#neverafter analysis

[ohmygeese]

My thoughst are a mess right now but Mira is so funny especially when you think about the princess suicide coalition.

Mira whose true love did not love her back cursing her to live in constant pain.

Mira who cannot go back to her old home because her body is not fit for ocean anymore. Because all her family is dead. Because the ocean is just not safe for her anymore.

But she's also Mira who refused to kill the prince. Mira who survived on fucking Toy Island by eating kid donkey meat. Mira who, unlike other versions of her story, did not kill herself. Mira who chooses to continue to walk despite all the pain.

While she may see herself as just driftwood for now, I think those dancer legs are going to come into play the moment she hears of the princess' plan.

[rain-dere]

Episode 10 Thoughts

Ylfa. Gerard. The Baron.

Bravery and cowardice being two sides of the same coin.

In a world literally designed to be horror-esque, it's no surprise that so many of our characters struggle with fear. I mean, from the get-go Gerard is labeled- both in-story and out-of-story- as a coward. Hiding and running away with the women and children, ignoring outside threats in a desperate attempt to cling to the comforts of high society. But is that all he is? We've seen him directly put himself in harm's way on the battlefield. We've witnessed him try and fail and pick himself back up again. There are moments- real definitive moments- where Gerard's bravery shines through.

Ylfa seems like the quintessential brave heroine. Mowing down enemies, sticking up for her friends, having the courage to slam that axe down and do the unthinkable in order to survive. But fear does not escape even her. I'm still thinking about that one scene at the Auroratory, where Ylfa is terrorized not by some external menace, but by the fear that the blame for her situation lies deep within herself: endemic, volatile, inescapable, and utterly unfixable. I wouldn't necessarily call that cowardice. But it is a moment where the veil of the beast falls away and leaves behind only a painfully young, scared girl sobbing in solitude.

The Baron. So quick to correct Rosamund's conflation of survival with bravery. Even he himself is aware that all his innovations were products of fear dampened by grief. That fear of Death itself, both its corporeal form as the Wolf and its general existence as a part of reality, was something he could not and would not turn around and face head on. So much so he would rather permanently rid the world of its source than move on or make peace.

I like that distinction. Of fear being an obstacle which forces Gerard and Ylfa to grow, rely on others, and change for the better, as opposed to the Baron's stagnation within the clutches of his own fear which is ultimately his undoing.

[feelingtheaster99]

You know another thing that makes THIS the horror season? The absolutely SPEED at which things are happening with no breaks.

Like Sibohan/Rosamund pointed out they haven’t slept/rested since the spider fight. That was 3-4 episodes ago! Action in this season happens fast and it doesn’t stop. This episode in itself also happened so fast—they went from one story to another in a series of desperate and frantic escapes, only to end up in an another unfamiliar land, but finally having the time to take a breath.

I’ve only watched a few other dimension 20 seasons, but in most of those (Escape from the Bloodkeep excluded, that season was WILD from start to finish) there are a lot more lulls in the action. The characters make the choice to stop and rest, or Brennan stops and begins to narrate the passage of time.

In this season, the characters literally all DIE and they still don’t get time to rest. They are constantly in danger and need to make life or death decisions and that adds an extra intensity to the eldritch, philosophical horror we already got going on

[pricklylittleloaf]

[lovevalley45]

pinocchio’s speech abt why his life is so hard compared to other kids, n why he has to suffer the consequences when other kids don’t, keeps ringing to me as like. what it feels to grow up black with this implicit bias against u, where u might be automatically seen as a troublemaker, where u aren’t allowed the same freedom bc the stakes are so much higher if u screw up

[sideblogdotjpeg]

ok soo i was trying to figure out how pib's character fit into the thematic web of the neverafter and it made me think of like. pib & aesop acting as foils wrt to the concept of morality in fairytales

i think pib, in a very roguish way, represents moral neutrality/amorality. he will lie, cheat, steal and kill happily and unrepentantly (because lying is SOO much fun) - but he also does it without any real sense of malice or greed. like its important that the core of the original puss in boots story was him lying in order to help tomas. pibs lies are never centred around hurting anyone, but rather to help himself and his friends.

