This article first appeared in issue 10 of Touhou Culture Journal. We are making it available here in connection with the call for contributions to our eleventh issue’s special feature, both as a reference for anyone interested in submitting work and as a thank-you to the fellow fans who have followed and supported us over the past four years. For more articles, please see the print journal.
Touhou Culture Journal (《東方文化學刊》) is a dōjinshi—an independently produced magazine—devoted to the Touhou Project series and its dōjin culture. Founded in Taipei in June 2015, it is edited by Hu Youtian, founder of Hengcui Workshop (恆萃工坊). Both its title and its internal formatting imitate a formal academic journal. The point is to “give everyone encouragement”: to demonstrate that games, anime, and manga, like other art forms, deserve serious study and criticism. By uncovering the history and folklore within the Touhou Project games, and exploring what goes into their music, art, game design, and other aspects, we can help fellow fans understand Touhou’s world more deeply while offering creators something to draw on as they make ever more accomplished work.
An armchair Marxist gentleman;1 member of the Alice Observation Association, the Alice Club, and the Alice Gentlemen’s Order; believer in the AI faith (the ALICE faith).
[Author profile]2
In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche buried God, Weber banished the ghosts, Marx cursed capitalists as vampires, and Darwin acknowledged monkeys as our ancestors. Europe gradually entered industrial society through the Scientific Revolution, while opium blasted open the gates of Qing China. In one corner of this turbulent scientific century, on a quiet summer afternoon in Oxford, England, a fine-featured maths-and-science type who spoke haltingly was photographing a half-naked, dark-haired ten-year-old girl. She leaned against a wall, smiling, but her clothes were ragged, her shoulders entirely bare, and even a nipple was faintly visible. The “Beggar Maid” in this controversial photograph of a child would later become the namesake heroine of (one of) the world’s great fairy-tale classics: Alice.
This maths-and-science type, who seemed to have rather unusual tastes, was the Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll,3 father of the fairy-tale Alice and author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There—hereafter, the Alice books. His Alice has had an enduring influence on popular culture. Yet from the moment she fell down the rabbit hole, this “Alice” was no longer simply the little bourgeois girl dressed up as a beggar or a child prostitute. Over nearly two centuries, she has become a cultural symbol, continually re-created (interpreted) by people across the arts, scholarship, politics, science, and entertainment.
In different cultural contexts and subcultural communities, “Alice” has become a particular configuration of meanings or body of cultural knowledge. Entering popular culture, she has undergone something like a rebirth: she has become Freud’s “Alice,” the pedophile’s “Alice,” the hippie’s “Alice,” the “Alice” of male otaku fantasy—and our “Alice,” the Alice of Touhou fans.
Alice means something quite extraordinary both to Touhou fans and to the father of Gensokyo. ZUN chose Alice as part of his circle’s name, Team Shanghai Alice. Both the old Touhou games of the last century and the new century’s Touhou Project have had their “Alice,” both friend and foe to the protagonists. For Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square in 1998, ZUN also composed an Extra-stage theme called “Alice in Wonderland” (不思議の国のアリス), borrowing the Japanese title of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland outright—an unusually direct allusion for him.
Alice is also one of the most popular characters in Touhou fan creation. She has never topped the popularity polls, but in MMD,4 the hottest field of Touhou fan work, she is indisputably Gensokyo’s number-one idol, comfortably ahead of both the Komeiji and Scarlet sisters. From うすた’s Marisa as Usual (いつものまりさ) to キイロイヒト’s Smile (微笑) series, Gensokyo’s Seven-Colored Magician has remained a fixture of the finest story-driven MMD videos, carrying forward two great traditions of hand-drawn Touhou fan animation: “Alice as Usual” (アリスいつも通り) and “Alice, the Capable Woman” (できる女アリス).
