arrival in theatres of “Wicked,” a musical prequel based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name, which is mentioned briefly in Updike’s article as an example of contemporary output by “Oz-besotted children now aged into postmodern creators.”

Baum might not have minded such acts of reinterpretation: during his lifetime, he churned out numerous sequels, along with a silent film and an operetta based on his work.

Writers including Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie later saw metaphors for their own experiences in the original story; another enthusiast ranked it alongside “Moby-Dick” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as one of the “great classic quests in American literature.”

Updike isn’t prepared to go that far, but he finds examples of Baum injecting more imagination into the world around him (the Midwest city that inspired the Emerald City), and of others who improved upon his vision (the initial color of Dorothy’s ruby slippers).

The story’s impact on pop culture remains undeniable—but perhaps not, Updike argues, for the reasons Baum would have anticipated.

“It is hard to read Baum’s later Oz books,” he observes, without seeing “a writer who only dimly understands his own masterpiece.

Celebrating the Centennial of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”

A hundred years after the book’s publication, the movie adaptation is the main road to Oz.

A hundred years ago, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum, was published by the soon-to-be-defunct Chicago-based firm of George M. Hill.

The Library of Congress is hosting a commemorative exhibition, and Norton has brought out a centennial edition of “The Annotated Wizard of Oz,” edited and annotated by Michael Patrick Hearn ($39.95).

Hearn, we learn from a preface by Martin Gardner, became a Baum expert while he was an English major at Bard College, and put forward an annotated “Wizard” when he was only twenty years old.

Gardner, the polymathic compiler of “The Annotated Alice” (1960) and “More Annotated Alice” (1990), had been invited to do the same, in 1970, for Baum’s fable; disclaiming competence, he recommended the young Bard Baumist to Clarkson N. Potter, who published Hearn’s tome in 1973.

In the years since, Hearn has produced annotated versions of Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” added to the vast tracts of Baum scholarship, co-authored a biography of W. W. Denslow, the “Wizard” ’s illustrator, and labored at a still unpublished “definitive biography” of Baum.

Presumably, he and Norton have been patiently waiting, with fresh slews of annotation and illustration, for the centennial (which is also that of Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie,” Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” Colette’s first Claudine novel, and Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”) to roll around.

It is not hard to imagine why Gardner ducked the original assignment.

The two “Alice” books are more literate, intricate, and modernist than Baum’s “Wonderful Wizard,” and Lewis Carroll’s mind, laden with mathematical lore, chess moves, semantic puzzles, and the riddles of Victorian religion, was more susceptible to explication, at least by the like-minded Gardner.

But Baum, Hearn shows in his introduction, was a complicated character, too—a Theosophist, an expert on poultry, a stagestruck actor and singer, a fine amateur photographer, an inventive household tinkerer, a travelling china salesman, and, only by a final shift, a children’s writer.

He was forty-four when “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was published.

His prior bibliography included a directory of stamp dealers, a treatise on the mating and management of Hamburg chickens, a definitive work entitled “The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors” (also celebrating its centennial), and a few small volumes for children.

Baum’s life (1856-1919) reflects the economic and ideological adventurism of his America.

Hearn tells us that his father, Benjamin Ward Baum, “followed nearly as many careers as his son would. He was building a barrel factory in Chittenango [New York] when the boy was born, but made a fortune in the infant Pennsylvania oil industry only a few years later.”

Lyman Frank, one of nine children, of whom five survived into adulthood, was raised on a luxurious estate in Syracuse and educated by English tutors.

He was a dreamy reader of a boy.

He lasted only two years at Peekskill Military School, and went on to Syracuse Classical School, without, apparently, graduating.

He married the twenty-year-old Maud Gage when he was twenty-six and, grown into a lanky man with a large mustache, was touring as the star of a musical melodrama, “The Maid of Arran,” which he had written—book, lyrics, and music.

His mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a prominent feminist and a keen Theosophist;

she had not wanted her daughter to leave Cornell to marry an actor.

But Maud did anyway, and when she became pregnant Frank left the theatre.

With his uncle, Adam Baum, he established Baum’s Castorine Company, marketing an axle grease invented by his brother Benjamin and still, in this slippery world, being manufactured.

Maud’s sisters and brother had all settled in the Dakota Territory;

in 1888 Frank moved with his family to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he opened a variety store, Baum’s Bazaar.

Drought and depression caused the store to fail; in 1890 Baum took over a weekly newspaper, calling it the Saturday Pioneer, and by 1891 it, too, was failing.

He found employment in Chicago, first as a reporter and then as a travelling salesman with the wholesale china-and-glassware firm of Pitkin & Brooks.

The two-and-a-half-year Dakota interval gave him, however, the Plains flavor crucial to the myth of Dorothy and the Wizard;

gray desolation and hardscrabble rural survival compose the negative of which Oz is the colorful print.

In Baum’s Kansas, “even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.”

Chicago’s spectacular White City, built of plaster and cement for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on the lakeside marshes, gave both Baum and his illustrator, Denslow, the glitz and scale, but not the tint, of Oz’s Emerald City.

A contemporary writer, Frances Hodgson Burnett, likened the White City to the City Beautiful in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and wrote:

Endless chains of jewels seemed strung and wound about it.

The Palace of Flowers held up a great crystal of light glowing against the dark blue of the sky, towers and domes were crowned and diademed, thousands of jewels hung among the masses of leaves, or reflected themselves, sparkling in the darkness of the lagoons, fountains of molten jewels sprung up, and flamed and changed.

Woven of electric illusion (newly feasible, thanks to the Wizard of Menlo Park) and quickly an abandoned ruin, the White City fed into Baum’s book a melancholy undertone of insubstantiality.

A Bobbs-Merrill press release in 1903 claimed that the name Oz came from the “O-Z” drawer of the author’s filing cabinet, but the name resonates with a Shelley poem known to most Victorians:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains.

A note of hollowness, of dazzling fraud, of frontier fustian and quackery taints the Wizard in the first of the many Oz books, before a plethora of wonders turns him into a real sorcerer.

In the M-G-M movie, the seekers along the yellow brick road rapturously sing, “The Wizard of Oz is one because . . . because of the wonderful things he does”; then it turns out that what he does is concoct visual hokum with a crank and escape in a mismanaged hot-air balloon.

But Baum, who turned to editing and writing as a way of spending more time with his four young sons, proved to be an authentic wizard as a children’s author.

He had made the acquaintance of William Wallace Denslow, a footloose artist from Philadelphia who had come to Chicago for the Exposition;

the two had definite and ambitious ideas about what children’s books should look like, and paid for the color plates of their first collaboration, a book of Baum’s verses called “Father Goose, His Book.”

The book attracted praise from Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Admiral George Dewey and, Hearn says, “became the best-selling picture book of 1900.”

That year saw the publication of no fewer than five titles by Baum, of which the “Wizard” was the last.

Hill was overwhelmed by orders, and went back to press four times, for a total of ninety thousand copies.

The Minneapolis Journal called it, in November, “the best children’s story-book of the century”—high praise if the nineteenth century was meant, more modest if the infant twentieth.

In 1902, the George M. Hill Company went bankrupt, in spite of Baum’s success, and the rights to the “Wizard” were placed in the crasser hands of Bobbs-Merrill;

meanwhile, Baum and Denslow parted, each taking the Oz characters with him, since their contract provided for separate ownership of text and illustrations.

That same year saw the opening, at Chicago’s Grand Opera House, of “The Wizard of Oz,” a “musical extravaganza” created by Julian Mitchell, who was later to mastermind “The Ziegfeld Follies.”

Mitchell had scrawled “No Good” across Baum’s script for a five-act operetta closely based on his tale, and substituted a vaudevillian hodgepodge that capped its Chicago success with a year-and-a-half run on Broadway and a road career that lasted, off and on, until 1911.

The extravaganza increased Baum’s wealth, but it also encouraged his tropism toward the theatrical.

His first sequel to the “Wizard,” “The Marvelous Land of Oz,” in 1904, was designed to be the basis of another extravaganza, featuring the vaudeville performers David C. Montgomery and Fred A. Stone, who had played the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow in the Mitchell production.

The book was dedicated to them and loaded with patter and puns suitable to their routines.

It sold as a book but failed as a musical called “The Woggle-Bug,” with lyrics by Baum and without, in the end, Montgomery and Stone.

Anticipating the piggyback publicity system perfected by Walt Disney, Baum promoted this unfortunate production with a “Woggle-Bug Contest” in a Sunday comic page, drawn by Walt McDougall and titled “Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz.”

Despite frail health (angina, gallstones, inflamed appendix), Baum was a whirlwind of activity until his death, at the age of sixty-two.

Along with thirteen Oz sequels, he wrote a teen-age-oriented “Aunt Jane’s Nieces” series under the name Edith Van Dyne, young people’s books under four other pseudonyms, an adult novel published anonymously, and many unpublished plays.

Splendidly dressed in a white frock coat with silk lapels, he toured with film-and-slide presentations called “The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays.”

A reviewer in the Chicago Tribune wrote that “his ability to hold a large audience’s attention during two hours of tenuous entertainment was amply demonstrated”; these early electronic productions were expensive, however, and by 1911 had helped bankrupt him.

Thriftily moving his California winter residence from the Hotel del Coronado to a “handsome bungalow he christened Ozcot,” in Hollywood, Baum found himself surrounded by the burgeoning movie industry without being able to tap into it profitably.

The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, with Baum as president, produced some silent films, beginning with “The Patchwork Girl of Oz” in 1914, but, dismissed as “kiddie shows,” they fell short at the box office.

In 1925, six years after Baum’s death, a movie of “The Wizard of Oz” was released; according to Hearn in one of his sterner moods, it was “totally lacking the magic of Baum’s book” (though a Laurel-less Oliver Hardy played the Tin Woodman), and “had a dreadful script, written in part by the author’s son Frank J. Baum.”

It was M-G-M’s 1939 adaptation, of course, that hit the jackpot: the three-million-dollar film showed no profit on its original release, but it became a staple of postwar television.

A hundred years after the “Wizard” ’s publication, the movie is the main road into Oz.

Oz had very quickly become zoned for commercial activity, and there is something depressing about the chronicle of its exploitation, a chronicle that Hearn caps with a compendious footnote taking us up through the all-black “Wiz” (stage 1975, movie 1978) and the dead-on-arrival Disney “Return to Oz” (1985).

And then there is the upcoming television series “Lost in Oz,” produced by Tim Burton.

It is hard to read Baum’s later Oz books without feeling the exploitation in progress, by a writer who only dimly understands his own masterpiece.

After his death, the series was extended by Ruth Plumly Thompson, who between 1921 and 1939 added nineteen titles;

then, briefly, by John R. Neill, whose spidery, often insipid drawings illustrate all the Oz books but the first; by Jack Snow, a “minor science fiction writer”; by Rachel Cosgrove; by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw Wagner; and even by Baum’s son, who legally battled his mother for the precious trademark “Oz.”

And, Hearn indefatigably tells us, “of late there has grown up a peculiar literary sub-genre of adult novels drawing on the Oz mythology,” such as Geoff Ryman’s “Was” (1992) and Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” (1995)—the products, presumably, of Oz-besotted children now aged into postmodern creators freed from fear of copyright infringement.

The potent images of the “Wizard” do cry out for extension and elaboration.

The M-G-M motion picture improves upon the book in a number of ways.

It eliminates, for example, the all too Aesopian (and, prior to computer graphics, probably unfilmable) episode wherein the Queen of the mice and her many minions transport the Cowardly Lion out of the poppy bed where he has fallen asleep;

instead, it retrieves from the 1902 musical the effective stage business that had a sudden snowstorm annul the spell of the poppies.

The movie weeds out a number of extravagant beasts and the especially artificial episode of “the Dainty China Country” so quaintly planted on the path to the witch’s lair.

The scenario amplifies the role of the Wicked Witch of the West, showing her as the source of all the obstacles in the pilgrims’ path, as she watches them on the private television of her crystal ball.

In the book, she is a relatively passive presence, easily doused

(“I never thought a little girl like you would ever be able to melt me and end my wicked deeds. Look out—here I go!”), compared with the cackling greenfaced film presence of Margaret Hamilton, who dies mourning her “beautiful wickedness!”

Once she is dead, the film picks up speed;

after the Wizard’s unmasking and his unplanned departure, it is virtually over, where Baum’s tale dilly-dallies through further complications on the way to the Good Witch of the South, with fresh humanoid gadgetry like Fighting Trees and armless Hammer-Heads and a mechanical plot dependency on the Golden Cap and its three-wish control of the Winged Monkeys.

As a writer, Baum rarely knew when to quit, unfurling marvel after marvel while the human content—a content shaped by nonmagical limitations—leaked away.

He did not quite grasp that his “Wizard” concerns our ability to survive disillusion; miracles are humbug.

The Hollywood film begins with the human, gray Kansas and, unlike the book, plants on that drab land all the actors who will dominate Oz—the three farmhands, the wicked Almira Gulch on her bicycle, Professor Marvel in his flimsy van.

They are Kansans, and Dorothy returns to them.

Hearn calls it “unforgivable” that the M-G-M movie cast Oz as a dream;

but Dorothy on awakening protests, “It wasn’t a dream.”

It was an alternative reality, an inner depiction of how we grow.

As Jerome Charyn observes in his excellent “Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture” (1989), “The whole film was about metamorphosis.”

Judy Garland, who was sixteen and noticeably buxom in the role of Baum’s pre-pubescent Dorothy, was “a woman who seemed to flower from an ordinary little girl.”

Growth is metamorphosis, and self-understanding is growth.

The Scarecrow already has brains, the Tin Woodman is sentimental to a fault, the Lion has courage enough, but until the Wizard bestows external evidences (in the movie more wittily than in the book) they feel deficient.

Dorothy, capable and clear-sighted from the start, needs only to accept the grayness of home as a precious color, and to wish to return as ardently as she wished to escape “Over the Rainbow”—the movie’s grand theme song, nearly removed from the final cut.

