Nevanna's Forest of Stories

These are five of the books or series that were foundational to my mind control obsession.

1. The Witch Herself (1978) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The subject line of this post is from a song that recurs throughout Naylor’s “Witch” books.

I discussed this series last year, during Spooky Season, but I chose to single out this particular book (the third out of six) because it’s the one in which protagonist Lynn’s best friend, Mouse, declares her intention to be a hypnotist. After minimal study, she can put people in trances, control their actions, and access repressed memories. She also communicates with Lynn’s internal shadow self; it’s suggested that everybody has one, and that some witches - as well as an amateur hypnotist, apparently - can control these aspects of their victims by learning their secret names. (That part was, for better or for worse, also tremendously fascinating to me as a young reader.)

Mouse’s hypnotism is not part of the latter three books, in a series that is generally very smart about continuity and callbacks. The possible Watsonian reason is that she’s understandably frightened of her own power, but to the best of my recollection, it’s never even mentioned again.

2. The Ghastly Glasses (1985) by Beatrice Gormley

A psychic researcher posing as an optometrist gives young Andrea a pair of glasses that allows her to change people’s personalities when she looks through them.

This book is the sequel to Mail-Order Wings, which I haven’t read, but works pretty well as a stand-alone. It has a solid “be careful what you wish for” message and a very funny ending that would probably please cat lovers. I remember stealing one of its plot threads (minus the glasses) for my own long-ago attempt at a Psychic Kid story, about which I can unfortunately remember very little now.

3. Animorphs (1996-2001) by K.A. Applegate

Most of my peers probably at least know the hook for this series (written by spouses Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, along with a team of ghostwriters): five kids are given the power to transform into animals in order to fight an invasion by parasitic mind-controlling aliens. Although I never actually finished reading all the books, they were overwhelmingly formative for me while I was following them, and the horror of Yeerk infestation – both from the inside, when it happens to the team leader at one point, and from the outside – was a huge part of the reason why.

4. Extreme Zone (1997-1998) by M.C. Sumner

When her father’s secret scientific research leads to his disappearance from the military base where they live, Harley teams up with Noah, a classmate suffering from nightmares of what might be an alien abduction, to investigate.

There are satisfying amounts of mind control in this series, but it also contains: conspiracies, astral projection, interdimensional travel, clairvoyant visions, cults, shapeshifting, genetic engineering and other forms of Weird Science, and lots of questions that – even though the story seems to come to some sort of conclusion in its eight-book run – are never really resolved. Given the time frame of its publication, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was partly inspired by The X-Files. And unlike Animorphs, which is a generation-defining phenomenon, I have never met another person who’s read Extreme Zone. It doesn’t fall into the category of “do I remember reading this or did I hallucinate it?” that happens sometimes with childhood favorites – you can find and buy copies online, and I held onto my own collection – but some elements of the story, which are both surreal and specific, as well as its relative obscurity and the fact that I was only ever able to find most of the books exclusively at one independent bookstore in upstate New York, make me feel like a lot of adults probably do when processing those half-formed memories of nostalgic media.

5. Daughters of the Moon (2000-2007) by Lynne Ewing

Four (later, five) teenage girls use their supernatural powers to fight a demon and its human (and not-quite-human) thralls.

As a teenager, I already recognized that these books were kind of awkwardly written, not to mention morally uneven when it came to excusable applications of mind control (it was okay when the good guys did it!), and I didn’t care. As I wrote on Tumblr some years ago, the series scratched my itch for sensual descriptions of psychic contact as well as an enemies-to-lovers romance with a tormented immortal bad boy. Even then, I knew what I liked.

I wrote about why I was obsessed with Unico in the Island of Magic, a movie that I previously mentioned in this entry.

At some point last year, I told a couple of my co-workers about Unico during a conversation about favorite anime, and one of them immediately started looking up pictures on his phone.

Him: "Oh, this guy has a flute."
Me: "That's Toby, he's the villain's tormented apprentice."
Him: "That's... an awakening."
Me: "You get me."

