Alice (or Wonderland fame) wasn’t the blueprint for angry autistic weirdgirls that have a bone to pick with society at large for popular culture to reduce her personality to “quirky”.

I know Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (mostly the former) are extended metaphors for the childhood experience (being ordered around, dismissed by all, subjected to silly rules, unable to control your environment, etc) but... maybe it's just me, sure, but growing up as a "weird kid" -read: most likely neurodivergent but never diagnosed- adds this very relatable, and very unpleasant, layer.

I think Alice 100% grows up to be queer in like 10 different, seemingly contradictory directions ngl

my Alice design btw, featuring source!Alice (left) and adult!Alice aka Alice 20 years and one gender later (right)

More adaptations of Alice in Wonderland should remember the Hatter is supposed to be Scottish. J*hnny D*pp putting on a kilt and an accent isn’t enough I need a theatre production in which the guy just straight up plays the bagpipes.

Hello I would like to hear everything you know about Alice’s cat

I can’t remember her name rn but I am very invested in the lives of her and her children

I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO HEAR ABOUT THAT ONE TRAIN AND ALSO THE BUGS FROM THE PART RIGHT AFTER THE TRAIN

In the books, Alice has a cat called Dinah, and she has a habit of talking to her. By TLG, Dinah has had kittens, and Alice owns two of them, yet unnamed: a white kitten and a mischievous black kitten. The two kittens are, respectively, the White and Red Queens from her dream. I absolutely love that plot twist because it literally comes out of nowhere and makes no sense.

OH THE FUCKING TRAIN… that part was terrifying ngl. Alice is teleported into a wagon in a magical train in which all the passengers are connected to a hivemind and think the same things and speak at the same time. One of the passengers is Laws personified. And the train is the Stock Market. There’s a talking mosquito in it, and the mosquito introduces Alice to the dreamworld insects— one of which, the Snap-Dragonfly, is based off a Victorian Christmas game called Snapdragon! (You had to pick raisins coated in flaming alcohol from a bucket… the Snap-Dragonfly, of course, is Christmas-themed and only eats Christmas food. Would that be cannibalism? Maybe.)

The fucking train scene scared me so bad as a kid. It came outta nowhere.

Opinion on the queen of hearts? What do you think she could symbolize to a child? Was i the only person who was and still is haunted by the part where she wants to decapitate the Ceshire cat but cant because was just a head? I wasnt worried about thw cat, i just get a really creepy weird feeling whenever i read or see or remember that part.

AAAAAH THE QUEEN OF HEARTS! She’s an amazing character and I really like her!!! Lewis managed to create an antagonist that is both hilarious and creepy and the funny and scary parts don’t cancel out each other.

The Queen of Hearts is a reference to an admittedly pretty dark nursery rhyme that has since become less well known. After all, a lot of elements in AIW/TLG don’t make sense to non-1860s audiences, much less if you don’t have the context of Lewis’ personal life and friendships to back your readings up.

To me, the Queen of Hearts represents authority, particularly seen from a child’s point of view. I am not entirely sure if that was the real authorial intent, but I say death of the author and express only my reading, which is that the Queen symbolizes adult demands that, to Alice, are completely non-sensical… though all of AIW/TLG’s nobility represents authority and it’s many facets in some way. The Red Queen is a strict preceptor, the White Queen is a friendly mother figure, the Duchess is an abusive caretaker that doubles as an overbearing moral guardian, and the Queen of Hearts is the sort of authority figure kids can’t understand. She is angry, but Alice can’t figure out why. She wants to have everyone, even disembodied heads, decapitated, which Alice finds ridiculous. She never comes through with her threats according to both the King and the Griffin. And for some reason she really likes Alice, who doesn’t like her back, or at least at first, before she starts questioning the dreamworld’s warped justice system.

To me, the AIW/TLG shared dreamworld represents life seen from Alice’s perspective, though they are distorted as nightmares tend to be. If Alice has some authority figure in her life she can’t understand or whom she thinks is unreasonable yet still tolerates her conditionally (such as a teacher or a family member), those feelings have been sublimated into the Queen of Hearts.

(I can’t get the part in which Alice compared the Red Queen to her private preceptor out of my head, and I think this comparison gives a bit of credence to my hypothesis- though, in-universe, the Red Queen is Alice’s black kitten, so it’s unclear just how real the dreamworld is! And the Hunting of the Snark’s out of universe’s existence implies the dreamworld isn’t just a figment of Alice’s subconscious.)

In short I have many thoughts about the Queen of Hearts but overall I can say she’s got a bomb aesthetic and is rather disturbing for a relatively non-threatening villain.