#oz analysis

First off, I'd like to start of by saying I am more often than not referencing fanfiction interpretations of Nick and Boq's personalities and mindsets rather than their canonical and officials books/films.

Such as these fics inspiring me to write this post:

Alexithymia by RandomArtistPerson/thegameartist03

til we know what the sediment knows by theabsolutelybest789

The Evolution of Boq by igiveup101

bite the hand (series) by youeitherseeitoryoudont

I still love you, i'm sorry. by Devilpet

she's the death you chose (you're in terrible danger) by kazberries

Informal Essay Start:

I write this little analysis as an argument against Wicked 2025 Boq's interpretation that he led Nessarose Thropp on and was an incel towards Glinda. And I write this little analysis about how Nick Chopper, if upon meating tinboq, would eventually realise and acknowledge how their love for Nimmie Amee and Nessarose Thropp was in fact as pure they could be, but it was Boq who had been trapped in a situation where is love was taken advantage of and twisted.

Nick Chopper agreed to marrying Nimmie Amee because:

Unknowingly Queer Nick simply believed that everyone had to get married eventually, thus he might as well marry Nimmie Amee who he knows, gets along with and is happy to marry him back.

They had know eachother fairly well from childhood and adulthood, living in the same oppressive MunchkinLand ruled by the Wicked Witch of the East.

Nick's had a fear of being alone as his parents may or may not have just recently died.

Marrying Nimmie provided the young woman and Nick's dear friend freedom from her servitude/servant slavery under the Wicked Witch of the East or the mean/lazy/abusive old woman in the canonical oz book series. (And thus, Nimmie Amee may have been a romantic believing a knight would sweep her off her feet and save her from her servitude).

Nick figured he and Nimmie Amee could find companionship in each other if they were to take up the postions of married couple together.

Boq Woodsman agreed to date/enter a romantic relationship with Nessarose Thropp because:

At first to impress Glinda just as Glinda had directed him toward Nessarose.

He saw and recognised at the OzDust that he had no chance with Glinda and Glinda was with Fiyero. Thus, turning back to Nessarose, who had obvious affection for him, tried to return that affection back.

He didn't want to hurt Nessa's feeling.

He figured he could make himself fall in love with Nessarose since from a surface level inspection, she'd be everything Boq/anyone could want in a girl. Self-assured, witty, sweet, loving and from Boq's family's perspective, she'd grant some upwards social mobility due to being the Governor's daughter.

Did you catch that?

Nick/Boq believed that they could learn to romantically love Nimmie Amee/Nessarose Thropp.

Nick/Boq tried to being the devoted partners they were meant to be.

Nick/Boq did not pity Nimmie Amee's servitude/Nessa's disability and stayed by their sides for more than simple obligations and for love that they did hold for their partners.

The difference is revealed with how Nimmie Amee and Nessarose Thropp response to Nick and Boq's love and devotion.

For Nick, Nimmie Amee had to eventually beg Nick to stop building the house he swore to build for them to prove to the East Witch that his love was true, as his cursed axe had already taken all his limps.

For Boq, Nessarose, with her new trauma of being abandoned (despite the fact that she took her sister love for granted anyway), called for Boq to come to her aid after her father's death (which he did come because he cared for her and eas worried for her) but than would not let him go despite the long amount of time he already stayed by her side and simple wished to leave to attend to other matters such as seeing his family.

I'll repeat myself - Nick and Boq did not pity their partner and their hearts truly cared and loved them. It simply was not romantic love as much as they tried to love them romantically.

But-

Nick had freely given all of himself, his love and devotion, that he could give to Nimmie Amee - and freely made his own decision to continue his challenge until he was fully made into the Tin Man. He sacrificed himself, freely made himself the price/cost of Nimmie Amee's freedom from servitude and I fully believe he as no regrets in his decision beside having a temporary period of anger and grief as one would naturally after losing their old body.

Boq had given as much as his love and devotion as he could, but Nessarose Thropp took more from him. Nessarose Thropp took Boq's heart before she took his heart literally as she changed from his partner to his delusional/obsessive warden. Remember, Glinda's wedding is a blip if you consider all the other people Nessarose kept Boq isolated from.