Like Charyn and Salman Rushdie (who has extolled the “Wizard” as “a parable of the migrant condition”), I belong to the generation more affected by the movie than by the book.

For the testimony of one who read all the Oz books with adolescent credulity and delight, Gore Vidal’s long essay of 1977, printed in two parts in The New York Review of Books, is impressive and peppery.

He sees Baum as a protester against the violence of the rising American empire and “the iron Puritan order.”

It is true that an undercurrent of dissidence in the Oz books seems to have antagonized some librarians and critics;

the director of the Detroit Library System, Ralph Ulveling, in 1957 pronounced them guilty of “negativism” and “a cowardly approach to life.”

Baum, in his introduction to the “Wizard,” strikes a challenging note; he deplores the “horrible and blood-curdling” incidents contained in “the old-time fairy tale” and promises his readers “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.”

American Theosophy, to which Baum had been introduced by his formidable mother-in-law, mixed spiritualism and Buddhist and Hindu beliefs with a meliorism that rejected the darker, Devil-acknowledging side of Christianity.

“God is Nature, and Nature God,” Baum said; yet he also professed an animistic vision in which every bit of wood, every drop of liquid, every grain of sand or portion of rock has its myriads of inhabitants. . . . These invisible and vapory beings are known as Elementals. . . . They are soulless, but immortal; frequently possessed of extraordinary intelligence, and again remarkably stupid.

Madame H. P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, in her book “Isis Unveiled” (1878) wrote of these Elementals as “the creatures evolved in the four kingdoms of earth, air, fire, and water, and called by the kabalists gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and undines.”

This giddying, virtually bacterial multitudinousness came to characterize Oz as sequels multiplied its regions and its strange and magical tribes; but the “Wizard” itself presents an uncluttered cosmogony, drawn in bright blunt tints.

According to Theosophy, our astral bodies come in distinct colors, and so do the regions of Oz, with their inhabitants.

As Vidal points out, Oz exists in orderly patches like the extensive gardens that Baum remembered from his childhood home, and which he recreated in the geometrical plots of his garden at Ozcot.

The evils of capitalism, whose rewards proved so fickle for Baum, are absent from his alternative world.

Enemies of socialism find in “The Emerald City” this much quoted passage:

There were no poor people . . . because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler.

The people were her children, and she [Princess Ozma] cared for them.

Each person was given freely by his neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire.

But the proletariat does not rule; rather, it is ruled in a mock-medieval manner, by benevolent tyrants more often than not female, in keeping, perhaps, with the feminist tendencies of Theosophy and Matilda Gage’s militant suffragism.

Baum’s rulers have a parental absolutism:

Glinda is the ideal, ever-resourceful mother and the Wizard a typically bumbling father in Oz’s sitcom as Baum first conceived it.

Though he supported the populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and 1900, and the literature of the late nineteenth century abounds in literary Utopias, Oz is too unearthly to carry much political punch.

It is constructed not of revolutionary intent but of wishful thinking.

What earthiness the “Wizard” does have derives in considerable part from Denslow’s sturdy, antic illustrations.

Denslow, we learn in Hearn’s “Annotated Wizard,” sometimes operated independently of the text: he drew a bear where Baum mentions a tiger, crowns the Lion before the author does, dresses Dorothy in her old gingham frock when Baum still has her in her Emerald City silks, and consistently omits (as does the movie) the “round, shining mark” that the Good Witch of the North plants, as protection, on her forehead with a kiss.

A centennial is a time for praise, but this reader is inclined to accept the invitation to argue with Hearn when he states, “Arguably there have been three great classic quests in American literature, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883), and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).” Whatever their flaws of carelessness or aesthetic miscalculation, the first two titles were gloriously written, in the ambition of telling all the truth, “heart-aches and nightmares” included.

The “Wizard” is relatively a lucky bauble, in the flat clear style of a man giving dictation.

Nor does it seem to me true that “Uncle Henry and Aunt Em have come to symbolize the stern American farmer and his wife as much as the couple in Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic have.”

Hearn has been too long peering through the magnifying glass of The Baum Bugle, the triquarterly publication of the International Wizard of Oz Club, “founded in 1957 by thirteen-year-old Justin G. Schiller.”

In the course of his devotedly researched footnotes, Hearn sometimes nods into critical banality: “Much of the charm and wit of The Wizard of Oz relies on Baum’s irony and amusing incongruity”; the Cowardly Lion “proves Ernest Hemingway’s dictum that courage is grace under pressure.”

A juster analogy, drawn by Hearn more than once, is with “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” another few-frills picaresque search story by an author in his forties with a habit of public performance (Bunyan was a preacher).

The “Wizard” is a “Pilgrim’s Progress” emptied of religion, except for the Theosophist inkling that there are many universes.

At a time when children’s literature was still drenched in what Hearn calls “the putrid Puritan morality of the Sunday schools,” Baum produced a refreshingly agnostic fantasy.

The witches are too comically wicked to be evil.

The humbug Wizard, accused by Dorothy of being “a very bad man,” protests, “I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”

In another bold stroke of American simplification, Baum invented escapism without escape.

Dorothy opts to forsake Oz; gray, windswept Kansas is reinstated (less thumpingly than in the movie) as the seat of lasting, familial happiness.

Indeed, as a practical matter it is easier to color with contentment the place where we are than to find a Technicolor paradise.

Denslow’s last drawing shows the return with more exuberance than Baum’s prose manages.

In her hurry, little Dorothy runs so hard that her silver shoes, Baum’s less photogenic original of M-G-M’s glistening ruby slippers, are flying off; we feel her rounding the bases (Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion) to home plate.

“Oz Is Us.”

On Rereading the Oz Books Gore Vidal October 13, 1977

In the preface to The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum says that he would like to create modern fairy tales by departing from Grimm and Andersen and “all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised” by such authors “to point a fearsome moral.”

Baum then makes the disingenuous point that “Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wondertales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.”

Yet there is a certain amount of explicit as well as implicit moralizing in the Oz books;

there are also “disagreeable incidents,” and people do, somehow, die even though death and illness are not supposed to exist in Oz.

I have reread the Oz books in the order in which they were written.

Some things are as I remember.

Others strike me as being entirely new.

I was struck by the unevenness of style not only from book to book but, sometimes, from page to page.

The jaggedness can be explained by the fact that the man who was writing fourteen Oz books was writing forty-eight other books at the same time.

Arguably, The Wizard of Oz is the best of the lot.

After all, the first book is the one in which Oz was invented.

Yet, as a child, I preferred The Emerald City, Rinkitink, and The Lost Princess to The Wizard.

Now I find that all of the books tend to flow together in a single narrative, with occasional bad patches.

In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy is about six years old.

In the later books she seems to be ten or eleven.

Baum locates her swiftly and efficiently in the first sentence of the series.

“Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife.”

The landscape would have confirmed John Ruskin’s dark view of American scenery (he died the year that The Wizard of Oz was published).

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side.

Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions.

This is the plain American style at its best.

Like most of Baum’s central characters Dorothy lacks the regulation father and mother.

Some commentators have made, I think, too much of Baum’s parentless children.

The author’s motive seems to me to be not only obvious but sensible.

A child separated from loving parents for any length of time is going to be distressed, even in a magic story.

But aunts and uncles need not be taken too seriously.

In the first four pages Baum demonstrates the drabness of Dorothy’s life;

the next two pages are devoted to the cyclone that lifts the house into the air and hurls it to Oz.

Newspaper accounts of recent cyclones had obviously impressed Baum.

Alone in the house (except for Toto, a Cairn terrier), Dorothy is established as a sensible girl who is not going to worry unduly about events that she cannot control.

The house crosses the Deadly Desert and lands on top of the Wicked Witch of the West who promptly dries up and dies.

Right off, Baum breaks his own rule that no one ever dies in Oz.

I used to spend a good deal of time worrying about the numerous inconsistencies in the sacred texts.

From time to time, Baum himself would try to rationalize errors but he was far too quick and careless a writer ever to create the absolutely logical mad worlds that Lewis Carroll or E. Nesbit did.

Dorothy is acclaimed by the Munchkins as a good witch who has managed to free them from the Wicked Witch.

They advise her to go to the Emerald City and try to see the famous Wizard;

he alone would have the power to grant her dearest wish, which is to go home to Kansas.

Why she wanted to go back was never clear to me.

Or, finally, to Baum:

eventually, he moves Dorothy (with aunt and uncle) to Oz.

Along the way to the Emerald City, Dorothy meets a live Scarecrow in search of brains, a Tin Woodman in search of a heart, a Cowardly Lion in search of courage.

Each new character furthers the plot.

Each is essentially a humor.

Each, when he speaks, strikes the same simple, satisfying note.

Together they undergo adventures.

In sharp contrast to gray flat Kansas, Oz seems to blaze with color.

Yet the Emerald City is a bit of a fraud.

Everyone is obliged to wear green glasses in order to make the city appear emerald-green.

The Wizard says that he will help them if they destroy yet another wicked witch.

They do.

Only to find out that the Wizard is a fake who arrived by balloon from the States, where he had been a magician in a circus.

Although a fraud, the Wizard is a good psychologist.

He gives the Scarecrow bran for brains, the Tin Woodman a red velvet heart, the Cowardly Lion a special courage syrup.

Each has now become what he wanted to be (and was all along).

The Wizard’s response to their delight is glum: ” ‘How can I help being a humbug,’ he said, ‘when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can’t be done? It was easy to make the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Woodman happy, because they imagined I could do anything.

But it will take more than imagination to carry Dorothy back to Kansas, and I’m sure I don’t know how it can be done.’ ”

When the Wizard arranges a balloon to take Dorothy and himself back home, the balloon takes off without Dorothy.

Finally, she is sent home through the intervention of magic, and the good witch Glinda.

The style of the first book is straightforward, even formal.

There are almost no contractions.

Dorothy speaks not at all the way a grownup might think a child should speak but like a sensible somewhat literal person.

There are occasional Germanisms (did Baum’s father speak German?): ” ‘What is that little animal you are so tender of?’ ”

Throughout all the books there is a fascination with jewelry and elaborate costumes.

Baum never got over his love of theater.

In this he resembled his favorite author Charles Reade, of whom The Dictionary of National Biography tells us:

“At his best Reade was an admirable storyteller, full of resource and capacity to excite terror and pity; but his ambition to excel as a dramatist militated against his success as a novelist, and nearly all his work is disfigured by a striving after theatrical effect.”

Baum’s passion for the theater and, later, the movies not only wasted his time but, worse, it had a noticeably bad effect on his prose style.

Because The Wizard of Oz was the most successful children’s book of the 1900 Christmas season (in its first two years of publication, the book sold ninety thousand copies), Baum was immediately inspired to dramatize the story.

Much “improved” by other hands, the musical comedy opened in Chicago (June 16, 1902) and was a success.

After a year and a half on Broadway, the show toured off and on until 1911.

Over the years Baum was to spend a good deal of time trying to make plays and films based on the Oz characters.

Except for the first, none was a success.

Since two popular vaudevillians had made quite a splash as the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow in the musical version of the Wizard, Baum decided that a sequel was in order…for the stage.

But rather than write directly for the theater, he chose to write a second Oz book, without Dorothy or the Wizard.

In an Author’s Note to The Marvelous Land of Oz, Baum somewhat craftily says that he has been getting all sorts of letters from children asking him “to ‘write something more’ about the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman.”

In 1904 the sequel was published, with a dedication to the two vaudevillians.

A subsequent musical comedy called The Woggle-Bug was then produced; and failed.

That, for the time being, was that.

But the idiocies of popular theater had begun to infect Baum’s prose.

The Wizard of Oz is chastely written.

The Land of Oz is not.

Baum riots in dull word play.

There are endless bad puns, of the sort favored by popular comedians.

There is also that true period horror: the baby-talking ingenue, a character who lasted well into our day in the menacing shapes of Fanny (Baby Snooks) Brice and the early Ginger Rogers.

Dorothy, who talked plainly and to the point in The Wizard, talks (when she reappears in the third book) with a cuteness hard to bear.

Fortunately, Baum’s show-biz phase wore off and in later volumes Dorothy’s speech improves.

Despite stylistic lapses, The Land of Oz is one of the most unusual and interesting books of the series.

In fact, it is so unusual that after the Shirley Temple television adaptation of the book in 1960, PTA circles were in a state of crisis.

The problem that knitted then and, I am told, knits even today many a maternal brow is Sexual Role.

Sexual Role makes the world go round.

It is what makes the man go to the office or to the factory where he works hard while the wife fulfills her Sexual Role by homemaking and consuming and bringing up boys to be real boys and girls to be real girls, a cycle that must continue unchanged and unquestioned until the last car comes off Detroit’s last assembly line and the last all-American sun vanishes behind a terminal dioxin haze.

Certainly the denouement of The Land of Oz is troubling for those who have heard of Freud.

A boy, Tip, is held in thrall by a wicked witch named Mombi.

One day she gets hold of an elixir that makes the inanimate live.

Tip uses this magical powder to bring to life a homemade figure with a jack-o-lantern head:

Jack Pumpkinhead, who turns out to be a comic of the Ed Wynn-Simple Simon school. "‘Now that is a very interesting history,’ said Jack, well pleased; ‘and I understand it perfectly—all but the explanation.’ ”

Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead escape from Mombi, aboard a brought-to-life sawhorse.

They then meet the stars of the show (and a show it is), the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman.

As a central character neither is very effective.

In fact, each has a tendency to sententiousness; and there are nowhere near enough jokes.

The Scarecrow goes on about his brains; the Tin Woodman about his heart.

But then it is the limitation as well as the charm of made-up fairy-tale creatures to embody to the point of absurdity a single quality of humor.

There is one genuinely funny sketch. When the Scarecrow and Jack Pumpkinhead meet, they decide that since each comes from a different country, ” ‘We must,’ ” says the Scarecrow, ” ‘have an interpreter.’

