House of R - Tropes Course: Down the Rabbit Hole and Into Portal-World Stories

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Jo and Mal are here for another one of their famous Tropes Courses; this time, it is the journey into portal worlds (09:13). From Narnia to Oz and so much more, they take a look at what magical, other worlds have brought to so many readers and lovers of stories throughout the years. Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, I am Juliet Litman, and let me tell you about my podcast Bachelor Party. It is your one stop for all things, Bachelor Nation. That includes The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Bachelor in Paradise, and now Golden Bachelor. We are very excited about that in particular, but if you like anything having to do with those shows, come check it out. It's on Mondays and Thursdays. On Mondays, I am joined by my co-host, Callie Curry. We also dip into a little Love Island, and by a little, I mean, we are enthusiastic about that one as well. Plus, on Thursdays, I have a rotating series of guests with people from The Bachelor and from The Ringer who share my affection for this world. So don't forget to subscribe or follow Bachelor Party wherever you get your podcasts. The playoffs are here.

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Services not available in all areas. Toto? I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. Oh, Toto. I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. Wake up, Toto. You're not in Kansas anymore. Jesus, are you startled me.

You are not in Kansas anymore. You're on Pandora. There's a bad draft over there where I usually sit. It's kind of like a big downward gust. It's not exactly Twitter, we're not in Kansas anymore, but it's still pretty darn uncomfortable. Like school bowl, buddy? I've got a feeling we're not in Coolsville anymore.

It's Buckley's seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye. To the House of Our, Sister Podcast of the Ringerverse. And we're still, I would say, your Nexus podcast feed for All Things Fandum. Joining me today, now that she has gone down the rabbit hole, through the licking glass, into a sticky, icky vine-covered portal in a middle school somewhere, it is Maui Rubin.

Ooh, Joanna, curious, sir and curious, sir. Can't wait for today's pod. I'm so stoked. Today we are here to do yet another installment in our ongoing Troops course series. You can check back earlier in the feed for some of the other episodes we've done on stuff like enemies to lovers, lone wolf and club, magical swords. But today we're here to talk about this one doesn't really have an official title. I'm calling it down the rabbit hole. You could call it not in Kansas anymore.

You can call it Portals if you want. I don't know. But we're here to talk about it. Are you using your Portles voice as you shot Portals? Uh-huh. Blake Portals, a person who I definitely know exists. We're here to talk about other worlds in sci-fi fantasy. And we are inspired today by Asoka.

We'll talk a little bit more about why. But yeah, we just wanted to talk about a bunch of stories that we love. This is our favorite thing to do on Troops course. I think you want to say about that basic idea or your excitement around it, Mallory, before we get into program reminders, et cetera. I'll issue the caveat that has become a routine. part of the Troops course setup, the Troops course intro, which is this is not a fully comprehensive, exhaustive list and rundown of every single example of the thing in the history

of time. We're talking about some of our favorites. We're talking about some of the most quintessential, some of the ones that feel most central to the stories that we're consuming today. And I always have fun on Troops course pots. Always. have fun, prepping, seeing what stories we're going to dive into, making my way through your beautiful Google Docs. This is the one where I was like, how will I ever do anything with my time again other than just continue to read all of these books that we just had a fresh excuse to open again? Like you read one line, one quote, one passage, and you have fallen down the rabbit hole again. And that I think is one of the things I'm most looking forward to discussing today.

Not only all of these beautiful examples, but that really, like, deeply meta quality of what the stories represent to us and what the other worlds or wonderlands inside of them represent to the characters. I'm hyped. Me too. I'm so excited. You and I both had a problem putting down the books last night. It was like, what if I just didn't do the pod and just read to each other? It was like pencils down. Yeah, maybe that is the pod.

Okay. So. That is that. That is what we are doing. That is what we are doing today. Obviously, there's a lot always going on in the larger ringer-verse family. Tonight, we're recording on Tuesday morning. Tonight, the Mid-N-Eboys, Poo-Pew!

We'll be recording their fresh reactions to Asoka, Episode 7. If you're not listening to the Mid-N-I boys' coverage of Asoka, what are you doing with your lives? It's gotten really exciting and fresh, especially now that they're, like, you know, frostily recording, fresh out of the bottom. Box recording on Tuesday night when the newest episode of Assoca drops. So that'll be available to you on Wednesday. Mint Edition, the minty fresh crew will be here over on Riggerverse on Friday to talk about the Gen V premiere, which I can't believe is already here. That is astonishing. And then, of course, Mallory and I will be here on Friday to do our Asoka deep dive.

Deep. Next week, though, Mallory, on Tuesday. what is it already time for? Astonishingly, somehow Palpatine returned and somehow it is already time to talk about Loki. Loki Season 2.

Obviously, we'll be talking about Loki's season 2 a few days after that, but on Tuesday at the top of the week, we will have a preview, a primer pod for you. We're gonna do something a little bit different for this one for the primer pod.

So you'll find out what, in real time, what shape this will take? But it's a teaser. this will be focusing on Loki the character and why he is such a meaningful figure to Marvel Pants. Can't wait for that one. We love Loki.

And we didn't get to pot about the first season. I know. And then we'll be talking about Loki together like in real time. It's just a thrill. Next week is going to be wild. A Loki Primer, Osoka finale.

And then just right into Loki. Season 2, episode one. And then I get to see your face with my face. And then your book tour. Wow. What a time. Posting some baseball. All of it. Yeah. How are the O's doing? Fucking great. Yeah. I didn't have to ask because I already knew. Um, Mallory. How do all the beautiful bad babies out there? And I'm sorry, I didn't say hello to you guys. What's up bad babies?

How can they keep track of everything? How can they keep track of everything? Thanks for asking. Here's what I'd recommend. Follow the pod. Follow the pod. Follow the pod. on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. We've got this beautiful, still brand spanking newish house of our feed where we're pod in twice a week. So follow. You'll see the archive of our former House of Our episodes from the Ring ofverse feed porting over. It's begun. The migration, the journey has begun. Steve is doing the Lord's work. And really most likely over the next couple days, the whole archive will be there for you so you can catch up on prior pods if you're so inclined. Those will also still be over on the main ring reverse feed for you. So follow along.

While you're at it, follow the ringerverse on the social media platform of your choosing. If you're on Twitter or X or whatever the hell it's called, ringerverse is there. If you're on Instagram, ringer versus there. If you're on TikTok, ringer versus there. And while you're at it, emails, send them. You got something longer than a tweet. You got some. You got some longer than an X. See, this is why X doesn't work, among many other reasons that we won't talk about right now.

I just refuse. He can't make me. Send your emails to Hobbits and Dragons at gmail.com. Here comes your friendly, other world, spoiler warning. Yeah.

Is it just stories? All stories ever. For a trope's course. some possible points will worlds will visit today Narnia, Wonderland, Oz, Philly and Further,

Fantasia, the lands beyond, fairy, spelled the really fun way, Neverland, the quantum realm, the upside down, and oh yes, Barbie land because Mallory has finally seen the Barbie movie. Finally! Can't wait to talk about that.

We'll talk about that at the end of the podcast just briefly. Let's go to the scope of the trope. So we always like to explain us. Explain yourself. What are you doing here? Why are we talking about this trope right now? As I mentioned, we're covering Asoka on Fridays, and there are sort of two possibilities for inspiration for this episode. There is, the world between worlds is a sort of more obvious portal world. We literally in the show, Rebels, watch Ezra walk through a portals.

There are portals galore in the world itself. This is very much a portal world, an obvious one. But there's also the question of Pyridia. We don't know yet how different our heroes have gone to another galaxy entirely. And is that other galaxy entirely just as same as our galaxy? I think that would be a bit of a storytelling shame. And so though we have not seen it, yet, beyond, you know,

while there's zombies there, we haven't dealt with like a ton of zombies we've seen them before. So are they going to show us something new? Are there different rules there, the different ways at work? Is this going to feel like, you know, because we went through a portal to get here,

is this going to feel like one of the other worlds that we will be talking about in our conversation today? Mallory, do you have any pretty a, Thoughts or feelings, expectations? So many. But luckily we have other pods that people can listen to for that. I'll say to the question of whether Pyridia ends up fitting this description or not, I think it's like there are two potential ways.

The pathway to Pyridia and Paredia itself, but also like whatever the quest on Pyridia leads to could also end up being our portal into some sort of other world. So maybe that's something that Baylon's quest to find the beginning or the power opens or reveals or unlocks. Maybe it is something inside of or connected to Peridia or accessed once on Peridia and not just Peridia overall. Who can say, we're going to find out quite literally tonight and or a week from tonight. thrilling what a time to be us.

But as you noted, the world between worlds certainly an apt comp. And, you know, we've quoted some of these lines from Faloni before, but this idea, as he said, I don't know how real it actually is. I don't want it to find that for people anyway. And how that quest for knowledge

that he's described and that we've seen play out in Rebels and Now, Asoka maps on to what this sort of allegorical or mirror dimension and many different forms and many different stories can unlock for you about your own life, but also how there is often a benefit of room to play

and room to interpret in one of these planes where you have to discover what it is for you. The character has to discover what it is for them, and that is actually part of its great utility. If it were clearly defined and everybody understood it the exact same way,

then what would the adventure be? I completely agree. Wouldn't be nearly as fun. So to nail down a tighter definition of what this trope is, we're going to talk about what it is, and then I have a lot of lists of what it's not. Yeah, so we're here to talk about other worlds, like a whole universe and setting, preferably when you've accessed through a portal or a gateway of some kind. And that portal gateway door down the rabbit hole idea, I told Mallory when we were when we were, when we were, putting first putting this together. I was like, well, for once I won't be quoting Tolkien because Tolkien doesn't count. This is historic. And then I forgot that one of Tolkien's most

famous speeches he ever gave was called on fairy stories. Um, yeah. So I, I have just like a few tiny, tiny Tolkienisms in here. Um, and one is- The first mention of anything Tolkien or Middle Earth adjacent comes on page two of the Google back. I'm actually, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to bump one up right here and say in talking about portals and doors and rabbit holes and all that sort of thing. Tolkien talks about the draw of the forbidden, the prohibition. He says in fairy stories, he says, thou shalt not. The gentlest nursery tales know it. Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick.

