Listen, normally I am not about 2edgy theories about cartoons meant for children, but the facts of OTGW are this:
It’s explicitly stated in the text that the whole thing takes place after the protagonists fall down a very steep hill, onto train tracks, almost get struck by a train, and end up drowning in deep water.
All the scenes that take place in the Unknown, which, again, is a place explicitly stated to be outside of life and at least on the border with death and dreaming, have a soft-focus blur all around the edges of the frame.
This blur is not present during the single flashback episode where we get the story of how Wirt and Greg found themselves in the Unknown in the first place. That episode takes place entirely in the ‘real’, living world.
This blur, however, is present in the final episode, after Wirt and Greg supposedly ‘wake up’ back in ‘the real world’. It doesn’t go away.
The show also ends with a scene of the woodsman’s daughter alive and well, though she is explicitly stated earlier in the text to be dead and lost forever.
The show is bookended with the lyrics “the loveliest lies of all” and “if dreams can’t come true, then why not pretend?”. The implication being that at least some of what we’ve seen on the screen is a fabrication, which is most likely just a meta callout meant to disquiet the viewer.
But if that’s the case, it’s interesting that it refers specifically to “the loveliest lies”, when so much of what happens in the show is Extremely Upsetting -
Except the ending.
Like, I don’t want to be the one to say it, but…whether Wirt and Greg actually survived that Halloween is at the very least not certain, in my mind.
I have never seen Islam shown so humanized, so relaxed, so innocent and pure. That’s brilliant and funny.
This feels like the equivalent of the school girl running to class with toast in her mouth but prayer
You all deserve to know dude in the foreground is Jewish, and has done his own version of this with Chanukah where he’s literally just. Running out the door reciting his prayers in Hebrew and it’s wonderful
We’re only finding out recently that a lot of animals have colors and patterns that we cannot see because they’re outside of our visual range. It calls to attention how much of the world we can’t experience because our senses are limited.
When we shine UV lights on them, they glow pink or blue, but these are the colors that we CAN see…. they could be a bunch of different colors, which we SEE as all pink.
It’s also interesting to consider that most of these animals are not aware of having glowing patches on their bodies…. isn’t it also possible that we have skin or hair patterns that were not aware of? . . (There is actually some research out there to support the idea that our own skin fluoresces as well and that there are gender differences in the pattern and glow.)
Humans do have invisible stripes! They’re called Blaschko’s Lines, formed as skin cells divide at the embryonic stage. Normally we can’t see them at all, though certain skin conditions follow those same lines.
Apparently this is roughly what we’d look like, if our eyes could see in a different spectrum:
Dunno about you, but I want to use this in a story someday. Aliens can see our stripes and we can’t! Magical transformations follow Blaschko’s Lines! A subtle sign of lycanthropy is darker hair there! Wizards are bald with that cool spiral on their heads!
Speculative fiction is so much more fun when you can speculate about something strange but true.
THIS??? IS THE COOLEST???? SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY EVER??????????? AAAAAAAA THAT IS FLIPPING AWESOME!!!!!
my fam is doing our annual rewatch of the lord of the rings movies and i’ve come to the conclusion that when they’re trying to go over the pass of caradhras and gimli is like ‘we should go through mines of moria instead’ and there’s that long saruman speech about how gandalf doesn’t want to go into moria because he knows what the dwarves awoke there, and then gandalf … immediately doesn’t say any of that to any of the party
…that’s basically the equivalent of, in dnd, if the dm had just given a whole prepared monologue of information to gandalf’s player of things gandalf should already know …
….and then when they go ‘so do you tell the rest of the party that?’ gandalf’s player just goes ‘no.’