History Headscratchers / AliceInWonderland

* OP makes it sound like there's only ''one'' Jabberwock. How do we know it's not part of an entire species?

*** Trying to rip off {{Batman}}?

!!The book
* When Alice grows too large in the White Rabbit's house why doesn't she use the fan again (like she did in the Hall Of Doors) to shrink herself?
** As soon as she realized the fan was shrinking her, she threw it away and it was lost in the sea of tears.
*** Yes but she found another one in the White Rabbit's house.
**** Not the same fan, and thus unlikely to have the same results.
*** Except that the only reason she ate the carrot was under the reasoning that foodstuffs seemed to be having effects on her size. Wait, are we actually trying to bring ''logic'' into '''Alice in freaking Wonderland??!'''
**** Alice isn't from Wonderland. She still has logic.
***** But she is ''in'' Wonderland and a lot of her frustration comes from the fact that trying to apply logic to situations while she's in it gets her nowhere.
* Why does this book get so much DarkerAndEdgier stuff done to it?
** I suppose its mostly because of the MindScrew attached to the setting, or maybe because, frankly, the animated Disney version of the setting was quite dark and unusually unsettling for the kind of stuff Disney is most often associated with. The characters themselves, specially the Mad Hatter and the Queen(s), have qualities that make a darker and edgier interpretation seem not too far fetched.
** ValuesDissonance perhaps? In this day and age, people probably find the idea of a girl falling down a dangerously deep hole and wandering around aimlessly and alone with creatures that are either apathetic to her or want to kill her to be very dark and scary. It was probably put best in ''The Annotated Alice'', when the Queen of Hearts first shows up. The annotation mentions that parents have worried about the effect such a murderous character would have on children, but kids themselves seemed quite at ease with her (while the annotation mentioned that ''adults'' on the other hand had best be kept away from the Queen).
** Because madness is a common theme in the books, and madness/mental illness isn't the happy trippy funtimes that media likes to portray it as.
** My favourite interpretation of the book is that it's about how scary and illogical the world really is. Alice questions who she is, she's aware of changes happening to her body and her mind but can do nothing about them, she has to humour people who she doesn't like or understand, and she's constantly making up her own rules about how to exist in Wonderland because she doesn't understand everyone else's. That's how most of us feel about growing up/starting a new job/starting a new relationship/meeting new people/going abroad etc. That's just my opinion though :)
* Why is every single Alice "re-imagining" some variation on "OMG DA RED QUEN [[CompositeCharacter OF HARTZ]] IZ EEVIL AND ALIC MUST STOP HER AND STUF!!!1" How is it that the Wizard of Oz has so many good re-imaginings when all Wonderland re-imaginings are ripped off from American Mc­Gee?
** Because the Queen of Hearts is the closest thing to an antagonist the series has, the Red Queen is probably in second, and people like to combine the stories.
*** Why do they always have to be a CompositeCharacter, okay their both queens and red but can't one adaption have them as separate characters? Especially as one is from a deck of cards and the other from a chess set. Now that's a type of adaption I want to see.
**** If they made the Red Queen a villain, I'd imagine her being a calm and collected woman who is an evilly affible, manipulative bitch who is tricking Alice into becoming queen so she can intercept the white army in some way and win the battle. And she wouldn't be interested in chopping heads off and isn't as violent as the Queen of Hearts. Now that's a type of adaption I want to see.
***** Like [[AlternateCharacterInterpretation the White Queen]] from the Tim Burton film? [[FridgeBrilliance Interesting]]...
* Why the (please excuse my language) fuck is everyone convinced that the book is an hallucination by an insane woman, or a drug trip? WHY? Because it's fantasy? But why this book in particular? Why not Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or the Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan or the Spiderwick Chronicles or the NeverEnding Story? Why can't anybody suspend disbelief and use their fucking imagination? No, everything needs to have a rational explanation, even Wonderland.