The locked door stands as an eternal temptation. So I just like that idea when we're talking about portals, we're talking about when you see that rabbit hole, when you see it, you know, I mean, you can't really control the tornado necessarily. But, you know, like a lot of these options involve a conscious choice to step through something is that in a lot of cases you're pretty sure you shouldn't, you know, and especially if the protagonist is a young child. But it's like, fuck it. That looks too fun. I'm going to go, you know. Absolutely. It's one of the things that I love about the trope.

and there are a number of different subsets and permutations, but whether it is like some sort of weariness or wanderlust or just more like coming of age, thirst for adventure, there is an aspect of a call and an aspect of a quest, and there is an active quality. Not always. Sometimes you do quite literally, like, fall in or something reaches out for you.

But typically, there is a step you take. there is something about your circumstance that leads you to seek and explore. And of course, if that is the origin, then there's just such a rich, ripe, fertile earth for like discovery, whether that discovery is about you, your life, your own world back home, the world that you're in. And of course, in the best version of these tales, those things are inextricable from each other. And all of that awakening is happening in tandem. It's, if we think of just, you know, I love that you opened with like all of the different terms or short hands that you can use to indicate what you're talking about. Is it Wonderland? Is it Otherworld? Is it down the rabbit hole? Is it not in Kansas anymore?

I always think of like portal fantasy and Wonderland as just like not only, you know, Otherworld too, not only like great app to descriptions of the thing we're talking about, but as language that has seeped into a feeling. Like, much more so than even just the trope, right? If you talk to somebody, you recommend a story as a portal fantasy, or you talk about a wonderland inside of a fictional universe, without you telling that other person, a single thing about the world or the characters, they will have a sense of the kind of possibility that awaits and that wonder, what better word could there be for it, right, of a whole new world of possibility. This is like what it is to read.

This is what it is to fall in love with a fictional universe in the first place. And sometimes there are very fully realized and rich allegorical renderings. Sometimes it's subtler. Sometimes the mapping on hues more closely to something recognizable. Sometimes it's utterly distinct.

A lot of these are part of a great coaching tree and you can trace the connections and influences. The best. The best. And to your point about like wonder, like, Injecting Wonderland is part of it, but also the idea of like Neverland or the upside down, this disorientation that comes with all of it. Your underground, you're upside down.

Everything is on its head. It's flipped. What are the rules? That's the thing we'll talk about. Like, what are the rules? How do I figure out what the rules are? Are they something? And is that part of the process of like either letting go of a rigid idea of what the rules should be

or in some of like the more Victorian examples. inserting rule and order back into sort of a chaotic world. Yes. I do want to mention, as Mallory said up top, none of these trips course are ever fully comprehensive. So I will acknowledge a whole or a portal, if you will, in our own knowledge here and say that the Japanese have a whole, like, rich tradition of these other world stories.

Forgive my pronunciation, but I believe it's called Isakai. And it means like other world. That's what it literally means. is a whole kind of story in Japanese storytelling. It's a little more specific than what we're going to be talking about today. Usually there's a lot of life and death, like death and reborn sort of storytelling in these stories. Or our hero gets to this portal world and is vastly overpowered compared. It's sort of like Superman being charged up by our yellow sun kind of situation.

And then there's also an element, and I'll confess, I did not explore very, far, but apparently our hero instantly attracts an other world harem as part of this narrative. I'd like to learn more about it. I did not for this pod, but I just want to acknowledge this is a whole rich tapestry that we will not be spending a lot of time and empathetic exists. Let's talk about what it decidedly is not the other world story, because you're like, isn't this all fan art, don't all fantasies take place in magical world? Yes, but let's talk about it.

So we're not simply talking about one character going somewhere else on the magical map. So like Gulliver's Travels is not a portal story. Frodo leaving the shire to go to scarier parts of the magical map of Middle Earth doesn't count because you cannot simply walk into a magical. I mean, sometimes you literally do, but like one cannot simply walk into a magical land is the point. So like Westeros or Earthsea or even the Arrhusian, or even the. original planet hopping of Star Wars, that is not portal travel necessarily. The reason we're making distinction with Puritia is because it just seems significant. We're in another galaxy entirely.

It's a whole different thing. So, you know, in those other stories that we love, there's magic there, there's dragons, but that's a status quo of that world. That is the familiar world to our hero versus our hero leaves their familiar world, whether it's literally our real world or another kind of quote quote unquote ordinary world to go to a different one where the rules do not apply. We're not talking about the underworld. We could because a lot of underworld stories serve a similar purpose, but we kind of want to save that for its own thing. So things like cocoa or what dreams may come or stuff like that, like that's a rich storytelling tradition. We're greedy and we want that to be its own trip's course. So we're saving that for a later.

Carve out, Steve, carve out 17 hours for when we're finally talking about the underworld and his dark materials together. Done. Get the Kleenex ready. We're not talking about something we've been talking about a lot on the Doctor Who podcast, which is the concept of hiding in plain sight. Right. So this is something like Harry Potter, where like there is magic in this world.

You just didn't know where to look. Or Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Or Percy Jackson, a book that we have both read. Yeah, we have. We read a book. We're so proud of ourselves. We're not doing hiding in plain sight. Neverwhere maybe counts because he literally goes to a door, but I'm not counting it.

And then we're not, this is a tricky one. We're not doing Dreamland mostly. It's complicated. As Mallory said, what would be the fun if you could clearly define these things? But stories that I love like over the garden wall or where the wild things are or Inception that are like overtly dream space is not what I'm talking about here. And here comes Professor Tolkien again to tell you, this is. I have only one more after this, and then we're done.

We're putting J.R. to bed. Tolkien fucking hates a Dreamland story, and I kind of love that about him. In his On Fairy Story's essay, he said, if a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal desire at the heart of fairy, the realization independent of the conceiving mind of imagined wonder. I just love that where he's like, that's fucking cheating. guys. It's all a dream. Fuck you.

You can keep it. Love that. I love that. I love that. Tolkien's like, don't try that shit with me. No. Great stuff. So salty. I did want to shout out, though. Imagine if Tolkien had X. Twitter, you mean? Yeah.

Just firing his hot takes on. Just rip it off takes. No, he would be... This is what I will say about On Fairy Stories, an essay that I reread last night. Incredible. I love to. Tolkien, you know I do. Everyone in the world knows I do. He needed an edit on that essay. You could have done wonders and trim that down for him. Not that we're one to talk about trimming

runtime. Yeah, everyone who's listening to this and knows nothing about my career as an editor and only knows the runtime of our pods. It's like, what the hell is Joanna talking about? Mallory contains multitudes. That idea that's all a dream, though, I just want really quickly one-to-mentioned this concept of like gaslighting that happens sometimes in these sequels official or not of these stories. So I'm thinking of like the 80s nightmare fest that is returned to Oz where Dorothy is literally given electroshock therapy because Anteem and Uncle Henry thinks she has lost her mind talking about Oz.

Or in Hook when Robin Williams is Peter Pan is like, what do you mean? that never what are you what are you talking about wendy neverland does not exist that never happened you know and that rediscovering of the wonder of that affirmation that you were right all along and uh they shouldn't have made maybe tried to give you electrical shock therapy um return oz what a waking nightmare that was a yellow jacket it's a show we're watching in real time uh hook i used to watch this all the time when i was a child you know every now and then you're just like this was you think back on a movie that you watch kind of every two

weeks for multiple years that's one of them for me yeah I love Hook. We're going to hear from Hook, actually, later today. And then last one at least, we're not doing time travel. Being trapped in the past or the future, like in stories like a Connecticut, Yankee and King, Arthur's Court, or Outland or something like that, that can serve a similar narrative function to being trapped in a portal world. But why on earth would we rob ourselves of the future time travel tropes course that we certainly plan to do? Question for you. Yeah, yeah.

If we're not talking about Outlander today, will any other stories that we are discussing today involve saving somebody's life via a hand job? Actually, possibly. Oh, yeah. Oh, Sassanach, what can't you do? Okay, that's all the things that we're not talking. Oh, boy.

Great stuff. Let's talk a little bit more what we already talked about. Subcategories of the trip. Mallory already mentioned this a little bit, but there's like two kind of main categories that we want to talk about. Like the idea of something that's fantastically grounded. So there's like wizards and dragons and everything's like real and there's clear internal logic, firm rules. My favorite.

Internal logic and firm rules. Love that. Usually confirm not to be a dream. Be like, am I dreaming? And then like someone pitches you and you're like, no, I'm awake or something like that. Or you take an object from that world back into your real world and it still exists, something like that. that's one kind of escape. So, like, yeah, there's weird stuff going on, but it all makes sense side the world.

And then there's dream-like fantasy worlds. And this is where things get a lot fuzzier, right? In terms of, like, I said we're not talking about dreamy, but there's dream-like worlds where, you know, we're vibing. We're viving. We're viving in these worlds, right? Mm-hmm. These are usually, like, very allegorical in nature. Dream logic often applies, like, doors might lead.

to different places depending on where and when and how you open them, etc. Wonderland, Alice of Wonderland is a big one here because you might be like, Joanna, why is Wonderland allowed when Alice is dreaming the whole time? And my rebuttal to that, because I knew you'd be saying that at home, folks, is that at the end of through the looking glass, when Alice comes back to the real world and like wakes up shaking her cat. She has this question of like, was I dreaming or was the Red King,

was I dreaming the Red King or was the Red King dreaming me? One for the philosophers, actually, out of Alice in Wonderland. So I might argue that if Alice is in fact a figure inside the Red King's dream, then she's just like nestled in another frame narrative. And this is actually not all a dream. That's my excuse for why Alice is here.

But stuff like the, like the labyrinth the classic Jim Henson, Jennifer Connolly, David Bowie, joint, where a girl goes to rescue her baby brother from the Goblin Gang. That idea of rule, that idea of like rule and order being amiss. Steve, can we hear this clip? It's not fair. You say that so often. I wonder what your basis for comparison is.