” ‘What is an interpreter?’ asked Jack.

” ‘A person who understands both my language and your own….’ ” And so on. Well, maybe this is not so funny.

The Scarecrow (who had taken the vanished Wizard’s place as ruler of Oz) is overthrown by a “revolting” army of girls (great excuse for a leggy chorus).

This long and rather heavy satire on the suffragettes was plainly more suitable for a Broadway show than for a children’s story.

The girl leader, Jinjur, is an unexpectedly engaging character.

She belongs to the Bismarckian Realpolitik school.

She is accused of treason for having usurped the Scarecrow’s throne.

” ‘The throne belongs to whoever is able to take it,’ answered Jinjur as she slowly ate another caramel. ‘I have taken it, as you see; so just now I am the Queen, and all who oppose me are guilty of treason….’ ”

This is the old children’s game I-am-the-King-of-the-castle, a.k.a. human history.

Among the new characters met in this story are the Woggle-Bug, a highly magnified insect who has escaped from a classroom exhibition and (still magnified) ranges about the countryside.

A parody of an American academic, he is addicted to horrendous puns on the grounds that ” ‘a joke derived from a play upon words is considered among educated people to be eminently proper.’ ” Anna livia plurabelle.

There is a struggle between Jinjur and the legitimate forces of the Scarecrow.

The Scarecrow’s faction wins and the girls are sent away to be homemakers and consumers.

In passing, the Scarecrow observes, ” ‘I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.’ ”

To which the Tin Woodman replies, ” ‘Spoken like a philosopher!’ ”

To which the current editor Martin Gardner responds, with true democratic wrath,

“This despicable view, indeed defended by many philosophers, had earlier been countered by the Tin Woodman,” etc.

But the view is not at all despicable.

For one thing, it would be the normal view of an odd magical creature who cannot die.

For another, Baum was simply echoing those neo-Darwinians who dominated most American thinking for at least a century.

It testifies to Baum’s sweetness of character that unlike most writers of his day he seldom makes fun of the poor or weak or unfortunate.

Also, the Scarecrow’s “despicable” remarks can be interpreted as meaning that although unorthodox dreamers are despised by the ordinary, their dreams are apt to prevail in the end and become reality.

Glinda the Good Sorceress is a kindly mother figure to the various children who visit or live in Oz, and it is she who often ties up the loose ends when the story bogs down.

In The Land of Oz Glinda has not a loose end but something on the order of a hangman’s rope to knot.

Apparently the rightful ruler of Oz is Princess Ozma.

As a baby, Ozma was changed by Mombi into the boy Tip.

Now Tip must be restored to his true identity.

The PTA went, as it were, into plenary session. What effect would a book like this have on a boy’s sense of himself as a future man, breadwinner and father to more of same? Would he want, awful thought, to be a Girl? Even Baum’s Tip is alarmed when told who he is. ” ‘I!’ cried Tip, in amazement. ‘Why I’m no Princess Ozma—I’m not a girl!’ ” Glinda tells him that indeed he was—and really is. Tip is understandably grumpy. Finally, he says to Glinda, ” ‘I might try it for awhile,—just to see how it seems, you know. But if I don’t like being a girl you must promise to change me into a boy again.’ ” Glinda says that this is not in the cards. Glumly, Tip agrees to the restoration. Tip becomes the beautiful Ozma, who hopes that ” ‘none of you will care less for me than you did before. I’m just the same Tip, you know; only—only—’ “

“Only you’re different!” said the Pumpkinhead; and everyone thought it was the wisest speech he had ever made.

Essentially, Baum’s human protagonists are neither male nor female but children, a separate category in his view if not in that of our latter-day sexists. Baum’s use of sex changes was common to the popular theater of his day, which, in turn, derived from the Elizabethan era when boys played girls whom the plot often required to pretend to be boys. In Baum’s The Enchanted Island of Yew a fairy (female) becomes a knight (male) in order to have adventures. In The Emerald City the hideous Phanfasm leader turns himself into a beautiful woman. When John Dough and the Cherub (1906) was published, the sex of the five-year-old cherub was never mentioned in the text; the publishers then launched a national ad campaign: “Is the cherub boy or girl? $500 for the best answers.” In those innocent times Tip’s metamorphosis as Ozma was nothing more than a classic coup de théâtre of the sort that even now requires the boy Peter Pan to be played on stage by a mature woman.

Today of course any sort of sexual metamorphosis causes distress. Although Raylyn Moore in her plot précis of The Enchanted Island of Yew (in her book Wonderful Wizard Marvelous Land) does make one confusing reference to the protagonist as “he (she),” she omits entirely the Tip/Ozma transformation which is the whole point to The Land of Oz, while the plot as given by the publisher Reilly & Lee says only that “the book ends with an amazing surprise, and from that moment on Ozma is princess of all Oz.” But, surely, for a pre-pube there is not much difference between a boy and a girl protagonist. After all, the central fact of the pre-pube’s existence is not being male or female but being a child, much the hardest of all roles to play. During and after puberty, there is a tendency to want a central character like oneself (my favorite Oz book was R.P. Thompson’s Speedy in Oz, whose eleven- or twelve-year-old hero could have been, I thought, me). Nevertheless, what matters most even to an adolescent is not the gender of the main character who experiences adventures but the adventures themselves, and the magic, and the jokes, and the pictures.

Dorothy is a perfectly acceptable central character for a boy to read about. She asks the right questions. She is not sappy (as Ozma can sometimes be). She is straight to the point and a bit aggressive. Yet the Dorothy who returns to the series in the third book, Ozma of Oz (1907), is somewhat different from the original Dorothy. She is older and her conversation is full of cute contractions that must have doubled up audiences in Sioux City but were pretty hard going for at least one child forty years ago.

To get Dorothy back to Oz there is the by now obligatory natural disaster. The book opens with Dorothy and her uncle on board a ship to Australia. During a storm she is swept overboard. Marius Bewley has noted that this opening chapter “is so close to Crane’s (‘The Open Boat’) in theme, imagery and technique that it is difficult to imagine, on comparing the two in detail, that the similarity is wholly, or even largely accidental.”

Dorothy is accompanied by a yellow chicken named Bill. As they are now in magic country, the chicken talks.

Since the chicken is a hen, Dorothy renames her Billina.

The chicken is fussy and self-absorbed; she is also something of an overachiever:

” ‘How is my grammar?’ asked the yellow hen anxiously.”

Rather better than Dorothy’s, whose dialogue is marred by such Baby Snooksisms as ” ‘zactly,” “auto’biles,” ” ‘lieve,”

” ‘splain.”

Dorothy and Billina come ashore in Ev, a magic country on the other side of the Deadly Desert that separates Oz from the real world (what separates such magical kingdoms as Ix and Ev from our realer world is never made plain).

In any case, the formula has now been established.

Cyclone or storm at sea or earthquake ends not in death for child and animal companion but translation to a magic land.

Then, one by one, strange new characters join the travelers.

In this story the first addition is Tik-Tok, a clockwork robot (sixteen years later the word “robot” was coined).

He has run down.

They wind him up.

Next they meet Princess Languidere.

She is deeply narcissistic, a trait not much admired by Baum (had he been traumatized by all those actresses and actors he had known on tour?).

Instead of changing clothes, hair, makeup, the Princess changes heads from her collection.

I found the changing of heads fascinating.

And puzzling: since the brains in each head varied, would Languidere still be herself when she put on a new head or would she become someone else?

Thus Baum made logicians of his readers.

The Princess is about to add Dorothy’s head to her collection when the marines arrive in the form of Ozma and retinue, who have crossed the Deadly Desert on a magic carpet (cheating, I thought at the time, either a desert is impassible or it is not).

Dorothy and Ozma meet, and Dorothy, “as soon as she heard the sweet voice of the girlish ruler of Oz knew that she would learn to love her dearly.” That sort of thing I tended to skip.

The principal villain of the Oz canon is now encountered:

the Nome King (Baum thought the “g” in front of “nome” too difficult for children…how did he think they spelled and pronounced “gnaw”?).

Roquat of the Rock lived deep beneath the earth, presiding over his legions of hard-working nomes (first cousins to George Macdonald’s goblins).

I was always happy when Baum took us below ground, and showed us fantastic caverns strewn with precious stones where scurrying nomes did their best to please the bad-tempered Roquat, whose ” ‘laugh,’ ” one admirer points out, ” ‘is worse than another man’s frown.’ ”

Ozma and company are transformed into bric-a-brac by Roquat’s magic.

But Dorothy and Billina outwit Roquat (nomes fear fresh eggs).

Ozma and all the other victims of the nome king are restored to their former selves, and Dorothy is given an opportunity to ham it up:

“Royal Ozma, and you, Queen of Ev, I welcome you and your people back to the land of the living. Billina has saved you from your troubles, and now we will leave this drea’ful place, and return to Ev as soon as poss’ble.”

While the child spoke they could all see that she wore the magic belt, and a great cheer went up from all her friends….

Baum knew that nothing so pleases a child as a situation where, for once, the child is in the driver’s seat and able to dominate adults.

Dorothy’s will to power is a continuing force in the series and as a type she is still with us in such popular works as Peanuts, where she continues her steely progress toward total dominion in the guise of the relentless Lucy.

Back in the Emerald City, Ozma shows Dorothy her magic picture in which she can see what is happening anywhere in the world.

If Dorothy ever wants to visit Oz, all she has to do is make a certain signal and Ozma will transport her from Kansas to Oz.

Although this simplified transportation considerably, Baum must have known even then that half the charm of the Oz stories was the scary trip of an ordinary American child from USA to Oz. As a result, in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), another natural catastrophe is used to bring Dorothy back to Oz; the long missing Wizard, too.

Something like the San Francisco earthquake happens.

Accompanied by a dim boy called Zeb and a dull horse called Jim, Dorothy falls deep into the earth.

This catastrophe really got to Dorothy and “for a few moments the little girl lost consciousness. Zeb, being a boy, did not faint, but he was badly frightened….”

That is Baum’s one effort to give some sort of points to a boy.

He promptly forgets about Zeb, and Dorothy is back in the saddle, running things.

She is aided by the Wizard, who joins them in his balloon.

Deep beneath the earth are magical countries (inspired by Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth 1864?

Did Verne or Baum inspire Burroughs’s Pellucidar 1923?).

In a country that contains vegetable people, a positively Golden Bough note is sounded by the ruling Prince:

” ‘One of the most unpleasant things about our vegetable lives [is] that while we are in our full prime we must give way to another, and be covered up in the ground to sprout and grow and give birth to other people.’ ”

But then according to the various biographies, Baum was interested in Hinduism, and the notion of karma.

After a number of adventures Dorothy gestures to Ozma (she certainly took her time about it, I thought) and they are all transported to the Emerald City where the usual party is given for them, carefully described in a small-town newspaper style of the Social-Notes-from-all-over variety.

The Road to Oz (1909) is the mixture as before.

In Kansas, Dorothy meets the Shaggy Man; he is a tramp of the sort that haunted the American countryside after the Civil War when unemployed veterans and men ruined by the depressions of the 1870s took to the road where they lived and died, no doubt, brutishly.

The Shaggy Man asks her for directions.

Exasperated by the tramp’s slowness to figure out her instructions, she says:

” ‘You’re so stupid. Wait a minute till I run in the house and get my sun-bonnet.’ ” Dorothy is easily “provoked.”

” ‘My, but you’re clumsy!’ said the little girl.”

She gives him a “severe look.” Then ” ‘Come on,’ she commanded.”

She then leads him to the wrong, i.e., the magical, road to Oz.

With The Emerald City of Oz (1910) Baum is back in form.

He has had to face up to the fact that Dorothy’s trips from the USA to Oz are getting not only contrived, but pointless.

If she likes Oz so much, why doesn’t she settle there?

But if she does, what will happen to her uncle and aunt?

Fortunately, a banker is about to foreclose the mortgage on Uncle Henry’s farm.

Dorothy will have to go to work, says Aunt Em, stricken.

” ‘You might do housework for someone, dear, you are so handy; or perhaps you could be a nursemaid to little children.’ ”

Dorothy is having none of this.

“Dorothy smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ she said, ‘for me to do housework in Kansas, when I’m a Princess in the Land of Oz?’ ”

The old people buy this one with surprisingly little fuss.

It is decided that Dorothy will signal Ozma, and depart for the Emerald City.

Although Baum’s powers of invention seldom flagged, he had no great skill at plot-making.

Solutions to problems are arrived at either through improbable coincidence or by bringing in, literally, some god (usually Glinda) from the machine to set things right.

Since the narratives are swift and the conversations sprightly and the invented characters are both homely and amusing (animated paper dolls, jigsaw puzzles, pastry, cutlery, china, etc.), the stories never lack momentum.

Yet there was always a certain danger that the narrative would flatten out into a series of predictable turns.

In The Emerald City, Baum sets in motion two simultaneous plots.

The Nome King Roquat decides to conquer Oz. Counterpoint to his shenanigans are Dorothy’s travels through Oz with her uncle and aunt (Ozma has given them asylum).

Once again, the child’s situation vis à vis the adult is reversed.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said to them. “You are now in the Land of Oz, where you are to live always, and be comfer’ble an’ happy. You’ll never have to worry over anything again, ’cause there won’t be anything to worry about. And you owe it all to the kindness of my friend Princess Ozma.”

And never forget it, one hears her mutter to herself.

But while the innocents are abroad in Oz, dark clouds are gathering.

Roquat is on the march. I must say that the Nome King has never been more (to me) attractive as a character than in this book.

For one thing, the bad temper is almost permanently out of control. It is even beginning to worry the king himself: ” ‘To be angry once in a while is really good fun, because it makes others so miserable.

But to be angry morning, noon and night, as I am, grows monotonous and prevents my gaining any other pleasure in life.’ ”

Rejecting the offer of the usual anodyne, a “glass of melted silver,” Roquat decides to put together an alliance of all the wicked magic figures in order to conquer Oz.

He looks among his nomes for an ideal general.

