A Kemetic Halloween

 

A Setian Halloween Story

When I first converted away from Christianity, I joined my friends in their Wiccan coven. I never really felt 100% commited to Wicca, perhaps I never really could get behind duotheism, I was mainly using it to lay the groundwork for a more modern pagan practice, which I think it is very useful for. And this was when I learned about the Wheel of the Year, and Samhain. Halloween is my favorite holiday, but it’s not all slasher films and candy to me, it is a spiritual experience. It’s the day we honor our ancestors, the “akhu” in ancient Egyptian. Honoring the akhu is a big deal in Kemeticism as well as Armenian paganism, so I feel no need to drop the holiday. Not to mention, I do have some Scottish, Irish and English in my background on my mother’s side. 

How to tie it in properly with Kemeticism, though? Kemetic Orthodoxy came up with “Moomas” as a replacement for Christmas/Yule based on the Ascension of the Celestial Cow (while Anpu and Wepwawet deliver presents to Kemetic kids around the world from a flying chariot pulled by jackals). I thought I might come up with a Kemetic, or better yet a Setian, Halloween. I call this holiday Magaween. 

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The story is based on the birth of Maga, the Son of Set (no relation to American right-wing nutjobs). To explain, Set, famously infertile, managed to impregnate Astarte and Anat using forbidden Heka from the Book of Thoth, after the botched attempt in the Story of the Seed Goddess. Astarte birthed the Ka, and Anat birthed the Ba, which came together into the crocodile netjer Maga. Maga was born knowing what injustice had befallen Set, and immediately escaped to exact revenge on Set’s enemies, against Set’s will. Maga has the power to cross through dimensions, and escaped to Duat, where Osiris was sailing in his underworld barge with His entourage, including the mysterious demon Medjed. Catching everyone by surprise, Maga lept out of the water and bit a chunk out of Osiris’ shoulder, disappearing into the inky black waters before anyone could retaliate. Osiris was rushed to Heliopolis and treated for His wounds. He declared that Maga must be killed on the spot if seen again, and tasked Medjed with this. That night as Osiris slept, Maga climbed through the window, and tried to finish Osiris off. He screamed, and Medjed breathed fire and shot light from His eyes at Maga, who retreated out the window and back into the celestial Nile. 

The next day, Horus, son of Osiris and Pharaoh of the Netjeru, was sailing the Nile with His entourge, spearing river animals for sport. Maga knew that Horus was also His father’s enemy, so he again leaped from the water and bit off part of Horus’ shoulder, disappearing before anyone could fight back. Now the Netjeru were on high alert, after the attack on Horus. Even Ra knew to be on the lookout for this dangerous menace. No one expected that this menace was the son of Set. 

Eventually news of the attacks reached Set’s oasis. Set and His consorts had been distraught at Maga’s disappearance, and unable to find Him anywhere else, Set knew and dreaded that he would have to descend into Duat, the realm of His brother, as this was the only clue they had about Maga’s whereabouts. Set went to Duat with his consorts Astarte, Anat, Nephthys, and Ash. The five of them encountered many obstacles, but Set and His consorts were all formidable opponents and made short work of the many demons They encountered, until they reached the Burning Pits of Duat, a large lake of fire, and were confronted by the shrouded figure of Medjed, also looking for Maga. Medjed was dressed in a white sheet with holes cut out for His eyes, His bare feet the only part of His body that was exposed. Despite this mysterious but somewhat comical appearance, Medjed was one of the most feared entities of the House of Osiris. His name means “the Smiter”. When Osiris threatened to send his minions to the mortal realm to terrorize the living if His son Horus was not put on the throne, He was talking about Medjed. Medjed knew that Set was enemy number one as far as Osiris was concerned, and was about to shoot light from His eyes and cut Set to pieces when Ash approached Medjed with a gift basket, filled with delicious offerings of bread, fruit, treats and wine. Medjed glared at this basket, and asked if this were some kind of trick, or was it a treat? Set and His consorts insisted it was a treat. Ash soothingly told Medjed that it was about time someone gave an offering to such a mighty and impressive netjer. Medjed never had a temple to Himself, only appearing once in the Book of Going Forth by Day, the humans barely knew who He was. So to receive offerings after so many centuries, even from another netjer, melted Medjed’s heart. 

Set explained that they were only there to retrieve His son Maga, that he meant no harm to Osiris and they would be on their way once Maga was found. He promised to discipline Maga and keep Him in the oasis where Set and His consorts made their home, beyond the Big Dipper and the Field of Reeds. Medjed agreed to help them, and after a long journey through Duat, they eventually found Maga. Medjed used His power of invisibility to startle Maga while Set snuck up from behind and wrestled His son into submission; a difficult feat. Set performed a powerful binding spell on Maga, so that Maga could not bite Him, and gaining Maga’s obedience, left back to His oasis with thanks to Medjed.  As a result the Netjeru banned Maga from leaving the oasis, and it was after this incident that Set became further villified and demonized, as most of the Netjeru believed Set had sent His son to attack Osiris and Horus on purpose. But, at least Set and His consorts finally had their son, handful that Maga was. 

Because of this story, we dress in disguises like Medjed, and anyone who is dressed up in costume should be offered treats, in honor of Medjed and of Ash, whose quick thinking and ability to calm and refresh anyone was able to pacifiy the mighty Medjed. 

Thoughts on “Ojo in Oz”

 

I’ve still been plodding my way through the Thompson Oz books. Some I feel like I don’t have a lot to say about, but I’ll briefly give some thoughts on the books I’ve read since The Lost King of Oz. 

The Giant Horse of Oz was okay. I find the title a bit baffling because the titular horse doesn’t appear until many chapters in and is not the main focus of the book at all, but that does happen in this series from time to time. I did wonder how the Munchkins and Gillikins felt about Ozma haphazardly assigning monarchs who she just met to their countries. Like “hey, you seem like a nice guy, here, rule one fourth of Oz.” Surely Ozma could have found better rulers than some guy she’s known for five minutes. I don’t think Thompson really goes anywhere with the characters Joe King (King of Gilliken Country) and King Cheeriobed (King of Munchkin Country) in subsequent books either. They show up at Ozma’s parties, that’s about it.

