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witchesoz · 2 years

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Oz Lore: The Black Brick Road

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

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

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

II)

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

III)

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

IV)

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

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

VI)

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

VII)

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oz lore #volkov's magic land #webcomic #the black brick road #the black brick road of oz #wicked witches #good witches #nome king #wizard of oz

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