He finds him: ” ‘I hate good people…. That is why I am so fond of your Majesty.’ ”

Later the General enlists new allies with the straightforward pitch: ”

‘Permit me to call your attention to the exquisite joy of making the happy unhappy,’ said he at last. ‘Consider the pleasure of destroying innocent and harmless people.’ ” This argument proves irresistible.

The nomes and their allies make a tunnel beneath the Deadly Desert (but surely its Deadliness must go deeper than they could burrow?).

Ozma watches all of them on her magic picture.

She is moderately alarmed. ” ‘But I do not wish to fight,’ declared Ozma, firmly.”

She takes an extremely high and moral American line; one that Woodrow Wilson echoed a few years later when he declared that the United States “is too proud to fight” powerful Germany (as opposed to weak Mexico where Wilson had swallowed his pride just long enough for us to launch an invasion).

” ‘Because the Nome King intends to do evil is no excuse for my doing the same.’ ”

Ozma has deep thoughts on the nature of evil; ” ‘I must not blame King Roquat too severely, for he is a Nome and his nature is not so gentle as my own.’ ” Luckily, Ozite cunning carries the day.

Baum’s nicest conceit in The Emerald City is Rigamarole Town.

Or, as a local boy puts it,

“if you have traveled very much you will have noticed that every town differs from every other town in one way or another and so by observing the methods of the people and the way they live as well as the style of their dwelling places,” etc.

Dorothy and her party are duly impressed by the boy’s endless commentary.

He is matched almost immediately by a woman who tells them, apropos nothing:

“It is the easiest thing in the world for a person to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when a question that is asked for the purpose of gaining information or satisfying the curiosity of the one who has given expression to the inquiry has attracted the attention of an individual who may be competent either from personal experience or the experience of others,”

etc.

A member of Dorothy’s party remarks that if those people wrote books ” ‘it would take a whole library to say the cow jumped over the moon.’ ”

So it would.

And so it does.

The Shaggy Man decides that there is a lot to be said for the way that the people of Oz encourage these people to live together in one town “while Uncle Sam lets [them] roam around wild and free, to torture innocent people.’ ”

Many enthusiasts of the Oz books (among them Ray Bradbury and Russel B. Nye) point with democratic pride to the fact that there is a total absence, according to Mr. Nye, of any “whisper of class consciousness in Oz (as there is in Alice’s Wonderland).”

Yet Martin Gardner has already noted one example of Baum’s “despicable” elitism.

Later (Emerald City), Baum appears to back away from the view that some people are better or more special than others.

“It seems unfortunate that strong people are usually so disagreeable and overbearing that no one cares for them. In fact, to be different from your fellow creatures is always a misfortune.”

But I don’t think that Baum believed a word of this.

If he did, he would have been not L. Frank Baum, creator of the special and magical world of Oz, but Horatio Alger, celebrator of pluck and luck, thrift and drift, money.

The dreamy boy with the bad heart at a hated military school was as conscious as any Herman Hesse youth that he was splendidly different from others, and in The Lost Princess of Oz Baum reasserts the Scarecrow’s position: ” ‘To be individual, my friends,’ ” (the Cowardly Lion is holding forth) ” ‘to be different from others, is the only way to become distinguished from the common herd.’ ”

Inevitably, Baum moved from Chicago to California.

Inevitably, he settled in the village of Hollywood in 1909.

Inevitably, he made silent films, based on the Oz books.

Not so inevitably, he failed for a number of reasons that he could not have foretold.

Nevertheless, he put together a half dozen films that (as far as special effects went) were said to be ahead of their time.

By 1913 he had returned, somewhat grimly, to writing Oz books, putting Dorothy firmly on ice until the last book of the series.

The final Oz books are among the most interesting.

After a gall bladder operation, Baum took to his bed where the last work was done.

Yet Baum’s imagination seems to have been more than usually inspired despite physical pain, and the darkness at hand.

The Lost Princess of Oz (1917) is one of the best of the series.

The beginning is splendidly straightforward.

“There could be no doubt of the fact: Princess Ozma, the lovely girl ruler of the Fairyland of Oz, was lost. She had completely disappeared.”

Glinda’s magical paraphernalia had also vanished.

The search for Ozma involves most of the Oz principals, including Dorothy.

The villain Ugu (who had kidnapped and and transformed Ozma) is a most satisfactory character.

“A curious thing about Ugu the Shoemaker was that he didn’t suspect, in the least, that he was wicked. He wanted to be powerful and great and he hoped to make himself master of all the Land of Oz, that he might compel everyone in that fairy country to obey him.

His ambition blinded him to the rights of others and he imagined anyone else would act just as he did if anyone else happened to be as clever as himself.” That just about says it all.

In The Tin Woodman (1918) a boy named Woot is curious to know what happened to the girl that the Tin Woodman had intended to marry when he was flesh and blood.

(Enchanted by a witch, he kept hacking off his own limbs; replacements in tin were provided by a magical smith. Eventually, he was all tin, and so no longer a suitable husband for a flesh and blood girl; he moved away.)

Woot, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow (the last two are rather like an old married couple, chatting in a desultory way about the past) set out to find the girl.

To their astonishment, they meet another tin man.

He, too, had courted the girl.

He, too, had been enchanted by the witch; had chopped himself to bits; had been reconstituted by the same magical smith.

The two tin men wonder what has happened to the girl.

They also wonder what happened to their original imperishable pieces.

In due course, the Tin Woodman is confronted by his original head.

I have never forgotten how amazed I was not only by Baum’s startling invention but by the drawing of the Tin Woodman staring into the cupboard where sits his old head.

The Tin Woodman is amazed, too.

But the original head is simply bored, and snippy. When asked ” ‘What relation are we?’ ” The head replies, ” ‘Don’t ask me…. For my part, I’m not anxious to claim relationship with any common, manufactured article, like you.

You may be all right in your class, but your class isn’t my class.’ ”

When the Tin Woodman asks the head what it thinks about inside the cupboard, he is told,

“Nothing…. A little reflection will convince you that I have had nothing to think about, except the boards on the inside of the cupboard door, and it didn’t take me long to think everything about those boards that could be thought of. Then, of course, I quit thinking.”

“And are you happy?”

“Happy? What’s that?”

There is a further surprise when the Tin Woodman discovers that his old girl friend has married a creature made up of various human parts assembled from him and from the other man of tin.

The result is a most divided and unsatisfactory man, and for the child reader a fascinating problem in the nature of identity.

In Baum’s last Oz book, Glinda of Oz (posthumously published in 1920), magic is pretty much replaced by complex machinery.

There is a domed island that can sink beneath the waters of a lake at the mention of a secret word, but though the word is magic, the details of how the island rises and sinks are straight out of Popular Mechanics.

Ozma and Dorothy are trapped beneath the water of the lake by yet another narcissistic princess, Coo-eeh-oh.

By the time Glinda comes to the rescue, Coo-eeh-oh has been turned into a proud and vapid swan.

This book is very much a last round-up (Baum may not have written all of it).

Certainly there are some uncharacteristic sermons in favor of the Protestant work ethic:

“Dorothy wished in her kindly, innocent heart, that all men and women could be fairies with silver wands, and satisfy all their needs without so much work and worry….” Ozma fields that one as briskly as the Librarian of Detroit could want:

“No, no, Dorothy, that wouldn’t do at all. Instead of happiness your plan would bring weariness…. There would be no eager striving to obtain the difficult…. There would be nothing to do, you see, and no interest in life and in our fellow creatures.”

But Dorothy is not so easily convinced.

She notes that Ozma is a magical creature, and she is happy.

But only, says Ozma, with grinding sweetness, ” ‘because I can use my fairy powers to make others happy.’ ”

Then Ozma makes the sensible point that although she has magical powers, others like Glinda have even greater powers than she and so ” ‘there still are things in both nature and in wit for me to marvel at.’ ”

In Dorothy’s last appearance as heroine, she saves the day.

She guesses, correctly, that the magic word is the wicked Coo-eeh-oh’s name.

Incidentally, as far as I know, not a single Oz commentator has noted that Coo-eeh-oh is the traditional cry of the hog-caller.

The book ends with a stern admonishment, ” ‘it is always wise to do one’s duty, however unpleasant that duty may seem to be.’ ”

Although it is unlikely that Baum would have found Ruskin’s aesthetics of much interest, he might well have liked his political writings, particularly Munera Pulveris and Fors.

Ruskin’s protégé William Morris would have approved of Oz, where

Everyone worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play…. There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them and find fault with them.

So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.

Anticipating the wrath of the Librarian of Detroit, who in 1957 found the Oz books to have a “cowardly approach to life,” Baum adds, slyly, “I do not suppose such an arrangement would be practical with us….”

Yet Baum has done no more than to revive in his own terms the original Arcadian dream of America.

Or, as Marius Bewley noted, “the tension between technology and pastoralism is one of the things that the Oz books are about, whether Baum was aware of it or not.”

I think that Baum was very much aware of this tension.

In Oz he presents the pastoral dream of Jefferson (the slaves have been replaced by magic and good will); and into this Eden he introduces forbidden knowledge in the form of black magic (the machine) which good magic (the values of the pastoral society) must overwhelm.

It is Bewley’s view that because “The Ozites are much aware of the scientific nature of magic,” Ozma wisely limited the practice of magic.

As a result, controlled magic enhances the society just as controlled industrialization could enhance (and perhaps even salvage) a society like ours.

Unfortunately, the Nome King has governed the United States for more than a century; and he shows no sign of wanting to abdicate.

Meanwhile, the life of the many is definitely nome-ish and the environment has been, perhaps, irreparably damaged. To the extent that Baum makes his readers aware that our country’s “practical” arrangements are inferior to those of Oz, he is a truly subversive writer and it is no wonder that the Librarian of Detroit finds him cowardly and negative, because, of course, he is brave and affirmative.

But then the United States has always been a Rigamarole land where adjectives tend to mean their opposite, when they mean at all.

Despite the Librarian of Detroit’s efforts to suppress magical alternative worlds, the Oz books continue to exert their spell.

“You do not educate a man by telling him what he knew not,” wrote John Ruskin, “but by making him what he was not.”

In Ruskin’s high sense, Baum was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not—imaginative, tolerant, alert to wonders, life.

“Wicked” and “Gladiator II” Offer Nostalgic, Half-Satisfying Showdowns

One of the movie industry’s many recent laments is that 2024 has given us no Barbenheimer—no box-office showdown between two thrillingly brainy blockbusters, cemented together in the cultural imagination and in the commercial stratosphere.

And yet, just in time for Thanksgiving, here come two wishfully galumphing epics, “Wicked” and “Gladiator II.”

One is a revisionist fantasy of Oz, the other a revisionist history of Rome, and both are chockablock with political conspiracies, authoritarian abuses, and foul-tempered monkeys, none of which adds up to a full-blown phenomenon.

If “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” struck blows for risk and originality in Hollywood, the slickly refurbished wares of “Wadiator”—or, if you prefer, “Glicked”—suggest a safe retreat to known quantities.

Choose your own adventure, but, whether it leads to the Colosseum or to the Emerald City, you’ve surely been there before.

In “Wicked”—or, as it appears onscreen, “Wicked: Part I”—that familiarity is entirely the point.

The movie, directed by Jon M. Chu with some of the whirligig showmanship he brought to “In the Heights” (2021) and “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), kicks off a two-part adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, which was itself loosely based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.”

All yellow brick roads lead back to L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” though the classic 1939 film adaptation exerts the mightiest influence, having immortalized the Wicked Witch as a green-skinned, broomstick-riding cackler—played by Margaret Hamilton, in one of the most primally terrifying movie-villain performances.

Evil this delectable can no longer be simply savored;

it must be deconstructed, and lucratively prequelized, in the manner of sympathetic villain origin stories like “Maleficent,” “Joker,” and “Cruella.”

It makes sense that “Wicked,” a forerunner of this trend on the page and the stage, has now found its place on the screen, where the story can shoulder its full weight in cinematic Baumbast.

And so the real Wicked Witch steps out from behind the curtain—and, lo, she is Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), an intellectually gifted, morally courageous, and grievously misunderstood outcast, whose only crime is having been born with a complexion of chlorophyll.

Much of “Part I,” scripted by Winnie Holzman (who wrote the book for the musical) and Dana Fox, unfolds at the ill-named Shiz University—Hogwarts with Munchkins—where Elphaba arrives as a caregiver for her newly enrolled sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who has a disability.

But Elphaba’s irrepressible talents catch the attention of the school’s headmistress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), prompting a rivalry with Galinda (Ariana Grande, billed as Ariana Grande-Butera), a shallow, self-absorbed classmate who will eventually become Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.

Elphaba and Galinda are forced to be roommates, and they go together like asparagus and bubble gum.

But Galinda is more than just a walking dumb-blonde joke: she’s the secret seriocomic weapon of “Wicked,” and Grande balances her delightful queen-bee insouciance with a porcelain vulnerability worthy of Baum’s own China Princess.

Beneath every exaggerated hair toss, she unleashes a poignant frisson of panic.

When the two witches finally set their differences aside (cue “Popular,” the deftest and funniest of Stephen Schwartz’s songs), Galinda’s joy is unfeigned; her friendship with “Elphie” fills a real void.

Erivo makes you believe it.

Her coolly magnetic stare is her onscreen superpower, and here it serves to modulate the narrative clutter swirling around her.

As a fastidiously retconned “Wizard of Oz” prequel, “Wicked” has its puzzle-box pleasures:

the uninitiated can muse over the narrative significance of, say, a terrified lion cub, a bicycle basket, or a hunky prince (an assured Jonathan Bailey) who foretells his future with the lyric “Life is painless / for the brainless.”

As a parable of political radicalization, however, the movie soon turns lumbering and obvious.

Oz is in the grip of creeping totalitarianism, and the more Elphaba grasps the stakes, the more pointed the hats she has to wear become:

she’s a feminist crusader, an animal-welfare activist, and, in time, a full-blown resistance leader, with the not so wonderful Wizard of Oz (a well-cast Jeff Goldblum) as her target.

