YMMV / Land of Oz

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Handy Mandy in Oz has quite a few, such as when she accidentally "jerks off" Nox the Ox's horn.
  • Ojo in Oz introduces us to Dicksyland, populated by the “queer” Dicks. Some Dicks are described as short and fat, others thin and handsome. Their leader, the Dicktator of Dicksyland, has a “Right Hand Man”. It goes on; the fact that “dick” and “queer” already had their current slang meaning in the 1930s makes one wonder if Thompson knew.
  • In Lucky Bucky in Oz the protagonists visit a soap-themed Wacky Wayside Tribe ruled by a man made of soap named “Slippery Dick”.
• Adaptation Displacement: Tales of the Magic Land, basically an unauthorized Alternate Continuity, is much more popular in the former Soviet Union than the original. Baum versus Volkov is still a major point of contention among Russian Oz/Magic Land fans.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Wizard Of Oz: a troubled, but sweet, man who made a few bad choices or a malicious Karma Houdini? The mixed interpretations come predominantly from the first two books. It's shown that he usurped the king and gave the infant heir to an abusive witch (who he personally taught magic). He then ran the Emerald City for several years by lying and pretending to be all-powerful. Later books retcon these elements of his character away, but many fans still view him as a liar and a villain. This is a major part of the Dystopian Oz trope.
  • Ozma's personality is completely different from Tip's. To explain this, a common interpretation is that she's hiding her personality because that's what others expect from her. Alternatives are that either Tip's personality was the fake persona because she felt the need to act like a boy "should" be or that the spell Mombi put on Ozma changed her personality. Some adaptations even make Tip a separate person, who may have ceased to exist when the spell was broken.
  • Dorothy and Ozma's relationship is ambiguous to modern readers. They're very close and kiss often. What was intended as a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship can be easily reinterpreted as Puppy Love.
  • Glinda is often interpreted as less benevolent (or at minimum, more creepy) than she initially seems. Though there is a Good Witch of the North, Glinda takes all the spotlight and is treated as the second ruler of Oz after Ozma. Glinda herself is an Incorruptible Pure Pureness but she has shades of a Trickster Mentor. Some have even called into question whether or not she knew about Dorothy’s arrival in Oz or even had a hand in causing it, and refrained from telling Dorothy how the silver shoes worked sooner in order for her to first assassinate Glinda’s political rivals (as infamously happens in the film, due to combining Glinda with The Good Witch of the North, who is the one who greets Dorothy at the start, but doesn't know the secret of the shoes); but this would depend on whether or not she had the Book of Records yet, which was never mentioned until book 6. This, combined with her ability to see anything in Oz, makes her an Ambiguously Innocent figure. It doesn't help that fairies are known for being ambiguous.
• Archive Panic: Fans who only know about the famous movie and might only be vaguely aware that it was a book first will often drop their jaws when told the original series consists of 40 books. And that's not even getting into the numerous later novels.
• Audience-Alienating Era: While Ruth Plumly Thompson has her defenders, a lot of Baum purists would consider her tenure in the series this. Almost every fan would consider Neill’s tenure as even worse though (a much better artist than a writer by most accounts, although to be fair Reilly & Lee’s editors did not help matters). The authors after Neill tried to emulate Baum’s style more.
• Briefer Than They Think: Baum’s run only lasted 14 books, but considering how influential his writing is along with the rarity of seeing a Long Runner book series switch authors midway, the uninformed may assume that he wrote the entirety of the Famous 40, rather than a small fraction of it.
