#also me: white wizard makes another claim

[messiahzzz]

i have been thinking a lot about mystra’s relationship with gale, how reducing her to “his ex” really is an understatement. she was and still is so much more than that. moreover, using the term “ex-girlfriend” in relation to her plainly feels wrong and diminishes the influence she has over him, as well as the role she played in his life since his childhood (and it also trivializes the abuse he suffered through her).

there are several instances where gale gets defensive when his companions mention or ask him abt mystra. he claims that their relationship was no less real even though most of their interactions were incorporeal.

we have already established that gale is an unreliable narrator in this particular case, still not having fully come to terms with the fact that he was groomed, manipulated and abused. he ping-pongs between bouts of realization (even in his romance), gaining clarity that he was merely used and eventually discarded and that mystra never truly cared for him, back to making light of his situation, idealizing her once again. realizing the extent of his trauma, that he is indeed a victim in this scenario, unlearning what he has been made to believe from a young age is a slow and painful journey. he is in the process of healing, but it takes time. time he deserves just like anyone else.

which makes me wonder what their relationship really looked like, once the lines between teacher, muse, and lover began to blur. i also feel like one of the reasons why part of the fandom still struggles to identify mystra as his abuser, is because she is a white woman who initially presents herself in a soft-spoken, benevolent manner… and well, the fact that gale himself is ambitious to a fault and a lil insane about the promise of power. he also briefly mentions "crossing mystra’s boundaries” when he confides in tav and tells them about his folly. (“i am, after all, the villain in this story.”) which led to a looooot of misinterpretations.

leaving the overall lore and mystra’s treatment of her other chosen aside — what we can discern from her interactions with gale in-game, is that mystra is civil as long as she remains in control and gale follows her demands, but as soon as there’s even a slight mention of challenging her power or defying her rule, she rather quickly changes her tone.

there is also one particular exchange between them that just won’t leave my head:

“you were many things to me, but never a threat. and never a savior."

even if we choose to blatantly ignore the fact that mystra is a deity, his goddess - there is no possible way that their relationship ever could have been equal by any mortal standards. the power imbalance that comes with her being his teacher and a symbol of his admiration, plus the sheer control she holds over him and his powers are simply too great. don’t even let me get started on how it is a common tactic of abusers to isolate their victims from any outside influences so they can exert full control over them. and how up to meeting tav and their merry band of misfits, every single soul he was close to was inevitably tied to mystra in one way or another. he briefly mentions his colleagues and then there’s elminster, also mystra’s chosen and former lover, and tara, who is a fine wizard in her own right. he spend so many years in service of her, dedicating his life to her, that now there is no one left he can truly call a friend. most of his little anecdotes and stories he tells are restricted to his childhood and university days, everything else was mystra.

evidently, ordering gale to detonate the orb is the most efficient course of action in her eyes. he is just as expendable as any other mortal, after all. maybe once significantly more useful given his status and the extent of his powers, but she doesn’t feel sorrow nor remorse for ordering him to end his life. his death is simply the most convenient means to an end.

another thing i would also like to briefly touch upon is the trigger/detonator itself. a dagger to the heart. it could have been literally anything else, a simple incantation. it is well within mystra’s power to stabilize the orb and also to remove it from his body entirely. but no, what she requires of gale is to stab himself. one might argue that it was simply a cinematic choice meant for a more dramatic effect, but it really leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. especially considering the fact that she is commonly known and referred to as a jealous goddess. it almost makes it seem like yet another form of punishment or mere pettiness. after his long period of isolation, gale is now surrounded by fellow humans. people he cares about, even perhaps people he might eventually consider good friends — which is enough of a reason for him to not want to die, to keep going and try to find another way, rather than to blindly follow mystra’s bidding. now there’s a group of people who support him and are genuinely invested in him staying alive. hmmm...

[memryse]

if mcyt isn’t fiction then

people who create dnd characters that are similar to them in personality are just playing themselves and should not be treated as having made a character

people who make any other dnd character should also be treated as just playing themselves since people refuse to even consider roleplay smps as fiction

any ocs someone puts a bit of themselves into? nope not fiction!

actors who play a character with the same first name as them aren’t really acting

and so on

maybe YOU can’t separate characters and real people and think that everything you see from a youtuber even when they’re explicitly acting is how they are in real life but we as a fandom just don’t have that issue lol. we’ve had disclaimers and indicators for when we’re talking about characters and not content creators for years because a certain smp contained a character having suicidal thoughts as a result of abuse at the hands of another character and we needed to make it absolutely crystal clear that we were referring to a fictional storyline and not real guy #1 being an abuser and real guy #2 being suicidal. these customs have either extended into other corners of mcyt fandom, or some developed their own independently like hispanic mcyt fans have used the word cubito to distinguish mc guy from real life guy from years, a term that other language speakers liked so much we’ve also started picking it up lol

we know exactly what we’re doing. i get that the line maybe does seem more blurred to an outsider looking in (i wouldn’t know given that both my first fandom at age 12 and current fandom at age 20 were mcrp lol) but it’s universally understood amongst us. i don’t have a problem separating hermitcraft!gem and empires s1!gem the wizard with a twin brother and empires s2!gem the princess and cc!gem the real life canadian woman.

idk it rubs me the wrong way that after years of trying to explain this we’re either met with people calling us racists because of three guys that the rest of us (all of us, really, because dream team fans do not claim to be minecraft fans. those are the type to actually write rpf and ship the real life racist guys) hate probably a lot more than any of you do, or they watch a few minutes of a less roleplay-heavy series/part and decide that the entire medium is invalid as a form of storytelling

it’s so annoying. i don’t think we need to be understood to have validity as a fandom we’ve been doing this for years already without that but it is so infuriating and sad how whenever there’s some kind of fandom poll thing one of three things happens

mcyt fans are banned outright and placed on the same level as something like hp

an mcyt fan runs their own and gets harassed for it

a non-mcyt fan allows us in until they get harassed so badly by whatever fandoms we go up against that they end up deleting our bracket

in what world is that normal behaviour. and that harassment always involves calling them all racist cishet white men such as misgendering both eret (real life bisexual genderqueer person) and their character (also queer), attempting to harass jimmy solidarity fans because jimmy makes mc videos so he must be a dream associate (the only time they interacted was in a tournament during which dream and georgenotfound shittalked jimmy’s best friends to his face), all the shit quackity has gotten for being a former friend of the dream team as if he wasn’t the #1 victim of their racism and xenophobia, the fact that any time c!technoblade is involved in a poll we have to beg other fandoms not to talk shit about him because the real life man died of cancer before dream’s grooming allegations came out, similarly when tfc was in one. and so on and so forth. all because people can’t separate roleplay and real life and think that the entire minecraft sphere revolves around dream just because their idea of mcyt does (not even his own smp named after him did that).

[livingmydreamlife5555]

MHA dr #4

Name: Jasmine Usagiyama (Sister of Miruko)

Birthday: January 24th

Height: 5'4" or maybe 5'2" somewhere inbetween

Appearance: So since I'm the sister of Miruko, I also have bunny ears. Rumi has white hair and red eyes, and I have blonde hair and purple eyes. My hair is going to be slightly curly and long. I also have long eyelashes, just like my older sister.

Voice claim: I didn't really claim any specific voice, but I just have a soft and pretty voice that's beautiful.

Background: This one isn't all that intricate but since I have a famous sister, when I was born in Japan, me and my mom moved to America for safety reasons since my sister is really good at making more enemies. I stayed and did school in Japan all up until highschool and then I came to Japan to go to UA. Since I was quite hidden, it would take a little while before people figure out. But I guess we do look similar 🤷🏾‍♀️

Quirk: now this one is more intriguing 😼. I have the same bunny quirk like my older sister, but I also can do...MAGIC!! Once I turn four, I unlock a magic sentient book that stays with me as my quirk kinda. I named the second part mana manipulation. I can do magic spells that are offensive, defensive, and support. There are all types of spells there. I'll explain more in the Extra info.

Extra info-

My spells are written in actual ancient languages. (Ex- Gaelic, Tamil, Sanskirt etc.) So my whole book is actually written in all those types of languages. I have to learn them on my own too. So, I'm pretty smart in this reality.

The languages correspond to different elements. For example, all elemental spells are written in Gaelic. Earth spells can also be additionally written in Tamil and sanskirt. I couldn't script for all the languages, but the universe will figure that out.

So anytime I summon my magic book, it can levitate on its own and it understands what I say. Only I can understand what it says. Once it becomes more powerful, it could speak out loud too. We have inside jokes that only we can understand 😚

I can do basic spells, like making people 10% stronger, a fireball spell, lightning spell, healing spells. Just mostly basic wizard spells. There will be more intricate spells, but that's once I get more powerful.

I also trained in Taekwondo, Muy Thai, Capoiera, Wushu, and Karate.

My eyes glow purple and the tips of my hair turn purple when I use my magic.

I have to have enough mana to use my spells so I also do mana training.

The magic part is from my mom's side and the Mutant part is from my dad's side

Edit- also all the spells are even written backwards. If midoriya even asks for any info, imma make sure I confuse him 😐☝🏾(don't want him being all in my business sorry not sorry)

This is another intricate quirk type so do ask any questions. I'm a certified yapper 💯. That's the last of my official MHA drs that I have planned out. Do expect more, cause once I see an interesting power, I make a script for my hero academia.

-Honey out 🍯🍯🍯

[tyrantisterror]

Well gang, it's Walpurgisnacht, a time when the veil is thin and the supernatural powers are at their strongest. That also means it's the two-year anniversary of the publication of the first Wizard School Mysteries book. I had hoped to have a third out by now but life has been... well, it's been life, and things are progressing if at a slower pace than desired, that's how it goes.

ANYWAY! To keep with the faith and tide over the five or so of my followers who are actually looking forward to a third one of these (and five more after it at some point), I thought I'd share something special: the Wizard School Mysteries Freshmen Year soundtrack! Yes, like ATOM and No Sympathies before it, I've made a soundtrack for Wizard School Mysteries. It's not fully complete, mind you - this is the biggest writing project I've undertaken so far, and things are constantly developing, but the parts of it that cover the first three books are more or less done - and today, I'm sharing the first two with you, i.e. the songs that cover the freshmen year of my eight meddlesome youths.

As with the previous books, I've made a youtube playlist of the songs involved, and will post the tracklist below along with what each track corresponds to in the books. So if this kind of thing interests you, dive in after the cut!

Book 1: The Meddlesome Youths

Prologue: He's Leaving Home - She's Leaving Home by The Beatles, which is a song about a runaway teenager escaping a family that refused to acknowledge their pain. This is, obviously, a song for James Chaucer.

Chapter 1: The Treadscar Path - We Are Going to be Friends by The White Stripes. This song's about kids going to school for the first time and making friends, and while the protagonists of the song are much younger than our Meddlesome Youths, I still feel it captures the spirit of the first meeting of James, Ivan, and Gretchen.

Chapter 2: Elemental Orientation - Pursuing My True Self from Persona 4. The Persona games are the biggest influence on Wizard School Mysteries out of all its inspirations, and the opening theme for Persona 4 to this day screams "teenage sleuths diving into a mystery" to me when I hear it, which made it the perfect song for our introduction to the AAAM.

Chapter 3: Academics and Absences - Beneath the Mask -rain- from Persona 5. Second verse same as the first where Persona and WSM goes. I consider this another James Chaucer theme, both lyrically and in its general vibe, and the "rain" version's specifically moodier, more contemplative arrangement really suits where his head is at during this chapter of the book, as James is exposed to the faults in the AAAM and how it's failing some of its students.

Chapter 4: Of Chariots and Fire - She's Actual Size by They Might Be Giants. This is a Margot theme, and also kind of a James theme since it fits his view of her really well.

Chapter 5: What No Student Has Done Before - Rasputin by Bony M. This is an Oomlowt theme, which I struggled to find for a while when putting together the early versions of the WSM soundtrack, until one of my friends pointed out that, as an Aitvaras, Oomlowt could be considered Russian - and, well, as the first book's sole "cool" teacher, I think he's earned the right to claim one of the raddest fucking songs ever sung as his unofficial theme.

Chapter 6: The Hoard of Knowledge - Magic by The Mystery Skulls. I wanted a song that captures the feeling I got when entering my college's enormous, jaw-dropping library of books back in the day, which is a feeling this chapter also tried to catch. The fact that the song is full of language dealing with magic spells also helps it fit a wizard book.

Chapter 7: Tea With Mackers - The Nuckelavee Song from The Bard's Tale. Listen, this is the chapter where a nuckelavee plays a big role, and that's as good an excuse as any to use this song.

Chapter 8: The Matter of Manners - Changes by David Bowie. This is a Rodrigo theme, and I try to give him glam rock songs as much as possible to fit his vibe as the most fashionable of our wizard youths. I think the song also fits what Rodrigo is attempting to do in this chapter - namely, help his friends figure out how to fit in with a "higher" class of people.

Chapter 9: Hobgoblin Poetry - Magic Dance Underground / A Labyrinth Medley by Aurelio Voltaire. As I've opined before, I think Jim Henson's Labyrinth is one of the best illustrations of what folkloric fairies are like in terms of behavior/morality, and so for this chapter, when we get some characterization for a normal fairy underling for the big bad, I felt a Labyrinth song would be appropriate, and this medley is like half the soundtrack condensed into five minutes.

Chapter 10: The Samhain Celebration - Love Is All by Dio. Speaking of characterizing the Fae, there's a manic aspect to the cheery 70's positivity of this song that I find subtly sinister while still being playful and fun, which I think fits the dance-scene in this book quite well.

Chapter 11: Traps and Treasures - God's Away on Business by Tom Waits. This is a Fafgander theme - like Oomlowt, I kinda struggled finding a good song for him. I knew I wanted his theme to be something by Tom Waits, but I struggled to decided on one song in particular. I kept coming back to this one despite having already used it on the No Sympathies soundtrack - I generally try not to repeat myself on these to make sure each book's audio accompaniment is unique to it. But I couldn't stop picturing a big dragon slithering out of the clouds to the opening beats of this song, and the playful cynicism of the lyrics just felt very Fafgander.

Chapter 12: A Wild Hunt & Chapter 13: The Summer Prince - Tam Lin by The Fairport Convention. Yeah, I know, kinda cheating to lump two chapters under one song, but Tam Lin is a long-ass song, though short by Medieval Ballad standards. A song about a clever mortal finding a way to trick a high-ranking fairy noble into releasing a person she was intending to use as a sacrifice is, I think, a pretty fitting song for the climax of book 1.

Chapter 14: The End of the Beginning - This Must Be the Place by The Talking Heads. A song about finding comfort and solace despite the uncertain future that lies before you, because you have people around you to help lift your spirits, which is exactly where our heroes are emotionally by the end of book 1.

Book 2: Tournament of Death

Chapter 1: The Dragon Tithe - Don't Let's Start by They Might Be Giants. There's a fan-made Adventure Zone animatic to this song that kind of cemented it as a Fantasy song in my mind despite there being no inherent fantasy elements to the lyrics. I mean, I already loved this song, They Might Be Giants has been one of my favorite bands since I started actively considering what my favorite bands are, but this just added to that love. Like a lot of TMBG songs, it's got a very peppy, upbeat vibe while having pretty dark lyrics, which feels pretty appropriate to the tone of WSM as a whole and Tournament of Death in particular.

