Chatterbox: Inkwell

Some disconnected world-building ramblings. About Wonderland, because I'm writing fanfiction about it. And because I need to put my thoughts down somewhere and this is the most readily available place to do it. Thoughts, suggestions, etc. are all quite welcome.

So my conception of Wonderland is something like this:

Wonderland and Looking Glass Land are two sort of parallel dimensions to our own world (hereafter called the Aboveground). A helpful (if physically inaccurate) model is that of a braid, with the three worlds being tightly intertwined without actually sharing space. From a Wonderlander's point of view, the Aboveground is a considerable distance overhead, while Looking Glass Land is—elsewhere, but on roughly the same level from a three-dimensional point of view, accessible from Wonderland via the Looking Glass, which is on the extreme west border of Wonderland (and, by the time of my fic, the kingdom of Looking Glass Land has been annexed to Wonderland). 

Early in Wonderlander history, the borders between Wonderland and the Aboveground were very thin and porous, so it was very easy to cross back and forth between the two and such crossings took place often, with Abovegrounders falling into Wonderland accidentally as well as climbing down on purpose, and Wonderlands climbing up and down frequently. However, Wonderland being fundamentally differend from the Aboveground in terms of natural laws etc., this frequent exchange caused certain—problems within Wonderland.

Simply put, the Aboveground is essentially "sane" where Wonderland is essentially "insane", and unless crossings were handled very, very carefully, bits of sanity from the Aboveground would cause averse reactions in the fabric of Wonderland's reality, causing natural disasters, the appearance of monsters such as the Jabberwock, and so forth. 

To remedy this, the Queen of Hearts sent a champion by the name of Dodgson into the Aboveground to seal off the Wonderland borders. He spent some years at this, until at last they were almost perfectly closed. However, finding himself unable to seal them completely, he came up with a clever solution: he enlisted the help of the extensive Hare family to form a passageway (which came to be known as the rabbit hole) from the last gap in the border, and, with the help of an Abovegrounder girl named Alice Liddell, keyed the RH to open only once in a very great while, so that any crossings that did occur could be carefully controlled so as to protect both worlds.

Since nothing of the sort had ever been attempted before, several limitations were later discovered: the rabbit hole would only open Wonderland-side for a member of the Hare family, and on the Aboveground-side for imaginitive and open-minded people named Alice. Furthermore, the rabbit hole was very unstable: most of the time, it is in a state of flux, opening for only a few minutes in random places on Wonderland, and only opening on the Aboveground-side when a Wonderlander was already inside it. It was impossible to predict when or where the rabbit hole would open, so visiting Alices were few and far between.

Over time (and a good deal longer in Wonderland than in the Aboveground, since Wonderland time can cram years into a single Aboveground second), the arrival of an Alice became a kind of holiday, with extravagant parties and imitations of the first Alice's visit.  

Eventually, a large portion of both Glasslander and Wonderlander culture becomes based on the structure we know from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, with certain roles (i.e. the Hatter, the Mock Turtle, the White Knight, etc.) being filled over and over again by each generation. (In other words, being the March Hare or the Dodo or the Bellman or the White Queen or what-have-you is the Wonderlander/Glasslander equivalent of having a job. [an exception to this is the Tweedles, who in my fic are anthropomorphisms of LGL itself—entantiomorphs a la Gardner—and therefore immortal]). Because of this, one very important thing about LGL and Wonderland is that neither place changes very much over time; the same basic pattern is repeated every day/week/month/year, with only very minor variations. 

Wonderland and LGL are also somewhat dependent on the imaginations/mental states of the current Alice—that is, the one scheduled to visit/most recently visited—so both kingdoms will change a little to reflect the current Alice's upbringing/tastes/experiences/etc, even though they remain in essentials the same (so LGL will always be a chessboard, Wonderland will always have the tea party and the axe-happy Queen of Hearts).

(And yes, this is my way of allowing for all the gazillion other adaptions of AiW to exist within the same general fanon of my own Wonderland. Heh heh, I'm so sneaky. Although in terms of timeline, my fic predates SyFy's Alice. Not that it matters, since the only AiW adaption I specifically reference is the Wildhorn musical, which is the one that inspired the whole fic. BUT JUST SO YOU KNOW.) 

Anyway I've been striving for the appropriate balance between absurd and sense-making, and I'm fairly happy with how it's turned out. What does everyone else think, and also, if you were to design your own version of Wonderland, what would it be like?