Reading/Watching Log #123

February has come and gone, and I’ve continued my foray into the worlds of Wonderland, Neverland and Oz, which I think of as the Big Three of children’s literature. Perhaps the most interesting thing about reading the original stories concerning these worlds is how much of what we assume about them is based on adaptative material with no basis in the actual books. For instance, Neverland is always referred to as the Neverland in J.M. Barrie’s text, and before his transformation, the Tin Man was initially called Nick Chopper – not Boq, though there is an unrelated Munchkin that goes by that name.

There’s also a lot of material that never made it into any adaptation: for example, I’m sorry that Baum’s delightful Queen of the Field Mice never made it onto the screen, though I can obviously understand the limitations there.

Likewise, there’s a lot more emphasis on the weird and wonderful events being framed as dreams in the adaptations, even though Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the only one that actually used this framing device in a book. MGM’s The Wizard of Oz famously made Dorothy’s adventures a prolonged dream, with actors playing characters both in the real world and fantasy counterparts in Oz, something that wasn’t part of Baum’s book at all. The concept became so pervasive that Return to Oz used it too.

They also hinted at it in Disney’s animated Peter Pan, which ends with the Darling parents returning home from their party to find Wendy asleep by the window, the implication being that she dreamt it all (unlike the book, where the three children are gone for a long time). Likewise, the 2003 film leans into the double casting of Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook and Mr Darling, providing a degree of commentary on Wendy’s relationship with each one.

More than that, the concept of madness barely figures into the books, but has since become an intrinsic part of these stories, with the mental facilities of the girls being called into question much more than in the books themselves. ABC’s Once Upon a Time spin-off starts with Alice in a sanatorium, with doctors trying to convince her that her adventures were a hallucination. Obviously Return to Oz starts with Dorothy (nearly) receiving electric-shock therapy, and the facility staff becoming the villains she faces in Oz.

And Andy Weir’s Cheshire Crossing is a crossover graphic novel in which Alice, Dorothy and Wendy all meet at a remote research facility and sanatorium. It’s interesting the way these components have soaked into our understanding of the stories, becoming an intrinsic part of retellings, even though that subtext isn’t present in the original texts. Sometimes they even borrow from each other: Dorothy in Return to Oz has a scene in which she appears to do some slow-motion rabbit-hole falling.

And for the record, Peter Pan is by far the best book of the three. You get the definite sense that Baum and Carroll were simply making things up as they went along, writing as the mood struck them, and though a lot of people have put a lot of effort into trying to understand or cross-examine Alice’s Adventures and Wizard of Oz, by each author’s own admission, they exist mainly to entertain and as such often come across as completely random.

Baum is probably the least sophisticated of the three authors, though I still think it’s fascinating that he almost didn’t seem to understand a lot of what he was writing. There are clear feminist undertones at work (his mother was a suffragette, so this was no doubt on purpose) but although he claims to have written: “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out,” it certainly didn’t pan out that way.

There’s some genuinely scary stuff in these books, and despite the Americanization of certain archetypes (switching out the kings, carriages, knights and heraldry for tin men, scarecrows, hucksters and cornfields) he couldn’t help but retain some of the fey elements of our oldest stories (as in Coraline and Labyrinth, the conclusion of Ozma of Oz features a competition against an ancient being with impossibly high stakes).

He also manages a few nuggets of wisdom, like this from the Scarecrow: “I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed,” or this from the Hungry Tiger: “It isn’t what we are, but what folks think we are, that counts in this world.”

For the most part though, his stories (like Carroll’s) come across as pretty random. In comparison, Barrie has something important to say about the nature of childhood, the passage of time, and the realities of growing up. Peter Pan is an inherently bittersweet story, one in which its grand adventure is framed by the anguish of parenthood and the cost of never achieving maturity.

Going forward into March, I’m leaving Wonderland and Neverland behind, but the Yellow Brick Road is stretching on for a while longer. Baum wrote a lot of these books.

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2025

It’s time for my favourite annual post: a look back at all the female characters I discovered, revisited, and/or enjoyed watching or reading about across the course of the past year. As I’m sure you know, I start every month with a post that spotlights a female character of note, the only two rules being that she has to be a somewhat inspiring figure, and that I can feature only one woman per project (though I can always include more from the same narrative universe in these end-of-year retrospectives).

But last year I decided to do something a little different and make 2025 the Year of the Villainess.

What struck me whilst selecting and compiling these twelve women is that female villains are so often twisted reflections of abnormal femininity. They are women… but wrong.

There’s the overbearing mothers (Norma Bates, Agnes Skinner, the Queen of Shadows in Mirrormask), the abusive nurturers (the Other Mother, Mother Gothel, Nurse Ratchet), the abnormally masculine (Agatha Trunchbull, Lady Macbeth; who asks to be unsexed: “come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall”), and of course – the crazy bitches (the Queen of Hearts, Daenerys Targaryen, Hexadecimal, Drusilla, even Azula in her final stretch of episodes). In that last case, it’s often the woman’s loosening grip on reality that proves to be her downfall.

Then there are the monstrous mother-figures (pick a stepmother, any stepmother from a fairy tale), the jealous harpies (now pick a stepsister, or any character that’s ever been played by Lucy Punch), the embittered crones desperate to regain their youth (Lamia from Stardust, the Sanderson Sisters, Mother Gothel again), the Alpha Bitches (Regina George, Libby Chessler), the Ice Queens (the White Witch, Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen), the Women Scorned (Hera, Alex Forrest, Isabella of Gisborne) and the Femme Fatales, who use their sexuality to get what they want (Melisandre, the Brides of Dracula – honestly, there are too many of these to name, though shoutout to Delilah, the Ur-Example).