Chapter 2: The Dragon Trick - Just the Right Bullets by Annabelle Chvostek. This is a theme for Juno Panopte, and was chosen for a couple reasons. First, Annabelle performs this song with just the right sort of gritty, vaguely sleazy charm that I wanted Juno to ooze. She's a charismatic teacher who nonetheless puts you a little on edge - you're never sure if she's fucking with you or not. Second, it's a cover of a Tom Waits song by a lady, and Juno Panopte, the character who represents the Empress arcana in WSM's tarot motiff, is a sort of equivalent to Fafgander, the Emperor arcana - and another character with a Tom Waits song as his theme.

Chapter 3: Curios of Calampen - Marketland by Lemon Demon. This is a song about people trying to hock weird shit to you at a flea market, for a chapter about our heroes buying weird shit at a flea market.

Chapter 4: Herring Lordred - Chaos King (with lyrics) by ManontheInternet. A theme for Lord Dhenregirr, and specifically for his duel with James at the start of the titular deadly tournament.

Chapter 5: The Sundown's Shine - Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by White Denim. Yeah, it's the version from the Fargo TV show. Obviously this is a song for Geoffrey Travers, out Dude-inspired wizard.

Chapter 6: Chivalry Dies - The Impossible Dream (The Quest) from Man of La Mancha. If there is a song that more succinctly captures the ideals of chivalry and gallant knighthood, I have not heard it, and no other song could make for a better funeral dirge for poor Gabriev Zelgad.

Chapter 7: Grudge Match - Barracuda by Heart. I looked for so many other songs for this chapter because Barracuda seemed like to obvious a choice, but nothing fit as well and, hey, this is me we're talking about, and more than that, it's Midgaheim. I am not one to avoid obvious, one might even say cliche, story choices if they appeal to me. And, like, this is specifically a song about confronting and telling off your abuser, very few things would fit this chapter better. A second theme for Margot, obviously.

Chapter 8: A Needlessly Gendered Night Out - Sandstorm by Danude. Ok, so, in every high school dance, as well as every dance club I went to in college (which was, like... three? I think? I did not party nearly enough when I was young) played this song at some point, so it's cemented in my head as THE song for teenagers/young adults doing stupid shit and getting into ridiculous drama, so I included it despite it being even longer than fucking Tam Lin.

Chapter 9: Lightning Struck - Under Pressure by Queen. A song that perfectly captures the teenager/young adult condition of, like, complete and total anxiety that any moment now you could ruin your life forever without meaning to. A song for Polybeus, but also for all the Meddlesome Youths, and really for all young people everywhere.

Chapter 10: Well-Timed Pranks - The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel. Once I remembered and accepted that being trite/cliche/obvious is very much my bag, I figured what the hell, let's use one of the most-overused songs about dealing with grief for the chapter that's about dealing with grief, because this song happens to be really fucking good at describing the process of dealing with grief.

Chapter 11: Wasp Under Glass - Woman!! Spirit of the Festival from Sakura Wars (2019). This song is a leitmotif for the most under-developed lady in the main cast of this game, which is a shame because the song itself is a fucking banger. Here it serves not just as a theme for Serena (hopefully more well-developed as a character) but specifically for her fight with Sadie Pineed. Can you hear the part where all the towers fall down? I can.

Chapter 12: Deadly Threads - General's Battle Song from Centaurworld. This is a song about a character who's seemed pretty affable and cool revealing his true colors as a total bastard, and on this unofficial soundtrack it serves as a theme for Richard Rainsford. If you read the second book, you know why.

Chapter 13: The Fury of Stars and Shards - Get Along from Slayers. This is specifically a theme for Margot and Serena's two-on-two fight with the saboteurs of the tournament. Can you hear the part where Serena gets the power up? Or when our two heroines, having dealt with the first saboteaur, bear down on the second and utterly curbstomp him? I can!

Chapter 14: Triumph of the Chariot - La Bete et la Belle by The Real Tuesday Weld. The Real Tuesday Weld is another of my favorite bands, and this song is actually a reprise of their song "The Ugly and the Beautiful" from their concept album I, Lucifer (which is in turn the official soundtrack for a novel of the same name by Glenn Duncan). The song itself is about a somewhat toxic relationship between two deeply unwell people, but this reprise differs from the first instance of it by being more sweet and mellow in how it's arranged which, combined with it being sung in French instead of English like its predecessor, softens a lot of its edges and brings the sweeter, more hopeful parts of the song to the forefront. I picked it as a song for James and Margot - two people who, while not toxic, are still a bit broken and unwell because of their life experiences - who are finding hope in each other and the people around them.

[solarkindred]

You guys know the canon illustrations of Hogwarts founders?

Yeah I totally disagree with them. And I read a founder’s era fic where Hogwarts was actually built as refuge for this war fought between wixes and muggles. And I’m totally all for that.

So, today I’m going to describe my renditions of the founders.

Salazar Slytherin- A tall, lithe white haired man with handsome and sharp features. His eyes are a striking and vibrant yellow, akin to a snake’s. He’s of pure-blood and noble descent, wearing fine clothing of the highest qualities. His nose is pointed and long, eyebrows sharp and masterfully crafted. His usual attire often consists of flowy long sleeved blouses and tight pants or silk tunics. Salazar was from a high point in society, his parents are what most other nobles call “lunatics” for allowing their son to play in the dirt and own pets such as snakes. He likes plants. A lot. The elixirs master and field medic, along side Helga.

Godric Gryffindor- Another tall man, but he’s much more defined and muscular. A gorgeous blonde with viridescent green eyes, a mask of stubble on his chin. He often has a lopsided grin on his face, always able to brighten up a room with his mere presence. A lovable oaf. By modern terms, he’s a bit of a himbo. He has a certain affection to felines, even has a chimaera mount he rides into battle (he raised it from a cub. His explanation to his success is, and i quote, “As long as it imprints on you, you’re good.”) Terrifying but cute, sinnamon roll. Frontlines and defensive teacher, rune magic knowledgeable.

Helga Hufflepuff- A stout and slightly chubby black girl with hair as wild as wild can get. An immigrant and servant girl to the Ravenclaw family. She’s treated well by her masters, especially by her charge, Rowena. Her friends often ask for portraits of either scenery or themselves, her painting skills are of the virtuoso variety. (does that make sense?) She has a knowledge of poisons and medical applications, sometimes her knowledge coming across as terrifying. Cute but terrifying. Poisons and main medic, stealth/assassins operator.

Rowena Ravenclaw- A raven haired Asian-English noble of moderate height. With a cunning smile and knowing sharp cobalt eyes. Pretends to be knowledgeable about everything but is easily dumbfounded at the most simplest of things. Constantly asks Salazar to explain his snake-speak and Godric to explain his pet chimaera. Rowena prefers to wear expensive furs and layered satin dresses that can somehow pull off the modest style. She’s the woman to flaunt off her riches when she gets the chance to. But can dress extremely modestly when the situation calls for it, situations like war. The strategist of the group.

I have wands for them too, but honestly i feel wand making isnt as refined an art yet during their era. Ollivander lineage is an established “wandsmith” family. Hogwarts comes as the Wix-Muggle War begins and develops (you’d think the wixes would win but boy are muggles resilient) also, yknow the Unforgivables?

Yeah they were forgivable during this time because sometimes you have to get extreme.

Also, muggle-borns are treated foully in the wizarding world due to many suspicions and the community consisted of mostly pure-bloods with occasional half-bloods. Godric being a good example, to me. This claim heavily denies Salazar’s supposed “pure-blood beliefs” but then again some of the things said about famous people are just the projections others push on to them. Two of his friends are half-bloods after all.

[princeescaluswords]

I've touched on this before, where despite claiming he ~should've done more~ with his druid powers, stans never give him (Deaton) the Stiles treatment where they make him a mighty archmage with a major role in fanfiction. I mean, if you're so upset that he didn't intervene or use better wards or whatever, why not rectify that by writing him smiting hunters with magic or something?

Just kidding, we know WHY haha, because power fantasies like that are reserved for white characters

You know, I've been thinking about it, and I don't think it's as simple as parts of the fandom simply refusing to choose to make a black man powerful. The racism is far more pervasive than that.

Look at the stories where Deaton provides Stiles (or Peter or Derek or sometimes even Scott) with the means to travel back in time and fix everything. They very seldom explain why, if Deaton had the means to go back in time, he didn't use it. We have Deaton's admission that he loved Talia and that "helping [the Hale] family was a big part of my life." I suspect that this doesn't occur to most of these authors because, they are either unable to think that a black male character could act for his own emotional needs or they are unable to conceive a black male character acting in a morally ambiguous manner.

In the end, it's probably a toss up.

Think about how parts of the fandom conceive of Deaton in his most powerful form: The Evil Tree Wizard. For those of you who might not know, this trope doesn't just manifest in fanfiction. This specific interpretation of the actual television show that appeared after Season 3A concluded, was very popular in parts of the fandom, and still nestles like a parasite in the nests of anti-Scott stans. Dissatisfied with the True Alpha story line, they dreamed up -- with literally no evidence whatsoever -- that Deaton stole the Hale Spark from Derek and gave it to Scott using the Nemeton. There are more benign versions, such as that Deaton knew that teaching Scott how to pain-drain would lead him to becoming an alpha while corrupting him like Deucalion, but all the versions have in common the idea that Deaton used his mysterious powers to make Scott an alpha. (I think that Deaton did play a role in guiding Scott to become a True Alpha, but it was through being a positive role model and father figure, and not magic.)

Usually, the response from actual fans of the show is most often a confused squint, but I want to propose an alternative reaction: good for Deaton! Why wouldn't a benevolent father figure want to help his protege reach his full potential as a werewolf and use the means at his disposal to do so. In addition, it would also free Scott from having to follow Peter -- a villain who murdered his own niece for power, a fact which no amount of hand-wringing excuses will change -- or Derek who, in Deaton's opinion, was not particularly competent.

Cue the offended gasps from racist Hale-stans. To them, black characters (or any non-white character to be honest) are not allowed to be motivated by their emotional needs. Stiles can lie to everyone on the cast because he's insecure, Derek can Bite teenagers in a war zone because he's lonely, and Peter can become a serial killer because he was in a coma, but Deaton cannot boost a child whom he considers hard-working and virtuous into becoming an alpha.

After the gasps die down, the racist Hale-stans suddenly turn into people concerned with morality. Shades-of-gray vanish when the individual operating with moral ambiguity isn't a white male character. Deaton doesn't have the right to take the Hale spark, the Hale territory, the Hale land from Peter -- who has the right to take the spark away from Laura because she may or may not have visited him while he was in a coma -- or from Derek, who attacked Deaton and would have straight up killed him on a hunch. It would be wrong.

Let me give you another example of this. Ever notice that a common occurrence in Archmage-Super-Spark Stiles stories, he's bloodthirsty and violent towards his enemies but also to the people he 'cares about' but only if they're Latinos. Super-Spark Stiles throws Scott against walls, strips him of his alpha status, there is even a recent story where Stiles strips Scott of the ability to speak for five hours because Scott tried to defend his actions. The hilarious part is that so often one of Super-Spark Stiles's complaints to Scott is that Scott used his unwanted werewolf bite to become first line. Because that's selfish! And Stiles will prove it to Scott by punishing Scott for the crime of using the new-found power granted to him by lycanthropy selfishly by ... using his new-found power to torture Scott.

See what I'm getting at here? There's no point in them writing power fantasies for non-white characters because the fandom can't conceive of non-white characters having motivations that satisfy them emotionally or taking actions that might be morally questionable. Non-white characters are either Evil or Selfless Buzzkills. It's the same way traumatic events which happen to characters of color seem to vanish from fandom's collective memory -- like when people argue that Scott never suffered in the television show. The empathy gap is wider and deeper than you might have imagined.

[odysseywritings]

Interviewing the Sorceress

@flashfictionfridayofficial

She caught my eye with her colorful purple clothes, half her hair jet black and half white, and a collection of gold trinkets that had no obvious origin, such as a cyclops and a three headed alien. For privacy, her real name and location have been omitted, yet her van had an elaborate painting of a wizard surrounded by trees. She appears to be born in the 50s yet her energy is youthful and loose.

My dad fought in the Second World War, and he never shook that off, so I grew up a military brat. I went across the states but also Germany. And everywhere I went, I saw premonitions coming from anything at any time. I didn't think about them a lot until they came true. It started off small with what food would be in school or what buildings I'd see. You couldn't say this stuff out loud or you'd be labeled insane so I kept it inside like a good little patriot.

Then bombs showed up nearly every week, us being the "Duck and Cover" generation, and I had this growing anxiety that the world would end. It made me cold and violent toward anything and anyone, small or big. Why bother being good if the world would turn to fire and rubble before I could drive or get my first kiss?

My teenage years had me running away a lot, meeting outcasts, smoking, bussing with rock stars, joining protests, all that. I dabbled in tarot and psychedelics, but what I saw was different, more real. By the 70s, I'd go through these invisible doors that would open up.

When did you realize you were entering these doors?

They would be around corners: alleys, woods, interiors. I didn't feel anything change on my body, but I felt I was in a transient state. Like a caterpillar turning into mush in a chrysalis. Suddenly, I was no longer in my world. It was like being in an alien planet in those hokey B-movies. (laughs)

People looked the same, but the fashion was radical, people were teleporting in these phone booth things, and robots were much more life-like. And before I knew it, I'd flip back to the world of tie dye and an energy crisis.

Some people claim to be abducted by aliens. Do you think you experienced a similar fate?

Oh, goodness, no. I didn't see any little green or gray men. I always felt like I stayed on Earth. The free love movement and sexual revolution made the culture shock easier to absorb, but it was overwhelming at first. As the 80s went on, and progress was slowing down, I felt a longing to go back. I was so tired of people being cruel and dumb, getting obsessed with yuppie greed, settling down in unhappy marriages and jobs. Things were becoming hazy and I wondered if there was any optimism.

It took a few years before another door opened and I couldn't wait! Everything was even more futuristic. There was no smog, no poverty, no real divisions. People had magic, or some kind of advanced technology, where they could just create things out of thin air!

I spent so much time in that future, I left my old one for... I think, 8 years. In that time, I could feel the universe and grab all the atoms. They could be weaved and crafted like a sewing kit for any problem. Viruses, fuel shortages, broken bones, hunger, all gone. I didn't worry about survival like I used to, and I studied and traveled with all the time in the world. I even trained to be an astronaut!

I could see so much of the galaxy and beyond. Even in space, the most terrifying and lonely place, I felt secure knowing I was closer to knowing life in its entirety.

What made you decide to return here?

I didn't want to learn everything while I was still healthy. What else would I do besides get bored to death? I'm over 70 but I haven't felt this young before. All the regrets, shame, anger, confusion, and pessimism in my youth are so distant that they belong to someone who doesn't exist anymore.

