Thinky Thoughts about Oz, Glinda, and the O.Z. of Tin Man

[jedibuttercup]

Sorry I haven't been writing this week. I never get trivial colds-- unless I KO my immune system by spending a couple of weeks in a manic daze, getting too little sleep and expending too much energy on mental tasks. Should have remembered the other consequence of college finals week when I was comparing it to Yuletide writing season.

*blows nose* Yeah, so I'm a little under the weather.

Anyway. I'm seven books into the Oz series now, and seriously curious about whether there is any analytical commentary available about them. I mean, fan-level commentary, not scholarly works attempting to frame them as political allegories, or whatever. Attempts to explain (in-world) the wobbly inconsistent elements of Baum's fourteen-book canon (not including the rest of the "Famous Forty", or the multitude of Oz-ian apocrypha written since they started going out of copyright, ranging from additional children's books to more adult entries). Even attempts to real-world-ize them-- to come up with "reasonable" (as far as you can get with magic) explanations for the weirder bits.

Because right now? My brain keeps insisting that Glinda has to be sneakily evil, and thanks whatever source she gets her powers from every morning that Dorothy dropped in and eliminated her only serious competition, thus paving the way for a young girl with every reason to be grateful and attentive to Glinda's advice to take the throne and start running Oz the way Glinda wants it. I like Ozma. Lots. But some of her decisions, especially in Patchwork Girl, made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and her attitude has definitely shifted since her introduction in the series.

The next seven books might change my opinion again. But right now? Yeah, I can definitely see how the tarnished O.Z. of "Tin Man" evolved from the "perfect" fairy-tale world of Baum's books.
~

Comments

[aella_irene]

Have you read 'Wicked' by Gregory Maguire? It's a prequel to the Oz series, and I've heard that it goes behind, and makes the characters rather more nuanced.

[cat-77.livejournal.com]

I was just going to suggest the same thing. I freely admit I have not read all of the original OZ books, but my partner swears "Wicked" is a wonderful addition to the "cannon" of the series. I think she just loves that Glinda is not the perfect princess she tries to appear to be.

[jedibuttercup]

Can you point me at a detailed review? Every time I've walked past his books in the store I've got the impression that Mr. Maguire writes in the satire/dystopian side of the fairy tale genre, and that's not really to my taste. If it doesn't get too wangsty about the evil witch's excuses for turning into a villain, however, I might be interested in checking it out sometime.

[jedibuttercup]

I've heard about it, but I'm not sure whether to pick it up. It's about the Wicked Witch, obviously, and thus must end in tragedy; and from a quick skim of the man's books when I picked one of them up, Mr. Maguire tends toward the satire/dystopia side of fairy-tale storytelling. I like serious treatments of fairy-tales, but not when the point is to spork or titillate or make angsty excuses for villainy, and no-one on my f-list has yet read it and advised it to be otherwise.

I'll probably just go ahead and read it one of these days to be complete about things, but not while I'm trying to build a Baum-based explanation for how the world would evolve after his books.

[the-jackalope.livejournal.com]

I've read it, cause I am a huge OZ fan and have been for a while and I hated it. I think it's the weakest of his novels, and just not well done at all. Plus the place he was talking about felt nothing like OZ while the O.Z. in Tin Man kinda did.

[jedibuttercup]

Different as in having unfamiliar locations/characters? Or different as in different atmosphere?

One thing I appreciated about Tin Man is that it kept the fairy-tale atmosphere. It was a tarnished world and there were dark doings afoot, but the point was the heroine overcoming the dark with the help of those she encountered along her journey, with plenty of wonder mixed in and a hopeful ending. (The atmosphere wasn't quite as quirky as Princess Bride or Stardust, both of which movies I also loved, but I'd class them in the same "more grownup, yet still magical" fairy-tale genre).

[the-jackalope.livejournal.com]

Different as in different atmosphere. The fairy tale element was totally gone.