You can try and argue about Boq leading Nessa on, but you cannot say Boq had any control over the situation as soon as Nessarose (now the governor of MunchkinLand (power abuse) and someone Boq did care for) sent message for him to come to her aid and sent message to no one else. Only Boq, not her other two friends Fiyero or Glinda. At most they should have had a dysfunctional marriage and a messy divorce, Boq should not have suffered slavery (depending if the film gape was 1 or 5 years.)

In conclusion, when people wonder why Nick and Boq as so different, despite supposedly being people with so much heart and empathy remember:

Nick and Boq's partners were two very different people.

Nick and Nimmie Amee were on equal power, a Woodsman and a (trapped) servant.

Nick's heart and empathy had him choose to sacrifice his own body for Nimmie Amee even if he wasn’t romantically in love with her.

Boq's love and empathy was taken advantage of by Nessarose until he was almost a willing prisoner in her house. And soon forced to give more of himself than he could offer honestly.

Boq's autonomy was stripped from him before, during, and after he was tin man (especially with so much of his metal coming from the utensils he served Nessarose while he was her servant.)

Thus, Nick could keep his heart and empathy as the Tin Man while more or less having an identity crisis with his new body. While Boq experienced a traumatic event and just recently escaped from abusive relationship leading him down his path of vengeance and his arguably psychotic break that drives him to want to kill Elphaba.

Wicked as a stage show puzzles me because it implies Oz has electricity, a broadcast radio system, and trains.

How much tech is present in Oz in the books?

Oh boy that's one COMPLICATED question... Now, before I start saying anything, I will point out that I am not an Oz expert by any means. I have not read all of the Oz books. However I do know an Oz expert that tackled the subject! He is here on Tumblr somewhere, but I know his Oz analysis and lore-exploration by his blogs. He started doing them more than a dozen year ago on vovat.livejournal.com ; and then he continued his Oz posts to vovatia.wordpress.com ; I know they have very, VERY helpful when it comes to my own knowledge of Oz, and he tackled several times the topic of technology in Oz and Baum's work, with quite fascinating analyses! So go check out these blogs, you might find some interesting info!

That being said, what can I tell you?

Since I haven't read all the Oz books I will stick to Baum's novels only - but before doing that I want to point out something... It is something I said in my previous Oz post (So you want to know about Oz 5), but the Wicked stage musical is part of a pretty big wave of 2000s-onward Oz adaptations that decided Oz was a steampunk world. I know you entertained yourself a pretty similar project of a Gilded Age Oz, if I recall correctly? And when you look at Oz adaptations, you have this wave of SyFy's Tin Man, and the Amazon series "Lost in Oz", and the graphic novel/animated movie "The Steam Engines of Oz", and more recently the show "Emerald City". Even "Dorothy and the Witches of Oz" had a steampunk-vibe to their Oz. It is kind of the modern direction to go.

Now back to traditional Baum's Oz... Does it have electricity? I don't think so. The Oz created by Baum is... it is something between a fantasy version of the late 19th century American countryside, and your archetypal fantasy land. The Land of Oz is mostly a huge countryside to be honest. Its lots of forests with woodsmen and wild animals ; it is lot of fields and orchards because most of Oz's economy relies apparently on farming ; the only other big industry seems to be metal-working (Winkies, the guy who made the Tin Man) and stone/gem-working (due to the huge presence of precious stones, though no mine or miner is ever descrbed in the Oz books) ; it is a lot of small villages scattered around the one big city that is Emerald City (or around big castles like the Tin Man/Wicked Witch castle) ; this all gives it a very medieval/feudal feel in structure... Though Baum really tried to give Oz originally a "fairytale feel" and thus you have the same historical madness typical fairytales have. For example, just like your typical Renaissance fairytales (a la Charles Perrault), you have mirrors and candies and porcelaine in Oz ; and yet, just like your also typical 19th century fairytales (a la brothers Grimm) you also have guns in Oz! Mind you the guns are rare and rarely used, they seem mostly to belong to the military cast (they are always wielded by soldiers or royalty bodyguards), and they are usually useless against the monsters and magical threats... But they do exist! But Oz seems to lack things like electricity of petrol or even steam machinery. At least in the beginning!

