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[Ben-San]

Nice Pete is aware of the wedding.

He would sort of have to be. Deliberately hiding it from him seems like an unnecessary hazard if he finds out. With Nice Pete, the safest thing to do is invite him, put "fifteen pairs of clean socks" on the wedding registry, and have Ray slip a few bills under the table to the tux rental place to make sure he's treated politely.

But since Oz is public domain, it's arguably fan-fic and canon at the same time.

Oz is public domain but it is not open-setting. There is a fixed canon, and even high-quality fan material remains apocrypha.

[littlefallsmets]

Baum got pretty fuck*ng wild in the Oz universe building near the end. All kinds of crazy backstory and frontstory.

Princess Ozma turns out to have been a boy until her early teens and seems to flirt with Dorothy at times, her father the old King of Oz had gone into hiding in our world as a trolleydriver in San Fran and... there was the Patchwork Girl, made entirely out of discarded rags, with button eyes and a tongue of felt.

Weird weird stuff.

[Ben-San]

Baum got pretty fuck*ng wild in the Oz universe building near the end. All kinds of crazy backstory and frontstory.

Princess Ozma turns out to have been a boy until her early teens and seems to flirt with Dorothy at times, her father the old King of Oz had gone into hiding in our world as a trolleydriver in San Fran and... there was the Patchwork Girl, made entirely out of discarded rags, with button eyes and a tongue of felt.

Weird weird stuff.

Ozma's transgender transformation was in the second book of the series. We aren't introduced to the existence of Ozma until we are already well familiar with Tip (her male form) as a protagonist. So.. calling that part crazy backstory from near the end is a little misleading, unless you consider everything after the first book to be near the end.

I didn't remember the bit about the king being a trolley driver, and checking Wikipedia reveals why: it was never in the books. It was in a stage musical made as a loose adaptation of one of the books. The old king, as I thought I remembered, was established as being dead and gone in the same book that introduced Ozma. Apparently one of the later authors who wrote sequels after Baum introduced a plot about his being alive and living as an amnesiac tailor, but I would question the canonicity of that retcon.

..and how is the Patchwork Girl any weirder than the Scarecrow, the Saw-hoss, or Jack Pumpkinhead?

[Nabubrush]

Take it to the VIP lounge.

[littlefallsmets]

Well, to be fair, I'm probably in the high percentile of Oz knowledge just for remembering that there were a bunch of books afterward and retaining some knowledge from them. I would have to imagine most people don't know these things.

But clearly, Ben, you possess Large Knowledge on the Oz.

I guess my point is just that... man, there was some crazy shit in the Oz. I mean this in a good way, seven books of Harry Potter, and it's all just rehashes of long-worn concepts, just put together well. I appreciate the hell out of ACTUALLY going way the fuck out there if you're gonna write science fiction or fantasy.

You have all things imaginable as your palate and everyone is basically still people basically still doing people things? BOOO.

Baum went Large Weird and I salute him for it.

And I dub you the unofficial Oz expert of an unofficial messageboard.

I ain't read that stuff in years and years. What would YOU say was the weirdest stuff in the Oz stories?

[jaydub]

You have all things imaginable as your palate palette and everyone is basically still people basically still doing people things?

One who puts paint on their palate probably eats paste too.  Here's one of those terrible English homonyms.  The OED tells me they're even derived from completely different roots.  Middle French gives us the flat artist's tool for mixing paint, while the roof of the mouth was called the palātum by speakers of Latin.

[Ben-San]

In retrospect I didn't mean to come off as aggressive as I probably did. I don't exactly possess Large Knowledge of Oz, but when I was wee my family picked up a cheapish boxed set of the Oz books so I ended up reading them more than most people.

The highlights of weirdness I remember are from Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz, where an earthquake drops Dorothy, the Wizard (now mostly reformed and working as a traveling huckster/stage magician again), some boy and his donkey deep under the ground and they have to work their way back to the surface through various fairy-kingdoms. The first one they hit is a kingdom of plant-people with seven suns in different colors, buildings made out of glass, and air thick enough that, with caution, it can be walked upon. Due to a gardener's error, their princess has been grown with an excess of compassion and is due to be mulched; in the process of rescuing her and escaping, the royal chancellor ends up being cut in half vertically without dying, revealing the internal consistency of a potato. This stuck in my head very firmly.

..there's at least one other case of a beautiful princess growing on a plant and being prematurely picked by protagonists, forcing an escape. I wonder if this was a Thing.

[littlefallsmets]

Baum seemed to have Troubles of some sort.

Also, in theory I understand the difference betwixt palette and palate but... taking the time to grammar check casual internet conversations is pretty much too far even for my OCD-ass.

I reckon that the fact that I generally use complete (if painfully run-on) sentences and don't pepper my crap with shitty text-message shortening is... y'know... goin' above and beyond the call.

That's part of why I like this message board so much, actually. Everyone seems to actually write coherently here unless specifically in character for comedy purposes and... it's refreshing as hell.

[dejavroom]

The hollow cat ingests a powerful emetic regularly as a result of his delusion.


Re: The wedding: Come to think of it, it's actually quite clever what Onstad is doing - you know, instead of going the familiar way of doing the "wedding arc", a self-contained capsule with its own set of jokes... He's doing it as we would experience it in real life, like a looming event in the horizon or in the background, something that gets mentioned here and there until the inevitable day. A very nice way of handling it, I think. Also I just noticed that "the witch is making my hands shake and dance" is Nice Pete's description of the physical act of Taking.  Very unnerving and sad.

[wombat]

Baum seemed to have Troubles of some sort.

Jeez, seriously. I am sorry I even read those posts, I'm glad I never made the mistake of reading the books.

[CortJstr]

Jeez, seriously. I am sorry I even read those posts, I'm glad I never made the mistake of reading the books.

They're all on Project Gutenberg, if you're trying to waste time online.

[Ben-San]

Jeez, seriously. I am sorry I even read those posts, I'm glad I never made the mistake of reading the books.

The books are quite good if very strange in places.

[RMJ12345]

Jeez, seriously. I am sorry I even read those posts, I'm glad I never made the mistake of reading the books.

Being from Kansas, I am intimately familiar with the movie (I have probably seen it 25+ times) and I love it. But the book I thought was pretty lame, and my family never went beyond reading the first one aloud.

Oh, and PS - Since when does labor day weekend start on Friday?

[CortJstr]

Being from Kansas, I am intimately familiar with the movie (I have probably seen it 25+ times) and I love it. But the book I thought was pretty lame, and my family never went beyond reading the first one aloud.

Oh, and PS - Since when does labor day weekend start on Friday?

Hey, at least it doesn't start 6 weeks early, like Christmas. Your coworkers all listening to Labor Day carols 8 hours a day starting July 5th. Kids at the mall lining up to sit on the Labor Day Duck's lap in his big backyard barbecue themed play area. SNL getting lazy and just showing "Best of Labor Day" clip shows every year. WWE's Labor Day with the troops.

I'll stop now.

[Bobby Isosceles]

Ah, verbalizing what is tightly implied isn't fan fiction.

Fan fiction is, excepting the beautifully rare cases of their just being writing exercises, generally about imaging having sex with the characters and couching it in a thin veneer of speculation.

What I did was just quoting-for-truth that which had not yet been said outloud.

You are too young for Tomax/Xamot references.