A reaction to TV Tropes’ “Dead Unicorn Tropes”

TV Tropes and Idioms is a great site, and a bad website.

For dissecting fiction, identifying tropes, throwing little tidbits of cool info and fun trivia, it is a great site.

For actually teaching people real things about the world, or when it comes to its generalizations of genres and styles... it can be very bad. 

I have this love-dislike relationship (not hate though) with TV Tropes because this site was so useful for me so many times I can’t imagine not living without it ; BUT I also noticed so much wrong things posted or written in pages because TV Tropes is not kept by actual experts and anyone can actually write anything in there - hopefully people double-check and hold the website together, but a lot of false, incomplete or biased information just slips by as it lacks Wikipedia’s stern neutral position. 

And as I was scrolling through the pages I found the “Dead Unicorn Tropes” page. A page listing tropes that are basically “dead horse tropes” (that is to say over-used, over-parodied, over-played with, over-referenced tropes to the point they are seen as painfully cliche, greatly unfunny or dreadfully doll and boring owadays) - but with the twist that they are “unicorns”. Aka... while everyone treat these tropes as ancient, worn-out, over-used cliches, they never actually existed as “tropes” in the first place. They never were as popular and widespread as people believed - it is basically the Mandela Effect, but for popular culture. 

For example many people think that James Bond wears a tuxedo all the time - when in truth he always just wore tuxedos for a few crucial scenes. But given they were among the most iconic and well-known scenes, popular culture developped the belief that James Bond was ALWAYS in a tuxedo. Or a lot of people parody romance animes by having the main protagonist running late for school with a toast in their mouth only to bump into someone... despite this scenario never being widespread or really used in the first place in animes of this genre. 

Anyway... What caught my eye was a specific section of this page. A section dedicated to fairytales. And this being a fairytale blog... let’s react! 

Fairy tales' supposed idealism and inevitable happy endings are commonly mocked and "deconstructed", most people being unaware that the real stories were often violent, cynical, and depressing. It's something of a Cyclic Trope, since the original stories had such a grim tone, before being bowdlerized and Disneyfied because Children Are Innocent (which is in itself an example of this trope), causing the stories to end up in an Animation Age Ghetto, which left them filled with Fridge Logic and other ripe fodder for deconstruction. On the other end of the spectrum, the belief that all fairy tales were originally gory grimdark horror stories before their Disneyfication is similarly exaggerated; the most common gratuitously violent passages that modern adaptations tend to leave out involve the deaths of the villains at the story's end. Grimmification as a trope is a rather ironic appellation, as The Brothers Grimm were in fact the Ur-Example of Disneyfication, with many of their stories being even darker before the Grimms retold them (but still not the nightmare gorefest people like to think).

I don’t have much to add to this section. The complicated thing with TV Tropes is that it mixes all fairytales together, not separating their origins, genres, cultural context - but what you can be sure about is that when they generalize “fairytales”, they actually talk of the “Western fairytales”, the specific chain of fairytales that went Italian-French-German. 

It is true that the original Italian fairytales (well... they weren’t fairytales because the term fairytale was invented by the French, but these were proto-fairytales) were filled with sex, violence and grotesque elements - but that was because they were farcical humoristic stories, part of a long tradition of surreal bawdy slapstick tales inherited from medieval times, and they were entirely destined to adults. 

The French fairytales were a “Disneyification” as TV Tropes says : because they became courtly tales told by nobles, aristocrats and intellectuals - it was the introduction of traditional fairytale princesses, of virtues and beauty winning over vice and ugliness, of delicate dialogues and scenes out of pastoral romances, etc... Perrault was the one who removed from Little Red Riding Hood the most gruesome details (such as how the wolf, according to some versions, leaves a bit of the blood and flesh of the grandmother for Little Red to eat). BUT on the flipside, French fairytales were FAR away from being Disney fairytales. They were “dark” as while they removed obvious sexuality they kept all the violence, from Bluebeard killing his wives in a chamber of blood to ogres eating their own children while being drunk one night. And while happy endings were very common, they weren’t a standard of fairytales: Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood ends with the girl being eaten by the Wolf, and that’s it - because it is a warning tale ; while Madame d’Aulnoy’s The Yellow Dwarf ends with the two lovers dying and becoming a couple of trees - due to the story being inspired by ancient myths. 

As for the German fairytales, the work of the Brothers Grimm... On one side they do seem “darker” than the French fairytales due to trying to imitate/stay more faithful to the original folktales, and thus they include much less refinment, much less clear virtues and vices, much more bizarre, disturbing or murky elements... But nothing is too simple, as the Brothers Grimm also HEAVILY “Disneyified” fairytales - they cut down many tales from their book they deemed too “immoral” ; they added many happy endings (they invented the Woodsman saving Little Red Riding Hood) and they changed many dark elements (Snow-White’s stepmother was originally the girl’s mother). 

Overall it is impossible to pin-point a specific “culprit” for making fairytales “lighter” or “darker” because each new incarnation of them has its own part of darkness and lightness... But TV Tropes might also evoke “fairytales” as in “literary fairytales VS folkloric fairytales” - opposing the fairytales written down by authors who actually tried to create a work of literature (all the fairytales talked about above are part of this category) to the actual “fairytales” told by common people, part of folklore and which inspired the literary fairytales. That is another often overlooked simplification: the fairytales we know are all literary works - inspired by folktales yes, but the same way you can have television shows, movies or podcasts inspired by folktales. And under this angle - yes, definitively, all the literary works put a “lighter” twist on the original tales of the common folk. 

True Love's Kiss is not an original element to most fairy tales, but is rather a Disneyfication element. Many fairy tales' protagonists did indeed have The Big Damn Kiss, but it's not meant to be something especially powerful or magical, like a Deus ex Machina. Taking a survey of the most popular such kisses: in the Grimms' version of "Sleeping Beauty", the prince does awake the title character with a kiss, but that's just coincidence because he happened to be there when her hundred-year curse expired;note and in "Snow White", the prince never kisses Snow White, but instead drops her coffin and dislodged the chunk of poisoned apple stuck in her throat. The Ur-Example of the trope was in Norse Mythology, of the Valkyrie Brunhilda who was punished by Odin to sleep on a couch surrounded by fire and was awakened with a kiss from the hero Siegfried.

True! Well, almost... “true love kiss” was present in some French fairytales (as part of the “courtly love” angle - later taken back by the Grimms who wanted to make some tales “cleaner”), and fairytales do have magical kisses of various kinds, but 1) the term “true love kiss” was invented by Disney for its Snow-White movie and 2) the concept of a magical kiss has been taken out of proportions in fairytales. As the text points out: no versions of Snow-White, from the Grimms or from others, have the princess being woken up with a kiss - it was a Disney invention. But given Disney’s two most prominent and famous fairy-tale adaptations (Snow-White and Sleeping Beauty) used the “true love kiss” resolution, people learning of fairytales through Disney thought it was a traditional ending - and Disney’s capitalizing on it did ot help. 

I will also add that while the Grimms’ use of the “magical love kiss” might have been influenced by the Germanic myth of Siegfried (after all the Grimms heavily studied and reconstructed Germanic mythology) ; the “magical love kiss” of French fairytales was obviously taken rather from Greco-Roman sources, more precisely from the tale of “Psyche and Cupid”, THE first proto-fairytale. 

The Knight in Shining Armor rescuing the Damsel in Distress from a dragon is commonly associated with fairy tales, but this is rather rare; The Brothers Grimm only used it twice.

Kind-of-true too. Dragons are NOT typical or traditional fairytale villains - except maybe in folktales and rural legends. Similarly, male heroes in fairytales are rarely knights - they are mostly princes/nobles or peasants of some sort - sometimes a soldier, but that’s all. In fact, beyond the rare Brothers Grimm example cited above, the only other manifestations of this scenario appear in French fairytales, which loved to have a noble male hero save a damsel from some sort of monster - but dragons weren’t more popular than giants or wicked sorcerers, and the male hero rarely was a “knight” and rather a warrior-prince or fighting king. 

The Unicorn (natch) is even more rare. If you do catch one, it won't be the delicate and pure creature like the modern trope, but the fierce and dangerous version of actual medieval legend.

True, because unicorns do not belong to the world of fairytales, but to the world of legends! I never saw one “original” fairytale, literary or otherwise, using a unicorn. Unicorns were part of medieval bestiaries and legends, and as thus were then reused in works of the “fantasy” genre in modern days - and then fantasy “bled” and got a bit confused with fairytales, and unicorns hoped into the “modern fairytale” conception... But yeah, unicorns in fairytales are basically completely unseen.

The Fairy Godmother is extremely rare and appears to have been introduced from literary variants. Sleeping Beauty is often just the victim of a prophesied fate. Cinderella is generally helped by her dead mother in some way, or by some magical beings whose good will she's earned. Even when she appears, it's not that "fairy godmother" is a type of supernatural being akin to a "guardian angel", but rather that a character's godmother, someone everyone in medieval Christendom would have and would already know as a close family friend, is unexpectedly revealed to be a fairy in disguise.

Ah... “Literary variants”. Now that’s a very interesting thing. You know, for a very long time the critics, the teachers, the ones studying fairytales, had this approach: look for folklore, rural legends, the “folktales” first, then look at the literary fairytales later and compare the two, seeing literary fairytales as “reimaginations” of the “original” tales. Nowaday, people in universities, and experts of literature, and critics, recognize that this approach is false and outdated - thanks to the research proving that most of the “folktales” we claim were the “original” sources... actually are just rural twins or doubles of the literary fairytales, which became so popular they spread to the lower classes. And fairytale history nowadays begins with the literary fairytales first - heck, the very term “fairy tale” was invented to designate the literary tales. Fairytales was originally a literary genre - and the term was only later broadened to include “folktales” in it (resulting in many mythological legends or religious tales being often incoherently called “fairytales”). 

