Princess Ozma

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Princess Ozma of Oz
Oz character
Illustration from The Lost Princess of Oz by John R. Neill
First appearanceThe Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
Created byL. Frank Baum
In-universe information
AliasTippetarius, or Tip
SpeciesHuman-Fairy hybrid
GenderFemale
Male (as Tip)
TitleQueen of Oz (officially)
Princess of Oz (more commonly)
OccupationSupreme Ruler of Oz
FamilyPastoria (father)
Lurline (mother)
Ozana (first cousin)
Ozga (cousin)
Mist Maidens (cousins)
ChildrenN/A, though Jack Pumpkinhead thinks of himself as her son.
RelativesLurline's fairy band; L. Frank Baum said she descends from a long line of fairy Queens

Princess Ozma is a fictional character from the

Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), and in every Oz book thereafter.[1]

She is the rightful ruler of Oz, and Baum indicated that she would reign in the fairyland forever, being immortal.

Baum described her physical appearance in detail, in The Marvelous Land of Oz: "Her eyes sparkled as two diamonds, and her lips were tinted like a tourmaline. All adown her back floated tresses of ruddy gold, with a slender jeweled circlet confining them at the brow." As originally illustrated by John R. Neill, she fit this description; however, in most subsequent Oz books, Ozma's hair became darker.

The classic books

Ozma is the daughter of the former King

Glinda the Good Sorceress discovered what had happened and forced Mombi to turn Tip back into Ozma. Since then, the Princess has possessed the Throne of Oz (although many realms within Oz remained unaware of her authority).[2]

In some of his last Oz books, namely The Tin Woodman of Oz and Glinda of Oz, L. Frank Baum indicated that Ozma has the appearance of a fourteen-year-old and is therefore older than Dorothy Gale. By that point in time, Baum had also established that the inhabitants of Oz cease to age, suggesting that Ozma would always appear to be an extremely beautiful young girl.

Baum was not inclined to worry about strict continuity in his series, however, and so there were discrepancies in the origins and very nature of Ozma. In her initial appearances, she was portrayed as no more than a human princess, born shortly before the Wizard's arrival in Oz. Later in the series, Baum revealed that Ozma is actually a fairy, descending from "a long line of fairy queens" as stated in The Scarecrow of Oz. In The Magic of Oz, Glinda tells Dorothy that no one knows how old Ozma really is. And in Baum's final book, Ozma herself explains that she was in fact a member of the Fairy Queen Lurline's band when Lurline enchanted Oz and turned it into a fairyland.

Jack Snow attempted to reconcile Baum's disparate accounts in The Shaggy Man of Oz, which explains that the Fairy Queen Lurline had left the infant Ozma in the care of King Pastoria, making the Princess the adopted daughter of the last King of Oz. This does not gel with the version of Ozma's story which says she is an ageless fairy who has ruled Oz for centuries.

Ozma frequently encounters difficulties while ruling her kingdom. In The Lost Princess of Oz, for instance, the Fairy Princess is kidnapped, although her dearest friend Dorothy comes to her rescue with a search party. Both Dorothy and Ozma are captured by the wicked Queen Coo-ee-oh in Glinda of Oz, while trying to stop a war between two races, but Glinda manages to save them with the help of the Three Adepts at Sorcery. In order to circumvent trouble, Ozma prohibits anyone other than the Wizard of Oz and Glinda from practicing magic in Oz unless they have a permit.

L. Frank Baum portrayed Ozma as an exceedingly benevolent and compassionate ruler, who never resorts to violence and who does not believe in destroying even her worst enemies. In

pacifist disposition, which led to the Scarecrow
's suggestion that Ozma's enemies be made to forget about their wicked intentions by drinking from the Fountain of Oblivion.

Furthermore, Ozma discontinued the use of money in Oz, and took systematic measures to ensure that all the citizens of Oz receive the land's resources in equal measure, without having to work harder than necessary.

Ozma invited several people from the outside world to come live in the Land of Oz, most notably Dorothy, The Wizard,

Cap'n Bill
.

According to the timeline of The Road to Oz, Ozma's birthday falls on August 21.

Relationship with Dorothy

See also: Dorothy Gale § Impact on LGBTQ community
Dorothy and Ozma kissing in an image from The Road to Oz

When Ozma first meets Dorothy, Oz's greatest heroine, in Ozma of Oz, they immediately like each other and become best friends; in the canonical Oz books by Baum, Dorothy and Ozma are each other's closest relationship.[3][4]

In The Emerald City of Oz Ozma arranges, at Dorothy's request, for Dorothy and her family to move into the palace, and Ozma declares her an official princess of Oz and her "constant companion". In The Lost Princess of Oz the first page mentions that Ozma loves Dorothy very much and by page two says that Dorothy is the only one privileged to enter Ozma's rooms without an invitation. In turn, Dorothy often represents Ozma when some task takes the latter away from the Emerald City.

Ozma and Tip

Ozma was born a girl but was magically transformed into a boy named Tip while an infant to hide her from Glinda the Good. Tip was raised as a boy until his early teens, at which point, after the adventures detailed in The Marvelous Land of Oz, Tip is informed that he was born a girl. After some trepidation, Tip agreed to be transformed back into a girl and assumes rule of The Land of Oz as Princess Ozma.