I didn’t like The Yellow Knight of Oz, partly because I just wasn’t ever invested in the character, and it seemed like just one event after another without much of a point. Like The Road to Oz, it was almost just a travelogue with not much at stake. The knight sets off on his journey because he’s bored rather than for any special reason, and he tours the often pun-based gimmicky communities of Oz. As Handy Mandy in Oz showed, even having a likable, well-rounded yet flawed main character can be enough to save a book with kind of a cliche and predictable plot, but the Yellow Knight was not a character like that, to me at least. 

And lastly I read Pirates in Oz, which kind of like Baum’s Rinkitink in Oz was only barely an Oz book, with 98 percent of it taking place outside Oz. I actually liked this book too, and I shall need to give the public domain direct sequel Captain Salt in Oz a read now that I’ve familiarized myself with its predecessor. Thompson’s character Peter, who visits Oz from America in a few books, has a little more personality in this book than the blank slate, audience surrogate he seemed to be in Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz.

Which gets me to the next book I read, Ojo in Oz. 

Nice hourglass figure, Ojo.

Overall, despite a few flaws I thought this was one of the better Thompson books, actually. I had heard mixed things about it. Working on an Oz book of my own in which Ojo is a character, I had long felt the need to familiarize myself with this book, although it is still under copyright and I couldn’t include anything directly from it legally anyway. It’s still canon. I can see why the modern Oz authors I’ve talked to tend to hate this book because its ending kind of limits Ojo’s storytelling potential, since (spoiler alert) he moves to Seebania to live with his newfound parents. Even Jack Snow, an official author of the Famous Forty, decided to retcon it and have Ojo and Unc Nunkie living back in their cottage outside the Emerald City as if Ojo in Oz had never happened. Its ending is going to force me to change my story around as well, that is, depending on how I publish it (if I’m self-publishing I will ignore this book too, if only for legal reasons). I think I can still work with it if I bend and twist the plot around, it’s not enough to completely sink my story. I may also have to work in other modern Oz stories I haven’t read yet to make it fit in with the Oz Timeline, making this story the least of my problems.

Anyway, back to the book. The first thing I would like to discuss is the title itself. Ojo IN Oz. It should have been Ojo of Oz. The titles of Oz books generally follow a formula, besides the odd titles like The Road to Oz and Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz. There isn’t always a character in the title (The Marvelous Land of Oz, The Emerald City of Oz), but when there is and the title character is a native of Oz, the formula is “((character name)) of Oz”. If the title character is from outside of Oz and visits Oz, the formula is “((character name)) in Oz”. Ojo is a native of Oz. Why then, is it Ojo IN Oz? Of course he’s in Oz, he’s never left Oz. The “in” makes it sound like he’s just visiting Oz. He’s a citizen of Oz. OF OZ. Ozma of Oz, Tik Tok of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz, Glinda of Oz. They’re all of Oz, because they live there. Come to think of it, now that I’m looking at a list of the Famous Forty, two other books also have this problem, and both are Thompson books; Kabumpo in Oz and Grampa in Oz. Both title characters are Oz natives. It annoys me. It’s probably the publisher’s fault. Anyway, enough on that, it’s just a pet peeve.

The second thing I should discuss, and this story is fairly notorious for this, is the unfortunate racism. Yes yes, Baum could be racist too on occasion, and it was the 1930s, people didn’t know any better, but that’s less an excuse and more just an explanation. At the beginning of the story, Ojo is kidnapped by Gypsies, now widely known by the more politically correct name Romani. It is never explained why there is a group of Romani in Oz. Now Thompson could have easily replaced them with whatever fictional gimmicky group of Ozians she wanted and it would have been fine, but she had to go and needlessly vilify an ethnic group from the real world, in a way that makes zero sense in the context of the Oz series. I know attitudes were different in the 1930s, and this is far from the only negative depiction of Romani people in literature and media even going into recent decades, but I guess what irritates me about it most is how easily avoidable this could have been by simply replacing them with a fictional group of people native to Oz. It would both make more sense and be less racist. At the end of the book Ozma sends them back to Europe, and it’s the 1930s. Yikes. Not that Thompson would have known what was to happen in a few years. Thompson was merely a product of her environment. This book gives us a glimpse into the mentality that led to the genocide of Romani during World War II. 

Moving onto more pleasant topics, this book contains in it one of the most unintentionally hilarious chapters ever in an Oz book. Now it’s best read if you dumb your sense of humor down to the maturity of a 12 year old, which fortunately I can do on command. When Dorothy, Scraps and the Cowardly Lion are searching for Ojo, one of the towns they visit is a place called Dicksyland. Dicksyland is populated by the “queer” Dicks. Some Dicks are described as short and fat, others thin and handsome. Their leader, Dickus the Third, the Dicktator of Dicksyland, has a “Right Hand Man” (I guess the Left Hand Man was fired, he just didn’t have as good of a grip on his job). The innuendos go on; the fact that “dick” already had its current slang meaning in the 1930s makes one wonder if Thompson knew. Was she a pure and innocent children’s book author, or could it be that she was somehow privy to obscene locker room jargon of the day and wanted to see how much her publisher would let her get away with? The world may never know.

“The Second Dick was short and fat.” HAHAHA yeah I know I’m immature.

In all, while I appreciate the effort Thompson often put in to revive some of Baum’s more forgotten characters (it always bugged me how Scraps just kind of stopped hanging out with Ojo after becoming a favorite at the palace, despite their previously close friendship, and he became relegated to mere cameos from then on), she unknowingly and unintentionally threw a monkey wrench into the stories of Oz authors for decades to come by taking Ojo in her own drastic direction. It’s similar to how she did her own thing with the Scarecrow’s backstory. Not that I really blame her for it, she was the Royal Historian after all, given free reign over Oz by the publisher, and the only more legitimate source on Oz canon than her is Baum himself. To be fair, Unc Nunkie and Ojo always had being former royals as part of their backstory, as Baum mentions Unc Nunkie could have been king of the Munchkins had Ozma not ascended to the throne. It just so happened that characters turning out to be royalty was one of Thompson’s favorite plot twists, so it almost seems like something she made up herself. Plenty of royals to go around in Oz when their towns seem to have kings and queens instead of mayors. At least Ojo’s dad, the lovable rogue Realbad, is a pretty cool guy and a well-rounded character. His mom could have used some characterization though.