• Designated Hero: The Wizard of Oz lied to the gullible people of Oz, convincing them that he was a powerful magician, and declared himself its new ruler. He usurped the throne from its rightful king and had the witch Mombi transform the king's baby daughter into a boy and raise him herself. He then had the citizens build him the Emerald City and forced them to wear green tinted glasses 24/7 in order to keep up appearances. About two decades later, he sent Dorothy and her friends to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, hoping to either rid himself of the one real threat to his rule, or rid himself of the little girl and her friends and avoid granting their wishes. On the whole, his actions make him little better than the Wicked Witches but the books say that he was just a bad wizard and not a bad man and the worst thing to happen to him was the Scarecrow calling him a humbug. On the other hand, the fourth book tries to pull one big retcon by stating that the Wizard didn't have a clue about Pastoria and Ozma, and that the former had already died and the latter had been Gender Bended and Made a Slave before he even got there. And seeing how said former Gender Bended slave (Ozma) was the one who told the Wizard most of this herself, there's not really any room for doubt. Now you could try and justify this as saying that Ozma was perhaps misinformed, or that the Wizard was lying through his teeth about not knowing a thing, but even that still needs a bit of wiggle room to work. For all intents and purposes, the Wizard was excused from many of his past misdeeds, if only because he had apparently no longer committed them. You can argue till you're blue in the mouth about whether he should have been excused, but as far as Baum was concerned, the Wizard was now 'a very good man' in both word and deed.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Several characters have been identified as possibly autistic-coded by modern readers, such as the Scarecrow, Jack Pumpkinhead, Scraps and Button-Bright.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: With several one-off or incidental characters popping up in every book that has no less than 40 canonical installments and dozens of fan additions, it's not surprising:
  • Scraps, The Patchwork Girl (who's insane even by the series' standards) was very popular when she debuted. It was rare for newly-introduced characters to join the main cast by the 7th book, but she was popular enough to do so, while her co-stars didn’t fare nearly as well (Ojo at least got one more book in the Famous Forty).
  • Jack Pumpkinhead has gained quite a bit of popularity, thanks to appearing in the Cult Classic Return to Oz. This was the case when the books were first being written too; Baum strongly hinted in the second book that Jack died when his pumpkin finally spoiled, but because the fans loved him this was retconned to him simply replacing his heads when they spoil.
  • Jellia Jamb from the second book, who provides a Funny Moment by mistranslating Jack and the Scarecrow's dialogue since they're both too dimwitted to figure out they're speaking the same language, milking the situation for all its worth. She eventually earned herself a big role in Ruth Plumly Thompson’s final book in the Famous Forty, Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz.
  • Tik-Tok, one of the earliest examples of robots in fiction. He even inspired Asimov's famous Three Laws concept.
  • While it's easy to forget this due to being a main character in the first book and popularized by the MGM film, the Cowardly Lion becomes a secondary, almost minor character in the book sequels. He was entirely absent from the second book, but because children missed him he returned in the third one, and after that would generally make at least one substantial appearance in every subsequent book Baum wrote to show that he was still around. There would be a handful of books where he was a major or semi-major character; Ruth Plumly Thompson featured him heavily in her first book and eventually gave him A Day in the Limelight with his own book — but for the most part he had a very reduced role. These days he is a fan favorite and seen as just as important of a character as Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman by fans, but this is mostly thanks to the MGM film and the comparative obscurity of the book sequels.
  • The Wizard returning to Oz and having his previous misdeeds revealed in the second book retconned was entirely because of his status as an Ensemble Darkhorse when the books were being written.
• Fair for Its Day: The Oz series was very progressive and ahead of its time with regards to feminism, however racism still cropped up on occasion, more often in Ruth Plumly Thompson's books, but not completely absent in Baum's.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Confusing elements from the 1939 film as canon is a quick way to get under the skin of most fans (especially calling Dorothy’s silver shoes “ruby slippers”, and saying Oz was all just a dream). Even worse when someone confuses elements from Wicked as canon (the Wicked Witch of the West was never called Elphaba).
• Fandom Rivalry: Fans of the books, smaller in number as they are, tend to look down on fans of the 1939 film, especially if the particular movie fan makes it very obvious they've never picked up an Oz book in their lives, if they even know that they exist. Most Oz book fans like the movie well enough, and the overwhelming majority likely saw the movie first before reading the books, but get irritated over how the film has overshadowed the books and forced them into Mainstream Obscurity, and how every subsequent Oz adaptation has to be based on the movie or risk becoming a box office bomb like Return to Oz. Likewise, fans of the movie might view the book fans as snobbish. Some fans of the books might also take to trying to convert the movie fans into book fans, but not everyone has the patience to read that many sequels.
• Fandom-Specific Plot:
  • Many Dystopian Oz works revolve around an alternate outcome to the original book: what exactly happens to Oz now that Dorothy killed two leaders in a short period? The answer is chaos and civil war. This also often leave a power vacuum open for more dictators.
    • The Wizard, Glinda, and on occasion even Dorothy being evil is often a staple of Dystopian Oz fic. It helps that the former two can be interpreted as morally ambiguous even in the original books.
