Jack of Birds

"Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that——as if Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course——but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know——Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!" But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard the question.

Which do you think it was?

However the topic of who had the dream is even more interesting when you know that the "game of chess" ends up precisely between Alice and the Red King... Because by Alice seizing the Red Queen, she puts the Red King in checkmate, which somehow "bursts the dream" and makes her return to reality... It is very possible that, if you take the chess logic behind the story, Alice actually ended up "waking up the Red King"... But at the same time, it is implied that it is Alice herself who sets up the game as it is, when she picks up the sentient pieces in the "mirror-house"...

(Also, for those of you that always wanted more visual guiding to the chess-game-hidden-in-the-text, beyond that one annotated page you find at the beginning of every "Through the Looking Glass" book, here is a nice blog article that includes pictures of how the pieces move across the board during the events:

"Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that——as if Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course——but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know——Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!" But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard the question.

Which do you think it was?

The most recent case is, obviously, the "Gretel and Hansel" movie where her own children are the first she ever devoured...

And more kid-friendly, as a joke, though still as disturbing, you had before the Baker from "A Tale Dark and Grimm" who discovered she enjoyed eating kids after looking at her baby and thinking it looked yummy...

Enjoyers of the old Internet will recall the dread of the witch in "No Rest for the Wicked" - with the twist that "Hansel and Gretel" were the name of her ORIGINAL children...

[Damn, I had the page I wanted to share here but I deleted it - and now the original website is broken? Well only our memories can help us go forward...]

Even in France we had this as in Benjamin Lacombe's Grimoire de Sorcières the gingerbread-house witch, Gretchen, is said to have unlocked her powers when eating the corpse of her own son out of starvation and madness...

(Warning: Spoilers for Gameoverse 2026 Pilot)

Rossini's opera La Cenerentola: Angelina, or Angiolina

Massenet's opera Cendrillon: Lucette

Wolf-Ferrari's opera Cenerentola: Violetta Pia

Viardot's opera Cendrillon: Marie

1955 Fritz Genschow film: Margrit (German) or Margaret (English dub)

1995 musical A Tale of Cinderella: Angelina

Ever After: A Cinderella Story: Danielle

2000 TV movie: Zezolla

Thanks @marlinspirkhall ʚ♡⃛ɞ(ू•ᴗ•ू❁)

This is in regards to a post I rebloggled about a week ago, where I mused in the tags about why Brits called it Cluedo.

I had to have a look thank to this "ask" too!

Welp, now I know!

Ludo is a classic, easy-to-learn strategy board game for 2 to 4 players. The objective is to race all 4 of your colored tokens from your starting base, clockwise around the entire board, and into your home column before anyone else.

The "clue/ludo combo" refers to Cluedo, the international name for the famous board game Clue.

While Clue is primarily a murder-mystery deduction game, its foundation is a mechanical nod to Ludo.

The game was devised in 1943 during World War II by a British musician named Anthony E. Pratt.

Publishers Waddingtons bought the patent in 1945 and suggested combining "clue" with the traditional tabletop game "Ludo".

When Parker Brothers licensed it in the US, they dropped the "Ludo" reference and simply renamed the game Clue.

(apparently us USA-ians have never heard of internationally famous Ludo)

OKEY DOKEY THEN! (ᵒ̤̑ ₀̑ ᵒ̤̑)wow!*✰

This theory is no news - it is an old idea that relies on the way fandoms have behaved when it comes to works of horror for example, or dark brutal war stories, or dark fantasy, or similar works ; versus cases like the infamous Bronies, THE definition of what happens when the fans of what is supposed to be a simplistic, goody two-shoes, nice and fluffy and light-colored children entertainment become a massive, nefarious, vindicative, petty and disturbed organized mass of adults. (Or at least it used to be, I don't know how it evolved since).

The dialogue was still up to date with the more recent case of "Steven Universe", which also became known for its toxic fandom (which for some became THE toxic fandom by definition) despite the story (while definitively darker than "My Little Pony" for sure) still being a relatively comedic, hopeful, "positive" show with colorful designs, feel-good messages and overall trying to be "nice".

But the way the exact same toxicity has gotten to a show like "The Amazing Digital Circus", which is definitively more mature in content and more anxious, sinister in tone, I think brings the nuance that this phenomenon isn't just about "feel-good kids shows". It is about any show that happens to look like one. Even if the story is dark or brooding, even if it is horror, even if it is about complex or sinister characters, as long as the show will have colorful design, as long as it will have a "kid-like" aesthetic, as long as it will have a "nice entertainment" vibe in art direction, the toxicity will raise up in the fandom.

Mind you, this is nothing proven - experiments and studies have to be led. But I believe what we thought before was wrong. It isn't that simplistic, optimistic, nice, "gentle" soft stories attract nasty, disturbed, violent people in the online space - it seems to be purely a question of aesthetic, of them swarming to colorful designs, cute styles and childhood-associated/nostalgia-bringing aesthetic.

However, to all the points above, I have to add two cases that muddle a bit the waters - the Miraculous case and the Helluvaverse case. The Miraculous case is definitively something similar to the My Little Pony case, or rather between the Pony and the Steven Universe case, as it is about a fandom taking way too seriously and in a way-too-complex style a show that was meant to be children's entertainment for PRIMARY SCHOOL KIDS. Because it looks good, because it has 3D style, because it was shared internationally and features teenagers, a lot of people assumed it was aimed at teenagers and young adults, but as I like to remind people the show is literaly put by TV channels in the same batch and hours as Paw Patrol (hence why it has a whole dozen of episodes dedicated to selling toys).

The Helluvaverse in turn is definitively a show for adult, by adults, about very dark subjects and other a lot of dark humor - gore, sex, etc... But it also has this more simplistic and colorful design, with a throwback-style that can potentially evoke the same "old cartoons" and "kids show" people are used to... But the more important tie between the two works is that in both cases the creator and showrunner got A) too much and too directly involved with the online fans and haters and B) clearly belonged to a generation or a type of people that is not used to the traps of the Internet and not ready to face the trolls, drama-makers, and people who are not their target audience. Thus a lot of the debates, drama and storm around their show was partially fueled by the creators themselves, who "fed the trolls" to the point you could say it was over-feeding.

But I think these two cases, of Thomas Astruc and Vivzipop's interaction with their toxic fandoms (and how it further made it more toxic) is to be compared with the way other creators have been dealing with toxic fandoms directly on the Internet - from Steven Universe to, more recently, Gooseworx, where in this case Gooseworx not being as "problematic" as Astruc or Vivziepop, and their case being one of a person that a mob on the Internet set out to destroy and managed to complete gut out (spiritually and morally speaking).

This post has no conclusion and goes nowhere, but there's a lot of comparisons to be made, a lot of studies to perform, and a lot of recurring things to consider.

EDIT: Oh yes I forgot to add - the only "nice, fluffy, cute" styled cartoon that seem to avoid the toxic fandom thing are those whose content truly, REALLY goes hard on the dark and makes it clear the target audience is meant to be enjoyers of horror comedy and black humor. I am thinking of Happy Tree Friends for example.

They do that because for many these media become their comfort food, their biggest and sometimes only sources of pleasure in a very shitty life.

And what do you do when people insult or don't understand the characters, stories, and ships that saved your life? You feel the need to viciously attack them.

So the reason these colorful shows have such vicious fanbases is because they attract lonely, broken, mentally ill people who use it as a life boat.