 In any case, Ojo later moved back to the Emerald City to be roommates with Button-Bright in modern post-Famous Forty canon, so there.

My Tropes on TV Tropes

TV Tropes, for those who don’t know, is a wiki website dedicated to recognizing and cataloguing trends and patterns in fiction known as tropes. A good place to waste time, perhaps, but I’m of the opinion that nothing is a waste of time if you’re enjoying yourself. It’s probably helped my writing a lot, at least on the theory side of things. If I am thinking of using an idea in a story I can look up how other works used it. You could think of a trope kind of like a cliche or a stereotype, but it isn’t exactly the same thing, since it isn’t necessarily overused or negative. It is simply a tool of storytelling. An underlying assumption or an accepted premise which may or may not reflect reality. I discovered TV Tropes in 2009, and have been a member for going on 12 years. It’s amazing to think it’s been that long. It was still the days of MySpace when I started on there. TV Tropes was a very different place back then, and had a very free, laissez-faire approach to what they allowed on the site, allowing users to inject personality and opinion into their posts, as well as apply tropes to real life, bragging “we are not Wikipedia”. They’ve since had to become more strict and sanitized the site, in an attempt to be taken more seriously and be more friendly towards the advertisers. In fact I blame the corporate advertisers for most of the tone changes to the site over the years, which seems to happen to every website that lasts long enough. To be fair, things also changed thanks to people abusing their privileges and posting weird, creepy or offensive stuff, creating the need for regulation. As always, the worst part about wikis are all the other people on them, of course. But, slight feelings of They Changed It Now It Sucks aside, I’ve stuck with the site.

Since 2009 I’ve launched my fair share of tropes, as well as works pages for the site. It’s usually a very shocking experience when I can think of a trope that’s not already on the website somewhere, but it’s happened at least eleven times. And I suppose I should feel proud, or at the very least feel lucky, that none of them have ever been deleted as of yet. They’re solid tropes. I watch a lot of old films and cartoons that I would wager most people under a certain age don’t watch these days, which probably explains why many of these tropes hadn’t been launched yet before I did it. Most TV Tropes users are on the younger side, and are too busy watching anime I guess (to be fair I watch and enjoy anime too, but if you knew nothing about culture except what was on TV Tropes you could be forgiven for thinking that Naruto has far more cultural significance and literary merit than the writings of Shakespeare; but I think the lack of literary snobbery is one of the greatest things about TV Tropes, so don’t get me wrong). They’re mostly comedy or animation tropes of the early to mid-20th century, because yes, I’m a grown man who watches cartoons. Disgraceful, isn’t it? Well, societal norms are mostly bullocks anyway. Except maybe the taboos against murder and cannibalism, those are alright. But I will watch and enjoy whatever I want. So there. 

When you edit a wiki you don’t really get to take credit for anything. It becomes part of the public domain, in a way. But I felt like writing about the pages I started and what inspired them, just so that there was record of it somewhere. Click on the trope titles to be take to the page. This will be roughly in the order they were launched.

I Fell For Hours

This is when a character just keeps falling and falling, maybe into a bottomless pit, usually but not always for comedic effect. You know it’s in play when the character has to take a breath mid-scream, or otherwise starts to wonder when they’ll finally hit the ground. It’s a classical trope that has examples dating back to Greek mythology, but likely emerged in its modern form with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, although this example still predates it being used for comedy. That may have started sometime in the Golden Age of Animation. It lends itself to animation because it is something that should be physically impossible; not that there are no live action examples, of course. There are quite a few literary examples as well. This was my first trope, launched when the Super Mario World cartoon was at the apex of its memetic popularity. The most popular episode to parody and meme was “Mama Luigi”. Videos like this one for example were all the rage on YouTube. During the episode, Luigi falls into a chasm, and narrating the story, he says that he “fell for hours”. If I were to do it today I might have come up with a different name, like Overly Long Fall, but it is what it is now. The trope has been up for more than ten years at this point. I just find the concept of falling for that amount of time funny, for some reason. While brainstorming the trope I thought of a lot of different examples of characters falling “for hours”, such as scenes in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, the Bugs Bunny short The Heckling Hare, and more. The other users came up with even more examples, and a trope was born. 

Is There a Doctor in the House?

This was a phrase I heard a lot in the old media I watch a lot of from the 1930s-50s. When someone is injured or faints, inevitably someone shouts for a doctor. This originated in theater, when “house” referred to the theater itself. It’s usually played for comedy; its turn toward being a comedic trope happened with the advent of film, because it was funny to see someone on film address the audience when we all know it’s a recording and not live. The phrase can be altered, with the words “doctor” or “house” replaced by something more plot-relevant. Examples from The Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, along with others, were what prompted me to start it. You barely ever hear this phrase uttered today, but the most recent examples I thought of were from the 1990s, so it was still in the public consciousness in my lifetime. The trope luckily survived the website’s purge of stock phrases that weren’t true tropes. It was tropey enough for them, I guess.

Vot Ocksent?

Someone speaks in an accent but is oblivious to it, leading to hilarious misunderstandings. Gussie Mausheimer from An American Tail was my initial example, as well as Antoine from the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, among others. The other users found the bulk of the other examples. There’s really not too much to say about it, but I do find it funny when it turns up.

Gold Tooth

This trope probably would have been launched eventually with or without my involvement, but it didn’t exist yet when I joined the site, so I got the ball rolling. People with gold teeth in fiction are usually shady and villainous, for some reason. Obviously in real life having a gold tooth doesn’t make you a bad person, but if someone in a story has a gold tooth you can bet they’re evil. That’s what this trope is about. Warren T. Rat, again from An American Tail, as well as one of the robbers from Home Alone, were my initial examples.

