#I also think it's historically FASCINATING that

[mask131]

Can you someday do a post about a very important question that always deeply fascinated me: How technologically advanced is Oz?

Wicked as a stage show puzzles me because it implies Oz has electricity, a broadcast radio system, and trains.

How much tech is present in Oz in the books?

Oh boy that's one COMPLICATED question... Now, before I start saying anything, I will point out that I am not an Oz expert by any means. I have not read all of the Oz books. However I do know an Oz expert that tackled the subject! He is here on Tumblr somewhere, but I know his Oz analysis and lore-exploration by his blogs. He started doing them more than a dozen year ago on vovat.livejournal.com ; and then he continued his Oz posts to vovatia.wordpress.com ; I know they have very, VERY helpful when it comes to my own knowledge of Oz, and he tackled several times the topic of technology in Oz and Baum's work, with quite fascinating analyses! So go check out these blogs, you might find some interesting info!

That being said, what can I tell you?

Since I haven't read all the Oz books I will stick to Baum's novels only - but before doing that I want to point out something... It is something I said in my previous Oz post (So you want to know about Oz 5), but the Wicked stage musical is part of a pretty big wave of 2000s-onward Oz adaptations that decided Oz was a steampunk world. I know you entertained yourself a pretty similar project of a Gilded Age Oz, if I recall correctly? And when you look at Oz adaptations, you have this wave of SyFy's Tin Man, and the Amazon series "Lost in Oz", and the graphic novel/animated movie "The Steam Engines of Oz", and more recently the show "Emerald City". Even "Dorothy and the Witches of Oz" had a steampunk-vibe to their Oz. It is kind of the modern direction to go.

Now back to traditional Baum's Oz... Does it have electricity? I don't think so. The Oz created by Baum is... it is something between a fantasy version of the late 19th century American countryside, and your archetypal fantasy land. The Land of Oz is mostly a huge countryside to be honest. Its lots of forests with woodsmen and wild animals ; it is lot of fields and orchards because most of Oz's economy relies apparently on farming ; the only other big industry seems to be metal-working (Winkies, the guy who made the Tin Man) and stone/gem-working (due to the huge presence of precious stones, though no mine or miner is ever descrbed in the Oz books) ; it is a lot of small villages scattered around the one big city that is Emerald City (or around big castles like the Tin Man/Wicked Witch castle) ; this all gives it a very medieval/feudal feel in structure... Though Baum really tried to give Oz originally a "fairytale feel" and thus you have the same historical madness typical fairytales have. For example, just like your typical Renaissance fairytales (a la Charles Perrault), you have mirrors and candies and porcelaine in Oz ; and yet, just like your also typical 19th century fairytales (a la brothers Grimm) you also have guns in Oz! Mind you the guns are rare and rarely used, they seem mostly to belong to the military cast (they are always wielded by soldiers or royalty bodyguards), and they are usually useless against the monsters and magical threats... But they do exist! But Oz seems to lack things like electricity of petrol or even steam machinery. At least in the beginning!

(In fact I had a chat with @artmakerproductions recently about fireworks in Oz. He wondered if the Oz The Great and Powerful idea of using fireworks as something non-existent in Oz could work with Baum's canon, and indeed, while the presence of guns implies gunpowder is a thing in Oz, there are to my memory no mention of fireworks anywhere in Oz... Maybe they appear at one of Ozma's birthday parties, but I couldn't find which one. Fireworks are evoked in his non-Oz/Oz-crossovered work "The Magical Monarch of Mo" but only as a comparison to how lightning appears in this country...)

Is there radio in Oz? Actually there is! In the opening of book 7, to get out of how he had written his way out of Oz in book 6, Baum explained his return to the series by "Oh yeah, Ozians got hold of the radio and now they send me radio messages about what is going on in Oz". So Oz DOES have some sort of radio equivalent. How, since there's no electricity or batteries in Oz? That's beyond me, but here's why it is difficult to say for certain what Oz's technology level is: Baum, as I said, started not giving a fuck anymore about continuity. As I explained the first two-three books are kind of solid in terms of continuity because they were designed as their own closed novels, but book 4 onward Baum just gave up any concrete effort at "solid" worldbuilding and went the "Fuck it, I'll add whatever I want" road. As such, don't expect any serious effort at making a cohesive technological system - Baum isn't Tolkien. He's the anti-Tolkien. That being said, another very interesting point when it comes to Baum's work is that, as you go through his fourteen Oz books, you realize how modern technology slowly creeps onto Oz. Baum was writing Oz book between 1900 and 1920 - and the technological evolution of these two decades quite influenced Baum. The addition of the radio element was one case of Oz "evolving"; in later Oz books there are also magical equivalents of television popping up. But if you want to see a concrete comparison, you can compare the first Oz book, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", with the last Oz book Baum wrote, "Glinda of Oz". The first shows an Oz so technology-lacking people are easily fooled by stage tricks ; while the last book is heavy on technology, with for example evocations of submarines, but it is a technology presented as a form of magic. Which leads me to my last point...