That being said... “The Fairy Godmother is very rare”. Oh boy... you feel whoever wrote this only knows of German fairytales, aka the Grimms’ work. Fairy godmothers are EVERYWHERE in the French fairytales. Why do you think the genre was called “fairy tale”? BECAUSE THERE WERE FRIGGIN FAIRIES EVERYWHERE!!! What’s even funnier is that the whole idea of “The Fairy Godmother protects the heroine” was invented by Grimms and Disney. A lot of fairytales in Madame d’Aulnoy’s books are actually persecuted by the fairy godmothers of the story’s villains, or of their rivals! Sometimes you even have battles of fairy godmothers! 

Fairies themselves. Almost any conversation involving them will bring up that in the original tales fairies weren't good or helpful but were supposedly all represented by the most sinister interpretations of The Fair Folk. In reality fairies in the old tales and mythology tend to run the whole gamut from being good and/or helpful to being downright vicious. In many tales the behaviour of the same fairy type or fairy character can vary wildly depending on how a human interacts with them (usually courteous and virtuous behaviour will be rewarded, while vanity and other character flaws will be punished)

On top of what I said above, the article of TV Tropes here also keeps practicing a big confusion between several types of fairytales. 

Fairies are actually pretty much absent from the fairytales of the Brother Grimms, who rather leave place for either magical dwarfs and imps, either witches, and sometimes supernatural ladies such as Frau Höle. The fairies REALLY come from the French fairytales - again, I have to insist, the very term “fairy tale” (conte de fées) was invented to talk about the works of Perrault and d’Aulnoy. And fairies in French fairytales were far from the “all good, kind and cute” fairies - again, this is Disney’s work (and actually it is also the work of Victorian literature, but that’s another subject). In French fairytales you have both good fairies and wicked fairies - though most of the time they are clearly divided by a manicheism of “good, kind, beautiful, benevolent fairies” VS “ugly, monstrous, old evil fairy”. However, some fairytales (such as those of Aulnoy) still blurred the line between the two as good fairies could be easily offended and thus do wicked things. 

But here TV Tropes again refers mostly to “folktales” VS “literary tales” - and of course in “folktales” fairies are wildly different from their literary counterpart... Though even there is yet again another layer of confusion (so many...), because the French “fées” are NOT the English “fairies” even though they do translate by the same word. In English “fairies” originally designates a lot of inhabitants of the Otherworld ranging from pixies to monsters: in French “une fée” is originally a supernatural lady of the Otherworld, a cross between a goddess and a druidess/priestess, halfway between a nymph and sorceress. 

Another random example of how TV Tropes’ description of Greek gods is... fanciful let’s say

I have talked about my problems with the description of the gods on TV Tropes pages about “Classical Mythology” (which puts under one category Greek and Roman myths), and here is another interesting example of what is wrong with it. This precise passage, found in the description of Ares:

** He also platonically adores both Eris and Hestia, In Eris’s case she is a NightmareFetishist so she liked him for the same reason most didn’t, Hestia on the other-hand [[AllLovingHero loves everybody]] so naturally this includes Ares.

Do I even need to precise what is wrong with this being found on the page for the ACTUAL religious and mythological figure? This is something straight out of a fictional take on the god.

I mean for Eris, despite the wording being quite poor, there is at least some basis. But for Hestia?

Do we have any text, any visual depiction, any clue or discovery that shows Hestia and Ares interacting? No. We have no record of Hestia and Ares having any specific contact or connection between each other. This specific sentence about Ares appreciating Hestia just because she loves and is kind to all the gods, including Ares... is bullshit. In fact, where does it say in Greek mythology that Hestia is an “all-loving goddess”? Yes, she is a goddess who is known to have never gotten angry with anybody ; yes, she is a giver of peace, joy and tranquility ; yes, she is greatly respected and honored by all, including the other immortals... But does it mean that somehow she will like everybody and be kind to everybody? Not really. That’s an interpretation. An interpretation that became popular thanks to Riordan’s take on Hestia - and while I do not dislike what Riordan did with Hestia (I think he really worked well into giving her honors back), one has to remember that it is a fictional interpretation. 

The TV Tropes page is supposedly here to inform people about the actual mythological and religious figure, and yet it is filled with info like that. Like this sentence which is actually basically the mythical equivalent of a “headcanon”. Just because Hestia has a good vibe, people draw the conclusion “Oh well, she probably musn’t have hated Ares!” or “Ares probably liked her more than others, because everybody loved her, right?”. But that’s... your deduction. Your interpretation. It is not written in texts. It is not engraved in old stones. It was not a religious or philosophical ideas of the Greeks. It’s... your headcanon.

And the TV Tropes page is just... filled SO MUCH with headcanons it becomes really creepy when you take a longer look at it. Once we had to fight a misinterpretation of Greek mythology based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how things worked - with Hades being the devil, and whatnot. But now, we have to fight a different type of misinterpretation - an over-interpretation that mixes fictional retellings with actual Greek beliefs and that confuses true facts and invented headcanons. 

the pass of branching out a silly parody expy character into no longer being a silly parody expy character and instead a normal regular character is that someone who likes the character you xeroxed from at 15 can look at the new version of the expy and not have a single fucking question about why there's an expy of so and so in the story. once you've passed that test you can now be sure that in the last 8 years this character has gotten marginally normaler and a lot less like D—[OUR BROADCAST SIGNALS HAVE BEEN CUT. PLEASE STAND BY]

I have some thoughts about episode 240 and I'd like to share them all with you here.

[Long post under cut]

I've been thinking mainly about the VHS tapes, and the idea of them being this kind of legacy that one has to hold on to, before giving them up and letting them become a memory.

And with that, I'm thinking about the literal physical act of cutting the cord after swiftly announcing who you are. Cutting the cord is an idiom for becoming independent. In broadcasting (TV or otherwise) it's dropping a channel you no longer want to view.

Kevin announcing to the town who he was, and then subsequently cutting out the broadcast in one fell swoop not only declares his independence, but also takes control right back. To cut the cord implies, to me, no longer being defined by that of what one has been defined by for eons.

An ancient radio host.

A man who has wandered the desert for centuries.

Given everything we know about Cecil and Kevin's relationship, and the animosity, and then perhaps vague understanding later on, it is no wonder that Cecil was the one to make the boy confront who he is. So much has happened to Cecil since he last saw Kevin. Angels are real. He's a father. His town has been explained away and brought back to life. Cecil doesn't give him a choice to turn his head away.

Cecil, who so rarely has the opportunity or ability to truly confront who his is, seeing a young boy in front of him asking the same questions, looking in dire need of an explanation, and instead of telling him, Cecil makes him confront it. Cecil's job isn't to explain, it's to observe, report and offer perspective.

So I'm thinking about Cecil as a father, who was once himself a child abandoned by his mother, giving this child, despite who it clearly is, the chance to come into his own, even if its terrifying. And I wouldn't even be bringing this up if it were not for the beginning bit at the episode about Tamika worrying about the knife the boy was holding. Cecil's calm, "Well, is he doing anything with the knife? Has he hurt anyone with the knife?" is so..... parental in a way that Tamika hasn't had the time to really cultivate herself yet.

Carlos seemingly, once again, was aware of something before everybody else and chose to stay silent. Some things some people are meant to discover on their own, and perhaps Carlos knew this, but I also think Carlos was once again afraid. Cecil has had eons to become comfortable with not understanding the truth, where Carlos has only had about two decades (or one, depending on how you want to view it) to become accustomed to it.

The beauty of this episode is that I feel like it is about the anxieties of being a parent. And it did it so beautifully without ever directly saying it. Think about it.

You have Tamika unsure but trusting her instincts, you have Carlos encouraging curiosity despite what it may entail, and Cecil, letting the boy define himself despite his fear.

In a very dramatic, reversed horror story trope, Cecil allowed Kevin to define himself, despite what that's going to entail. He doesn't know if it's going to be anything good, but that's the risk you take as a parent. I'm not saying that Cecil is Kevin's parent here, just to be clear, I'm saying symbolically speaking, sometimes we have to let people make their own choices and be their own people, and sometimes they end up doing bad things or making bad choices and we have to live with that. Sometimes it's not our place to step in. Sometimes we are just an observer, it's not our job to change the story, but to simply let it unfold.

That's the job and the anxiety of being a parent, of a person, of a friend, of a reporter.

The beauty of this episode is that it's a rebirth. And we've been given hints over the last handful of episodes. The murals, the children worshipping, the snake god (Cecil's whole bit about being swallowed by a snake in episode freaking 1) of Carlos un-explaining the town, the car crash on Buellton Avenue, of Lauren even saying (episode 237) "Because to ignore our past is to destroy our future. I hope you don't have anything in your past that you have not atoned for, Kevin." etc. All of these themes have been present.

So, to go back to the tapes and of legacy, and how legacy can be traded off for the relief of memory. These two people, once solely defined as their position at their station, have diverged.

The last time Cecil and Kevin were alone in a studio together (physically, and if memory serves) Cecil was taking back his station from Kevin. In episode 48 Cecil even says, as a one off, "Don't run with knives". Since then, Cecil has had the opportunity to really create roots elsewhere, to set aside a legacy and create memories, all we have heard of Kevin (recently that is) is him being subsumed by Lauren who, might I add, kept making him call her 'Mother'.

And now, here we have Kevin, cutting the cord, cutting out the broadcast, not as a double, not as a replacement, not as his past or his future, but as Kevin.

ˏˋ°*♡➷ get to know me ༊*·˚

Thank you @sflow-er for the tag!

The aim of this tag game was to take your favorite movie, character, animal, drink, song, season, book, color and hobby and create a mood board.

I apologize for the super long delay. Was there a common tag everyone used? I was on a grief retreat mountain wondering about the meaning of life and so missed everyone's entries and I'd love to catch up.

Movie: Enter the Phoenix (2004) this movie is full of my favorite tropes. Secret & mistaken identity, power dynamics, competence kink, enemies to lovers friends, swords, loyalty. It also has a well written and portrayed out and proud queer lead. It didn't age super well, but it makes me nostalgic of the Hong Kong that once was, especially from a queer perspective, and remains my favorite comfort comedy.

Character: Methos from Highlander the Series. Wilhelm is my precious and my baby and I love him, but Methos has had an almost thirty year head start, okay? Maybe after season 3 and with some time to digest things will change, but for now it's still Methos all the way.