Verbed Title

This was a pet-peeve trope for me in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when every animated movie had to have a stupid one-word title, often a verb in the past perfect tense. Tangled, Frozen, Hoodwinked, Enchanted. Ugh. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was a big thing in television show titles too for around that same period. It advertises to people with short attention spans. It seems to have gradually died off now though. For the most part anyway; it’s probably not going to completely go away, as it does also predate that glut of movies I mentioned, and isn’t exclusive to animated movies either. Scrooged, for example. An awful example of taking a word that isn’t even a verb and putting it in past perfect tense; and not the only example like that. Ooh I can’t stand it, as a Creative Writing major. I started this trope out of spite, I admit.

Construction Zone Calamity 

This trope used to be very widespread, but it’s not used much these days. As the description says, it’s where every sleep walker or escaped baby wanders into. The protagonist will always either be chasing someone through the construction zone (or is the one being chased), or less commonly have gotten a job working at one and still have to go through all the slapstick comedy hijinks. You have to dodge swinging steel beams, deal with malfunctioning elevators, almost fall off the tall steel skeleton of the skyscraper multiple times, all that fun stuff. Every classic cartoon series had a construction zone episode, sometimes more than one. But it wasn’t exclusively an animation trope. The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy did it too, as you see above. In fact Harold Lloyd was the likely inventor of this trope, in the silent film Never Weaken. No one has come up with an older example yet. So it was a live action film trope first. But the trope died out in live action long before it died out in animation, which kept it alive for decades longer. It didn’t really survive the fall of the Hollywood studio system in the 1960s when cartoons went to television. Every once in a while someone brings it back in a modern work, but only in reference to the classic uses of it. It’s weird that it died out, since it’s not like there aren’t still tall buildings being constructed. I guess that style of slapstick humor is no longer in fashion, really. Or maybe you just can’t really do anything new with it, since it was so overused from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Dogs Love Fire Hydrants

Images you can hear if you’re of a certain age.

This was just something I noticed they didn’t have yet one day, so I decided to start it myself. I never really got the whole “dogs love fire hydrants” thing. Never seen it happen in real life. Dogs will pee on anything, not just fire hydrants. But I’ve seen it a lot in cartoons. The oldest examples found were from the 1930s, and the oldest example on the page is a Disney cartoon starring Pluto. However it must be older than that since it was already something they could rely on the audience assuming. The examples I grew up knowing were in Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life.

Fur is Clothing

This is another widespread classic cartoon gag, where a cartoon character’s fur is removable and they have little boxers underneath, or alternatively their fur has pockets built in. The Tex Avery short Lonesome Lenny (pictured above) as well as a number of uses in Ren and Stimpy were my initial examples. Others came to me later. The trope still shows up sometimes in modern works, but was more prevalent back when cartoon characters were getting blown up by sticks of dynamite on a regular basis.

Pie Eyed

They had a trope for Black Bead Eyes, but not this, so I started it. It’s the eye-style from 1920s and 30s cartoons, where the pupils are shaped like Pac-Man. Think Betty Boop, early Mickey Mouse, all those old black-and-white cartoons. The name “pie-eyed” is the actual term for these eyes among animators. I researched that prior to starting the trope. The modern examples are interesting too. Most are trying to capture the aesthetic of classic cartoons, but a couple, like the 1980s Super Mario Bros. cartoon, seem to have it for no special reason. The Pac-Man cartoon really missed an opportunity by not using this trope. 

Meet your Early Installment Weirdness 

This is one of my favorite tropes I launched. This is when a show or some other work of fiction does a crossover episode where the characters meet their previous selves, either how they were at the beginning of the series, or the versions of themselves from a previous unrelated series. Early Installment Weirdness was already a trope on its own, so this trope kind of builds off that. I don’t know how old the trope is or who was the first to use it, but it seems relatively recent. I don’t think anyone has brought up a true example from before the 1980s. Except maybe one; The Road to Oz, published in 1909, actually has kind of an example, but it’s more of a nod to a previous illustrator than a full-fledged crossover episode, so it’s only barely this trope. What they call an Ur Example. Meet Your Early Installment Weirdness is a very meta, post-modern kind of trope. And post-modernism was rare if not nonexistent before the mid-20th century. 

Turtles Forever was the example that inspired me to launch this trope; a 2009 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles special where the latest incarnation of the Turtles at the time met their 1980s counterparts from another dimension and they had to join forces. I ranted about this briefly on the blog before (it came up in my An American Tail reviews), but let me do a more in-depth rant, because it relates to this trope and how it gets handled sometimes. I hated how they portrayed the 1980s Ninja Turtles, making both them and the villains Shredder and Krang look far stupider and more incompetent than they were in the original show, mere caricatures of their original selves. The 1980s cartoon was mainly humorous while the 2000s cartoon was more serious, but they didn’t have to exaggerate the characters that badly. They tried their hardest to make the 2000s Ninja Turtles look cooler because the special was created by the people who did the 2000s cartoon, obviously. They must have been sick of having their cartoon compared to the original cartoon, and it shows. It smacks of insecurity, and is what happens when someone is forced to homage something they not-so-secretly despise. But I quickly thought of other examples of this trope. The video game Sonic Generations is a more level-headed example, where the modern Sonic teamed up with the classic Sonic and they remade some of the old levels in 3D. Sega has no real reason to despise the 1990s Sonic the Hedgehog (at least the Japanese version, they seem to hate the American incarnations of Sonic like the cartoons), so they treated both versions fairly. Someone else brought up the Garfield example, which provides the perfect image to illustrate the trope in action. Not every example ends up bashing the earlier versions of the characters, but a good many do. I prefer the ones that don’t.

Deliberate VHS Quality 

This music video is not in fact from the 1980s.

My most recent trope, launched a couple years ago now. I started to notice a lot of the music videos I watched from goth and synthwave bands were either filmed on VHS or used a VHS filter, in an effort to capture a nostalgic 1980s aesthetic. Someone familiar with VHS can discern the difference between a filter and the real thing quite easily. It’s a relatively new trope, having only emerged after the advent of the DVD, making it exclusively a 21st century trope. It’s hard to say exactly where and when it started, but I started noticing it around the mid-2010s. They often make it look like the worst, most warped and degraded VHS tape you could ever find (especially some of the filters do this), which is a bit unfair to the medium, but that’s the reputation VHS has these days. The examples quickly piled up, and I had enough material to launch a trope. I’ve almost single-handedly written the whole page, although of course not all of it. My love of collecting VHS tapes was what led me to notice a trend not many people were talking about. 

