One of the things that’s been annoying more and more is modern media depictions of vikings where they basically dress in bland colored furs and leather and they look and act like Klingons.
Wish more movies and TV shows would have the gumption to use accurate costumes.
Also throughout all periods of history people wore colors!!! Even the puritans wore colors and only wore black on Sunday.
This seems like a good excuse to share these beautiful colors from the Viking Age (courtesy of the National Museum of Denmark):
So when discussing the ending of ‘Over the Garden Wall’ and the nature of the Unknown in general, I think it is important to remember that it’s left deliberately up for interpretation. You know, it’s not a Quiz with one concrete answer we must uncover, but it’s more about our interpretations and personal feelings. Each and every one of us experiences that journey with Wirt and Greg into the Unknown in a slightly different way.
So what I want to do here is not present a Correct Interpretation that will dispute all the others and prove them all wrong and prove myself right, I just want to share my own outlook on the nature of the Unknown. In the hopes that others will like it and it’ll inspire more cool readings and interpretations
So on some level I do agree with the popular theory that the Unknown is some sort of Afterlife - but I don’t see it as a regular Afterlife for human souls, I think it is an afterlife for Stories. This place is where fictional characters and stories end up once they’ve been totally forgotten by the living, ‘lost in the clouded annals of history’. and become…. unknown It is quite literally a place where ‘long forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood’.
That’s why the Unknown is a mishmash of different time periods and primarily visually and narratively influenced by stuff like fairy tales, ghost stories, children’s books and old cartoons - these stories have a high-tendency to be forgotten and thus get lost in the Unknown (whatever it’s because they rely on oral traditions or because they suffered from very poor preservation historically).
And that is what the theme song, ‘Into the Unknown’ is talking about…
Where can we pretend that dreams do come true? In Stories.
And what are ‘the loveliest lies of all’? Now that would be Fiction.
The entire concept of stories is a huge theme of this song, I think.
Beatrice and her family, Adelaide of the Pasture, Auntie Whispers and Lorna were all originally fairy tales. Maybe the same fairy tale, or maybe they were originally separated before being ‘melded’ together. (If, for example, the last child to Remember them before they were forgotten just assumed the Bad Witch in both the Auntie Whispers and Beatrice stories was Adelaide)
Pottsfield was an old urban legend about a haunted ghost town, Wirt and Greg basically played through its ‘plot’ directly.
Miss Langtree, the schoolhouse and the other associated characters come from a long-forgotten and out-of-print children’s book. That’s why those characters tend to talk in comically-stilted expository dialogue.
The Tavern was the setting for a series of 20’s animated cartoons. (Although obviously set long before that era). The Tavern Keeper was created as a Betty Boop clone and was the main character. The Tavern setting was probably a mere framing device for all sort of musical animations. The reason why none of them can comprehend the idea of not having some sort of Title or Label is because that’s how they were written - all given job-related titles but not named.
Fred the Talking Horse was a main character from a forgotten tradition of humorous oral stories where he was sometimes a trickstery anti-hero and sometimes a straight-up comedic villain protagonist.
Quincy Endicott and Margueritte Grey were characters from a satiric limerick about the greedy rich and their wacky habits. (Quincy was at least inspired by a real-life person since his name appears on a tombstone in the real world)
Possibly the same limerick where the punchline was the status-quo at the beginning of their OTGW ep, that both rivals’ mansions have become connected and they assume the other is a ghost haunting their house. Or maybe they were each from different regional variations of the same limerick about a greedy rich weirdo being lost in their own house and going mad.
Frogland and their little boat might be from a children’s book as well, but I also think that maybe… from the vignettes shown at the opening of the series…
That one might take place outside the Unknown, and shows the real inception of Frogland. Two brothers making up stories with their toy boat by the river. Since they never shared these stories with anyone else, when these two brothers died or maybe just grew up and forgot their boyhood misadventures by the stream - these stories also ended up in the Unknown.
The Fishing Fish we see briefly in ‘Babes in the Woods’ might be a small comedic illustration from a children’s book, or another piece of limerick, or just someone’s random notebook doodle that gained a life of its own first in the creator’s mind and then in the Unknown.
Cloud City, the North Wind and the Queen of the Clouds were also, much like the Tavern, from a very old cartoon.
The Beast was once just a mere Boogie Man to keep young children from wandering off into the woods. Ending up forgotten in the Unknown just ended up giving him a whole world of lost souls to harvest.
