#astrid lindgren#tf are these results... american ass website#you don't know pippi longstocking? the brothers lionheart? ronja the robber's daughter? the motherfucking KARLSSON???

^^^^^ exactly my reaction

my school thought a good time to read ulysses and flowers for algernon was 14-16 so make of that what you will

(and literature lessons were fun and kids loved them, though i recognize that a lot of that was individual teacher charisma. Of all three of our literature teachers. The school was Like That)

yup. gotta have a Dorothy Gale too

or Ellie Smith. gonna stick to Dorothy as the name tho since she's the OG

the thing is, those are two completely different canons. Ellie Smith and Dorothy are two different girls with two different destinies. Their dogs happen to have the same name (ish) and they had a very similar inciting incident but Oz and Magic Land are located completely differently so you can't even say it's the same one. Yes the first book is a stolen translation but the rest of the lore elaborated upon in the subsequent books makes the stories COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!! I don't think Dorothy has an uncle Black. Their hair color isn't even the same!

I'm aware, yes

I know I'd like to get my hands on translated copies of Magic Land books because the stories sound very interesting and i don't know Russian!

anyway my goofy drawings where i blend canons together with zero forethought shouldn't be taken too seriously.

I am sending HUGS and GOOD VIBES your way and you should learn Russian because holy shit Russian literature is an entire separate ecosystem and yes I say that as Ukrainian plenty of Ukrainian writers have written in Russian too for empire reasons

tfw a movie in a language I don't understand has a cute fat scarecrow and I'm like

actually there's two of them. (two of them)

anyway enjoy these gifs lol

...I only just now realized the movie has an English title too asfagffd

but yeah, Урфин Джюс и его деревянные солдаты (2017). it has cute scarecrows.

hear me out

from:

#oh gosh!!!! what a cute design#Oz#scarecrow#the tin man#the cowardly lion#blonde dorothy is weird to me somehow hhh but otherwise Nice#Huck get in here

her name is Ellie in the knockoff! and the place is just called "Magic Land" it's not Oz. it's not particularly similar to Oz either, only the first book is a direct 'creative translation' knockoff

basically Oz veers really hard into "this place is weird" after book 1 while the Emerald City series veers into fantasy sociopolitics instead

If there's any character in this world who suffers from literary Ken-ification it's Patroclus. Especially in the zeitgeist of today (thanks tsoa), it's always Achilles AND Patroclus, never just Patroclus. Who is he? Why does he exist? He is Achilles' boyfriend! What's his job? Death! In the sense that he just. Dies. That's just his job now. Death. Death and Achilles' boyfriend. That's it.

I read the thing

I am a changed woman. Sorry for even making this post when Victor Hugo said it 150ish years before me

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:

No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.

Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.

Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.

John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!

Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.

The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.

It's all fiction.

None of it is real.

The characters are fake and do not exist.

Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.

There is genuinely no such thing as an inappropriate book for a child.

People in the tags who read Clan of the Cave Bear or Flowers in the Attic, but did you fucking die? You are fine like every other kid exposed to Jondalar’s turgid, upright member was fine. These are clearly ideal books for nine year olds because so many very alive and unharmed former nine year olds read the shit out of them and many adults find them boring.

Would you really be such a John Hughes adult kind of hypocrite as to rip the inspiring tale of Ayla, who invented aspirin, knitting and cunnilingus during the last ice age out of an elementary schooler’s hand?

If you don’t want kids to read a book, don’t allow it to portray a child’s actual, relateable anxieties around puberty, sex, adulthood and their parents in the most high gothic way possible. This is like preventing incest by locking your adolescent grandchildren in a small room with no access to non-family members.

-- Mitch Hedberg

I think we need to start being more nuanced with this take because yeah kids could probably read anything at 16-17 years old, but it's if they should.

Like not in a "I don't want my kids to read XYZ book" but in a "Are they actually capable of understanding and processing the material in the book properly."

Teenagers are not mentally adults. They will not be able to comprehend certain things because those are things that come with age, and life experience.

If you are willing to help guide a teenager through adult materials up to and including when to recognize when you should stop reading a book, then feel free to show whatever feel is going to help the child.

If you aren't willing to do this and just chuck a bunch of books at a teenager, then you're just setting them up for failure.

And if anyone has problems I'm an adult fiction writer who's a mom. My books read at 6th-8th grade reading level, because I write in casual, easy to digest language, much like how this post is written.