Given the story’s insistence on not judging a witch by her color, is it churlish to say that I wish “Wicked: Part I” looked better?

(And also that, at two hours and forty minutes, there were less of it to look at?)

The visual bar here is admittedly high;

no new movie can be expected to match the dazzling Technicolor brilliance of “The Wizard of Oz,” a picture I’ve seen so many times that even its flaws feel like old friends:

the lopped-off lines, the mismatched edits, the shot in which Hamilton’s Witch, about to vanish in a poof of smoke, misses her mark by a second or two.

These imperfections, far from diminishing the experience, give the older film a material weight, a conviction about its own magic, for which the pristine digital surfaces of “Wicked” can conjure no equivalent.

It’s not easy being green screen, but, even so, there is little in this movie’s muted palette and washed-out backlighting to make you muse, even for a second, “What a world, what a world.”

Near the end, though, “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life.

The climax is protracted but darkly thrilling:

ugly secrets spill into the open, winged monkeys screech and scatter, and Elphaba comes into full possession of her powers.

“It’s time to try defying gravity,” she belts to the skies, and the film shrewdly follows suit, with a vertiginous airborne number that doesn’t just feel like Oz—it feels like Vegas.

You’d want to see it projected onto the Sphere, perhaps with Elphaba soaring on a rhinestone-studded broomstick and then leaving the MGM Grand—sorry, the Emerald City—in the dust.

“Part II” looms next year; until then, Elphie has left the building.

The lesson of “Wicked,” should you happen to miss it, is that the appearance of villainy can be deceiving.

“Gladiator II,” in its own punchy, stabby, neck-chomping way, upholds the same principle. Directed by Ridley Scott, nearly a quarter century after he steered the first “Gladiator” (2000) to smash returns and Oscar glory, this is the sword-and-sandal epic as both sequel and shell game. Clean good-vs.-evil demarcations are a thing of the past, and motives and alliances can be murderously tricky to suss out. The hero, at least, is no mystery: he is Lucius (Paul Mescal), a fierce young warrior of Numidia, who, after experiencing crushing defeat and tragic personal loss, is hauled off to Rome as a prisoner of war. Soon he will be a gladiator in the Colosseum, where a bloody quest for vengeance begins.

But vengeance against whom? Is his enemy Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the general who inflicted his particular agony—or do Pascal’s soft eyes and grave sighs signal us to look elsewhere? Perhaps Lucius should blame the emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), monstrous twin tyrants who have sent the empire spiralling into decadence. And what of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a wily slaveowner who casts Lucius into the arena, recognizing a total killer when he sees one? What’s his long game?

After a while, it barely seems to matter, and “Gladiator II,” following a propulsive opening stretch, recedes into the long shadow of its predecessor. If the first “Gladiator” still retains much of its visceral and emotional force, that’s because it serves us our revenge-thriller poison straight; to see the mighty general Maximus (Russell Crowe) smack down the unambiguously loathsome emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) remains an irreducible pleasure. As “Gladiator II” opens, Maximus has been dead for sixteen years, and, though his fighting spirit becomes a guiding light of sorts for Lucius, their bond never feels more than circumstantial. The lead role is a stretch for Mescal, but a good one. After the art-house melancholy of “All of Us Strangers” and “Aftersun,” he tears into Lucius’s red-meat physicality with voracious fury, as if it were his first and possibly last meal; all the sadder, then, when that fury suddenly evaporates in the face of narrative expedience.

Even so, we are not not entertained. There is, for one, the invigorating if empty-calorie flash of Denzel Washington, who will play Othello on Broadway next year, and who might have seen, in the warrior-whisperer role of Macrinus, an opportunity to channel his inner Iago. The arena battles have an agreeably batshit, can-you-top-this conceptual absurdity; you won’t soon forget a scene in which Lucius fends off a deranged baboon, or when the Colosseum is reconfigured into a kind of third-century Sea World, complete with snapping sharks. In planting us squarely in the splash zone, Scott and his collaborators pander so unabashedly to our bloodlust that it rings all the more hollow when “Gladiator II” suddenly fancies itself a civics lesson, entreating its characters to mourn their failing empire and dream of its glorious rebirth. We get it, we get it: there’s no place like Rome. ♦

Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande make movie magic

As one might say in Oz, “Wicked” is thrillifying in its melodiousness even if overlongical and ponderrific.

Even with a few missteps, it’s easy to get swept up in director Jon M. Chu’s colorful spectacle (in theaters Friday), adapted from the popular Broadway musical (based on the Gregory Maguire book) and a revelatory prequel to “The Wizard of Oz.”

The song-filled character study of the Wicked Witch of the West’s early years ekes out great performances from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande that’ll wow musical theater kids and old-school “Oz” fans alike.

And while it hasn’t been marketed as such, this “Wicked” is the first of a two-part epic that — unlike, say, “Dune” — at least pulls off a truly soaring closing cliffhanger.

‘Wicked’

Star rating: ★★★☆

Actually, “Wicked” begins with an ending:

The Wicked Witch is no more, melted in a puddle of water, while Dorothy and pals ease on down the yellow brick road.

After the well-known events of “The Wizard of Oz,” the Munchkins are celebrating the villain’s death when Glinda the Good Witch (Grande) shows up in a flying bubble and is interrogated about her own connections to the dead baddie.

She explains that the green-skinned menace was named Elphaba (Erivo) and that they went to Shiz University together.

Glinda, a self-centered mean girl, almost immediately butts heads with the reserved but confident Elphaba, who is tasked to watch over her sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) at school.

In a tense moment where a faculty member attempts to move Nessarose’s wheelchair, a protective Elphaba showcases her considerable (but raw) magical ability, which puts her on the radar of professor Madam Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) as well as sorcerer wannabe Glinda.

Elphaba and Glinda become roommates and their mutual loathing fuels the lively duet “What Is This Feeling?”

But following a couple acts of kindness and a practical joke gone wrong, not to mention a quasi-love triangle with charmingly rogueish Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), Elphaba and Glinda grow to be best friends.

When Elphaba gets the chance to meet the enigmatic Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum, toning down his usual quirkiness), the duo heads to the Emerald City, where Elphaba learns that Oz isn’t as great and wonderful as it looks, and she embraces her power but also makes enemies.

Erivo is often the best part of whatever she’s in, from “Widows” to “Harriet,” and she stuns in a role that runs a gamut of emotions.

Elphaba maintains a smirking facade to hide her inner vulnerability but also revels in what she can do even in the most dangerous of circumstances.

(And, hoo boy, she nails the money notes of signature showstopper “Defying Gravity.”)

While Grande is known as a singer – and doesn’t disappoint in that area – anyone who watched her kid sitcoms “Victorious” and “Sam & Cat” can attest to her subtle comic timing, which she utilizes in several scenes (and her big number “Popular”) with hair-whipping, doe-eyed zest.

The enchanting pair keeps “Wicked” watchable as many scenes drone on or feel stretched and overcooked.

Chu’s movie lasts two hours and 41 minutes – almost the same runtime as the entire Broadway production (with intermission), even though it only covers the stage musical’s first act.

You feel it, too, especially in an extended opening bit about the Wicked Witch’s demise and a busy “Defying Gravity” sequence that clocks in at a good 15 minutes.

The latter still gets the job done, but some judicious editing would have gone a long way.

At the same time, other aspects could have used more depth, such as character development and a key animal rights subplot. (Those monkeys didn’t always fly, FYI.)

“Wicked” does stick mostly to the musical script, maybe for the best considering the show’s protective fandom.

There are nifty “Wizard of Oz” Easter eggs, including musical cues and character footwear, and clever dialogue that hints at what’s to come in the story.

Plus, Chu really immerses you in the fantasy, with awesome production design, wellchoreographed song-and-dance numbers and folks throwing oddball words like “scandalocious” in conversation.

The movie musical is both superfluous and splendiferous, yet it casts a bighearted spell that you’d have to be wicked not to appreciate at least a little

Once it gains speed, ‘Wicked’ soars

‘Wicked doesn’t need a movie adaptation to be relevant — it’s already a cultural phenomenon, even before the behemoth two-part film adaptation hits theaters.

The beloved Tony-winning Broadway musical is adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West , a revisionist history of Frank L. Baum’s 1900 fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , and that book’s iconic 1939 film adaptation, The Wizard of Oz .

This new film comes heaped high with a century’s worth of heritage, in the traditions of literature, screen and stage.

While Dorothy’s tornado-twirl into Technicolor is burned into our collective consciousness, so, too, is the massive note sung at the end of Act One, by the witch at the center of Wicked , Elphaba, in the show’s signature song, “Defying Gravity,” written by Stephen Schwartz (who wrote all the music and lyrics for the show).

Director Jon M. Chu’s oversized movie adaptation takes every second of its two hours and 40 minutes to build up to that one note.

The battle cry that emerges from Elphaba (played by the Tony-winning, Oscar-nominated Cynthia Erivo) is a moment in which the anti-tyrannical ethos of the film snaps into sharp focus with such crystal clarity that it’s breathtaking.

It’s just the preceding rising action that feels a bit underwhelming.

Wicked seeks to understand the Wicked Witch of the West, and the movie starts off when a denizen of Munchkinland dares to ask Glinda the Good Witch (Ariana Grande), “Is it true you were friends with her?” inspiring a flashback to their days at Shiz University, where the pair met.

Elphaba, rejected by her father since birth because of her green skin, follows her sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) to the school and accidentally unleashes some rough, untrained powers, catching the eye of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).

She’s forced to bunk up with pretty, popular, pink-obsessed Galinda (the first iteration of the Good Witch’s name), and though they are at odds at first, Galinda can’t resist a makeover or the intriguing powers of her new pal.

It’s essentially a high school musical, with more magic — but not enough movie magic.

The script has got to get Elphaba and Galinda to Oz to meet the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), and hone Elphaba’s motivation for eventually defying the wizard (and gravity), which is wrapped up in a rushed subplot.

Elphaba sings emphatically about wanting to meet the Wizard, but why she cares so much is a bit underbaked.

Grande is delightful as Galinda, showing off her comedic gifts and superb voice.

She’s all big brown eyes and a pout, which she puts to marvelous use in her performance as the petulant princess of Shiz.

But her character turns are also quite flat, and the world-building here could have been so much sharper and funnier.

Bowen Yang does heroic work with a few ad libs and reactions as Galinda’s pal Pfannee, and Jonathan Bailey is terrific as the dashing prince Fiyero, but the setting doesn’t feel well-rounded on the screen.

Still, Wicked will delight fans of the stage production as a faithful adaptation that is at once playful but reverent.

With another installment on the way, a gargantuan press tour and over 100 years of cultural baggage, Wicked is already too big to fail.

But the weight of expectations is a heavy thing to bear, and they bog down this capable movie version on its way to liftoff.

The film struggles to take flight, but when it does, it is undeniably moving.

[kierancampire]

Even though this is my fourth time doing this, I only remember from looking at my memories. Once again a short reminder, I started this in 2020 cause it was such a shit year, and this year's have been difficult over all, that I needed to remind myself that good can still happen and I need to focus on that at least as much as the bad

In no particular order:

At the start of the year the girls both got spayed, and although both had complications, they both healed well and it went fine in the end! It was such a nice peace of mind having them done to stop all the issues! And they did love on me hard after the spays!

I won the Ombudsman case, a process that had taken almost 2 years and took everything from me, but winning the case was such a huge achievement. Swan still haven't sent me my apology, or dealt with the roof/mould, but at least I won the case, showed they are awful people, and got partially compensated for the heavy toll this all took on my mental and physical health

With that compensation obviously I got the PS5 which was a great treat for everything! It is such a lovely console and I am having so much fun with it! Then I also got my two tattoos, which the cat one I originally designed in 2017 so getting that done finally was a huge thing, plus the Winnie the Pooh one means a lot to me and I really do love how both came out thanks to Peyton

This year we finally did my living room, and while the rest of my flat needs doing, it's so nice to just have one room sorted and how I planned, I still constantly look at it and smile, it's nice to stay in here and imagine I actually like my home

Due to the Ombudsman, I finally got a new front door which has improved things drastically, sound and air no longer pour through a warped door. Then I also got a new bathroom essentially! I got a new shower, a new toilet that is no longer caked in mould, and a sink that I can actually clean and is no longer perpetually disgusting! It also got painted for me so it is no longer that god awful electric blue!

This is the year I finally got all my ornaments back, something that was unexpectedly painful and bittersweet. But it's so nice having them all back, especially my Baron Von Humbert Gikkingen music box! I love that one!

Then this also is the year I *FINALLY* started the autism process, after trying and failing for years, I am finally on the waiting list to get an autism diagnosis!

There potentially is more, but these were the things off the top of my head. Honestly, this year was hard again too with making this list, outside of the Ombudsman I had no huge victories, I met no friends, partially in purpose this ignores a lot of bad, also, seeing all the UC stuff and how I tick all the boxes for it being taken from me, I am terrified of 2024 and the coming years, I literally get so anxious I feel sick whenever I think of it, I am so incredibly scared. But I guess this is why this is so important, even through suffering in the year and fear of the future, good still happened and I need to remember that good, no matter how big or small that good is, as that's what keeps you going. If I remember anything else I'll edit it on later, but yeah, I just wanted to do this while I remembered

[goethitee]

ok so ik i never made a smokey update post but now i have more stuff so.

so basically smokey did really well with us! he was making improvements, still a little crazy but i think he’ll always be.

when he went back home, he was good for a few days, but then went back to the way he was before; peeing, chewing his crate, & he started biting more. before he nipped them like twice, today i heard he the bit the bf so hard that he was gushing blood from his hand. he did not bite when he was with me.

theyve made the decision to get rid of him which i honestly think is for the best. hes 10 months, i think a lot of his problems can still be fixed, & they dont even like him. so keeping a dog that they dont even like & they just leave in a crate all day long is not fair for the dog.

which brings us to here… they asked us to take him. i really do not want another dog right now. my dad especially does not want another dog right now. if i were going to get a dog rn it would not be him. it would be a chinese crested show prospect so i could get into confirmation. not a poorly bred mini aussie with behavioral problems.

honestly trying to type this rn im struggling to think of reasons to take him lol. i guess because i like him. hes got potential & i feel whoever they give him to will not be prepared for how far back he is for his age. also the biting.

i could also turn him into my agility dog, considering winni is retired.

idk ig i’ll update whether or not we take him but.. yea

[ranchthoughts]

Feeling like:

Excuse how awfully formatted this is (people with asterisks next to their names appear else where on the chart):

TLDR:

There's a lot of nonsense under the cut, so to summarize:

I enumerated 15 possible universe set ups before I started to lose it. I believe there are more, especially since I didn't account for if some of the shows were just their own universe, irrespective of whether they had to be given the layout of the other shows.