Does Oz have trains? Not by the time Baum wrote them ; though modern day adaptations and authors did add a handful of them to the Oz world (and you can also find things such as ray guns or time-travelling machines in modern Oz books so you know, it evolves with its time). But Baum did wrote about a carriage that did the entire tour of Oz for touristic purpose: that's one of the subplots of "The Emerald City of Oz", and how Dorothy shows her aunt and uncle all about the fantasy land. It is not a train, but you have already here the idea/potential for a train-like system here (even though it is rather a carriage/wagon drawn by a wooden horse that can never tire and doesn't eat). And here's my point: the reason technology is so weird in Oz, and why it is also lacking in many way, is due to Oz being filled with magic.

Most Ozian equivalent to our world's technology is, in Baum, powered by magic. There is no camera or surveillance system, but there are the Magic Picture or Glinda's big magical "spy on everyone" book. There are no lie detectors, but there is Glinda's pearl. The magic eye of the Wicked Witch of the West was explicitely compared to a telescope. Etc etc. Magic replaces most advanced technology around the Land. Advanced technology and mechanism do exist, and Baum was very fond of the idea of the... "magical mechanic" if I can say so. What he does is basically take an actual real-world technology, but take it to fantasy extremes - which notably is why the Oz books are considered early sci-fi. There's how the Tin Man came to be: Baum took the workings of actual real-life prosthetics for missing limbs, but pushed it to the extremes by making a "vintage android". There is how the Woggle-Bug came to be: a great scholar used a machine to project an enlarged image of a small bug on the wall. Quite ordinary right? But turns out the machine literaly enlarged the bug to a greater size - which is a very common sci-fi tropes (all those rays that shrink or enlarge things or objects). And while it is not an Oz example per say, Baum gave us the most blatant example of "magical technology" with the realm of Ev, where lived Smith and Tinker, the inventors of many fantastical automatons, first of which being Tik-Tok, a sentient automat that is considered one of the first robots of modern literature!

So... On one side, Baum tried to show a land that would not advance technologically because magic was there and much more powerful. It is the line by the Good Witch of the North, about how Oz still has magic because it is not "civilized", and one of the traits of "civilization" is advanced technology. Take how guns are treated in Oz: they exist but they are not made a big deal out of, and in fact prove quite useless among the many magical items and beings. And yet, on the other side, Baum's Oz is the literal proof of the law "Any advanced technology is magic" ; or rather a whacky incarnation of this principle, because indeed, the most advanced form of technology in Ozian lands work by fantasy and extravagant sci-fi rules (Tin Man, Tik-Tok), while most of the great spells and magic items of Oz are fantasy equivalents to our real-world technology (the Magic Picture, or even the Gump which works as a fantasy equivalent of flying machines).

[queerbauten]

Some people on TikTok have made videos about Anne and Jane swapping songs, which I think is really cool! It also makes me want a Cleves version of “I Don’t Need Your Love”.

[corvidaedream]

i just think the funniest possible way to come out is to recover from a fever and be like “oh [deadname]? she died, im a genderless angel who took over her corpse, my name is The Friend now. i have no pronouns. in 1780 the sky is going to get real weird looking.”

[guqin-and-flute]

For the WIP ask game, the word is: hanfu

Oh, even without searching I know I haven't used hanfu because I am woefully unknowledgeable about the types and parts of traditional robes and what makes a hanfu a hanfu vs. another type of robe ;-;

I think I shall make it my goal to use it in the Modern 3zun one--have someone wear a traditional hanfu or something because THEN I can know specifically that the thing that I'm talking about is the correct word!

(I do have something for robe, though I know it's not exactly the same?

Xiyao [When Silk Flowers Bloom] : A slide of blue robes through the trees, the flash of the sun off a silver hairpiece.)

[Feel free to send a word and I’ll see if I have it in a WIP!]