Animal: Elephant. I also like cats and guinea pigs but elephants always made me feel safe (as a kid elephants where about as real to me as dinosaurs)

Drink: Assam tea. Never come near me with Darjeeling. In a pinch a strong espresso macchiato will do. Bonus points if there's some vanilla in there as well. (Ostfriesen Sonntagstee ftw, even if it's kinda tricky to get here)

Song: Sogno di Volare by Christopher Tin. I've had musical anhedonia since I was eleven so I don't really listen to music, but hearing this always brings be joy because it means I have hours of playing Civ ahead of me. Also the lyrics are cool.

Season: Summer all the way. You can be outside, the days are long and I've always associated that time with freedom and carefreeness.

Book: 琅琊榜 by 海晏. I adore this book. All the tropes from above (except not explicitly queer) and with bonus historical low fantasy elements and lots of elaborate politics. Also all the idioms and very well written. Better known by the title of the excellent tv series it inspired and which I never have the time to rewatch called Nirvana in Fire. (won because it's great and because the three defining book (series) of my youth turned out to be written by authors of varying degrees of horridness)

Color: light turquoise green. Is that what it's called? Anyway that color.

Hobbies: writing about power dynamics Wilmon fic

Daughter-in-law From Hell by Ramesh Thakur

"But what if the interview has damaged the prospects of this happening? Now that would be karma."

The cruel mother-in-law is a familiar and popular trope all over the world, not far behind the stepmother as a proxy for the evil witch. Curiously, there’s no alternative, counter-balancing trope of a cynical, calculating and manipulative daughter-in-law who rents asunder the existing close bonds in a family.

I was born in India after independence and grew up in a free republic. Even while absorbing many of the idioms and iconic stories from our British political-education legacy, we were also socialised into the anti-British strains of the independence struggle and viewed many familiar historical milestones through completely different lens. This came together in a popular explanation for why the sun never set on the British Empire: because even God would not trust an Englishman in the dark. In the second half of the last century, that ambivalence was transferred to the Americans and best captured in the placard being waved by the anti-Vietnam War protestor in the streets of Calcutta during my university days there: ‘Yankee! Go home – and take me with you’.

On the other hand, I left Calcutta (since renamed Kolkata) for Canada and in the course of my wanderings have lived and worked, among other places, in New Zealand and Australia and collected citizenships in all three. This means I have sworn the oath of loyalty to Her Majesty three times in her capacity as the Queen of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. I feel impelled accordingly to defend her and ‘the Firm’ against the attacks from Meghan Markle in the infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey. Full disclosure: I have not watched the interview, not even a minute of it, and have no intention of doing so. My comments are based on accounts of it in print.

To start with, the Queen’s life is a story of duty to country and the multiracial Commonwealth carried out with unfailing grace, dignity and decorum. Between the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex, who does and does not fit in with this lifestyle? To ask the question is to answer it. Markle gives the impression she had a glamourised vision of what marrying into the royal family would be like. The measure of self-discipline and onerous restrictions on independence and personal freedoms proved too suffocating, which is easy enough to understand. The press can indeed behave with no sense of moral compass, violate peoples’ privacy – who can forget the phone-hacking scandals – and turn viciously on someone. But the search for privacy taking her to a tell-all interview with the Queen of TV that turned out to be a self-indulgent settling of scores? A couple that has complained loudly about press intrusions was happy to wash the family laundry in public for millions of viewers. Their remarks and ‘revelations’ were calculated to inflict the maximum damage on her husband’s family. No matter what the provocation, that is unforgiveable. She has a long history of manipulating the media to boost her celebrity status. She can make truly awful accusations against her in-laws. No proof required. The warmth with which she was welcomed by the family – remember the touching scene when Prince Charles walked her down the wedding aisle owing to the absence of her father? – as well as press and people, makes the charge of racism implausible.

Why say things without substantiation that will make the estrangement from his family irreparable? Because she names no names, provides no context and fails to specify exactly what was said, the entire royal family is smeared and that too on the flimsiest of reasoning. This is not courageous but cowardly. Someone wondered about the skin colour of the child while he was still in the womb. Well cry me a river in a $20 million mansion in Santa Barbara. As an inter-racial family that is increasingly common in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US, we wondered the same about our children and speculated on it on multiple occasions. And repeated the experience with the next generation. As soon as this article is done, I’m off to enrol myself in cultural re-education class to exorcise this deep-seated unconscious racism. So, sorry, but until and unless we are provided with some context and specificity about who made the remark, that sounds like interested curiosity rather than malicious racism.

Along with racism, mental health and thoughts (ideation, in the current jargon) of suicide have been weaponised by wannabe victims in the proliferating grievance culture. I’m afraid for once my instincts are similar to those of Piers Morgan. President Joe Biden has praised Markle’s courage for talking openly about feeling suicidal. But the charge that the pleas for help of a five-month pregnant Duchess of Sussex expressing suicidal thoughts would be dismissed with the comment that it ‘wouldn’t be good for the institution’ is, on the face of it, implausible. Once again, we need more specificity and context. On its own, this simply doesn’t ring true. Who was that callous palace official? What stopped the couple from seeking treatment directly from the several mental health charities with which they are connected?

In the interview Markle claimed her son not being a prince ‘would be different from protocol’. Displaying the racial prism through which she views everything, Markle said Archie is ‘the first member of colour in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be’. This is factually wrong as well as incendiary. Someone so conscious of titles should know that her son cannot be called a prince at present. Under existing rules going back to 1917, the titles of prince and princess are limited to children of the monarch, children of the monarch’s sons and the eldest living son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales. In other words, Archie cannot be prince with the Queen as monarch but will be due the title if and when Prince Charles becomes King.

"But what if the interview has damaged the prospects of this happening? Now that would be karma."

Hello Slug! Translation question here. I am interested in doing translation work someday (but first I need to work on my Japanese). I wanted to know, how would you translate "tsundere" (or other dere types) ? Or do you think the concept of tsundere is familiar enough to English readers that you could leave it as is? I know you're big on localization, eg. leaving out honorifics, making equivalent jokes in English, etc. I thought about "playing hard to get", but I don't think that's accurate? Idk.

I understand why this question is being asked, but in my opinion, questions like "how would x word be translated?" fundamentally miss the point of how translation works. At its core, translation is a process of taking ideas conveyed in one form, tailored to one audience (in this case, an audience of Japanese speakers), and changing the form to tailor the idea delivery to a different audience (in this case, English speakers). Words are a part of this, but words are only one of multiple means to express ideas. A single word could be used in a myriad of contexts to convey many, many ideas. Maybe an author writes a character using the word tsundere to make them sound like a reclusive nerd. ("Michiko slapped me after I asked her out for the 99th time. Isn't it cute how tsundere she is?") Maybe it's intended to add levity to an otherwise serious scene or undermine the legitimacy of a character's outburst. ("You're such a jerk! How dare you vanish for two years? I thought you were dead, you selfish bastard!" "Wow, tsundere much?") Each of these scenes should probably be handled in different ways, so focusing on translating individual words in a vacuum is, imo, missing the forest for the trees.

The same message will also be communicated differently depending on its audience and purpose, which by no means should be a controversial statement. Turning down a friend's invitation to hang out vs declining an invitation to an academic conference would necessitate two radically different communication styles, even if the core idea ("I don't want to accept this invitation you've offered me") is exactly the same. Localization is the concept of changing communication styles to fit one specific locale, wherein translation plays a part in that. The difficulty is that locales and groups of people who speak a particular language are not always the same thing, particularly with especially common international languages like English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese. The English-speaking sphere is such a vast group encompassing over 1 billion people that it's virtually impossible to assign anything but the broadest generalizations as rules or guidelines of the entire group's thought patterns, behaviors, and collective cultural consciousness. Without a small enough locale to work with, determining the target audience's exact needs and background knowledge is enormously tricky. In the past, I've focused mainly on a US-centric approach because you really do have to choose something, but I've learned more over the years how this thought pattern is frustrating for many and how it continues to further neoliberal globalist/imperialist thought in ways that I'm not fully comfortable with. So I am moving away from that in my own work, but determining as much information about the target audience is still enormously tricky and varies wildly from work to work. A niche fantasy isekai light novel might be comprised mainly of hardcore readers who will pick up on many tropes of Japanese fiction and will feel slighted if these tropes are not present. A cute animal manga in print will likely have a much broader market appeal and will attract many readers with little to no knowledge about Japanese customs, language, and literary tropes. A free-to-play mobile game based on a TV show that's popular in, say, Latin America will have many non-native English speakers playing it who may be puzzled by an excessive use of idioms and figurative language. In some target audiences, the word tsundere is very likely to be understood by most readers, some of whom might take offense if that word is not transcribed as is. In other target audiences, transcription may cause the core idea to fly over the majority of the readers' heads. It's not a bad thing or an inherent insult to understand that different audiences have different needs and different knowledge levels. A friend with a Phd in chemistry understands that I have not spent the past 5+ years in deep study of chemistry and adjusts his communication with me accordingly. Likewise, it's not wrong to know that most (even if they are not the most vocal!) audience members of fictional works tend not to have spent years studying Japanese language and media and adjust the communication accordingly as well.

But without any knowledge about the information to convey, the format it is being conveyed in, and who to convey it to, I can't make any sort of informed decision about how to translate something. "Playing hard to get" would work totally fine in some circumstances. So would "tsundere." So would "blowing hot and cold" or "a love-hate relationship" or half a hundred other things.