The fewest possible universes are 5, the most is 12 (if each show was it's own universe, except for Bad Buddy and ATOTS which we know are together, and Vice Versa spans 2 universes as we know it does).

5 universes: au!Vice Versa, Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP, Moonlight Chicken, and The Eclipse// OR au!Vice Versa, Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP, Moonlight Chicken, and Vice Versa

6 universes: au!Vice Versa, Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP, Moonlight Chicken, TOL and The Eclipse// OR au!Vice Versa, Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP, Moonlight Chicken, TOL and NLMG// OR au!Vice Versa, Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP, Moonlight Chicken, The Eclipse and NLMG

7 universes: au!Vice Versa, Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP, Moonlight Chicken, NLMG, TOL, and The Eclipse

Central to this attempt is my assumption that Drake playing 2 characters in one universe (Korn in Bad Buddy and Rang in ATOTS) is an outlier and that he is the only one to ever do that. If not, well then I weep to think of the number of potential universe arrangements that have been added. Any one good at math?

Initial Notes:

No show can be in au!Vice Versa's universe because gay marriage is legal there and it isn't legal in any other show (though there are several shows where this is not confirmed/explicitly said - please correct me if I'm wrong)

Also to consider with regards to au!Vice Versa: Mix is a veterinarian, Tay Tawan is a delivery driver, Perth is a director, and Gun is a screenwriter named Third (thanks to @benkaaoi for reminding me - though TOL cannot exist in the same universe as au!Vice Versa unless they have gay marriage and I don't know if it is confirmed they do?)

The presence of First implies Moonlight Chicken, The Eclipse, Theory of Love, and Not Me do NOT all take place in the same universe (barring a Drake Korn/Rang situation - let's assume Drake is an outlier). This is further confirmed by the presence of Off and Gun in both Theory of Love and Not Me, and Papang in Moonlight Chicken and Not Me.

The presence of Earth in Moonlight Chicken, Bad Buddy/ATOTS and TOL imply these shows can NOT be in the same universe.

The presence of Mike in Theory of Love and A Boss and A Babe (ABAAB) implies these two shows do NOT take place in the same universe.

The presence of Satang and Winny in MSP and A Star in My Mind (SIMM) implies the two shows do NOT take place in the same universe.

The presence of Satang and Dunk in Bad Buddy/ATOTS and SIMM implies the two shows do NOT take place in the same universe.

The presence of Force and Book in ABAAB and Enchante implies these two do NOT take place in the same universe.

The presence of Mike in ABAAB and Theory of Love implies these two do NOT take place in the same universe.

The presence of Neo and Pawin in The Eclipse and Never Let Me Go (NLMG) implies these two do NOT take place in the same universe.

The presence of Neo in au!Vice Versa, The Eclipse, NLMG and Vice Versa implies these shows do NOT all take place in the same universe.

The presence of Perth in au!Vice Versa and NLMG implies these two do NOT take place in the same universe.

Because TOL, SOTUS, and 2gether are shows in the Vice Versa world, they cannot exist in the same universe.

I haven't even looked at Dark Blue Kiss, Fish Upon the Sky...

Therefore:

SIMM (=/= Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP, au!Vice Versa; could be in Moonlight Chicken)

NLMG (=/= The Eclipse, Vice Versa, au!Vice Versa; could be in Bad Buddy/ATOTS or MSP but not if The Eclipse is)

The Eclipse (=/= NLMG, Vice Versa, Not Me, au!Vice Versa; could be in Bad Buddy/ATOTS or MSP but not if NLMG is there)

Vice Versa (=/= TOL, au!Vice Versa; could be the same as Enchante or MSP)

Not Me (=/= TOL, Moonlight Chicken, au!Vice Versa; could be the same as Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP)

Enchante (=/= ABAAB, au!Vice Versa; could be in the same as Vice Versa or MSP)

ABAAB (=/= TOL, Enchante, au!Vice Versa; could be in Moonlight Chicken, Bad Buddy/ATOTS or MSP)

TOL (=/= Vice Versa, Not Me, ABAAB, Moonlight Chicken, Bad Buddy/ATOTS, au!Vice Versa; could be in MSP but only if Vice Verse is not)

Therefore:

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (could include ABAAB and/or Not Me and/or NLMG OR The Eclipse)

MSP (could include Enchante and/or Not Me and/or Vice Versa OR TOL OR ABAAB OR The Eclipse)

Moonlight Chicken (could include SIMM and/or ABAAB)

au!Vice Versa (cannot include any other show unless they have gay marriage, there is an argument to be made for TOL existing in this universe due to Gun)

If NLMG is part of the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe and TOL is part of the MSP universe, then The Eclipse is its own universe.

If The Eclipse is part of the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe, NLMG is its own universe.

If TOL is part of the MSP universe, Vice Versa is its own universe.

If ABAAB OR Vice Versa is part of the MSP universe, TOL is its own universe.

Ok now to brainstorm different options for universe set ups:

Option 1A (5 universes, The Eclipse is one; ABAAB is in the Moonlight Chicken universe, Not Me is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM, ABAAB)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes Not Me, NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, TOL)

The Eclipse

Option 1B (5 universes, The Eclipse is one; ABAAB is in the Moonlight Chicken universe, Not Me is in MSP universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM, ABAAB)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, Not Me, TOL)

The Eclipse

Option 1C (5 universes, The Eclipse is one; ABAAB is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe, Not Me is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes ABAAB, NLMG, Not Me)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, TOL)

The Eclipse

Option 1D (5 universes, The Eclipse is one; ABAAB is in the Moonlight Chicken universe, Not Me is in the MSP universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM, ABAAB)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, Not Me, TOL)

The Eclipse

Option 2a (6 universes, TOL is one, The Eclipse is one; ABAAB and Vice Versa are in the MSP universe, Not Me and NLMG are in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes Not Me, NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, ABAAB)

The Eclipse

TOL

Option 2b (6 universes, TOL is one, The Eclipse is one; Vice Versa is in the MSP universe, ABAAB and Not Me and NLMG are in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes ABAAB, Not Me, NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa)

The Eclipse

TOL

Option 2c (6 universes, TOL is one, The Eclipse is one; ABAAB and Vice Versa and Not Me are in the MSP universe, NLMG is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, ABAAB, Not Me)

The Eclipse

TOL

Option 2d (6 universes, TOL is one, The Eclipse is one; Vice Versa and Not Me are in the MSP universe, ABAAB and NLMG are in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes ABAAB, NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, Not Me)

The Eclipse

TOL

Option 3a (6 universes, TOL is one, NLMG is one; ABAAB and Not Me and Vice Versa are in the MSP universe, The Eclipse is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes The Eclipse)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, Not Me, ABAAB)

TOL

NLMG

Option 3b (6 universes, TOL is one, NLMG is one; ABAAB and Vice Versa are in the MSP universe, Not Me and The Eclipse are in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes Not Me, The Eclipse)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, ABAAB)

TOL

NLMG

Option 4 (6 universes, NLMG is one, The Eclipse is one; ABAAB and Not Me and Vice Versa are in the MSP universe, NLMG is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes TOL)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, Not Me, ABAAB)

The Eclipse

NLMG

Option 5 (7 universes, NLMG is one, The Eclipse is one, TOL is one; ABAAB and Vice Versa are in the MSP universe, Not Me is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe):

au!Vice Versa

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes Not Me)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa, ABAAB)

The Eclipse

NLMG

TOL

Option 6 (5 universes, The Eclipse is one; TOL is in the au!Vice Versa universe, ABAAB is in the Moonlight Chicken universe, NLMG is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe, Vice Versa is in the MSP universe)

au!Vice Versa (includes TOL)

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM, ABAAB)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes Not Me, NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, Vice Versa)

The Eclipse

Option 7 (5 universes, Vice Versa is one; TOL is in the au!Vice Versa universe, ABAAB is in the Moonlight Chicken universe, NLMG is in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe, The Eclipse is in the MSP universe)

au!Vice Versa (includes TOL)

Moonlight Chicken (includes SIMM, ABAAB)

Bad Buddy/ATOTS (includes Not Me, NLMG)

MSP (includes Enchante, The Eclipse)

Vice Versa

This is when I started to lose it... So there are more. I think. Also this doesn't account for "what if some/all of the shows just were their own universe?"

If all the shows were their own universe, there would be 12 universes.

so Bad Buddy exists in the same universe as A Tale of a Thousand Stars

and MSP exists in a universe where Bad Buddy and ATOTS are shows (along with He's Coming to Me) that the characters watch

Fourth and Gemini were students in Bad Buddy, but those were not Gun and Tinn (MSP does not happen in the same universe as Bad Buddy does)

Prom, Mark, and Lotte are students in Bad Buddy, but those are not Phat, Tiw, or Yak (MSP does not happen in the same universe as Bad Buddy does)

Ohm must be an actor in MSP's universe (he stars in the shows Bad Buddy and HCTM)

Drake is two people in the collective Bad Buddy/ATOTS universe (Korn and Rang) - let's ignore this for now

clearly, Moonlight Chicken does not exist in the Bad Buddy/ATOTS or MSP universes (unless its a Drake Korn/Rang situation) - Earth and Mix/Fourth and Gemini/Kahotung/Mark are not Phupha and Tian/Gun and Tinn/Longtae/Saleng in Bad Buddy/ATOTS or MSP

Vice Versa has two universes so I will handle them separately: in Puen and Talay's regular universe [Vice Versa] SOTUS and 2gether are shows. In the alternate universe Puen and Talay travel to [au!VV], Enchante exists (we see AkkTheo) but this is ALSO an alternate universe for Enchante as Akk and Theo are able to get married in this universe (gay marriage is legal). HOWEVER - are Akk and Theo from Puen and Talay's original universe (Vice Versa) and Puen and Talay just don't know them? Or are they from another universe?

Singto is in SOTUS and HCTM - therefore in the Vice Versa universe Singto could be an actor - is the Vice Versa universe the same as MSP's (where HCTM is already a TV show)?

If the Vice Versa universe is the same as MSP's, then Enchante is potentially in the same universe as MSP as well

Therefore I posit at least 4 GMMTV universes: Bad Buddy/ATOTS, MSP (where Bad Buddy, ATOTS, and HCTM are tv shows), Moonlight Chicken, and au!Vice Versa; with the potential for a Vice Versa universe (where SOTUS and 2gether are shows, if it does not take place in the MSP universe), and a Enchante universe as well (if it does not take place in the Vice Versa or a Vice Versa/MSP universe).

I know this barely scratches the surface (GMMTV has so many shows and a dozen actors) but I'm already all over the place

intertextuality????

[elysianrey]

i’ll come to thee by moonlight

(a/n: this is basically the story nobody asked for but I somehow wrote? all it takes is seeing Anne with her own two eyes for Winnifred Rose to quickly understand Gilbert’s undevoted attraction toward her. Minor spoilers related to season 3. content rated G+)

Winnifred Rose sat snuggly between a tall blonde boy, of whom she noticed dressed quite fashionably and exquisitely for someone of his age, and her dear friend, Gilbert Blythe. She glanced curiously about the luxurious garden in which they sat at, as the beautiful blooms gently swayed from the early afternoon summer breeze on the island. She suddenly startled as her attention was swiftly refocused on the dainty, soft girl raising her voice in passionate cry as she finished the end of her poem. The crowd gathered around the small platform before them clapped in admiration at her performance, and she heard a loud ‘whoop’ from a group of boys seated in the section of chairs to their right. She clapped politely along with the others from Avonlea. The small freckled girl smiled shyly from her spot on the stage and gave a curtsy bow before exiting and seating herself in the front row next to a familiar head of auburn hair.

“Next, we welcome to the stage, Miss Anne Shirley-Cuthbert. Miss Shirley-Cuthbert will be reciting The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.”

Winnifred watched as the young woman made her way from her chair up onto the stage. To her right, she sensed Mr. Blythe shift in his seat, slowly leaning forward in anticipation. Had it not been for this fundraiser organized by the spirited Anne herself, Winnifred would not be seated where she was today. Gilbert had expressed his excitement for the fundraiser in his last letter, urging Miss Rose to attend with him in order for her to finally meet this Anne he had fondly spoken of many times in the past.

Anne gracefully took her place in the center of the flower-adorned platform and clasped her hands together in front of her chest. Gilbert’s body inched even closer to the edge of his seat as the girl dressed in a luxuriously deep blue satin dress began to speak. 

“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.   

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.   

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   

And the highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.”

All around her, eyes that were nodding in tiredness or looking elsewhere quickly became fixed on the redhead’s delivery of the famous poem. It was as if a spell were overtaking the crowd, herself included in the magic this faerie was casting over them. Winnifred could not help but glance over at the curly headed boy. Wonder and awe were written clearly on his features, yet his own eyes held a secret that he had never revealed in all the time she had known him. Gilbert was in love. No, perhaps love was too light of a word. He was smitten, captivated, and completely bewitched by Miss Shirley-Cuthbert. A hidden smile made the corners of her lips turn upward at the realization. 

