Alice in Wonderland/WMG

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


General Guesses

Kitty was always the Red Queen.

Notice how Through the Looking-Glass ends with the Red Queen turning into said kitten. Also note how the Red Queen was in charge throughout Alice's surreal adventures. By encouraging her to become a Queen, she manages to forestall the White side's victory. Even Alice believes Kitty was the Red Queen, as evidenced by her behavior in the last chapter.

Alice is the third Alice from Alice Human sacrifice

Because she becomes the queen.

  • Isn't this because of the promotion rule?
    • The third Alice went insane with power: "she now only sees rotting human flesh" or something like that. Alice didn't remain on the other side of the mirror long enough for this "dream of distorsion" to possess her (though it is not excluded that it would have, had the dream (?) lasted longer).
      • She's actually the fourth Alice (one of them, anyway) - entering the Wonderland and travelling through it from curiosity. Lots of people have tried matching the Alices in the song with characters from the books/movies - Second Alice is either the March Hare or the Hatter, Third Alice is one of the malevolent queens (Probably the Queen of Hearts), and the First Alice is...hard to figure out.

The Cheshire Cat is a hyper-dimensional being

He exists in four spatial dimensions. He moves parts of him in and out of Wonderland's space to make it seem to Alice they disappear and reappear.

  • Then why wasn't he a mouse?
    • Cats evolved to catch and eat mice. To do this, they had to be able to go where the mice do. So, cats can freely enter and exit hyperspace; but, since they are of native Earth stock, doing this drives them insane. Not too insane to function, mind you, but insane.
      • Can someone explain to me why that's not canon? Seriously, it's awesome.
    • My God, it's true!

Everyone is high

Extremely high, it's a wonder Alice didn't damage her brain with this trip.

  • It would explain all the hookah-smoking.
    • Actually, the Caterpillar was most probably smoking tobacco. AS well as this, he was probably intended to be a parody of British generals in India or something like that.

Alice is schizophrenic.

Yes, it's cliched and bad, but so many Gothic Grimmifications had been made by the time that [Tropers/[[[Cue]] this troper]] had read the original that it made too much sense and brought down the humor at points.

The Mad Hatter is high on mercury.

It Makes Sense in Context, especially if you know where his name comes from.

The Mad Hatter suffered from lead poisoning.

  • I always figured it was lead poisoning, though I'm not sure why a hatter would have come in contact with a significant amount of lead over the average person of his time and place. Perhaps Alice had heard the phrase, but was confused as to what kind of madness would result from mercury poisoning, and her misconception shaped that corner of Wonderland as it did other places, and behind the looking glass? (If you're talking about Tim Burton's Hatter, yeah, that's the intent.)

The Mad Hatter is Willy Wonka's real father.

...It could happen.

  • Going by Tim Burton continuity, Willy did seem to be very estranged from the man who claimed to be his father. And since he and the Hatter are both played by Johnny Depp, it does seem to add up, doesn't it?

The Mad Hatter IS Willy Wonka

  • He found a way to build a factory that physically existed in Wonderland, but had a portal there in the form of a mysterious factory in Germany.
    • But their personalities are completely different! The Hatter is a demented loon, while Wonka is an eccentric genius.
      • OR, he was Willy Wonka first, but when he lost his awesome hat he couldn't find any more in the style he liked...SO he went into hat making, as well as continuing to make chocolate. The mercury started to affect his brain and he started to go wilder and wilder with his chocolate experiments, until he punched a hole between dimensions. Travelling through this sent him back in time (to the Victorian era), and made him younger (hence how he was able to be a younger version of himself in the flashback).
      • Also, Wonka is an eccentric genius; the Hatter is a demented loon AND an eccentric genius.
      • Not in the books. The Hatter's really just an antagonistic eccentric who sometimes borders on Jerkass. However, thanks to Draco in Leather Pants ...

== Alice fell down the rabbit hole and broke her neck, and the whole book from then on was her Dying Dream ==. Gotta get these DD-WMG's in there somehow.

