#eibhlis97

Ruddger, of the Dorfmann pack, is a courier.

Well, technically, he’s somewhere between an All-Trade mercenary and an exorcist’s disciple (bodyguard), but he has a small, aspirational courier business, you know, on the side.

On the other side, he has a long-handled battle axe.

What is the battle axe for? Mm, basically it’s decorative. Ruddger likes to stand around with it. Sometimes it gets heavy, though, being a battle axe, so he puts it down, and purely coincidentally there happens to be something in its trajectory that is interested in impairing Ruddger’s deliveries.

He is a very dedicated postal worker, and as couriers in Ceiba are one of the few careers that are occasionally rewarded with gratuity for their punctuality, and Ruddger very much enjoys currency, he is resolute that he will be as early as it is possible for him to be, so long as he doesn’t get held up standing around with his very heavy axe.

That is a convenient joke but no, it means I don’t have to be a social justice warrior: I can be a social justice mage, a social justice healer, and a social justice support class, too.

Ozma and Dorothy are definitely cat people.

Dorothy has a cat, Eureka, who is the most horrible little shithead imaginable and Dorothy loves her anyway. Eureka was once put on trial for murdering one of the Wizard’s eight tiny piglets and she had evidence to prove herself not guilty (the piglet wasn’t even dead and Eureka knew exactly where it was) and withheld it because she found the trial entertaining.

The Glass Cat is vain, fickle, careless, and awful, but she is hopelessly beautiful and her tail looks like it is made of cotton candy and she has real pink brains and you can see ‘em work. (Not that she’s very smart- she isn’t.)

So the Glinda Anon asked me, and @eibhlis97 seconded the question: “what do you think Glinda’s weaknesses/secrets are?” and now it’s time for Z’s Opinion:

Glinda is a scholar. The thing about academics and academia is that change can take hundreds or even thousands of years to occur. New ideas have to be thoroughly explored, vetted, and experimented on before they can be implemented. Glinda does nothing in a hurry. How long was Diggs in charge? Long enough to age into a shriveled old man from early middle age, at the very least. If he aged in Oz, it was before the geas against aging was made part of the magical fabric of the land. Even if his aging was slowed by living in a fairy country, as the rules of fairyland have long stated time is different there, all throughout Diggs’ tenure as the ostensible head of state, Glinda did nothing to challenge him. She sat in her palace and waited. For decades. And then Dorothy showed up and solved the problem with no assistance from Glinda to speak of.

Glinda is aggressively reclusive. The witches of the East and West were sisters and colluded together to sustain their mutual reign of terror over Munchkins and Winkies alike. No act of collaboration between Glinda and any of the other good-aligned magic users is ever listed in the Baum books prior to her collaborations with Ozma, though, presumably she would have been able to check the Book of Records to verify the claims of any allies she might have chosen to make. Glinda’s policy of non-interference starts where her castle hits the Quadling country and goes in every direction, including Oz, Ev, and all the other nations. If it’s not on her doorstep, she sits and waits to see how it will pan out, even though she might have information that would be helpful, at the very least.

Glinda’s morality is livid and sherbet. Livid is gray-blue, and sherbet is pale orange. She’s not quite inscrutable, but her priorities are unique to her and no one else knows what they might be. Arguably, if she really cared about enforcing Ozma’s proclamation that Ozma, Diggs, and herself be the only magic users in the country, she could do the most to stop any other magics from happening, but she tends to ignore everything that isn’t immediately inconvenient to her personally. Most of Ozma and Dorothy’s adventures that don’t involve her interference hint at this, as does her adoption of Diggs as her apprentice, and most of her actions in Book 14. Why does Glinda do what she does? Nobody knows. Ozma gives her carte blanche so nobody ever questions it. Imagine if Jadis of Charn and Jafar had better manners, more restraint, and aggressive public relations campaigns. I’m not saying Glinda isn’t as good as her reputation suggests she is, I’m just saying that she’s the official grand dame of magic in a country fueled on the stuff and she has charmed/steamrolled Ozma into giving her no oversight. It’s a little puppet masterish.

Glinda is only unwilling to do magic that isn’t in her wheelhouse when it’s convenient. One of the things that bothered @forablueeyedmiracle when they read the series that I hadn’t previously bothered to consider was that Glinda slyly managed to get her own three wishes out of the Golden Cap before she freed the Winged Monkeys from slavery. It puts Glinda’s opinions of holding people in magical bondage in a strange sort of light, doesn’t it? Because the Animals of Oz are decidedly people, albeit people of a different shape. My conclusion, based on the things I pointed at further up, is that Glinda wanted time to study the Golden Cap before she surrendered it to the Monkey King, and having the band fly the adventurers all over the place gave her time to haul the artifact into her workshop and map every single thread. But when Tip expressed misgivings about being disenchanted into Ozma, suddenly Glinda can’t read, she doesn’t know. Mhm. Didn’t want a teenage puppet ruler who was in awe of/slightly terrified of her and in her debt, either, I’m guessing. And where is this insistence on things being in their proper forms when she decides to leave Queen Co-ee-oh as a swan, I wonder?

Glinda has the only true standing army in all of Oz. Jinjur’s band is a bunch of quitters, and Ozma can’t even get the Royal Army to do anything other than send Tik-Tok to fight their battles for them. Meanwhile, Glinda’s guard are all in trim fighting shape and as impassive as Amazon Beefeaters with swords. Does her palace face threats she doesn’t disclose to Ozma or Dorothy? Who are those swords for? Ostensibly, the Witch of the North would benefit from an alliance with her, but they never seem to interact. Is the Quadling quarter just like, Texas or something? Nobody seems to know what the fuck is happening down there, but she wouldn’t have an army if she didn’t feel like they were necessary, and she never uses them where we can see, not once. She handles interactions with the rest of Oz in person, and Diggs is initially terrified of her and then, in typical Diggs fashion, relaxes as soon as he’s fairly sure she’s not going to murder him outright and she’s taught him a few party tricks. Yeah, that wasn’t at all because Diggs was experiment fodder for Glinda to see how outsider humans might react when given controlled access to fairy magic. It’s not like he’s expendable to her, or anything, when she maintained a cold front that solidly repelled his empire aspirations for decades, and he colluded to depose Oz/Ozma on her north border. Don’t look at that too hard.

Given her powers and the extent to which she chooses to use or not use them, I think Glinda is unintentionally (because Baum was like me and couldn’t keep his own canon straight for two novels in a row) a good candidate for a minder left behind by Lurline to see what her fairies did with this randomly enchanted country, or something entirely else.

 (I know she has her swan chariot, but hear me...

well the did ride the saw horse at one point?

I never really thought of the Byronic Hero as actually having a heart of gold? And I think the fanon ghost can have a bad boy element - in sort of a "plays by his own rules" way. I don't think it's always "professionalism" so much as a strict adherence to a personal code that's often unknown to or misunderstood by everyone else. But I think that depends on the manifestation of the ghost, and how much canon material the fans are pulling from. Like, TV Tropes had both Tony Stark and Loki listed for Byronic Heroes, but between the two of them, I've only seen Loki as the ghost. 

So you're right it's definitely not exact. I don't think I see the Byronic Hero as a direct ancestor; maybe more as a forgotten inspiration? That trope also inspired a lot of vampires, which is definitely a trope I associate with the fanon ghost.

Shit I have to go to work and I'm rambling but this too interesting xD I was thinking about the door kickers too! Because I feel like I've seen fanon ghosts that can be described differently - like as lock pickers or networked.