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Oct. 26th, 2010 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOnce On a Time is a sort of fairy tale, except it's the sort of fairy tale in which the author is constantly explaining that he knows noted historian Roger Scurvilegs would disagree with him on this point in his seventeen-volume history, but honestly Roger Scurvilegs, while very well-intentioned, is nonetheless a bit stuffy and anyway the author suspects him of plagiarizing that bit from King Merriwig. Besides Roger Scurvilegs, it features the following principal characters:
Countess Belvane: The villain of the piece, except the author is totally in love with her, and is not afraid to admit that he thinks everyone else should be also. The Countess is scheming to marry the King of Euralia, and also duping the kingdom out of quite a lot of money through various bureaucratic schemes such as pretending to administer to a nonexistent army, but this is mostly because she is addicted to the habit of throwing large bags of money out of carriages at passersby. She also writes poetry in multicolored ink.
The Kings of Euralia and Barodia: AT WAR. The King of Euralia once encountered a wicked fairy, but got out of it by being placidly cheerful as he was turned into various small animals until the fairy threw up her hands and wandered off in disgust. The King of Barodia has very impressive ginger whiskers, and has to manufacture a temper to go along with them. They both have magic swords and capes of darkness, and both very cunningly once impersonated swineherds while out walking the battlefields at night and were able to fool a REAL SWINEHERD. (Spoiler: neither of them actually encountered a real swineherd.)
Princess Hyacinth: Seventeen years old, beautiful, etc. She wouldn't mind the Countess Belvane being evil and cheating her out of money so much, if it wasn't that the Countess Belvane also made her feel like a twelve-year-old who has turned in her homework late. "I feel like this myself," explains our narrator sympathetically, "when I have an interview with my publishers, and Roger Scurvilegs (upon the same subject) drags in a certain uncle of his before whom (so he says) he always appears at his worst. It is a common experience."
Wiggs: Princess Hyacinth's handmaiden; approximately twelve years old. She has a magic ring that she would like to use to wish to dance like a fairy! But in order to activate it she has to spend a day being either ALL GOOD or ALL BAD, and apparently making Countess Belvane an apple-pie bed does not cut it.
Woggs: Smaller and less refined than Wiggs; calls everybody 'Mum'. The entirety of Countess Belvane's Army of Amazons. The narrator finds her difficult to explain, and is sulky about it: "it is a terrible thing for an author to have a lot of people running about his book without any invitation at all."
Prince Udo: Princess Hyacinth calls him in to be properly heroic and to help her deal with Countess Belvane. Countess Belvane finds out, which leads her to magically wish, with a terrible smile in her eyes, that something very humorous will happen to him on his journey. Something does.
Coronel: Prince Udo's Designated Wingman, Praise-Singer-Of, Etc., and rather tired of it.
In the introduction, A. A. Milne says that whenever people complimented him on his books, he would automatically respond "BUT YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BEST ONE!" And this is true for most people, because Once On a Time is a weird not-quite-children's-book that has very rarely been in print and is now emphatically out of it. But it is available on Project Gutenberg! And, I mean, either you're going to trust A. A. Milne when he tells you which book is his best one, or you aren't, but personally I grew up on it, and I suspect it had a lot to do with forming my taste for fairy tale satire and witty pseudo-history, and on a reread last week I still love it passionately.
Countess Belvane: The villain of the piece, except the author is totally in love with her, and is not afraid to admit that he thinks everyone else should be also. The Countess is scheming to marry the King of Euralia, and also duping the kingdom out of quite a lot of money through various bureaucratic schemes such as pretending to administer to a nonexistent army, but this is mostly because she is addicted to the habit of throwing large bags of money out of carriages at passersby. She also writes poetry in multicolored ink.
The Kings of Euralia and Barodia: AT WAR. The King of Euralia once encountered a wicked fairy, but got out of it by being placidly cheerful as he was turned into various small animals until the fairy threw up her hands and wandered off in disgust. The King of Barodia has very impressive ginger whiskers, and has to manufacture a temper to go along with them. They both have magic swords and capes of darkness, and both very cunningly once impersonated swineherds while out walking the battlefields at night and were able to fool a REAL SWINEHERD. (Spoiler: neither of them actually encountered a real swineherd.)
Princess Hyacinth: Seventeen years old, beautiful, etc. She wouldn't mind the Countess Belvane being evil and cheating her out of money so much, if it wasn't that the Countess Belvane also made her feel like a twelve-year-old who has turned in her homework late. "I feel like this myself," explains our narrator sympathetically, "when I have an interview with my publishers, and Roger Scurvilegs (upon the same subject) drags in a certain uncle of his before whom (so he says) he always appears at his worst. It is a common experience."