  • How do you explain Through the Looking Glass then?
    • She got better, then smashed the looking glass with her face because she couldn't stand looking at her shriveled, wheelchair-bound body, and Through The Looking Glass was her Dying Dream Near-Death Experience as she bled to death. The focus on strategy and chess themes instead of lunacy and card themes is because she learned how to play chess to pass the time because she couldn't go out and play tag or hide and seek or any of the other games the kids her age played.
    • Jossed by this and this.

Because Alice is a Heart Princess she'll never grow up

Yes certainly Princess Alice hasn't grown up in over a hundred years thus can exist in both 1865 (anime/book/movie of Alice in Wonderland) as well as 1991 (television series Adventures in Wonderland). They are the same girl, simply adopted into a new family in second scenerio.

Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?

Alice's "Dreams" are drug induced

With all the crazy things she's dreamed of, they can't be just normal dreams of any sane person. No, you'd have to be on some serious crack for those sort of hallucinations. In the first book, when she goes to Wonderland, what really happened was Alice had been running through a field of poppies before she tripped. Being only a child during this time, she most likely wouldn't have known that opium came from poppies thus was contently breathing in the scent before it started to take effect. She fell over in the field and her "dream" of Wonderland was only her hallucinating from the opium. In the next book, we don't necessarily see what Alice had been doing before she was playing with her cats. And after the first opium incident, one can assume that by now she's most likely an addict on the stuff and regular goes off to indulge in opium when no one is looking. So before playing with her cats she was already highly drugged up and just waiting to collapse in a slumber of a drug induced state. This of course led to another string of hallucinations.

  • However, children are perfectly capable of coming up with some of the most messed up and freakish ideas, especially in dreams, while being completely free of drugs.
  • Also, I don't think simply breathing in poppies would get you that ridiculously high. She would have had to be smoking some really hard core stuff to have a trip like that. I'm still for the dream theory.

The Duchess is the Queen of Hearts' mother.

I think in the Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner mentioned that their relationship may have been a parody of Queen Victoria's with her own mother. So, perhaps the reason for their hatred of each other was because the Duchess tried to control her daughter or tried to prevent her from taking over Wonderland?

The Cheshire Cat is the only sane character there. Or is he?

There is a lot of mysteries left unexplained in the books, especially where Cheshire-puss is concerned. Now, Cheshire claims to be mad, right? But if he is aware he is mad, isn't he sane? But wouldn't only a mad person claim to be mad when they really were sane? Perhaps he's a character similar to the Joker and Deadpool and is gifted with medium awareness. Maybe he's even a boojum...

Wonderland is Faery and all its inhabitants are The Fair Folk

Those of you who are hardcore Carrollians are probably aware of the fact that while a devout Christian, Dodgson also had an interest in the paranormal. Therefore, he may have heard about Faery and the Fair Folk (though this is unlikely, seeing what the Fairies- noute the spelling -in Sylvie and Bruno are supposed to be like). Anyway, you have to admit that the way some of the characters Alice encounters possess elements of a Blue and Orange Morality. And could cheshire-puss be a Cait Sidhe (Irish for "faery cat")? Also note the whole idea of time having stopped during the March Hare's tea-party. According to most legends, time stops in Tir na n'Og.

Wonderland is our afterlife.

Just don't ask me how Alice got there.

  • Near-death experience after hitting her head?


Guesses specific to the Tim Burton film

The White Queen was a Manipulative Bitch

As a kid, she used the Wounded Gazelle Gambit and tearful eyes to get everything she wanted and blame it on her aggressive older sister (she probably tortured animals too, hence her vow). However, White eventually grew out of it and matured while Red held on to the grudge and got worse, which cost her the kingdom of Underland.

