IT REALLY WAS REAL! The "I saw this so long ago I thought I hallucinated it" thread

! thank you! i appreciate that a lot and i hope they come up with something :3
i wasn't familiar with ito at the time, so i don't know, but from what i remember of the style it's distinctly possible

 

Alright. So. I just gave up on another fruitless hunt, so I might as well ask here.

One time when my family to a vacation to BC, Canada, I bought a book of mazes at a secondhand store. It was quite a large rectangular book, longer than it was tall, and had a dark cover with one of the mazes on the cover. I think it was some sort of monster, maybe the Minotaur, and it was colored in bright colors. The mazes were all pretty unique and interesting, and there were some "repeats" that weren't actually quite repeats, but variations on the same form. I distinctly remember one of the mazes was created with "help" from the author's cat, who had stepped (? I think) on the maze when he was drawing it. There were a lot of references to Greek mythology in some of the mazes (one was, I think, a woman trying to "get" to her husband by going through the maze? I think her husband may have been Menelaus, but I'm not 100% on that). I completed a bunch of the mazes and colored some of them, but the book itself seems to have disappeared at some point. I really want to get another copy of it, or at least see acknowledgement that this cool thing existed in the world.

Examples of some of the mazes I remember:

• Two people kissing, I think? Either that or looking into each other's eyes (think there were a couple of versions of this)
• The maze I mentioned above that had someone looking for their true partner (pretty sure they were figures from Greek mythology)
  
• A maze composed of "cubes" with the corners cut out, very mosaic-ish and geometric
• Several versions of the Minotaur/monster maze
• One that was very "loose" and "wavy", almost like an underwater scene

I can't remember what it was called or who the author was (I think it was a he, though). I remember that in the introduction, the author suggested coloring the mazes when you'd completed them. I remember mentions of a cat. The only clues I have are what I've said above and that I bought it in Canada, so it may have been published there and not in the US? And I feel like the title was something completely unhelpful in trying to track it down, like "Something Mazes".

Saro's rendition of the fuzzy memory she has of the cover:

 

does anyone here recall a musical about pirates, in which grace o'malley (and another girl) are both crossdressing in order to be pirates, and one (or both) of the girls die at the end, perhaps 'cause they were girls?

i know it exists but the name eludes me and google is not helping.

 

@unknownanonymous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Queen maybe?? I just googled it, have never seen the thing.

 

i already looked at that and it doesn't sound right. like, i'm pretty sure that the musical i'm thinking of didn't end in grace o'malley triumphing.

 

Thunderbirds anime. Hard to find, and there is one episode I've only seen parts of that drives me crazy. (It involved a white deer I think?)

There is this one after school special I think? Or Saturday movie thing. And I don't remember anything except the one point where a kid falls out of a tree and disappears. I have no idea what it is or where it's from.

Sometimes, I have a hard time believing that Rock and Rule exists, and I watched it all the way through multiple times.

Fantastic Planet. Creepy cartoon movie that probably should have given me the screaming meemies but didn't. Because it was kind of my jam.

There's a french cartoon, the name of which slips my mind, which involves a Hollow Earth storyline and a quest to fix the "sun" at the center of the world. I don't remember the name of it.

That one show made by the same people that did Land of the Lost. Just. That one show.

I have a vague memory of a movie involving a woman who was washing an improbable number of dishes. Blood may or may not have been involved.

That one Doc Savage movie that always gives me a headache because of the glowing green snake-things.

That one cartoon anthology that was basically cartoons based off of books and their take on Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood. (cue otherkitten skreeing because the canon was wrong.) And my complete inability to ever see their take on Ratha's creature.

 

There's a Valerian and Laureline comic in which they have to stabilize the sun-like center of a hollow world, World Without Stars/Le Pays sans Etoiles, but I don't know if it ever got animated.

 

Nope. There were weird punk "pirates" and armadillo like critters made of stone. And it was definitely supposed to be Earth. With lots of different worlds inside of it.