conversely, i think pib also recognises the need to do traditionally "bad things" to survive. like he WILL absolutely give the mule the shit for betraying them, but ultimately also understands that it was what was necessary for him to survive. and he cant fault him for seeking safety and refuge. which is why i think pib could represent a kind of amorality (or at least morals in the fairytale sense). like literally adhering to a universal moral code is simply unimportant to him. not a factor of consideration. he is protecting himself and his friends, and thats what matters (and of course what else should matter to a tricker cat)

this is in contrast to aesop who is like, from his introduction, defined by his strong sense of morality. he is also fundamentally a good person, but he believes that that goodness is manifested through behaviour that adheres to a moral code. his stories are strictly cause and effect. you act good, you are rewarded / you act bad, you are punished. also, beyond that, i also get the sense he thinks his stories are superior for having that stricter morality? (hopefully i didnt misremember this bit, but) he says that the neverafter is more susceptible to corruption BECAUSE of its lack of moral clarity & rigidity. but it seems that he believes the world SHOULD operate within that strict moral system (aka he is a TOTAL SNITCH!!). thus, in contrast to pib's amorality, aesop represents a hypermorality - adherence to a universal moral code that allows for no exceptions no matter what.

- also, side note, from this framework it might also explain why pib & pinocchio team up at the beginning. like pinocchio IS in the transitory stage from the aesop-like fixed moral to the kinder neutrality of "lying cant be bad if it saved my father" -

anyways! idk if this is something that will ever come up or was intended. PROBABLY not! but its an interesting parallel i think!!! ummm neverafter fr makes my brain go brrrrr

[pjoneedstherapy]

I’ve seen a lot of people on Twitter complaining about NeverAfter to the point of hating on the players which is bizarre in its own right, but someone asked why the characters were motivated to fight the princesses and saying it felt low stakes because they couldn’t die… my guy are we watching the same show??

THEY LOSE EVERYTHING OF THEY CANT PULL THIS OFF!

you can only enter your Twice Upon A Time if you have been made aware of the greater world. The Fairies want to take away free will and force everything to go back to the way it was. No one would be able to go against them ever again because they won’t know better. The princesses want to fully destroy the book using the ink and everything else with it. They said that they can’t have a part in the new land that would come after because their trauma would make them write their stories in reaction to their past lives rather than in indifference to their past lives. The stepmother wants something similar, so in both cases everyones lives would be erased, without guarantee that they would even exist in the new world.

Why are the intrepid heroes fighting to save the universe? Because they live in it and are the only people aware enough to try and stop it! They don’t know what comes next, but they aren’t fighting to make a new world, they’re fighting to not nuke the current one.

As for how they make the world better…

As he died in “No Place for Princes and Princesses” Mother Goose said that he believes the world they live in can be better which is why he left home to begin with. His motivation hasn’t changed from the start, and he has legit never done anything with the book that would imply that he wanted control or power. (He always asks everyone what they want when the person they’re going to put in the book isn’t able to speak for themselves, i.e. Candlewick, and he actively keeps other people from going into the book if he thinks there’s a different way, i.e. the Itsy Bitsy Spider) He’s not gonna force people to live the life he wants by writing it in the book, he’s gonna give them control over their own lives using him as a tool to get it. (I have a feeling that when he dies Jack will pick up his work and keep helping people but that’s just my opinion)

I see no reason for the cast or Brennan to get hate. Is this a huge season that might have benefitted by having ten more episodes? Yes!Did it meet your expectations for what horror should be? Maybe not. But don’t dumb down the characters and the choices they made. Each of the characters gave up something that they needed for their Happily Ever After, but they’re selfless enough to not want to ruin the possibility of change for the rest of the world (unlike the princesses and the Stepmother)

TLDR: (JUMP SCARE CHRIS PRATT)

[theoutcastrogue]

Trickster saves the world by fucking it all up

“The water begins to part, and you see vast and many realms of the Neverafter, many stories, many different versions of the stories of your companions. You see different versions of Pinocchio, different versions of Sleeping Beauty. All these things unveil themselves to you, and you see lots of great powers in this world. You see witches and fairies. You see monsters, like a terrible leviathan coming after Pinocchio. You see the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood’s legend.

But you also see, over and over again, this continuation of animals in these stories getting up to mischief, and you look back at all the different lives you’ve lived, and you always see the clever fox, the cunning rabbit. You see these different versions of the cat in these stories, and in some places you’re helping, in some you’re hurting. But you feel this sudden tug or pull of understanding that there’s some reason or purpose to the animals that appear in these stories.