In his comments on the old-series Alice in Mystic Square’s character notes, ZUN mentions five Alices: Alice Clone from the shoot-’em-up ESP Ra.De. (1998), the Fiend Alice from the RPG Shin Megami Tensei (1992), Alice from Izumi Takemoto’s manga ルププパウ (1998), the nurse Alice from the fighting game Bloody Roar (1997), and the lich Alice from the fighting game Asura Blade (1998). Add the classic Alice invoked by the Extra-stage theme “Alice in Wonderland,” and we have six. Clearly, whether we are talking about the last century’s “Loli Alice”—the old-series Alice’s nickname—or the new century’s puppeteer, at least two cultural traditions have shaped ZUN’s “Alice”: the nineteenth-century fairy-tale source, and the inheritance, transformation, and rebirth of Carroll’s “Alice” in Japan.
The linguist Yuen Ren Chao first introduced Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to China in translation in 1922. Since then, it has appeared in at least eighty-two Chinese translations and countless reprints. Yet, beyond its standing as a classic children’s book, I have seen no derivative work of any great influence. The Japanese are another matter: not only do they love translating Alice, they love re-creating it even more—and here “re-create” is a verb. “Alice” became a darling of Japanese popular culture, giving rise to a distinctly Japanese postmodern configuration of meanings called “Alice Style” (アリススタイル).5 Born in Britain, “Alice” has achieved localization in the fullest sense in Japan, even entering into a “syncretism” with certain native cultural quirks (and sexual kinks) to form a complex. This essay will attempt to decipher the cultural allure behind Gensokyo’s “number-one idol.”
A Nineteenth-Century Dōjin Miracle
Compare Carroll with ZUN, the Alice books with the Touhou series, and you may be surprised by how much they have in common. Both authors are maths-and-science types. Both began by creating freely and independently, as amateurs crossing into other fields. The Oxford photographer and the Nagano musician both delight in allusion, parody, and playful mockery. Both series are so intensely denpa.6 And both have generated an ocean of derivative creations. Touhou’s dōjin culture is already a magnificent spectacle, but even it may be dwarfed by the century-old, towering tree of Alice. The Alice books have been translated into 121 languages, and Alice has devoted fans young and old. Across different periods, adaptations, references, and re-creations have appeared in countless forms: films, animation, paintings, novels, essays, poetry, even scientific papers—consider medicine’s “Alice in Wonderland syndrome” and biology’s “Red Queen hypothesis.” And after all, the subject of this very essay is Touhou’s re-creation of “Alice.” The Alice books are an exemplary instance of what ZUN hopes to create: a work for a whole nation, a work for the world.
But read the original Alice books and you may find yourself puzzled. How did work like this become one of the world’s most spectacular “dōjin miracles”? Carroll’s fairy tales are, in fact, not all that interesting. Their content and form are too steeped in their period, their locality, and their author’s personal world. Carroll parodies nineteenth-century British moral poems such as “Against Idleness and Mischief” and “The Old Man’s Comforts, and How He Gained Them”;7 devises peculiarly British word games involving tail-shaped verse, puns, doggerel, and regional dialects; and draws on Victorian customs and cultural references such as the antipodes, bathing machines, the Caucus-race, mock turtle soup, croquet, and Humpty Dumpty. Carroll’s own “circle,” first of all, was nineteenth-century Britain’s middle and upper classes, its bourgeoisie.8 The considerable demands these books make on the reader’s knowledge of English literature and British history and culture, together with their loose, fragmentary narratives, make them downright obscure and intensely denpa for foreign readers. You may even need an entire book of annotations to get through them.
An Eastern reader encountering the Alice books’ historical and local in-jokes—the Caucus-race’s riff on nineteenth-century British party politics, for example—probably feels much as a Western player does on meeting such cultural knowledge as feng shui, Chang’e, or the Suwa faith in Touhou Project, if not more so. The Alice books, especially Wonderland, also contain a great many private allusions. The Lory in the Caucus-race is modeled on Alice’s eldest sister, Lorina Liddell; the Mouse stands for the Liddell sisters’ Black governess; and the Dodo is Carroll himself. Many characters come from Carroll’s social circle, centered on the Liddell family. They did not become iconic figures; they were simply one of his ways of pleasing Alice. In a sense, Carroll’s “circle” came down to that little girl who gave him the occasion to invent his story as they boated together on the Thames one summer afternoon.