Oz Lore: The Black Brick Road

Have you heard of it? The Black Brick Road of OZ was a webcomic that began on DeviantArt, was quite popular on Tumblr and even got its own website! It was a reimagining of Baum’s Oz works, mixed with the tales of Volkov’s Magical Land (the author being Russian but also aware of the original American works), but the whole thing twisted and reinvented into something much more surrealistic, whimsical, dream-like – but also darker. In fact, the story was supposed to be, or rather become, or rather end, in a very dark, gory and depressing way. Unfortunately, the author stopped the project and deleted her DeviantArt account, her Tumblr account and also destroyed the website that hosted the comic. On one side because she was dissatisfied with how the story was told, and on the other side because she realized she had developed her story too much. Her worldbuilding had gotten out of hand and the project as it was couldn’t have been told unless she spent several years working as hard as she could on three different chronologies/series. Now hopefully everything is not lost. The author explained her full plans for the story – the full chronology, character info, all the secrets that would have been revealed and the ending that she had planned, on her wordpress blog. Unfortunately said wordpress blog is now private so you need to have an account there and be authorized by the owner. The webcomic still has a TV Tropes and Idioms page, and numerous pages and drawings of the original webcomic were kept on Pinterest. BUT the most useful things of all is that the author left her Toyhouse account open, and in it she stored a lot of infos about Black Brick Road – as in full character sheets for nearly all of the characters of the story, with extensive biographies, backstories, their role in the story and extensive galleries. I will put all of the links in the description, because I can’t of course sum up everything the author created, but I want to highlight some of the most interesting and useful facts here (plus I collected some info back on the Tumblr account that are now gone and can’t be found on the ToyHouse account).

I) Anyway… In this webcomic O.Z. means “Outer Zone”. The Outer Zone is split into five different countries: the Violet Country in the North, the Blue Country in the South, the Green Country in the West, the Yellow Country in the East, and the Red Country at the center. And of course, everything begins when a young girl named Dorothy wakes up in a trashed house, that just landed on top of a Wicked Witch. A little girl with a little cat, that may actually come from IZ…

When Dorothy arrives in Oz, there are six powers ruling OZ, three “good” and three “wicked”, four Witches and two males: Ichor the Good Witch of the South, Ferret the Good Witch of the West, Godween the Great and Terrible Wizard, Ruggedo the Nome King, Pepper the Wicked Witch of the East and Bastille the Wicked Witch of the North. These six powers are actually childhood friends. A long, long time ago, in the Violet Country, there was a reformatory named the “Motley Horde”, and in it was a Tower – in the Tower, “special” cases, weird kids with weird abilities. These kids were prepared and groomed for the conquest of OZ. These six were part of the original “Tower Kids” (even though there were more, but not all of them did the cut). The four Witches are believed to be sisters, even though they don’t look like each other – they were abandoned as infants at the door of the Motley Horde. All of them share strange abilities, which made some theorize that they come from IZ. They also all received upon one of their birthday a visit from the embodiments of death (characters from another series of the author) who offered them special “Death-Wish” to use, a bit like genies, but of course always with a price and a twist. (Originally the author had planned to have the four Witches absolutely lacking in humanity, able to do the worse thing with a smile and no care in the world, whether “good” or “wicked”. But she later gave them a bit more complexity in terms of personality and morality.) Another interesting point – in this webcomic, the four traditional inhabitants of Oz are reinvented as familiars of the Witches. Well not so much familiars as “Dolls” which are basically inanimate objects given life, including living toys (a la China Country), or the scarecrows of Oz – but also include other strange things such as birds made of scissors. Pepper’s Doll is a giant four-limbed ball named “Munchkin”, Ferret’s is a sort of giant caterpillar with two porcelain masks as a face named Gillikin, Ichor’s doll is a sort of snake made of smoke with two eyes and little wings around its head named Jellikins (Gillikin) and Bastille’s is actually a bunch of Dolls, the Winkies, flying alarm clocks with an eye in them.

II)

Pepper is the Wicked Witch of the Yellow Country (the equivalent of Baum’s Wicked Witch of the East, and Volkov’s Gingema). She is an overweight young woman with curly Venetian blond hair. She is very… childish. Energetic and joyful, but also selfish, short-tempered, violent, lacking in intelligence and always refusing to admit her own faults. She has a huge love for sweets and candies, and this is why during the Conquest she chose to rule over the Yellow Country – because it had all of the candy-making factories and industries of OZ. In fact the Yellow’s Country main theme is food – it is populated often by living meals and dishes, such as hot-dogs that are literal dogs, or crabs made of waffles. Among its most noticeable locations are : the Sea of Tea, the Sugary Desert, the Jelly Valley, the Oil Rock, the Ice-Cream Caps and the Milky Way. Its capital is the Topaze City, where Pepper lives, on top of Sweet Hill. Note however that her fat is not related to her sweet-tooth, her obesity rather being caused by illnesses. She always was a very sick and ill girl, forced to take numerous drugs and medicines. Her main hobby always was cooking – but she can cook cakes and pies as easily as she cooks potions and poisons. She adore all things cute and pretty, especially dresses and hats, but don’t ever get on her bad side – if she is angry she will devour you. Literally, she will take out a fork and jab you and eat you pieces by pieces. Pepper has an obsession with love, finding love and finding her “Prince Charming”. Her overweightness gave her a bad self-image, and she believes only Bastille, the other Wicked Witch, and Ruggedo the Nome King can ever really love her – so she created herself this fantasy of a finding a prince, and she keeps trying to become the girlfriend or to marry all the cute boys she can find, to the point of becoming an obsessive stalker. During her rule in the Yellow Country, this resulted as a strange “dating game” where Pepper would chose randomly one of her beautiful male subjects and forces him to stay in her castle for a while. If he can please her, he will go home with presents (and a good mental trauma). If not, she will hurt him or kill him or devour him, or all three at once. Because the thing is that no one can really like Pepper. Not because of her appearance, but rather due to her personality: she is insufferable. In fact, this shows on how she ruined the Yellow Country – she invaded it by force, spreading destruction everywhere, and then ruled it according to her selfish whims and her neglectful stupidity. What else to say… She was one of the two Witches to create the “life stone” that animates the dolls, by providing one of the two essential ingredients, a special potion. She is said to be “chaotic evil” and that her corresponding insect is the “Colorado beetle”. She has a spiral-symbol on her forehead that can “do” strange things when “activated”. And, of course, she gets crushed by Dorothy’s house.

III)

Bastille is the Wicked Witch of the Violet Country, or Wicked Witch of the North (the equivalent of Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West, and Volkov’s Bastinda), a tall and slender dark-haired and pale-skinned woman. She is a totalitarian ruler of the Violet Country, feared and respected by her subjects, but she actually is the complete opposite of Pepper, never falling into mindless destruction. She may be aloof, ruthless and condescending, but she judges everything fairly, if not strictly. Under her cold and stern appearance, she is a woman with trust issues, strong beliefs and a strict personal set of morals, as well as great devotion to those that she cares about. But she is also the kind of woman that refuses to feel love as not to “soften” or “weaken”. Stoic, smart, educated, her two main passions are sewing and biology. She did not “invade” her country like Pepper. Pepper was the first one to launch the Conquest by invading and destroying the Yellow Country. Soon after Bastille appeared to the royal family of OZ and threatened to unleash the same destruction on the land if she wasn’t given the Violet Country, she even took the daughter of the royal couple hostage to make them accept. As a result she took the North without harming its people or resources, and while she became a dictator, under her rule the country’s production and well-being skyrocketed. Under her rule, the Violet Country became an industrial region, centered around science. But it is still a very creepy and sinister region, as proven by its most notable locations: the Grave Grove, the Copse of Corpses, the Creepy Creek or the Wicked Thicket. Bastille rules from her Clockwork Castle, in the Amethyst City. Bastille was always fascinated with the questions of life and death, especially since she was a very frail child that had several near-death experiences, and because Witches are unable to reproduce. She did experiments on animals to try to find more about it, and she is the one that created the “life stones” that animate the Dolls. For that, she mixed two ingredients: a potion that only Pepper can make, and her own “Sand of Life”. This precious sand was actually given to her by the Deaths – Bastille was the first one to make her Death-Wish, by wishing to know the secret of life. She was given an hour glass filled with this “Sand of Life”. It is only later that Bastille discovered that this hourglass was actually HER hourglass, that this sand represented her own life. When she created all her Dolls, including an army of soldier Scarecrows, she wasted her own life, that is why she is so frail and weak now. Ever since she stopped creating new dolls and merely recycled the old ones, carefully taking back and hoarding the life stones.  But this Sand will end up being her doom – she had received a prophecy, “After the house falls, Bastille dies” and indeed after Bastille’s death she sees her hourglass is running out of sand, which makes her paranoid. She tries to trick fate by trying to remove all possible threats to her – including Dorothy and her gang. And in defense, at one point they will poor a boiling potion on her Sand, melting it and melting Bastille as a result. Her other main power is that one of her eyeballs can actually be removed from its socket and answer any question asked – she was born with this specific ability. But the eye can only answer by telling what everyone knows is true, or what everyone believes is true, which leads to its information being biased. It also can see things hidden or invisible. “Evil Lawful”, associated with the praying mantis, she has a slight accent that makes her replace the “w” with “v” and the “th” with “d”.