What matters is that I keep doing new things, making the impossible happen, and delivering the truth to others. I know I seem like a crazy old lady, but you can find doors to enter if you turn your head around the corner, and discover a new way to live life when everything seems to drag you down.

Thank you for taking the time for this interview.

My pleasure, dear!

[opinated-user]

Lily, in her It's More Mature To Accept Things Are Just Evil video: "I hate when people ask for serious and mature writing. Fandom says they want mature storytelling but they actually don't want it because they don't want everyone who's bad in fiction to be murdered. No one on Earth wants villains to be killed but me. No fiction ever kills villains (please ignore the many pieces animation pre-90's, most pre-Revival Disney movies and anime that do kill villains regularly). People who like a character I don't like are fucking idiots, no I will not provide proof. Also people are lying, they're not actually interested in why people turn to darkness. No proof, I'm just rushing the video along onto another topic and talking really quickly and hoping you never ask me for any examples of anything. People only like villains when they're white, no I will not acknowledge the many non-white villains who've had fandoms going as far back as when silent film era Asian actors who were forced by the industry to only play villains had huge fanbases, fuck history, it's definitely just AFAB white women wanting to fuck AMAB white men. I'm going to say this is not a disputable fact despite providing no proof and ignoring actual facts that contradict my 'factual' point.

Anyway murder is the 'logical endpoint' of all villains' stories, no I will not acknowledge how that blanket statement does not work in all settings. Here in reality (I say about Star Wars, as if it's real) Vader would've been executed. Why? Because I want him to be, even though it would make no sense for Luke to let Vader be executed. A good hero would automatically be cool with that even though compassion is Luke's defining character trait and Luke, Han and Leia 100% have the know-how to simply claim Vader died, put him in a new life-sustaining suit and transport him and Luke somewhere else. Fuck you, commenter who imagined compassion for someone and whose name I'm showing onscreen to shame you in front of my entire audience.

Fans are stupid. Fans who want redemptions have 'poisoned minds'. They're the same as people who simp over serial killers. Yeah I just compared liking a black-clad space wizard or crystal alien cartoon to liking someone who murdered actual human beings. No I will not acknowledge that make-believe is not real. No I will not acknowledge that I just turned to the families of murder victims and said that a kid liking the wrong cartoon is just as morally wrong as someone liking the man who murdered their actual family member in the real world, I'm just going to keep talking quickly and pretend I didn't devalue the lives of murder victims by making them as unimportant as a cartoon."

I couldn't make it through Lily's last video. Hooktube not giving her a view doesn't mean it gives me the ability to deal with this many fallacies. Unsubstantiated claims, false equivalencies, saying 'the real world' about Star Wars as if it's real, ignoring historical facts, ignoring the facts of the medium she's reviewing, erasure of the long and complex history of POC in villain roles in Western media and audience response, assuming murder works as a solution to all problems in all circumstances in all universes...

I get that talking quickly is supposed to prevent people from thinking about the things she's saying, but as someone who did debate in high school, I was taught to process things going by at this speed. And there's so many things wrong with so much of this that the speed actually makes it worse, because she piles up more and more untrue statements, opinions stated as fact, and absurd statements than I can even describe in a very short frame of time.

THIS is why your channel is dying, Lily. Your lies are so obvious, opinions so outlandish, arguments so fallacious and statements so egregiously lacking in factual basis that to a normal person, you sound ridiculous, unhinged and unwell.

That's not ableism on my part. I mean this as someone with mental health issues myself - she sounds unwell. She is not okay. She has completely detached from reality at just about every level and appears to be unable to even distinguish it from fiction, resulting in her thinking liking some cartoon cartoon is like being a fan of real-life murderers. She doesn't know real life murder is worse! She does not understand that a real person dying is worse than a fictional one dying. Holy shit, has she been like this the entire time? I watched her videos in middle school and I remember thinking they were funny but looking at this as college-aged me, she sounds like someone less than half her age who thinks they were Amity in a past life. She is on fictionkin levels of 'crimes in a fictional universe are just as bad as crimes in this one'. She called Star Wars the real world!

At this point only a full-on mental health intervention could save her. I don't think anything less could salvage her mind, nevermind her channel. She's just broken mentally in a way that I can't even take the tiniest bit of 'whew! glad I'm not her' satisfaction in because it's so awful.

Even when I was unmedicated and had manic episodes, I would not compare serial killers to cartoons. I don't know what mental illnesses she has but she needs help.

i think it's worth remembering that a lot of what LO does is purely performative. any attempt at wanting progressive politics or wanting queer people to stop hating on themselves is empty noise, they don't mean anything. her actions speak louder than words and through those we know already that LO does not care about LBGT+ people, only cis lesbians and only as long they satisfy her on the way she wants them to be.

that line about liking serial killers and liking villains is nothing but more examples of her overcompensating for liking sadistic cruel murderers and bending backwards to try to still make them the heroes. it's not what she really thinks, but it works to come across the idea of how despicable villain liking looks to her. it's there to make you forget about all the way that LO has liked and written character who have done far worse than many villains.

[cinematicct]

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Directed by Spike Lee and produced by Jordan Peele, this biographical crime film is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first African-American police officer who ran a sting operation in which he went undercover to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

John David Washington (real-life son of Denzel Washington) plays Ron Stallworth while the supporting cast includes: Adam Driver as Jewish colleague Philip “Flip” Zimmerman, Laura Harrier (aka Liz in Spider-Man: Homecoming) as civil rights activist Patrice Dumas, Topher Grace as KKK Grand Wizard (and National Director) David Duke and Paul Walter Hauser as KKK member Ivanhoe. Alec Baldwin and actor/activist Harry Belafonte have special cameo appearances as segregationist Professor Kennebrew Beauregard and Jerome Turner (who claims to have witnessed the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington), respectively.

John David Washington delivers a knockout performance as a real-life detective who sets out to make a difference by working his way up the ranks to expose the looming threat of the KKK. Adam Driver is notably outstanding in the role of a trusty partner. Laura Harrier’s character is somewhat fictional (though possibly based on Angela Davis), but she definitely gives a swell performance as president of the Black Student Union. Topher Grace is arguably one heck of a performer as a white supremacist. At the same time, his cartoonish portrayal of a treacherous racist is entirely different from his version of Eddie Brock/Venom (a fictional antagonist) in Spider-Man 3. That’s another story, but trust me, if you were to watch both his villainous characters simultaneously, you’d know what I mean.

The movie blends satirical humor within a heavily dramatized storyline of racism at its worst. Some examples include Ron receiving offensive slurs during his first day on the job in the records room and Flip almost having to take a lie detector test to prove he’s an all-white American to the KKK.

In terms of observing the motivation of each character, Ron wants to give his support to the liberation of the Black community. However, he strongly believes in law and order, hence he hides his authority from Patrice, who only believes in the Black Power movement after being sexually assaulted by a racist cop. Furthermore, Ron masquerades as a white person over the phone to fool the KKK, sending Flip to meet the Klan in person. Flip (who doesn’t fully acknowledge his Jewish heritage) is willing to “get his skin in the game” out of respect and admiration for Black people. Meanwhile, David Duke plots to fight for an all-white nation across America to maintain white superiority over racial equality.

The story is also based on the memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth, set in 1970s Colorado Springs, Colorado. Interestingly, the movie, which serves as a wake-up call to what’s happening nowadays in the real world, draws a parallel between racism of the 20th century and recent political injustices of the Trump regime. The Civil Rights Movement may have been successful at one point in the past thanks to Martin Luther King Jr., but the Klan managed to form an invisible empire that would eventually take action during Donald Trump’s presidency, specifically when white supremacists began to reemerge as a way to “Make America Great Again”. Overall, the movie won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The movie even contains some film history references. A clip from Gone with the Wind is shown in the beginning and is occasionally mentioned. The Blaxploitation genre originated in the early ‘70s and is debated by Ron and Patrice in one scene. Footage of the 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation is depicted, which inspired the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan to begin with. Both those epic movies are a reminder of the way cinema used to exploit Black people back in the old days. Blaxploitation movies were inconsistent because, despite the empowerment of Black celebrities at the time, they emphasized damaging stereotypes as well. On the other hand, thanks to the groundbreaking direction of Spike Lee, this particular biopic makes it clear how important it is for us to hear what African-Americans have to say in order to live in peace and harmony.

On that note, the ultimate message of the film is to put a stop to civil disorder and unite to prevent America from being pushed to the brink of chaos. While I recommend this movie, I’d like to say that everyone deserves an equal chance.

[sdarbvtterfly]

Two Letters: The Sent One

I can't even begin to describe how I felt when I learned that there was an international letter waiting for me. After all these years, you were probably the only one who remembered me – well, half the blame lies with me, but you did find where I am in the end, didn't you?

As for me, I'm fine. America is an amazing country. You can always find kindred spirits here. In fact, when I received your letter, I had just returned from Niagara Falls, which you don't see that big ones in London: it was as if ten million white birds were struggling to fly down, and the cool mist of water flooded in a roar. I was standing right at the edge of it, thinking that even the best Quidditch player couldn't fly over it. There are plenty of waterfalls in this country, and Yosemite's is beautiful too, just not as spectacular as this one.

I'm already a professional traveler, Blaise. And I'm planning to do a trip to Antarctica – not this year, of course. It's already August, and I have to prepare for that for at least three months. Then it is September. September, you told me your kids are starting school, I believe. My Lyla is nine years old. She's a clever girl, but unfortunately she's nothing like me, except for her serene black eyes. Her nose is a bit like my mother's, and I guess she got her slightly dark skin from her father (I'll have to include a photo for you).

Okay, let me be honest. None of us saw Lyla coming. But she's very talented, and I believe her father was probably a brilliant wizard in disguise. Does that offend you, Blaise? If it were a few years ago, that might have made me ashamed for a while, but now? I'm half a muggle now, Blaise. My wand makes me weak. I can't keep myself from remembering how many unforgivable curses shot from her tip. And my hair is mostly white – that beautiful black hair that even you weren't fastidious about. I try to blame all this on the war, but I am also guilty. It was me who screamed that "Harry Potter" in the Great Hall, and also me who chose to flee the battlefield. I chose to avoid this trial…I waited for fate to claim its price from me.

I'm going to send Lyla to Ilvermornyin the future. Hogwarts is not for her. Lyla is too obsessed with magic, like a child obsessed with toys. And magic is more than toys, isn't it? Also, I'm sorry, Blaise, it's a little hard to talk about, but it does exist. My feet are afraid to set foot on the land of Britain. Like a deserter who doesn't want the scars on his back to be seen, I am afraid to face my former friends and professors as I fled timidly while they drew their wands to defend Hogwarts. On top of that, we Slytherins – and how evil should we be portrayed? No one can forgive us, Blaise, especially me.

I am still thinking, still resentful. I sink into the memories of the past. I dreamed of Hogwarts again and again, dreaming of us walking through the old and strong corridor, of the sunlight enveloping us like the fog in the dark forest at night, of the gentle, sad eyes of the women in the portraits. How can you smell the so-called ambition in these dreams and bad memories that have passed like water? All my secret thoughts are only about another person, who alone makes me sigh with no resentment…

I miss you so much, Blaise. If one day my destiny reaches its end, the only one worthy of my smile will probably be you, old friend. I often think of our first rafting trip on the Black Lake. D, Goyle, Crabbe and I were in the same boat. You and Theo's boat was next to ours. I was thinking what an arrogant and insolent brat you were, but I didn't think you would be a faithful and reliable friend, just as I didn't realize that the moonlight that night was one of the rare times in my life pure and bright.

Your sincerely,

P.P

Included: a stilled photo

[mackerelphones]

The Patchwork Girl Of Oz: Patching Together A Story

(Continued from my previous post in this series, and each of the ones before that. I meant to link all five in these parentheses, but Tumblr is weird and doesn't seem to want me to? Too bad, here is the one about Ozma of Oz and here is The Marvelous Land of Oz.)

Above: The Shaggy Man using a telegraph.

In The Emerald City of Oz, Oz was hermetically sealed. However, L. Frank Baum, continuing to be a character in the fiction, is able to continue his role as Royal Historian by corresponding with the Shaggy Man via wireless telegraph. From Ozma of Oz onward, Baum depicts Oz as a utopia, not a land for perilous adventures but where the adventures end. However, the action can no longer leave the bounds of Oz. Continuing the series meant finding more peril and conflict in Oz itself. So, in 1913, the fan-favorite The Patchwork Girl of Oz began a new phase of the series in which Baum reveals that huge swaths of Oz consist of wilderness and areas beyond Emerald City control, still with beasts, individuals, and whole nations (e.g. the Hammer-Heads, the Utensians, and Jinxland) that do not know about or refuse to acknowledge Ozma’s rule. Even the Kalidahs, which Baum insisted had been tamed in The Emerald City, are apparently still wild. (“Hammerhead” is now spelled without a hyphen, one of Baum’s favorite types of inconsistencies.)

This resembles Dorothy’s journey in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Emerald City greets her merrily, but the repeated warnings that Ojo will be arrested in the Emerald City prove true: he and his friends are engaged in illegal activities. During a series of chapters showing the Ozite penal system (prisoners are marched through the streets under sheets to hide their shame), Ozma seems to be the villain, or at least something less than universally good. Then Ojo realizes Ozma is kind and loving after all, phew. After Ozma releases Ojo, her one and only prisoner, from jail, she allows him, Scraps, Dorothy, and the Scarecrow to journey into the “wild country” of the Quadlings to seek out the remaining potion ingredients.

The story is to some extent a parody of the original novel: misfit friends follow the Yellow Brick Road from Munchkin Country to the Emerald City and from there travel south to Quadling Country. However, instead of grand, world-changing adventures and emotional bonding, this time the characters are often nasty to each other and to the people they meet. They learn nothing while doing nothing that affects anything. The Hopper and the Horner war episode is silly comedy, more like make-believe than war, with none of the weighty dread or substantial changes that result from the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wizard plots. Finally, the characters completely fail to achieve their goals. Then, instead of, as in the original novel, the Wizard using fake magic to pretend to resolve the issues the misfits already internally resolved, the Wizard uses real magic to resolve their real problems in an abrupt deus ex machina.

Baum was also involved in creating the 1914 movie adaptation of The Patchwork Girl of Oz (which takes out none of the racism), but I leave it to someone else to describe that financial failure. I just want to clarify that it exists and does not quite follow the plot of the novel. With that acknowledged…

Ojo Begins

In addition to Oz now having imperfections, there is another break in the series pattern. Instead of Dorothy Gale, the main character is—not the Patchwork Girl but rather Ojo the Unlucky, a Munchkin boy with a huge ruffled collar. He lives in an isolated house in the wilderness of Munchkin Country with his white-bearded uncle Nunkie, apparently just north of the mountain of the Hammerheads in Quadling Country. Unc Nunkie is a taciturn man, usually responding to any subject with a one-word answer if he must speak, for which reason he is known as the Silent One.