Conclusion 

I guess it’s been a little while since I launched a new trope, but that’s because by now there are so few that haven’t been catalogued on the site yet. The majority of the ones I launched were within my first year or two on the site, back when there weren’t as many trope pages and launching them was much easier to do. You have to go through a lot more red tape to start a trope than you used to, thanks to people abusing the privilege. Even when I tried to start an index for Armenian Media on the site they made me launch it like a trope through the same process, having to gain approval of enough users and prove it was something the site needed. But who knows. Maybe I will discover another trope soon. In the meantime, I often start new works pages. That is still easy to do, for now, and I’ve done dozens of those. Of late, I’ve been doing the Oz books; before I got to it TV Tropes only had pages for the first three. I did the rest of L. Frank Baum’s books and a few of Thompson’s, and even a couple modern pastiches. In the near future I will start one for my own webcomic too, and in fact I’ve done a page for everything I published, from Odinochka to my fan fiction (and the fact that they still allow fan fiction to be catalogued on their site shows me that they haven’t completely lost their way, not many other wikis would allow that). The site is forever one of my homes on the internet. 

Scenes that Freaked Me out as a Kid

Fear is an interesting emotion. I was a very timid lad. I wouldn’t say fearful or cowardly, but timid. I wasn’t ever really afraid of the dark. But things that struck me as unnatural, startling, or cruel were what kept me up at night from time to time. As a kid, you’re still struggling to understand reality and how the world works. So you don’t really know what is and isn’t possible. In childhood, every once in a while something comes along and screws with your perception of reality and terrifies you. Things that, as an adult who understands how the world really works, wouldn’t phase you, can give you nightmares when you’re a kid. It’s interesting to look back on the things that scared me when I was a kid, and examine why they did. 

 

The Library Ghost - Ghostbusters

I didn’t ever fully watch Ghostbusters until sometime in my teens due to this scene at the beginning of the movie, where a ghost in the library gets pissed off at the paranormal investigators (not yet Ghostbusters) and scares them off. This scare had such a drawn out build-up to it too. I think the filmmakers tried to soften the blow by having jazzy music play as the characters run from this ghost, but that didn’t work on me. I was terrified.

 

Judge Doom dipping a cartoon shoe – Who Framed Roger Rabbit

 This was another scene that prompted me to demand my mother turn the movie off when I was little, so I never saw the whole movie until I was older. And it’s a pity because now this is one of my favorite movies. Seeing a cute cartoon shoe die a slow, horrifying death as it is erased from existence was too much for me to handle in early childhood. I guess by making it a shoe the screenwriters were trying to make it something the audience wouldn’t get too attached to, but the animators ruined that by giving the shoe such emotion in its final moments.

A Troll in the Bed – Ernest Scared Stupid

Yes, something in Ernest Scared Stupid of all movies actually scared me, sigh. But hear me out. In this scene, a little girl curls up in her bed, ready for a sound sleep. She turns over, to suddenly see this monstrosity staring her in the face. In the mind of a child, your bed is supposed to be the one place where you’re safe. Under the bed is sketchy, of course, but not the top of it. This scene just underscored that nowhere is completely safe. Complete safety is a myth. This scene taught me that I could turn over in bed and suddenly have a monster in bed with me. Maybe not this monster, but something or someone. It’s a slim chance of that happening, but not zero percent. This is the stuff sleep paralysis is made of. 

 

The Jabberwocky – Alice Through the Looking Glass (1985)

This is from my all-time favorite adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, a made-for-TV version that covered both books, from 1985. Since this was a year before I was born, I watched it on VHS much later. Being a made-for-TV production, the special effects weren’t the best, but the part that did creep me out was more due to the situation than due to it looking real. After returning from Wonderland, Alice enters her home. There’s an unsettling scene where she sees her parents in the mirror, but they don’t see her no matter how she bangs on the glass. This part is upsetting enough to a child, but pales in comparison to the next part. After this, Alice reads the Jabberwocky poem. The room fills with thunder and lightning, and then this thing, the actual Jabberwocky, shuffles into the room as she screams. It looks silly when I watch it now, but I think this scared me as a kid for the same reason that troll in the bed scene in Ernest Scared Stupid scared me. Alice was home, and home is supposed to be safe. This scene flies in the face of that assumption.

Hermit Ren – Ren & Stimpy

It should come as no surprise that this twisted cartoon had its share of disturbing scenes. But I feel like not enough people talk about this episode, because it was one of the later ones. “Hermit Ren” has Ren, stressed out from his job and Stimpy’s demented antics, reach a breaking point, and leave his life behind to go live as a hermit in a cave. In the cave, the isolation slowly drives him mad. He finds a mummified corpse in the cave who becomes his only friend. In the freakiest scene, he begins to hallucinate. He stares at his hands and watches the flesh melt away. He then looks over at the mummy and sees his face on it. This was too much for me to comprehend as a kid. As an adult though, I get having a terrible job and wanting to just hole up alone somewhere. The hallucination scene however seems like a bad acid trip or something. It could be the whole episode is a metaphor for drug use. 

 

Faceless Aliens – Are You Afraid of the Dark?

https://areyouafraidofthedark.fandom.com/wiki/Blank_Faced_Aliens

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a horror show aimed at children in the 1990s, never usually scared me, except for this one episode, which I had mentally blocked out. For a long time it only existed in the fringes of my memory. I remembered a hole in the ceiling opening up, and all these faceless aliens beckoning upwards. It took me the longest time to realize this wasn’t just some figment from a dream, but from an episode of this show. I googled “faceless aliens in the ceiling” and found the source. At least it wasn’t a fragmented memory from a real alien abduction.

