scalpho - Tumblr blog

scalpho · 4 days

Text

Neverafter notes (1) The Time of Shadows

No need to tell you this will contain spoilers - because this is a set of notes I take after watching the entire season.

Item 1: The Time of Shadows

Let us begin with the very name of the episode and the motif introduced. We are in the "Neverafter", the world of fairy tales, named after the famous sentence "And they lived happily ever after" ending every English-speaking fairytale. But here twisted with "never" of course - because we are in a time that is beyond the ending of the well-known fairytales, we have passed the "they lived happily ever after" line, and now we are in what can be found afterward. And this afterward turns out to be the "Time of Shadows", dark, dreadful, terrible times befalling upon lands typically in peace and prosperity but now plunged in war and ruins. Kingdoms fall one after the other as great wars ravage the lands, many malevolent entities are very active and spreading destruction wherever they go (they are explicitely listed as giants, witches, wizards and "creatures of the sea"), and there's a bunch of big storms and bad weather everywhere. A true "dark fantasy".

Now the Time of Shadows is here a transposition of a phenomenon preponderant in modern fairytale media and that the website TV Tropes and Idioms has codified and classified as "Grimmification", a term that is a pun (on the brothers Grimm and the adjective grim) and that has gained a big success on the Internet, everybody using it today in opposition to another term popularized by TV Tropes "Disneyification". Grimmification is taking a fairytale and turning it into a much darker, bloodier and sadder tale, a nightmare filled with gore and horror ; hereas Disneyification is doing what Walt Disney did to fairytales - making them look "cuter" and sanitizing them for children and making them much happier and more naive than they used to be. (Of course this is a massive simplification as Disney was not the main one responsible for the "cutification" of fairytales but you get the idea, it works as a simple dichotomy). The Time of Shadows is literaly a transliteration of the phenomenon of "Grimmification".

Now I do want to insist upon the fact that the idea of the "Grimmification" of fairytales is not new, and that it existed long before TV tropes popularized this term. I do want to compare Neverafter and its Time of Shadows with another work that is very similar in terms of vibe: John Connolly's famous "The Book of Lost Things", which precisely describes a fairytale world that regularly undergoes cycle, switching between the "happily ever after", sweet, naive, cartoonish depictions of fairytales we kow today, and much darker times filled with violence, death and horror. A big part of the book precisely relies on the breaking of such a cycle and the "healing" of the fairytale land - in a way VERY similar to Neverafter's own treatment of the Time of Shadows (I wouldn't be surprised if the Book of Lost Things served as some inspiraton, after all it is one of the prime examples of a "Grimmification" book)

Item 2: Rosamund du Prix

Our first introduced character is Rosamund du Prix, Neverafter's version of Sleeping Beauty. With also added horror, because Neverafter is the horror season - from the briars actually growing OUT of the princess' body when she fell asleep (and her being forced to rip the roots out of her throat, in the very reverse of a fairytale kiss), to Rosamund being forced to experience the atrophy of her muscles after a hundred years sleep and the claustrophobic feeling of being buried alone in masses of thorns. Of course, she falls victim to the Time of Shadows' first rule: the happy endings either do not arrive, or happen in a broken and incomplete way. In the case of Rosamund, this means her prince has not arrived, she woke up from the curse despite not having a "true love kiss", and she is all alone into an entire kingdom prey to magical thorns and sleep.

I will note that this version of Sleeping Beauty is not based on Perrault's story, at least not directly. Yes there were fairies at her birth, and her kingdom is named Rêverie (which is a French word meaning "dreaming"), so there's a Perrault reference in there... But they are slim, very slim. There are stronger references to the brothers Grimm's version of Sleeping Beauty, "Briar Rose", from the constant references to "briars" all the way to the princess being named "ROSamund", but the most obvious reference is all the dead princes in the thorns surrounding her castle. This is actually an element present in the brothers Grimm's verson of the tale, where the briars kill those that try to enter, absent from Perrault's version (the forest is just so thick it is impossible to cross, plus a bunch of creepy stories keeps everyone away).