  • An alternative version of mine was that she is a reincarnation of the White Witch and at first was indeed evil if not outright tyrannical, but changed prior to the Red Queen's own tyrannical turn, maybe because she knew she would invade years to come and "played nice" to give a good impression. Now that the Red Queen is out of the way the White Queen can show how she really is...
  • Whilst both Iracebeth and Mirana were bad, because Mirana was a lot more manipulative and Iracebeth was a little less subtle about it, Mirana got the crown and Iracebeth went completely batshit, killing their parents and going on a murderous rampage. Mirana - who still had a bit of good in her, or who had started to Become The Mask - realised that this was what she might have become, and hid the darkness away. She surrounded herself with sweetness and light and did her best to convince everyone and herself that she was as far from her sister as possible.
    • Supported by Anne Hathaway, the actress who plays her, who described the White Queen as being just as insane as the Red Queen but pointed in a different direction. Her dark fingernails, lips and eyes are meant to be a visual hint that, despite all the pure white clothes and smiles, there's still darkness in there.

The entire film is an opium trip

Alice, pressured from being a nineteen year old woman in the 1800s falls back on her old habits of her childhood experimentation with opium, the darker Wonderland is symbolic of her growing up and natural cynicism. This is also what her company exports to China (The movie taking place at the same time as the Opium Wars

Tim Burton is a macrophile

Why else would someone include full clothes ripping, complete with nudity, in an Alice in Wonderland movie MADE BY DISNEY?

  • If a Tim Burton movie doesn't have at least one bit of Fetish Fuel in it, something's gone wrong. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street gave some ladies a blade fetish. Sleepy Hollow? Fainting, I believe. Somebody who saw Batman no doubt likes the idea of doin' it upside down and/or dominant men in black leather.
  • While there is the fetish aspect, there's also the basic freaking logic behind it. You know, like the fact that clothes don't normally shrink and expand?
    • Some of her clothes (the under-dress, or whatever that green thing was) do stretch and contract to fit anywhere from a six- or eight-inch tall woman (loosely) or an eighteen-to-twenty-foot woman (stretched quite thin), at least before it was altered significantly to fit her two-ish inch tall form, so logic doesn't seem to be that integral to it (aside from this being Wonder- freaking -land, of course, to adopt the precedented emphasis).
  • If Tim Burton has a fetish for anything, it's seeing his disproportionately attractive girlfriends with guys much hotter than he is.

Alice goes to China but decides not to import... whatever it is her company imports because she is enamored with Kung Fu.

Not a lot of "sane" Englishwomen would want to learn martial arts, would they? And then the "unmentionables" start showing up...

She never makes it to China. The sequel is just a gender-reversed version of Gulliver's Travels

See? I told you Burton was a macrophile!

Captain Jack Sparrow eventually returned to England when he could not find the Fountain of Youth, and discovered that killing time was a viable means of immortality in Underland.

Ms. Kingsley reminds him of that girl from a long, long time ago, before he went to Underland and changed his piratecaptain's hat for a top hat, and may or may not necessarily have been a blood relative or direct descendant thereof. Of course, murdering time while in the presence of the Red Queen is a tea-timeable offense, and I think everyone knows what happened afterwards.

Underland is a region bordering London Below.

The time compression differs (one has a nearly 1:1 ratio with England Above, one... doesn't), but the UnPersoning is still linked to the amount of "outside" time that passes. Underland is likely a high-magic zone, as opposed to London Below which has little more than that which is sustained by its inhabitants, hence the increased strangeness and temporo-spatial differences. The Looking-Glass World near Underland is only accessible by someone who has been to England Below prior to finding one of the portal mirrors, and the Unperson Effect of the Looking Glass world is much more pronounced. Perhaps the chaos level of the Looking-Glass World is due to a higher level of background magic than London Below, but a lower level than Underland?

The White Knight lives.

After he was seemingly killed in the flashback, he retired from his place as champion and gave up his title due to the shame of losing the vorpal sword. He then moved to a nearby area of the White Queen's domain as the appointed Gatekeeper, went quietly senile (possibly before his appointment as Gatekeeper), and designed a suit of armor made from pots and pans before having an escalating war with his next-door neighbor.