And when you think of your most recent life, of taking a poor miller’s son and through cleverness and trickery making him king, it seemed that there were a lot of forces trying to control the flow of these stories and determine what it is they should be, and that your role has often been to upset that. That you’ve lived many lives of saying, something’s actually going to be a different way now. Something unexpected or strange or hilarious is going to happen to subvert the order of how these things tend to go.”

— the DM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) to Puss in Boots (Zay Oyama) in Neverafter Episode 4: “Once Upon A Time”

Reynard the Fox

“In mythology, whenever a system becomes overregulated, a figure spontaneously appears to restore balance by introducing chaos. The trickster is “playful, mischievous, and sometimes outrageous.” He delights in paradox, confusion, and “auspicious bewilderment”. He keeps us from being too confident that we know what we are doing or that we are in control. [...] The trickster confounds a perspective that sees reality only through the lens of power. He proves that something exists that is neither power nor its opposite.”

— Susan Wyatt, “Awakening the Trickster”

“[Tricksters] stabilize society by annoying it.”

— Paul Mattick reviewing Lewis Hyde’s Trickster makes this world

“I feel like in the last one, my kind of life was a little simpler. I did some trickery, but overall, I was a little on the sweeter side. And I think it seems fun and it seems correct to just fuck it all up.”

— Puss in Boots (Zac Oyama) in Neverafter Episode 4: “Once Upon A Time”

@we-are-trickster​

[adarkrainbow]

Neverafter notes (1) The Time of Shadows

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

Item 1: The Time of Shadows

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

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

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

Item 2: Rosamund du Prix

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

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

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

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

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

Item 3: Gerard of Greenleigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Item 4: Pib

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

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

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

Item 5: Mother Goose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Item 6: Ylfa Snorgelsson

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

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

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

Item 7: Pinocchio

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

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

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

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

Item 8: The Chandling caravans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[norcumii]

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR D20′S NEVERAFTER

(This was started the weekend after the finale, then my spoons ran away for awhile. -_-; Hopefully this is coherent anyways, even if late.)

I have been...struggling with this season of Dimension 20. As we’ve gone from episode to episode, I keep coming back to the issue of foundational rules – not in the sense of mechanics of world-building, but the thematic underpinnings and models. You’re telling a story about stories. We have these elements of horror and free-will; themes of consumption and corruption; cycles and multi-verses.

And I haven’t been able to tie it all together. My metaphorical wall-chart of photos and string has been an unending tangled mess (and my brain staunchly refuses to stop fixating on Aesop’s Mouse and Lion, aka the mascots of Disney and MGM so obviously that’s been a heel-turn of Capitalism waiting to happen >_>). After the finale I just sat there blinking for a bit, feeling like that certainly was a thing that had happened, but what did it all MEAN?????

There wasn’t anything that felt wrong with what happened, but there wasn’t any narrative logic I could grasp, no themes to tie things together other than “things are better now and what people chose for themselves” which is...nice, but vague enough to be unfulfilling. I couldn’t find anything to the Adventuring Party episode to help, so in growing frustrating I went browsing through the related tags on the tumbls.

This deceptively simple post broke me because it explained matters so well. It’s trauma. The whole season, all the horror and meta themes are about trauma. Suddenly all the oddly shaped puzzle pieces I couldn’t stop pawing at fit.

This is why the dark times began in the first place. People worried so much about trauma that they managed to traumatize themselves. Look how Sleeping Beauty’s vines literally smothered her in an attempt to protect her. All these population centers withdrew from each other, borders closed between the various kingdoms, and thus people pulled away from the potential for community support – everyone was left to struggle and fall on their own.

It wasn’t what I originally thought, some nebulous fear of fear itself inevitably leading to the darkside nonsense, but instead how we isolate ourselves into our little echo chambers – each person caught up in their story and their story alone. How we become mired in those events/trauma until one’s entire life is framed around That Horrible Thing What Happened At One Point In My Life.