As the poem drew to a close, Winnifred understood why this enchanting young woman had captured the heart of her close friend because she had been drawn into the same allure. Why Anne had no sooner breathed the final words of the poem than Gilbert was already on his feet clapping fervently with the crowd and shouting, “Encore!” The crowd seemed to follow suit and the tall blonde boy next to Winnifred joined in Gilbert’s pleas for more from Anne. Miss Rose saw the redhead glance purposefully in their direction as she beamed and bowed for those cheering at her magnificent delivery. The color creeping up her cheeks began to match that of her hair as Gilbert whistled and smiled so widely his dimples dotted his cheeks. 

After an encore performance from Anne, the poetry reading ended and those attending the fundraiser dispersed and headed toward the refreshments located in another section of the majestic garden. Winnifred trailed behind Gilbert and the tall boy who had been sitting beside her, of whom she learned was also a friend of Anne’s, named Cole. They found Miss Shirley-Cuthbert surrounded by an entourage of men, women, and children alike, complimenting and commenting on the zeal they had experienced from her performance. Waiting patiently as she graciously accepted and thanked their praises, she suddenly came bounding over to them, smiling eagerly and laughing happily.

 She threw her arms around Cole first and he spun her around once before placing her firmly back on the ground. “Oh Anne!” he exclaimed proudly, taking her hand in his own.

Miss Rose observed the interaction between the pair rather quizzically and stole another glance at Gilbert, who did not appear taken back by the gesture.

“You were simply marvelous! The way you proclaimed the last stanza nearly had me in tears!” Cole clutched at his heart for added dramatic effect and Anne nearly doubled over in laughter.

 “We have both come a long way since our days imagining up all kinds of stories in my room at Green Gables, have we not?” Anne stated, catching her breath, and turning away from Cole to Gilbert and Winnifred.

 Winnifred watched as Gilbert opened his mouth and his hand began to gesture in her direction when Anne abruptly cut him short by enveloping him in a tight hug. He appeared taken back as he nearly lost his balance, but his arms soon found their way around her petite waist.

 “Thank you for coming!” she cried as they broke apart. “Really and truly, Gilbert. I daresay I might not have been on that stage if it had not been for your dear companionship after school these past weeks.”

 Gilbert looked down at the ground, flustered at the unexpected recognition from Anne, a blush crawling up his neck from beneath his collar. “You were remarkable, Anne. I was only an outlet for your creativity and talent,” he said fondly, his eyes meeting hers as the two shared a moment in which Winnifred felt like she was intruding upon.

 Anne was the first to break the trance by turning to Winnifred and taking both of her hands in her own. “You must be Miss Rose. I was so pleased to hear that you were attending the fundraiser. I hope you have enjoyed Avonlea. Before you leave, I simply must show you The Lake of Shining Waters. It would be a shame to miss such a glorious sight at this time of the year,” said Anne with nearly as much fervor as the poem she had just recited.

 Taken aback slightly by her enthusiasm, Winnifred returned the offer with a genuine smile herself and squeezed the redhead girl’s hands, declaring, “How could I pass up such a lovely proposal for adventure, Miss Shirley-Cuthbert? Perhaps while we are there, you could read another poem? I do not think I can take another conversation about the latest medical practice from Mr. Blythe.” She shot Gilbert a teasing look and he shrugged in return.

 Winnifred feared Anne was going to burst from elation—quite literally—after hearing her proposal and the redhead squealed delightedly. “Yes of course! I—”

 However, before she could finish her next thought, she was being ushered away by a short, stout, grey haired woman who had been calling her name and informed her that she must meet one of the biggest donors of the fundraiser. Anne turned and waved, mouthing ‘Good-bye’ to the three of them as she disappeared in the flock of people.

 “I think I know where your passion lies, Gilbert,” she smirked as he stared after the satin outline of the girl. He turned, giving her a puzzled look and she continued. “Oh please, dear friend. You may deny it until you are blue in the face, but your eyes tell me all that I need to know. Perhaps anyone for that matter. You mustn’t let someone like her slip away from you. She’s a rarity in this big world.” Winnifred would know, seeing as she had met many people from all kinds of places thus far in her short lifetime.

 Gilbert stood there, his brow furrowed after listening to her words, his brain making an obvious effort to understand everything she had spoken to him. Then, it was as if a new dawning had just occurred to him, and the lines in his forehead smoothed. He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and uttered a ‘Thank-you’ before turning on his heel to go find the auburn-haired girl she assumed.

 She stood there, arms crossed, feeling rather smug with herself for helping a friend in need. Perhaps one day, she would find an equal partner in life like Gilbert with Anne, but for now, she was content in experiencing more that this world had to offer. She was awakened from her reverie when Cole, who she had nearly forgotten was still standing beside her, spoke.

 “I think you and I are going to be good friends,” he said with a glint in his eye that said, ‘I have been telling them the same thing for years.’ Miss Rose grinned up at him and accepted the gentlemanly arm he extended.

“Shall we drink to prosperity or continued foolishness?” she questioned as they arrived at the beverage table, handing him a glass of punch and taking one of her own. 

“Both!” he chuckled, as they clinked glasses and each took sips of the sweet, orange liquid.

Winnifred would later learn that his toast would reign remarkably true.

[ideahat-universe]

Listen guys, we have to have a talk. Or should I say, I need to have a talk with you guys about this thing where we deconstruct everything to get some maligned meaning out of it that we mistake for value.

I have a vision and it has a name and it's name is Meta-Modernism. That's right. I have an initiative to embrace the uncomplicated and to take things as they are or at the very least celebrate the essentials of how something is typically portrayed.

That's kind of what I'm doing with the Pony RPG. On one hand I amplify the action and the potential for violence that MLP oddly embraces in it's own way while also keeping other elements like friendship, a light hearted tone, and a sense of adventure.

And I say this because during the height of MLP G4 fandom I found a lot of popular fan art erased elements of MLP rather than amplify.

For all the humor in it. Dawn Somewhere's MLP cartoons embrace a level of cynicism that appears to have contempt for the franchise rather than acceptance.

And speaking of cynicism, I'm pretty tired of the Winnie the Pooh mental illness theory.

This too drastically misses the point of the book (and the show for that matter) and its characters and its general theme in order to promote the obsession with defining behavior with a specific illness to the point where you have to ask if having a personality is synonymous with having a mental illness.

If you go back and actually watch The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh or even the first film you'd recognize that they are pretty normal and more well rounded than people give them credit for.

Winnie the Pooh, at its best mixes the fantastic with the grounded to create this world that exists in the mind of a child who (and this is my meta-modern theory time) is anthropomorphizing his own suburban neighborhood.

The 100 Acre woods is just a neighborhood and the residents there are people living their own lives in the ways they've grown accustomed to. The actions of adults from a child's perspective.

Do those adults have mental illnesses? Maybe. It's clear that Piglet has some sort of anxiety issues and that Eeyore is a bit depressed but perhaps there's a reason for it and it's never debilitating. There are shades to even Eeyore's behavior that doesn't imply he's clinically depressed, merely grounded with what he considers sensible outlooks on a situation.

Beyond that I take umbrage with every other definition.

Classifying Pooh as nothing more than a gluttonous honey eating machine grays out the specifics of how he behaves and interacts with others.

Owl being defined as a narcissist implies that one can't have confidence in their own intelligence and lived experience without that person being extremely self involved.

Or Rabbit being obsessive compulsive. Being a homemaker means you have OCD I guess. Rabbit does not have a pristine and immaculate home nor does Rabbit have physical or emotional ticks. They get annoyed when their stuff is being damaged or stolen and they like the stuff that they have. That's completely normal.

Tigger being labeled with ADHD is fairly problematic as it's probably the most over diagnosed condition you can apply to a person. "Oh, they have a lust for life and like running head first into adventure which makes them feel happy and alive? Well that person has a mental illness!"

The worst is the one I saved for last. To decide that you need to call a child with an imagination Schizophrenic is terribly disgusting. Every child that make believes something has Schizophrenia? Because Christopher Robin doesn't have any other traits of Schizophrenia but he does pretend that his stuffed animals are people that live in a forest near his home.

There's a reason why Christopher Robin is portrayed as some sort of authority figure in the 100 acre woods and that's because from Christopher's perspective the residents of the woods are silly people living slightly off kilter lives and he is the straight laced adult that understands the world and can solve the simple problems that these characters have.

Why? Because Christopher Robin wants to imagine himself as a responsible, intelligent adult who can be depended on and trusted which is what a well adjusted child pretends to be.

That's why almost all the characters in the woods are odd people with simple problems and flaws because Christopher based them on real people he knows in his neighborhood but doesn't know the long back story that formed their character or what their actual problems in life are so they have simple problems that he understands and can on addition solve because it's his make believe story.

Winnie the Pooh is just a child having fun in the woods. That's all there is to it and that's the best thing about it.

[theamityelf]

-I liked the way they conveyed the characters’ backstories; it was for the most part pretty graceful and felt rewarding, as someone who knew these things from the book. The stuff about Miss Hannah was not something I expected to see acknowledged on such a level, and they were able to have Sarah verbally state what happened to her without it feeling unjustified.

-As I mentioned in previous posts on the subject, I disliked most of their adaptation choices for Dana. They took most of her ideas from the book and had other characters verbally feed them to her in the show. I felt like a lot of what I loved about her character wasn't there anymore.

-They adapted Rufus well. He seemed true to his book self, and the scenes between him and Dana were largely lifted from the book. The extra scenes of him that weren't in the book also felt in-character.

-They did Sarah DIRTY, and overall weakened Dana’s relationships with the enslaved characters; in my opinion, this was the biggest flaw of the addition of Olivia to the story and the dulling of Dana’s situational intelligence; in the book, she didn’t have to be told to help out around the cookhouse, and she didn’t have to be told to do what she could for the slaves.

-Except for the ways where I felt she overstayed her welcome and took too much attention from characters and relationships I liked, I thought Olivia was fine. I like that she "poisons" Dana. I like that Olivia felt protective of Alice, and I’m happy that Alice got to have a cat.

-WHY NOT JUST NAME WINNIE TESS?

-I really loved the Carrie fake-out. I fully believed they were going through with it, and the impact it would have on Rufus's friendship with Nigel and how it might parallel Tom's relationship with Luke intrigued me. I was very curious where they'd go with it. Then when that culminated the way it did, I was still intrigued. Also, I really liked Carrie and Nigel.

-I dislike how it tried to spin her concerned neighbors as Karens? Like, I get that you're going through a lot and don't feel like explaining, but you guys have been SCREAMING and you're visibly injured. It's not weird that they're concerned. Like, I understand Dana’s reaction of like “I get it but please leave me alone right now; I do not have the emotional mileage for this conversation,” but Kevin getting actively angry and being so aggro over barely anything was weird and really very stupid.

-I kind of enjoyed the encounter with Temperance; this weird evil child who very much isn’t written as just a little kid who is a product of her time; she isn’t normal with most people and then racist with slaves, she is just a weird evil Bad Seed-esque child, and Dana very mildly no-dice-ing her cruelty was enough to violently shake her worldview, and I found that fun to watch.

-I like that they placed it in the modern day, but I dislike that they made no use of it, really. IF YOU HAVE AN IPHONE THAT CAN TAKE PICTURES, THERE IS NO REASON TO LET ANYONE DOUBT YOUR STORY. Also, show Auntie the ring???

-Margaret was very in character; Tom was a little off. I didn't mind it, but I don't like the way Tom ended things with Kevin; it felt like a change that would threaten future book events, and that worries me.

-I like that they brought chocolate back; I wish they’d played with that idea more. The fact that they made a shopping trip for this is a change from the book that I enjoy, because while it didn’t make too much sense lore-wise, it had the potential to give us some cool moments. I wish the show had indulged in that more. If driving to the store is on the table, I want you guys drawing up some freedom papers for Dana, some old timey money for both Dana and Kevin, etc. You have iPhones? Take pictures. While you’re at the store, buy a multipack of candy for the enslaved children. Maybe you notice the attic is cold and leaky and you come back with putty. The fact that your thesis is that we wouldn’t stand a chance in slavery times doesn’t mean they can’t use the tools available; it means you need to show how those tools are ultimately a band-aid solution for the larger problems, and show us what those problems are! Yes, you’ve made freedom papers, but someone can easily take them from you. Stuff like that. These are things they thought about, in the book, but couldn't accomplish, for various reason. Here, there is no reason given.

-The characters don’t know how to lie, and it’s very frustrating. Like, really frustrating.

-I enjoyed the adaptation and have hope for the future of it, if it does continue. But they did not write Dana well, in my opinion.

Have yall been watching? Im interested to hear from people who have read the book and watched the first season of the show. What worked and didn't work for you?

[mercurygray]

So, I Hear You Liked: 1917

More World War One Films

I was very excited about 1917 when it first came out because it almost perfectly coincided with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, a conflict that I love to read about, write about, and watch movies about. This period is my JAM, and there's such a lot of good content for when you're done with Sam Mendes's film.

Obviously there are a lot of movies and TV shows out there - this is just a selection that I enjoyed, and wish more people knew about.

Note: Everyone enjoys a show or movie for different reasons. These shows are on this list because of the time period they depict, not because of the quality of their writing, the accuracy of their history or the political nature of their content. Where I’m able to, I’ve mentioned if a book is available if you’d like to read more.

I'd like to start the list with a movie that isn't a fiction piece at all - Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old (2019) is a beautifully produced film that allows the soldiers and archival images themselves, lovingly retimed and tinted into living color, to tell their own story. It is a must watch for anyone interested in the period.

Wings (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), A Farewell to Arms (1932, 1957), The Dawn Patrol (1938), Sergeant York (1941), and Paths of Glory (1957) are all classics with a couple of Oscars between them, and it's sort of fun to watch how the war gets changed and interpreted as the years pass. (The Dawn Patrol, for instance, might as just as easily be about the RAF in World War 2.)