Wiggs: Princess Hyacinth's handmaiden; approximately twelve years old. She has a magic ring that she would like to use to wish to dance like a fairy! But in order to activate it she has to spend a day being either ALL GOOD or ALL BAD, and apparently making Countess Belvane an apple-pie bed does not cut it.
Woggs: Smaller and less refined than Wiggs; calls everybody 'Mum'. The entirety of Countess Belvane's Army of Amazons. The narrator finds her difficult to explain, and is sulky about it: "it is a terrible thing for an author to have a lot of people running about his book without any invitation at all."
Prince Udo: Princess Hyacinth calls him in to be properly heroic and to help her deal with Countess Belvane. Countess Belvane finds out, which leads her to magically wish, with a terrible smile in her eyes, that something very humorous will happen to him on his journey. Something does.
Coronel: Prince Udo's Designated Wingman, Praise-Singer-Of, Etc., and rather tired of it.
In the introduction, A. A. Milne says that whenever people complimented him on his books, he would automatically respond "BUT YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BEST ONE!" And this is true for most people, because Once On a Time is a weird not-quite-children's-book that has very rarely been in print and is now emphatically out of it. But it is available on Project Gutenberg! And, I mean, either you're going to trust A. A. Milne when he tells you which book is his best one, or you aren't, but personally I grew up on it, and I suspect it had a lot to do with forming my taste for fairy tale satire and witty pseudo-history, and on a reread last week I still love it passionately.
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Date: 2010-10-26 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 04:00 pm (UTC)Have you read Tanith Lee's take on the same sort of thing (well, more or less), The Dragon Horde? I have the feeling it is also OOP, which is sad, because it's a delight.
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Date: 2010-10-26 04:03 pm (UTC)I have not, but clearly I should! I've missed out on a lot of Tanith Lee, actually, mostly because my childhood library didn't carry lots of her, which is a sadness.
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Date: 2010-10-26 04:11 pm (UTC)I discovered Lee (and many many other YA-kinda authors) during my pre-teen/teen years, through diligent searching through the Science Fiction Book Club, which my mom was kind enough to allow me to order from if I paid for the books with my chores. XD
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Date: 2010-10-26 04:16 pm (UTC)My library was pretty great on the seventies and eighties overall - I have it to thank for my overwhelming and enduring Diana Wynne Jones obsession. I still will be forever sad that I grew up and had much less time to read just in time for the post-Harry Potter YA renaissance, though.
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Date: 2010-10-26 04:25 pm (UTC)One of my friends started me reading Diana Wynne Jones by an offhand remark of, "You should read Dogsbody." Mind you, it took me about fifteen years to find that novel and was my first Jones book. I had seen the Wizard series mentioned in SFBC for years, when I spotted it at the library, I started reading it. That's also how I found The Dark Is Rising - the library I visited in those tween-teen years had a copy of it (but none of the other books; another twenty years and a friend gave me a collected set for Yule).
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Date: 2010-10-26 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 04:58 pm (UTC)I forgot to say that the Wizard series was only found within the past three years...and only then because [info]marlex wrote a ficlet for me based in that universe when I gave him a one-word prompt. When I recognized the title at the local library, I started reading the books. :D
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Date: 2010-10-26 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 04:39 pm (UTC)I have not read this book. I feel I must fix this.
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Date: 2010-10-26 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 05:53 pm (UTC)*_______*
...i still haven't finished nun band.
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Date: 2010-10-26 06:04 pm (UTC). . . does this imply that you have actually gotten further in nun boy band? *giggling*
(I may have made Gen, Emmy and Mr. Emmy watch several episodes this weekend. They all love Jeremy best. AS IS ONLY RIGHT AND JUST.)
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Date: 2010-10-26 06:07 pm (UTC)But not much. ;_;
(this is because they are wise. Jeremyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy *cracking up* WHY ARE YOU SO RIDICULOUS, CHILD.)
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Date: 2010-10-26 06:11 pm (UTC)(HE JUST READ TOO MUCH SLASHFIC AT A FORMATIVE AGE IS ALL.)
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Date: 2010-10-26 06:43 pm (UTC)But that was like a week ago so I probably need to rewatch it to remember what happened.
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Date: 2010-10-26 06:44 pm (UTC)because british people are ridiculous BY NATURE. Yep.
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Date: 2010-10-26 06:56 pm (UTC)You probably don't need to rewatch really; kdrama is very helpful about inserting as many DRAMATIC FLASHBACKS to help you remember what happened five minutes ago as possible.
Also, I LOVE THIS TOO. *giggling* It's almost as funny as when they explain away people's weirdness by going "THEY'RE FROM THE US."