No, what this version of Sleeping Beauty is actually based upon is... Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I am not just saying that because Siobhan Thompson explicitely plays the character of a Disney princess lost in a world of horror but still hopeful that her "prince will come". But note the explicit number of fairies: four fairies in total in the kingdom, three invited to the birth, the fourth one ignored - and the fourth one being the "wickedest". This is literaly Disney's take on the story, here a transposition of Flora, Fauna, Merryweather and Maleficent as the "four fairies of the kingdom". (As a side-note, here the two first good fairies gifted Rosamund with "beauty" and "grace" - "beauty" explaining why she still looks good even when she has been living like a wild woman in the woods for quite some times now ; "grace" translating in gameplay as added agility and dexterity).

In terms of D&D structure, Rosamund is here the transliteration of a "Ranger" character type, with the reinvention that, waking up all alone in an entire kingdom devoid of human life and overtaken by wild trees and briars, she has to learn how to survive on her own, and even fashioned herself a bow out of thorns. The ranger's affinity to nature is notably coupled here with the cliche of the Disney princess being able to talk to animals or summon them with her song, for hilarious effects (see the nat 1 when Rosamund tries to call for animal help in one of the scariest primeval forests of the Neverafter).

I will highlight here that the briars' voice attempts at explaining to Rosamund how and why they will keep her "safe" has very strong echoes of the Witch's own plea to Rapunzel about keeping her safe in her tower, from the musical "Into the Woods". And I do not make this comparison out of nowhere because, as I will point out later, there are other references to "Into the Woods" meaning this was clearly one of the inspirations behind the Neverafter season (but again, when you do a Grimmification of fairytales, Into the Woods is bound to pop up at some point) [The briars do say "None can touch you in your tower, stay with us", I mean come on!] [I also note that, in terms of world-building, the curse is apparently still maintained within the spindle, because to put Rosamund back to sleep the briars try to prick her again with it]

Item 3: Gerard of Greenleigh.

Gerard of Greenleigh, husband of the princess Elodie, is the Neverafter's version of "The Frog Prince" (originally "The Frog King") by the brothers Grimm. (Elodie fights in the war with a golden mace, as a nod to the gold ball the princess played with in the fairytale)

Gerard's failed "happily ever after" here takes the form of his love with Elodie slowly breaking away due to their incompatible mentalities (Gerard is a self-centered, arrogant, pleasure-seeking prince with no actual knowledge about ruling a kingdom, while Elodie is a serious, no-nonsense girl who tries to maintain her kingdom safe as it is facing a war - we will later see Gerard's character is partially due to his frog transformation, which happened when he was a child and didn't left him much time to get prepared for his role as a prince). As a result of Elodie's love fading away, Gerard is slowly turning back into a frog, currently being a frog/human hybrid (which corresponds to a D&D hobgoblin).

I will point out that the motif of a "de-transformation" being reverse because of love fading away has been done before with a different fairytale in a quite important fairytale modern media. It was done with Beauty and the Beast in the very opening issue of the famous "Fables" comic book , which was a huge influence on fairytale media (before the series kind of went to crap, you know). In the very opening issue we see the Beast slowly turning back into his beast form precisely because he had a big fight with his wife, and it is a recurring joke with the couple during the first doen issues that since their couple has highs and lows, the Beast keeps switching between his human form and a more beastly form, as the curse cannot be fully taken away and relies on his wife's love to be maintained at bay.

Back to Neverafter - we do know that the kingdom of Greenleigh fell, the same way almost all of the other kingdoms of Neverafter fell, in this case due to a war launched upon it by the armies of the Snow Queen (from Andersen's fairytale of the same name), who rules over the kingdom of "Snowhold" (and is explicitely said to have under her control beings/powers of "ice and wind"). I might go as far as to point out a possible parallel with "A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones" about the Snow-Queen being one of the big antagonists of the Neverafter's background, because as I said before this season has big "dark fantasy" vibes and... "Winter is coming". I thought about this joke because it was exactly done as such in the Fables comic book, again - when the Snow Queen, one of the antagonists, first appears, a messenger before her warns the inhabitants "Winter is coming!", as a nod to Martin's book series. But don't get me wrong, I am not saying it was always meant to be the reference - in many fairytale media the Snow-Queen is depicted as an active antagonist, and a wicked power.