Which in turn addresses the Authors – as a storyteller myself, I was mighty uncomfy with the presentation of the Authors as a unified bloc of uncaring eldritch horrors from beyond that only wanted the suffering of their playthings. I couldn’t figure if I was picking up on the wrong vibe, or if this was one of those learning moments where “if you’re uncomfy that might be ‘cause it hits too close to home and you need to sit with that for a bit to chew it over” or whatever. With the trauma context, it makes sense. On the one hand, the Authors are the external force: just like the characters, they’ve been corrupted by the fear of the Dark Times, and thus spreading that to their creations, which spread it back to them, etc. On the other they are very much an internal force: when we are traumatized, we tell ourselves stories to contextualize what happened. That can be done in a healthy way – this is one of the reasons we tell stories to begin with – or one can become mired in that narrative, telling and retelling it while fixating on the worst parts (that fear of the Dark Times thing again) until all that one sees is the worst iteration.

Which is why there was the multiverse aspect, and why each one could/did get worse. For that matter, it addresses the evolution of Pib’s minis, which baffled me when they were revealed. He begins as the dapper rogue, then becomes the hardened stray, then the scared little cat. Trauma wears at people, and oftentimes the immediate reaction is to withdraw, to be emotionally distant and appear tough – Rather like Zac’s choices on how Pib changed between incarnations. From there its so easy to get ground down further, into something so tired and hurting that it’s difficult to expect anything other than to be hurt further. Or look at Rosamund, increasingly isolated by her briars, which are choking her as they “lovingly” work to protect her from the big bad scary world – until she is puppeted by them.

Honestly, a lot of character choices make a lot more sense. Ylfa’s separation, how she believed that “the girl kept holding the wolf back.” The Stepmother’s everything, exemplifying that old saying about how “hurt people hurt people,” and a classic example of how easy it is to repeat generational trauma, especially when you don’t have a model for other ways to approach matters. The princesses’ utter nihilism, the exhausted desperation to just have the suffering stop. The fairies as the well-meaning but misguided faction endorsing placating the/a source of trauma to keep things from getting worse is all too familiar of those caught up in traumatic cycles but want to exercise some, any kind of autonomy. Meanwhile look at how Rapunzel grew able to lash out at literally everyone, and how she was utterly honest without ever needing to be truthful. How so many people just needed to rest in Mother Goose’s book, to get some reprieve from the relentless cycle of trauma (and how it helped them, and in return helped the party).

This explains the horrible Worst Case ending that was mentioned in the Adventuring Party: the Stepford Wives society of terrifying seeming-perfection crystallizing everyone into a semblance of how Everything Is Fine, Nothing Is Wrong, and no lessons are learned, no changes can be made, and the core is often rotting away unseen. All too often, society pressures us to pretend trauma didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t so bad. (How many times have you heard that PTSD is only for military folks, or those who survived massive natural disasters or whathaveyou?) The lesson we internalize is to pretend that all is peachy-keen, no problems whatsoever, and when that happens the trauma is never addressed. One can’t heal if all your energies are devoted to keeping up the facade of an idyllic existence. To be stuck in that cycle is indeed pretty apt for the worst end of a horror season.

Of course, this leads to the big question: what makes the players different? HOW did they manage to break the cycle? By literally crafting a new narrative – by allowing EVERYONE to make their own, new narrative, to shed the weight and burden of generational trauma. Some of them, like Pinocchio, had already internalized their own story – in his case, that meant taking up the terrifying responsibility of autonomy, taking up his own strings and destiny. Pinocchio learned and understood his story, stepping forward to not be ruled by his past experiences – like Gerard, choosing to leave his humanity and stop chasing the old goals that everyone said he should desire. Even though they both grieved the loss of that goal, and all the ramifications of leaving those hopes behind – even as it meant accepting the scars and changes it wrought upon them – it helped them and others in their stories break out of the cycle of trauma.

Stories are doorways to other places – sometimes a temporary haven in someplace better, where no matter how bad things get, there is a ‘happily’ at the end of it. Sometimes they’re models of how things could be horrible, and we can learn how others deal with grief/tragedy/horror – so we in turn can acquire those skills and life lessons. Vicarious experiences can help mitigate/understand trauma, and somehow, without me even noticing it, this season leaned wholeheartedly into it.

I think I need to rewatch it all through that lens, and tbh? I’m looking forward to it.

[littledoggy-girlcollar]

sorry wait didn’t cinderella literally say in her first meeting w rosamund “do not take the crimes of those who have manipulated us and put them at the feet of the world” like bitch! what are you doing!