** Its mostly because of how outright absurd it seems; from a generic person's view, [[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings having Earth's prehistory as magical, with medieval european looking civilisations, with elves, orcs and dwarves and with a fallen dark lord that once disguised himself as a bishounen to fool the elves]] or [[HisDarkMaterials a multiverse with a god like particle of which angels are made and with armoured polar bears]] makes more sense, because as a whole things seem to follow a certain logic. Literature/AliceInWonderland is not by any means logic, in fact its the opposite of it, not even having a recognisable plot, and thats what leads people to think it was the result of drugs, which is quite sad because MindScrew is an awesome trope.
** Not to mention the fact that the author was a known drug user and was possibly under the influence while coming up with the story. With that in mind its not that much of a stretch to think that the protagonist too would be under the influence.
*** I've never heard he was a drug user, and I've read several biographies. I think you've mistaken him for someone else.
*** Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) never used drugs. That is pure fiction. He was a surprisingly sane and logical fellow.
*** Although he might have been a paedophile.
*** The pedophilia is also entirely made up by misinformed biographers (and largely based in values dissonance) and ''any'' reliable source will tell you so.
**** Speaking of the false rumors of pedophilia, why don't people even mention that the entire book was based around trolling his students? Since from some records that he believed that the mathematics his students were thinking was pure lunacy.
** Both stories are openly revealed as dreams, at the end. Dreams, hallucination, and madness are all akin.
** But most people have dreams and they aren't mad. Though YMMV, I suppose.
* Not necessarily about the book, but why don't we have a separate article for Through the Looking-Glass? It has the same number, if not more characters than the first book, is just as witty as it, and is quite possibly the first major ChessMotif in literature. (We have an article on TheHuntingOfTheSnark, why not this?)
** It is this troper's personal opinion that the two ''Alice'' stories are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. Besides, two separate articles would just [[ViewersAreMorons confuse people who are unfamiliar with ''Alice''.]]
** Why not call it "Through The Looking Glass" with "Alice in Wonderland 2" as an alt title?
*** Because Alice In Wonderland 2 is not and never has been the tile of the story?
** Many pages for films also include the sequels. TheHuntingOfTheSnark is not really linked as closely to AIW as TTLG.
* From the BlackComedy-example, exactly what is the dark joke Humpty Dumpty makes? The best I can guess is that Humpty suggests Alice that she should have asked someone to kill her on her seventh birthday, but it still doesn't seem quite right.
** I guessed it was about aborting a baby.
** That wouldn't account for the age of seven. It's exactly what it sounds like: Alice says she can't help growing up, and Humpty counters that she could if someone killed her.
*** I (probably not the original poster) am not sure why one can't help aging past six and a half, but two can, since ICannotSelfTerminate wasn't really implied (unless [[ValuesDissonance Values Dissonance]] between myself and a 19th-century Christian is obscuring [[IntrinsicVow the strength of the "no suicide, no heaven" thing]]).
*** Maybe Humpty Dumpty is saying he would need two people to shove him off the wall.
*** Well, before Queen Victoria took the throne, a child could be hung if they commited a crime, but anyone under seven was too young to be hung. Perhaps the joke is a reference to that?
** It's definitely an allusion to dying/having someone kill you, but I seriously think Gardener was reaching on this point. As a lot of other examples show, people love stretching to find darkness in Alice in one way or another. Gardener's idea doesn't make much sense -- people can commit suicide very well alone, possibly easier than they can find someone willing to kill them. Much more likely (in my opinion) is that the real joke there was Carroll playing on the use of 'one' as a pronoun -- he was very fond of creative, illogical misinterpretations like that -- and Gardener took it entirely the wrong way.
* In ''Through The Looking Glass'', are Hatta and Haigha (the White King's messengers) supposed to be the Mad Hatter and the March Hare from the previous book?
** No, just {{Expies}} who happen to have similar-sounding names. Remember, Looking-Glass Land and Wonderland are two different places.
* Another question about that book. Are the White Queen and the sheep (in the shop) meant to be the same character?