In The Road to Oz and The Emerald City of Oz, Baum claims there are no poor people in his fairy land utopia. This time around, though, the novel opens with Ojo and Unc Nunkie out of food and wondering why they are so poor. The answer preserves Ozma’s benevolence: their extreme isolation. “There is plenty for everyone, you know; only if it isn’t just where you happen to be, you must go where it is” (20). Poor people as protagonists? Yes, but never fear, Baum has not lost his fixation on bloodlines. Before his self-imposed exile, Unc Nunkie “might have been King of the Munchkins, had not his people united with all the other countries of Oz in acknowledging Ozma as their sole ruler” (50).

So they are poor, yes, but they are still royalty. It feels like if Baum cared to revise his texts, he would have made Dorothy a relative of the Tudors. There is no reason for this detail, either, as it never comes up again and is of no relevance to the story. It is also strange because, in earlier novels, each of the four countries of Oz has its own ruler who simply ranks lower than Ozma. This is still the case in The Patchwork Girl itself, where the Tin Woodman remains the Emperor of the Winkies. Moreover, “the Monarch of the Munchkins” attends Ozma’s birthday party in The Road to Oz. Fan fiction brain might imagine that Unc Nunkie was opposed to unification and got deposed as a result, replaced with this unidentified monarch.

Desperate for food, these two isolated weirdos walk through the wilderness to the house of another weirdo, Dr. Pipt, the “crooked magician” who lives with his wife, Margolotte. Ozma has banned the practice of magic, excepting Glinda and the Wizard (230), so even the Good Witch of the North gets screwed over. The truth is that this character has just stopped existing because Baum forgot about her.

Above: Margolotte carrying the Patchwork Girl.

Weirdly, Dr. Pipt, a wizard, can’t help but praise Ozma for banning magic: “Too many people were working magic in the Land of Oz, and so our lovely Princess Ozma put a stop to it. I think she was quite right. There were several wicked Witches who caused a lot of trouble” (42). Magic has to be illegal or the status quo might be challenged again, and nothing is more precious than the status quo. Because there are no police in Oz to search for Dr. Pipt, he has continued his illegal practices and insists he has a right to create artificial beings if he wants to, just that he cannot legally do magic for other people. Ojo and Unc Nunkie happen to find Dr. Pipt finishing up a batch of the Powder of Life to animate a human-sized, colorful patchwork ragdoll to become Margolotte’s slave. This is not me applying edgier language—Margolotte calls the Patchwork Girl her slave.

These sleazy marginalized wack jobs, including a surly Glass Cat Dr. Pipt earlier brought to life “because the meat cats drink too much milk” (208), prepare to awaken the Patchwork Girl. However, Ojo thinks it “both unfair and unkind” to limit her psychological functions so that she can be only an automaton. He discreetly “[takes] down every bottle [of personality] on the shelf and pour[s] some of the contents in Margolotte’s dish [of liquid brains]” (40).

As a result, when the Patchwork Girl springs to life, she is raucous, creative, intelligent, defiant, and overflowing with chaotic energy. In her first moments, she causes Unc Nunkie to accidentally tip Dr. Pipt’s bottle of Liquid of Petrification, which spills on Unc Nunkie and Margolotte, turning them to stone. Recall that Mombi threatened to work this kind of magic six books ago (though I took it as trying to scare Tip rather than as a sincere intention, a degree of subtlety I no longer think Baum capable of).

Ojo pushed the Patchwork Girl away and ran to Unc Nunkie, filled with a terrible fear for the only friend and protector he had ever known. When he grasped Unc’s hand it was cold and hard. Even the long gray beard was solid marble. The Crooked Magician was dancing around the room in a frenzy of despair, calling upon his wife to forgive him, to speak to him, to come to life again! (56)

The Patchwork Girl rejects the name “Angeline” that Margolotte intended, instead deeming herself “Scraps” (queer allegory). In her joy to be conscious and queer, Scraps isn’t much concerned with what has happened and, displaying her good brains already, suggests Dr. Pipt just use the Powder of Life to reanimate the petrified people. Creating more powder will require “six long, weary years if stirring four kettles with both feet and both hands” (60). However, there is another compound that could break the petrification spell. Unfortunately, this potion requires a six-leaved clover, the left wing of a yellow butterfly, “a gill of water from a dark well” that light has never touched, three hairs from the tip of a Woozy’s tail, and a drop of oil from a live man’s body. Dr. Pipt does not know what the last three ingredients of this list even are.

Ojo sets out to explore Oz for the first time to find every item in the recipe. Scraps joins him. When Dr. Pipt insists she stay as his servant, the cloth homunculus claims she is serving him by helping break the petrification magic. The Glass Cat also tags along, claiming she is intelligent enough to help but really just hating life with Dr. Pipt and hoping to learn more about the world. So begins the adventure with these argumentative oddballs to whom the Land of Oz is scarcely less new than it was to Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard. They set off down the Yellow Brick road to find the six-leaved clover outside the Emerald City, though they will not be welcome because Ozma has banned the picking of such clover. We have a proper quest with clear, specific goals and emotional stakes for the characters! Incredible! I thought Baum had forgot narrative structure exists after Ozma of Oz.

Messy, strange, evocative, and moving, these first five chapters alone contain more personality and drama than the whole of the previous two books. Sadly, despite initial promise, The Patchwork Girl fails to deliver on most of its thematic and narrative threads. I do not blame people who like this novel, as it is so much more entertaining compared to The Road to Oz and The Emerald City of Oz that a reader who has torn through each, one after another, would find The Patchwork Girl water in a desert. The book also introduces, well, the Patchwork Girl, one of the more likable characters.

How Is John R. Neill Doing?

John R. Neill’s full-color pages are printed on the same quality and the same pages as the rest of the text, an organic means of incorporating the drawings that has been missing since Ozma of Oz.

However, for the first time, there is no unique quality or distinguishing gimmick of the artwork, another way in which The Patchwork Girl initiates a new phase of the series. The quality of the illustrations is lower than usual.

The colors are often odd. The text repeatedly notes that, as a Munchkin, Ojo dresses in blue and even dislikes other colors, yet the colorist (I assume Neill) likes depicting Ojo dressed in red. But it’s inconsistent! Sometimes Ojo is red, and other times he is blue. Baum is also specific about the colors of Scraps’s face, text ignored in the illustrations. However, this might be attributable to the book originally being printed without color, as the earlier editions seem to lack it.

Another confusing illustration error is Dorothy’s inclusion with Ojo’s party in the title illustration of Chapter 13 (above), when Dorothy never appears until Chapter 16. Not necessarily a mistake, Neill also draws Dorothy much tinier than in previous books. She is sometimes shorter than Ojo and not much larger than Toto, looking like a toddler, as below.

But at other junctures, Neill draws Dorothy the same height that he has previously:

Beginning in The Patchwork Girl, the Scarecrow’s face is drawn white, with red marks around his eyes and mouth. The clown makeup look isn’t necessarily a continuity error. When he first appears in The Patchwork Girl, the Scarecrow is traveling to visit, of all people, his “old friend” Jinjur to touch up his face paint (as in, his face is literally paint). She only tried to kill him once, so I understand why they get along now. For the Chapter 17 title illustration, Jinjur appears, in full Army of Revolt regalia, painting the Scarecrow’s face. Sure enough, in this and only this drawing, the Scarecrow’s head has its former brown hue. Even though Jinjur’s uniform is colored incorrectly. So she must have painted his head white and added the red markings around his eyes and mouth.

Neill continues adding unique flourishes to the illustrations, such as giving the Horners horrifying, uneven chalk-like teeth or having Jack Pumpkinhead smoke a pipe. As ever, the drawings are as pivotal to bringing life to the fantasy as is Baum’s prose (and poems, this time around). I prefer these to the messy illustrations in The Emerald City.

The Players

In addition to plots, Baum seems to have remembered strong characterization, which in The Emerald City he reserved only for villains. Scraps is an abrasive clown. In a good way! Prone to singing, Scraps initially draws the ire of other characters. As though setting up a horror plot, a woodman darkly tells Scraps, “You’re crazy, girl. Better crawl into a rag-bag and hide there; or give yourself to some little girl to play with. Those who travel are likely to meet trouble; that’s why I stay at home” (77). Oz, it seems, is still so dangerous that people prefer never to travel. But the woodman does not hate Scraps, remarking, “A Glass Cat is a useless sort of thing, but a Patchwork Girl is really useful. She makes me laugh, and laughter is the best thing in life” (75).

After gaining consciousness, Scraps immediately deems herself “the supreme freak.” She then adds, “But I’m glad—I’m awfully glad!—that I’m just what I am, and nothing else” (57). (Again, queer allegory. The character is literally rainbow already.) Scraps totally defies her intended fate as a domestic slave. As she learns more, she rejects ordinary forms of respectability and even opposes Ozma (who is now the leading wet blanket aside from Glinda).

“I hate dignity,” cried Scraps, kicking a pebble high in the air and then trying to catch it as it fell. “Half the fools and all the wise folks are dignified, and I’m neither one nor the other” (132).

Scraps witnesses repressed Horner girls. They live submissive existences waiting for marriage, forbidden from cracking jokes, as per “the rules and regulations laid down by a leading bachelor” (290). Seeing these girls, her opposites, Scraps exclaims, “That old bachelor who made the rules ought to be skinned alive!” Feminist Scraps?

Not only joyous and selfish, Scraps is clever, observant, and shows great regard for Ojo. At one point, the characters encounter Chiss, a giant porcupine who kills travelers by launching quills as projectiles. When Chiss prepares to attack Ojo, Scraps “realize[s] in an instant” what is happening, “so she sprang in front of Ojo and shielded him from the darts, which stuck their points into her own body until she resembled one of those targets they shoot arrows at in archery games” (155). Scraps also dares conceal incriminating evidence and claim Ojo is innocent when Ozma puts him on trial. Sadly, the Wizard blows Scraps’s deception. But the effort demonstrates, yet again, that the Patchwork Girl is fearless. And brighter than the Scarecrow!

Despite how she protects him, Ojo also remains really mean about Scraps to the end. When Dorothy, for instance, asks Scraps if she is “feeling a little queer,” Ojo answers for her: “Not queer, but crazy[. …] When she says those things [i.e. sings] I’m sure her brains get mixed somehow and work the wrong way” (157).

Baum is in a poetical mood. Scraps frequently recites songs or poems, including her first words upon seeing her reflection and understanding herself:

“Whee, but there’s a gaudy dame! Makes a paint-box blush with shame. Razzle-dazzle, fizzle-fazzle! Howdy-do, Miss What’s-your-name?” (56)

I didn’t say it was inspired poetry. Scraps is in love with her colorful appearance. Most of the other characters dismiss her as ugly and crazy. The foolish owl puts it best in, ironically, a song:

“Patchwork Girl has come to life; No one’s sweetheart, no one’s wife; Lacking sense and loving fun, She’ll be snubbed by everyone” (93).

Only when Dorothy, Ozma, and most especially the Scarecrow meet Scraps does she receive respect. The Scarecrow deems her the most beautiful sight his eyes have ever beheld, and Scraps shows the Scarecrow rare deference, attempting to be slightly more respectable even though first she has Ojo roll her on the ground to reach her full height (169). The Scarecrow and Scraps don’t become an item, though, at least not in this book. (After all, the Scarecrow is spoken for by his boyfriend, Nick Chopper.) Their faux courtship is probably meant as a joke, much like the physical abuse the Scarecrow faces throughout the novel. Scraps remains no one’s sweetheart, no one’s wife, and maybe she’s happier that way. I guess she is “feeling a little queer,” like Dorothy observed.

The Glass Cat, a foil and semi-sister to Scraps, also has strong characterization. Like Scraps, she rejects the name her oppressive parents gave her, “Bungle,” and refuses her intended role as a housecat, wanting instead to be an admired person. The Glass Cat is indolent, selfish, and vain, having no respect or patience for someone loud and strange like Scraps. The first words she tells Scraps are that the latter is horrid. The Glass Cat is visually her opposite: Scraps’s body is made from a durable rainbow patchwork quilt, whereas the Glass Cat is made of delicate glass and is transparent, colorless. “I am much more beautiful than the Patchwork Girl,” the Glass Cat gloats to the Scarecrow. “I’m transparent, and Scraps isn’t; I’ve pink brains—you can see ’em work; and I’ve a ruby heart, finely polished, while Scraps hasn’t any heart at all” (172).

The Glass Cat’s most defining source of vanity her is “pink brains” (you can see ’em work). These seem to be a small pocket of fluid of the kind inside Scraps rather than organic brains, and Neill draws them as little marbles. While Scraps is also highly proud of herself, she does not dismiss others as lessers, demonstrating a healthier self-attitude than the Glass Cat manages.

The Glass Cat is haunted by the Shaggy Man’s advice that, if she doesn’t want people to break her, she should “purr soft and look humble—if you can” (145). In other words, she is told she should accept the limiting role society tells she should. While the story implicitly rejects this moral for Scraps, also honoring her chosen identity by never calling her Angeline in the narration, Baum believes the Glass Cat should change her attitude and does sometimes call her Bungle. The ominous and rather sexist dismissal of her feelings leads to a distressing ending, which I’ll return to later.

The Woozy whose three hairs Ojo needs for the potion is no less memorable. The only Woozy on Earth turns out to be a boxy animal that can shoot fire from its eyes. Local beekeepers, failing to kill this bee-devouring creature because of its impervious skin, imprisoned the Woozy without food for years, but even starvation never killed it (104). Though stubborn, the Woozy is friendly and “lonesome—dreadfully lonesome” (103). Initially hating to part with its only three hairs, the Woozy acquiesces when it realizes the hairs might be life-saving. When Ojo and Scraps lack the physical strength to tear the three hairs out, the Woozy, wishing to have company anyway, agrees to join them until they meet someone who can.

A belief that its growl is almost supernaturally terrifying is one of the Woozy’s memorable traits. After much buildup, the actual growl turns out to be “Quee-ee-ee-eek” (152). Carrying on the pattern of oddballs who prove adequate in their inadequacy, the Woozy concludes, “It has always sounded very fearful to me, but that may have been because it was so close to my ears” (154). Ojo, however, reassures it that “it is a great talent” to be able to shoot fire from one’s eyes.

The argumentative nature of this group adds texture and tension missing from the last two depictions of Oz. This might stem from these characters being outcasts on the road instead of magical royalty relaxing in luxurious castles. Their contrasting personalities also permit the comedic repartee from The Marvelous Land of Oz to return:

“All right; I promise,” said the Woozy, cheerfully. “And when I promise anything you can depend on it, ’cause I’m square.”

“I don’t see what difference that makes,” observed the Patchwork Girl, as they found the path and continued their journey. “The shape doesn’t make a thing honest, does it?”

“Of course it does,” returned the Woozy, very decidedly. “No one could trust that Crooked Magician, for instance, just because he is crooked; but a square Woozy couldn’t do anything crooked if he wanted to.”

“I am neither square nor crooked,” said Scraps, looking down at her plump body. [Note that this is another instance of Scraps being neither in one category nor the other. She doesn’t quite fit in any expected roles.]

“No; you’re round, so you’re liable to do anything,” asserted the Woozy. “Do not blame me, Miss Gorgeous, if I regard you with suspicion. Many a satin ribbon has a cotton back.”