Wearing: Long blue skirt and a red shirt with a big green frog on it. Today’s storytime theme was Reptiles & Amphibians.
Reading: I just started An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson.
Writing: Still nothing at the moment. smallfandomfest started yesterday, so I’ve been keeping an eye on the list of prompts. The info post is here, and I encourage anyone and everyone to request fic and art for their obscure fandoms!
Planning: Today was a workday, and my housemate is hosting a movie night this evening. Tomorrow, I’m visiting Older Sister in Providence and we're going to a used clothing sale together! On Sunday, I might take a walk around my local Open Studios.

What about you?

This probably won't be a weekly feature, but I'll try to revisit it from time to time.

pastrylikewolf and I recently finished watching the first season of Cobra Kai, the sequel to/spinoff from the Karate Kid franchise, which I’d seen before but she hadn’t. Our other housemate introduced me to the show a few years ago, and our goal is to catch up to the last season so that all three of us can watch it together. The series finds Johnny Lawrence – the antagonist from the original movies – adrift in middle age, estranged from his teenage son, struggling to hold a job, and drowning his self-doubt in alcohol and misanthropy. When he rescues his young neighbor from bullies, he decides to bring back the karate dojo that gave him meaning in his youth, and also crosses paths with his former rival, Daniel LaRusso, who’s achieved financial success and a loving nuclear family but still has his own ties to their shared past.

I went into the show with no particular expectations, and certainly didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I hadn’t seen The Karate Kid in many years and have yet to watch the sequels, I never had any particular interest in martial arts films overall, and my attachment to “plucky underdog learns to do a sport real good” narratives had faded long ago. (I was a Mighty Ducks girl, in case anybody was wondering.) I also don’t have a lot of patience for the current pop culture trend of nostalgic reboots and remakes. But Cobra Kai is one of the rare examples that really works for me, possibly because it is clearly made with a lot of love for the original franchise but also tries to tell a new story… or several new stories, really, since Johnny’s and Daniel’s journeys unfold alongside the story of a new generation of karate students. High school drama — dating, shifting social dynamics, and some horrifyingly authentic depictions of bullying — takes up a significant amount of narrative space. Although the star-crossed romance between Sam, Daniel’s daughter, and Miguel, Johnny’s first student, is a throughline throughout the first season, I was much more invested in the dynamic between Sam and her childhood friend Aisha, whose friendship fractured when Sam started hanging out with the popular crowd, and was further tested when Aisha started learning karate from Johnny. Although the girls share a moment in the season finale that seems to point to a reconciliation — and Sam owns up to some of her mistakes — it’s unclear whether they’ll find their way back to each other.

I think I realized that the show was doing something interesting when it refused to portray the resurrected Cobra Kai as either the straightforward villains that they were in the movies, or purely misunderstood underdogs. Arguably, The Real Villain is Toxic Masculinity, and central to Johnny’s arc in the first season is his slow understanding of which lessons from his teenage years will be helpful to him and his students, and which ones really, really won’t. Among a talented cast of new and returning actors alike, William Zabka sells every emotional beat perfectly, inviting audiences to sympathize with this character even when it’s very difficult to like him. (“Goddamnit, Johnny” is a frequent refrain from us as viewers.)

That said, despite those sincerely dramatic twists and turns, and genuinely compelling performances, Cobra Kai is fundamentally about an increasingly complicated and intense competition between rival sports teams, and if you can’t buy into that, you probably won’t have a good time with this show. I bought into it more easily than I expected, and I’ve been having a great time with this rewatch so far.

Which shows have you found yourself liking more than you expected? What was it that surprised you?

I’m trying out a new weekly feature, inspired by the weekly roundups that a friend of mine posted back in Ye Olde LiveJournal Days.

Wearing: Green shirt, red skirt, yellow tights. Today’s library storytime theme was“Things That Go” so I’m dressed in traffic light colors!
Reading: Bright Ruin, the finale of Vic James’ Dark Gifts trilogy. I read the first two books a few years ago, skimmed the third one to discover what seemed to be some troubling character deaths, and backed out. Now I’m revisiting the series in order to find out what actually happened (and maybe complain to the Internet about it).
Writing: Nothing at the moment, though it’s amnesty week at fan_flashworks and I do have a TMA ficlet in mind…
Planning: Today is a workday. I’m trying to make plans with a couple of friends for tomorrow, either to visit the Gore Place Sheep Shearing Festival or (if the rain scares us away) a bookstore for Independent Bookstore Day. On Sunday, I plan to attend a book processing session with the QT Library.