To take another piece of media, there is the famous mini-series "The 10th Kingdom", another important piece of American "fractured fairytale" or "fairytale urban fantasy/portal fantasy" media. Now, the Snow Queen is only alluded to in the series (and sequel novel), but extra-material and outside of series info confirmed that if the mini-series had delved more into the world, the Snow Queen would have been the next big antagonist because she had plans to conquer the entirety of the fairytale kingdoms. Another more recent example of the Snow Queen as an antagonist in a multi-fairytale fiction would be her character within the book series, "The Land of Stories" (with added point that in this series he overthrew the king of the land she rules upon - and if my memory serves me well the Snow Queen of Neverafter kind of overthrew the Tsar of Snowhold? Or something like that? I will need to check it again)

As additional notes: we know the court of Greenleigh has a set of "wise women" that are experts in medecne, tonics and other products of the sort - very likely a nod to how in the Grimm fairytales fairies were replaced by "wise women". And Elodie highlights the innate horror and terrifying metaphysical implications of a "happily ever after" by pointing out how uncomfortable and unwell she feels with the idea that her life ended the moment she married her prince. A very clever line, especially since it works on two levels - the meta-fictional level of a character trapped in a farytale logic, and who stops existing once her story is done ; and the human level of how her story is one of marital troubles and of a couple falling out of love after their wedding.

[Extra-considerations: Names are of course very important, especially in a fairytale setting, especially in a world inspired by the "fae lore", and especially in Neverafter. I can't analyze every name because I don't have all the info needed, but just look at the name of the Frog Prince's land "Greenleigh". "Green", the color of frogs, sounds like "Greenly" and "leigh" means a meadow or a glade. Same thing with how Rêverie is the land of Sleeping Beauty. And given Rosamund's last name is "du Prix" and it is French I am wondering if there was a sort of dark intended pun there... I am probably reading way too much into this, but "du Prix" means "of the price". And can be read as "of the prize" (because a price/a prize is the same thing in French). Is it implying that the princess is literaly the "prize" the prince must win?]

Item 4: Pib

Pib is short for "Puss in Boots" - the character made famous through Charles Perrault's fairy tale of "The Master Cat, or the Booted Cat", better known in the English-speaking world as "Puss in Boots". As with all the other fairytale characters, poor P-I-B (here a reinvention of the Rogue character class) saw his land falling apart and his happily ever after being crushed - quite literaly as a swarm of giants invaded the land and destroyed everything, crushing many buildings and people under their feet. I will highlight again the "Into the Woods" reference - because we are literaly in a setting where, after the "Happily ever after", giants arrive and crush/kill everybody, turning everything into a dark survival tale... Just like for "Into the Woods".

Right before, there was of course a delightful play on considering wha it REALLY means for a miller's son to pretend to be a king - starting with how the poor guy can barely read... I do wonder about the choice of Marienne as the land from which Puss in Boots hail. Since Puss in Boots is a Fench story, Marienne can evoke "Marianne", the female personification of the French Republic, but Marienne sounds distinctively like "Marien", which is the German version of Mary (and is found in places' names, such as Marienbad to take a famous example)... It doesn't help that Amanti, Pinocchio's village (Italian) is apparently within Marienne? So... seems kind of a melting pot of cultural influences.

Not much to say about this, outside of the fact that Pib's boots are blue, which is (I don't think?) a usual color choice when illustrating the story, so nice!