Decaying zombie face – Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

 

That face. Just that face. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark were a popular series of children’s horror books from about when I was a kid.  The stories in these books were usually corny, but the illustrations were the most disturbing part. And especially this one. A woman’s half-decayed face. Decaying corpses were a major phobia of mine as a kid, and still is. Can you believe this book was for children? Freaked me out. I don’t even really remember the story this illustration went with. This is all I remember. And that’s enough.

Charlie goes to Hell – All Dogs Go to Heaven

Don Bluth put so many kids in therapy when they were older. At least he didn’t sugarcoat his movies, but ye Gods. Did we need to see the main character descend into Hell and get eaten alive by little demonic puppy things? And that is why this is another movie I didn’t fully watch until I was older. At least An American Tail was just depressing, it never scared me out of my wits like this scene.

 

Freddy’s chest faces – A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

 

I was way too young to see this movie, but I remember channel surfing at age six or thereabouts, and coming across this scene. I didn’t even know what it was from until years later in my teens when I watched the third Nightmare on Elm Street movie and the memory came flooding back. I remembered seeing Freddy Krueger’s shirt ripped and there were these screaming faces in his chest, and it just terrified me as a kid. I changed the channel immediately, but I never forgot that image. What was this doing playing on TV during the day where some unsuspecting child could stumble upon it? I think my parents had HBO at some point for a brief time, maybe that was it. 

Trapped in a Painting – The Witches

 

This scene was unsettling for the concept. It has no jump scares, no monsters, no scary imagery. But the concept is what horrified me. Less a shock kind of scare and more an existential dread kind of scare. I fully understood the implications of this scene as a kid, and I didn’t like it. This part of the movie The Witches tells the story of a little girl who crossed a witch. The witch trapped her in a painting, and her grieving family got to watch her slowly grow older in the painting over the years, appearing in different spots each day and becoming an old lady, until one day, decades later, she was gone. The very idea of this scene was what scared me. What happened to the old woman? Where was she sent? Did she die alone in that cabin in the painting? 

Johnny 5 Gets Beaten Almost to Death – Short Circuit 2

 

I remember watching and enjoying the first Short Circuit film well enough. But the second one was something I had blocked out for a number of years due to a scene where the innocent, childlike living robot Johnny 5 gets beaten nearly to death by some thugs, all the while begging for his life. His human friend finds him in an alley, and when asked if he’s alright, he writes the word “dying” on the wall. Did they have to have this in the movie, really? Kids watched these movies!  I don’t even like thinking about this scene. 

2012 Apocalypse Prediction – Ancient Prophecies

People didn’t really talk about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse Prediction until around 2008 or so, but I knew about it way back in 1997, thanks to the speculative documentary series Ancient Prophecies. As a kid I didn’t yet understand the concept of a “speculative” documentary, and figured if a documentary said something, then it must be true. So I believed all those prophecies, UFO and cryptozoology documentaries that even back then were all over the History Channel and the Discovery Channel. These prophecy shows are hilarious to watch now because of how wrong they turned out to be, but at the time, they filled me with angst about the future. In particular, the segment (about an hour and ten minutes in) about the Mayan prophecy insisted that on December 21, 2012, all of our technology will come to life and try to kill us. It happened to the Mayans, and it will happen to us next. “Imagine all of your household appliances getting a mind of their own, and deciding they don’t like you.” is the quote I remember. Images filled my mind of my Sega Genesis coming to life and trying to strangle me with its controller wires. I have never heard anyone else interpret the prophecy this way. Luckily, nothing happened. And I’ve learned not to believe everything claiming to be a “documentary “.
 

Leap Castle and “IT” - Castle Ghosts of Ireland

I saved the scariest for last. In the mid-1990s there was a speculative documentary series called Castle Ghosts, which discussed various ghost stories from castles around Ireland and the United Kingdom. The Ireland episode was the one that I never forgot. I only saw it once when it first aired, but when I finally saw it again almost twenty years later on YouTube, I remembered it perfectly. The first half of the episode is your typical spooky ghost documentary that’s not really scary. A World War I soldier haunts a castle he grew up in, a worker who died in an accident on the job haunts another castle. Eh. 

At about 34 minutes in, things go downhill fast, when they start talking about banshees. The screams in the documentary always creeped me out. But then, they discuss Leap Castle, one of the most screwed up, cursed locations on Earth. Here they discovered an oubliette in the wall. You might have heard the term oubliette from the movie Labyrinth. Real oubliettes were just deep pits with a big spike at the bottom. They threw you in to get impaled on the spike and bleed to death, and forgot about you. If you missed the spike, then you got to starve to death atop a pile of corpses and skeletons. It’s mentioned that when they finally cleaned out the oubliettes sometime in the early 1900s, long after they’d fallen out of use, they had to remove tons of bones and it took wheel barrel after wheel barrel to get them all out. Fun! Now if that had been all they said, that would have been enough. But no, there was a ghost involved. All of that collective negative energy from the people thrown into the oubliette manifested itself into an elemental ghost known only as “It”. (No relation to Pennywise the Clown.) It isn’t a proper ghost, just a being created by negativity. A tulpa, if you will. A woman in the castle once turned around and saw It, which looked like a rotting corpse with maggots in its eye sockets. They show this in the documentary as a dramatization, zooming in on the maggoty eye sockets. This scared the living hell out of me as a kid. More than anything else on this list. I would worry that It was in my closet or something. 

Anyway, that’s my list. There were probably more, but these stand out the most to me. What were some things that freaked you out as a kid, hm? You can tell me on Facebook, or write your own list.