What about you?

It's almost farmer's market season in my part of the world! Here are some of the fruits and veggies that I'm looking forward to buying this summer.

1. Berries! Raspberries are probably my very favorite, but I also love blueberries, blackberries, strawberries… I put them in oatmeal and sometimes in pies or muffins.

2. Peaches! They’re also great in cereal and pies, sometimes in combination with any of the berries.

3. Asparagus! I occasionally roast it to toss with pasta but use it more often in a stir fry.

4. Red and green peppers! These are also fine stir-fry or curry ingredients, though I also like to mix them into other rice dishes: with coconut and chili and lime, or with cheese and salsa and chicken.

5. Diva cucumbers! Those are the tiny seedless ones. Last summer, I sliced one up to include in my lunch at least once a week; alternatively, they’re another great addition to cold rice dishes (I add shredded carrots, soy sauce, sesame seeds, and some kind of protein).

I had a mostly pleasant, sometimes challenging, weekend with my family. At least once, as it often does, our conversation turned to shared formative media. This inspired the following list of movies that my sisters and I, and sometimes our parents, enjoyed together and often quoted when I was growing up.

1. Harvey (1950)

This black-and-white classic, in which Jimmy Stewart’s best friend is a giant white rabbit that almost nobody else can see, was an old favorite of my parents’; they showed it to my sisters and me when I was a young teenager, and it’s been a family viewing standard many times since. Every once in a while, something will prompt one of us to exclaim, “Doctor, that is not my mother!” or remark, “You can be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. For years, I was smart, and I recommend pleasant.”

2. The Hobbit (1977)

The Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit might have been one of the first movies that I ever watched, when I was a toddler and Older Sister was seven or eight. (Around the same time, I named one of my stuffed animals “Bilbo.”) Since then, she’s read the book to me, and I’ve read it on my own, and I still think the movie does an amazing job of bringing the characters and songs to life.

3. Unico in the Island of Magic (1983)

Recently, I summed up this one to my housemates as follows: “early anime adventure in which an adorable baby unicorn tries to stop an evil wizard from turning people and animals into living puppets.” Someone in my family almost certainly picked up the VHS at an independent video store in our hometown, and the genuinely terrifying villain obviously wasn’t a deal-breaker for me or my sisters.

4. The Princess Bride (1987)

You know it, you love it. The Princess Bride was another go-to viewing choice for my family, and remains one of the rare adaptations that I enjoy more than the source material. Although Goldman’s novel is clever and inventive, it’s tonally very different from the movie, which blends humor and sincerity in a way that I overwhelmingly prefer. I fully admit to having been the obnoxious kid who could – and often did – quote some of the scenes from memory. (Or sometimes I’d just let out a snarl when someone said, “Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.”)

5. Hackers (1995)

This is another one that means more to my sisters and me than to our parents, which is understandable, since it is so very ’90s. During one of our many viewings, as we watched colorfully dressed high school students (played by visibly older actors) rollerblade to secret gatherings where they pooled their “elite” computer knowledge, Older Sister said, “Wasn’t there a time when we thought this was what teenage life would be like, if only we could find it?” There absolutely was. Honestly, I could not tell you whether the technology makes any sense at all, and I’ve been known to forget the plot from one viewing to the next, but the characters and the humor and the aesthetics are, well, hard-coded into my memory.

I’ve been thinking about fictional depictions of Grim Futures lately, for absolutely no reason at all, why do you ask? Here are five pieces of dystopian fiction that made an impression on me when I was younger (long before The Hunger Games or the subsequent “YA dystopia boom”).

( How post-apocalyptic! )

Have you read any of these books? Did any fictional visions of a Grim Future make an impression on you when you were younger?