The Queen of Hearts is the Red Queen's sister or half-sister, as well as the White Queen's.

Either Lady Crim, Queen of Hearts killed off the Red Queen first, the Red Queen is too busy running her part of the country after the Red King was put into checkmate to join in on the fray, or a three-sided battle is no place for a chess army regardless of the tactical advantage.

The Red Queen killed the Queen of Hearts, thus fusing with her

Because when Chess People kill another Chess Person in Through The Looking Glass, they become them. The Queen of Hearts was a Queen; but not of Chess; so the transformation wasn't "kosher" and drove the Red Queen of Hearts crazy.

  • This is why the White Queen has a vow not to kill anything; she knows what will happen.
    • This is also why nobody killed anyone in the final battle; they were really trying to avoid it because the transformation would have been bad. Alice killing the Jabberwock didn't count; because the Jabberwock would eventually regenerate. (IE, his eternal battle against the Vorpal Sword indicates this has happened before.)


The Knights are Dragoons.

Because they have to be. Also, they carry lances/pikes/spears/glaives/guisarmes/volges/guisarm-volges/glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaives long pointy things used for poking people to death or smacking them with the flat... And those helmets!

The battle between the White Queen and the Red Queen is a battle between chaos and order.

The Red Queen: Living things, change, difference, foraging and simpering to the queen's whims, card games. The White Queen: Potions (made of formerly-living things), status quo, Anne Hathaway, standing around and looking pretty, chess. It does, of course, come back to bite the Red Queen though not literally.

W/underland is a coping mechanism, and not real in any meaningful way.

Alice is mad. Entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All the best opium lords trade baron suffragettespeople are.

  • What about the Bandersnatch scratch?

Also, about the opium, rememember way back in the beginning, when HER FATHER was a merchant? No one seems to remember that.

    • Also the Futterwacken, unless your implying that Alice is so ridiculously insane she can learn things like how to breakdance from HER OWN HALLUCINATIONS.
      • It's not like she's any good at it.Her dance was around back then, just in the sort of dance theater where attendees can see the dancers' knees.
      • Really now? She's only 19, unless your saying she was a stripper WHEN SHE WAS 18 OR LESS. I don't even think that was legal back then. Or now.
        • No, just saying that her version was a dance back then, though qualifying that it was only for certain contexts rather than general partying. She never learned how to breakdance.
      • Her version was exactly the same but just with the nonsensical leg movements. Or did the Victorians learn to move their legs and twist their ankles like that without Underland?

The White Queen and King of Hearts were having an affair.

You heard Her Majesty yourself, "Had too, he would have left me." Plus Whitey can make anyone fall in love with her, including men, woman, furniture,. Since Whitey stole her husband Red used the Jabberwocky to steal her kingdom.

The White Queen is the reason her sister is such a bloody big head.

Someone else said it first on this site, can't find it, but the White Queen is responsible for the shrinking and growth potions. Before the recipe was mastered she must have tested it on her sister which caused her head to triple in size and shattered her sanity. Their parents were so repulsed by their eldest they begun favoring their spare and made her heir instead. The White Princess, horrified by what she'd done to her big sister, started to control her sinister impulses from that day on.

  • Upon reading this WMG and the above, doesn't this make the Red Queen a real Woobie?

The Cheshire Cat is the true ruler of Wonderland/Underland, if not a god.

In one shot in the film his face appears around the moon. Plus, he does seem like he knows everything to happen but he hides it from averyone else, giving them mysterious gestures instead.