Maybe the Woodsman and his daughter were always a part of the story of the Beast. But since it seems that the Woodsman being a lantern-bearer is a fairly recent development - they might have had their own separate story. Some sort of pastoral novel about a family moving near the woods? But their narrative has been ‘hijacked’ by the Beast.
Wirt and Greg ended up lost within the Unknown cause had they actually died in the lake that night - they would have become a Story in their town. I mean we have a moody lonely teenager and his adorable little brother disappearing/dying - on the night of Halloween - after last being seen in a graveyard - with the older brother’s last act on this earth being to hand his crush a cassette of his love poetry. Can you imagine what sort of Urban Legenda you can grow from those seeds?
But as they were not yet dead, and not a Story yet… so they were technically an Unknown story. Between the borders of life and death from a human perspective because they were about to die, and from a Story perspective because they were just about to be born.
And the ending sequence, with the little vignettes showing where all the characters from all the episodes ended up. I think that’s almost like Wirt and Greg back in the world of the living and the real - being able to create happy endings for all of those stories they’ve met. That’s how the Woodsman’s daughter ended up being alive all along - it was less that the Woodsman’s whole tragedy was a wacky misunderstanding all along. But it became so as a gift of thanks by their new storytellers - Wirt and Greg.
Because if dreams can’t come true, than why not pretend?
Okay I just wrapped up the annual Over the Garden Wall rewatch and it’s late and I don’t know how well I’ll be able to articulate these thoughts but:
The Beast knows it’s in a story
The Beast knows it’s in a story, and it knows how people react to stories, and that’s horrifying in a series based out of folklore and fairy tales and storytelling tradition. The Beast preys on people by knowing how they’ll react to stories. The Beast acts frustrated that Greg used a honey comb for a “golden comb” and a spiderweb on a stick for a “spool of golden thread,” but it’s baiting a trap - by exploiting that same fairytale logic, Greg is going to die of exposure in the cold while he waits for the sun to “set” in a cup
Because of course Greg will wait to see the sun set into the cup. Of course the Woodsman will keep the lantern lit. That’s how the story should go. The Beast is a parasite sucking blood out of a perfectly arranged Grimm fairy tale about the martyrdom of parenthood.
The only way to properly defeat it is to actively defy the story being set out ahead of you. Over the Garden Wall says, over and over again, that Wirt will sacrifice his life for Greg. “You are responsible for you and your brother’s actions,” the show says. The original pitch bible for the series said that Wirt would sacrifice himself for Greg, that he’d die to take responsibility for Greg-
And then Wirt stops and says “Wait. That’s dumb” and immediately shatters the story that’s been set up for him, and that’s how he defeats the Beast.
I come after a long time with a question from my husband:
Are “Stumpley’s” and “The Harlequin Jaguar” good names for bars, and if so which one is better?
Can you guess what I answered him? 😆
Stumpley’s is the comfortable, worn-in, neighbourhood institution that you can go to to relax after work. The Harlequin Jaguar is the fancy sort of place with a dress code that expects you to wear shoes AND pants.
And there is the man himself 😆
Hello my tumblr friends,
I come after a long time with a question from my husband:
Are “Stumpley’s” and “The Harlequin Jaguar” good names for bars, and if so which one is better?
the world is running out of glassblowers and yet you want to become a fucking doctor
One of the most jarring moments of my university education was in a physics class when I was given a device that measures gravity and was told “this cost the university sixteen thousand dollars, but the only glass blower in the world who could make the glass springs inside it died so it’s literally irreplaceable. If you drop it those springs will shatter. Go fuck around with it for a day and take some measurements”
And there’s probably some neurodivergent person in the local community who could fix it, but because we don’t have UBI, she’s stuck away in an office somewhere trying to get through her day without losing her goddamned mind because she needs to pay the rent and have health insurance to pay for her hrt
It’s deeeeep in the notes/reblogs but I’ll add it here so it’s a little easier to find: Salem Community College in Salem County, New Jersey does have a scientific glass blowing program for anyone seriously interested. The town it’s in is only 30 mins appx from Philadelphia if you want to get into a city and the living is fairly cheap by national standards (because there’s not really anything there but farms and warehouses). I once knew some people in the program and they loved it.
“The only program of its kind in the nation, Scientific Glass Technology combines classroom study and hands-on laboratory techniques, technical drawing and advanced fabrication. Students develop a solid understanding of scientific glassblowing so they are able to fabricate apparatus according to technical specifications.”
ALT