No. Did I fucking stutter? This is not a nuanced issue and especially in this dangerous political context, people who care about children should absolutely not yield to the opinions of shitty parents such as yourself.

I wasn’t even talking about teens! I was talking about elementary age kids reading sexual content not adolescents encountering new or difficult concepts! Jesus Christ! I think it’s genuinely worse than the moms for liberty style censorship to censor materials simple because an adult has made the call about what they might find easy enough to understand! How is a teenager supposed to gain wisdom and experiences if a bunch adult busy-bodies prevent them from exercising their own judgement about what they want to learn? At what point is someone who’s old enough to drive, have sex and be sentenced to life in prison also allowed to pick their own reading material? How is a person going to be able to understand or absorb ideas if they never get challenging practice?

I am an extremist on this because this is an issue of children’s basic human rights. It’s what American Library Association President Emily Drabinski calls a child’s “right to a private reading life” and“right to their own imagination and the sovereignty of their own minds.” Even your children have that right, despite having been born to a small-minded little tyrant who treats exposure to new ideas like a traumatic event. Yes, just throw books at teenagers! Let them be aware of a world outside their intellectually suffocating home life!

The idea that a seventeen-year-old might need their reading monitored absolutely horrifies me. Yeah, if we're talking about seven-year-olds, they might benefit from a bit more guidance, although I'm still in favour of giving them free rein in the library. But a seventeen-year-old? Teens are not adults, teens are kids in the process of becoming adults, and books are one of the safest means of gaining adult knowledge.

If a kid is traumatized - not briefly upset, but traumatized - by a book, then there was already something very wrong in their life long before they got to that book, and they need help, but definitely not with the book.

So, when I was a kid, my parents warned me about two books. The first is that they warned me that The Silmarillion was probably not as cool as I was hoping, and I think they were probably right for my taste at the time at least, and the second was that they warned me that Gravity's Rainbow was probably incomprehensible.

That's it, I read everything else. I read about the last half of Lord of the Rings, because I learned to read from my parents reading it to me, and then started reading ahead. I read Prof E. McSquared's Calculus Primer (in third grade). I read The Hite Report. I think I did in fact read one of the Clan of the Cave Bear series but honestly it was boring. I read The Talented Mister Ripley and several of its sequels. It was fine. No problems at all, I didn't get overwhelmed or traumatized or anything, and I assure you, I hit every category of content that you might be worrying about.

"I'm an adult fiction writer who's a mom" is not any kind of source of authority on "how to raise children". It might become one with testimonials from now-adult kids who've been out on their own in the world for a while and have opinions, but even then, it doesn't really answer questions like "was this the best thing you could do".

Yes, it's true that teenagers, and small children, will not be able to comprehend some things. That is also true of the lives they are living; they will not be able to comprehend some things. But the point of childhood is to have experiences, starting out understanding none of them, and then learn about things from that experience.

You don't have to monitor what the kids are reading. You have to be ready to answer questions, some of which might be hard. That is your job as a parent.

Also kids’ minds don’t traumatize the way adult brains do. They don’t have the context yet to see the horrors. Like, anybody who read animorphs as a kid thought “oh cool! Kids turn into animals and fight aliens!” but you read it as an adult and holy shit. Body horror, trauma, ptsd, torture, moral grey, war crimes, psychological horror. It’s a trip! A beautiful glorious dark trip. But kids see the adventure, not the horrors. To think that an adult can comprehend what a kid would, what a kid would get,from a story is kinda bonkers.

I read adult books(not porn, but they inevitably had the romance and sex was mentioned and occasionally described) a lot when I was a kid. Carted trilogies to school to read during breaks. And it was great. I was there for the adventures and the sex was small and in passing.

Then I had to read a book for school which had actual smut in it. I tapped out. I didn’t want to read that. I had my parent’s support. I controlled my media. When I had to read another lots-of-sex book for school, the teacher marked out which pages I could skip, or the alternative book I could read. I opted to read the sex book because I’d heard horror stories about how boring moby dick was xD

But like, none of that traumatized me. And I certainly read raunchier things later on at my own pace. And I think that’s sort of the point here? That you can’t know a child’s mental pace. Or a teenager’s, despite adults’ persistent belief that they can. And books are a relatively safe and controlled way to see and explore the world and pace your understanding. Let kids read books y’all

One of the things I was told in passing during my psych degree was that some researchers had found evidence strongly suggesting that at least some small children (like, age 4-5 or so) knew that all living things die, that they would someday die, and that death was permanent... and also knew that adults *found this upsetting* and would try to conceal it from them.