Set the Alice books beside other great fairy tales—Michael Ende’s (1929–1995) fantasy epic The Neverending Story (1979), the four companions’ “scripture-seeking” adventure in Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the love that “cannot reach” its beloved in Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (1838),9 or Wilde’s exquisitely affected and romantic The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)—and Alice seems an outright oddity. Unlike the two Alice books, with their fractured plots, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, another story of a girl transported to a strange world, has a very clear narrative line. It tells of a journey of growth, or a rite of passage: Dorothy leads the Cowardly Lion, the heartless Tin Woodman, and the brainless Scarecrow to the Emerald City in search of courage, a true heart, and wisdom, and in the end they find their whole selves. How closely this resembles the structure of Journey to the West: the monk Tang Sanzang leads Bajie, Wukong, and Wujing, who represent the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion, westward to obtain the scriptures; through trials, they purge their evil thoughts and finally attain spiritual fruition. Though Oz and Journey to the West arise from very different cultural contexts, they share a common “deep structure” within human literature. I suspect many Chinese readers would find the Oz books far more engrossing than Alice.
Yet, strangely, history tells us that Dorothy has apparently never been as popular as Alice, at least in popular culture. The reason may lie not in the stories of “Alice,” but in “Alice” herself.
The Alice Club
Since the Alice books were written by a mathematician, many people have interpreted them through philosophy, logic, and linguistics, with rich results. Yet these rarefied, speculative readings also seem hard-pressed to explain popular culture’s “Alice” complex, for popular culture places greater emphasis on sensory gratification. In Japan, for instance, “Alice” is to a considerable extent the visual style of Lolita fashion mentioned above, “Alice Style.” Whether in fictional character design or real-world clothing design, including cosplay, a blue dress, white apron, and black boots are the basic equipment. Victorian accessories—frills, bows, hairbands—are indispensable. Playing cards, pocket watches, keys, tea sets, mirrors, rabbits, cats, and other fairy-tale elements are welcome embellishments. The virtual YouTuber Mononobe Alice offers a particularly vivid example.
Mononobe Alice is not the Alice of the fairy tale. She is conceived as a sixteen-year-old Japanese high-school girl of mixed Japanese and British parentage. But from her clothes to her programs’ “tea party” label, she very actively packages herself in fairy-tale elements to attract viewers. Her name cleverly splices together one of Japan’s oldest surnames, Mononobe, and that most ordinary and extraordinary of British names, Alice. Yes, 物述 and 物部 are both read Mononobe; more cleverly still, the characters 物述 suggest telling a story, so that the whole name doubles as “Alice the storyteller.” 有栖 is read Arisu, the Japanese sound of Alice. Yet the focus of Mononobe Alice’s design seems not to be fairy-tale elements such as the Mad Tea-party or the Queen of Hearts in themselves, but the tiny protagonist they point toward: that girl of “seven years and six months,” the “blonde loli” drawn by John Tenniel (1820–1914), illustrator of the first editions of the Alice books. For this has become the virtual YouTuber’s biggest selling point.
The young female body is a commodity constructed for popular culture by patriarchal consumer society. Mononobe Alice may be sixteen, but her height has been set, much to everyone’s delight, at a level where “even a comparison with an elementary-school child wearing a backpack would leave her feeling despondent.” Supposedly, this is “because she ate a biscuit in Wonderland that made her body shrink.” The fairy tale ingeniously explains the discourse surrounding Mononobe Alice’s body; in turn, her commercial success reinforces the body-related pattern of meaning called “Alice.”