And that's when he just fucked with time. We'll talk about time a little later on, but he just like moved the clock around. She's on a clock, a ticking clock, and he just moved up a couple hours because he can. Because he's a goblin king. A lot of time dilation in these stories. What are you going to do? Under the dream, like, fantasy world, I will just mention like the spirit realms.

This one is also like a little bit harder to define necessarily, but stuff like Miyazaki's great film spirited away. The spirit realm that exists in Avatar and Cora. In Neil Gaiman's American Gods, the spirit realm is called The Backstage. I've always loved that. And I'm going to shout out Brando. Sandos Cosmere as a sort of like spirit realm. Do you any, have you ever wanted to go to the, if you, if you were to pick a spirit realm, where would you go? And what would you eat? Ooh. I would probably, I would probably make my way into the Avatar universe. Yeah. Just always seemed like an absolute delight. Bug knows what's up. Yeah. What about you? Which would your choice be? I mean, you're, you're in your hardcore Brando Sando discovery phase right now. Has that swayed you? I am in the Brando Sandoz discovery.

stage, but I think that like, spirited away, I don't know. I've always, I've always wanted to go there. Sometimes I dream I'm there. Oh, yeah. It's true. How nice. It's Miazaki season. I always feel like follows Miyazaki season. So, you know, throw on some Kiki's Liberty Service and just enjoy yourself. The origin of this trope, which we're just going to zoom through really quickly, we've always, in our storytelling, obviously, always had ideas of other worlds that have manifested in a million different ways. If it's like Olympus

or Asgard, where the gods live the pantheon, heaven or hell, you know, if you believe in that binary, please forget my pronunciation, but like Viraj or Chinvat, I believe, are like other worlds that exist in other, like,

more Eastern storytelling traditions. We've always believed in this idea of elsewhere. The Irish have a very strong tradition of this, because we're going to talk about fairies in a second, but the Imram tradition, which is usually involved getting in a boat and going elsewhere in the world and discovering a fantastical place. Something I thought was really interesting I was reading in one of the various essays that I read is this idea of like when we decided to circumnavigate, when we just circumnavigate the world, when we finally decided to go

out to all corners and actually plot what the world was sort of starting the 16th century, that's when we really started to move from this like Imram's story tradition of like get in a boat and go somewhere fantastical to like, oh, no, we've been everywhere and it's all just like here. So then we then we start to create these portals, these fairy rings, these other things that will transport you to elsewhere, you know? Yeah, like what actually used to rest in the corner or the edge of a map, you know, there'd be dragons. Like the possibility was here and then once it wasn't, we had to find it elsewhere. Yeah. Also, I cannot confirm this, but I love the concept of this, so I'm just going to share it. And when I said I read it and then I couldn't find it corroborated anywhere else, there was this idea that like Dreamland in medieval storytelling, that they would set things in Dreamland to excuse like basically continuity errors in their storytelling.

Like if their storytelling was shoddy, they're like, but this is set in Dreamland. So don't worry if it doesn't like make sense or line up or whatever. I was like, well, that's, you know, I've heard worse. excuses, honestly. For plowls. And I will. Okay, last comment from the professor. Because we want to talk about fairy, F-A-E-R-I-E, as this sort of idea as a dangerous place.

And I love this. I was a little dismayed when I was doing research for this podcast to realize something I had never before, which is that the fairy tradition as it existed, let's say at least, like the Celtic tradition was sort of warped by the intrusion of Christianity, which might be responsible for transforming the fairies from like household gods and goddesses to evil, wicked things. But I've actually always loved that the idea of the fay and the fairy are dangerous and wicked. Like the older tradition, they were always sort of tricksters, but maybe more benign tricksters.

and then perhaps it's the church that was like, actually they're closer to demons. And I'm like, what if demons rule, though? That's how I feel about fairies. So here's Professor Tolkien. The last we'll hear of him today, I think. Talking about fairy, F-A-E, R-I-E. He says, fairy is a perilous land. And in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.

The realm of fairy story is wide. and deep and high and filled with many things. All manner of beasts and birds are found there. Shoreless seas and stars uncounted. Beauty that is an enchantment and an ever-present peril. Both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm, a man may perhaps count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them. And while he is there, it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost. I've always loved that passage, right? I think these stories should be a little scary, right? A little dangerous. Absolutely. I mean,

if you're following that rabbit, what does that represent, whether you're in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or The Matrix? It's the unknown. And so does the unknown and that desire to sate some sort of curiosity or urge to like understand and discover always lead to something pleasant and positive? Of course not. What would that, how would that serve to reflect something illuminating

about what it means to live a life? So I also like, especially because of the, and this is something we'll talk about a little more later, the number of other world stories that are also coming of age stories that center, and this is not always the case, but often the case on young people. that's part of growing up. Being afraid, facing your fears,

something in front of you that challenges a notion you always held. And the idea that a fairy wouldn't just be a fun and pleasant, flitting thing, but maybe the thing you needed to figure out how to thwart or evade is kind of thrilling. I love that. I won't quote him, but Tolkien also elsewhere in that speech is like, no, but he was like, fuck the Victorians for trying to turn fairies into these like insipid little garden. in things. He was like they should be wild and wicked. Modern examples of like fairy stories that we're still reading today.

A quarterthorn and roses is a hugely popular series right now. Takes place in a fairy realm. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. A very dangerous Faye in that book. Neil Gaiman's starred us less well a mixed bag, but we're going to we're going to land of the fairy. Coraline also is a is a, is a classic. classic child snatching fairy story. And I love, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld,

fairy is this like parasite universe ruled by this unhinged queen, caught between day and night, where creatures of myth are stolen for other dimensions or even people's minds and dreams. Yeah, and just that threat of violence we already talking about, like off with her head is like a pervasive Alice refrain. There are pirates and crocodiles who might get you in Neverland. You know, like, dangers abound.

So I love a dangerous portal world. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess. You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer, unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner. Or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those WeatherTech seat protectors.

So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. As we always do, we want to check in with our pal Joe, Joe Campbell. You heard of him? Lads. Oh, yeah, you got the first one in this week. I did.

I didn't even do the accent, though. I've done it in Lads. All right. So which step on the hero's journey do we find a portal world? or an unknown world. If you've only ever, if you haven't studied the hero's journey and only ever heard us

just constantly bring it up, you might not know that the hero's journey is often depicted, not as a straight line, but as a circle, of the story wheel, as it's often called, and often as it's depicted,

you'll see the stops along the way on the wheel as we leave home and return home, right? But in the center of the wheel, it is divided. between the normal world and the unknown. And it's, I would you say, two thirds, two thirds unknown, one third known. Yeah, roughly. Yeah.

In the center of the story wheel. And so to our earlier point about what does and doesn't count, all magical worlds, all portal worlds, but not all unknowns are portal worlds. You swear aromboicing us? Exactly, I am. Yeah. Luke leaves Tatooine to go off an adventure into the unknown, as Elsa would say. That's not going through a portal, but Alice ditching her boring-ass sister to go down the rabbit hole.

That's also going into the unknown. Her sister reads books that don't even have pictures in them. What are we doing? What are we doing here? What are we doing? Do you want to talk about any examples on this hero's journey section? Yeah, you know, this feels like a potentially apt place to talk about a series of books that I absolutely love. The Catherine M. Valenti Fairyland series, Cat Valenti, five novels that center on September, who when we meet is a 12-year-old.

So, right, right in that prime, I'm on a coming of age journey. These were set in the 1940s in September's world, in our world, in Omaha, Nebraska. and it is instantaneous that September is carried by the green wind. Page one, instantaneous. The first sentence is, once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house. We know all we need to know immediately. And obviously we don't, right?

And we discover quite a bit after that. But it does not take long for us to be swept up right along with September into the hero's journey. And there are a lot of different sections of today's pod where the Fairyland books would fit beautifully. But the reason I wanted to hit them here is because they do such a brilliant job. I mean, I think the writing in these books is gorgeous. Of tapping into that meta quality of how these stories that we read at home, in our beds and our couches with each other at the library are those portals for us and the characters

inside of them we'll talk about that idea more in a few minutes are able to experience in their other world what those books give us right the call to adventure that step into the hero's journey so i'll read you a passage from the first fairyland book hang with me it's a I love it when he reads me. It's not a short one. I love it when he reads me. But it's about this idea. It's about the call, the journey. The trouble was, September didn't know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it were merry, she might dash after a spoon. And it would all be a marvelous adventure with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party with red lanterns at the end. But if it were a serious, tale, she might have to do something important, something involving with snow and arrows and enemies. Of course, we would like to tell her which, but no one may know the shape of the tail in which they move. And perhaps we do not truly know what sort of beast it is either.

Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble. Surely, she must have suspected the shape of her tail when the green wind appeared

in her kitchen window. Certain signs are unmistakable. But now she's alone, poor child, and there do not seem to be too terribly many fairies about. And instead of dancing in mushroom rings, she must contend with very formal witches and they're dead brothers, and we must pity her.

It would be easy for me to tell you what happened to her, why I need only choose a noun and a few verbs, and off she goes, but September must do the choosing and the going, and you must remember from your own adventuring days how harsh a task lies before her at this moment. I love this idea, that the call isn't just an electric, thrilling thing Of course it is. That's why we call it the call to adventure.

But it's scary. It's daunting. The unknown is exciting for the same reasons that it's terrifying. Like what might we discover that changes the way we think about everything we've known to that point? And that can unlock something for you. Part of the power of like the allegorical nature of these stories is that you can learn something about your life when you're looking at it through a different colored lens, right? but it's not all pleasant. It's not all popcorn.

And I think that the idea of like glimpsing horror amid the wonder is like part of what makes this Fairyland series so so brilliant because it's not an either or. It's all entwined. That's part of the magic of it. There's this line pretty early in the book, Fairland is an old place and old things have strange hungers. And that idea of strange hungers is, I think, such a perfect summation of what you might find in some sort of other world if you follow that rabbit.