IV)

Ferret, full name Ferret Lie, is the Good Witch of the West, or Good Witch of the Green Country (the equivalent of Baum’s Glinda, Good Witch of the South and Volkov’s Stella). The Green Country is centered around notions such as glamour, entertainment and capitalism, and her Witch represents those notions perfectly. Some noticeable locations of this country are: the Mellow Meadows, the Doves Coves, the Glamorous Glades, the Orchestra Orchard, the Mirror of Fears, the Mawkish Mountain and the Fame Lane. Ferret lives in her Flying Fortress, above the capital of the Green Country, the Emerald City. She is a very… controversial figure in OZ. Yes, she is a Good Witch, who “conquered” her region not by force, but by kindness. When Jinjur with her army of rebels overthrew the royal family and conquered the Ruby City at the center of OZ, the last princess of OZ, Zee, asked Ferret and her sister Ichor for help. They kicked Jinjur out of the Ruby City and as a result, Zee rewarded them with the two regions that hadn’t been already conquered by Wicked Witches, the West and the North, turning the two Witches into national “heroes” and “Good Witches”. But that was when people still ignored that Ferret was one of the brains behind the idea of conquering OZ… or that she had a hand into convincing Jinjur to attack the Ruby City… and that she had promised to her boyfriend, who is Oscar Diggs, the Ruby City to rule over, explaining why he was put in charge right after Zee stepped down from the throne. (Because yes, in this version Glinda and the Wizard of Oz are together). Ferret is a manipulative woman, with many layers to her plans, and always with a plan. As I said, Ferret represents her country perfectly. Just like her country is a commercial one based on trades and economy, Ferret is a merchant, a saleswoman, but a manic and foxy one. She can grant you any wish, make any of your dreams come true – but always to a price. She may appear as a sweet, kind and benevolent figure, but she will still force you into a Faustian deal with a big smile. And she also corresponds to the notions of glamour and entertainment: she is a show woman, a “superficial actress” in the author’s words, glamorous and flamboyant, always changing her clothes, colors and hairstyles nearly everyday, a true Lady Gaga. A chronic liar with a dramatic and quirky persona, the thing is that Ferret hides her true feelings. She learned, through the hardships of her life, how to put a fake smile on her face, and how to please people by telling them what they want to hear, and she plays this whole “act” for so long that now she forgot completely her real feelings, she is a “mask on an empty shell” drowning in denial. Quite funnily, she also wears a real mask over her eyes – it is explained by the fact that she actually isn’t born with real eyes, but with screens instead of orbits, resulting in her ”eyes” being actually digital pictures showed on the screens. Ferret is also indirectly the cause of many of the horrors that befall her sister – that she saw die one by one. For example, she always desired to learn how the Wicked Witches created the Dolls and gave them life, but they always refused to share their secret with her. She sent a spy to steal Pepper’s recipe for her potion, and the spy succeeded, but caused a lot of harm, deaths and damage for both the Witches and civilians. And later she was the one that sent Dolly/Dorothy and her friends to fetch the Life Sand out of Bastille’s hourglass, not knowing that this would cause Bastille’s death. Her ruling of the Green Country is described as “rash”. She mostly focuses on her deal, her business as well as her public persona (which pays off given that she is loved and appreciated through all of OZ) but for all the technical details, administration and “real” ruling, she leaves it to associates and underlings. Associated with both flies and butterflies, she is a “Chaotic Neutral” Witch. Oh yes, and she is obsessed with poppies, putting them everywhere she can.

V)

As for the last of the four Witches, her name is Ichor – the Good Witch that rules the Blue Country (the equivalent of Baum’s Good Witch of the North, and Volkov’s Villina). A “true neutral” Witch associated with the cicada, she is actually dead when the events of the webcomic. To be precise she killed herself, which shook deeply the three other Witches, leaving only behind a note destined to Bastille, informing her that she would die soon after the “house falls”. Each of the Witches has a special characteristic. Pepper has her strange swirl on the forehead, Bastille her magic eye, Ferret her screen-eyes. Ichor’s specific characteristic was that, outside of her hair, she was completely invisible – not only that, her voice also couldn’t be heard by other people. As a result, she was often overlooked or ignored as a child by other people. This marked her, despite all the love and attention her Witch sisters gave her. Ichor often tried to be noticed by using her magical powers, mostly telekinesis, but it often ended up pretty badly since she was the “weakest” of the Witches and thus had a very hard time controlling her powers, leading to accidents or disasters. The “mother” of the Tower Kids offered Ichor a violin, which she learned to play, and tried to use music to help her control her powers and her moods. It worked, to an extent. But outside of that, Ichor also had the dreadful habit of causing or getting into trouble, only to flee from it, due to her inability to deal or cope with it, half out of fear and cowardliness half out of shyness and self-loathing. In fact one of the first Dolls Pepper and Bastille created, named Jellikins, was created to be the mentor and guide of Ichor. But her bad habits culminated in a dreadful accident – losing control of her powers, Ichor accidentally pushed Bastille down a cliff, breaking her spine. Afraid, Ichor fled, hiding away and leaving Bastille to die. Hopefully she was found and saved – she had to be in a wheelchair until Pepper used her “Death wish” to heal her spine, to the cost of Bastille’s body becoming very frail. Bastille never hated Ichor for that, but she deeply despised her “sisters” cowardliness and habit to flee from troubles, thus dooming others. Ichor still hoped to regain her sister’s love and trust, but this only stayed a hope, she never actually did anything to regain it. Pepper was the most aloof of her sisters. Ichor helped her during the conquest of the Yellow Country, amplifying Pepper’s destruction with her own magical music, but she always refused to hurt people. Ichor also saw Ferret slowly craft her fake persona and take on her role of the always-happy saleswoman, and felt her “drifting away”, resulting in the invisible Witch realizing she could never be certain of the authenticity of her sister’s feeling. When the last princess of Oz, Zee, went to Ferret and Ichor for help, and when the Good Witches vanquished Jinjur’s army, Zee offered to Ichor the ruling of the Blue Country as a “thanks gift”. Ichor was thrilled to have an entire country to rule, thinking of it as a new and exciting experience. It proved itself much more difficult than she thought, but she still held on, supported by Jellikins and by her people that – while creeped out by her appearance and powers – still loved her. As a bit of geography, the Blue Country, in the South, has for capital the Sapphire City, with at its center the Ivory Tower, Ichor’s residence. It is a very… calm country. Very quiet, very foggy, a bit eerie, it has locations such as the Lace Lake, the Domino Domains, the Gale Dale, the Stream of Dreams, the Obscure Ocean, the Hush Underbrush or the Uncanny Canyon. Now, the last straw that broke the Witch’s back was a dreadful incident – good friends, almost family of her boyfriend, needed a dire help, else one of their own would die. They begged Ichor to contact the Wicked Witches, the only ones able to help, but Ichor was too afraid of Bastille to do so, so she refused to help them. Which lead not only to her breaking up with her boyfriend, but also to all of this little group dying in atrocious ways. Falling into depression, Ichor started giving up on ruling her country, stopped appearing in public, locking herself in her tower. The people who loved her quickly considered her inept and useless. While the other countries changed, for the better or the worse, her own country stayed still, not evolving, not regressing, burying itself under “dust and cobwebs”. Then she died, killed herself. The end. Or is it?

VI)

Now, we talked about the ladies, but we also need to talk about the gentlemen! On the Good side, Oscar Diggs! At the time of the comic, he is known as Godween (the equivalent of Baum’s Wizard of Oz and Volkov’s Goodwin), the ruler of the Red Country – a country at the center of Oz, associated with the body and organs (notable locations include: the Capillary Caverns, the Pneumonia Pool, the Wounded Woods, the Mouthful Moor, the Brain Barren and the Knee Knoll). Godween resides in his Palaver Palace, at the center of the Ruby City. A giant jack-in-the-box, apparently blindly following the orders of Ferret, he is the one that sent Dollie and her gang go get Bastille’s sand. But back in the days, he was a normal-looking young man, named Oscar Diggs. Excitable, optimistic, sociable, a bit too prideful, he was a good actor and a big book-reader that always dreamed of joining a circus. Ironically, he wasn’t one of the Tower Kids like the Witches or the Nome King. He was merely a member of the “regular” Motley Horde, an orphan sent there due to petty crimes such as pickpocketing. He met the Tower Kids and the Witches one day, and decided to manipulate them, becoming their “friend” so they could help him escape – however he soon became truly attached to them, and even had a big crush on Ferret. Bastille and the future Nome King both built a blimp in order to escape OZ and go to the fabulous IZ, but it was Oscar that went on this blimp by mistake, and he was the one that went to IZ. He came back several years later. He tried to find a normal life in OZ as a librarian, but he was found back by Ferret and the Witches, and included in their plan for the conquest of OZ – Ferret used Oscar’s knowledge of IZ technology to scare the very superstitious Jinjur out of the Ruby City, which secured the Good Witches position. In fact, Ferret became Oscar’s girlfriend, and she promised him the Red City as his domain (he got to rule over it when the last princess of Oz abandoned the throne). Oscar used his knowledge of IZ technology to make people believe he was a Wizard, when he really was not. He also refuses to talk much about IZ (which is implied to be our world). He had pictures of it, but they were stolen by Ichor. Despite not speaking of it, Oscar kept dreaming of IZ and he sincerely wished to return there. Ferret became very jealous, suspecting that he had another lover there. Fearing that he would leave OZ, Ferret decided to use her “Death Wish” to make Oscar completely submissive to her. Which resulted in Oscar being turned into a giant, mindless Doll – Godween, a brainless, heartless puppet only dedicating to pleasing and obeying Ferret’s every whim. This incident had a huge, huge toll on Ferret’s mental health, I can tell you that.

VII)

As for the “Wicked Wizard”, he is none other than Ruggedo Quareria, aka the Nome King. (a mix of Baum's Nome King and Volkov's Urfin Jus) Long ago, the Nomes lived in colonies of the Violet Country. Working in the mines, spending most of their time underground, they were fantastic mechanics, good workers and the ones that offered many resources of Oz. But they were also rude and mischievous, vengeful and unpleasant, only tolerated for the wonderful gift they offered OZ. People accused them of every crime, including kidnapping children to make them their slaves. It all went down when the current King of the Nomes, Roquat Quareria, made a deal with the Snowbank family (the equivalent of Ev’s royal family, but here living in the Yellow Country), humble candy-makers. He offered them wonderful machines that quickly made them the most powerful candy makers of the Yellow Country. But in exchange, Roquat asked for his share of the profits and the wealth of the Snowbank family. And since the machines needed to be rewound, and only Roquat had the key, he greedily raised the prices of his rewinding, until he asked the leader of the Snowbank family to offer his whole family to slavery. Snowbank did, but then he poisoned Roquat and many of the Nomes with a special delivery of body-rotting candies. The Nomes being now without a ruler, and half-dead, the people of OZ quickly saw here an opportunity to eradicate their troublesome “neighbors”. All of the Nomes colonies were reduced to ruin and nearly all of the Nomes killed, except for some that fled underground. And except for Ruggedo that was found as a baby near the ruins of a Nome colony. Swearing vengeance on the Ozians for destroying his race, and wishing to create a doomsday device that would annihilate all of the Outer Zone, he only managed to receive during his childhood many injuries that prevented him from really creating performing machines. Later caught and sent to the Tower, he proved himself mistrustful and antisocial at first, but quickly started to develop feelings for Bastille, who helped him refine his machinery and create better devices, becoming a very good craftsman in the process. Ruggedo ended up sharing with her his childhood dream – while he was mocked by the other Nomes for being a “failure”, he kept dreaming that he was secretly the heir to Roquat and their rightful king. Bastille promised to make his dream come true. During the Conquest, Ruggedo united the leftover Nomes under the promise of getting revenge for the crimes against their race. Allying himself with Bastille, they threatened together the royal family to obtain the rule of the Violet Country – the Nomes even built a tunnel that led to under the royal palace in order to kidnap the last princess of Oz as a ransom. Once the Violet Country was theirs, Ruggedo recreated the Nome colonies, and they returned to their peaceful life. Ruggedo tried his best to change the Nomes ways, in order to be seen under a better light by the other Ozians, but he never managed to do so, still being seen as in league with the “Wicked Witches”.

