Reading more MAC and I have so many questions.

 

Okay, so in Alison Walks the Wire, we learn that going through the mirror can sometimes give the girls magical talent. Do they know that talent? I assume they don't get to keep it. In the epilogue of this book, Alison talks about having the confidence to act like she's walking the wire when she's giving a speech. Anyway, I think that's pretty cool, though if the experiences that they go through in the mirror are things that also happen in real life, and don't happen in parallel dimensions, then that has some weird implications.

How to identify that these books happened in the 90's is partly that an elderly woman trusts five 10-year-olds to know where the keys to her house are hidden.

How good of friends do you need to be with an old lady before it's not weird when she jsut reaches out and touches your hair? I've had strangers in starbucks touch my hair without asking and it's frankly just awful.

I can't tell who is who in this picture because they're not color-coded. I need Megan and Heather to wear pink and yellow or else I can't tell who is who.

I noticed in this thumbnail of Jane in a Land of Enchantment that it also looks a little weird because Jane's outfit is completely uncolored. There's no way they'd release that as an outfit and have it all be sepia tones. This adds evidence to my theory that these book covers were never completely finished. When you compare this thumbnail to other thumbnails from the books, you realize that it looks very different. I'd still love to uncover the original source for these book covers. How did they get on the internet? 

And inb4 "they have ISBN numbers," it's not uncommon to get an ISBN before the book is published. 

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So, here's my magic attic questions

1. When they go through the mirror, are those adventures happening in the same reality as the one the girls live in, or is it a split into a parallel universe. Megan meets a unicorn in one, so they either definitely can happen in a parallel universe, or unicorns are canon in the world that's also the world where Alison get reading tutoring. I don't know which one is more interesting.
2. The girls often get skills that allow them to perform things that normally take very long times to learn correctly.  This makes the adventures fun and helps the stories work, but how does it work? In Alison Walks the Wire, it's sort of spelled out that she doesn't get her wire walking powers until after she reads a book. 
3. How does time pass on one side of the mirror versus another. It seems like most adventures seem to take about two days of adventure time, but no one has ever asked why the girls were missing for multiple days in the attic. From this, we can assume that a trip through the mirror takes max a couple of hours, or just a normal amount of time for a child to get bored playing dress up. 

I'm sure I'll come up with more questions. I love these books, and picking at their plots doesn't mean that I don't like them. In fact, one of the ways that I show media that I love it is to overthink it. Looking at the small details like this shows an appreciation for the fine parts of the work. Thinking about the story allows you to find small things that the writers and production team put in. I hate when people tell me "You're putting too much thought into this," because, like, HELLO, have you ever met Shakespeare fans?  No one ever tells dramaturgs that they're thinking about the Bard too much. Why am I not allowed to think about my favorite books the way that professionals get to look at classic literature? Why do people assume that when I'm picking apart a book, it's because I hate it, or want to break it.

Let's take a video game like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This is a video game with a story, and if you play the game all the way through, you get to see the whole story. But this is also a game with a world that the game takes place in, and you can explore that world. You get the main plot when you just play the game, but there's details that you experience, that aren't part of the main plot, but that are nonetheless worth experiencing. Telling someone that they can't think about the world the books are set in is like telling someone that they can't play any of the mini-games or do anything other than the main quest. And when you're someone who has played the whole game and learned every secret and done 100% playthroughs of the game, what do you do? Well, some people data-mine the game, which is going through the game's code and assets and looking for new things, or looking to understand how some things work. Some people write fan fiction. Some people draw fan art. Some people build things like randomizers, which mix all the items up and force them to complete the game in new ways. It's totally fine to take something you love, and try to expand on the world that it's in, and try to change it so that you have more to experience in a world that you love.

A line of play dolls was made for people to create new stories and experiences about. If you give a child a doll and they only re-enact the books word-for-word, that'd be strange. We want people with the dolls to dress them up and change their clothes and build them stories and play with their hair. Reading the books and trying to understand them and build the world they're in is part of loving the dolls, their stories, the characters, and their world. 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.