  • AUs where Dorothy didn't return to Oz in the third book. She doesn't return until years later.
    • Related to this, these stories will often have Oz facing some kind of crisis, and Dorothy's friends bring her back to Oz from Kansas because they think she’s the only one who can help them, for whatever reason. While a common plot in Oz adaptations this never happened in any of the books. These will usually disregard the sequels, or at the very least incorporate a few elements from them. (See for example Dorothy of Oz by Roger S. Baum, The Wizard of Oz cartoon series from 1990, Tom and Jerry: Back to Oz, among many others; in fact Return to Oz managed to use something like this despite being based on the books.)
    • Another common variation; Dorothy never returns to Oz, but her daughter or granddaughter does return to Oz many decades later, where she will be mistaken for Dorothy (it's nearly always a female; one notable aversion was in Philip José Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz, where the main character is Dorothy's son). They may or may not know they're related to the real Dorothy Gale. If they know about the events of the first book they might think it was just a fictional story, and be amazed to learn it really happened. These adaptations always act as if there were no sequels; due both to the general public's unfamiliarity with them, and the fact that in canon, Dorothy moves to Oz permanently in the 6th book, which stops her aging and makes it impossible for her to even have offspring.
  • Dorothy Gale was a real life person, who L. Frank Baum met and interviewed, using her stories about Oz as the basis for his books. Whether or not Oz actually is real in stories with this plot element may vary (see Was for example, where it is not), but if it is real it may be a Dystopian Oz that Baum toned down for children. This may be rooted in Baum’s use of Direct Line to the Author, where he claimed to be Oz’s “Royal Historian”; as well as the fact that Baum did name Dorothy after his deceased niece who died in infancy. It can be combined with many other stock fan plots.
    • Another plot point these stories often employ is that only some of the Oz books are based on true events and the rest were only written for the money; they might say only the first book or the first six books really happened. This is based on the fact that Baum was forced to write the sequels for the money in real life.
  • Ozma and Dorothy aging into adults, which naturally allows them to explore their relationship as a sexual romance.
  • Ozma dealing with gender identity issues stemming from growing up as a young boy but being changed into a girl. This of course wasn’t ever dwelled upon when the books were written more than a century ago, but it’s a popular topic for modern fan fiction writers with a Trans Audience Interpretation.
  • The Wicked Witch of the West returning. She was popularized by the 1939 film, but never reappears in any of the book sequels and is actually a very minor villain in the overall series compared to the Nome King or even Mombi (who at least appears in three books). These are sometimes paired with “Dorothy never returned to Oz” AUs as a catalyst for her friends to try to get her to come back (see In Search of Dorothy for this exact plot, although it is far from the only non-canon work that has used it).
  • Fix Fic to repair the Continuity Snarl caused by Ruth Plumly Thompson, or occasionally L. Frank Baum himself. This is the basis of a large percentage of canon-friendly Oz stories.
  • Patchwork Fic which tries to combine the canon of the 1939 MGM film with the books. Even authors writing modern Oz books based on the entirety of the Famous Forty have to write sort of a patchwork fic to reconcile all the continuity errors between all the different authors that worked on the series, which is why many of them tend to focus on just the Baum books.
• Fandom VIP: Almost any well-regarded Oz work in modern times will have illustrator Eric Shanower involved; Shanower has for example edited and published a leftover manuscript of an Oz novel by John R. Neill from the 1940's (The Runaway in Oz), has lent his artistic talents to the Marvel Oz comic adaptation, as well as illustrated a lot of the higher profile modern Oz books along with even writing a few himself. Then you have of course the upper echelon of the International Wizard of Oz Club.
• Fanon: Publisher Reilly and Lee came up with “The Famous Forty” to describe the 40 official books published by their company, and this is considered the baseline for what is canon. However there are further books that could still arguably be considered as canon, including Baum’s Trot and Cap’n Bill series and other fantasies he wrote (which crossover with Oz), a book of short Oz stories also by Baum, and Oz books by later authors in the series that did not get published by Reilly and Lee for various reasons, some of which would eventually be published by Books of Wonder (who rereleased the Oz books in the 1980s and '90s) and the International Wizard of Oz Club. With the addition of these arguably canon works, Oz publisher Joe Bongiorno coined two terms for this complete Oz series on his website, "The Sovereign Sixty" or "The Supreme Seventy-Five".