[ohmygeese]

I feel like the complaints people have about this season about the princesses and destiny's children have the mechanics of dnd combat and storytelling to "blame."

Like I would've loved if Rosamund got to do a persuasion check for either Snow or Cinderella. Like I was ready for it even before the start of the episode but it couldnt happen 'cus one: Rosamund was out for I think a round of combat, two: Rosamund heard people coming from out side the Canonade and three: Snow white was already four rounds into the spell and something needed to be done pronto. Yes, her concentration got broken but I think at that point Cinderella stole Scheherezade's book.

So, Siobhan not wasting anytime decided to go for what could solve the problems at hand. A zephyr strike so she could at least deal good damage to Snow (maybe so Tim can put her in the book or at least to knock her unconcious) and so she could move 60 feet away from what she knows should either be the fairies or the Stepmother.

And then she fucking hit a nat 20, you don't plan that. A great, poetic nat 20 btw. Like again the image of Sleeping Beauty killing Snow White, two princesses who needed a true love's kiss to wake up from what is essentially death. One undead princess to another, trading crits and blows. Really, if any other dc member killed Snow, it wouldnt have felt as good anf painful as this.

And besides, we got Mira and Elody (maybe, Cinderella, I honestly don't know how thats going to go but I am waiting for it meaning I need Rosamund in her fucked-up state to do it). Heck, Red really tried with La Bete. And even got her fur when it was obvious that talking wouldn't work. It's the thought of even if it came down to this, I'm thinking of you. We're thinking of you. We'll accept you with open arms.

(Well maybe not all of them but c'mon you have to let the Frog Prince eat Rapunzel like the heron at Baba Yaga's hut. It's funny and nice callback. Who knows maybe Gerard coughs up a hair ball).

All in all, I am happy with this season and am excitedly waiting for the finale. I hope the Stepmother and Baba Yaga have a looney tunes type brawl. And I hope the Baba Yaga makes Alphonse appears in a battle one last time.

[rain-dere]

Episode 9 Thoughts

Thinking about Neverafter and the topic of consumption.

Obviously there's consumption of sustenance- food, flesh, etc. Ylfa eating the Wolf, Stepmother eating her daughters. Even the bit about Timothy's rotten apples for his husband, Gerard's frogginess made manifest in his decision to munch on some cave spiders, and Muffet's town's obsession with curds and whey play into that food theme.

What's most interesting to me is the intersection here of consumption and necessity. Ylfa slaying the Wolf not out of kindness or evil but pure, instinctive, overpowering necessity. That need to survive. And then the Stepmother, who wreaks havoc by literally swallowing up the people and things standing in her way. Even Timothy's book is, in a way, swallowing up people and objects for safekeeping.

And side note, overindulgence and overconsumption of wealth certainly have a part to play in all this. The folly of Gerard and Pib being tied to complacency and material abundance which accompanies success. The Turquoise Haired Fairy dissuading Rosamund and Pinocchio from wanting more out of their stories- trying to have their cake and eat it too.

It makes sense that so many fairytales and their lessons revolve around food because it's been a staple of human culture since as long as we've even had culture, but I just love how consistently it's being commented on through the actions of both the antagonists and the PCs.

[thedragonagelesbian]

I promised a post elaborating on the ordering of the one-on-ones, and I’m here to deliver! Be prepared for some VERY passionate structural and functional analysis.

So the order was Lou/Pinocchio -> Zac/Pib -> Siobhan/Rosamund -> Emily/Ylfa -> Murph/Gerard -> Ally/Timothy and here’s why this is brilliant and Brennan was very smart in picking this order:

First, Pinocchio is an EXCELLENT place to begin. PERFECT for establishing tone and ambiance and stakes for the multiverse/body jumping that is going to be repeating across the other characters WITHOUT too much lore-dumping upfront specifically because the Stepmother is so deliberately withholding and obfuscating. We get all the VIBES of what’s going on without getting much detail about the mechanics or rules of this crossing.

We follow that up with Pib. Also an inspired choice. We get a much needed reprieve from, y’know, all the child abuse in Pinocchio’s segment, and we learn a bit more about how this is all working. Specifically, not only the notion that the same characters appear across stories (which was mentioned in Pinocchio’s, with the horrifying detail that that Pinocchio had to die for this Pinocchio to enter that world) but that the same archetypes can transcend individual characters and stories entirely. This is brilliant to reinforce so soon after we see the Stepmother again because (as we’ve suspected since episode 2 at least with the mirror) she is the only entity of that type that we’ve encountered so far.

