Lost In A Good FanFiction

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

Edited to add: Since a lot of people are reblogging this original post, I'm adding the updated version I did that incorporates the intersex circle...

Ok, First of all, Dorothy Gale is played by a young Fairuza Balk.

These pictures do not do justice to the raw Traumatized Child energy she brings to this role.

A bit of plot: Dorothy Gale won’t sleep. She’s always talking about Emerald Cities and Talking Scarecrows and Ruby Slippers. At her wit’s end, Aunt Em decides to commit her to the sanitarium for electroshock therapy.

Disney made this.

This is where one of the core Uncanny elements of the film first appears; this movie does not share continuity with the 1939 Judy Garland film.

It is a much more faithful adaptation of L.F. Baum’s Books, but despite being a sequel both objectively and canonically, it really just pretends the ‘39 film doesn’t exist.

They land in a desert that turns people to stone called the Deadly Desert. They get food from a Lunch Pail Tree. The chicken can talk. The Scarecrow is King of Oz, allegedly.

But, like,

Here’s her house from the first movie.

The one that landed on a witch? Right smack dab in the middle of a whole dang Munchkin Village?

There was literally a whole song and dance!

Where did the Munchkins go, you might ask?

Well, while Dorothy was away,

There was an Apocalypse.

OZ HAS FALLEN

And this is where we meet the nightmarish Eldritch spawn of Roller Disco and David Bowie:

I don’t-

What is-

This is one of the Good Guys

He’s just a guy. Like, really, very much, Just A Guy of a character. His entire personality, such as it is, is comprised of

His quest to find his Mom (we’ll get back to that) and

Commenting on his lifelessness. For example, when faced with death, he comments calmly that he won’t miss eating or sleeping, since he does neither.

His mom ends up being this girl:

I LIVE TO PLEASE

Ahem. Sorry. Anyway.

So. I mentioned an Apocalypse.

Behold! The citizenry of Oz!

They have been turned to stone by the evil Nome King! Why, you ask?

For stealing his Emeralds, of course!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I forgot to introduce The Army of Oz, affectionately referred to as Tik-Tok!

This guy

That’s… apparently the whole army?

He’s spring-wound. Has 3 winding keys: one for moving, one for talking, and one for thinking. At one point his thinking gears wind down while his action and talking gears are still tight and he creates a lot of trouble. He has a… spin attack…

I used get dad to rent this film for us when I was 8 or so. Mostly because I knew it was the only film my tough little sister was visibly scared of. Children are brutal.

This breakdown doesn’t even touch on Mombi, who scared the living daylights out of me. She is played by the same actress who plays the nurse at the sanatorium. And she is the reason the citizens of Oz up there are missing their heads. She keeps the still living heads locked in glass cabinets in her palace and swaps them out for her own head depending on her mood.

There is a later scene where all the heads are screaming as Dorothy makes a run for it. Mombi’s original head bellowing ‘Dorothy Gale!’ It is genuinely disturbing. I love this film so much.

You don’t have to limit yourself to jokes.

There’s a lot of horror that will also go over kids heads.

Ever seen Coraline?

Most kids who watch it go “that was a fun movie. Little scary.” Meanwhile the adults are having a panic attack, especially if they’re the parents.

This movie has plenty of that. Most of the stuff I talk about being “traumatizing” is really, if I’m being honest, “remembering trauma.” It’s the stuff that I, an adult, can put together contextually but which is not necessarily obvious to a child viewer.

Dorothy gets there because she and her uncle were going on vacation in Australia and the ship sailed into a storm, then she meets with Ozma and other assorted characters because Ozma is trying to save the Queen of Ev and her children from the Gnome King after they got sold to him by her husband in return for “a long life,” if not outright immortality, and then he immediately rendered that deal kind of pointless because he committed suicide out of guilt for what he did to his wife and kids.

Meanwhile, Langwidere the head swapping woman is in charge because she is the only relative of the royal family left (i think she’s a cousin or something)

Tik-Tok is also originally from Ev, and he was just a mechanical marvel of sorts. But he goes to Oz at the end of the book and joins Ozma’s army. …Eventually becoming the only member of the army who is actually permitted to do dangerous things and face combat (after the course of a few more books) because all the other members of the army get promoted to positions that typically don’t see combat.

By the way, there are 14-ish Oz books that Baum actually wrote, and then a few more that were written by ghostwriters. And they do have a loose continuity they keep up with, mostly in the form of returning characters.

Like the Gnome King.

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.