Found it! Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea

 

I used to get this mixed up with the Aristocats all the time and wonder why some of the things I was sure I remembered were not in that film.

Then I read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Purr-ee and realised I'd seen both films as a child and conflated them badly.

 

I know Fantastic Planet!!! That was freaky but I loved it when I was a kid.

 

the dude talking at the start has the exact same voice as o'malley from the aristocats, i swear, so it's not at all surprising that you confused them

 

Does anyone who has ever lived in Japan here remember Mitsuya Pink Soda?

I've missed it for years.

 

So I'm trying to find a book and google's insisting that it's Codex Alera which I'm 99% sure it isn't but hey.

I read it something like ten years ago, and I can't remember most of the plot. I do remember some of the core characters though.

The main Dude Character is the son of a (wizard/mage???) of high repute that come from a town near a glacier. We're introduced to him getting kicked out of magic school because he was out afterhours and was able to unlock the magic lock on the gate which is like... Negative Magic or something. Mere days after he gets sent home in disgrace, his town is attacked and overrun, and he's pulled into slavery.

(He has a little sister who Talks To Magic Things on the glacier and she runs and hides there??? I think??? This is also regarded as bad and unnatural and I think she might end up dying of exposure but I can't remember.)

As a slave, he ends up in the gladiatorial ring, and discovers his Negitive Magic can be used to give him an edge in fighting. I don't think it's called the magic of cutting, but maybe it is? Anyways over the years he ends up a super famous gladiator but still a slave, and at one point his cousin (who didn't get kicked out of magic school) shows up to heal him and is five kinds of resentful over DC being famous.

(Also there's a whole thing where there's??? Sexy demon and/or lizard women in the basement???? And they sap your strength so DC is a Chaste Hero and never falls for their sexual wiles???)

Cut over to Lady Character who is... I can't remember if she's in school, or a poor cousin to a noblewoman, or what. But she's one of like ten women picked to be the emperor's next bride, and they have to pass trials to prove their worth. One of the trials is that they give her something to drink and she's rendered blind; she accepts her fate and tries to come to peace with this while dutifully performing tasks, and is eventually given her sight back and told she won, and was to marry the emperor. I think this took place in a monastery??

Anyways, LC is married and goes to a gladiator match with the emperor who is like a god among men, and makes eye contact with DC. And I guess they fall in love? Or were soulmates?? And the emperor is using death magic or something to power his reign. So there's this huge revolution and DC saves LC from the emperor but maybe they're seperated?? It was a series, I think, and I'm pretty sure it was a cliffhanger.

Does any of this ring a bell to anyone?

 

Yeah that's def not Codex Alera at all you can put that one off the list.

But otherwise it sadly doesn't ring a bell with me.

 

Yeah, Codex Alera's MC just straight-up cannot do magic. And he definitely never gets sold into a slavery or becomes a gladiator. Hell, after the first book he gets personally sponsored through spy school by the emperor.

 

See, I THOUGHT so but my memories of Codex Alera were even fuzzier so i wasn't sure if I was misremembering.

 

I'm pretty sure I found the story through this site, in one of the "rec" threads, but i can't find it now.

the main character was a boy, he finds either a magical wall or staircase or wall with a staircase in the middle of a field. on the other side is a magical world that's had a bunch of humans make their way there, it had a freaking training camp/school and everything. it was purposely trope-subverty and the main character refused to fight because he was a self righteous punk and instead read all of the books and papers and started helping out by like, shoe-horning his way into becoming an ambassador. he was also one of those characters who's a real smart mouth and always picking fights and getting into fights. his dad is emotionally distant and his eventual best friends are a boy from a family of really great, well-known fighters, and an elf girl who's culture is a subversion of the patriarchy, with boy elves having the sexual purity thing pushed on them and stuff

i remember almost all of it but i can't find it for the life of me and i need to bookmark it so bad ;-;

 

The Turn of the Story, by Sarah Rees Brennan.

 

Which is now also professionally published as In Other Lands!

 

Thank you so much, it can stop haunting me now!