Scraps didn’t understand this, but she had an uneasy misgiving that she had a cotton back herself (112–113).

This emphasis on comedic dialogue might suggest Baum wanted this to be a stage play too, though the adaptation turned out to be a movie.

The Second Half

The second half of the novel, the journey from the Emerald City south to the dangerous Quadling Country, features plenty of new ideas and settings. The new protagonist party of Ojo, Scraps, Dorothy, and the Scarecrow (I guess Toto is around too) never achieve the chemistry or dramatic promise of the initial grouping. Dorothy has no further character elements to develop and is too well-established to change. So is the Scarecrow, who has completed whatever arc he had six whole novels ago by believing himself brainy and then stepping down as king. Baum has him tag along only to be the victim of repeated slapstick violence. There is a frightening encounter with the giant Yoop (whose wife is an important character in The Tin Woodman of Oz) and a surprisingly grounded sojourn with a Quadling couple. Otherwise, the tone loses the edge and the drama to become predominately silly comedy.

An unfortunate addition to Quadling Country are the Tottenhots, childlike people who inhabit black dome-shaped houses. Their name is derived from an offensive term for the Khoekhoe people. Baum describes them in stereotypical “native” dress, calls them “dusky” (244) and “little brown folks” (246), and portrays them as childish and work-hating in a way derived from racist stereotypes of Black Americans. While hardly a shock for 1913, when popular American media took mocking Black people for granted, this is definitely one of the uglier moments in Baum’s canonical Oz novels. (My William Morrow and Company Books of Wonder edition preserves the Tottenhot sequence. But earlier, some editor rewrote the minstrel show-influenced lyrics of a song called “My Lulu” to no longer call someone “coal-black,” so I wonder what the rationale was.)

Above: These, er, problematic Tottenhots playing with the Scarecrow.

Later, Ojo and his companions discover two cave-dwelling countries inside a mountain. This seems like a promising place in their hunt for the dark well. The first of these peoples, the Hoppers, have a single leg each and hop around like pogo sticks. “Walk! Who wants to walk?” says Hip Hopper, first Hopper we meet. “Walking is a terribly awkward way to travel. I hop, and so do all my people. It’s so much more graceful and agreeable than walking” (274). The second group, the Horners, each have a single horn in the center of their forehead. The Hoppers are at war with the Horners—a war in which nobody is hurt or dies—because they misunderstood a cornball pun. Dorothy willingly participates to achieve her goals, pretending to take Hip Hopper prisoner.

A few chapters of comedy hijinx resolve the conflict, but what is more likely to alarm a modern reader is that the underground city of the Horners glows. Why? Because they coat the interiors of all their buildings with radium! The city is so radioactive it glows brightly! Dorothy has a few more days to live, tops. “They found themselves in a vast cave which was dimly lighted by the tiny grains of radium that lay scattered among the loose rocks” (300). OH NO. No wonder this ends my Oz reading series: the remainder of the novels concern Dorothy, Ojo, and Toto dying of radiation burns. Well, I’m sure brightly glowing radioactive material is good for you since the Chief Horner tells Scraps that it is medicine (288). Perhaps the Horners are sustaining brain damage that causes them to enjoy bad puns as much as they do (this is coming from me, a pun enthusiast).

It is all for naught. The Tin Woodman refuses to allow Ojo to tear a wing off a yellow butterfly and thereby attain the final ingredient. (The yellow butterflies all live in the yellow Winkie Country and hence are under the Tin Woodman’s protection.) Ojo and Scraps are shocked and outraged, much as they were when they learned Ozma forbade the picking of six-leaved clovers. “I want to help Ojo, who is my friend,” declares Scraps, “to rescue the uncle whom he loves, and I’d kill a dozen useless butterflies to enable him to do that” (327). When the crying child (!) tells him that without killing a single butterfly he cannot save his uncle, the Tin Woodman even says to the mourning orphan child (!), “firmly” no less, “Then he must remain a marble statue forever” (328). Yeah, that legendary compassion on display. Some heart. /s

I don’t necessarily object to the principle that hurting a living creature is always wrong, but the Tin Woodman apparently values a single insect over the lives of two humans. Where is that compassion when the Tin Woodman kills the Kalidahs or butchers a cat to save a mouse or kills forty wolves in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? Or when he attacks a bunch of jackdaws in The Marvelous Land of Oz?

“I’m Ojo the Unlucky,” says Ojo, despairing (329). When he describes the various circumstances that prove he is unlucky, the Tin Woodman ripostes that they are all lucky. His final advice to Ojo is to be Ojo the Lucky instead, treating this as an internal psychological state rather than an external metaphysical one.

The Disturbing Anticlimax

Upon their return to the Emerald City comes a bizarre ending. Ozma informs Ojo that she has apprehended Dr. Pipt, destroyed all his magical equipment, and burned his spell book (332). Glinda, who now apparently is aware of people’s predetermined fates, knew all about his journey and that he would fail. Glinda herself does not turn up to resolve the story this time around, however, but has her minion, the Wizard, act in her stead. The final chapter, entitled “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” in an ironic reflection of the original novel, has the Wizard wrap up the characters’ issues with genuine magic as I mentioned above.

Above: the Wizard has put on a lot of weight.

The Wizard greets Ojo in a room with Dr. Pipt and the petrified Margolotte and Unc Nunkie. Next the Wizard magically straightens out the literally crooked Dr. Pipt, announces the Woozy can live in the Royal Menagerie, and says that Ozma respects Scraps enough that she may live wherever she pleases “and be nobody’s servant but her own” (338). Reciting a magic word he learned from Glinda restores Margolotte and Unc Nunkie to life. Ojo weeps from joy, embracing his uncle, and when the Tin Woodman reminds him he is in fact Ojo the Lucky, Ojo responds, “Yes; and it is true!” With this, the book ends except for, in my Books of Wonder edition, Peter Glassman’s afterword.

The whole journey was completely pointless, with the Wizard resolving every conflict completely independent from the main characters. This is another disappointing ending, in part because it makes little sense: why didn’t Glinda intervene immediately and spare everyone this trouble? The subversion is so complete, however, that it feels deliberate.

You might object that Dorothy’s journey in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is similarly pointless despite my more positive judgment of that book. This misses that, although the Wizard is a fraud in the scene The Patchwork Girl ending parodies, the characters in The Wonderful Wizard genuinely achieve things. They radically change the Land of Oz, and when the Wizard gives the Scarecrow “brains,” the Tin Woodman a “heart,” and the Cowardly Lion “courage,” he is not actually giving them any character growth or attributes. Their actions have already demonstrated they possess these qualities. They have learned and grown. Rather than the end of their journey, this is also just another episode of it, with a third of the book and more adventures to go before Dorothy achieves her goal of returning to Kansas.

In contrast, does Ojo even learn anything? His issue, being unlucky, is not a personality trait, as the original novel’s wisdom, compassion, and courage are, but rather a metaphysical condition. It is a matter of fantasy goofiness instead of potential real-life relevance. Through their own actions, the Lion can display courage, the Tin Woodman can display love, etc., but Ojo cannot exactly display luckiness by acting a certain way. The lesson might be just to have a positive attitude, which isn’t bad advice.

What I have not mentioned about the ending is that the Wizard also happily announces he lobotomized the Glass Cat.

“The Glass Cat, which Dr. Pipt lawlessly made,” continued the Wizard, “is a pretty cat, but its pink brains made it so conceited that it was a disagreeable companion to everyone. So the other day I took away the pink brains and replaced them with transparent ones, and now the Glass Cat is so modest and well behaved that Ozma has decided to keep her in the palace as a pet.”

“I thank you,” said the cat, in a soft voice (336–338).

In Oz, animals such as the Glass Cat are inarguably people, with no more or less intelligence and complexity. The Shaggy Man told the Glass Cat she should “purr soft and look humble” or else she warranted being killed, and now, with the reader not privy to the specifics, the Wizard physically removes her personhood to make her a submissive pet, the very identity she rejected and wanted to escape. Baum mocks the seen-not-heard attitude of the Horner women yet endorses it for the Glass Cat. The “soft voice” with which she uncharacteristically thanks the Wizard is the first time the reader has seen her since Ojo left for Quadling Country, creating a chilling scene despite the celebration. At least the Wizard (or Glinda) sees fit to spare Scraps. Does Oz welcome diversity and oddness, or do they violently force people to comply by destroying their personhood? Ozma already did this with the invaders in The Emerald City, though there the act feels justifiable since they were, well, merciless bandits and not a slightly surly person.

The Wizard has become Glinda’s enforcer, destroying people and hoarding the magic to a coterie of elites. He literally boasts about his powers of control: “You’re a stranger here, Miss Patches, and so you don’t know that nothing can be hidden from our powerful Ruler’s Magic Picture—nor from the watchful eyes of the humble Wizard of Oz” (228). And listen to what a bootlicker (and hammy carnival barker) he is: “I beg to announce that our Gracious Ruler has permitted me to obey the commands of the great Sorceress, Glinda the Good, whose humble Assistant I am proud to be” (336). The Wizard himself has been domesticated. No longer a morally ambiguous conman with a complex role, he is an allegedly pure good, totally honest cop.

Ozma bans magic, which in this fictional world is almost in the same league as banning fun. She runs a surveillance state that burns books. Also, if you are in Oz, you are incapable of leaving because of Glinda: the Wise Donkey states directly that he is stranded there, unable to return to his homeland Mo (93). Not only can people not escape Oz, but Glinda’s magic has erased the ability to even see the outside world. Instead of the Deadly Desert, Dorothy reports “in any direction, there is nothing to be seen at all” (269). Granted, the prison in the Emerald City is a lovely house, Ojo is the first person to stay in it, and Ozma pardons everyone with the same mercy she earlier showed Mombi, but this does not change the dystopian implications.

The Magic Picture, remember, allows Ozma and her cronies to survey anything anywhere in the world. Worse than the telescreens of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the painting, a whimsical way to keep in touch with Dorothy in Ozma of Oz, has instead turned Oz into an inescapable panopticon.

My issue is not that Oz has become this but that Baum is totally uncritical of these ideas—and, worse, allows them to dull down and simplify his world instead of bring out new qualities.

Who Is Dr. Pipt?!

The Patchwork Girl reintroduces some nuance to the Land of Oz, then, but Baum still reigns in characters to certain parameters. Yet in other ways The Patchwork Girl persists in the pattern that began in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz of retroactively erasing nuance and moral grays where they previously existed (without re-editing the earlier novels, creating an incoherent mess). As my earlier comments highlight, Baum chooses to forget that he earlier depicts the Tin Woodman as perfectly willing to kill animals to save the lives of others. But the worst continuity issue is Dr. Pipt himself! (Puts on nerd glasses)

Above: Dr. Pipt reading from his magic book.

Ozma explicitly states that Dr. Pipt is the man from whom Mombi bought the Powder of Life in The Marvelous Land of Oz (220). In that earlier novel, the narration describes this interaction: “[Mombi] had met a crooked wizard who resided in a lonely cave in the mountains, and had traded several important secrets of magic with him” (16). In exchange, she attains magical powders and herbs. These products are comically branded like commercial goods under the name “Dr. Nikidik’s.” This implies the wizard’s name is Dr. Nikidik, not Dr. Pipt. As you can see below, Neill draws this character as a standard bearded wizard with a staff and pointed cap, physically not crooked at all.

The implication is that the wizard is crooked in the sense of being sleazy or criminal. This is why Mombi tests the Powder of Life on what becomes Jack Pumpkinhead: she does not trust the wizard has given her a fair deal and wants to check. I love this idea that there are shady wizards around who will sell you seedy snake oil magic that may or may not work. However, Baum has rewritten Oz to be a land so flawless, whose people are so innately kind, that he cannot accept someone might be untrustworthy. So he reinterprets the obvious meaning of his words such that the wizard is physically crooked but wholly honest and, moreover, praising the laws that oppress him (!) and insisting he actually obeys them (!) because, dang it, he is an honest, good guy. This sanitizing is almost insulting to the reader. Granted, he illegally creates a magical entity to be his wife’s slave, so I shouldn’t overstate the extent that he is no longer a shady weirdo.

But this is not the only issue. In The Road to Oz, the Tin Woodman explains to the Shaggy Man that Mombi bought the Magic Powder from a “a crooked Sorcerer,” here unnamed, who inhabited Gillikan Country (177), not Munchkin Country, as in The Patchwork Girl. The detail about Mombi and the Powder of Life confirms he is referring to the “crooked wizard.” However, the Tin Woodman exposits that this man has since died. There is no reason for Baum to include this information at all, and yet he did and then he ignored it entirely to re-name and re-introduce the same character as the “crooked magician” Dr. Pipt present in The Patchwork Girl. By now, reiterating that this series is incoherent in both themes and literal continuity is passé. But these issues drain the verisimilitude of the setting (and usually make the world less interesting).

Baum also devotes a surprisingly large number of pages (and one whole chapter) to complaining about how much he hates music (both popular and classical) and calling music listeners “feeble-minded” and “ignorant” (137) before seemingly forgetting about the kindly living phonograph character, Vic. Everyone hates and abuses Vic for playing music. Even Scraps, who spends her time singing bad songs, begs Vic to stop and tries to run away. Baum calls ragtime, the most pleasant music that has ever existed, “a jerky jumble of sounds which proved so bewildering that after a moment Scraps stuffed her patchwork apron into the gold horn and cried: ‘Stop—stop!’” (89) Later the Shaggy Man, having failed to murder Vic himself, indicates Vic will soon be killed by angry Ozites (138) because everyone hates music because Oz is a nightmare world of people who will kill you for playing ragtime. Then the Shaggy Man sings a long, terrible song that everyone applauds. Baum seemingly forgets Vic and never mentions it ever again. What is going on aaahhhhh

Some Final Thoughts about Oz

This is the last of my Oz posts, save that “Politics of Oz” if I finish it. I will give some last observations. As this series has shown, L. Frank Baum possessed a rare creativity but struggled with plotting, characterization, pacing, and continuity, in other words, with writing novels. Through the experience of discovering how insipid it could have been, I have gained a whole new appreciation for the craft and care of the original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is a pity that Baum never recaptured the tight writing that makes Ozma of Oz so appealing or the satisfying and meaningful journey of The Wonderful Wizard.

In the original novel, Baum wrote that his objective was to create fairy tales for modern children “in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.” What this naïve perspective misses is that the wonderment and joy are only possible, in art, when there are heartaches and nightmares to compare them to. Pain and unpleasantness are part of life, and stories entirely without these traits are lifeless. Triumph only feels triumphant if the characters previously suffered heartache and nightmares. The return to Oz in Ozma of Oz feels so ecstatic because chapters and chapters of horror precede the rejoicing. The unpleasantness (save the racism, which is just a pity) is what renders The Patchwork Girl of Oz more interesting than the pastoral fluff of The Road to Oz and (most of) The Emerald City of Oz. As the Shaggy Man says, “[A] little misery, at times, makes one appreciate happiness more” (Patchwork Girl 136).