I love that. We are, that was so beautiful. Thank you for reading to me always. We're going to talk later about, like, this idea of a hungry portal, right? Like a hungry other world that wants to devour something. Indeed. So as we mentioned, yeah, so this idea of, I love this idea of the call to adventure, as we've sort of alluded to, coming from sort of inside the human heart or head.

It's not that you've got a hologram of a hot princess who happens to be your sister asking for help and met a wizard at the desert. It's not that the neighborhood stoner wizard has come to your door telling you you've got a magic ring. It comes from some restlessness and dissatisfaction inside of you, which, you know, like all of those heroes share. Luke is staring at the binary sunset for a reason.

He wants to go feel adventure. But a lot of these characters don't need anything other than just to see the portal open up before them and decide to go. And I like that the reason we have these ordinary real world frameworks is there are a bunch of different reasons. But one of the reasons we have these kind of stories is, is to have a protagonist that goes with us into this new world. So we are oftentimes more emotionally invested in these characters because it is like we are journeying together.

They are our guide. They're as disoriented as we are. They are figuring things out in real time as we are. And so I really like that. But also, we talk about spending time in the Shire, spending time on Tatooine or whatever the case may be. We often talk about that idea as you need to know what's worth defending. What is home that's worth defending? Is it good, freshly tilled earth? Is it, I don't know,

blue milk with Baru? Who knows? But like, that there's something important about your home that is threatened that you go out and protect. That's often not the case of these stories. They're like, guess what? Home sucks and I'm bored. It's a real, real COVID vides. Board in the house, in the house board, you know? Yes, absolutely. And like, often inside of that, including I won't spoil the specifics, but just broadly, including in the Fairyland books, there is still room to gain some sort of appreciation and perspective for the thing you left behind. Yes. But not at the expense of the thing you found.

It's not ultimately a rejection of that. It's making room inside of your heart for both of those things. So two quick quotes. One is from one of my favorite books of all time, The Phantom Toll Booth by Norman Jester. If you've never read this story, the story is about a boy named Milo who is gifted a toll booth and he gets a little toy toll booth and he gets a little toy car, he drives through it and then he's in his adventure. And here's how we meet Milo in the story. There once was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself, not just sometimes, but always. When he was in school, he longed to be out and when he was out, he longed to be in.

On the way he thought about coming home and coming home, he thought about going. wherever he was, he wished he were somewhere else. And when he got there, he wondered why he's bothered. Nothing really interested in him, least of all the things that should have. And what I love about that promising and the Phantom Toll booth in a number of these stories, you know, in your Fairland story as well. She's like, I don't want to watch these teacups. What the hell is my life, you know?

Dorothy's like, guess what I don't want to do? Chores on a farm in Kansas, right? Alice and Alice in Wonderland, Luce Callerles, Alice in Wonderland. Alice says Alice is, Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister. This is the opening line. Very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book.

Her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it. And what is the use of a book thought Alice without pictures or conversations? Basically, Alice's sister is like a nonfiction reader and I'm like, same. Alice, I also don't shop in the nonfiction section. So. Fantastic. But I love that restlessness that I want. Yeah.

you know, which we see in so many stories is just like all it takes. And I love, I love how appealing that is to young readers, because if you're a kid, that idea of maybe you're passing a time alone, I don't mean to sound like really old, but like maybe kids don't feel this way as much anymore because there's constant stimulation. But that idea of like a long afternoon and you get to, to your point, escape into a book, right? I'm here. My sister's I'm really bored. My parents aren't around. No one's paying attention to me.

I'm a kid. They don't think I'm worth noticing. My chores suck. I want an adventure. Here we go. Let's go on a journey. Yeah. There are a number of other stories

that will come up today that share that through line of like the complete and total lack of hesitation. And it's just something you lose when you age. It's just something that ceases to feel instinctive to you. Like, think about, you know, I don't mean to sound like literally like a hundred, but think about the number of things every day in our lives as adults, as people's responsibilities where we're just like meetings. What about instead of like if achieving anything, I just thought about all the things that I don't know how to work through, right? And that's just like what it is to be a person in the world with worries and cares and concerns and anxiety.

And so when you're reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and some of the first passages, it's instant, right? In another moment, down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. Because why would you think about returning the whole point is what awaits you? And like one of the things I'd love about the early passages of Alice is, you know, the fall, the fall, it's so long. so long will I ever stop falling. And then what happens right when she does have to make the decision again? There was not a moment to be lost. It's like you could have the impulse.

This very strange thing just happened to me. I didn't think about how I get back. Maybe I should. No. Onward. There's the rabbit. Have to keep hustling. And like, one of the great things about these tropes, course pods.

And, you know, anytime we get to think about stories that first came into our life at an earlier point. Like, you know, we talk a lot about the idea of like, growing with a story or bringing a different perspective to it over time. That was like, I was feeling that keenly thinking about these stories. Because when you're a young person, you're reading them, it's like, fuck yeah, that would be me. And honestly, I felt part, I felt like a little bit sad. I was happy and jubilant and it was like exhilarating. But I was also like, am I at the point in my life anymore where I could imagine doing those things? And that was like sort of a somber feeling, you know? But that's also part of the magic of it is like you become.

become a different person as you age, and the stories are about that in a lot of ways. It's also baked into a lot of these stories. Like, at the end of Alice in Wonderland before through the looking glass, she wakes up, if you decide it's all the dream, she wakes up or whatever. And her sister, her boring nonfiction sister, she sends Alice inside and then she sits out there on the lawn,

and she starts to dream. and she starts to think that she sees all the things that Alice saw, the rabbit, et cetera, all these sort of things. And I love, you know, and then she sort of shakes herself out of it. And then she thinks about Alice growing up and never being that child. But then Alice becoming the person telling the story to her young children and stuff like that. So that idea of like the passage of time of like her sister being, we talk about this a lot when we talk about like Susan and Narnia, like a character being too grown up, to get to go back to the place. In Peter Pan, in the original play,

Peter Pan is so hard to track because there's been so many versions. But in like the original play, there's this implication that what, like, you know, Peter Pan takes Wendy and her brothers to Neverland. They come back. We meet Wendy's, we get to know Wendy's mother a little bit, Mary Darling, and she's got a secret kiss in the corner of her mouth, just like Wendy.

And there's this implication that like once upon a time, and perhaps Wendy's mother also went to Neverland, you know? So, like, it's something we all do and then we all lose at some point. And that, again, along with, like, the danger that fleeting nature of the portal world, can you go back again, is really fun. On this, we are the reader, the reader is us. There is no better version of that story than. And the never-ending story.

You know, classic iconic, obviously 80s film with some diminishing returns on the sequels. But I really recommend reading the book if you've never have by Michael Enda. And it is such a beautiful book beautifully written. And I'm going to read you a little passage about when Bastion, our hero, steals the book in the first place from the bookshop that will lead him. The book is his portal to adventure. And this is, this is, just goes out to all the bad babies who are, who are readers and, and, and our, and our soulmates, okay? He writes, if you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair for getting the world around you over a book, for getting cold and hunger, if you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground, that it was kind of, to sleep because you had to get up so early. If you have never wept, bitter tears, shout out Mallory, because a wonderful story has come to

an end, and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless, if such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastion did next, which is a shoplift. He shoplifted his adventure. So, yeah. I love that passage so much. And even, you know, even if you never read the book, I just remember as a kid watching the movie and, you know. And thinking about your favorite type of apple? Absolutely. He's eating at Grayne Smith, by the way. But yeah, when he's just like, he hungriest. He's been waiting all pod for you to bring this up. I wasn't, I actually wasn't going to,

I was going to bring up the apple. I wasn't going to identify as a Grady Smith. But when he like hunkers down, he like pulls the blanket over his head. And he's just like, you know, just like chomping on his apple and just like greedily diving into this story that he wants to consume. It is, I've never felt more represented on screen than by good old Bastion, you know? This, I don't, I don't know why I don't like references or talk about this quite as much as some of the other formative things in my life. But same for me. Like, I used to, I love the book.

I used to watch this constantly, when I was a kid, like, genuinely maybe more than anything else. It was so fun when Neverending Story was invoked in season three of Stranger Things to just, like, have the spark to go back to it. And I hadn't in some time at that point. And I was just like, again, like you're saying, the past that you picked is so perfect and so beautiful because it can, you can feel that way in any. singular moment, but also that's the experience overall of loving stories of pulling that blanket over yourself and feeling that coziness that the world you're inhabiting can bring you. I love in general across the book, the description of the physical thing you're holding in your hand as just a glimpse of everything that awaits beyond.

There's just no better way to sum up why we love spending our time with these worlds. I love, it's just very early, it's in the, it's in the intro before the first chapter, but I wonder he said to himself, what's in a book while it's closed? And I have that paragraph. Like I always just loved that. Oh, I know. It's full of letters printed on paper, but all the same. Something must be happening.

Because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people. I don't know yet in all kinds of adventures and deeds and battles. And sometimes there are storms at sea or it takes you to strange cities and countries. All those things are somehow shut up in a book. Of course, you have to read it to find out, but it's already there. Like, that's just, that's it, right? That it's just waiting for you. That's your old nan quote.

Yes, it is. Like, it's just waiting for you to, like, open it for the first time or make your way back to it. That's the wardrobe that we walk through, you know? And, like, to get to do it anytime we want, anytime we pick up one of those books, it's just the most beautiful thing. I love it. I'm going to reread this. It's been a minute since I've reread this. Can I tell you one of my favorite never-ending stories is I bought back when I had like,

back when I was like moving all the time and I had a very small collection of DVDs, the never-running story happened to be like one of the DVDs. I would say I had like 10 DVDs and the never-ending story was one of them. And I was living for like two months in someone's like sublet room in San Francisco. And two of my dear friends and I had perhaps. engaged in too much California legal herbal relaxation. And they were like incapacitated. They were like laid out.