(In fact I had a chat with @artmakerproductions recently about fireworks in Oz. He wondered if the Oz The Great and Powerful idea of using fireworks as something non-existent in Oz could work with Baum's canon, and indeed, while the presence of guns implies gunpowder is a thing in Oz, there are to my memory no mention of fireworks anywhere in Oz... Maybe they appear at one of Ozma's birthday parties, but I couldn't find which one. Fireworks are evoked in his non-Oz/Oz-crossovered work "The Magical Monarch of Mo" but only as a comparison to how lightning appears in this country...)

Is there radio in Oz? Actually there is! In the opening of book 7, to get out of how he had written his way out of Oz in book 6, Baum explained his return to the series by "Oh yeah, Ozians got hold of the radio and now they send me radio messages about what is going on in Oz". So Oz DOES have some sort of radio equivalent. How, since there's no electricity or batteries in Oz? That's beyond me, but here's why it is difficult to say for certain what Oz's technology level is: Baum, as I said, started not giving a fuck anymore about continuity. As I explained the first two-three books are kind of solid in terms of continuity because they were designed as their own closed novels, but book 4 onward Baum just gave up any concrete effort at "solid" worldbuilding and went the "Fuck it, I'll add whatever I want" road. As such, don't expect any serious effort at making a cohesive technological system - Baum isn't Tolkien. He's the anti-Tolkien. That being said, another very interesting point when it comes to Baum's work is that, as you go through his fourteen Oz books, you realize how modern technology slowly creeps onto Oz. Baum was writing Oz book between 1900 and 1920 - and the technological evolution of these two decades quite influenced Baum. The addition of the radio element was one case of Oz "evolving"; in later Oz books there are also magical equivalents of television popping up. But if you want to see a concrete comparison, you can compare the first Oz book, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", with the last Oz book Baum wrote, "Glinda of Oz". The first shows an Oz so technology-lacking people are easily fooled by stage tricks ; while the last book is heavy on technology, with for example evocations of submarines, but it is a technology presented as a form of magic. Which leads me to my last point...

Does Oz have trains? Not by the time Baum wrote them ; though modern day adaptations and authors did add a handful of them to the Oz world (and you can also find things such as ray guns or time-travelling machines in modern Oz books so you know, it evolves with its time). But Baum did wrote about a carriage that did the entire tour of Oz for touristic purpose: that's one of the subplots of "The Emerald City of Oz", and how Dorothy shows her aunt and uncle all about the fantasy land. It is not a train, but you have already here the idea/potential for a train-like system here (even though it is rather a carriage/wagon drawn by a wooden horse that can never tire and doesn't eat). And here's my point: the reason technology is so weird in Oz, and why it is also lacking in many way, is due to Oz being filled with magic.

Most Ozian equivalent to our world's technology is, in Baum, powered by magic. There is no camera or surveillance system, but there are the Magic Picture or Glinda's big magical "spy on everyone" book. There are no lie detectors, but there is Glinda's pearl. The magic eye of the Wicked Witch of the West was explicitely compared to a telescope. Etc etc. Magic replaces most advanced technology around the Land. Advanced technology and mechanism do exist, and Baum was very fond of the idea of the... "magical mechanic" if I can say so. What he does is basically take an actual real-world technology, but take it to fantasy extremes - which notably is why the Oz books are considered early sci-fi. There's how the Tin Man came to be: Baum took the workings of actual real-life prosthetics for missing limbs, but pushed it to the extremes by making a "vintage android". There is how the Woggle-Bug came to be: a great scholar used a machine to project an enlarged image of a small bug on the wall. Quite ordinary right? But turns out the machine literaly enlarged the bug to a greater size - which is a very common sci-fi tropes (all those rays that shrink or enlarge things or objects). And while it is not an Oz example per say, Baum gave us the most blatant example of "magical technology" with the realm of Ev, where lived Smith and Tinker, the inventors of many fantastical automatons, first of which being Tik-Tok, a sentient automat that is considered one of the first robots of modern literature!