Trivia / In the Realms of the Unreal

• Creator Breakdown:
  • Darger lost a photograph of a little girl named Elsie Paroubek, who had disappeared in the spring of 1911 and was found a month later, apparently suffocated to death. He had clipped the image from a newspaper, and unable to retrieve it, came to believe that God himself was conspiring against him. When his prayers for the return of the photograph went ignored, Darger flew into a quiet rage, and in the story, the tide turned against the Christian nation of Abbieannia and in favour of the atheist nation of Glandelinia, who visit horrific Cold-Blooded Torture and murder on the citizens of Abbieannia, subjecting them to strangulation, crucifixion, burning, disembowelment, and forced cannibalism. Darger eventually forgave God and turned the tide back in favour of Abbieannia.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Elsie Paroubeck's parents left the Catholic church to become Freethinkers, did not have their children baptized, and Elsie had a Freethinker funeral service.
  • As mentioned in the article, John Manley's appearance is based on Czar Nicholas II, who was a devout Christian and fond of children.
• Truth in Television: The search for Elsie, as detailed in newspapers across the country, actually involved organized bands of schoolchildren! Taking advantage of the fact that little kids notice things adults do not and often go into small, overlooked places while playing, police worked with School Superintendent Ella Flagg Young to recruit over 230,000 children from all over the city to join the search for Elsie. Darger, who read the Chicago papers every day, would have known about this, and while he would already have been working on the Vivian Girls narrative, the idea of children's "sharp eyes and keen wits" accomplishing what adults could not would have resonated with him.
• Write What You Know: Darger based the experiences of the child slaves on his own experiences of abusive orphanages and insane asylums.
• Write Who You Know:
  • Darger also included a fictionalized version of William Schloder, his Only Friend, as a Four-Star Badass Angelinian General. The evil General John Manley is based on Darger's Frenemy of that name from the Lincoln Asylum.
  • Darger himself seems to appear as several different characters throughout the novel - at one point even appearing as a villain.