And I was like, and I was like, oh, God, how do I care take for them? And I was like, I'll put on a movie. I'll put on a movie I'll love. And I pull out the never-ending story. And they both, as incapacitated as they were like sat up, like bolt upright and we're like, what is wrong with you? We are not watching the never-ending story. Guess where we're not going right now, the swamps of sadness.

Oh, no. And so, like, we wound up watching my Eddie as their stand-up DVD instead. But, yeah, they were just like, what is wrong with you? I was like, that are writing stories, a fantastical adventure. They're like, uh-uh. No, no, no, no, no, no. Not right now. Not ready for that adventure.

Okay. We want to talk about time. Yeah. The way that time works in these portal universes, because it is often time-wise, like, dilates in both directions when we talk about these portal world. sometimes you can live lifetimes and then come back and find no time has passed at all. Or sometimes you can go with Deferia and no time has passed at all for you and you come back and everyone is aged. Let's hear a little clip from actually not the Chronicles of Narnia, but Prince Caspian. Steve?

I was so tall. You were older then. as opposed to hundreds of years later when you're younger. Not at Rubin. We're not here to talk about Professor Tolkien. We are here to talk about his BFF. His drinking buddy.

Chronicles of Narnia. Take me through the wardrobe. One of my favorite memories ever is going to the pub where they used to meet and just like having a steak and ale and just being like, what if I never got up? This is the stuff, Lionel?

Is that what he said? This is the Stuff Lionel. Oh, boy. Chronicles of Narnia. Avianna. Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. Of course, now if you pick up a box set, that is not what you will see as the first book.

You will see The Magician's nephew. Slotted at the beginning of your nude box set, controversial. Narnia has come up a few times in our recent pod. because, Joe, you've noted how the Wood Between the Worlds is one of the philony inspirations for the world between worlds, this idea of in the Narnia Tales, like this forest of portals into new worlds. But like, what is our first portal? It is the wardrobe.

It is one of the most iconic and quintessential portals in all of portal fantasy. And we'll read some passages and talk about that idea of discovery in a second. but to the time point, the allegory point, like, when we meet Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy, their children

who have been pulled out of their lives because of the war and sent off into the countryside, sent off into this sprawling mansion that they can't wait to explore, they will go on to rule Narnia, they will go on to be cast out of Narnia. Some of them will find they cannot return to Narnia, that idea of being too old for Narnia, which is first reality that Peter and Susan

have to face. And obviously, there have been, there's been much scholarship over many a year about Susan's fate in the Narnia tales in particular, certainly not the only, the only thing to The recess of with the passage of time. Certainly not. But time manifests inside of the story in a couple different ways. There's that literal dilation, right? The fact that when they return in Caspian,

more than a thousand years have passed. And this sense that then some of the other stories, including the magicians, which we'll talk about a little bit later today that kind of crop up in part in Narnia's image, also then incorporate into their text. A lot of these stories have this idea of a return. You must leave, and then you must come back.

Sometimes there's a contract. Sometimes it comes from eating fairy food, which is another thing we've talked about a lot in recent thoughts. What becomes the pattern and rhythm of this reality and your relationship between realities? Think of just the number of things, whether it's in Narnia or the magicians or other stories, that literally involves,

some sort of clock, the ticking in hook, right? Like, time becomes this thing that is moving and changing in a way that you cannot understand. It is like emblematic of the larger uncertainty around you, the unpredictability of the new thing that you have fallen into or walked into or made your way into through a bunch of fur codes that you couldn't wait to rub your face against. Lucy, really just loves fur, weird stuff. Yeah. Well, Mr. Thomas, who doesn't love a little fur, you know? don't I am. Indeed. Well, okay then. That took a turn. That took a turn. So I'm sorry. You're telling me that you watched James McAvoy in the Chronicles of Narnia and we're not like, that's a hot fawn. It's it is a hot

fawn. It's a hot fawn. It's a hot fawn. Yeah. I love a hot fawn. The quickness with which Lucy initially goes through the wardrobe, it's one of the really fun things about like picking this story up again. Oh, I wonder like, how long did it take? Were there a lot of conversations about what should happen? We find the wardrobe. We walk through it and the second chapter of the book is called what Lucy found there. Like that idea of discovery is just the beginning. And long before anybody is thinking about what it will mean to be cast out, to be told by as well, that you're too old, that you can't come back to this place anymore for you to have grown and lived an entire life inside of this place and then go back and just be a teen again, you get to

feel the crunch of something unfamiliar beneath your feet. Nothing there, said Peter, and they all trooped out again, all except Lucy, the youngest, crucially, right? That was being interjecting. That was not in the story. Resuming. She stayed behind because she thought it would be worthwhile trying the door of the wardrobe, even though she felt almost sure that it would be locked. To her surprise, it opened quite easily, and two mothballs dropped out. Looking into the inside, she saw several coats hanging up,

mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy like so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open. Of course, because she knew that it was very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in

and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in, then two or three steps,

always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers, but she could not feel it. This must be a simply enormous wardrobe, thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her.

And then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. Like, yeah, the sensation that you were just waiting for the barrier and the barrier not coming. And the rules. Well, you know, the rules of the world are is if you walk into a wardrobe, you're going to hit the back of the wardrobe. That's the rules of the world we live in. And so for immediately that to be stripped away. Yeah. And like for you to be unmoored because the thing that is the base of like nature and natural order,

didn't happen. You didn't find it. It didn't block your way. The response is not, holy shit, oh no, I'm terrified. Sometimes it is. But what is it here? Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well. That mix, that brew that pushes you forward, even though you're not sure how you could be moving forward. That's what Narnia is. I love when you say brew. It's like a real Baltimore word for you and I love it. brew. Brew. I got some cold brew at the yard, gone to see the Ouse. I've always, I always think about how odd the Pevensey children must have been when they come back. I mean, like the series itself engages with that, but just sort of like, imagine living to adult, like living for years and years and years. You're the king and queen, kings and queens of Narnia. And then you go back in your, the Pevenzies.

Yeah. This is one of the fun things about the magicians and like aging the kids up into the college years. And then it's like, what are you supposed to do? We'll talk about Hillary a little more later. But what are you supposed to do after you discovered that? And that's for kids who actually are magicians back in the real world. This is a common thing. You know, like Alice becomes a queen.

Like this idea of becoming the queen, the ruler of the land as a recurring idea. that I really love. Yeah. What else you want to say about Narnia? I think, you know, that's good for Narnia, unless there's anything else you wanted to add, I guess, like, on the time front. Yeah.

You know, again, I think, like, we talked a lot already about this coming of age aspect and why so many of the story center on young people. But, like, just to note again that that time dilation or time contract thing is such a through line. I was like toward the end of the first fairyland book, this idea of like being ravished and what that means in terms of what you were bound by or two. You are bound to us now, but you will never live fully here nor fully there. Ravished means you cannot stay and you cannot go.

And so we talk a lot about like, yeah, we talk about, we talk a lot about like the gift, the bounty of discovering the awakening. but this is the other side of it. It's like feeling forever like you're never quite at home. Yeah. Heavy. And the passage of time obviously heightens that.

Yeah. Live the life in another place. Every single call to adventure hero's journey coming of age story is like is somewhat adolescent coded. How do you go from a child to an adult? But I think even more so

these worlds, these portal worlds that you step through. The young a question you asked sort of in our notes was like, you know, why do so many of these other world stories center on young people? And like my first, like, my initial flip response was sort of like, the same reason there are so many orphans and fairy stories is like you

can't have children, you can't have parents and authorities there or else these children would not have their adventures, right? And so to remove them entirely from the world of their family is to allow the child to be the one driving the adventure. Right. But also just thinking a little bit more academically about the inception. Alice, I took this children's literature class in college. I absolutely love. What a gift. God, fun. Alice is such a found. Wow, I wonder if I could go sit in on that class now. Let's go to Davis. Let's go audit. The children's like, class of Davis was so good. But Alice is such a foundational text in terms of these stories. So many of these authors are chasing Alice and like openly talked about that. Like El Frank Baum talked about how much he loved Alice when he wrote The Wizard of Oz. J.M. Berry is chasing Lewis Carroll when he writes Peter Pan. And it's worth noting that both Lewis Carroll and Jamberry,

have like oddly similar origin stories for why they're telling you stories. They were both, I'm not getting into any of the implications about this. Let's just talk about the facts. They both were very close to the children of family friends. Alice Liddell and the Davies children inspired Alice and Peter and Wendy and John, etc. And so this idea of writing a story to. to entertain a child you know. And to write that story as a portal story to sort of like tell that child,

you two could go on, you two could go down a rabbit hole or you two could like follow the star off to Neverland. And so I just like really like that idea. The, this is reminding him literally grabbing a book from the chair behind me because I didn't have this. But what you're saying is reminding me that the dedication in Lionel Witch and the wardrobe is about this. this idea. My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you. But when I began it, I had not realized the girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you were already too old for fairy tales. And by the time

it is printed and bound, you will be older still. But someday, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it and tell me what you think of it. I love that. And also, in theory, uh, this is true. of he who shall not be named Tolkien. This is true of C.S. Lewis. This is true of Lewis Carroll. This is true of Jay and Barry. That there's like an oral storyteller.

These are stories that they told children that they knew or their own children in the case of like Tolkien, etc. That they then wrote down, you know, like the hobbits are childlike so that his children could feel like they were part of an adventure. Right. And so to make the child the hero is to delight the child that you were telling the story to, which, you know, like, I mean, I think my parents did this sometimes. But this is like, it's a really fun bedtime story tradition of like, tell me a story. Tell me a story in which I am the hero. I am the adventurer. The other thing that I loved. Once upon a time, Maguna went to bed. Oh, exactly. That's great. The, like, Lewis Carroll didn't invent the idea of, like, children being the protagonist of the story.

But what he did do with Alice that was so different from what came before in, like, other Victorian literature, is that his story is, like, it's not a morality tale. Usually these stories featuring little girls and little boys is about, like, being good and following the rules and this is your reward, et cetera, et cetera. And he's like, whatever thing is just really weird. And the animals talk, et cetera, et cetera. Let's just go on a weird fun. Let's let her imagination just like sprint. And don't worry about what's right and wrong and any of that. And we're just going to have fun.