Thoughts on The Lost King of Oz - Wasted Opportunities and Casual Executions

Oz books are always a great distraction from the real world. As is critiquing them. On the eve of its falling into the public domain on January 1st, I finally read The Lost King of Oz, the 19th volume of the Famous Forty Oz books, and fifth book by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Like it or not this book is a pivotal one in the series; it features the return of Mombi, not seen since the 2nd book The Marvelous Land of Oz, and the return of the titular King of Oz, Pastoria, who went missing long before the events of the first book. When she inherited the Oz series, Thompson ran things as she saw fit. She wasn’t afraid of shaking things up in Oz. She started by giving the Scarecrow a backstory (which falls apart under closer scrutiny), and soon Oz was gaining new independent kingdoms left and right (it’s as if towns and mayors don’t exist in Oz, every little town has to be its own gimmicky little kingdom), and new mainstay characters like Kabumpo the Elephant and the Yellow Knight. Ozma was a lot less of a pacifist, as we’ll see in this book, and eventually makes Oz a colonial power, quite contrary to the first 14 books. Later writers would be more careful with Oz canon, not wanting to contradict anything Baum wrote, unless deliberately doing their own thing with Oz like Wicked and Dorothy Must Die. But Thompson did as she wished. She did things her own way. No one stopped her, it would seem. She had official backing from the publisher and the go-ahead from Maud Baum, L. Frank Baum’s widow, giving her a level of legitimacy no modern Oz writer will ever have, and this emboldened her. 

There are some that really love her books, and there are some that really hate them. But I think most Oz book fans agree that they were pretty hit-or-miss. I think at least some of the criticisms leveled at her are unfair at times; after all, L. Frank Baum also liked to introduce new kingdoms and characters, and forget them just as easily in the next book. Baum too would occasionally decide he wanted to focus on original characters and leave the main characters as mere cameos. His books were also filled with encounters with gimmicky communities that distracted from the main plot. Baum also liked puns almost as much as Thompson did. Even though Thompson didn’t always follow canon, sometimes Baum contradicted his own canon. If someone’s main criticism of Thompson is the racism in some of her books, then I won’t blame them one bit. I don’t like that either. But I think some people don’t like her just because she’s not Baum, overlooking flaws in Baum’s stories while criticizing Thompson for doing the same things he did. As for me, I suppose I’m just pretty forgiving in general when it comes to Oz books because I have a soft spot for them. I fall squarely into the “hit-or-miss” camp when it comes to Thompson. I can see where her detractors are coming from, but I recognize she deserves credit for keeping the series going, and for those of us writing our own Oz stories, she really paved the way. No one’s going to see and interpret Oz exactly like Baum did. Thompson was the first one to interpret Oz in their own unique way after its creator passed away, and any later writer of Oz stories owes her a debt for that. Do I always like her interpretation of Oz, though? No, not always.

With all that said, I have mixed feelings about The Lost King of Oz. Spoilers ahead, by the way.

The main character of the book is Mombi, who is also the main villain. For some reason Thompson seems to have a special hatred for Mombi, since she extended Mombi’s rap sheet and elevated her to be even more evil than she was originally. Even after this book, Mombi gets blamed for new things that happened before Dorothy’s arrival in Oz which were unmentioned by Baum (I’m currently reading The Giant Horse of Oz, which does exactly this). In addition to kidnapping Ozma and switching her gender, she erased King Pastoria’s memory and turned his Prime Minister into a goose. This goose turns up at her new workplace, a kitchen for King Kinda Jolly (take a second to groan at the name), in the small kingdom of Kimbaloo in Gillikin Country (or “Gilliken” as Thompson insists on spelling it for some reason). The goose, Pajuka, is on the menu, despite Oz being a vegan fairyland where “meat” grows on trees, and where all animals have human-level intelligence and talk. Evidently the barbaric residents of Kimbaloo are still carnivorous despite this. Anyway, upon being reunited with the former Prime Minister, Mombi comes up with a somewhat convoluted plan to find King Pastoria and use him to regain her powers and take over the Emerald City. I don’t know how she thought Glinda, Ozma and the Wizard would simply stand by and allow a powerless former witch to take over Oz, but evidently she didn’t think that far ahead. She kidnaps a boy who overheard her evil scheme, Snip the Button Boy (in addition to being one of the last Oz kingdoms to still murder sentient animals for meat when they could literally find a tree that grows fried chicken if they wanted to, Kimbaloo’s main export is buttons, hence Snip the Button Boy whose clothes is covered in buttons), and forces him to be her pack mule on the long journey. They encounter some forgettable Wacky Wayside Tribes along the way which pad the book out and make it longer.

Eight whole chapters in we finally get our secondary plot (suddenly introducing a subplot almost halfway through the book is a thing Baum did as well), in which Ozma and her friends are given a clue about Pastoria and set out to find him. Before they get the clue we learn that Dorothy has gone off to visit some friends, leaving Ozma sad and lonely. I am glad Thompson preserved their chemistry, and never decided to pair Ozma up with some random prince or something. As you know if you’re familiar with the series, Ozma probably really isn’t into princes, if you catch my drift. Overall their subplot isn’t terribly significant to the main plot. And in chapter 10 we get a third subplot featuring Dorothy Gale. And let me tell you, the wasted opportunities in her subplot make me angrier the more I think about it. After visiting some characters from the previous book Grampa in Oz, she stumbles upon a very convenient Wish Way, a dirt road where your wishes come true if you speak them aloud. Thompson used this plot device in her first Oz book. There are at least two Wish Ways in Oz that we know about. It’s interesting to think of how previous books would have been different if people had known about the Wish Way. Dorothy could have wished herself back to Kansas in the first book, Jinjur could have conquered Oz using it, Ozma could have gone there and simply wished for Ev’s royalty to be freed from the Nome King without having to travel to Ev, Ojo could have wished his uncle not to be turned to stone anymore. There wouldn’t be an Oz series anymore, really. I mean maybe if the Wish Way randomly changed locations periodically it might make for a good occasional plot device, but having it always be in the same spot and not be widely known about and never be used by anyone until they stumble upon it is a little unbelievable. (In my planned Oz book, it’s protected by spells and largely obscure, but Ozites can still find out about it if they read the Oz histories).