As these examples suggest, “Alice” and the young female body—the so-called “LO-LI”—essentially stand for one another in popular culture. In all these forms of popular culture, what “Alice” really amounts to is the body as a commodity, and the commodities capital puts on the market cannot exist apart from their consumers. No gentlemen, no loli; no Humbert, the male protagonist of Lolita, no Lolita; and without Carroll, of course, no “Alice.” The fetishization of the young female body exists because of adult men’s complex desires. To decode the “Alice” complex, then, we must first return to the male photographer with the unusual tastes who opened this essay: Carroll.
The ambiguous relationship between Carroll and Alice Liddell, his photographic model and the inspiration for his fairy-tale heroine, is one of literary history’s enduring mysteries and controversies. It has shaped interpretations of the Alice books. Some regard them as pure children’s literature, with Alice as Carroll’s soulmate and creative muse. Others see the books as full of dark allusions and believe that Carroll harbored an unusual erotic desire for Alice.
The most influential dark interpretations of the Alice books have come from psychoanalysis. Many Freudian scholars believe that Alice’s “adventures”—her dreams—are full of sexual symbols. An early example is A. M. E. Goldschmidt’s essay “‘Alice in Wonderland’ Psycho-Analysed” (1933), which argues that Wonderland’s recurring doors and keys metaphorically represent the (O) act. Full-sized doors symbolize adult women; the little door leading into the beautiful garden, the focal point of the tale’s conflict, symbolizes a young girl; and the curtain concealing that door, which Alice lifts, symbolizes children’s clothes. Goldschmidt concludes that Carroll concealed his sexual longing for Alice within Wonderland. How much truth there is in this conclusion is not my concern here. The point is that a postmodern society amusing itself to death has a taste for this kind of prurient “gossip,” and the essay’s approach has profoundly influenced subsequent interpretations of Alice-related texts, especially in popular culture. The spread of Freudian philosophy allowed sexual desire to become “the engine of consumerism.”12 Freudianism placed flesh—especially the flesh of young girls—at the center of interpretations of the Alice tales. At that point, sex ceased to be a pre-Freudian taboo discourse and became a new master imposed upon the body. As cultural scholar Will Brooker observes, contemporary media actively select one-sided evidence to construct Carroll as a “pedophile,” even without conclusive proof.13 They drag little “Alice” out of her dreams and back into reality, an adult world awash in lust for things—and flesh—because this is what the public “loves to see,” what it is happy to consume. Especially in today’s new-media age of information overload: traffic (cash) first; truth comes later.
How mad is this postmodern world into which “Alice” awakens? In 1998, British police dismantled a notorious online child-pornography ring called the Wonderland Club in an operation codenamed Cathedral.14 The chatbot written by this group was called “Alice.” And if Alice were to go through the rabbit hole and fall out on the other side of the earth, she would discover that Japan, too, was then publishing a legal “***” magazine named after her: Alice Club (アリスクラブ). It chiefly printed nude photographs of young girls, along with some erotic fiction and manga about girls and news of child performers. It did not survive into the twenty-first century, but it operated legally from 1988 to 1999. AliceSoft (アリスソフト, 1988–), a long-lived industry leader in Japanese adult games, also made her its mascot, and so on. Clearly, the gentlemen of the century’s end independently turned to “Alice”-related texts to construct a collective identity for their communities, whether their dōjin gatherings went under the name “Wonderland” or “Alice.” Whether Carroll, their uncrowned “chairman,” ought to occupy the club’s seat of honor remains open to question.
Although Carroll liked making friends with young girls and photographing them half-naked or entirely nude, many scholars point out that the taste for girls expressed in his literature and photography belonged to the Romantic “cult of the child,” which gradually emerged alongside the concept of “childhood” after the Enlightenment.
Like Jia Baoyu, Carroll once lamented: “It was a pity the world isn’t composed entirely of little girls from 6 to 12.”1516 As nineteenth-century British literature—from Dickens’s Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop to George Eliot’s Silas Marner and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind—portrayed them, children embodied innocence and redemption; they were beings without gender. The naked girls in Carroll’s photographs therefore represented not a “loli” signifying desire, but an innocent child signifying redemption (abstinence). Love of a girl’s flesh was, in the Victorian age, actually a sacred faith. But once it starts playing bondage games with money, capital, and power in today’s consumer society, it cannot help degenerating into a form of evil.