And so like all the people chasing Alice after that, that really took this kind of story into a new direction. Yes, I love that. And the embrace specifically on that last point that, like, that is for you to figure out on your own. Like, it cannot be prescribed to you, right? Yeah, I love that. Did you know about one and three people with plaques psoriasis may also develop psoriotic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness, and swelling? Does this sound like you?

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counter. Visit your local deli today. Discover the craftmanship behind every bite. Bor's Head committed to craft since 1905. It's a trap slash you've always been here is what we're calling this next section. This idea that like sometimes when these portal world stories, you're on a mission to rescue someone who's been trapped there, oftentimes a parent, you know, you were raised without your parent because your parent has been trapped somewhere and you have to go rescue them. And that puts you the child into this sort of too soon, maybe thrust into this adult role. An example that I like to think of even though it slightly breaks the parameters of like what

we're allowing here is we're just going to briefly mention. that like when you think about his dark materials, when you think about the subtle knife, that Will Perry's call to adventure has so much to do with his father, John Perry, being stuck in another world. Now, Mallory and I agree that his dark materials is a little bit more of like a multiverse story

than it is a portal world story. And part of that I, my feeling on that is because both Lyra in the Golden Compass and Will and Settle Knife, we have dual protagonists. So we don't have like one origin world. There isn't one origin world. And so then we're just, then we're just reality hopping.

Right. And it's very different. It is fun. Yeah, we're on the borders here, but it is fun. I'm glad you mentioned the John and Will example. And it is fun to think about like, even though they go to world after world after world,

thanks to the tip of that knife, it is fun to think about how the base reality and the portal flips, depending on your point of view and how like somebody else's normal can be the portal world for you. That's a lovely little thing to think about. Now I'm thinking about their bench

and I'm gonna cry. Thanks. I'm always on that bench, Mallory. I'm forever on that bench. I want to talk about like Wonderland and the labyrinth as part of this, right? So labyrinth, as I already mentioned, we have this character,

Sarah, who is 16-year-old. She has been asked to babysit her brother Toby or infant brother Toby. And she is as petulant and impatient and stomperfoot as any teenager you will ever meet. I read some like original reviews where people just like did not like the Sarah character, but I'm just like, oh, that's just a teenage girl. I don't know what to tell you. That's just like a teenage girl. And she's in this very interesting space of like she's a theater kid.

She's very dramatic. She likes, you know, her mom was an actress. Her mom who is now deceased. an actress. So she likes, you know, like wearing her mom's lipstick and just sort of like dressing up in the trappings of adulthood, but actually really wants to stay a child. She doesn't want a babysitter brother. She wants to be the baby. She resents that he has taken her place as the child and the family, all this sort of stuff like that. And she says, like, I wish the Goblin King would come and take my brother away forever. She doesn't believe the Goblin King exists. It's just something

she says. And then, uh-oh, oops, the Goblin King's here. It's very hot. It's deep. It's David Bowie. Uh-oh. Oops. And he takes the baby. And she has to go and rescue her baby, her baby brother, begrudgingly at first and then more and more emotionally invested in it from the labyrinth, which is the goblin kingdom, the center of the goblin kingdom.

And I love that for her because she merges the other side. It's that transition to adulthood. We think about this a lot when we think about Alice, not necessarily because, as we mentioned, there isn't like a ton of morality here, like, you have to grow up or you shouldn't grow up or anything like that. But the confusion of that in-between space for young girls, particularly this idea of, I'm too big, I'm too small. I don't know what my, you know, Alice's body is constantly changing.

And this is constantly a source of anxiety and confusion for her. Or, like, I will say at first a source of anxiety and confusion for a lot of. lot of young girls and for Alice specifically, um, see if you play this clip. Who are you? I hardly know, sir. I've changed so many times since this morning you see.

I do not see you. Explain yourself. I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir, because I'm not myself, you know. This idea of like, who is Alice? This is something she's trying to figure out as she traverses Wonderland. And something I love is that eventually that like I'm too big, I'm too small. Like when she first grows, the first couple of times she grows too big, whether it's eating a mushroom or eating a cake or whatever, it's calamity. I can't fit through this door I need to fit through.

I've grown to the size of this house that I was standing in and now they think I'm a monster, all this sort of stuff like that. And then by the end, she grows big again at the end. and that is a source of power for her. She's at the trial. The king and queen of hearts are there. And, you know, the king, she does not mind interrupting the king of hearts because she's grown so big. She doesn't mind anymore.

And suddenly her height is the source of her power at the end of that story. And I love that, like, both Sarah in the labyrinth and Alice in Wonderland, find power in their transition into adulthood. Sarah specifically, because Jennifer Connolly is so, like, perfect as 16-year-old Sarah

because she is like that epitome of like right on the brink of womanhood. And David Bowie as this like hyper-sexualized goblin king who eventually it turns out like wants to court her and make her his queen. And like if you watch the labyrinth as a very small child, you're just like, oh, puppets,

whatever. And then you watch it when you're a little older and you're like, how was this much groin allowed in a children's movie? If you've never seen The Labyrinth, he is wearing such tight pants. And like the camera lingers intentionally. And he's just sort of like oozing his way through this story. And Sarah eventually like the crux to Sarah getting home is her rejected. He's like

seduces her via this fantasy sequence at a masque ball and then there is this ending pitch he makes and her realization, Steve will you play this clip? Damn. Just fear me. Love me. Do as I say and I will be your slave. Great.

You have no power over me. You hear the chiming of the clock? Shiming of the clock as she figures it out, you know? Amazing. Do you enjoy the synth? music. Beautiful. I loved it.

Steve, have you added how is this much groin allowed to the soundboard yet? It is now. Thank you. Yeah. Sarah says, you have no power over me. And Alice says you're just a pack of cards. And that's how they get out of their respective portal worlds out of Wonderland. The flip side of chasing someone you love from your world who's trapped another world is this idea of a portal world as your true home.

This is like a very common fairy tale idea of like you're a changeling. You were actually fay all along and you have been taken home to your people. Depending on your read of Guillermo del Toro's Pans Labyrinth. Right. That's that's the more optimistic read of the end of Pan's Labyrinth is that, Our beautiful young protagonist was actually the daughter, the king and queen, and she has gone home. That's my preferred ending of that story. But you can read it however you like.

Great movie. Beautiful movie. Very upsetting. Deeply. Anything you want to say on this beat before we roll forward? We nailed it. Take me into the next portal. Let's talk about the danger of never going home.

So, like, for a lot of these stories, the common goal is I want to go home. There's no place like home. Dorothy says it's how she gets home. It's not true for everyone. Like, Alice just wants to get into this, like, little garden. She's, you know, the Pevencies just want to rule. Like, there's plenty of kids who are just like, I'll just stay. I'm just going to stay.

Chorah is on my farm in Kansas. Who wants to go home to that, Dorothy, apparently? But, like, there is always this, like, call of home. Like, for Alice, and this is relatable content mallory. constantly like, I wonder what Dina is doing. That's her cat. She's like, a cat always on always top of mind. She's like, who's feeding diner right now? I would like Sabine this week on the so going to be like, who's feeding my loath cat right now? Who's feeding the sweep up with a loth cat? This is why I will never get to make my way into a portal.

I would just like never. I would just like, I never. I can't walk into the wardrobe because what if I end up in Narnia and then HALO's not with me. What would I do? But what if, what if, what if, like, Dorothy, you can just take your toto with you? I don't know how hyped Toto seemed about all that, you know? Yeah. You need a basket, at least. Definitely need a basket, yeah. Some details.

I love The Wizard of Od so much as a kid and watched it so often that my grandma made me like a little Dorothy outfit and I had little ruby slippers. And I had a little stuffed to to toto dog and I used to like, and a basket. and I used to dress up and like braid my hair and then sit down and watch The Wizard of Oz This is like a grand tradition for me. This is the sweetest thing I've ever heard in my life. I think this is wonderful. It perhaps will not surprise you to hear

that I did not have that experience. I was deeply terrified of the Wizard of Oz when I was a kid. Like I found it actively upsetting. Monkeys? Yeah, more the monkey. The trees. The monkey adjacent stuff than the witch.

like I just found it so unsettling. And then it was actually kind of fun in, like later in middle school and early in high school, you know, when you're learning about all of the symbolism and like what a essential text it is to give it another chance and find a lot of richness there. And now I really love rewatching it and revisiting it. But when I was a kid, like, my mom would want to watch it. I was just like, this is like, I'm going to have nightmares. Couldn't hack it. I had, I was not afraid of that wicked witch. But. But I had seen the Disney version of Snow White. And the crone in that film, I had this tree right outside my bedroom window that had

branches that would scratch on the glass. And I just, like, had a strong association that that was like the crone from Snow White outside my window. Being a kid is wild, man. What a wonderland. This idea, though, of like if a, if a hero of this story just is trying to get home, I love the tension of like the hero wants to go home.

The reader's like, uh-uh, what? No, we're staying here. I want to be in Wonderland. I want to be down here where the adventure is. And I like this idea of also the cost. You mentioned already the price of, you know, forever bound here, but you can't stay here. These idea of these stories where fairyland, however you want to define it,

has a cost in the never-running story, for example, in the book and also the very shoddy sequel to the original film, for every wish Bastion makes, because Bastion becomes this, like, creator of the universe. He's regrowing it after it's ravaged by the nothing. And he makes all these wishes, and as his wishes come, you know, his imagination is just repopulating Fantasia. But for every wish he makes, he loses a memory of his life as a human. And for some people, they're like, sounds great.

But for most, hopefully, you want to at least remember your cat dinah or something like that. You know what I mean? I always loved that because it is a toll. It is a cost. And it's an honest assessment maybe of what you would be willing to give. But it's also such a rich way of illustrating that idea of pouring yourself into the place the way the place poured itself into you. And getting to give back to it the gift that it gives. you of like creation, imagination.

