#it’s like such old news too bc it’s been retconned and the series is fucking over

[metallteeff]

still thinking about this tweet i saw this morning that was like guys petscop is bad bc the creator based it off a real case and like yea that was shitty. we shouldn’t let him forget he fucked up with that but then people were all like this is why i never liked petscop petscop is soooo bad and i’m just kind of like. okay.

like you guys realize really impactful art can have shitty production behind it or like be hard to consume right. idk this isn’t about what tony did or like defending him it jisy very much seemed like i’m going to hate this thing now bc of this fucked up thing in its production and it was clear the ppl saying that really had never watched petscop idk

[the-starlight-papers]

I was really big into kingdom keepers in middle school and random unhinged stuff that happened keeps just hitting me like a sack of bricks.

For those who aren’t aware, the premise of the first book in the series is “the Disney villains are real and doing evil, but they can only be seen by Disney characters. So we’re going to make holograms of some kids to be used as guides in the park during the day, but when the kids go to sleep at night, they wake up as their holograms in the park.”

The rest is under a readmore bc I had a lot to ramble about.

There’s a ton of stuff that randomly gets retconned after the first book. The notable one is that basically everyone (hologram or not) can see the Disney characters running around, which is funny because it basically destroys the whole premise of the series.

They also randomly switch the character who is good with computers around the second or third book. The new guy who’s good with computer’s first name is literally Dell.

The plot of the books are kinda hard to follow, since there is kind of a focus on going to as many different Disney attractions as possible.

The first book has a pretty coherent plot. The main plot is that the Disney Villains are trying to like. Escape the parks or something, and the kids have to follow hidden clues from Walt Disney to power up the wards. There’s a side plot where the main character Finn’s friend from school (and love interest) Amanda, is secretly helping them in a “knows more than she lets on” way because her sister Jess had been kidnapped and was being mind controlled by Maleficent.

In the second book, Jess gets kidnapped AGAIN, and they have to run around animal kingdom to try and find her. The twist is they can’t go to sleep because if they do their holograms will be captured by the villains, and they have no way to Return to their bodies without the magical garage door opener. They also use Pictochat on the Nintendo DS to communicate.

In the third book, their wise old guy mentor Wayne goes missing. Also the villains are up to something in Epcot. Good thing they turned Jess and Amanda (who BTW are not actually sisters, and are both runaways with superpowers called Fairlies (short for Fairly Human) that are hiding from the government) into holograms so they can help. Too bad their magical garage door opener got stuck in lost and found, so they can’t wake back up. Also the villan’s whole plan was to make it so the seatbelts couldn’t unlock and hold the guests hostage.

The fourth book is basically “I thought we were done but now we need to go to Hollywood studios”. Philby, the computer guy, has probably committed multiple felonies at some point due to hacking into Disney’s systems to make it so they stop waking up as holograms in the parks manages to mess up his one job and now they’re randomly getting stuck in the parks again. Also people (including one of the other main characters and Finn’s mom) can get possessed by the evil villains, indicated by their eyes turning green. The villan’s plan this time is to take out the power plant for the parks.

The fifth book is Disney cruise. I’m gonna be honest this is where they start to get really nonsensical. They’ve introduced hologram model 2.0 which has some visual improvements for like. Their actual purpose, but mostly are beneficial for the main characters because now they’re mostly intangible (except for on their hands and feet) which is a big benefit on the “hey you’re a normal kid running around at night AND you glow in the dark” since they can’t be punched as easily anymore.

Book 6 is “we’re still on the fucking boat”. Again, idk what we’re doing here besides trying to stop the evil guys from doing something evil. The book culminates with an evil ritual where one of Finn’s friends from school dies graphically.

Book 7 is basically oh fuck, someone died. This is serious now. And the way I mean this is serious is that I mean “oh this whole operation is controlled by the US military.” Because you know the second that they heard “oh we’ve made a way to make people mostly invulnerable” and they immediately went “ah we can use this for combat.” Someone made a hologram of Finn’s dead friend that also is just a search engine to try and help him cope. Idk who thought that was a good idea. There’s some really weird sections in this book where characters get like. Stuck half tangible in a wall and it’s described in a lot of detail. Anyways this is the original Disneyland book and idk what happens besides Mickey shows up in a dramatic reveal because he had been like sealed away to stop the villains from harnessing his power. The old guy, Wayne, gets stabbed and dies. I think they saved everyone? Woo? We all have depression now.

The return: oh you thought we were done with this series. You thought wrong. There’s another trilogy and a spin-off book. The kids (they’re all like 18 at this point or something) go back in time to stop the villans from ever becoming real or something. They team up with no longer an old guy Wade to set up the clues that they used to save the parks back in book one. Also btw they went back in time as holograms, and then got stuck as 2D black and white images until Wayne was able to invent both color television and holograms in the span of like three days. The other issue here is that since they went back as holograms, their actual bodies are stuck in comas. Good thing they have Jess and Amanda to deal with their parents and try and keep them from like. Dying of dehydration. There’s a whole subplot here with a Fairlie who can read minds who has to try and read a US senator or something??? I don’t even know at this point.

Anyways that’s the plot of this series

The actual books have so much focus on the actual mechanics of “ok you’re half hologram now what”.

If they go somewhere that doesn’t have good projector access, they’ll just not be visible there. Places with projector shadow include: on rides with lots of scaffolding, in certain weird corners, near trees. Places without projector shadow include: random offices, hallways, ect. At some point the authors went ok this is annoying as hell and now any random camera can project holograms. which. Sure.

Certain characters can go “all clear” where they become 100% hologram. This is usually accomplished by letting your mind go blank since light doesn’t have thoughts. The main character Finn can go all-clear even in his human body if he tries really hard.

There’s a couple interesting questions raised here such as “what happens if you go all clear while the power’s out and no holograms are being projected?” and “what happens if you get stuck in all clear?” These questions are never answered or touched on again.

Also a significant portion of the plot rides on the goddamn magic garage door opener. It’s referred to as the fob. In the first book there’s multiple. After the first book this is retconned saying that if two returns get activated too soon to each other their minds could get stuck in limbo (basically they’d die). Large chunks of plot are focused on “we need to move the fob between parks” or “we lost the fob” or “the villains stole the fob” or “Philby has to hack into Disney’s servers to Return us since the villains stole the fob” or “Philby’s cat shut down his monitoring program and now I’m stuck here until he gets home from school to return me manually”

They apparently rewrote the first three books (imo the only good ones) in 2020???? I mean I guess it makes since because the books were outdated when I read them and the majority of my Disney knowledge is from when my family went there in 2014. Which at that point was 10 years after the first book released.

Starting in book 6, they added an online website where people could vote on new plot points, and submit character dialogue. This mostly just added a bunch of random asterisks and made it really distracting to read the books.

I also just learned there’s ANNOTHER GODDANM SEQUEL TRILOGY with the main characters kids. I’m tempted to read this and find out if being a hologram can be passed down genetically.

I don’t know where I was going with this whole ramblings but anyways. I hope you learned something about this book series that heavily impacted my childhood. I promise I’m not a Disney nut I just like weird fiction books.