Anyway, Dorothy accidentally wishes herself back to America, where she appears at the set of a movie somewhere not far from Hollywood, California (I pictured the whole thing taking place at Kirk’s Rock). After a bit she begins to rapidly age into an adult woman, her true age in 1925 if she had stayed in America. So according to Famous Forty canon, this is what happens when someone from the Outside World travels to Oz and stops aging, and then comes back. If it were to happen in a modern story Dorothy would age to nearly 130 years old and likely die. All of the characters who immigrated to Oz from the Outside World are essentially trapped there now. This makes me question the story in The Lost Tales of Oz, The Wizard in New York by Sam Sackett, where the Wizard of Oz, Oscar Diggs, goes to the 1939 World Fair in New York. Why didn’t he age to 100 or however old he would be in 1939? Of course, it’s up to the reader whether they want to consider modern Oz pastiches canon or not. I like to, just for fun. But surely they could have come up with some magical prevention spell to keep the Wizard from aging, as a nod to what happened to Dorothy when she went back to America. Perhaps the author could be forgiven for forgetting about this chapter in The Lost King of Oz, because Thompson treats it as forgettable. Or maybe it was avoided because the book was still under copyright, I don’t know.

To sum the rest of this chapter up (yes...this one chapter), she accidentally wishes a stunt dummy to life, and wishes herself back to Oz, where she ages back down to a child. What a wasted plot. There could have been an entire book about Dorothy accidentally wishing herself to America and trying to get back to Oz. It could have been a clever inverse to the first Oz book, especially at this late point in the series where Oz is very much Dorothy’s home. It could have been called “There’s No Place Like Oz”. I want to read that book. But no, instead it’s another single-chapter-long, quickly forgotten misadventure just like the other chapters that have the characters visit some bizarre gimmick community, and the only way it impacts the plot at all is to introduce Humpy the stunt dummy. A character who could have been left out of the story altogether without the plot changing much. Another annoyance in this chapter is the line Thompson slips in during Dorothy’s ordeal, “as she afterwards explained to Sir Hokus of Pokes”, indicating Dorothy will get back to Oz and tell the story to her friend the Sir Hokus the Yellow Knight, before it is revealed how she gets back. I mean of course she’ll get back, but way to just remove what little sense of suspense there still was in this episode. I hate when authors spoil their own story like that, it’s a pet peeve of mine. It takes you right out of the story. Wouldn’t want to scare the kids reading by having even an ounce of suspense in the story now would we? Those few words destroyed the entire subplot. Dorothy’s return to America was not treated as importantly as it should have been. This idea with so much potential was wasted just so Thompson could shoehorn this living stunt dummy into the story that didn’t need to be there!

I need to remind myself that there are more important things to be angry at than 95-year-old fantasy stories written for kids. Sigh.

So eventually Mombi gets sick of Snip knowing too much about her plan and throws him down a well, which very conveniently leads Snip to a tailor, Tora, who has been imprisoned by invisible people called the Blanks. This tailor has lost his memory. Hmm, I wonder who he could be? They escape, and rendezvous with Dorothy and the dummy, who have been joined by Kabumpo the elephant, and eventually they meet Mombi. They all come to the conclusion that Humpy the dummy who was just brought to life in America MUST be the lost king, because classism blinds them to the idea that the king might be an amnesiac tailor. Kabumpo even entertains the idea of not allowing Tora to enter the palace because he’s a lowly peasant. Maybe Thompson was trying to make a statement against classism and snobbery here, but reading her other books, I still think she was a lot more classist than Baum. Another example of this is the conspicuous absence of everyone’s favorite and totally not creepy hobo the Shaggy Man from her books. And the fact that just about every book of hers stars royalty or at least has royals as major characters at some point.

Anyway, once the king is revealed at the end of the book, he does not force Ozma to abdicate the throne as some feared, but wishes to continue on as a tailor and let his daughter rule. Thompson could have shaken things up in Oz by having Pastoria take the throne, she had the power to make a decision like that, but she wisely chose not to and kept the status quo going. Fiction needs more strong female rulers, even moreso back in the 1920s, so I think it was the right choice. What’s more debated is the decision for Ozma to order Mombi’s execution via being splashed with water like the Wicked Witch of the West (this was never stated to be the weakness of every witch in Oz). Yes, it would seem Mombi’s attempt to take over Oz was what crossed the line, causing Ozma to break her pacifism. And what’s more, it was meek little Dorothy’s idea to kill her with water. Dorothy, who never killed anyone on purpose before. Now I had already had the ending spoiled for me before I read the book, and was expecting at least an entire chapter devoted to this dramatic event, during which Ozma struggled with the decision, but when I finally read it, I was shocked by how casual and nonchalant the whole thing was. Dorothy and Ozma’s quick decision to kill her to the aftermath of the deed take up barely more than a page in the last chapter. 

Ahem...

Whatever happened to the Ozma who, in The Emerald City of Oz, refused to resort to a violent reaction when Oz was being invaded, declaring “No one has the right to destroy any living creatures, no matter how evil they may be, or to hurt them or make them unhappy. I will not fight - even to save my kingdom”?  (Aw, you’re making me feel guilty every time I kill a mosquito or cockroach now, Ozma.) Does this sound like the type of person who, when asked if Mombi should be killed, would shrug and reply “Eh, okay.” This is basically what actually happened in the book. Was she replaced by one of Jack Snow’s magical mimics? What happened to Ozma? Well, Thompson happened. She had drastically different ideologies from L. Frank Baum. I bet if she had written the first book, Dorothy would have killed the Wicked Witch of the West on purpose, and would have started moving stuff around in her house as it was falling to aim it at the Wicked Witch of the East.

Part of what got me glued to the Oz series as an adult was L. Frank Baum’s ideology, and Oz being a classless, moneyless and nonviolent fairyland where those who were different were welcomed. The polar opposite of this world. This is all sadly lacking in Thompson’s books. But, some part of me still likes at least some of her books. Handy Mandy in Oz for instance, is my favorite of hers, thanks more to the characters than the plot. Kabumpo in Oz is my second favorite Thompson Oz book, both because of the characters and because it had a plot that kept me guessing what would happen next. I guess what keeps me coming back to Ruth Plumly Thompson is Oz itself, and its characters. And it’s comforting to know there are so many Oz books out there I probably won’t ever run out of them. There’s always going to be another that I haven’t read. So, even if it’s something I’m going to end up heavily criticizing, I still enjoy reading Oz books, if only to escape the real world for a while.

Special thanks to my friend Paul Dana for the book! Otherwise I would have had to wait a few months for it to finally show up on Gutenberg, as it will be public domain in 2021.