I don’t like April Fool’s Day, but I do like stories about scams and hoaxes. Here are five of my… well, “favorite” is a loaded word when talking about some of this subject matter. People were definitely or very likely hurt in all of these cases. People died in connection with some of them. I am not trying to make light of those tragedies when I say that I am fascinated by these accounts… but then again, maybe that’s how all the True Crime Girlies excuse their obsessions.

Anyway. Here are five scams or hoaxes that I find myself thinking and talking about a lot.

1. Beatrice Sparks’s Teen Diary Empire

I already alluded, in a previous entry, to the intersection of books like Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal with the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic. I would still recommend Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice to anyone who’s interested in those topics, or remembers picking up the supposed “diaries” of “real anonymous teenagers” from their local bookstore or school library.

2. MsScribe’s Fandom Social Climbing

MsScribe was a fanfic writer and LiveJournal blogger in the Harry Potter fandom of the early 2000s, who employed sockpuppets, weaponized existing ship wars, and almost certainly embellished the truth about her personal life, to gain sympathy and favor from the “Inner Circle” of popular fangirls. Part of why her actions remain a compelling and enduring part of fandom history was the deftness with which she understood and manipulated the expectations, grudges, rivalries, and allegiances of her community. In addition to the Fanlore article and the archived version of Charlotte Lennox’s “Unauthorized Fandom Biography,” you can watch Strange Aeons’ video on the topic if the audiovisual format is your preferred one.

3. Thanfiction’s Hobbit and Wizard Cults… And Beyond

I think that there are two reasons why I closely followed the fandom exploits of Andy “Thanfiction” Blake (as recounted primarily by his former partner, Abbey, and by The Tea Blogger, who has spent years building a massive timeline of Blake’s online activity), and they’re only tangentially related to his phony celebrity connections or attempts to scam people out of their money (and it’s been speculated that financial benefit was never even his primary objective anyway). The first reason is that I understand, on a very personal level, how the narrative that he offered his closest followers – including his supposed ability to “channel” characters from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, as well as his own OCs – might have been appealing. I’ve talked about fictional characters and worlds in some of the same ways that he did, and so have a few of my friends, but none of us have ever started a cult about it.

Secondly, Blake’s years on Tumblr, in which he often posted about Supernatural and current events (and appeared to over-identify with fictional characters but didn’t necessarily “channel” any), offer another example of how a bad actor can manipulate the norms of a subculture – in his case, the trappings of social justice and the revisionist version of his own mental illness and trauma history – to gain attention and power over others. The use of Tumblr (and other online platforms) for activism or for bonding over shared experiences is not an inherently bad thing, but I’ve long been skeptical of the social expectations that can develop in those environments and their vulnerability to exploitation.

4. TIED: Amanda Riley’s and Belle Gibson’s Fake Cancer Diagnoses

As far as I know, these two cases are unconnected, but they’re similarly horrifying when one considers how brazenly each woman took advantage of a religious community (in Riley’s case) and the already problematic world of complementary medicine and “wellness” trends (in Gibson’s), benefiting both financially and emotionally from their lies, at least for a time. Riley’s crimes are covered in a podcast called Scamanda; my primary understanding of Gibson’s story comes from a recent Netflix dramatization, Apple Cider Vinegar, but it’s based on a nonfiction book that I’ve requested from the library and am looking forward to reading.

5. Lani Sarem’s Attempted Bestseller List Coup

Handbook for Mortals – an awkwardly written “urban fantasy, paranormal romance” complete with a love triangle – appeared at the top of the Young Adult New York Times bestseller list in August 2017 despite nobody in the YA writing and publishing community ever having heard of it or its author before. It remained there for less than a day while booksellers and journalists pieced together writer Lani Sarem’s plan to buy her way into fame (and hopefully the production of a movie franchise). Although this scheme didn’t arise in transformative fandom, it’s come up in fandom history conversations because of a brief rumor that Sarem was secretly the author of infamous badfic My Immortal. There’s no evidence that this was the case, and part of me hopes that that particular mystery is never solved.

Are there any scams or hoaxes – within or outside of fandom – that have captured your attention?

In light of her actress's recent and untimely passing, I wrote about my appreciation for Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.