The name of the Japanese adult magazine Alice Club is an excellent metaphor for the postmodern metamorphosis of the “Alice” complex. Under the guidance of contemporary media, so fond of “re-creation,” people no longer care about the intricacies of the philosophical games Carroll wove out of language, mathematics, and logic. Nor do they care what social realities his Victorian Easter eggs reflect from that age in which “all that is solid melts into air.”17 Still less do they have the inclination to savor each carefully devised piece of doggerel mocking a moral poem. The focus of aesthetic attention has long since shifted from the fairy-tale text to the character’s “attributes.” Fellow gentlemen build shrines—clubs—raise “Alice” onto the altar, and prostrate themselves before her. Yet the idol in the shrine no longer looks as she once did, for gentlemen of different times and places project their own cultural desires and aesthetic tastes onto her. The original fairy tales are deconstructed into fragments and collaged with new cultural elements to produce a postmodern multitude of “Alices,” as kaleidoscopic as “magically colored light” (魔彩光). However changeable the signifiers of these postmodern “Alices” may be, the flesh of the young girl remains their unchanging signified. Powerful primal feelings surge beneath the postmodern “Alice” complex.
Cut Open the Black Dream: Pink Inside—The Psychedelic Metaphors of the “Seven-Colored” Magician
Postmodern perverted gentlemen and Freud’s heirs are not the only ones to interpret “Alice” as a dark fable. Many serious scholars of children’s literature also point out that death’s shadow follows Alice throughout her adventures: from the White Rabbit’s house and the Duchess’s kitchen to the Queen of Hearts’ garden. In Douglas-Fairhurst’s reading, Alice’s absurd dreams may transfigure the many cruel realities children face in a world ruled by adults.18 The Queen, whose catchphrase is a demand for someone’s head, might in real life be an unreasonable, overbearing parent. Sleep itself was often a Victorian metaphor for death. Alice follows the “White Rabbit” out of curiosity, falls down the rabbit hole, and disappears; child abductions employing this “White Rabbit” tactic were not uncommon at the time, and so on. There are also two particularly suggestive passages in the Alice books. In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty advises Alice to “Leave off at seven”, though putting this proposal into practice would presumably require the services of Death. In Wonderland, despite all the company she finds in her dream, Alice still laments, “I am so very tired of being all alone here!” There is a similar expression in Looking-Glass: “it is so very lonely here!” Clearly, Alice’s adventures are not entirely “happy.” Victorian “childhood” was very different from “childhood” today. Could this be a portrait of children’s inner lives in the adult society of that age?
Among the modern and postmodern adult readings of “Alice,” if Freudian interpretation is “pink,” and some interpretations within children’s literature studies are “black,” then the hippies’ interpretation is “seven-colored.” In my short essay “Reimu Goes ‘Up,’ Alice Goes ‘Down’: Eastern and Western Psychedelic Metaphors,”19 I discussed how “down the rabbit hole” has become an established pattern of meaning in English-language culture. It refers to abnormal mental states such as madness, addiction, and hallucination, or to predicaments that are strange, distressing, and difficult to escape. Much of the credit goes to the cultural practices of those blissfully intoxicated hippies, including their allusions to “Alice” in psychedelic rock. The most famous is Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 song “White Rabbit.” Body-changing potions, cakes, and mushrooms, the Caterpillar’s hookah, the refreshments at the Mad Tea-party: through the many re-creations made in the Dionysian spirit of the 1960s and 1970s, these fairy-tale elements became colorful code names for hallucinogenic drugs.
These three interpretations of “Alice,” which originated in modernity and gradually took shape in postmodernity, all deconstruct and remake “Alice” from an adult perspective. Only their emphases differ. “Pink” points toward desire for young flesh; “black” projects patriarchal domination; “color” is the new century’s “religious experience.” These three “colors” that stain the fairy tales are also reflected in popular-cultural re-creations.