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Date: 2010-10-26 07:17 pm (UTC)It's actually funnier to me? Because while we're aware that other countires view us as somewhat ridiculous (OFTEN JUSTLY), we ourselves often view Britain as The Land of Giles in media. So having OTHER countries' media go "oh ridiculous terrified of slashficcer ex-princes who bleach their hair and go AAAAH and sic their dogs on people to SLOBBER ALL OVER THEM are totally normal in the UK, yeah." is kind of jarringly amazing.
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Date: 2010-10-26 07:20 pm (UTC)Haha, I totally see that! I always find it funnier when it's the US just because it's such TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY, buuuuut that is also true. (WHAT ARE YOU SAYING, I meet Jeremys every time I visit London.)
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Date: 2010-10-26 07:37 pm (UTC)We will have a Race. If I see you on before I have freetime to rewatch the episode, I will have your lowdown. If I do not, I will have rewatched the episode!
IT IS A RACE BECAUSE BOTH WAYS I WIN.
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Date: 2010-10-26 08:06 pm (UTC)THESE TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE TO ME.
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Date: 2010-10-26 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 04:51 am (UTC)I'm going to go write a horrible, horrible poem to commemorate this. I'll publish under the name Charlotte Patacake.
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Date: 2010-10-27 05:11 am (UTC)I have no recollection of how I felt about Belvane getting her royal gentleman at the time, but reading it this time around I was just generally pleased that she got to be gloriously opportunistic and ambitious and fabulous and didn't end up punished for it. Because, you know, she will be a good queen!
DO IT. cerusee the first rode off to war
like no other LJ-er had before . . .
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Date: 2010-10-27 05:24 am (UTC)She rode, she fought, she drank, she spat; she was really where it's at.
Never cross her, she won't flinch; she won't ever budge an inch.
Left, right, left, right, left, right, left right.
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Date: 2010-10-27 01:48 pm (UTC)The left, right, left, rights are an extremely crucial part of the poem!
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Date: 2010-10-27 07:39 am (UTC)I think "Once on a Time" was probably one of the last gasps of a somewhat satirical British original-material pseudo-fairy tale tradition that seems to have begun with, or at least been most conspicuously exemplified by, Thackeray's "The Rose and the Ring" (whose Fairy Blackstaff [I think that was her name] also had some sort of political ambitions, as I recall). Andrew Lang's "Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo" (they're really two separate stories about different generations of a royal family prone to somewhat amusing magical adventures, but were combined into a single volume in the edition I read) is somewhat similar, but I think Thackeray included a few more obvious jabs at actual real-life politics, while Lang stuck to spoofing and metatextually commenting on the less sensible tropes of the "real" traditional fairy tales he'd spent so many volumes collecting.
I'm pretty sure Eleanor Farjeon's "The Glass Slipper" was written after "Once on a Time," but that's a novel-length retelling of Cinderella, not an attempt to invent a new fairy tale more or less from scratch. Farjeon is also a lot less interested in, or at least a lot less successful at, deliberately injecting humor into the story. Her most conspicuous effort in that direction seemed to be a wisecrack about the wicked stepmother thinking that etiquette was a kind of petticoat. Even at age nine or ten, this line struck me as being a lot less amusing than the author had probably intended.
There are probably other examples, but I suspect the whole humorous new/quasi-new material fairytale British tradition overlaps significantly with the British pantomime tradition, which I believe also started in the nineteenth century. I mean the kind of Christmas pantomime that involved fairy godmothers played by men in drag, along with actual fairytale characters like Puss in Boots, which I know very little about beyond occasional mentions in the works of Noel Streitfeild(sp?) and various other British books and memoirs.
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Date: 2010-10-27 01:52 pm (UTC)I don't know if that tradition of humorous pseudo-fairy tales ever really died; I mean, Howl's Moving Castle and Stardust both have quite a bit in common with this as well, so it's possible the trope just grew up a bit. Much like panto is not dead! Someone on my flist has acted in a bunch of pantomime performances, which always makes me sad I can't fly over there and see them.
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Date: 2010-10-29 03:33 pm (UTC)Well, I remember it in disconnected, vague, and rather absurd bits, and that it had quite lovely (if rather caricatured) illustrations in my copy. I suspect the absurdity would stay but the satire would be rather more apparent, if I were to reread it today. I kind of want to track it down, now.
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Date: 2010-10-26 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-26 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-27 10:09 am (UTC)HOLY CRAP.
YES THIS OBVIOUSL DESERVES ALL CAPS.
*basks in happy booktastic memories*
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Date: 2010-10-27 01:43 pm (UTC)