And that’s it for now folks! There is much, much more to say about this webcomic, but I’ll keep it a little surprise Xp But yes, if you want to know more, go check the links in the description. (Prepare yourself, Dorothy is not who you think she is…)

- - - - - -

Now, all of the info concerning the project and most of the surviving art can be seen in the artist's Toyhouse page for the project:

https://toyhou.se/Xamag/characters/folder:345028

I suggest you go check it out because there are TONS and TONS of info I haven't included here, such as a reinterpretation of Ozma's story, the true identity of Dorothy, new backstories for the well known "companions" and much more!

You can also check the TV Tropes and Idioms page of the webcomic:    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Webcomic/TheBlackBrickRoadOfOZ

Tied for the top two moments of my life while writing fanfiction:

1. The drunk New Years Eve anon a few years back who was struggling up some stairs and wanted me to know they loved me and loved my widojest work.

2. Whoever put Hazardous Tech up on TV Tropes and Idioms Fanfiction recommendations.

Ohhhh, JAIL FOR TV TROPES AND IDIOMS!! JAIL FOR TV TROPES AND IDIOMS FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS!!!

Encyclopedia Brown thoughts: books 5, 7, and 8

Skipping book 6 because, as stated in Encyclopedia Brown vs. Two-Minute Mysteries, it's composed entirely of 2MM rewrites.

Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All General:

This book marks the first appearance of Wilford Wiggins, in “The Case of the Muscle Maker”, which is already covered in Encyclopedia Brown vs. Two Minute Mysteries.

The Case of the Super-Secret Hold:

Believe it or not, this book was the first time I ever heard of judo. So it has that going for it.

Bugs might not know the eponymous super-secret hold, but did he and his buddies actually learn anything about judo? Because that might make them actually effective as bullies.

The Case of the Wagon Master:

TV Tropes and the Encyclopedia Brown Encyclopedia both act like Joe is going around with a loaded gun, but where's a kid going to get ammo? Seriously, I've always assumed that it wasn't loaded, if only because his parents wouldn't let him load it.

This story is the only place I've ever seen the term "wagon train master".

How could Buck Calhoun lead a wagon train down from a mountain pass when there are no mountains in Florida?

I only learned this from a Goodreads review, but the solution falls apart when you realize that the Flag Code of 1923 wouldn't apply to a frontier fort in 1872.

Encyclopedia Brown Saves the Day The Case of the Junk Sculptor:

Four Wheels is a pretty lame-ass nickname.

Pablo Pizarro... his name sounds like Pablo Picasso, and he's an artist. Get it? :rollseyes:

Based on this and other cases involving Pablo, Sobol really seems to have something against modern art.

I think this is the only case of a perp reforming and becoming a recurring "good" character.

The Case of the Five Clues:

What kind of kid would know how to connect the five items in question to the apartment of the woman who takes in sewing?

And of course they can't have Mrs. O'Quinn being the thief... it has to be her teenage daughter. :P

The Case of the Flying Boy:

Apparently wingsuits hadn't been invented in 1970. But to be fair, that's not really "flying" either...

The Case of the Foot Warmer:

Because of course if someone buys things normally, they'll never be tempted to shoplift?

That being said, it was a nice twist, having Encyclopedia's client turn out to be the shoplifter in the end.

Encyclopedia Brown Tracks Them Down General:

Was the rhyming in the title intentional?

The Case of Smelly Nellie:

NGL, I'd rather be called Nelita than Smelly Nellie.

How does Nellie know that Encyclopedia has oil of peppermint, or that he knows where it's kept?

This book where I first heard of ambergris.

On a related note, do you pronounce ambergris with a silent S? Because I do.

I think this is the only Bugs Meany introduction case that doesn't include an alternate name for the Tigers.

The Case of the Boy Boxers:

Elmer Otis? What's his last name? *rimshot*

Never have I heard the idiom "calm as a clam" outside this story.

The Case of the Ax Handle:

Fishing seems to be very popular among the young boys of Idaville, seeing as Encyclopedia and his buddies seem to go fishing at least once per book.

Does anyone else think "worm fiddling" sounds dirty?

I wonder what foreign countries were represented in the International Worm Fiddling Contest?

Is worm fiddling really that popular IRL?

Say what you will about Justin, he did what he did in support of his mother, so he can't be all bad. But maybe I'm a bit sensitive after all the teen-bashing in this series.

Neverafter notes (1) The Time of Shadows

No need to tell you this will contain spoilers - because this is a set of notes I take after watching the entire season.

Item 1: The Time of Shadows

Let us begin with the very name of the episode and the motif introduced. We are in the "Neverafter", the world of fairy tales, named after the famous sentence "And they lived happily ever after" ending every English-speaking fairytale. But here twisted with "never" of course - because we are in a time that is beyond the ending of the well-known fairytales, we have passed the "they lived happily ever after" line, and now we are in what can be found afterward. And this afterward turns out to be the "Time of Shadows", dark, dreadful, terrible times befalling upon lands typically in peace and prosperity but now plunged in war and ruins. Kingdoms fall one after the other as great wars ravage the lands, many malevolent entities are very active and spreading destruction wherever they go (they are explicitely listed as giants, witches, wizards and "creatures of the sea"), and there's a bunch of big storms and bad weather everywhere. A true "dark fantasy".

Now the Time of Shadows is here a transposition of a phenomenon preponderant in modern fairytale media and that the website TV Tropes and Idioms has codified and classified as "Grimmification", a term that is a pun (on the brothers Grimm and the adjective grim) and that has gained a big success on the Internet, everybody using it today in opposition to another term popularized by TV Tropes "Disneyification". Grimmification is taking a fairytale and turning it into a much darker, bloodier and sadder tale, a nightmare filled with gore and horror ; hereas Disneyification is doing what Walt Disney did to fairytales - making them look "cuter" and sanitizing them for children and making them much happier and more naive than they used to be. (Of course this is a massive simplification as Disney was not the main one responsible for the "cutification" of fairytales but you get the idea, it works as a simple dichotomy). The Time of Shadows is literaly a transliteration of the phenomenon of "Grimmification".

Now I do want to insist upon the fact that the idea of the "Grimmification" of fairytales is not new, and that it existed long before TV tropes popularized this term. I do want to compare Neverafter and its Time of Shadows with another work that is very similar in terms of vibe: John Connolly's famous "The Book of Lost Things", which precisely describes a fairytale world that regularly undergoes cycle, switching between the "happily ever after", sweet, naive, cartoonish depictions of fairytales we kow today, and much darker times filled with violence, death and horror. A big part of the book precisely relies on the breaking of such a cycle and the "healing" of the fairytale land - in a way VERY similar to Neverafter's own treatment of the Time of Shadows (I wouldn't be surprised if the Book of Lost Things served as some inspiraton, after all it is one of the prime examples of a "Grimmification" book)

Item 2: Rosamund du Prix

Our first introduced character is Rosamund du Prix, Neverafter's version of Sleeping Beauty. With also added horror, because Neverafter is the horror season - from the briars actually growing OUT of the princess' body when she fell asleep (and her being forced to rip the roots out of her throat, in the very reverse of a fairytale kiss), to Rosamund being forced to experience the atrophy of her muscles after a hundred years sleep and the claustrophobic feeling of being buried alone in masses of thorns. Of course, she falls victim to the Time of Shadows' first rule: the happy endings either do not arrive, or happen in a broken and incomplete way. In the case of Rosamund, this means her prince has not arrived, she woke up from the curse despite not having a "true love kiss", and she is all alone into an entire kingdom prey to magical thorns and sleep.

I will note that this version of Sleeping Beauty is not based on Perrault's story, at least not directly. Yes there were fairies at her birth, and her kingdom is named Rêverie (which is a French word meaning "dreaming"), so there's a Perrault reference in there... But they are slim, very slim. There are stronger references to the brothers Grimm's version of Sleeping Beauty, "Briar Rose", from the constant references to "briars" all the way to the princess being named "ROSamund", but the most obvious reference is all the dead princes in the thorns surrounding her castle. This is actually an element present in the brothers Grimm's verson of the tale, where the briars kill those that try to enter, absent from Perrault's version (the forest is just so thick it is impossible to cross, plus a bunch of creepy stories keeps everyone away).

No, what this version of Sleeping Beauty is actually based upon is... Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I am not just saying that because Siobhan Thompson explicitely plays the character of a Disney princess lost in a world of horror but still hopeful that her "prince will come". But note the explicit number of fairies: four fairies in total in the kingdom, three invited to the birth, the fourth one ignored - and the fourth one being the "wickedest". This is literaly Disney's take on the story, here a transposition of Flora, Fauna, Merryweather and Maleficent as the "four fairies of the kingdom". (As a side-note, here the two first good fairies gifted Rosamund with "beauty" and "grace" - "beauty" explaining why she still looks good even when she has been living like a wild woman in the woods for quite some times now ; "grace" translating in gameplay as added agility and dexterity).