Baum knew this too. That mission statement of his was a lie—there is no way he wrote scary stories by accident, particularly the unrelenting horror in Ozma of Oz and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. Even the original novel contains nightmares and heartache, opening with Dorothy leading a life of hopeless poverty and then being separated from her home and family in a frightening weather phenomenon (that still scares me as an adult) that causes her to kill a slave-driving dictator in a freak accident in a world prowled by monsters. These darker aspects are an essential ingredient of the Oz series. The whimsical characters tend to be merry despite existing in their own little hells (the Tin Woodman’s dismemberment, the Wizard’s fraud imprisoning him to live in fear in his castle, the Hungry Tiger’s yearning to eat babies but conscience stopping him, and so on).

However, after the grizzly Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Baum seems to have tried to genuinely remove these darker elements from his stories. Increasingly his characters lose defining traits in service of being mindlessly happy and kind and (an idea of) funny all the time, though almost never kind enough for a moment to be touching. In fact, the characters are often judgy and mean but in a way Baum does not seem to recognize. Even, for instance, the Scarecrow’s alleged intelligence largely vanishes after the first novel so that he can spend the rest of the series as a blob of goofy character-shaped putty filling a spot in the roster.

In my estimation, the Oz books are consumer products written primarily to make money and not out of artistic passion. This is not to say they are without craft or thought, just that this is not the core of the enterprise. The Oz series’ often careless plotting and structure and even more careless inconsistencies reflect this mercenary nature, the intention to use the books as disposable goods to spin off into plays, movies, comics, and any other way to turn a buck, and then be forgotten about. Perhaps the characters are shallow because the main role of each is to be a marketable name and design. That Baum, like a machine part, was immediately replaced with another writer who would pump out even more Oz novels than he did further suggests that the IP was a cash cow product first and any soulful artistic work second.

In addition, his other writing proves that Baum was definitely racist (I would mention the name of one of his nursery rhymes, but just the title might get me in trouble). If his notorious pro-genocide columns are taken as sincere (some claim they are satirical), then Baum was perhaps more racist than usual for his day. I feel comfortable showing the degree of support for these novels that I have only because the racism, in my estimation, is for the first time ever present in their text only in the seventh book and because Baum is long dead and thus unable to benefit from any way I could be perceived to promote his work. This is even more true when every book I have discussed is already free online. There are Oz fans and people with nostalgia for these books from their childhood, and I respect that. But I feel little admiration for these books.

Despite these misgivings and harsh criticisms, my emotions about the Oz series are mixed. The novels are often underwhelming, but even so or because of their flaws, I still find in them a peculiar magic. The wild inconsistency almost allows the reader to project their own canon chain of events and imagine their own characters, perhaps accounting for how many unique artistic works Oz has inspired. In particular, the horrors are wonderfully inventive. The illustrations are glimpses an alien dream world full of fun and wonder and nightmares.

The first strong point is the tremendous creativity. Baum invented so many unusual and memorable ideas and characters that he hardly developed one before hopping to another begging for elaboration. The second strength is that, certainly by the standard of the time, every main-series Oz book except for the second is feminist. The most capable and important characters are girls and women, and the stories show the perfect society as one where power is concentrated among women (Ozma, Glinda). Baum even takes the time to introduce the idea that some witches are good rather than wicked. This is likely the influence of Baum’s mother-in-law, the famous feminist and all-around social justice advocate Matilda Joselyn Gage. This seems unusual for the early twentieth century and fuels the series’ lasting appeal.

Also consider the portrayals of men such as the Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion, Shaggy Man, etc. who are validated, loved, and valuable to others despite lacking customary forms of masculine strength and personality. Tin Woodman is a pacifist who frequently weeps, the Cowardly Lion is effeminate and also prone to crying, the Shaggy Man is gentle and nurturing and frequently sings, etc. The Wizard, while more martial (before Glinda makes him boring anyway), is physically unusual for a male hero, a defining trait being his tininess. The unexpected frequency of characters who read as queer, such as the apparently transgender Ozma, the considerable same-sex physical affection between her and Dorothy, or the Cowardly Lion wearing a girly bow, might also account for the attested popularity of Oz among queer people.

Yet of the Oz books that I have read, the only I would recommend just as good reading are The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Ozma of Oz. The rambling pointlessness of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz prevents me from suggesting it the way I would a more solid piece of work, but its story is such a cavalcade of darkness, with bears tearing the champion to shreds and emotionless plant people killing flesh beings in a living glass city, where even your sweet friend the Tiger will gore your horse and dear Ozma wants to kill your pet, I can’t say it’s boring. The Marvelous Land of Oz, though fun and memorably strange, is too sexist for me to really recommend and not for children who do not know how to contextualize that material. The Road to Oz is disposable. The Emerald City of Oz is also boring more often than fun or interesting. The Patchwork Girl of Oz falls firmly on the engaging side but leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

L. Frank Baum invented children’s fantasy novels. For that, he has a long-reaching legacy. But far from delighting (and scaring) children today, the Oz books, unlike the 1939 musical, have become more an obscure historical curiosity than a popular series, at least here in the US. That might be for the best.

If I write it, “The Politics of Oz” will also appear on mackerelphones.com and, at least in part, here on my Tumblr. If you enjoyed this Patchwork Girl post, you can follow me on Tumblr or subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I might be adapting this little Oz series into videos so that my words can reach a larger audience. (And might be collaborating with someone else on an Ozzy project). Finally, if you think this or any of my other work is worth it, I would greatly appreciate a donation to my Ko-Fi.

Thank you so much for reading these Oz posts, if you have, and know that for doing this, I love you, at least a little bit. Also I would love you more if you gave me money at that Ko-Fi link above. Byyyeee 🥰

[spiteandsaltcentral]

WAIT

FOR IMPORTANT REASONS, MAKE FUN OF JERICHO KAJFJEJFJDJCJ

YEEEEEEEESSSSSS >:33333

so first of all his current persona is a wizard or somethin???? lol no, his only powers are to repel everyone around him

istg wwe finds all these ways to ruin what would otherwise be cool fantasy concepts and outfits (ring gear is so cringe i can't even) ANYWAYS

also jericho has SUCH basic cringe hetero white man vibes. this is self-explanatory. he looks like one of those parents who owns a gun and who you would not let your queer kid around

has never hit a good hairstyle either. the long hair as of late is cool in theory but it doesn't work for him, his cringe hetero white man ass doesn't deserve it

he can't punch for shit either (see i told you wrestling was all acting!)

now this next part gets a tad political and mentions covid, so i'll put it under a cut

another friend has informed me that 1) jericho has claimed to "stay out of politics" when in reality he's donated to trump's campaign a bunch of times; 2) his wife is a trump supporter and also was in dc on january 6th (the capitol insurrection)

extremely sus of both of them right there

so not only do they both have cringe hetero white person vibes, they also have cringe RACIST white person vibes. even more rancid right there.

another detail shared to me: in september 2020 he downplayed 7 ppl getting covid at a concert, and i quote his twitter "7 cases out of... 450,000 people?" BITCH IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE THERE, IF ANYONE GETS COVID FROM AN EVENT LIKE THIS (IT'S A SUPER SPREADER ANYWAY) IT SHOULD BE CONCERNING

so yeah, exactly the person you would NOT want to hang with. because i do not trust trump supporters under any circumstances. makes his vibes 10000x more rancid than they already are

[catrose13]

Chapter Six The First Rule Of Any TTRPG is NEVER SPLIT THE PARTY, I think that my favourite of this chapters "Brought to you By"s is 2021, You Were One Of The Most Years Ever. Because it certainly was. Also remember there are SPOILERS

Oh no, now we're seeing things from the Parasites perspective, this is not a thing I ever wanted

Go Bakura! Trick that MoFo!!

...Rabbit...

Eugh Math and Sand two of the worst things

...Ammit's wearing a tiny hat?

Mokuba in what way does that resemble a dog?

Well at least Shadi's aware of where he ranks in this situation.

"White haired thief".... Mokuba I don't think he's talking about Pegasus

Ammit, Devourer of the Wicked

Is Mokuba talking about Tristan's nephews dog?

Shadi...you are so old

...Joey how do you know how much cocaine costs?

Joey's Dad is seriously in the Bad Parent Box with his Mom and Yugi's Parents

Tristan is such a Mom Friend

Téa when in doubt always guess a lower number

Oof Burgerville, I actually read some of the manga so I've read that bit. Big yikes

Well at least Yugi is aware about the Parasite

They really have had a day haven't they?

....Yugi you really need to phrase things a bit more delicately, you may give poor Yami a heart attack at this rate. Goddamn "Shadow Game Cherry"

"Knives up our sleeves" because cards would be cheating but stabbing your opponent clearly isn't

Oh Damn, Tristan's right guys! There's even a song and everything! It's catchy! I feel like he may need to start singing to them "Don't you know you never split the party? Clerics in the back keep those fighters hale and hearty. The wizard in the middle, where he can shed some light. And you never let that damn thief out of sight" Two of the fighters have bugged off to find, I guess, the cleric, the wizards have gone off to battle for the thief leaving possibly the other cleric behind

"Glaring furiously, like a cat forced to go to the vet" I can envision it perfectly

Shadi now is not the time for your dubious sense of humour to make an appearance

"With a sword. Right down the middle"...This will be important information to remember children

"Thanksgiving at the Wayne House" THE WAYNES!! 🤩

...Shadi those dudes were seriously screwed in the head, despite being a "Created" human you were still a person and they should definitely not have shopped you in half like some sort of sad pizza

...Technologically adept... this should have been another clue

"Dino-obsessed weirdo"... I know who that is

Op Ishizu has now got an Idea

How the heck did she keep all those questions straight?! Actually no she knows the Waynes, nevermind

"Dinosaur Blood Guy" Wow Rex

Despite everything Marik can be surprisingly sneaky

Poor Weevil freaking out in the background "Blood stuff?! What Blood Stuff?!"

"Less crazy Face tattoo brother" and "Blonde. Probably in a crop top and half of Fort Knox in jewelry" These are the best descriptions

HODGEKISS... is it the same one?

lol Wilburforce, that is certainly a name

Oh yeah I doubt there's two incredibly dumb Hodgekiss in the world. Or at least I hope not

...Do the Ishtar brothers know that Hodgekiss could potentially claim Blood Brother status from Ishizu giving him blood?

Ahh Relationships, the only person whose allowed to be mean to you is me

The Heart of the Cards loves Yugi

Lol Seto's Blue Eyes White Dragon is not a fan of you Parasite, prepare to lose your face

...Celtic Guardians are wild. "Just shoot me across the Board Bro!"

Who are you Red Coated Graverobber Goblin?

Lol God Complex Kuriboh

Oh man that Blue Eyes is really determined to get rid of the Parasite

I kind of love the Duel Monsters, they're so spirited

MAHAD, you have a Name! You Remember Things! I mean apparently you also have Amnesia but you still remember more than Yami does

Ah Bakura is ready for his Revenge

Heh Parasite has no idea how to command his Chess pieces

Graverobber Goblin Pawns are on Strike, Blue Eyes White Dragon Queen is looking to kill the player and the only one on their side of the board who know how to play won't help. Nice

Joey freaking a little about the "Romantic Foxes" sounding like the voices of the damned

...We're still talking about the Chupacabra?

Lol yeah Golden Retrievers aren't just cute and friend-shaped, they are also dogs you take hunting

Oh no the Clown done fucked up

Téa's so strong and fierce. She's going to absolutely destroy that clown

"Loud and Attractive is what I do best" Aw Joey

Ballerinas man, they're terrifying...kinda like hippos now that I think about it

"Mr-With-A-K"

Joey's notebook is gonna be so full by the time he actually gets to Pegasus

Oh man I just noticed Pega-SUS....his name tells you he's Sus

Téa's Yugi and Yami's Queen

Aww cute little Mousetrap. Such a good snek

More aww, brotherly snuggles!!

...I'm feeling deep concern for Marik "Future Pharoah and Ruler Of The World" that is a deeply concerning statement, especially the Caps

...Odion are you plotting Hodgekiss' demise?

Little Brother getting the snuggles!! I just want to wrap him in blankets, but I fear that if I tried I'd lose a limb. Sadness

"Karnak Blood Lady" and the "Karnak Dinosaur Blood Guy" those are certainly names

Odions like Hopeful feeling...text message...less hopeful feeling

[gleamglows]

Ask for a sirius request and you shall receive. I've been thinking about this idea for a while (and your writing is perfect for it ily) but how about a ravenclaw reader who is friends with james or remus and they introduce them? The one in my head was remus going to her dorm for a sleepover and bringing sirius and just being like "isn't she neat :)" and sirius immediately falling in love 🥺 no pressure if you dont vibe with it 🥰 ily bunches

i went to ravenclaw tower and all i got was this lousy stained shirt

pairing: sirius/reader

word count: 3.9k

summary: james and remus play matchmaker for you and sirius

content: ravenclaw!reader, fluff, it gets awkward (some of this was hard to write... 😭😭), dialogue heavy, you and sirius are very back-and-forth-y and witty (you’ll see what i mean), i know the title is long but i thought it was funny and i can do what i want

this was such a fun request!! i hope you don’t mind i took some liberties because i just immediately imagined remus and james secretly trying to match the two of you up for a while!! also i turned the sleepover into a party at ravenclaw tower!! (also also i came up with some cute ravenclaw girl ocs just for this, they were supposed to be minor but ended up having their own sideplots because i get carried away with everything. but they were fun to write! i gave them backstories and everything so if anyone wants to know more about them just ask :)

warning: mentions of alcohol!!

“You should meet Sirius.”

“Black?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, do you know another Sirius?”

You stick your tongue out at him and Remus smiles.

“What is it with Sirius, huh?” you tell him, adding a few drops of rain water into the potion before handing Remus the spoon to stir. He takes it and immediately gets to work.

“You and James,” you continue, idly counting Remus’s counterclockwise stirs in your head. “Not a day goes by where you don’t tell me I have to meet Sirius.”

In truth, you’d seen Sirius a few times. And he’d seen you, but neither one of you had actually spoken more than a few words to the other. Especially not since sixth year. Sirius had dropped Potions and Astronomy as quick as he could - the only two classes you’d had left with him. And seeing as you were in different Houses, bumping into each other in the common room was off the table as well.

But you had Potions with Remus and Astronomy with James, and whenever they could, they would always mention how you just had to meet Sirius. You sometimes wondered if Sirius was always being told he had to meet you.

“I just think you’d get along,” Remus shrugs, halting his stirring before you can even tell him to do so.

You both work in tandem for a bit after that, dropping ingredients into your potion and stirring when needed. You liked partnering up with Remus for this exact reason. You’d both fall into a comfortable silence and develop a good rhythm - you just flowed well together.

Once the potion is nearly finished, Remus speaks up.

“What about tonight? Isn’t there a party at Ravenclaw?”

“Robin says not to call it a party.”

“Well, that’s what it is.”

“Yeah, but we can’t call it that. At least not out loud,” you insist, not wanting your dorm mate’s wrath to come back later and haunt you. “It’s a quiet get-together,” you correct him.

Remus scoffs, knowing damn well that Ravenclaw parties are anything but. “That, then. You can meet him there.”

