I love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but I loathe how edgy subcultures have turned it into some one dimensional thing associated with psychedelics and other drugs.
Like, I wanna talk about the recurring presence of logic and mathematics, the cross language (primarily French) puns, I want to talk to people about their interpretations and thoughts but everyone’s so stuck on “haha yeah she’s on shrooms” like come on there’s so much going on don’t let it just be the easiest, weakest response, you’re smarter than that
It’s probably one of my favourite books and I have the exact same problem
My favourite take: Alice in Wonderland adaptations all all dysfunctional because both stories are a hellishamalgamation of victorian pop culture.
Turns of phrase, tourism in-jokes, children’s songs, academia at the time, popular figures in media, all of these are huge contributing factors to the characters and world of alice in wonderland/the looking glass. Reading the Annotated Alice is a trip and a half. Most of it isn’t actually nonsense, it’s an out-of-the-box joke on things most people when the book came out would have instantly recognized. They’re comedy pieces. Even as a modern reader it can get me to laugh, and the more I learn about what the time period was like when the book was released, the funnier it is. Caroll’s vicious deconstruction of mathematics was simply him cracking one one amongst many.
AiW adaptations are always going to be empty products unless you’re entirely willing to either double down on the time period or update it for modern times with commentary on things instantly recognizable to the modern audience.
AiW adaptations with modern settings are like “what if it’s a DYSTOPIA and the animals are all HUMAN and it’s DARK and FOR ADULTS” like…we still have animated movies starring animals? Kid media is more identifiable for the whole family than ever?? There’s a better way????? Turn the dancing mock turtle into a ninja turtle who paints masterpieces you cowards
I like this take.
So what you’re saying is that Alice in Wonderland is basically Victorian Shrek
Actually, yeah, kinda. There’s no real way to say, it’s never been fully explained by Charles Dodgson, it’s all truly interpretation. But in the way it’s written, I’d be willing to call it a literary version of Shrek. It has layers.
Why does everyone say that they played someone ‘like a fiddle’? Fiddles are actually pretty difficult to play? Why not say ‘I played him like a recorder’? ‘Like a xylophone’? ‘Like a triangle’?
I think it’s got to do with detail and subtlety. If you play someone like a fiddle, that’s like, Iago or some shit. If you play someone like a triangle, you just told them there was free food somewhere when there wasn’t.
I’ve once read the following exchange:
“You played me!”
“Like the cheap kazoo you are.”
Which in my books is a pretty epic burn if we’re going to be making musical comparisons.
My brother saved this document and everytime he gets angry at our neighbours for being loud he prints it to their wireless printer and you can hear the wife shout “Why the fuck would you print this AGAIN?!” to her son.
every time we serve chicken at work i think of this post
1. If you were wondering, you can type the numbers in the works cited into google and they appear to be medical journal articles about using medical imaging to detect and diagnose a rare form of Gastritis.
2. Please enjoy the offical powerpoint presentation of this paper at an academic conference by the original author, complete with Q&A:
Why the fuck would language evolve in such a completely illogical way like this
Which is why cursive is dying a much needed death. (don’t argue with me on this point, you won’t convince me, I have trauma and a background in functional graphic design.)
ok ok ok ok ok but Russian how do you tell cursive lower case Ls from cursive lower case Ts from cursive lower case Ms from oh my god it’s all just. Cursive lower case и looks like ш. It’s all. I don’t know! I don’t know. I’m trying to write properly in script in my own notes but I have to write it in block caps next to the lower case cursive because the lower case cursive just looks like someone wrote “minimum” in english without dotting the i’s. AND WHY IS YOUR PRINTED T A REAL T BUT IN HANDWRITING SUDDENLY IT’S m. WHY. WHY. WHYYYYY.
I was told recently about a school that was shamed into changing its school motto. The motto was “I hear, I see, I learn.” Nothing wrong with that per se. Unfortunately the motto was in Latin, and the Latin for “I hear, I see, I learn” is “audio, video, disco”.
What the fuck that’s the best school motto ever change it back
Your yearly reminder that “I learn through suffering” can be translated into Latin as “Disco Inferno.”
I love it when people ask shit like “Which world would you rather live in? Star Trek or Star Wars?” When like, Star Trek takes place in a world where mankind has erradicated diseases and war and explore space to make contact with new civilizations, and in Star Wars everything is old and dusty and every 20 years a new angry white man murders half the galaxy.
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