  • If a modern Oz book is high quality and close enough to the original series it might earn an honorary place in “fanon” even if it has no ties to the authors of the original Famous Forty, such as most of the works of Eric Shanower, and books like Paradox in Oz.
• Fanon Discontinuity: After the first six books, it's pretty easy to just take your pick of whatever you don't want to consider canon. Baum didn't seem to worry too much about what was canon either. Even within the Famous Forty, Jack Snow decided to ignore Ruth Plumly Thompson's and John R. Neill's contributions to the Oz canon up to that point and write The Magical Mimics of Oz as if it were the 15th book. Most authors who've written Oz books since the end of the Famous Forty do this as well; as an extreme example (but certainly not the only example of this), Roger Baum decided to ignore all the sequels in his Oz books.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • Dorothy/Ozma is by far the most supported ship. They get along well, have a lot of sweet interactions, and outside of the classic characters from the first book, Dorothy's known her the longest. Some authors have tried to avert the romantic implications by giving them male love interests, but it never stuck.
  • Tin Woodman/Scarecrow shippers have something of a rivalry with Scraps/Scarecrow shippers. Some resolve this by shipping all three of them with each other.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Filler chapters where the main characters visit a Wacky Wayside Tribe with a particular gimmick go back to the very first book, when Dorothy and her friends visit Dainty China Country on the way to see Glinda the Witch of the South. Baum would go on to use this in many books to come, and in moderation it could serve as Worldbuilding, although some might say Baum relied on it excessively in a few books (The Road to Oz in particular being practically nothing but Wacky Wayside Tribes). In his final four books or so Baum managed to reign this in, with steadily fewer such diversions from the main plot. Future authors in the series such as Ruth Plumly Thompson would take this trope and run with it, however, sometimes to the point where it felt more like padding to make the story longer.
  • People who criticize Thompson's addition of several previously unmentioned tiny micro-kingdoms within Oz might forget that L. Frank Baum actually did this first; the Queen of the Field Mice in the very first book being the first appearance of an alternate monarch in Oz, with the first small kingdoms within Oz being introduced in the sixth installment (Utensia, Bunnybury, etc.), and larger prominent kingdoms being Jinxland in The Scarecrow of Oz and Oogaboo in Tik-Tok of Oz. They were usually less central to the overall plot in Baum's books than Thompson's, however. The main problem people had with Thompson’s usage was she often used it to focus on her own original characters at the expense of the established Oz characters created by Baum, who would be relegated to minor roles if they appeared at all; but again, Baum sometimes did this himself.
    • In fact, quite a few of the things Thompson's Oz books are often criticized for; large numbers of characters, filler Wacky Wayside Tribe chapters, excessive pun-based humor and the like, are all things present in Baum's Oz books to varying degrees, especially the earlier ones. To what degree she is either being judged more harshly than Baum over many of the same things just because she replaced Baum, or she actually does over-accentuate the weaknesses already inherent in the series, may vary from book to book, and the reader's opinion.
  • The chronic Protagonist Title Fallacy issues of the series go back to the very first book, since the Wizard, the namesake of the book, is a relatively minor character compared to Dorothy and her friends. To be fair it wasn’t Baum’s first choice for a title (the Working Title was The Emerald City, which Baum eventually would use in a later sequel), and publisher Reilly & Lee had a large say on book titles, often going for marketability over reflecting who the actual story was about. Further mitigating matters was how, despite his relative lack of prominence compared to Dorothy and her friends, the Wizard still played an important role in the story's narrative by virtue of reaching his location and getting their wishes granted by him being the core shared motivation of Dorothy and her friends for the first 3/4 of the book. Later books, however, would continue to have their respective titular characters have similarly reduced screen time and prominence while also not having them play anywhere near as important a role in the narrative as the wizard had managed to play in the original The Wizard of Oz, which left many readers feeling frustrated.