In terms of D&D structure, Rosamund is here the transliteration of a "Ranger" character type, with the reinvention that, waking up all alone in an entire kingdom devoid of human life and overtaken by wild trees and briars, she has to learn how to survive on her own, and even fashioned herself a bow out of thorns. The ranger's affinity to nature is notably coupled here with the cliche of the Disney princess being able to talk to animals or summon them with her song, for hilarious effects (see the nat 1 when Rosamund tries to call for animal help in one of the scariest primeval forests of the Neverafter).

I will highlight here that the briars' voice attempts at explaining to Rosamund how and why they will keep her "safe" has very strong echoes of the Witch's own plea to Rapunzel about keeping her safe in her tower, from the musical "Into the Woods". And I do not make this comparison out of nowhere because, as I will point out later, there are other references to "Into the Woods" meaning this was clearly one of the inspirations behind the Neverafter season (but again, when you do a Grimmification of fairytales, Into the Woods is bound to pop up at some point) [The briars do say "None can touch you in your tower, stay with us", I mean come on!] [I also note that, in terms of world-building, the curse is apparently still maintained within the spindle, because to put Rosamund back to sleep the briars try to prick her again with it]

Item 3: Gerard of Greenleigh.

Gerard of Greenleigh, husband of the princess Elodie, is the Neverafter's version of "The Frog Prince" (originally "The Frog King") by the brothers Grimm. (Elodie fights in the war with a golden mace, as a nod to the gold ball the princess played with in the fairytale)

Gerard's failed "happily ever after" here takes the form of his love with Elodie slowly breaking away due to their incompatible mentalities (Gerard is a self-centered, arrogant, pleasure-seeking prince with no actual knowledge about ruling a kingdom, while Elodie is a serious, no-nonsense girl who tries to maintain her kingdom safe as it is facing a war - we will later see Gerard's character is partially due to his frog transformation, which happened when he was a child and didn't left him much time to get prepared for his role as a prince). As a result of Elodie's love fading away, Gerard is slowly turning back into a frog, currently being a frog/human hybrid (which corresponds to a D&D hobgoblin).

I will point out that the motif of a "de-transformation" being reverse because of love fading away has been done before with a different fairytale in a quite important fairytale modern media. It was done with Beauty and the Beast in the very opening issue of the famous "Fables" comic book , which was a huge influence on fairytale media (before the series kind of went to crap, you know). In the very opening issue we see the Beast slowly turning back into his beast form precisely because he had a big fight with his wife, and it is a recurring joke with the couple during the first doen issues that since their couple has highs and lows, the Beast keeps switching between his human form and a more beastly form, as the curse cannot be fully taken away and relies on his wife's love to be maintained at bay.

Back to Neverafter - we do know that the kingdom of Greenleigh fell, the same way almost all of the other kingdoms of Neverafter fell, in this case due to a war launched upon it by the armies of the Snow Queen (from Andersen's fairytale of the same name), who rules over the kingdom of "Snowhold" (and is explicitely said to have under her control beings/powers of "ice and wind"). I might go as far as to point out a possible parallel with "A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones" about the Snow-Queen being one of the big antagonists of the Neverafter's background, because as I said before this season has big "dark fantasy" vibes and... "Winter is coming". I thought about this joke because it was exactly done as such in the Fables comic book, again - when the Snow Queen, one of the antagonists, first appears, a messenger before her warns the inhabitants "Winter is coming!", as a nod to Martin's book series. But don't get me wrong, I am not saying it was always meant to be the reference - in many fairytale media the Snow-Queen is depicted as an active antagonist, and a wicked power.

To take another piece of media, there is the famous mini-series "The 10th Kingdom", another important piece of American "fractured fairytale" or "fairytale urban fantasy/portal fantasy" media. Now, the Snow Queen is only alluded to in the series (and sequel novel), but extra-material and outside of series info confirmed that if the mini-series had delved more into the world, the Snow Queen would have been the next big antagonist because she had plans to conquer the entirety of the fairytale kingdoms. Another more recent example of the Snow Queen as an antagonist in a multi-fairytale fiction would be her character within the book series, "The Land of Stories" (with added point that in this series he overthrew the king of the land she rules upon - and if my memory serves me well the Snow Queen of Neverafter kind of overthrew the Tsar of Snowhold? Or something like that? I will need to check it again)

As additional notes: we know the court of Greenleigh has a set of "wise women" that are experts in medecne, tonics and other products of the sort - very likely a nod to how in the Grimm fairytales fairies were replaced by "wise women". And Elodie highlights the innate horror and terrifying metaphysical implications of a "happily ever after" by pointing out how uncomfortable and unwell she feels with the idea that her life ended the moment she married her prince. A very clever line, especially since it works on two levels - the meta-fictional level of a character trapped in a farytale logic, and who stops existing once her story is done ; and the human level of how her story is one of marital troubles and of a couple falling out of love after their wedding.

[Extra-considerations: Names are of course very important, especially in a fairytale setting, especially in a world inspired by the "fae lore", and especially in Neverafter. I can't analyze every name because I don't have all the info needed, but just look at the name of the Frog Prince's land "Greenleigh". "Green", the color of frogs, sounds like "Greenly" and "leigh" means a meadow or a glade. Same thing with how Rêverie is the land of Sleeping Beauty. And given Rosamund's last name is "du Prix" and it is French I am wondering if there was a sort of dark intended pun there... I am probably reading way too much into this, but "du Prix" means "of the price". And can be read as "of the prize" (because a price/a prize is the same thing in French). Is it implying that the princess is literaly the "prize" the prince must win?]

Item 4: Pib

Pib is short for "Puss in Boots" - the character made famous through Charles Perrault's fairy tale of "The Master Cat, or the Booted Cat", better known in the English-speaking world as "Puss in Boots". As with all the other fairytale characters, poor P-I-B (here a reinvention of the Rogue character class) saw his land falling apart and his happily ever after being crushed - quite literaly as a swarm of giants invaded the land and destroyed everything, crushing many buildings and people under their feet. I will highlight again the "Into the Woods" reference - because we are literaly in a setting where, after the "Happily ever after", giants arrive and crush/kill everybody, turning everything into a dark survival tale... Just like for "Into the Woods".

Right before, there was of course a delightful play on considering wha it REALLY means for a miller's son to pretend to be a king - starting with how the poor guy can barely read... I do wonder about the choice of Marienne as the land from which Puss in Boots hail. Since Puss in Boots is a Fench story, Marienne can evoke "Marianne", the female personification of the French Republic, but Marienne sounds distinctively like "Marien", which is the German version of Mary (and is found in places' names, such as Marienbad to take a famous example)... It doesn't help that Amanti, Pinocchio's village (Italian) is apparently within Marienne? So... seems kind of a melting pot of cultural influences.

Not much to say about this, outside of the fact that Pib's boots are blue, which is (I don't think?) a usual color choice when illustrating the story, so nice!

Item 5: Mother Goose

Timothy "Mother" Goose is of course Neverafter's version of the character of Mother Goose/Old Mother Goose, and it is very fitting for a witch-storyteller to be a "bard" within the D&D classification. Now... Mother Goose is quite a convoluted and complicated character that has a bizarre set of origins - long story short she was a a character basically made out of nothing?

If I try to simplify stuff... People have been searching for the origins of Mother Goose for a very long time - quite recently in France there was an entire book dedicated to studying the mythological and cultural roots of the figure - but we can't really say anything before Perrault's time. Before Mother Goose, despite being a British character, starts out in France. An alternative name Perrault gave to his set of fairytales (but it is a name that became far more popular and well-known than the intended title) was "Mother Goose's Fairytales" (Les Contes de ma Mère L'Oie). Except Perrault was not refering any specific character when he wrote that - a "mother goose tale" was just an expression of the time, a name used to designate what we call today "fairytales". There was a whole bunch of these names (contes du loup borgne, tales of the one-eyed wolf ; contes de peau d'âne, tales of donkey skin, contes bleus, blue tales), and they were just expressions nobody knows the true origin of. When Perrault wrote that, it is like someone writing "fairy tales" even though they stories do not include fairies. However when Perrault's fairytales moved to England, the name "Mother Goose" was used as an iconic eye-catcher and a famous "trademark" so to speak. People started publishing nursery rhymes compilations under the name "Mother Goose's rhymes" or something similar, in reference to Perrault's best-selling book. And that was how England started "fleshing out" and dare I say "creating" Mother Goose as a character, as a sort of mascot or emblem of fairytales but ESPECIALLY of nursery rhymes, with which she got closely linked in England.

And while this Mother Goose gets involved with characters of fairytales, Timothy and Pottingham are rather born out of the nursery rhymes world (hence why he comes from the very obviously named "Lullaby Lands"). In fact, the whole thing of Mother Goose having a son named Jack, who ended up finding a goose laying golden eggs, and with a gander tied to Mother, comes from one very specific nursery rhyme which dates from when Mother Goose became a character in England - "Old Mother Goose and her Son Jack" (or variations of). It is an entire nursery rhyme dedicated to explaining the newly born character of Mother Goose (because nobody could agree if she was a literal goose or a witch), while involving her with the British stock-character of Jack, and the fable of the "goose layng golden eggs" (already quite famous thanks to the Jack and the Beanstalk story).

Speaking of Jack - the season does play on the multiplicity of "Jacks" in nursery rhymes and British fairytales, since, if you didn't know, Jack is the stock-name for the average fairytale male hero (every country has one - in Germany it is Hans, in Russia Ivan, in France Jean, etc). As such this Jack is explicitely referenced as being both the Jack from the Old Mother Goose nursery rhyme, and the one from the rhyme "Jack be nimble". [As a side note, the fact of having all the Jacks of rhymes and fairytales be one Jack was popularized, again, by the comic book Fables which precisely played on having fairytale archetypes be a singular character undergoing all those adventures, and had Jack as a prominent character]. The last member of the Goose family is also part of the nursery rhymes reference: Henry Hubbard is a reference to the rhyme of "Old Mother Hubbard". I will note that the nursery rhyme of Old Mother Hubbard was one of the subjects of traditional British pantomime... the same way Mother Goose was a big presence in this genre.