Which is honestly sort of charming.

Like, as an adult, I can look at LotR and see stuff in it that I probably was not well equipped to deal with or consider. And when I was six, I didn't deal with it or consider it.

I kind of hated LotR when I was eight because I was sufficiently equipped to comprehend Frodo's disintegration as he marched slowly toward doom and the increasingly welcome certainty of death, but not equipped to handle it.

But you know, I finished it because I Needed To Know, got mad about how unhappy it made me, and then came back four years later and I could handle it now. It was fine.

The book that fucked me up worst around that age was aimed at children, Nancy Farmer's A Girl Named Disaster, which is about an 11 year old girl in Mozambique undergoing various traumas. I had repeated bouts of violent physical tremors and nausea from over-identifying with this other girl and the lushly described 100percent at my reading level starvation and abuse and almost being eaten by hippos, and so forth. At one point I had to lie down on the floor to recover.

I don't think this did me permanent harm.

The other top contender was a Children's Illustrated Classics version of The Portrait of Dorian Grey. It's entirely possible that the process of cutting it down to be more accessible and child-friendly actually removed some essential character motivation cues and left it more horrifying than the original would have been.

Clan of the Cave Bear was a distant third, but looking back there were worse ways to be introduced to the concept of rape and its societal sanction. I still don't think my mom should have given it to a ten-year-old without at least, you know, a warning of some kind, but I don't think doing so was nearly as bad a mistake as trying to prevent me from accessing anything inappropriate or upsetting would have been.

(I did in fact notice how dark the Animorph books were, and therefore dropped the series about two thirds of the way through despite liking them a lot, because I had identified a personal limit.)

People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”

How fiction affects reality is about how it meshes with your internal templates for how the real world works.

Ratings are based on a rough estimate of when most people will have those templates form. For instance, there’s a standard for children’s media which states that you’re not supposed to include imitable violence more severe than an open-handed slap, because kids are just learning the overrides for the monkey-brain “if someone makes us angry, we hit them to send a message” drive. You can’t make a show for preschoolers that shows how to throw a punch, because they might very well just start punching people.

But you can show your average teenager as much punching as you want, and unless their parents REALLY fucked up, they won’t take it to mean “this is how you solve ANY problem, from a threat to your life, to someone looking at you funny.” When you can show the use of realistic guns to a person without them deciding that shooting people is a good idea depends on a lot of personal and cultural factors, but as a standard we can settle on people tend to agree that, as long as it doesn’t settle into reinforcing stereotypes as a possible invocation of “things that are okay only to defend your own life” or blatant war propaganda or similar exceptions, most adults can see all the violence they want - yes, even glorified violence - without turning into a violent menace themselves.

If you have it impressed upon you your whole life that killing people is bad - as you will, unless you have the worst kind of parents imaginable - you can watch your favorite action star kill tons of dudes, or play games that are just excuse plots for killing tons of dudes, or read about a million and a half creative ways to get away with killing tons of dudes, and you’re still not going to run out and kill tons of dudes or even think it might be okay to kill tons of dudes. This is because your mental template for how the world works strongly emphasizes “death = tragic; killing people = hurtful and bad”. Again, it might fuck with your head if the explanation for why killing tons of dudes is justified in the context of this piece of media aligns with common stereotypes of real people, or your own preexisting biases - this is how propaganda works - but even in THOSE cases a lot more factors have to align to get someone to the full extreme end and think “yes, killing tons of dudes irl is the answer to all my problems!”

It’s where people have weaker templates that’s really a problem. For example, most Americans have no idea that Cairo in the modern day like this:

…because they’ve been inundated with media that portrays Egypt as looking homogeneously like this:

And - and this is the important part - they have had little to no experience to tell them otherwise.

Now, I’m assuming the majority of the people reading this post don’t live in Cairo - if you do, take this shoutout! - and if you are in that majority that doesn’t, imagine if someone tried to pass something like this off as your own hometown. Obviously, you’ll call bullshit! You’ve seen that place and it’s nothing like that!