It was at that moment Hylas knew... he'd fucked up.

Occasionally you get women that’ve been possessed by greater powers that transform them into dangerous threats (Jean Grey, Azkadellia from Tin Man), and sometimes they’re just unrelenting, unthinking forces of nature (Shelob, Eris, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, weather events that are usually given feminine names and pronouns). Oftentimes, many of these categories can overlap.

Just take a moment here to try and imagine any of these archetypes applied to a male villain. It’s not impossible, and yet it’s also much rarer. When men are villains, it’s usually to do with the corruptive influence of power, or misguided motivation born of desperation or deceit, or the complexities of the human psyche, or… ya know, a woman made him do it. For female villains it’s usually about being the wrong type of woman: a bad mother, or a manipulative seductress, or either so emotional that it disrupts her mental faculties, or not emotional enough for her to count as a proper woman.

Obviously not always, but I feel reasonably comfortable making that generalization. When one looks back at some of our earliest villainesses, the likes of Lilith and Circe and Morgan le Fay, it’s easy to see what they have in common: their own hard power (generally manifesting as magic) and a disregard for male authority. What need have they for men when they have their own inherent abilities to serve and protect them? Stories about such figures read more like cautionary tales to a male audience about the dangers that women pose than anything to do with the characters themselves; a warning not only about the sexuality they embody, which can easily lure a man to his doom, but the dangerous subversion of male power.

It’s rare that a female villain is allowed motivation that transcends gender-coded characterization (“who’s the fairest of them all?”) or which doesn’t embody the anxieties the patriarchy has about them (their sexuality, their mental state, their unchecked emotions), or refrains from commenting (even implicitly) on how she should be controlled, dismissed or ridiculed. When someone like Demona from Gargoyles comes along, who is driven by a multitude of inner demons (her self-loathing and guilt, her desire to protect her people from discrimination, her hatred of human beings), it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.

Again, I want to stress that this is a generalization. I’m well aware that the rogue’s gallery of fictional villains has its fair share of abusive fathers, power-crazy tyrants and tantrum-throwing manchildren (the concept of an incel has definitely been the inspiration for several male villains over the last few years). But are there a lot of old men who are vilified for being old and therefore undesirable? Men that are considered unnatural because they’re unfeeling or “icy”? Do we see a lot of men seducing women for nefarious ends (and don’t say James Bond – he’s not only a designated hero, but considered a stud for how many beautiful women he can bed). Are there as many evil stepfathers as there are stepmothers? And if there were, would they be regarded as being as monstrous as an unfit mother?

When there are more male villains anyway, it’s rather obvious to see how the female ones are broadly divided into several recurring categories and themes, and most of them have their roots in what it means to be an “incorrect” type of woman. Simply put, female villains are often the ones that don’t comply with the patriarchy’s expectations of them: to be nurturing, beautiful, virtuous, young, submissive, obliging and preferably sane.

I could write a thesis on all this, but there’s definitely no time for that! Just food for thought as I delve into some of the other compelling villainesses that didn’t make this year’s short list, but who are definitely worth mentioning in some capacity:

Woman of the Month: Maddy Magellan

Maddy Magellan from Jonathan Creek

Having done this Woman of the Month project for over ten years now, I’m surprised that Maddy Magellan has never come up before, as she truly is one of my favourite characters of all time. A few weeks ago I had Jonathan Creek playing as background noise while I did other things, and I was reminded again of just how vivacious she is.

Sometimes the best fictional characters aren’t necessarily the ones you want to meet in real life. Maddy is bad tempered and dishonest, mercurial and fast talking; ruthlessly ambitious in her pursuit of a story and not above tapping into people’s private phone messages or pretending to be a police officer in order to gain access to a crime scene.

She’s everything we hate about investigative journalists, but damn it if she isn’t fun to watch. More importantly, she has a social conscience. The crime exposés she writes are about miscarriages of justice, and – as she frequently likes to point out – she doesn’t get paid much for them. When the time comes to glean more of her family history, we get a sense of why she’s drawn to this particular subject matter, and she’s definitely someone you want on your side if you’re ever the victim of an impossible crime (and not just because she’s essentially the handler of Jonathan Creek, lateral thinker extraordinaire).

It’s really the sheer levels of gumption and verve that Carolyn Quentin brings to the role which makes her so enjoyable as a character. We couldn’t condone half of what she does as appropriate in real life, but her sheer audacity – breaking into houses, reading people’s diaries, going through garbage bags, lying about being Jewish, recruiting a man to impersonate a police officer in order to extract information from her close-lipped colleague – is something to behold. At one point while under arrest she frets that she’ll be injected with a truth serum. Jonathan reassures her: “it wouldn’t stand a chance.”

The show certainly lost something when Quentin left to have a baby, and then for whatever reason, never brought back again. Because the Carla Borrego mysteries are still pretty good, I include them whenever I do a rewatch, but always finish things off with “The Black Canary,” a standalone Christmas Special that I can pretend takes place after Maddy returns from America, ready to pick things up where she left off with Jonathan.

Assertive and confident and quick-witted and unapologetic, she’s someone we could never be… but would secretly like to.