I vaguely remember reading L. Frank Baum’s Oz series of books as a kid, and recently decided to go through them again, as I now have a baby girl, and perhaps some day I’ll wish to read them to her. I didn’t remember much about them, but wow! There are some deeply disturbed bits and pieces in some of these books.
I’m currently in “The Road to Oz”, which starts off thusly:
Dorothy, a young girl of about 13, is standing outside her uncle’s farmhouse when a stranger walks up. She dubs him the Shaggy Man, because he’s very shaggy. He asks her for directions. She tries to give them, but, being a dumbass (this is one aspect of Dorothy’s character that didn’t make it into the movie - she’s seriously stupid), she can’t remember properly. She decides to walk Shaggy Man to the next intersection and point him in the right direction. While she runs inside to get her hat, Shaggy Man steals several apples of their tree, and also, for no particular reason, her dog Toto. He just grabs him and stuffs him in his pocket.
As it transpires, Shaggy Man is not only a vagrant thief and possibly kidnapper (as Dorothy of course finds herself wandering with him through strange lands instead of returning right home), but he’s also described as homeless, and uses mind control to make people do what he wants. He’s quite up-front about this. He has a device called the “Love Magnet”, which I can’t even type without feeling oogy, which causes any living thing he meets to instantly love him and do whatever he tells them.
So just to recap, a homeless, disheveled tramp wanders by, steals food and a small pet, and uses his mind control device to coerce a small girl to accompany him on a journey she has no interest in taking, certainly crossing state lines, and keeps her in his power for several weeks. Incidentally, they later happen across a boy sitting in the road digging a hole. This boy, Button Bright, is obviously mentally disabled, as he doesn’t know where he lives or where his parents are. It’s not that he doesn’t have a home or parents; he’s just forgotten about them. No doubt they, being aware of his simpleness, are nearby and will come get him when the time is right, but does that stop our possibly pedophiliac hobo? Nope. He scoops the boy up and takes him along with the group. The poor kid eventually has his own head replaced with that of a fox, and who knows what else in Mr. Baum’s disgusting imagination.
And that’s just one character in one story. There are plenty of other examples. In another book - I forget which one - Dorothy and friends find themselves in a land made entirely of carved wood, including all of the people and animals. Due to a simple misunderstanding, the wood people try to stop her group from moving on, so what do they do? Why, they simply light the place on fire. Forget simple genocide. They wipe out an entire system of life - who knows how many entire species and forms of sentient beings - just because they were in their way.
And don’t get me started on how the good witches in the first book manipulated Dorothy and the Wizard into eliminating their only competition, leaving them as the unchallenged rulers of the entire land, at the small cost of forcing a prepubescent girl to singlehandedly murder their rival and watch her literally melt into nothing. If Dorothy wasn’t so incredibly feeble-minded, she’d need a lifetime of therapy. Not as much as poor Ozma, who as a teenage boy was suddenly turned into a girl and informed that he was now the ruling princess of the land, but still.
Oh, and by the way - those directions Shaggy Man wanted to a nearby town? Turns out he didn’t even WANT to go to that town. Deceitful bastard.