I was going to mention Tolkien and being a subcreator. Sub creator. I had to like sit on my hands to not type the phrase subcreation into this document. It belongs. I love it. Let's go back to the Phantom Tollbeth because I want to talk about, you allude to this earlier. It's one of my favorite concepts of some of these stories, this idea of like once you've, gone adventuring.

Yeah. There's one of the story, again, to talk about Lord of the Rint. Like, I saved the Shire, but not for me. You can't go home again. That's definitely a common trope. We talk about it when we talk about Dr. Who. How is Rose going to go back to the chip shop after this, etc.? Can't.

But then there's this idea of like, there's this one of like the adventure that you've had. Can me just casually picking up Doctor Who references now. I know. I'm so proud of you. There was a new. trailer and I lost my mind. I'm so excited. The, um, this idea that your adventure has now seasoned, you know, the bland porridge that was your life before. And now it is this, to use a Mallory as a rich brew, uh, for you to enjoy.

So this is how to bookend Milo's boredom at the beginning of the Phantom Toll booth. This is how he experiences the end of the Phantom Toll booth. When he's back home and, um, whoever left in the toll booth has now taken the toll booth and left a note that says for Milo, who now knows the way, which I love, always loved. But this is the description. He noticed somehow that the sky was a lovely shade of blue and that one cloud had the shape of a sailing ship. The tips of the trees held pale young buds and the leaves were rich deep green.

Outside the window, there was so much to see and hear and touch, walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder and the special smell of each day. And in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere and things to invent and make and build and break and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn't know, music to play, songs to sing, and the worlds to imagine, and then someday make real, his thoughts darted eagerly about as everything looked new and worth trying.

I love this book. It's remarkable. Oh, my God. That's gorgeous. And the, the, um, the, um, the Jules Fifer illustrations that are in, like, I don't think there's been a print of the Phantom Toll Boot that doesn't have the Jules Fifer illustrations that are like sort of hand in hand. Milo is sitting in front of his window and the breeze is billowing in the curtains and the curtains

almost look like the sale of a ship, just like he's off on a new adventure, but now he's in his very own world and home, which I love. And then there's, I was thinking about the end of, again, it's hard to nail down with the end of Peter Pan is because, again, it was like a stage show, then it was like this, that, and the other thing, Jamberry, get your shit together. What is the official ending? But like, there is this very sad aspect of Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn't grow up. That is the darling children go home and they grow up and they have their lives.

The lost boys leave Neverland. Hook dies. Tinkerbell dies. Peter Pan is all alone in Neverland. I mean, there's new adventures for him to have. But basically, like, he takes Wendy home. And then he's like, I'll be back next spring for spring cleaning. Weird messaging about Wendy and her responsibilities in Neverland.

I don't want to go to Neverland to, like, mother all the lost boys in Clean House, but sure. But he's like, I'll have you back for spring cleaning next year. So he goes back to get Wendy, brings her back to Neverland, Hook's dead, Tinkerbell's dead, he doesn't remember, right? Like, he has no memory of the loss. He's got like a childlike, like, no sense of object permanence in his life, Peter Pan. And this idea of like a world that is leaving you behind because you refuse to leave your portal worlds. Obviously, we have a whole syndrome named after it. But one of the ending lines of the stage play, The narrator says when Peter feels both doesn't, doesn't feel the absence of the things that he's lost. It is something to do with the riddle of his being.

If he could get the hang of the thing his cry might become, to live would be an awfully big adventure because, of course, to die would be an awfully big adventure of Peter Pan. To live would be an awfully big adventure. Let's go to Back to Hook and talk about.

about, I mean, so like Hook, incredible film. Hook is... Wonderful. So much more... It is in itself its own sort of classic portal adventure in this vein

where Peter, who has come grown up, forgotten Neverland, become like a bad dad and doesn't like his life is reinvigorated by going back to Neverland, remembering who he is, comes back, wants to be

great dad wants to blah blah. So to remember that line from the original stage play, To Live would be an awfully big adventure. Steve,

will you play this clip? So your adventures are over. Oh, no. To live. To live will be an awfully big adventure. That movie rules. Steven Spielberg's like,

what if we gave Peter? Amazing. A happy ending. I love it. That used to give me chills when I was a kid and I would watch out and hear that. Robin.

miss Ron William so much. There will always be in Neverland as something that J. and Barry wrote, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless. And I love that, this idea of, like, gay as in, like, joyful, innocent, blah, blah, and heartless. Because that's like Peter is heartless. He is. There is this, like, viciousness to, and selfishness to childhood.

That is something that Peter is clinging to. It's very interesting. There's a great heartless children. passage early in Fairyland as well, like very, very early. Like, part of what allows you to have an adventure like this is that state of being. All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leaps so very high that grown up hearts flutter and terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot.

That is why it takes so long to grow one. I love that. This idea of like a portal story where you never go home. Yeah. It's a little, is quite complicated because, um, especially if, if we're, like, presenting a story with a frame narrative of home and like to return from your adventure through the phantom toll booth, uh, or to return to come back up the rabbit hole or whatever it is and to find your world fresh and exciting and new again is like a lovely story to tell a bookish child who

likes to escape into a book and then like come back to your world and and and take that story with you and and see the world fresh and new and exciting um but if the story instead is like never come back stay in the book it's better there never come home again um i'm just like that's just not necessarily like the the uplift i'm looking for from a from a portal adventure um and ironically um given how prominent there's no place like home is in uh the oz story. Eventually, that series goes on and on and on and L. Frank Baum eventually just like moves everyone to Wonderland. Dorothy and Antiam and Uncle Henry just like move into Wonderland. And they're like, fuck Kansas. Dusty here. We don't like it. No, no shade, by the way, to any of our Kansas listeners.

There's beautiful spots of Kansas, but not where, not where they lived. Uh-uh. Not, not. I was about to say go Jayhawks, you know, for all of our Kansas listeners, but I'm married to a a zoo grad so I couldn't possibly. You can't physically say it. Couldn't possibly. Should we talk, you mentioned Philly earlier. Should we, should we talk about Filler in further and The Magicians? Yeah, this is a, this is a great time. Yeah, we'll play this little clip to set Mallory up. Is Fillery real? The books have just, they've always felt realer than anything. There are other worlds out there, but Philly's just fiction. You dreamed of it, didn't you? Fillery

Funny thing about Fillery You don't really decide when to go It decides Who deserves you Good scoring Jason Ralph's voice

That just that just took me Constantly I love Q so much Me too The magicians The Leve Grossman Series of novels the sci-fi channel adaptation, which is where, of course, that clip is from.

You got three books waiting for you. You got five seasons of TV waiting for you. Check it all out. It's a great time. This is a really fun one to talk about here in the context of what you were just discussing about. Can you go home again? What does that mean? For a couple different reasons, you have the double portal.

You have portal escapism in two forms here. we have characters who read the Fillory and Further books. They're obsessed, just like we are with some of the stories we read, right? They're like the central thing in their lives. And then they discover that this place is real and they can go and they can seek and they can quest and they can rule. And also a lot of terrible shit happens too. And one of the things that's neat about the magicians for this pod, for probably some other pods in the future, is that it fits in a lot. of different tropes, like we said earlier, in the intro, when you were laying out what is not a part

of this trobe, this is not a hiding and plain sight episode. But the magicians is both hiding in plain sight and other worlds and other things as well. So you have like, you know, there are a number of overt influences on the magician's story and, you know, it was sold to me as Harry Potter that fucks is that was sold to me in the first place. Yes, exactly. There's like the, the, The TH White wants a future king influence on Love Grossman, which he's spoken about a lot over the years. Obviously, there's the Hogwarts, but college with break bills. And that's the hiding in plain sight aspect of like, okay, I'm going for my college interview at Princeton. And then everything that I understood about the fabric of reality changes right in front of me. But there's also the Wonderland. There's the Narnia. That's what Fillory is. The chat when children are. Oh, we are the children that we were just talking about in Narnia. We've got our ember and our umber. The neither lands is the wood between the worlds, et cetera, et cetera.

And this idea of, I don't know, like, how many details to get into in terms of, like, spoiling, spoiling plot points, but this idea that, like, a character like the beast, you also, and we'll talk about this more a little bit later with another story, get into this, like, encroachment aspect, like the crept. like the creep in reverse of something that can no longer be contained and what happens when a portal exists in the first place? Like, does it always work the way you wanted to? No, probably not, you know?

And also, like, doors go both ways. Yes, exactly. You can walk in or out of a door. Like, you can go through a window in either direction. And the question two of, like, who the beast is and what that eventual reveal, like, allows us to think about in terms of the way that we mythologize the figures and the stories that we read

is like so interesting. I just thought that was like a really cool and clever aspect. But in terms of like the initial, you know, and the first book, so I don't know if you felt this way. This won't probably surprise you to hear. As a, at that point in my life, like a person who had read the Harry books, you know, more times that could count. when I read the first magician's book,

I had a really like almost overpowering, I don't want magic to be this hard response to it. Like the way that you have to like learn these languages and move your hands and it's like the creaking and cracking and gnawing of your finger movements to learn to work a spell. It took me so long to acclimate to that, but ultimately in a way that I came to really like appreciate and enjoy. And you get this like hiding in plain sight,

different exposure to different worlds and realities. And like, you know, Quentin and Alice fucking as foxes when they're down. And Brickville's sad and the trials is just absolutely iconic. And like I'll never tire of talking about it. But all of that, all of the years of Brickville's tutelage, all of that comes before. Filleries. So like the pacing of the novels is like really interesting and a little bit. I find slightly disorienting at first just because of what your expectation might be heading in.

But once you know kind of how the flow of the world is meant to move, it's really gripping. And when Quentin, like, when through his eyes we are seeing the Netherlands and Philly for the first time, it hits so much of what we're talking about today, like that escapism, the portal, but also like what changes about your ability to go home again based on what has changed about the way you understand your life. So I'll read a couple passages that are fairly close together in the story. He really hadn't thought it was true. But now here they were in the city. This was it.