You raise an eyebrow in complete disbelief. “You’re gonna get Sirius Black to come to a Ravenclaw party?”

“What happened to quiet get-together?”

Damn it.

You quickly spare a glance at Robin, but she’s all the way across the room, scolding her partner for something he did to their potion.

“Good luck with that,” you continue, pretending to ignore his quip.

“We’ll convince him!” Remus assures you, as if it’s the least of his worries.

“Okayyy...” you sing, entirely unconvinced.

You’ve never seen Sirius Black at a non-Gryffindor party. He has way too much House pride to ever be caught partying in another common room. You’re almost positive you’ve seen him root for Gryffindor at Quidditch matches even when the team isn’t playing.

“Okay? So you’ll meet him?” Remus presses.

You laugh. “Okay! I guess!” you tell him, resigned. “But you and James have been hyping him up for a while, so don’t be surprised if he doesn’t live up to my expectations and I end up hating him.” You shrug a shoulder as you turn down the fire under the cauldron.

Remus just grins. “I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

.

.

.

Despite your nonchalant attitude with Remus earlier today, you actually find yourself feeling a bit nervous.

“Hey, do you guys know Sirius?” you ask over your shoulder as you straighten your outfit in the mirror. “Black?” you add quickly.

“Did you just ask us if we know Sirius Black?” A shrill voice cuts through the air and you know immediately that it’s Robin.

You groan, “I know, I know, everyone knows-”

“Everyone knows him,” Robin talks over you, and then sprays a copious amount of hairspray into her already voluminous blonde locks.

You move out of her way so she can use the mirror and she gratefully takes the opportunity, stepping in front of you to fluff up her roots.

“Yeah, how do you not know him?” Bea calls from the bathroom, where April is helping her into her dress.

“I mean, I know him,” you say, flopping down on your bed. “But I don’t actually know him. You know?”

“He was April’s first kiss!” Bea taunts. She makes several kissy noises and then you hear her say ‘ow!’

“You’ve got to stop bringing that up,” you hear April scold, “It was second year!”

Bea giggles and then skips out of the bathroom, April trailing closely behind.

Bea has on a stunning yellow sundress with long, belled sleeves - going all out, as usual. The color compliments her dark skin beautifully, but you know she’s really only wearing it to lure in that Hufflepuff boy she’s had her eye on.

April has still yet to get dressed, always waiting until the very last minute, but her straight black hair has been flawlessly curled - presumably Robin’s work.

“So what is it? Why do you wanna know about Black?” April asks politely, leaning against your bedpost as Bea sits on her trunk to slip on her shoes.

“James and Remus... They’re gonna get him to come here.”

Bea nearly drops her shoe, and Robin spins around to face you.

“Here?” The two say at the same time.

“Is he really?” April asks mildly, voice much gentler than the other two.

You shrug and nod your head at the same time, giving them an uncertain look. “I think so? Maybe? If they can convince him.”

There’s a beat of silence and then the hissing sound of Robin’s can of hairspray fills the air once more as she frantically tries to get her hair to cooperate. At the very same time, Bea starts to rummage around her wardrobe, muttering to herself about how ‘I think I have a red dress in here somewhere...’

It’s clear they’re both doubling their efforts, hoping to catch Sirius’s eye.

You laugh a bit and then turn to look at April, whose eyes are stuck on Robin’s reflection. She has a solemn expression on her face, but quickly snaps out of her trance when she notices you watching her.

“So,” she starts, putting on a small smile, “You’ve really never met Sirius Black?” she asks, sitting down beside you and crossing her legs beneath her.

“No, but I hear you have,” you tease, and she rolls her eyes.

“Yes, the first and only boy I’ve ever kissed.” She rolls her eyes.

You hear Robin fumble with her can of hairspray but think nothing of it.

April continues, “Anyway, that was second year,” she waves it off. “I do have muggle studies with him.”

“What’s he like?” you find yourself asking.

April shrugs a shoulder. “He’s nice, I suppose. Funny. Asks the professor a lot of questions about motorbikes.”

You tilt your head. “Motorbikes? Why?”

“Who knows. I think you two would get along, though.”

“Why’s that?”

April observes you for a few beats and then laughs a bit. You expect her to say something more but she just gives you a slight nudge with her elbow and then walks off, most likely to go get dressed.

Well that was pointless. You didn’t really learn anything useful. But then again, you’re not sure what you expected out of a conversation with April, who tends to keep her talking to a minimum (She claims it makes her more mysterious) (And she’s right, too).

Oh well. Perhaps you could find a way to strike up a casual conversation about motorbikes with Sirius.

Yeah, right.

.

.

.

It’s a few hours into the party when the door opens up, letting in James and Remus. Trailing behind them, looking unnecessarily wary, is Sirius Black. He traipses around as if at any moment something in the common room is going to jump out and bite him, and you struggle to stifle a laugh.

You quickly wander off before any of them can spot you, fleeing towards where the drinks are. You figure that when they find you, you may as well be doing something instead of just lamely standing around. So you pick up the ladle and start to refill your cup.

April had transfigured her cauldron into one made of glass, and Robin had used it to concoct her famous sickly sweet, lavender colored drink that she’d aptly named ‘Robin’s Brew’. It was made up of a mixture of muggle and wizard liquors, as well as a myriad of different fruit juices. The taste itself was actually semi disgusting, but you get used to it after the initial few sips.

You ladle some more of the drink into your cup and then spin on your heel, ready to resume the search for your friends.

That is, until you crash face first against a broad chest, effectively spilling ‘Robin’s Brew’ all over whoever you just bumped into.

“Oh my gosh!” you blurt out, setting the now empty cup down. “I am so sorry, I-” Your words catch in your throat when you finally look up to see the person’s face.

So much for a good first impression.

Sirius waves you off, looking down at his now purple stained white shirt. “Don’t worry ab-” he stops in the middle of the word as he raises his gaze to look at you.

His lips are still slightly parted as if his voice had simply escaped him mid-sentence, and his expression is stunned and mesmerized all at once.

“I, um...” he tries again, but it’s as if he’s been put in some kind of trance just by looking at you.

“Oh, great! You’ve met!” A cheery voice cuts through the tension, and you both turn your head to find James beaming at the two of you.

Trailing behind James is Remus, who takes in the state of the two of you and grimaces.

“Met?” Sirius voices as he looks at James, sounding a bit dazed.

“Yeah, remember? Y/N!” James reminds him. “She’s great, right?” he grins, and you cringe.

“Oh, this is...?” Sirius slowly turns his head to look at you again. “Hey...” he says faux-smoothly, as if attempting to salvage your very first meeting.

“Hey...” you say back a bit awkwardly. “Um... Look, there’s towels in my dorm, we can all go?” you suggest, looking to the others for approval.

“Why don’t you two go?” Remus proposes instead, and you shoot him an alarmed look.

“Yeah!” James nearly shouts, looking at Remus as if he’s a genius. “Yeah, you’ll find us later!” he’s quick to agree, and they both start to walk away.

You let out a nervous laugh. “Oh, I don’t know if-” you start, not sure if comfortable enough to be alone with a man you just met after spilling your drink on him.

But Remus and James don’t wanna hear it.

“Alright! See you later!” James throws a finger gun at you as he walks backwards and then spins on his heel.

“But I-”

“Bye!” Remus calls, and then they both disappear into a small crowd of people.

You turn to face Sirius, whose shirt is still dripping and who’s watching you with rapt intrigue. He turns away the moment your eyes meet, clearing his throat awkwardly.

Soon enough you’re leading Sirius down the corridor that leads to your dormitory, trying desperately to remember whether or not you’d tidied up your area of the room.

The door swings open just as you arrive at it, and from out of it come April and Robin who seem to be having a serious looking discussion. They quickly stop talking as soon as they spot the two of you, and April is quick to storm off, leaving Robin behind.

“Oh, you’ll want to get rid of that,” Robin says with a wince, gesturing at Sirius’s shirt. “The stain actually gets darker the more you try to get it off... So...”

You give a heavy sigh. “Yeah, thanks Robin.”

She shrugs apologetically with both hands in the air and then starts to walk off. “Robin’s Brew! Patent pending!” she calls over her shoulder as she scurries off to catch up with April.

“What’s up with them?” Sirius mutters under his breath as you lead him inside.

“Well, aren’t you nosy?” you’re quick to reply.

You say it as a joke, but immediately wish you could take it back. What were you thinking?! You didn’t know Sirius enough to joke around with him like that! You didn’t know him at all! Hell, you’d just spilled your drink all over him, for all you know the guy hates you!

You spin around, ready to apologize, but then Sirius is laughing, and you nearly let out a massive sigh of relief.

“Uh-” your apology catches in your throat for a moment but you quickly recover. “Sorry, I-”

“No, it’s okay.” He shakes his head. “You’re right, nosy is my middle name,” he tells you with a shrug and a lopsided grin.

You find yourself smiling back. “Sirius Nosy Black, huh?”

He hums. “Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, definitely.”

It’s silent for a moment as you both look at each other. Your thoughts leave you a bit as you get distracted by that strange way that he’s looking at you, but then you remember with a jolt that Sirius Black is in your dorm, shirt stained lavender and dripping ‘Robin’s Brew’ onto the floor.

“Um!” You scramble towards the bathroom and yank a random towel off the rack. “Here,” You toss it and Sirius catches it with one hand.

“You can, um...” You trail off but then realize you’re still standing in the doorway, effectively blocking his entrance. “Oh!” You quickly move out of the way, leaving a clear path for Sirius.

“Thanks,” he says with a slight laugh before disappearing into the bathroom.

Once the door closes you’re left alone, idly shuffling around, not really knowing what to do now.

This was horrible. All of this was horrible. You’re alone in your dorm with a man you’ve just met - sure he’s friends with Remus and James, but that doesn’t mean it’s not awkward!

You have to focus. You have to avoid any more tense silences. What would you say when he got out of the bathroom?

You suppose he did laugh at your quip earlier - he’d even added a little joke of his own. You’d gone back and forth a bit. It was easy to converse once you’d gotten started. But getting started was exactly the issue... You needed a good topic. Why can’t you think of a good topic?!

The door to the bathroom opens up and out walks Sirius, leather jacket now slung over his forearm and white shirt drier, but still equally stained.

You panic.

“Hey, do you like motorbikes?” You blurt out, and then have to resist the urge to hurl yourself out the window.

Sirius’s eyes widen and he opens and closes his mouth a few times, looking like a stunned fish, before saying “Motorbikes?”

You purse your lips. “Yeah, I was...” You shrug, trying to play off your very strange, very targeted question as just casual conversation. “I was just wondering... I dunno...” you say, leaning against one of your bedposts.

Sirius breaks out into a smile. “I have a motorbike.”

“Really! No way!” you exclaim, pretending to be shocked. Although you didn’t really know Sirius owned a motorbike, it wasn’t all that surprising considering what April had told you just a few hours ago.

Sirius’s eyes narrow slightly, looking at you as if he’s trying very hard to figure you out. “Yeah... I’m fixing it up right now...” he tells you, still grinning.

“Oh? Is it broken?”

He tilts his head back and forth a few times and then says “Not exactly.”

You cross your arms. “Then why are you fixing it up?” you challenge.

Sirius just rolls his eyes. “Well I’d argue that anything that can’t fly can definitely be improved.”

That startles a laugh out of you. “You’re gonna get your motorbike to fly?”

“Laugh it up now!” Sirius nods as you bring a hand to your lips, stifling your giggles. “No one’ll be laughing once I finish my flying motorbike!”

“Oh, I’d love to see it in action.”

“Sure, I’ll take you on a ride once it’s done,” he tells you, voice genuine.

That shuts you up. All of a sudden you find that you have no witty response. Apparently out of all the things that could have rendered you silent, the prospect of going on a ride on Sirius Black’s flying motorbike seems to have done the trick.

Sirius notices.

“I mean- If you want.” he quickly says, raising a hand. “I mean- Sorry. I know we just met, and I made you spill your drink, and I think I stained your towel with whatever that drink was - sorry about that too - but I-”

“Hey,” you cut him off, giving him a pointed but lighthearted look.

He gazes back expectantly.

“I’d love to,” you assure him, and he grins.

You don’t even remember what you were so nervous about. This was easy. Talking to Sirius was so easy once you got into a rhythm.

So you did.

You talked for a while, and when you got tired of standing you laid down on your bed, face down, head resting in your hands and legs kicking behind you as Sirius sat cross legged on your trunk in front of you. You talked about possible spells and modifications for Sirius’s motorbike, you bonded about all the times James and Remus had tried to get the two of you together, you even just talked about whatever nonsense came to your heads.

You were still talking (now both sitting on your bed) when the door creaked open, letting in April and Robin. April was asleep and Robin was carrying her bridal style. You notice they’re both barefoot, but Robin only has April’s shoes in hand - hers were probably somewhere in the common room.

“Oh, hey,” you say in a hushed tone, not wanting to wake April.

“Hey,” Robin responds, though she’s not quite as cautious with her volume as you.

Earlier today you’d have thought Robin would’ve freaked out the moment she saw Sirius, but if she cares about him being in the dorm, she doesn’t show it.

“She fell asleep on the couch. Thought I should leave her here,” the blonde explains as she pads over to April’s bed. She drops the shoes on the ground and then pauses to look at you. “Do you mind?” she questions, nodding her head towards the bed.

You quickly get up, striding over to April’s bed and pulling back the blankets.

“Thanks,” Robin murmurs as she gently sets the raven haired girl down.

You pull the covers up again and April stirs a bit but doesn’t wake up.

Robin finally acknowledges Sirius. “Hi,” she waves with a smile. Sirius smiles back. “Sorry, I didn’t-”

“No, it’s fine. We were just talking,” you assure her, and she nods a bit before turning her attention back to April, gazing down at her with a slight furrow to her brow.

“Where’s Bea?” you voice, curious.

“Went off with her Hufflepuff, I expect.”

“Mm. Is the party over?”

“Quiet get-together.” Robin corrects you without a second thought and you laugh lightly, sitting back down on your bed beside Sirius. “And yeah. I’m gonna go try to clean up a bit,” she says, sounding like the prefect she is.

You watch as Robin hesitates over April for a bit, smoothing the blankets over, brushing stray hairs from the sleeping girl’s face. It’s as if she wants to take care of her but isn’t sure how. In the end, she gives you a smile, bids a polite ‘goodbye’ to Sirius, and then exits quietly.

“We never went and found James and Remus,” you turn to look at Sirius once the door closes and he grins.

“I don’t think they ever expected us to.”

“You’re probably right.”

April stirs again and you get up to close the curtains of her four-poster.

“I should go help Robin,” you tell Sirius, and he takes the cue quickly standing up.

“Right. Sorry I kept you up.“

“No, it was fun. Sorry I spilled my drink on you.”

“No, it was fun,” Sirius echoes, and you give him a slight shove.

The two of you walk across the room and out of the door in comfortable silence, and once you’re in the corridor you speak up.

“So, hypothetically,” you start.

“Uh-huh,” Sirius assents immediately.

“If you wanted to... I don’t know... Have breakfast with me tomorrow...”

“Oh?”