  • This makes a lot of sense, actually. It would certainly explain his power which seems unequaled by any being in Wonderland/Underland. A possibility would be that the Cat is a kind of elemental force, a physical embodiment of the very spirit of Wonderland. Chaotic and insane, half there and half not there.
    • To elaborate on this, the Jabberwock might be an Evil Counterpart to him, the physical manifestation of everything WRONG with Wonderland. That would explain why he sticks with the Red Queen though nobody else will. He is not her servant, She is HIS. A creature of concentrated Evil, the Jabberwock just wants to see the realm bleed and the Red Queen helps him in this endeavor.
  • Another backing example to the god theory is how pissed the Hatter gets at the Chesire Cat simply for not being around when the Red Queen took over. Also, the Cat crowns the White Queen, and in just about every monarchy, it used to be believed that royalty is a deity's mandate.

The White Queen is a Stepford Smiler.

If insanity in her family is something of a hereditary trait (exhibited and embraced by the Red Queen), White's entire lifestyle is a massive put-on to disguise the fact that she is absolutely terrified of becoming like her sister. The floaty personality, the intense kindness and general Purity Sue-ishness behavior is to put on an acceptable exterior for the people around her. All the while White wonders how much longer she can keep the act up before the Sanity Slippage leads to a Freak-Out and possibly a Face Heel Turn.

The Cheshire Cat had a hand in the Red Queen's coup of Underland

Being very much a Chaotic Good-leaning Trickster, the Cat most definitely does a few things from time to time that irritate people. It could have been anything, a comment or an action, that began a series of events that caused the Red Queen to overthrow the White Queen. He may not know it, or if he does, want to admit it. This is what the Hatter was alluding to when the Cat showed up for tea.

  • The Visual Guide says the Cheshire Cat was the guardian animal of the Mad Hatter's family (who themselves were Underlandian aristocrats of some sort) and he bailed on them when the Jabberwock was sent to destroy their home.

Stayne wasn't trying to kill the Red Queen...

He was trying to kill himself.

  • This. It makes sense. Much sense. The Queen's just that self-centered, and since he begged for death once the knife was taken...
  • This Troper honestly believed that was his intention while watching the movie, and will still argue that is the case even now. That and, only the Queen was the one to say that "he was trying to kill me" which isn't something you can honestly believe in. For someone that self-centred, you can't consider her a reliable source for information. Also, the begging for death comes to mind...
  • Yeah, that's what I immediately assumed when I saw him draw that knife. I didn't realize it was supposed to be him murdering the Queen until I went online afterward. I still think that's what he really wanted.

Not only is this not the first time Alice has been to Underland, it's not the second, either... and it won't be the last.

Alice's recurring dreams were actually repeated visits there, each time instigating a change in power from one Queen to the other. When Alice says that she'll come back and the Hatter protests that she won't remember, he is speaking from experience: she never does. The cycle simply repeats itself, varying mostly in the details and in how much farther Underland has fallen from the cleaner, prettier, more idyllic version that she visited the first time.

  • OMG! That makes sense!
  • My personal headcanon always was that the first book was Alice's first trip to Wonderland--but she went back many more times after that, and by the time Through The Looking Glass rolled around (six months later) she had gotten used to it, explaining why she's much more Genre Savvy and chill about being in a dream world by that time.

On her trading voyages she will meet a girl with a similar experience to hers.

Her Name is Wendy Darling and she will tell Alice about her adventures in another alternate world, Neverland.

  • Each world has a protector. A maiden of the purest heart. A Princess of Heart. Neverland has one. Wonderland has one. Together, these worlds form a magical universe known only as...Kingdom Hearts
  • Somebody fanfic this!

Alice can travel between worlds/dreams which is why "Underland" is falling apart.

The books actually happened: Alice traveled to Wonderland then later through the looking glass, unfortunately as she was a little girl and unaware of her powers she left travel "holes" in the fabric between worlds that allowed things to slip through (which is why she still had dreams about what was happening in the places without going there). It was through these holes that The Red Queen arrived in Wonderland, an act that created further cracks inbetween the worlds that deepened the moment she defeated and merged with The Queen of Hearts (see previous WMG).