The actual neitherlands or something that looked uncannily like them. It was unbelievable. The most naive, most blissfully happy, sappy dream of his childhood was true. God, he'd have been so wrong about everything. He took a deep breath than another. It was like white light flooding through him. He didn't know he could be this happy. Everything that was weighing him down, Janet, Alice, Penny, everything was suddenly

insubstantial by comparison. If the city was real, then Fillory could be real, too. Okay, let's zip forward a little bit to Fillory is in fact real. One by one. Without speaking, they all scrambled up the sloping bank to get a closer look. It was one of the watcher woman's clock trees. A drink if you're waiting for a clock mention. Bon.

Quentin touched the place where the tree's hard, rough bark met the smooth silver bezel around the clock face. It was solid and cold and real. He closed his eyes and followed the curve of it with his finger. He was really here. He was in fillery. There was no question about it now. And now that he was here, it would finally be all right.

He didn't see how yet, but it would. It had to be. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but hot tears poured helplessly down his cheeks, leaving cold tracks behind them. Against all his own wishes and instincts, he got down on his knees and put his head in his hands and pushed his face into the cold leaves. A sob clawed its way out of him. For a minute he lost himself. Somebody, he would never know who, not Alice, put their hand on his shoulder. This was the place. He would be picked up, cleaned off, and made to feel safe and happy and whole again here. How had everything gone so wrong? How could he and Alice have been so stupid? It barely even mattered now. This was his life now. The life he had always been waiting for. It was finally here. Okay. In our best Arrested Development narrator voice, if you're putting all of that on the place you found in the portal, you're not going to find what you're looking for because that's not the purpose of it. It's, not to take you completely out of the life you inhabited before and to make it so you don't have to think about the mistakes that you made. It's so that you're able to eventually face them with newfound clarity. And it is a journey for our God Q from that point forward. That was so beautiful. I'm just reminded, so like my relationship with the magician's novels are kind of complicated. I think the world that Grossman built is phenomenal. And some of those things you're describing, like, what is it to be in the world, the fantasy world that you've

always read about and dreamed about and escaped you in your head. Absolutely incredible. Some of the characters, characterizations I don't love in those books. And that when I became obsessed with the sci-fi television series, I would say the first four seasons, I'm not wholly endorsing the way it ended, but like, I would say the first four seasons thereabouts. I think they took a lot of the things that sort of like bumped for me on the characters and like smooth them out and turn them into characters that I was just like, holy here for.

I would like, would like live and die for Jason Roth as Q. I just like and Margo and like all those like I just, I loved that show. I was absolutely obsessed with it. And it was so fun to watch

it interact with. It's such like a fun like zippy pop culture savvy show and then there's so and then like the high fantasy aspect of it and then the profound sadness also that that pervades it there is an episode i talked about this i believe um when we covered the last of us but there's an episode of the magicians um a life in the day talking about the passage of time and filari where we uh see elliot and q like live out an entire life inside of Filleri and then go back and as if no time had passed, one of those little mini stories inside of it.

It's so poignant and sad and beautiful and one of like the best episodes of television I've ever seen. And yeah, and it's a perfect use of a portal trope of that where all the time go, sort of kind of story. And how do you go back knowing that you've lived that together? Do you deny it? What do you do? So yeah, a lot of rich. rich material in the magicians. You talked about The Beast, about doors going two ways. Let's talk about, let's talk a little bit more about that. Danger to your home.

Portal worlds that, like the nothing, want to just eat and eat and eat and consume. Steve will you play us our final clip? Upside down. Exactly. But we're not the flea, we're the acrobat. In this metaphor, yes, we're the acrobat. So we can't go upside down? No.

Well, is there any way for the acrobat to get to the upside down? Well, you'd have to create a massive amount of energy. More than humans are currently capable of creating, mind you. To open up some kind of tear in time and space. And then you create a doorway. Like a gate? Sure, like a gate. But again, this is all...

Theoretical. But what if this gate already existed? Well, if it did, I think we'd know. It would disrupt gravity, the magnetic field, our environment. Heck, it might even swallow us up whole. Science is neat, but I'm afraid it's not very forgiving. We got a little sci-fi in with our fantasy, Mallory. Take us to Hawkins, take us to Stranger Things.

Yeah, check your compass. See if it's working. Don't go to StarCourt Mall unattended. Yeah, we wanted to talk about this for just a minute because, as we've noted a few times today, not every Wonderland is enticing. Like, sometimes they're. terrifying. Sometimes they're full of tripwire vines and suffocating

spores and candy-loving demadogs. Shout out, darned, I miss you still. Sometimes they are dark mirrors and sometimes they are overt ones, copies of our streets, our homes, our bedrooms, and sometimes the gateways are not ones that you want to walk into. There are ones that you are

hoping to never fall through, hoping that none of your loved ones will ever be pulled through. And sometimes an other world can seek to creep and encroach and subsume and claim your world. And there's no wonder waiting for you through the crack just to see if darkness where a creature lurks waiting to swallow you whole. We're talking about the upside down. And, you know, I think it's worth saying, and again, we'll keep the upside down part quick, but it is worth saying inside of this that we are still learning in real time as Stranger Things heirs what exactly we are seeing. And we have in the most recent season, you know, we gleaned new information

about the shape of this reality before it locked on to this dark mirror upside down Hawkins' reflection. The character connections. Part of what really is interesting about the upside down is like the center of Hawkins and this idea of like we're talking about a I'm noticing a lot of Midwestern locals coming up on today's podcast and you know this idea of a place where like when you hear this lot across stranger things nothing ever happens here and then all of a sudden everything happens here and like your whole home existence suddenly becoming the epicenter of everything that could be possible and redefine our understanding. of the universe. Like, what a, what a fascinating thing. And also for that to be true, like,

not only in terms of the place, but the people, like, what is one's connection to this place? What is, what is L's connection to this place? The gates, I love with the upside down, the rendering of, like, communication via thing X, you know, whether it's, like, the Christmas lights in the first season or, uh, the light bright, you know, that was like such a cool thing and the nature of like assessing how thin is the veil. And what opens a crack in the wall? When has 11 done something that opens the mother gate? When is Vecna's torturous, murderous pursuit opening new gates?

That can be new access points, but also new threats, like new, new perils and new points of vulnerability for our characters. One of my favorite moments in stranger things still to this point, and again, there's a really mess. an aspect to this because the way that the characters in the story talk about Dungeons and Dragons and D&D is like a way that they build community and like adventure together. Our characters are readers certainly, but like D&D is another version of book as portal for them, right? Game as portal. Community is portal. Campaign as portal.

And in midway through the first season, we get this great line that is still very handy from Dustin about the veil of shadows from D&D as a comp for what they're discovering. And he says, The veil of shadows is a dimension that is a dark reflection or echo of our own world. It is a place of decay and death, a plain out of phase, a place of monsters. It is right next to you, and you don't even see it. Now, that might run the risk of getting to hiding in plain sight. There's something in the corner of...

of your eye. It works here too because that like right next to you and you don't even see it, it may be the demigorgon that claims you if you're nursing your cut on the diving board in Steve's pool. All right, Pete, Barb, we, Joe and I don't miss you. A lot of other people do, but we don't. Injustice for Barb. So the upside down. It's another one.

It's a gnarly role. It's not a wonderland you want to go to. It's not another world you hope to ever find yourself in, but it is there. It is there and you don't even see it until you do. And then you're fucked. Last and last least, we're almost done. Oh my God. You might come in under two hours.

What a journey we have been on. Oh, my Lord. I'm calling this last section, the Uno reverse card. And it is the kind of story where we are worlds, the quote unquote real world that we live in, is the other worlds for our various characters, our heroes. So is this a thinly veiled excuse for me to talk to Mallory very briefly about? the Barbie movie perhaps. I'm so happy. Barbie land. Barbie Leaves Barbie land. She comes to our world. Our world is like a little different in the Barbie movie, but it is basically, recognizably,

our world. Enchanted fairy tale, animated fairy tale characters come into our real world. Thor, this is a question mark for me. Because that's the rainbow bridge. Is it space travel? Is it just the rainbow bridge? I don't, I don't know if Asgard counts as a portal world, but, But if it does, then, like, Thorval's a portal. Sure. In a fashion. Yeah. I'll allow it.

Classic cinema Beast Master 2. Just wanted to say the words Beast Master 2 on a podcast where the Beastmaster himself, Dar, comes to 1980s Los Angeles to bump up against mall culture. This is a real 1980s vibe. And then last but not least, it's been a while since I've read the books, but I am almost 100% sure. so let's say 92% sure that the Dark Tower series which I know involves portals and I know involves

our modern world and a fantasy world. I believe in the gunslinger, we're in a fantasy world and when we're portaling in later things and when we're bringing in contemporary modern day real world characters in, our core world that we start in

is not our world. And so I think it counts. Let's just take two seconds talk about Barbie. I finally watched Barbie after my summer of not being able to participate in the most meaningful shared pop culture event in recent recorded human history and I am so happy to be able to understand what everyone has been talking about

and to share in this joy and to talk to you about Barb our beloved Barb I would like to know I have not yet been gifted any I am Knuff merch from any of my cherished house of our colleagues but I guess that's just waiting. We're just waiting for you to catch up. Now you shall have it. But yeah, I loved this part of it, that reverse journey and this like fallacy of

expectation and needing to confront that and see like what in Century City or elsewhere what the fabric of the world really is and like how you can impact it. But once you've, once you've glimpsed that even for a second. once you've sat at that bus stop and watched Ken march there and back and had that lovely moment with the person next to you in her paper. How do you go back? How do you go back? How do you go back to just making your breakfast and going through your routine?

You can't. You have to try to change something that Barbie does. I love that movie. I loved this conversation. I love a tropes course. This is really fun. This is a really good one. We will be back as we mentioned on Friday to see.

whether or not Peridia stacks up to these portal worlds. Who knows? No expectations? Once again, check out the Ringerverse. A lot of great content over there. Mid-Ni-Ni-Boyd-Bee, etc., etc. Thanks as always to the great Steve Allman on Soundboard today. Mallory, you're my portal world. I don't know what that means, but I said it.

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