“How would you go about that?”

“Hypothetically?” Sirius raises an eyebrow, as if double checking.

“Of course,” you nod.

“Well in this completely made up scenario,” he starts, “I’d probably meet you here at seven and walk you down to the Great Hall.”

You fight a smile. “Well, great.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Hypothetically I’d definitely be ready by then.”

“Perfect.”

“Glad we’re on the same page.”

You’ve reached the door that leads out of the common room by now, and you open it up, leaning against the frame. The rest of the castle is dark as it’s well past midnight, and you can hear the quiet sounds of nearby portraits snoring. You’d be worried about him getting caught, but with all the pranks the Marauders have pulled throughout the years, you know for a fact that Sirius Black had plenty of experience sneaking about the castle after curfew.

You watch as he lights his wand with a quick ‘Lumos’ and starts to walk off, but then he hesitates.

“What?” you voice as he turns around, walking back towards you.

He stops right in front of you, looking at you very intensely, scrutinizing every inch of your face. For a brief moment you expect him to lean in and kiss you, but then he speaks.

“I know you brought up motorbikes on purpose. That girl April takes muggle studies with me, and she-”

You quickly shut the door in his face and press your back against it, eyes wide and smiling despite yourself.

You scurry off to help Robin and a few others clean up, spirits high with the promise of having breakfast with Sirius tomorrow morning.

And who knows, maybe by tomorrow he’ll forget all about the motorbike thing. At least, you hope he does.

(He doesn’t.)

.

.

Bonus, the next morning:

“There they are!” James exclaims as you and Sirius approach the table.

“Did he live up to your expectations?” Remus asks you pointedly as you sit down, and you poke your tongue out at him in response.

And then you shrug. “I’ve gotta say, right off the bat I wasn’t impressed.”

“You’re the one who spilled your drink all over me. My poor new shirt! Ruined!”

“Oh, boo hoo. Where will you ever find another plain, white T-shirt?”

“It had sentimental value!”

“And now it has a cute new design! So you’re welcome.”

“You want me to thank you for a stain?”

“It’s a fun souvenir from your first time in a non Gryffindor common room.”

“I should write on it. Big letters: ‘I went to Ravenclaw Tower and all I got was this lousy stained shirt.’”

“At least the stain is purple, it looked nice. Suits you.”

“Are you saying I look good in purple?”

“Sure.”

“So you’re saying I look good?”

“I- I didn’t-” you stammer, and then groan.

“Ah-ha!” Sirius points a finger at you. “Outwitted by a Gryffindor! If only Rowena Ravenclaw could see you now.”

Across the table, Remus and James watch on in dismay.

“Are you already regretting getting them together or is it just me?” James voices.

In response Remus sighs, “Oh, it’s not just you.”

.

.

.

(hey ps for the sake of my sanity let’s just pretend there was no easy simple drying spell they could’ve used)

also: about robin & april

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taglist <3 // @isxfisticated @l-adysansa @tomshollandz

[camillejeaneshphm]

Julian Ottesen-Taylor’s profile:

BASIC INFO

Quote by Character: “You wanna get to my sister? You’ll have to go through me first.”

Full Name: Julian Fridrik Ottesen-Taylor

Nicknames: Jules

Gender: Male (he/him)

Sexuality: Bisexual

Alignment: Neutral Good

Species: Wizard

Blood Status: Pureblood

Date of Birth: 16 March 1904

Race/Ethnicity: White, English/Icelandic

Nationality: British

Short Bio: The older child of Noah Taylor and Skadi Ottesen, Jules is fiercely protective of his little sister. Intelligent, though lacking some common sense, he’s also a decent cook. 

Personality: Cheerful and confident, though he tends to worry a lot. 

Languages: English, Icelandic

Likes: Cooking, time with his family, writing

Dislikes: Extreme heat, humidity

Greatest Flaw: Cowardice

Greatest Strength: Intellect

Place of Residency: 

birth-17: Alternates between his parents’s house and Hogwarts Castle

17-retirement: Reykjavík, Iceland

Future Career: Archivist with the Icelandic Ministry

APPEARANCE

Hair Color: Dark Brown

Eye Color: Blue

Skin Tone: Pale

Height: 6’4

Weight: 90.7 kg

Physique: Some muscle, though he’s got a bit of chub around the edges

Style Choice (what they like to wear): 1920s fashion, he also likes a lot of sweaters 

Accessories: An old watch from his grandfather

Inventory: A book or two, usually bandages since he’s super clumsy

Scars: Several small nicks on his face and hands from shaving and paper cuts

Face Claim: David Corenswet

Voice Claim/description of what they sound like: David Corenswet

MAGIC

Wand Description/Picture: Hazel, Dragon heartstring, 15 and a quarter inches

[A sensitive wand, hazel often reflects its owner’s emotional state, and works best for a master who understands and can manage their own feelings. Others should be very careful handling a hazel wand if its owner has recently lost their temper, or suffered a serious disappointment, because the wand will absorb such energy and discharge it unpredictably. The positive aspect of a hazel wand more than makes up for such minor discomforts, however, for it is capable of outstanding magic in the hands of the skillful, and is so devoted to its owner that it often ‘wilts’ (which is to say, it expels all its magic and refuses to perform, often necessitating the extraction of the core and its insertion into another casing, if the wand is still required) at the end of its master’s life (if the core is unicorn hair, however, there is no hope; the wand will almost certainly have ‘died’). Hazel wands also have the unique ability to detect water underground, and will emit silvery, tear-shaped puffs of smoke if passing over concealed springs and wells.]

Wand reaction when chosen: The room was illuminated in silvery light

Boggart: His baby sister, Cece, telling him she hates him and that she never wanted to see him again

Riddikulus Form: Cecelia’s voice is replaced by a honking noise

Patronus: Otter

Patronus Memory: He and his sister rolling down hills in a park

Animagus: None

Amortentia (what they smell like): Old books and lavender, with the smallest hint of woodsmoke

Amortentia (What they smell): unknown (open to interaction)

Mirror of Erised: Himself surrounded by friends and family

Misc. Magical Abilities: Julian inherited his mother’s ability to manipulate dreams. 

Favorite/Created Spells: nonel

SCHOOL LIFE

Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw

Ilvermorny House: n/a

Organizations Joined: Icelandic Ministry of Magic

Apprenticeships: Apprentice Archivist, Icelandic Ministry

Professions: Archivist, Researcher

Best Subjects: Transfiguration, Ancient Runes, History of Magic

Worst Subjects: Charms

Favorite Teachers: N/A

Least Favorite Teachers: N/A

Class Proficiencies (OWL grade, n /10 or ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆):

Astronomy: A

Charms: P

DADA: EE

Flying: A

Herbology: EE

History of Magic: O

Potions: EE

Transfiguration: O

Ancient Runes: O

STATS

Power (magic): 8/10

Power (physical strength): 4/10

Intelligence: 10/10

Skill: 8/10

Teamwork: 7/10

Speed: 7/10

Defense: 6/10

RELATIONSHIPS

FAMILY:

Father:

Noah Taylor, one of my hphl ocs. A professional duelist, he and his wife Skadi are madly in love. Faceclaim: Freddy Carter

Mother:

Skadi Ottesen (@nightmaresart)

Siblings: 

Cecelia Ottesen-Taylor. Julian’s younger sister by two years, he’s absolutely devoted to her and would do anything to make her happy. Faceclaim: Jessica Brown Findlay

Friends:

Closest In-Game Friends:

n/a

Closest MC friends:

Toby Brokenshire (@cursebreakerfarrier)

Love interest:

Berenice Cairncross (@cursebreakerfarrier)

Dorm mates:

None yet (four open spots)

Rivals:

None yet (open to interaction)

Enemies:

n/a

Pets: A snowy owl named Ekla. 

[itsivyberry]

after the war

Draco Malfoy x f!Hufflepuff!Reader

A blurb, continuing the Tri Wizard Champion series.

request: I'd really like to see another fanfic with Draco showing what happened to them after the triwizard tournament! That would be a great idea! [via @booksmione ]

a/n: HI! Here’s a request! I loved writing this, I usually am not a fan of after-war fics and prefer fics where the characters are still attending Hogwarts, but this makes my heart SOAR I love it. I hope you enjoyed, thank you for requesting this and keeping my favorite (and only) series alive <3

word count: 1160

warnings: mentions of blood loss, crucio, scars, death, war, etc. also fluff LMAOOO

summary: Y/N and Draco managed to find their way back to each other after three years of healing from the well-known Tri Wizard Tournament.

taglist: @drawlfoy @fanficflaneuse @babyhoneystvles @ccelinewritess @nekee-lilac02 @dracofeltonmalfoy

masterlist

read the series if you haven’t already!⬇️

{ 1 } { 2 } { 3 } { 3.5 } { 4 } { 5 } { 6 }

gif credit: @popartism

The war was a massive devastation for the Wizarding world.

Y/N was still grieving the loss of her best friend three years prior. Her school, her home had turned into a place she didn’t even recognize. A prison.

Just as quickly as Hogwarts had changed, she had watched family and friends die within its walls, protecting the students within.

Every single night in her dorm before the Battle of Hogwarts, Y/N would listen to the radio in search of any names listed off that she knew.

Although she claimed she was listening for loved ones, she was really listening for one particular name. Malfoy.

Y/N knew that there was no possible way the Malfoys would be put on the casualties list that grows every day, but she still listened with quiet breathing and a rapid heartbeat to hear the name of the boy she still loved.

From what she could remember, the battle was a blur. A blip in time. Faces that she knew, lifeless on the ground around her. Faces she has grown up with for almost the past decade.

Y/N couldn’t count how many people she loved and held dearly that she had seen dead. Fred Weasley, leaving his other half George. Nymphadora Tonks, a beloved Hufflepuff alumni, and Remus Lupin, Harry Potter’s last standing familial figure and spouse to Tonks. Lavender Brown, the Gryffindor that Y/N had grown quite close to while Hogwarts was under the direction of multiple death eaters. Colin Creevey, the young muggle-born Gryffindor who stood incredibly brave, and another close friend of Y/N’s.

~•.*✰

While attempting to save another young student, Y/N was hit with the Cruciatus Curse, and was severely attacked by multiple Death-Eaters. She could barely feel the pain, when her eyes focused on a head full of white hair that was speeding to wear she lay in a puddle of her own blood in the Forbidden Forest.

“How did you get out here? Why are you out here, Y/N?” Draco’s voice was deeper, aged, yet frantic and shaking. “Oh Merlin, you’re bleeding so much. We need to get you to the Great Hall.”

“Draco?” Y/N’s quiet voice asked. “What are you doing here?” Her voice was trembling, tears threatening to spill down her cheeks. She touched his face, leaving a bloody handprint behind. She tried to convince herself that he really was here, that he really was trying to get her help, and he wasn’t just a hallucination from the blood loss.

“Close your eyes.” Draco instructed.

A moment passed, and Y/N felt her stomach drop as if she were on a fast roller coaster.

“I need help! Help!” She soon heard Draco screaming, his voice cracking with every syllable. Bustling voices around her had forced her to open her eyes, and she soon realized he had apparated both of them into the Great Hall. Molly Weasley, a dear friend of Y/N’s mother, rushed over as two students behind her carried a cot.

They transferred her onto the cot, working as quickly as they could to heal the wounds without any more blood loss. Y/N was walking the thin line of unconsciousness, but refused to let herself pass out while Draco was still near her.

She knew he worried too much. The creases permanently etched into his forehead told her enough.

With the remaining strength Y/N had, she reached towards him to grab his hand. His eyes snapped down to her the second she made contact with his hand, and he clasped it in both and immediately started planting tear-filled kisses along every inch of her exposed skin.

“You’re gonna be alright. Everything is going to be fine. Please, stay awake. Stay awake for me, Y/N/N. Please.”

~•.*✰

“Wow, so Dad was a softie!” Y/N’s and Draco’s eldest daughter, Lyra, exclaimed.

“Yes, he really was.” Y/N smiled warmly, laying her hand atop Draco’s as they sat on the couch.

“So, that’s how you got that scar? It’s cool!” Scorpius piped in, pointing to Y/N’s stomach, where a prominent white scar lead up to her shoulder, meeting the three scars on her back from her fourth year.

“Mom, you have had some crazy accidents. How did Dad never have heart attacks?” Cassi asked, leaning forward in complete and utter amusement.

“Oh, I can promise you, Dad did have heart attacks. I enjoy keeping him on his toes.” Y/N winked, leaning back into Draco, who had an arm over her shoulder.

“Can you tell us about the tournament again, Mom? Please?” Scorpius begged, pouting.

“I think it’s about time for you three to go to bed, hm? Mom’s had enough revisiting her very, very dangerous experiences throughout her years at school. Let’s get you all to bed, shall we? Big day tomorrow.” Draco piped in, pushing himself off the couch and helping his children stand from the carpet.

“I’m nervous for tomorrow! First day of fourth year. I wonder if mine will be as adventurous as Moms.” Lyra said, walking slowly to her room.

“And first day of third for me. I hope I get to meet a Hippogriff like you did your third year, Dad.” Scorpius followed his sister through the hallway to their bedrooms.

“And first day of Hogwarts for our darling little Cassiopeia, isn’t that right?” Y/N appeared behind them, scooping her youngest up and planting kisses everywhere on her face. Cassi squealed, giggling loudly as Y/N continued walking to their separate rooms.

“Goodnight, my darling lovebugs.” Y/N said, blowing kisses through each of the open doorways to her children.

“Goodnight, my favorite troublemakers. Get some sleep, or I’ll have the boggarts come scare you!” Draco laughed mischievously, just before getting whacked lightly upside the head by his wife. She quietly scolded him, and he put his hands up in mock surrender.

“Goodnight! Love you the mostest.” Cassi peeped up, flicking her tiny wrist to turn off her lamp.

“Goodnight, Mom. Goodnight, Dad. Thank you for telling us the story again.” Scorpius yawned, turning on his side and doing just as his sister had done to turn off his lamp.

“Thank you, for reminding us again how cool our parents are. Love you guys.” Lyra said, snapping lightly to turn out her lamp. She always was a bit more advanced than her brother and sister.

Y/N quietly closed all three doors, before heading to her and Draco’s room to finally get some sleep. It wasn’t long before they were both dozing off, Y/N in Draco’s arms.

“Goodnight, my love.” Draco whispered, planting a kiss into Y/N’s hair.

“Goodnight, Dray. I love you.” She whispered back, her eyes closing and letting sleep finally take over.

Even though she struggled to get the happy ending she wanted after fourth year, she could now proudly say she was a part of a loving family with the boy she had loved since she was 14. She was has happy, healthy, and healed as she could be.

And that was her perfect happy ending.

~•.*✰

final a/n: as you can guess, Cassi is named after the constellation Cassiopeia and Lyra is also named after a constellation! I didn’t want Scorp to be an only child, so I gave him an older and a younger sister. I hope you all enjoyed, I really love this and now I’m mad at the lack of storyline after the war for Draco >:( anyways I just like smacked this out in 20 minutes because I’ve been in a Draco loving mood recently?????? Ok lol but I hope y’all enjoyed!!