[banji-effect]

Really want to just post all of The Book of the City of Ladies

[chadsuke]

Books read in 2022:

Scarlet Palace Vol. 1 by Yi Huan (2010)

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber (2018)

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020)

Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar (2019)

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)

When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz (2012)

An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo (2019)

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton (2011)

Carol by Patricia Highsmith (1952)

[ID: Covers of the aforementioned books. End ID.]

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

Modern Jean Prouvaire is really into K-pop, I am not accepting criticism at this time.

[westmeath]

i booked an open day in aberystwyth for the 6th of march and im hoping to stay a night or two or maybe three and make a little long weekend out of it so if any of you lot either live in or have been to wales and have recommendations for Things To Do Or See..... throw em at me

[misskamelie]

Like. I can't even fathom the thought of someone like. Having an actual opinion of me. It's all performing while I hope to get a close to perfect mark in human interactions and stuff as if that's something both normal and possible to achieve

[thisbluespirit]

Girl On Approval

Head’s up for anyone in the UK interested in James Maxwell - @jurijurijurious​ ? - but Talking Pictures (FV 81) are showing (on Monday 1st feb at 10.15 am) the 1962 Rachel Roberts film Girl on Approval, which also features James Maxwell, like so:

(it’s a kitchen sink/New Wave drama about children in foster care, and is actually pretty good, although a mix of terrible 1950s-ness (!!!) and things that are unhappily still all too current.  It’s also a pleasingly female-centric production in multiple ways.)

[sailorgreywolf-german]

.

[tonyglowheart]

This is a really great video that illustrates the different corsets through the eras, and also show how they look against the other. Of particular note, imo is the 1880s one, which is the more stereotypical “Victorian” corset (tho very differently shaped still from what a modern conception of a “Victorian corset” would be, which I think tends more towards, like, an overbust sweetheart, less hip shaping, and more tight-lacing).

I think it’s interesting to see how dramatic a shape you get, without actually tightlacing down - and it has to do with the cut of the corset. As Nicole talks about, with the raised hip line, and the lowered bust line, that create more of an illusion bc of a sharper angle of contrast. But I think what’s also important to note, is that the underbust measurement is quite large, which then means that it IS relatively comfortable, because there’s plenty of space to expand to breathe. Sometimes I see videos of people altering this era of corset patterns, but they alter it to fit closer to the body, or raise the bustline, and I think that actually kinda defeats the purpose of this era of corset as far as silhouette and shape go. If you look at fashion plates from this era, the torso area does in fact have that... like upper corset edge ridge? at or slightly under the fullest part of the bust, and the shaping in the corset is filled with the bust or with padding (the bodices often would have padding at the top too, to smooth out the shape). 

Nicole Rudolph’s notes about the underbust measure and the expansion of the ribcage as far as correlation with comfort, though, remind me of Bella Mae’s Cinderella corset video, where she talks about this 1860s corset that was short on her, but ended up super comfortable- and if it is indeed short on her, but with that extreme shaping, I can see why that would be comfortable. Because it seems like, people seem to think cinching is from the waist - and it is, because that’s where the squish is - but it’s the constriction of the ribcage & breathing that probably more determines “comfort” vs discomfort.

[flockofdoves]

imagine trying have a healthy and normal relationship with social media and fandom spaces because you’re trying to be a well-adjusted independent adult then BOOM you latch onto a hyperfixation from your preteens with even more intensity than you had the first time around in part because you unintentionally started getting invested in parasocial relationships as a questionable coping mechanism for your current situation in life

[childishzombiejellyfish]

finally reading les liaisons dangereuses and i dont recall in either the stage or film-versions i’ve seen that both Emilié and Cécile (and Marquise de Mertueil but that could just be the sheer sex-appeal she exudes and me projecting) have a lot of bisexual overtones

Emilié has admirers “of both sexes” and Cécile is into the Marquise like damn you do not control your thirst at all, it’s just a shame you don’t have a frame of reference (and also obvs that the Marquise is using you to get revenge, like... that is also a shame for sure...)

[heedra]

i think one thing that complicates ppls willingness to understand wild animal safety is that people often take the statement ‘this animal will kill you with no remorse’ as a morally-charged statement about that animal and will get defensive on that animals behalf, because they themselves are equating predatory behavior with ‘meanness’ and can’t imagine a situation in which an animal such as a bear or big cat could both be a delightful, fascinating animal with capacity for complex interactions with humans and also an animal who simply does not have the same social contracts or see any problem with killing an eating any other animal if it feels safe doing so to. i’ve said similar before on a broader post abt animal intelligence but like, if your appreciation for animals like bears and tigers is ruined by the idea that there’s nothing you can do to prevent a bear or tiger from seeing you as potential food (short of raising it in a way that would be extremely mentally damaging for the animal, lmao), then that’s problem with your own limits to compassion for animals lmao.

it’s wrong to equate an animals carnivory to it being ‘bad’ and its fair to point out how that’s been historically used to demonize animals like wolves but it’s no better to pretend an animal isn’t what it is for your own comfort.