As for the Gander, I can't say much here since it was barely introduced but A) it is immediately set as a "negative/reverse" image of the traditional Mother Goose imagery (when Mother Goose is not humanized, it is a big goose with a bonnet - but in colors reverse to the Gander) and B) The Gander literaly plays the trope of "The Monkey's Paw" and various other twisted takes on the archetype of the genie granting you three wishes, except there is a deadly catch to it.

Already from the get-go we know that one of the roles of the magical book is precisely to "protect" and "preserve" the stories from the Time of Shadows, by literaly putting them back in how they are "supposed" to be and sticking them into this idyllic "happily ever after" paradise-like dimension. Aka... When Jack is in the book he literaly just becomes the Jack of our nursery rhymes, in the real world, the one we know and that has been drawn in so many chilren's book. Basically the book does is reset the story before its "grimmificaton", and return it to its "cutesy, optimistic, simple" format, if not, dare I say it, "Disneyified".

Plus: The flooding of Pottingham and the endless rainy weather is already evoked here.

[I will add that @lostsometime posted about the line with the Gander taunting Timothy with the verb "wander" ; establishing a possible link with the nursery rhyme "Goosey Goosey Gander"]

Item 6: Ylfa Snorgelsson

Neverafter's version of "Little Red Riding Hood". Here the character seems to go on from Perrault's version of the story, rather than Grimm, since no woodsman is involved so far and poor Ylfa has been "eaten" by the wolf (here in the sense of - turned into a werewolf like creature). Though if my memory serves me well later episodes reveal it is more related to the Grimm's version of the tale? I'll need to answer that in future notes. [Note: Of course, I do mention the omnipresence of the axe motif around Ylfa's chracter, which does evoke the Woodsman of the Grimm version]

Not much to say here so far... The idea of Little Red Riding Hood being a story tied to werewolves is a modern trope that has been heavily used recently - from this "Red Riding Hood" 2011 movie passing by Zenescope's convoluted and NSFW Grimm Fairy Tales, without forgetting Once Upon a Tme's own dark take on the story. For context and history, the idea of bringing werewolves in the picture was first truly exploited by Angela Carter, in her feminist-Gothic fairytale retelling collection "The Bloody Chamber". In it, she wrote three different short stories (The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves, Wolf-Alice) that interwove together Little Red Riding Hood motifs and traditional werewolf beliefs and legends from Europe. This was the first big landmark in the habit of making Red Riding Hood a werewolf tale, and all three stories were later mixed and adapted into the famous Gothic dark fairytale movie "The Company of Wolves".

Of course, here the "fairytale ending" displacement is by having the game depict what happens when Little Red Riding Hood RETURNS to her house and her family, which is usually never talked about - especially if we follow the Perrault version, where the girl is supposed to be dead. I do love how Ylfa is attached to Mother Goose because, while Mother Goose becomes a sort of "replacement" for the missing Grandmother, it also blurs the line very well between the three feminine characters of Perrault's tale - because in Perrault's version, we have simply a quartet of characters. The little girl, the mother, the grandmother and the wolf - and so having Ylfa refer to Timothy as "Mother" blurs the line between Timothy's character and the archetypal "mother" of the Riding Hood tale... Oh yes, and the wolf of this tale is clearly identified as the Big Bad Wolf that the Three Little Pigs met in their story (the story of the Three Little Pigs is a traditional British fairytale, made famous by Joseph Jacobs on one side, who printed the best-known written version of the story, and Walt Disney on the other with his famous Three Little Pigs shorts).

Item 7: Pinocchio

No need to tell you that Pinocchio is... well Neverafter's version of Pinocchio, the famous character of Carlo Collodi, reinvented and repopularized by Walt Disney. Here turned back into a wooden puppet after winning his life as a "real boy", because he told a lie to save his father...

The interesting thing with Pinocchio is his reinvention in DnD classifications. Of course, the choice of the Warforged to work as a "Puppet" is obvious, but more fascinating is making Pinocchio a Warlock - with as his Patron the mysterious Stepmother, THE archetype of all Wicked Stepmothers... But more about her later. There's also the whole thing with the broken nose becoming his "wizard staff" and it is all so delightful.

As a worldbuilding note, we have in Pinocchio's backstory the apparition of the Wicked Fairy. Now we know that in this universe there are four fairies (due to Sleeping Beauty's background and how the number of fairies change depending on the universe), and that the Wicked Fairy that visited Pinocchio's village is the same as the one that cursed Sleeping Beauty. This also implies that the Fairy with Turquoise Hair and the Fairy Godmother we will later meet were part of the three fairies invited to Rosamund's birth... But who was the fourth fairy? If I recall, she does not have the time to be described since we jump off that universe too early... This Wicked Fairy is meant, as I said before, to emulate Disney's Maleficent, but since she is apparently most if not all the "wicked fairies" of this version of the Neverafter, I will dare invoke the name "Carabosse" to designate what she is meant to represent.

For those who don't know, Carabosse was a name chosen in the famous Tchaikovsky ballet adaptation of Sleeping Beauty for the wicked fairy. This ballet-Carabosse was one of the main inspirations behind Disney's Maleficent, and helped popularize the idea that "Carabosse" was the name of the archetypal wicked fairy. Especially in France where Carabosse is basically THE wicked fairy the same way in Russia Baba-yaga is THE witch. But the funny thing is that the name "Carabosse" does not come from Perrault's Sleeping Beauty... It comes from an unrelated fairytale written by madame d'Aulnoy, who was one of the most intensive makers of "wicked fairies" - and Carabosse was but one of those dozens of indiviual evil fairies, each with their own personalities, quirks and twists. But thanks to Tchaikovsky, she hijacked Sleeping Beauty and now almost every modern adaptation or retelling of the fairytale in French use Carabosse as the name of the fairy that delivers the curse. [Plus, we discovered during the minis auction that the Wicked Fairy's name was Bosartia... Maybe it is a link to CaraBOSSE? BOSartia? Who knows, my thing is overanalyzing stuff and finding links where there's not]

Item 8: The Chandling caravans

I just noticed that there is a total of seven players around the table - the six characters plus the game-master, which actually fits very well a fairytale world since seven is one of the key numbers.

Now we get into the main "plot" of the episode, so my notes will be a little less constructed.

Gerard and Rosamund are cousins "three different times" - I do love the joke that royal families in fairytales are just as inter-bred with each other as they were back in medieval and Renaissance times.

Shoeberg and its inhabitants and the woman that founded the town are of course from the nursery rhyme "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe".

We have a "troll-son""trollson", which is apparently a type of beings designated as such because they are the descendants of trolls (presumably they are from lines mixing human and troll). (I believe there is a pun here on how "son" is literaly a suffix in Nordic countries meaning "son of" or "descendant of").

The caravans are referred to as the "Chandling caravans", the "Chandling company". Now, given "Chandling" might be derived from "chandler", and the business of candle-making... Maybe it is a Rub-A-Dub-Dub/Three Men in a Tub" reference? The nursery rhyme which has "The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker"? But I am probably reading way too much into this... There's other nursery rhymes that could fit - such as an old British children song "Tommy kept a chandler's shop". But it might be completely unrelated...

Lord Bandlebridge's comment about beggars is definitively just a classist statement, but it does confirm that witches, fairies and ogres have an habit of disguising themselves as beggars.

The tricking of Bandlebridge works so well because, as Brennan Mulligan highlights (I know I should be using these people's first name like everybody else in the fandom but it feels weird, we're not on first-name basis), he believes in the fairytale untold rule that you must "grant every request the magical being [that you receive as a host] makes" in order to be rewarded.

The enchanted logs that ward off people from "goblins and boggarts" as long as someone tells a story by its fire is a genius way to highlight the need for "campfire tales".

The character leading the caravans is from the story of "The Little Red Hen" (hence the whole "You help or you don't get to eat"). Fun fact, this story is not from any "traditional" European corpus of fairytales - it is an American story that Mary Mapes Dodge had printed in the 19th century as a "fable".

Old King Cole from the kingdom of Jubilee is of course from the nursery rhyme involving the character of the same name (though I do have to say, the idea of a big bearded large warrior in a chariot drawn by a ram immediately made my mythological brain think of Thor).

I remember that when the episode was released a lot of people were excited at the idea that the giant teapot drawn by a giant rabbit was a Alice in Wonderland reference... More about that next episode.

Finally, the "Black Wood", identified as one of the several "primeval forests" of the Neverafter. I don't think I need to explain what kind of topos this is playing off here.

I already said that while I do admire the work of TV Tropes and Idioms over various pieces of media, their work on Greek (and Roman) mythology is a mess. I understand that it is a collaborative wiki made by the efforts of individuals who can put everything they want into it, and that not everything had time to be checked, but gosh the depictions and descriptions of the Greek gods and myths are sometimes so confused and wrong I do not recognize the mythology I spent more than twenty years or so studying. 

The worst thing is that people actually take TV Tropes and Idioms as a source of information for those things. But trust me: while it is not the worst source of info... it is definitively not the best. Really. 

To be fair I think this might be due to a widespread misinterpretation of Greek mythology as a whole by the Internet - or by Americans, given the media that propagate some of those false ideas tend to be mostly American. For the longest time they had one wrong, false, sanitized, oversimplified idea of Greek mythology inherited from movies like the original “Clash of Titans” or Disney’s Hercules. Then there was a renewal of interest in the “true” Greek mythology, with the whole Percy Jackson phenomenon and people searching for more serious, accurate and informed source. And so they got a much correct picture of Greek mythology... but this led to a whole new series of mistakes, misunderstandings or even caricatures based on those newfound elements that, while true, were either exaggerated or taken out of context. 

Note: this post announces a series of little posts where I’ll explicitely present the points that bother me with Internet’s reception of Greek mythology today. It will probably be interwoven with my “Myth misconception of the day” types of posts. 

english majors should have to write their papers using literary terms from tv tropes and idioms only

data in insurrection saying “saddle up. lets lock and load” made me wonder if he’d been watching old earth action movies cause it reminds me of when my friend from marvelcomics watched gladiator and then threw the thing out of the Baxter building and yelled “Are you not entertained”

I should try making a fake TV Tropes page for my OCs, just to kinda get a hang of their personalities.