• Hard-to-Adapt Work: The series is a children's classic, but few adaptations adapt more than the first book. It suffers from this for three reasons:
  • The main reason is the extreme case of Adaptation Displacement due to the MGM film being one of the most iconic films of all time. It's a loose adaptation of the first book out of fourteen (forty if you count the later canonical books not written by L. Frank Baum), but all attempts at sequels bomb because they're not like the MGM film. The most successful adaptations (The Wicked Years, Wicked, Oz the Great and Powerful, The Wiz, etc) take influence from the MGM film. One of the most Truer to the Text adaptations, Return to Oz, infamously bombed because it was "too scary", but almost all the Nightmare Fuel and Family-Unfriendly Violence originates from the original books. This was exacerbated by the fact that Disney bought the film rights to the sequels in the 1950's and decided to sit on them and do nothing with them until they were about to expire in the 1980's (various projects were planned but never made it out of Development Hell); thus making the MGM film the only Oz film for decades which Baby Boomers grew up with, thereby cementing it in American culture as the one true adaptation.
  • The premise of Oz is hard to take at face value due to Values Dissonance. As the books go on, it becomes clear that Oz is a benevolent dictatorship behind its utopian facade. There's a strict Ban on Magic (to the point where a boy gets arrested for picking a four-leaf clover) for everyone outside of the three main rulers, a Magic Mirror and Book of Records allows the rulers to keep track of literally everything in Oz, and Beauty Equals Goodness is in effect. Baum meant for this to be utopian but it instead feels dystopian (hence why the Dystopian Oz trope is so common). On top of this, Family-Unfriendly Violence is rampant on Oz.
  • The series consists of dozens of books that only loosely connect to one another and frequently contradict each other. This made the series easy to write and easy to jump into, but also made coherent Worldbuilding impossible. Oz is also a zany country where anything goes, similar to Wonderland, which makes it hard to adapt without toning it down.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The first book came out in 1900 but the way Kansas is described brings to mind The Great Depression and especially the Dust Bowl.
  • As of the 2020's, the name of the character Tik-Tok is likely to make people think of something completely different...
• Ho Yay: The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, insofar as both are both are actually men. In The Tin Woodman of Oz, we are told that they are satisfied to sit near each other for hours on end without saying anything.
• It Was His Sled:
  • The Wizard of Oz is a man behind a curtain.
  • Tip is Ozma.
• The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: The series is a whimsical fantasy series L. Frank Baum wrote for children, set in a fairy-land that is supposed to be utopian, yet many people see enough disturbing implications that Darker and Edgier homages bringing attention to them are a trope on its own. And that's not even getting into all the more mature and serious What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic? analysis that the books' adult Periphery Demographic like to apply to them.
• LGBT Fanbase: "Friend of Dorothy" originated with the gay male fanbase for Judy Garland, and Wicked added another surge, so the original books imported a hefty dose of it. It helps that there's a fair amount of Ho Yay and Les Yay in the main cast, and that Ozma spent her first nine to twelve years or so as the incorrect gender. The plot of many of the books focus on someone strange or unusual finding acceptance in Oz, which may have attracted many LGBT youth to the series (not to mention other traditional societal misfits, such as people with disabilities or autism, making up another large chunk of the modern book fandom). One of several theories on the origin of the Pride Flag cites "Over the Rainbow" as inspiration. Add Gregory Maguire's The Wicked Years novels, which have explicit same-sex and polyamorous relationships as well as Elphaba herself being possibly intersex.
• Les Yay: Dorothy and Ozma are rather close. In fact, when half of their interactions consist of kissing each other on the cheek, it's safe to say they're a bit more than 'rather close.' Hell, one of the official illustrations has them nearly lip-locking. There's not any other real way to spin this after that.
• Mainstream Obscurity: There are dozens of Oz books and numerous adaptations going back to the 1900s. Land of Oz has been known for over a century as very popular children's books classic. Yet, most of what people know from the series comes from MGM film rather than the actual books. It's even been argued that the series has become a "modern day fairytale" that people don't even associate as a book series.
• Nausea Fuel: Chopfyt, the final husband of Nick Chopper's (and Captain Fyter's) former sweetheart. He was made from the flesh parts of Nick Chopper and Captain Fyter glued together with the Wicked Witch of the East's flesh glue, along with a tin arm.
• Obscure Popularity: The books manage to be this. There are dozens of Baum canon books and it's considered a successful series, but, due to Adaptation Displacement with the MGM film, only the original book is well-known in the pop culture. Even iconic characters like Princess Ozma and Tik Tok play second fiddle to the Scarecrow, the Wizard, etc.