But if it’s a place you don’t know anything about beyond the fact that it exists and has these famous landmarks for these famous historical reasons, then anyone can…pretty much just say whatever they want from that baseline, no matter how absurd, and you will probably accept it as, if not a fact, at least a believable fictionalization with some basis in reality. At most, maybe you’ll go

This is how media creates and perpetuates stereotypes - by getting in where you don’t know better and forming your mental template. It can even work if you do have real-life counterexamples, when those real-life counterexamples are uncommon enough or you don’t spend enough time with them - if you know maybe 5 members of a minority group and none of them act like the 500 stereotyped examples you see on TV, you’re likely to end up thinking “okay, there are exceptions to the rule”, rather than “the rule is bullshit”.

This is why “honest, varied representation matters” and “not all fiction is 1:1 monkey-see-monkey-do propaganda and it’s really dickish to assume the worst of someone just because they like one (1) game that you see unfortunate implications in or something” are both statements that can and should coexist.

A Romance Story (No Not That Kind)

Tolkien considered "fantasy" to be different from "faerie-tales," namely in that he considered a fantasy to involve the sprawling and immersive development of what he called a "secondary world," i.e. a fictional world apart from our real one. Even if you didn't know that about his views, it should come as no surprise to you, given how deeply detailed Arda is, and how the few stories he wrote that were set in Arda were as much byproducts of the worldbuilding as endeavors in themselves.

I don't draw that same conceptual distinction myself but I see exactly what he's saying, and I do feel irrationally proud that my work would in fact qualify as a Tolkienian fantasy by his own criterion.

I feel very old-fashioned coming on Tumblr and talking over and over about JRR Tolkien, because I know a lot of people who see this are hip young things who are frankly Over It and are way more interested in contemporary stuff that's more inclusive / fits modern sensibilities better / etc. But I really never do seem to run out of things to say about Tolkien.

Today's saying is this: I too have an esoteric conceptual box that I set my work in. I consider After The Hero to be a "romance" in the vein of (but not identical to) the classical sense of the concept of literary romance: pomp and pageantry, a sweeping sprawl to the world, and epic adventures and quests within it. You might think of such a story as one that is told "for its own sake," as opposed to having a particular agenda in mind via the plot or a main character arc. There is a lot of spectacle all throughout The Curious Tale, with many scenes and moments being of the sort that would typically be omitted for length in most books. Last week, when I mentioned the scene of Sodish city runner Kayaju running alongside a bard as the bard sings her a song about the city's history as the Sun is rising, the reason I mentioned it is that it's just a really beautiful moment. But it doesn't do anything. There's no plot there. Kayaju is deep in the B-list of character importance. It's really just "Here's a beautiful moment I want to share." And that, for me, is the epitome of romance.

And it only works if the story is also a fantasy in the Tolkienian sense! 😂

I'm rereading one of my favorite novels of recent years, Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie, and it's even better than I remember it and I'll probably have something to say about it in this space soon, but it's so very much self-excluded from being romantic. Too practical, too cynical, too down-to-Earth, and too attached to the rails of the plot. No scenic detours, other than establishing paragraphs here and there. It's all very well done; don't get me wrong! But it takes real flagrance to write romance. You have to be prepared to put your readers through thousands and thousands of words that don't do anything.

It's a sacrifice I am willing for you to make! 😁

I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

If you are seriously against CSA, then you should absolutely read Lolita. Yeah, the book that set the western world on fire with weird sexual conversations. 

That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic). 

That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes. 

That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”. 

It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT. 

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality. 

an important function of modern (post-1950s) television aimed at children is modelling approved interaction patterns, and it still gets pretty overt even in more recent productions where the characters don’t break the fourth wall at the end to spell out the moral explicitly in case the kids missed it.

in this episode of She-Ra there is a typical example: Glimmer has lost her powers as a side-effect of torture and is reluctant to admit it to her mother, who grows suspicious of her increasingly evasive behaviour, eventually cornering her into confessing the truth that she was scared of appearing a failure, upon which her mother comforts her by saying that she has failed things too and they could work to overcome the problem together.

now while the average child might not be struggling with the loss of their ability to teleport it’s not unusual for kids to hide real problems for counterproductive reasons that make sense to them at the time and this encourages them not to, but it also shows what the correct adult response should be, the mother is on trial just as much as the child and it is her behaviour that brings the drama to a conclusion.

more generally we see that Glimmer and her mother are each labouring under misunderstandings about each other’s beliefs and intentions, which might lead us to wonder whether we are in a similar position regarding the people we know in our own lives.

and of course there is the meta point that the show choosing to tell a particular story also carries information about what matters, what is relevant to the society that makes the show, the fact that parent/child relationships are a subject worthy of drama in the first place.

it’s pretty heavy stuff that would be difficult to convey to a child in 1820 living on a farm somewhere with no television, no radio, no books, their only idea of family relationships being what they happen to experience themselves and see in the households around them, and I can’t help wondering how much of an impact it has on personal development.