*** To add, I found the mad hatter's makeup very unnerving, they add a pop song at the end instead of Danny Elfman's music, the script writer wanted to make this a feminist film, and most of all, I'm getting tired of Burton redoing films instead of working on adaptations of things that haven't been filmed like his defunct Robert Ripley film or original stories like NightmareBeforeChristmas. He feels the need to "improve" where it doesn't need to be in the first place. Though, I might be wrong in the future, and hope that one of my early inspirations gets back to doing original films in the future.

*** ... why? That's what they called eachother in every other version of the story.

**** Alice-of-the-film hates the Quadrille with a passion. Of course they couldn't have danced the Lobster Quadrille.

** Alice did not need to be made into a feminist. Tim Burton may consider her 'passive', but she is anything but.

***** Yeach, you guys are silly. Alice in wonderland is the antipathy to logic. :)'
***** Alice isn't from Wonderland. She still has logic.

* When Alice grows too large in the White Rabbit's House why doesn't she use the fan again (like she did in the Hall Of Doors) to shrink herself?

*** Anne Hathaway agrees. Quote: "She comes from the same gene pool as the Red Queen. She really likes the dark side, but she's so scared of going too far into it that she's made everything appear very light and happy. But she's living in that place out of fear that she won't be able to control herself."

* I saw a version of {{Monopoly}} starring the Disney Villains, and for some reason, the villain's spaces on the board game included one featuring the Mad Hatter. How exactly is the Mad Hatter supposed to be considered a villain?

** "Why must you always be the wrong size?" Said wistfully, to boot. That alone does it for the shipp- ew. You just gave me a horrible, ''horrible'' AlternateCharacterInterpretation involving your description of the Hatter's relationship with Alice, GettingCrapPastTheRadar regarding Lewis Carrol's... infatuation, and the WifeHusbandry trope. [[SarcasmMode Thanks, above troper]]. But I digress. Their relationship to me mostly seemed like nostalgic friendship with occasional hints of a little-kid style crush on the part of the Hatter (when she was nineteen, at least, the brief flashback wasn't very informative), vague sympathy/sense of purpose on the part of Alice until later on when she decided it wasn't necessarily a dream, and fire-forged [[PlatonicLifePartners something]] (still with the sympathy) towards the end.

** [[SarcasmMode Of course, there's no such thing as]] ExecutiveMeddling, [[ScapegoatCreator no, not at all]].

**** Ah. No, it's presumably a master at evaporation the same way termites are master architects, or [[DungeonsAndDragons sorcerors are different from wizards]]. It could be a master at evaporation magic, though, [[WhatMeasureIsANonHuman if it really is a being rather than just an intelligent beast]].

* In the Tim Burton film, the futterwaken. Not only that it was a BigLippedAlligatorMoment that makes anyone who preforms it properly look like the [[WidgetSeries Japanese]] [[UsefulNotes/McDonalds Ronald McDonald]], but Alice's use of it at the end was... utterly pointless, even if you consider it to be a generic victory dance, unless you interpret it as her attempt to convince those present that she's mad, a sort of RefugeInAudacity (I thought at first that she was merely flaunting her lack of stockings).

* In the Tim Burton film, the futterwaken. Not only that it was a BigLippedAlligatorMoment that makes anyone who preforms it properly look like the [[WidgetSeries Japanese]] {{Ronald McDonald}},but Alice's use of it at the end was... utterly pointless, even if you consider it to be a generic victory dance, unless you interpret it as her attempt to convince those present that she's mad, a sort of RefugeInAudacity (I thought at first that she was merely flaunting her lack of stockings).

*** My point remains though. To anyone who thinks Tim Burton's Alice is garbage, I kindly point you in the direction of the Jim Henson version. That right there is the truly inferior adaptation, [[YourMileageMayVary at least in my opinion]].

*** That's... even ''worse''. So, you adapted a book you don't like into a movie and made it "better" by imposing a plot where there was none and missing the whole point of said book (being, there is no point)? It's like asking [[WebOriginal/ZeroPunctuation Yahtzee]] to make a J-RPG for you.

** What always puzzled me about that part was that the singing voices of the cards are dubbed by the Mellomen, a barbershop ''quartet.'' But there are only ''three'' cards...

*** That's... even ''worse''. So, you adapted a book you don't like into a movie and made it "better" by imposing a plot where there was none and missing the whole point of said book (being, there is no point)? It's like asking [[ZeroPunctuation Yahtzee]] to make a J-RPG for you.

** Its mostly because of how outright absurd it seems; from a generic person's view, [[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings having Earth's prehistory as magical, with medieval european looking civilisations, with elves, orcs and dwarves and with a fallen dark lord that once disguised himself as a bishounen to fool the elves]] or [[HisDarkMaterials a multiverse with a god like particle of which angels are made and with armoured polar bears]] makes more sense, because as a whole things seem to follow a certain logic. AliceInWonderland is not by any means logic, in fact its the opposite of it, not even having a recognisable plot, and thats what leads people to think it was the result of drugs, which is quite sad because MindScrew is an awesome trope.