• Once Original, Now Common: A more modern audience spoiled by high and low fantasy (or even Tolkien's works) might find these books to be rather shallowly-written and the Worldbuilding to be rather clunky or sound like it was flat out made-up to suit the plot. Except, it's sometimes easy to forget that Baum's books were written within 1900 and 1920 - these predate Codifiers and Makers by as little as either two years or as much as decades. (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, The Worm Ouroboros, and The Chronicles of Prydain weren't even written yet, and wouldn't be for at least another decade at the earliest).
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Even within fans of the books, opinions vary on any of the Oz books published after L. Frank Baum's death, and whether they should be considered canon or not.
• Protagonist Title Fallacy: Don't be surprised when you're half-way through Tik-Tok of Oz or The Scarecrow of Oz and wondering when the title character who is featured on the front cover is going to show up.
• Replacement Scrappy: Betsy for Dorothy in Tik-Tok of Oz. In fairness she was a Suspiciously Similar Substitute to get around legal entanglements to make the play the book was based on, but she contributes nothing to the plot and just comes off as a more boring version of Dorothy. A few books gave her the occasional spotlight but it never caught on.
• The Scrappy: Opinions differ on Thompson's Oz books, with most considering them hit-or-miss, but one of her characters that is almost universally reviled is Jinniky the Red Jinn, a "benevolent" slave owner who mainly serves as Deus ex Machina when he does show up. He'd perhaps be more tolerable without the Values Dissonance.
• Tear Jerker: The introductory note to the reader of Glinda of Oz (L. Frank Baum’s last complete Oz book, published a year after his death), signed by "The Publishers", telling the reader how Baum left the physical world and brought Oz to those who lived too early to experience the Oz books in this world.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: One unfortunate thing about the Oz series is that rather than use and further develop existing characters, newly introduced characters in each book will often be cast aside in the next installment and relegated to mere cameos if they're lucky to make way for even more new characters, who themselves will be cast aside in future installments, with few exceptions. This resulted in the series having too many characters, with Thompson really being not much worse than Baum about doing this (although she did attempt to rescue Ojo, the Hungry Tiger and Jack Pumpkinhead from obscurity by giving them their own books).
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Princess Ozma of the Land of Oz series grew up as a young boy named Tip, but she was born female, this was a spell cast on her as a baby by the witch Mombi to hide her identity. The spell was undone, and not much more was ever said about it in the original books (not surprisingly since they were written in the early 1900s). Modern fan fiction writers however often have Ozma’s transition be much less seamless than it appeared, making her either a Tomboy Princess, or giving her even more severe gender identity issues. Whether or not she still feels more like the boy she grew up as inside or identifies as a female varies.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: The Ruth Plumly Thompson books, especially, to counteract the sheer number of Deus ex Machina artifacts Ozma and Glinda have between themselves.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Baum's books are actually pretty good about avoiding this (the Cannibal Tribe in The Road to Oz notwithstanding), but Ruth Plumly Thompson...not so much. Her first book, The Royal Book of Oz, contains a kingdom of offensive Asian stereotypes; Ojo in Oz involves the title character being kidnapped by gypsies (why Romani were even in Oz is never addressed), and perhaps worst of all The Silver Princess in Oz has the main characters put down a slave rebellion, turning several of the slaves to stone with Princess Planetty's magical powers, which the slave owner, Designated Hero the Red Jinn, elects to display in his throne room in order to discourage any future rebellions. This coupled with some very uncomfortable racist illustrations of the slaves by John R. Neill, make it a book not a lot of Oz fans like to talk about.
  • Baum's books are not the kind you want to read if you love cats: one gets beheaded by the Tin Woodsman for chasing a mouse (which you know is is part of its nature!) and the other gets lobotomized for being too conceited. Not to mention the crap, Dorothy's cat, Eureka goes through in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.
  • As mentioned under Hard-to-Adapt Work, the supreme power of Oz's rulers can make the country seem like an idealized dictatorship by modern standards, and the prevalence of Beauty Equals Goodness can be uncomfortable too. It's not surprising that some modern authors like Gregory Maguire enjoy deconstructing these aspects with the Dystopian Oz trope.
• The Woobie: Ojo the Unlucky. He gets better, finally becoming "Ojo the Lucky".

See also The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

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