Item 5: Mother Goose

Timothy "Mother" Goose is of course Neverafter's version of the character of Mother Goose/Old Mother Goose, and it is very fitting for a witch-storyteller to be a "bard" within the D&D classification. Now... Mother Goose is quite a convoluted and complicated character that has a bizarre set of origins - long story short she was a a character basically made out of nothing?

If I try to simplify stuff... People have been searching for the origins of Mother Goose for a very long time - quite recently in France there was an entire book dedicated to studying the mythological and cultural roots of the figure - but we can't really say anything before Perrault's time. Before Mother Goose, despite being a British character, starts out in France. An alternative name Perrault gave to his set of fairytales (but it is a name that became far more popular and well-known than the intended title) was "Mother Goose's Fairytales" (Les Contes de ma Mère L'Oie). Except Perrault was not refering any specific character when he wrote that - a "mother goose tale" was just an expression of the time, a name used to designate what we call today "fairytales". There was a whole bunch of these names (contes du loup borgne, tales of the one-eyed wolf ; contes de peau d'âne, tales of donkey skin, contes bleus, blue tales), and they were just expressions nobody knows the true origin of. When Perrault wrote that, it is like someone writing "fairy tales" even though they stories do not include fairies. However when Perrault's fairytales moved to England, the name "Mother Goose" was used as an iconic eye-catcher and a famous "trademark" so to speak. People started publishing nursery rhymes compilations under the name "Mother Goose's rhymes" or something similar, in reference to Perrault's best-selling book. And that was how England started "fleshing out" and dare I say "creating" Mother Goose as a character, as a sort of mascot or emblem of fairytales but ESPECIALLY of nursery rhymes, with which she got closely linked in England.

And while this Mother Goose gets involved with characters of fairytales, Timothy and Pottingham are rather born out of the nursery rhymes world (hence why he comes from the very obviously named "Lullaby Lands"). In fact, the whole thing of Mother Goose having a son named Jack, who ended up finding a goose laying golden eggs, and with a gander tied to Mother, comes from one very specific nursery rhyme which dates from when Mother Goose became a character in England - "Old Mother Goose and her Son Jack" (or variations of). It is an entire nursery rhyme dedicated to explaining the newly born character of Mother Goose (because nobody could agree if she was a literal goose or a witch), while involving her with the British stock-character of Jack, and the fable of the "goose layng golden eggs" (already quite famous thanks to the Jack and the Beanstalk story).

Speaking of Jack - the season does play on the multiplicity of "Jacks" in nursery rhymes and British fairytales, since, if you didn't know, Jack is the stock-name for the average fairytale male hero (every country has one - in Germany it is Hans, in Russia Ivan, in France Jean, etc). As such this Jack is explicitely referenced as being both the Jack from the Old Mother Goose nursery rhyme, and the one from the rhyme "Jack be nimble". [As a side note, the fact of having all the Jacks of rhymes and fairytales be one Jack was popularized, again, by the comic book Fables which precisely played on having fairytale archetypes be a singular character undergoing all those adventures, and had Jack as a prominent character]. The last member of the Goose family is also part of the nursery rhymes reference: Henry Hubbard is a reference to the rhyme of "Old Mother Hubbard". I will note that the nursery rhyme of Old Mother Hubbard was one of the subjects of traditional British pantomime... the same way Mother Goose was a big presence in this genre.

As for the Gander, I can't say much here since it was barely introduced but A) it is immediately set as a "negative/reverse" image of the traditional Mother Goose imagery (when Mother Goose is not humanized, it is a big goose with a bonnet - but in colors reverse to the Gander) and B) The Gander literaly plays the trope of "The Monkey's Paw" and various other twisted takes on the archetype of the genie granting you three wishes, except there is a deadly catch to it.

Already from the get-go we know that one of the roles of the magical book is precisely to "protect" and "preserve" the stories from the Time of Shadows, by literaly putting them back in how they are "supposed" to be and sticking them into this idyllic "happily ever after" paradise-like dimension. Aka... When Jack is in the book he literaly just becomes the Jack of our nursery rhymes, in the real world, the one we know and that has been drawn in so many chilren's book. Basically the book does is reset the story before its "grimmificaton", and return it to its "cutesy, optimistic, simple" format, if not, dare I say it, "Disneyified".