So the first book is NEARLY identical to Wizard of Oz, but after that the series goes off rails immediately and completely. Although I'd say it stays ON the rails more like, because from what I read of Oz it goes HARD on whimsical weird fairy creatures, while the Wizard of Emerald Town sequels feature such fantastic beings as:

The series features no less than three revolutions - first the place gets conquered by a guy who randomly became able to animate wood and immediately made himself an army of wooden soldiers (the protagonist gets a message asking her to come and help, and her uncle comes with her on a balloon and they lead a rebellion), then the protagonist gets lost in a cave system and comes out in magic land's underground ruled by a cruel and unjust monarchy which they proceed to overthrow (this is honestly just a stock soviet kid lit plot), and then in the last book. That one. Also the wooden army guy ended up retiring, regretting his warmongering ways, and was eventually an ally.

Also the protagonist is inexplicably named Ellie instead of Dorothy, and eventually stays home with her parents as she grows up, and the adventures are taken over by her little cousin Annie and iirc her best friend boy.

It's a completely and fully different genre than the Oz books, and the fact that basically the same first book leads to both equally organically blows my fucking mind.

It gets better: the Emerald City books by Aleksandr Volkov became so popular that eventually another writer, Sergey Sukhinov, wrote his own fanfiction/continuation of Volkov's retelling, but his books were the continuation of Volkov's first book (The Wizard of the Emerald City) only, disregarding everything that happened later. So no wooden soldiers, no Cousin Annie, no other characters or events that appeared in Volkov's later books. Instead, Ellie grows up in the ordinary world and then, already as an old woman, becomes a teenager again through the spells cast by the fairies who sought her out so that she helps them get into the Magical Land, and returns there. It's more of a children's high fantasy thing, with knights, monsters, evil wizards, magical swords, and stuff like that. There are eleven books in the series, not counting the spin-offs for even younger children (?); I've only read the first six. If you think alien revolution is an unexpected plot point, wait until I tell you about the founder of the Magical Land being a native of Atlantis, or about the alchemist Paracelsus and Koschei the Deathless (a figure from Russian folklore) both being among those who seek refuge in the Magical Land because elsewhere there is no place for magic anymore.

So the first book is NEARLY identical to Wizard of Oz, but after that the series goes off rails immediately and completely. Although I'd say it stays ON the rails more like, because from what I read of Oz it goes HARD on whimsical weird fairy creatures, while the Wizard of Emerald Town sequels feature such fantastic beings as:

The series features no less than three revolutions - first the place gets conquered by a guy who randomly became able to animate wood and immediately made himself an army of wooden soldiers (the protagonist gets a message asking her to come and help, and her uncle comes with her on a balloon and they lead a rebellion), then the protagonist gets lost in a cave system and comes out in magic land's underground ruled by a cruel and unjust monarchy which they proceed to overthrow (this is honestly just a stock soviet kid lit plot), and then in the last book. That one. Also the wooden army guy ended up retiring, regretting his warmongering ways, and was eventually an ally.

Also the protagonist is inexplicably named Ellie instead of Dorothy, and eventually stays home with her parents as she grows up, and the adventures are taken over by her little cousin Annie and iirc her best friend boy.

It's a completely and fully different genre than the Oz books, and the fact that basically the same first book leads to both equally organically blows my fucking mind.

Oh I haven't thought about this in many years!

I should ask my parents if they still have the books, I feel the need to reread them now.

Also, other authors continued the series past that Volkov's books, and it went way off the rails. I remember very little, and read, like, the 9th, 12th, and 17th book or something like that. iirc there was one taking place entirely on another planet, possibly with time travel? And one in an underwater kingdom.

Oh my god, really??? Lmaooooo that's amazing. I've never heard of that. I actually only own the books up to the giantess one, and only ever read the aliens one once at someone else's place. Life is beautiful.