Also one of my favorite books as a really young child was called ‘Cat and Bear’ and it was about a cat named Cat who was a little stinker, so idk this segment was weirdly nostalgic and warm and fuzzy

Next, ROSAMUND. CINDERELLA. HOT WOMEN. What else is there to say? Well, we’re back to the plot that the Stepmother was alluding to but not stating outright. We learn more about the mechanics and rules of this world, and in addition to confirming how the crossings work, we get the pivotal piece of information that these other stories are (a) not infinite and (b) getting progressively worse as the better stories are either exhausted or die off.

Cinderella is also key as, three one-on-ones in, we are getting our most reliable narrator to date. She gives Rosamund a clear goal, something to drive the plot forward that’s less cryptic than the book.

And on a beautiful fucking nat 20, Rosamund gains an incredible awareness of her past lives and other stories that supercharged her character arc. I wonder if it is for that awareness that Rosamund (and Ylfa) didn’t get new character portraits when they crossed over: that they are able to retain more of a fundamental essence of self (Rosamund because of the nat 20, Ylfa because she succeeded on the CHAR save).

Coming off of Rosamund’s almost empowering note, the affective roller coaster continues with Ylfa, in which Emily Axford breaks my heart for like thirty minutes straight and I thank her for doing so. We get more of a glimpse of the rules and forces at work in this world, the Wolf continues to be my absolute favorite metaphysical NPC in Dimension 20 history.

Again, each session dovetails beautifully with and builds off of the one-on-one before it to show us new aspects of how this masterwork of a world functions, all while varying tone and affect in a way that isn’t jarring but keeps interest throughout the 2+ hours. I can’t gush enough about how much I admire all of the intrepid heroes and their role-playing skills.

And it was Murph’s segment that made me want to make this post in the first place. Obviously the intrepid heroes did not know what was going on in everyone else’s sessions, but the timing of Gerard as comedic relief is SO perfect. Such an excellent follow-up to Ylfa, again another point of reprieve as Murph commits to Gerard just not fucking getting the concept that we as an audience have had presented to us now for four different characters.

And again, the presence of the fairy brings us back to the PlotTM. We’re getting a sense not for the metaphysical bigger picture but the factions that are at war in this world and the consequences that their fight is having for everyone else. We also get a delicious seed of interparty ~drama~ as Rosamund and Gerard (and Pinocchio) are being courted by different sides in this tale-spanning battle. I NEED to see how much they all tell each other when they finally meet back up again...

Finally, we end with Timothy because, like, how could we possibly end anywhere else than with the storyteller? The book is one of the keys to understanding this world and takes on additional symbolic weight as the characters are passing through to another story, a different, darker book.

But there’s still hope. Things are going to be harder this time around, but there’s still a chance, in another once upon a time.

Just... I commend all of them so much, Brennan for laying the tracks for the emotional, narrative, and lore beats of the episode and the intrepid heroes for picking up on them and responding to and expanding them like the endlessly talented improvisors they are.

WHAT A GOOD FUCKING EPISODE, CAN’T WAIT FOR EPISODE 5

[with-stars-in-hand]

Gotta say the wolf’s speech to ylfa about all the women in her family making a pact with him when they became mothers bc birth and death are so intertwined….Brennan Lee Mulligan I am showering you with almonds

[beachwae]

seeing a lot of thoughts about people saying that they might not be able to use elody as a seventh princess because she’s not the main character of her story. that’s certainly very interesting and not a completely invalid take, but i think it’s important to note that the story of the princess and the frog is one of the few tales in which it’s told from both perspectives very often. i can name several film and book titles that have “elody” or the princess as the title character whose perspective we follow, but in terms of shorter stories and the base fairy tales, gerard is often told as the main character as well (not always! i believe it is still told from elody’s perspective in some russian adaptations)

all of this to say. i don’t think gerard and elody can either claim to be the sole protagonist of their story. but of the two of them, elody makes the final decision and kisses gerard- or throws gerard against a wall. so is a princess defined as a person without a lack of agency (in which case elody doesn’t fit, but mira might not either) or the titular character/love story we follow (which elody and mira both do?)