Plus: The flooding of Pottingham and the endless rainy weather is already evoked here.

[I will add that @lostsometime posted about the line with the Gander taunting Timothy with the verb "wander" ; establishing a possible link with the nursery rhyme "Goosey Goosey Gander"]

Item 6: Ylfa Snorgelsson

Neverafter's version of "Little Red Riding Hood". Here the character seems to go on from Perrault's version of the story, rather than Grimm, since no woodsman is involved so far and poor Ylfa has been "eaten" by the wolf (here in the sense of - turned into a werewolf like creature). Though if my memory serves me well later episodes reveal it is more related to the Grimm's version of the tale? I'll need to answer that in future notes. [Note: Of course, I do mention the omnipresence of the axe motif around Ylfa's chracter, which does evoke the Woodsman of the Grimm version]

Not much to say here so far... The idea of Little Red Riding Hood being a story tied to werewolves is a modern trope that has been heavily used recently - from this "Red Riding Hood" 2011 movie passing by Zenescope's convoluted and NSFW Grimm Fairy Tales, without forgetting Once Upon a Tme's own dark take on the story. For context and history, the idea of bringing werewolves in the picture was first truly exploited by Angela Carter, in her feminist-Gothic fairytale retelling collection "The Bloody Chamber". In it, she wrote three different short stories (The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves, Wolf-Alice) that interwove together Little Red Riding Hood motifs and traditional werewolf beliefs and legends from Europe. This was the first big landmark in the habit of making Red Riding Hood a werewolf tale, and all three stories were later mixed and adapted into the famous Gothic dark fairytale movie "The Company of Wolves".

Of course, here the "fairytale ending" displacement is by having the game depict what happens when Little Red Riding Hood RETURNS to her house and her family, which is usually never talked about - especially if we follow the Perrault version, where the girl is supposed to be dead. I do love how Ylfa is attached to Mother Goose because, while Mother Goose becomes a sort of "replacement" for the missing Grandmother, it also blurs the line very well between the three feminine characters of Perrault's tale - because in Perrault's version, we have simply a quartet of characters. The little girl, the mother, the grandmother and the wolf - and so having Ylfa refer to Timothy as "Mother" blurs the line between Timothy's character and the archetypal "mother" of the Riding Hood tale... Oh yes, and the wolf of this tale is clearly identified as the Big Bad Wolf that the Three Little Pigs met in their story (the story of the Three Little Pigs is a traditional British fairytale, made famous by Joseph Jacobs on one side, who printed the best-known written version of the story, and Walt Disney on the other with his famous Three Little Pigs shorts).

Item 7: Pinocchio

No need to tell you that Pinocchio is... well Neverafter's version of Pinocchio, the famous character of Carlo Collodi, reinvented and repopularized by Walt Disney. Here turned back into a wooden puppet after winning his life as a "real boy", because he told a lie to save his father...

The interesting thing with Pinocchio is his reinvention in DnD classifications. Of course, the choice of the Warforged to work as a "Puppet" is obvious, but more fascinating is making Pinocchio a Warlock - with as his Patron the mysterious Stepmother, THE archetype of all Wicked Stepmothers... But more about her later. There's also the whole thing with the broken nose becoming his "wizard staff" and it is all so delightful.

As a worldbuilding note, we have in Pinocchio's backstory the apparition of the Wicked Fairy. Now we know that in this universe there are four fairies (due to Sleeping Beauty's background and how the number of fairies change depending on the universe), and that the Wicked Fairy that visited Pinocchio's village is the same as the one that cursed Sleeping Beauty. This also implies that the Fairy with Turquoise Hair and the Fairy Godmother we will later meet were part of the three fairies invited to Rosamund's birth... But who was the fourth fairy? If I recall, she does not have the time to be described since we jump off that universe too early... This Wicked Fairy is meant, as I said before, to emulate Disney's Maleficent, but since she is apparently most if not all the "wicked fairies" of this version of the Neverafter, I will dare invoke the name "Carabosse" to designate what she is meant to represent.