All Quiet is based on a famous memoir, and A Farewell to Arms on a Hemingway novel; both have several adaptations and they're all a little different. Speaking of iconic novels, Doctor Zhivago (1965) based on the Pasternak novel of the same title, examines life of its protagonist between 1905 and the start of the second World War.

I think one thing historians agree on is that the start of World War One is worth discussing - and that there's a lot of backstory. Fall of Eagles (1974), a 13 part BBC miniseries, details the relationships between the great houses of Europe, starting in the 1860s; it's long but good, and I think might be on YouTube. The Last Czars (2019) takes a dramatized look at the Romanovs and how their reactions to the war lead to their eventual demise.

As far as the war itself, Sarajevo (2014) and 37 Days (2014) both discuss the outbreak of hostilities and the slow roll into actual battle.

The Passing Bells (2014) follows the whole war through the eyes of two soldiers, one German and one British, beginning in peacetime.

Joyeux Noel ( 2005) is a cute story - it takes place early in the war during the Christmas Peace and approaches the event from a multinational perspective.

War Horse (2011) is, of course, a name you'll recognize. Based on the breakout West End play, which is itself based on a YA novel by Michael Morpurgo, the story follows a horse who's requisitioned for cavalry service and the young man who owns him. Private Peaceful (2012) is also based on a Morpurgo novel, but I didn't think it was quite as good as War Horse.

The Wipers Times (2013) is one of my all-time favorites; it's about a short lived trench paper written and produced by soldiers near Ypres, often called Wipers by the average foot soldier. The miniseries, like the paper, is laugh out loud funny in a dark humor way.

My Boy Jack (2007) is another miniseries based on a play, this one about Rudyard Kipling and his son, Jack, who served in the Irish Guards and died at Loos. Kipling later wrote a poem about the death of his son, and helped select the phrase that appears on all commonwealth gravestones of the First World War.

Gallipoli (1981) is stunning in a way only a Peter Weir movie can be; this is a classic and a must-see.

Gallipoli is a big story that's been told and retold a lot. I still haven't seen Deadline Gallipoli (2015) an Australian miniseries about the men who wrote about the battle for the folks back home and were subject to censorship about how bad things really were. For a slightly different perspective, the Turkish director Yesim Sezgin made Çanakkale 1915 in 2012, detailing the Turkish side of the battle. Although most of The Water Diviner (2014) takes place after the war is over, it also covers parts of Gallipoli and while it didn't get great reviews, I enjoy it enough to own it on DVD.

I don't know why all of my favorite WWI films tend to be Australian; Beneath Hill 60 (2010) is another one of my favorites, talking about the 1st Australian Tunneling Company at the Ypres Salient. The War Below (2021) promises to tell a similar story about the Pioneer companies at Messines, responsible for building the huge network of mines there.

Passchendaele (2008) is a Canadian production about the battle of the same name. I'd forgotten I've seen this film, which might not say very much for the story.

Journey's End (2017) is an adaptation of an RC Sheriff play that takes place towards the end of the war in a dugout amongst British officers.

No look at the Great War is complete without a nod to developing military technologies, and this is the war that pioneers the aviation battle for us. I really wish Flyboys (2006) was better than it is, but The Red Baron (2008) makes up for it from the German perspective.

One of the reasons I like reading about the First World War is that everyone is having a revolution. Technology is growing by leaps and bounds, women are fighting for the right to vote, and a lot of colonial possessions are coming into their own, including (but not limited to) Ireland. Rebellion (2016) was a multi-season miniseries that went into the Easter Rising, as well as the role the war played there. Michael Collins (1996) spends more time with the Anglo-Irish war in the 1920s but is still worth watching (or wincing through Julia Roberts' bad accent, you decide.) The Wind that Shakes the Barley covers the same conflict and is excellent.

The centennial of the war meant that in addition to talking about the war, people were also interested in talking about the Armenian Genocide. The Promise (2016) and The Ottoman Lieutenant (2017) came out around the same time and two different looks at the situation in Armenia.

This is a war of poets and writers, of whom we have already mentioned a few. Hedd Wynn ( 1992) which is almost entirely in Welsh, and tells the story of Ellis Evans, a Welsh language poet who was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. I think Ioan Gruffudd has read some of his poetry online somewhere, it's very pretty. A Bear Named Winnie (2004) follows the life of the bear who'd become the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh. Tolkien (2019) expands a little on the author's early life and his service during the war. Benediction (2021) will tell the story of Siegfried Sassoon and his time at Craiglockhart Hospital. Craiglockhart is also represented in Regeneration (1997) based on a novel by Pat Barker.

Anzac Girls (2014) is probably my favorite mini-series in the history of EVER; it follows the lives of a group of Australian and New Zealand nurses from hospital duty in Egypt to the lines of the Western Front. I love this series not only because it portrays women (ALWAYS a plus) but gives a sense of the scope of the many theatres of the war that most movies don't. It's based on a book by Peter Rees, which is similarly excellent.

On a similar note, The Crimson Field (2014) explores the lives of members of a Voluntary Aid Detachment, or VADs, lady volunteers without formal nursing training who were sent to help with menial work in hospitals. It only ran for a season but had a lot of potential. Testament of Youth (2014) is based on the celebrated memoirs of Vera Brittain, who served as a VAD for part of the war and lead her to become a dedicated pacifist.

Also, while we're on the subject of women, though these aren't war movies specifically, I feel like the additional color to the early 20th century female experience offered by Suffragette (2015) and Iron-Jawed Angels (2004) is worth the time.

As a general rule, Americans don't talk about World War One, and we sure don't make movies about it, either. The Lost Battalion (2001) tells the story of Major Charles Whittlesey and the 9 companies of the 77th Infantry division who were trapped behind enemy lines during the battle of the Meuse Argonne.

I should add that this list is curtailed a little bit by what's available for broadcast or stream on American television, so it's missing a lot of dramas in other languages. The Road to Calvary (2017) was a Russian drama based on the novels of Alexei Tolstoy. Kurt Seyit ve Şura (2014) is based on a novel and follows a love story between a Crimean officer (a Muslim) and the Russian woman he loves. The show is primarily in Turkish, and Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, who plays the lead, is *very* attractive.

Finally, although it might seem silly to mention them, Upstairs Downstairs (1971-1975 ) Downton Abbey (2010-2015) and Peaky Blinders (2013-present) are worth a mention and a watch. All of them are large ensemble TV shows that take place over a much longer period than just the Great War, but the characters in each are shaped tremendously by the war.

[nightingaelic]

NV companions reactions to taking the courier’s place in OWB

"Here and now got its ups and downs, but... focusing on the past, like it was any better? That's just Old World Blues." -Blind Diode Jefferson

Arcade Gannon: Being whisked off to a pre-war scientific research haven and adopted by a group of five floating brains in jars was actually a dream Arcade had once, but he was pretty sure it didn't involve losing his own brain along the way. Conversation with the Think Tank would leave him amused at first, but increasingly more horrified as he learned the secrets of Big MT and realized just how much chaos they could create if they weren't busy playing in their Mojave sandbox. The most intriguing part of Big MT for Arcade would, of course, be the Sink. The Biological research station, the light switches, the Sink Central Intelligence Unit and all the others would fascinate him, and he would do his best to figure out their components and try to replicate them in New Vegas for the Followers of the Apocalypse to use. This leads to more than a few circular conversations with Doctor Klein and, once he meets him, Doctor Mobius. I think Mobius' side of the story would leave Arcade depressed about the state of Big MT and the various things roaming its landscape that used to be people. His argument with his own brain, on the other hand, would be worthy of any pre-war sitcom. Though sorely tempted to destroy the Think Tank for good and prevent their wild experimentation ever escaping the crater, I think Arcade would weight the potential good their technology could do much more heavily and convince Doctor Klein to partner with him as a new head researcher.

Craig Boone: Given Boone's hatred for the Legion and their enslavement practices, the Think Tank would seal their doom as soon as they stripped him of his brain and his ability to fight back. And once he found Little Yangtze and its total pacification collars? Oh, it's on. I don't think Boone would be sly about his anger either, but given the Think Tank's flippant attitude toward their lobotomites, they probably wouldn't pick up on just how furious he was until it was too late. There are two things Boone would form attachments to while sneaking around Big MT: Roxie, the ever-loyal cyberdog with a heart of gold, and the Stealth Suit Mk II, which compliments Boone's combat style with minimal commentary. While I don't think Boone would have any strong feelings either way toward Doctor Mobius, I don't think he would kill him unless he had to. Mobius would probably be tickled by his stoic countenance, and would attempt to shower him in Mentats as a way of loosening up. Boone's brain would be a bit like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, reveling in its own sadness for once because Boone always shoved those feelings out of sight and out of mind. Their main argument would be over a compromise to confront that deep sorrow once reunited. When the Think Tank is dead, Boone zaps Roxie and himself back to Nipton, then smashes the Big Mountain Transportalponder! on the nearest rock.

Lily Bowen: I think we could class Lily's reaction to being kidnapped and experimented upon by the Think Tank as utter confusion. She would still be as benevolent as ever, trying her best to soothe the over-inflated egos of the various doctors as they debated what to do with this creature that had thoroughly stumped the Auto-Doc upon recovery, but I think she would start looking for the exit as soon as they suggested a full dissection. Lily's experience in Big MT would be very different from the other companions after that, with the Think Tank sending wave after wave of lobotomites and night stalkers after her in an attempt to regain their new test subject, and Lily beating each attack back with her trusty vertibird blade and the growing pile of new gadgets she accumulated with every location visited. I think Doctor Mobius would watch this play out with interest, and would send a few packs of robo-scorpions to herd her toward the radar fence, then surreptitiously lower the barrier long enough for her to stumble outside. The story of her time in "the Big Empty" would become a fireside hit in Jacobstown, but few would believe that she had actually found the place where all cazadores and night stalkers come from.

Raul Alfonso Tejada: Raul is already missing a few body parts, so what's one more? The old ghoul would be somewhat exasperated at finding himself in another situation of imprisonment and being forced to do work for others, but at least it's not as boring as Black Mountain. Big MT, on the other hand, is a heck of a lot more deadly than the State of Utobitha, but all Raul can do is roll his eyes every time he spots another band of lobotomites chasing him down or robo-scorpions crawling over the horizon. Like Boone, Raul grows fond of Roxie, though his favorite acquisition from Big MT's tech piles would definitely be the proton axe: He just likes the way it looks and feels when he's swinging it around. Confronting Doctor Mobius would come when the old ghoul is reaching the end of his patience with the Think Tank, though he would spare the mad scientist some time to listen to his sad story and ponder the fate of Big MT. I think Raul would be the one most in tune with his disembodied brain, and they would greet each other as old friends that share a rocky history, but have accepted each other's flaws. As for the Think Tank, Raul would leave the decision of what to do with them up to Doctor Mobius: After all, they're not his mess to clean up.

Rose of Sharon Cassidy: Oh boy. Cass is no one's errand girl, but she's also rather fond of her brain, pickled in liquor though it may be. She would blaze a deadly trail through Big MT, marked by the wrecked bodies of robo-scorpions and Y-17 trauma override harnesses (a personal scourge for the former caravan owner, maybe her teams wouldn't have been killed if she'd just had some goddamned walking suits to do the job) and the never-ending stream of curse words floating on the crater's breeze. The lobotomites would quickly learn to stay out of her way, and every new acquisition for the Think Tank would be tossed unceremoniously on the floor of the sanctum with a clatter. Doctor Dala loves the caravaner, but the others all hate her, and Cass can't help but find the feeling mutual. Doctor Mobius would not be able to sway her from high-tailing it out of Big MT as soon as possible, and like Raul, she would not see the Think Tank's containment as her responsibility. Her brain, on the other hand, would berate her for her internalized guilt and bully her into doing the right thing - which, in her case, is eliminating the Think Tank's threat once and for all.

Veronica Santangelo: The main challenge for the doctors of the Think Tank upon capturing Veronica would be prying her away from their sanctum long enough to set her on the path to retrieving tech for them. Like Arcade, Veronica would be fascinated by the Sink and everything in it, but she would be equally fascinated with the scientists themselves and their varied personalities. She would prod Doctor Klein for details about his work, decode Doctor 8's speech patterns, and roll her tongue around in her mouth for Doctor Dala's recording equipment. Getting her brain back would take a backseat to just wandering Big MT, taking in the crazy inventions from a world long gone and wondering which ones she could bring home to Elder McNamara to show him how remaining set in his ways has put the Brotherhood of Steel on a path to irrelevance. This desire would stay her hand after meeting Doctor Mobius, and would lead her to convince the Think Tank to abandon their escape attempts and return to testing silly hypotheses. Her most important discovery would be the clues left behind by Father Elijah, well on his way to becoming a mad scientist himself, and Christine, hot on his trail for the Brotherhood of Steel. All in all, the experience would leave Veronica hungry for more adventure and send her sprinting toward the Sierra Madre and an uncertain fate.

ED-E: As a robot, the Think Tank would be disappointed with the little intruder and would likely argue about whether to toss it in the scrap pile. Doctor 0 would be absolutely disgusted by the intrusion of Robert House's technology into Big MT, but Doctor Dala would become attached to the eyebot and adopt it, cooing about the elegance of its design while simultaneously bemoaning its lack of biorhythms. ED-E, confused, would humor her for a while before striking out to explore the crater and its many wonders. After its first run-in with lobotomites, the eyebot would flee in fear, straight past the X-42 giant robo-scorpion and into the clutches of Doctor Mobius. The self-proclaimed villain would take pity on the robot and release it outside the radar fence with an escort of robo-scorpions to take home.

Rex: Cyberdogs are a well-known quantity at Big MT, so the new arrival from outside the radar fence is immediately handed over to Doctor Borous for his X-8 project. With a fresh new brain, some grease on his joints, and a competent pack addition named Roxie, Rex is ready to take on any obstacle courses in the X-8 research center. Once the two cyberdogs grow bored of tearing through night stalkers and avoiding Gabe, they make their escape and lope off into the Mojave to have a litter of Boston terrifiers together.