[ithebookhoarder]

hi!!!! I just saw your “Marc and Steven with an ex-Black Widow!Reader” and I loved it!! but I couldn’t help but wonder, what about them with a scarlet witch!reader? 👀 how would khonshu react to them being with someone so powerful?

A/N: First, that is so sweet of you, thanks - and thanks for letting me know. It's always nice to know people enjoy these, so of course I'd love to do another one. 🥰 I also love having an excuse to research more about Ancient Egypt - I did a whole unit at university on the history of witchcraft and magic in ancient cultures and found it fascinating, so this was right up my alley.

Masterlist:

—

Considering all the crazy in Marc and Steven’s world, you having magic powers isn’t that surprising. Sure, Steven would be mostly terrified at first, but he’d warm up eventually and actually thinks it’s pretty cool. 

“It’s like some Harry Potter level, shit.” 

“Except I don’t need a wand or a broom.”

“But - wait. You can fly?”

Cue a deep dive into the history of magic, and those with it, in Egyptian heritage. You better believe Steven has a whole library of stuff waiting for you, each with notes scribbled in the margins, and a heck of a lot of questions to go with it.

“Did you know that, in Egyptian myth, magic - or heka - was one of the forces used by the creator to make the world. Through heka, actions could have practical effects, although it was mostly used by trained priests, but also by pharaohs, magicians, and ordinary people-“

It’s actually kind of cute when Steven gets all nerdy about it (especially with his reading glasses perched on his nose), and you’d be lying if you said you didn’t find it at least a little bit interesting. 

Marc would also be a little wary of the whole magic thing, but only because he knows if you did decide to turn on him he’d be in trouble.

Yet, like Steven, he’d come around pretty quick. If anything, he likes seeing what you can do. 

Just as they try to work out what’s happening with them, and the gifts they’ve been granted, you also try to fully understand your capabilities. If anything, you’ve all become like a weird little magic school of your own - something that, you firmly warn Steven, does not mean he gets to make any more Harry Potter jokes. 

“What do you mean I’m a Ravenclaw? I’m Slytherin-”

“Nah, Hufflepuff.” 

“How come he gets to be Hufflepuff?” 

“I swear to god”-

You’d also help and use your abilities to try and see what’s going on in their head, tracing memories and helping them control it. 

Khonshu would probably be wary of you but would accept that you’re a useful ally for his avatars. He’s probably wary of you, in the beginning, and despite eventually accepting your presence, would try to get rid of you initially. 

“Heka is but white or black. Red is unnatural… unstable… you cannot trust a sorceress of such power but with no pledged loyalty, no master.” 

“Woooow, you really can’t hear how crazy that sounds, can you? You may be a God and all, but you’re scared? Of her? Jesus. No wonder people stopped worshipping your sorry asses.”

I mean, imagine it with that gif: "You gonna listen to this bish? Just cause her fingers glow?" 🤣

Still, historically, Egyptian deities would use protective magic to help humans, as well as their own powers. That is why he permits you sticking around as he can use all the help he can get, especially when it comes to handling the other gods and their avatars. 

He has enough on his plate with his avatar and keeping them alive, so who is he to deny the help.

Hell, he’d even consider asking you to be one given your gifts - if everything with Marc and Steven goes to shit.

Yet you’d turn that down pretty quick.

You only agree to help him in that you wish to help Marc and Steve, and seek to prevent crazy people like Harrow from taking over the world. Other than that, he’s on his own. 

And if you’re being honest, you’d probably be scared of Khonshu in return, as magic is one thing. But a real life god? … it’s a lot to take on, even if you soon learn that your powers, and Marc / Steven’s help, makes you stronger than you think. 

Strong enough that Marc would feel less concerned about dragging you into danger if he knew you could handle yourself. If anything, you’re a big help considering you can hold your own against most adversaries. 

You can also heal which always comes in handy given your lives and the situations you end up in. 

You also try to bring joy into Marc and Steven’s lives. Your magic makes for amusement too, not just a weapon or tool. You love making them both smile and aren’t above making a tea cup float, or causing a prank every now and then. 

Plus you can think of some other uses for your powers around the house... particularly when it comes to the bedroom ;)