In the interactive fiction adaptation of the Oz books by Windham Classics, Tip is made monarch of Oz and no reference at all is made to Ozma.

love interest. Snow's story, "A Murder in Oz" (1956) was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and published in The Baum Bugle. Grandy's The Disenchanted Princess of Oz has been published by Tails of the Cowardly Lion and Friends. Hutchins's Tip of Oz, heavily mulling over ideas such as Pastoria-as-tailor and the execution of Mombi in The Lost King of Oz and similar material in The Giant Horse of Oz, received a one-paragraph citation in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and remains unpublished under the Copyright Term Extension Act.[5]

Other appearances

In other works

  • In the
    Magic Belt
    from the Oz books and mentions she is "not so young." She is also wearing large flowers in her hair, similar to the depiction of Ozma in the books. Later, in issue #87 (October 2009) Frau Totenkinder actually addresses her as "sweet little Ozma." Later on, she is proven to be Ozma, and to be a powerful enough witch to lead the Fable community's magic-users, after Frau Totenkinder leaves unexpectedly.
  • Tip makes a cameo appearance In
    Liir (son of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West) briefly encounters Tip and Mombi (the latter unnamed, but with a description matching Baum's and leading the four-horned cow mentioned on the first page of The Marvelous Land of Oz). Tip suggests to Mombi that she sell him to Liir, but Liir replies, "I don't buy children.... I can't save anyone. You have to save yourself."[6]
  • Tip and Mombi (respelled "Mombey" by Maguire) play a larger role In Out of Oz, the fourth and final volume of "The Wicked Years". In Out of Oz, Tip first appears as a runaway in the city of Shiz and is befriended by Rain (daughter of Liir and granddaughter of Elphaba), and flees the city with her. Later, when Liir is abducted by thugs in Mombey's employ (and transformed into an Elephant), Tip returns to Mombey hoping to secure Liir's release. Near the novel's conclusion, Tip and Rain are reunited and have just finished making love while Mombey performs a spell called "To Call the Lost Forward", in order to return Liir to his proper form; the spell inadvertently also returns Tip to his true form (Ozma) and restores Rain's natural green skin. Although the circumstances of the spell are quite different from those in The Marvelous Land of Oz, details of it closely resemble Baum's description and the illustration of Mombi's spell by John R. Neill. In Maguire's version of Oz, Mombey has kept Ozma in the form of the boy Tip for almost a century.[7]
  • In the superhero novel series Wearing the Cape by Marion G. Harmon, a character named Ozma appears in the third book, Young Sentinels. According to the book's narrator, Astra, she is a supernatural breakthrough (person who has developed superpowers) who genuinely believes herself to be the character Princess Ozma of Oz; it is unknown whether she was manifested into reality by an unknown person's breakthrough or if the breakthrough transformed the person into the Ozma character. She becomes a member of Astra's team of Young Sentinels and often explains the differences between Baum's description of events to what she believes really occurred in the Oz books.
  • In the Dorothy Must Die series by Danielle Paige, Ozma plays a key role. Although officially the heir to the throne of Oz, after Dorothy is corrupted by magic and takes the throne for herself, Ozma is driven insane and reduced to babbling nonsense, with her past experience as 'Tip' resulting in her magic manifesting a completely separate soul in the form of 'Pete', a boy about the same age as Ozma is more mentally stable. In the second book in the series, The Wicked Will Rise, Pete betrays the Order of the Wicked to Glinda and Dorothy as he fears that the characters intend to 'kill' him to restore Ozma, resulting in the Order losing several members. In The Yellow Brick War, Ozma is able to regain some of her mental strength after new series protagonist Amy Gumm uses the magic of Dorothy's old silver shoes to separate Ozma and Pete into separate entities, rather than two souls in one body. In the last book of the series, End of Oz, Ozma is official returned to her position as queen, and is one of the few people who retain their memory of Amy and everything that took place over the series. The series ends with Ozma recalling Amy to Oz to assist with further adventures.
  • In Final Fantasy IX, there is a secret enemy boss called Ozma accessible through the Chocobo digging sidequest.
  • In Jonathan Green's gamebook The Wicked Wizard of Oz, Ozma's appearance is used by an impostor as a disguise; what happened to the real Ozma is left to speculation.[8]
  • The American animated web series RWBY features an homage to Tip, in the form of main character Oscar Pine, who is the current incarnation of the warrior Ozma.
  • Ozma appears as an enemy in the 2020 video game Library of Ruina as one of a series of encounters based on characters from the Land of Oz. She is depicted here as an inhuman cursed princess with a withered body and a blood soaked veil covering her features. Her battle gimmick is centered around her pumpkin headed "Jack" minions.

Influence

Ozma was a direct influence on the design of the protagonist

Padme Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. In a 2022 interview with Star Wars Insider, concept artist Iain McCaig related the instructions that Lucasfilm provided its artists to visualize characters, saying, "Amidala was described as 'Kind of like Ozma' from The Wizard of Oz." According to McCaig, he chose actress Natalie Portman as a model for his designs because he felt evoked the Oz character, saying, "She had Ozma's aura of vulnerability and strength." After producer/director George Lucas spoke with McCaig about this inspiration, Lucas cast Portman to play her.[9]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-1-47210-988-0
    . Retrieved 10 February 2024.
  2. ISBN 0-394-41054-8
    . Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  3. Ms. Magazine. Archived
    from the original on November 11, 2020.
  4. ^ Waldron, Myrna (March 14, 2013). "The Oz Series & The Power of Women". BtchFlcks. Archived from the original on July 29, 2019.
  5. ^ Supreme Court of the United States (2003). Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 , p. 11 (p. 18 in pdf).
  6. ISBN 978-0-06-054893-3
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-06-054894-0
    .
  8. ISBN 978-1911390312
  9. ^ Wainerdi, Brandon (May 2022). "The Soul Sketchbook of Iain McCaig". Star Wars Insider. No. 210. p. 25.
Preceded by Monarch of Oz Succeeded by
Incumbent
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