For those who don't know, Carabosse was a name chosen in the famous Tchaikovsky ballet adaptation of Sleeping Beauty for the wicked fairy. This ballet-Carabosse was one of the main inspirations behind Disney's Maleficent, and helped popularize the idea that "Carabosse" was the name of the archetypal wicked fairy. Especially in France where Carabosse is basically THE wicked fairy the same way in Russia Baba-yaga is THE witch. But the funny thing is that the name "Carabosse" does not come from Perrault's Sleeping Beauty... It comes from an unrelated fairytale written by madame d'Aulnoy, who was one of the most intensive makers of "wicked fairies" - and Carabosse was but one of those dozens of indiviual evil fairies, each with their own personalities, quirks and twists. But thanks to Tchaikovsky, she hijacked Sleeping Beauty and now almost every modern adaptation or retelling of the fairytale in French use Carabosse as the name of the fairy that delivers the curse. [Plus, we discovered during the minis auction that the Wicked Fairy's name was Bosartia... Maybe it is a link to CaraBOSSE? BOSartia? Who knows, my thing is overanalyzing stuff and finding links where there's not]

Item 8: The Chandling caravans

I just noticed that there is a total of seven players around the table - the six characters plus the game-master, which actually fits very well a fairytale world since seven is one of the key numbers.

Now we get into the main "plot" of the episode, so my notes will be a little less constructed.

Gerard and Rosamund are cousins "three different times" - I do love the joke that royal families in fairytales are just as inter-bred with each other as they were back in medieval and Renaissance times.

Shoeberg and its inhabitants and the woman that founded the town are of course from the nursery rhyme "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe".

We have a "troll-son""trollson", which is apparently a type of beings designated as such because they are the descendants of trolls (presumably they are from lines mixing human and troll). (I believe there is a pun here on how "son" is literaly a suffix in Nordic countries meaning "son of" or "descendant of").

The caravans are referred to as the "Chandling caravans", the "Chandling company". Now, given "Chandling" might be derived from "chandler", and the business of candle-making... Maybe it is a Rub-A-Dub-Dub/Three Men in a Tub" reference? The nursery rhyme which has "The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker"? But I am probably reading way too much into this... There's other nursery rhymes that could fit - such as an old British children song "Tommy kept a chandler's shop". But it might be completely unrelated...

Lord Bandlebridge's comment about beggars is definitively just a classist statement, but it does confirm that witches, fairies and ogres have an habit of disguising themselves as beggars.

The tricking of Bandlebridge works so well because, as Brennan Mulligan highlights (I know I should be using these people's first name like everybody else in the fandom but it feels weird, we're not on first-name basis), he believes in the fairytale untold rule that you must "grant every request the magical being [that you receive as a host] makes" in order to be rewarded.

The enchanted logs that ward off people from "goblins and boggarts" as long as someone tells a story by its fire is a genius way to highlight the need for "campfire tales".

The character leading the caravans is from the story of "The Little Red Hen" (hence the whole "You help or you don't get to eat"). Fun fact, this story is not from any "traditional" European corpus of fairytales - it is an American story that Mary Mapes Dodge had printed in the 19th century as a "fable".

Old King Cole from the kingdom of Jubilee is of course from the nursery rhyme involving the character of the same name (though I do have to say, the idea of a big bearded large warrior in a chariot drawn by a ram immediately made my mythological brain think of Thor).

I remember that when the episode was released a lot of people were excited at the idea that the giant teapot drawn by a giant rabbit was a Alice in Wonderland reference... More about that next episode.

Finally, the "Black Wood", identified as one of the several "primeval forests" of the Neverafter. I don't think I need to explain what kind of topos this is playing off here.

#points. tbc reference #but dang this is such an interesting breakdown #neverafter

14 notes · View notes