While the fusing of Red and Heart made the complete fixing of the worlds impossible, they would have still stayed two different places and been fairly okay had The Red Queen not, in a fit of paranoia, killed The Red King. As The King was the Dreamer of the Dream (as suggested in Through the Looking Glass) and the only one who could thus keep order his death caused the two worlds to smash together rearranging themselves into the "Underland" that Alice falls into in the film.

This warped and slowing shattering world can not be saved, everything Alice did will not heal the cracks. Hatter being both mad and the only one to be given the idea of being a dream is aware of the cracks and the fact that once Alice leaves the world is doomed.

The Butterfly coming through to our world was the last straw that made the whole thing collapse.

The Red Queen is also the Queen of Hearts by marriage.

We know there was a king, of course, we see his head floating in the river. My theory is that he was the King of Hearts in his own right, and she was the Red Queen of Underland in her own right, and their marriage brought the two titles together. (This is part of my fanfic-in-progress.)

Iracebeth's real title is the Queen of Hearts.

She has card guards for soldiers instead of chess pieces, aswell as Stayne being the Knave of Hearts, and in general all the mannerisms that the Queen of Hearts in the story had. I think that she either changed her title to contrast with her sister's title, or she could have defeated the real Red Queen and decided to steal her title upon conquering Underland.


The whole thing was just a nightmare after listening to too much Tom Petty.

You'd have to be mad as a Hatter to survive this place!

The vocaloid song Alice of Human Sacrifice is...

About the Alice's who came before the Alice. And the Alice we see is not the Alice of any color, but the Absolute Alice, who is made of many colors. I believe that somewhere near the beginning of the movie, there was a line something like, "She's the wrong one!" That suggests there was more than one Alice. 4 others actually. Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow. If you've heard the song, you know these Alice's all met their demise horribly. But this one survived, which is why she isn't in the song.

More proof is at the beginning of the movie, when Alice first falls down the rabbit hole, she tries to open some doors. This would be unimportant unless you look closely. First off, there are four, the amount of Alice's there are in the song. Second, If you look closely at the third door, it has something that looks a bit like a crown on it, and the third Alic became queen of her own country. Third, the last door was double doors, and as we all know, the fouth Alice was twins.

  • I always thought the song implied that the Alice of the story came first, which is why newcomers in Wonderland are referred to as Alices.
    • Alice first entered Wonderland when she was about 6. The movie states that it takes place 13 years later, when Alice is 19. During this 13 year time difference, the White Rabbit could've brought back the "Alices" from the song while trying to find the right one. They were all wrong, and were thus unfit to survive in Wonderland. Going a bit further with this theory, the Third Alice temporarily overthrew the Red Queen, but soon became corrupt. Either the Red Queen somehow reclaimed her throne, or the Red Queen in the movie is the Third Alice in disguise. As for the others, I'm not sure.

Neither the Red Queen nor the White Queen are truly good nor evil. Instead, each is one of the True Fae, and their battle is just one more campaign for the Title of Queen of the Underland.

The various armored knights, talking animals, etc. are Changelings, Wisps, or Hobgoblins.

Alice is a nudist at heart.

I couldn't help but think she was a little too calm and collected when she grew out of her clothes in front of the queen and her people. and when you think at both her free spirited/defiant nature towards things sociably acceptable (especially her refusal to wear certain proper formal wear to the party) it would make sense.

Wonderland is The Neverending Story and Alice can get there by dreaming

Explains itself. White Queen= Childlike Empress, Red Queen= Xayide.

The Mad Hatter's whole family is dead.

In the Hatter's flashback, he says something like, "It was tradition for the Hightopp clan to be employed in the court." In the middle of the Jabberwocky attack, there's a girl who falls to the ground and looks up at the Jabberwocky. YMMV, but this troper thinks the girl bears some resemblance to the Mad Hatter. Sister? Cousin?

Think about it. Not everyone was lucky enough to escape.

  1. ↑ And an N in both, but no N in either. How deliciously absurd.
  2. ↑ The White Queen, that is
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