Take games. Beginning with American McGee’s Alice in 2000, Alice’s dreams became sinister, terrifying black dreamscapes. In Japanese game culture, “Alice” no longer appears only as a positive character: she may be the mastermind behind the story’s events. In the BLACKSOULS (2017) series by the circle イニミニマニモ?—Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?20—for instance, an Alice who has turned dark, or “Black Alice,” sometimes lurks deep within the personality of the protagonist—whom one might call “White Alice”—giving her heroic persona another dimension. At other times, she takes the form of White Alice’s twin and becomes entangled with her in love and hatred, good and evil (Rage of Bahamut, 2011). “Alice” may even be nothing but a skin, a fleshly sign onto which men project their secret desire for a change of sex (淫靡の國のアリス, 2017). And of course, Rozen Maiden (2002) has done much to make the dark “Alice” memorable. The living Gothic dolls’ “play,” which ends only in death, is the so-called Alice Game. The “Alice” sought by the genius doll-maker Rozen is a contradictory being in whom cruelty and perfection meet.
The Fiend Alice from the Megami Tensei series21—the Alice who has had the greatest influence on Touhou, and whom ZUN most delights in discussing—is a beautiful girl who dances with Death. Her blue outfit, powerful magic, merciless curses, and cute dolls undoubtedly established the basis of Margatroid’s appearance and the character details developed around her—not to mention the old-series Alice, whose title was “Girl of Death.” Yet Touhou’s “Alice,” especially the new century’s “puppeteer,” is not only “black” but also “colorful.” Shanghai Alice, opium, Butterfly Dream Pills, seven-colored bullet patterns: these textual elements reflect ZUN’s attempt to blur the boundary between Alice’s dreamworld and drug-induced hallucinations.
Cut open the dōjin world’s Margatroid, and you will find “pink” inside: Alice in yuri pairings, Alice as a sexually voracious woman or an idol, Alice hypnotized, imprisoned, or dosed with hallucinogenic drugs (including aphrodisiacs) by strange men, and so on—all blooming side by side with her strong, capable-woman persona. Niconico Pedia, Japan’s largest popular-culture encyclopedia, has a popular Alice-related entry called “Alice Is Cute” (アリスはかわいい). Its editors remark: “There are all kinds of cute Alices in the world: the Alice of Megami Tensei, the Alice of ARIA, and countless others. One might even question whether an Alice who is not cute can exist at all. But there is only one ‘Alice’ in this entry: Alice Margatroid of Touhou Project. Much as it pains us, we must leave all the other cute ‘Alices’ out.” This entry, positively bursting with partisan fan devotion, reveals both Touhou Alice’s prominent position in Japanese popular culture—especially anime, comics, games, and novels—and the basic hue of Margatroid fan creation on Niconico, Touhou’s largest platform for derivative work.
Although Alice usually sits near the bottom of the top tier in popularity polls, and has been away from Touhou’s main storyline for years, in fan creation she often takes the form of an erotically charged idol, guiding curious outsiders into Gensokyo. From Niconico’s oldest million-view Touhou video, “Marisa Stole the Precious Thing” (魔理沙は大変なものを盜んでいきました), to the site’s overall number-one MMD work, “Sweet Magic” (Sweet Magicを魔法使いが踴ってくれました), it is clear that Touhou fans are not the only ones who fall for the Seven-Colored Magician. In bringing fresh blood to Touhou, her contribution is no smaller than that of the Yukkuri subculture. After all, behind her stands a household name, a world-class cultural symbol. And how many adults could bear to turn down an invitation from a blonde girl—a blonde loli?
Conclusion: A Girl Moving Between the Fairy-Tale World and the Adult World
“Alice” is the gaming world’s model worker. She laid the foundations for two of its great narrative traditions: transformation and passage into another world. From the classic Super Mario to the avant-garde Undertale (2015), we seem to catch glimpses of “Alice” everywhere. The wildly imaginative “Wonderland” itself often serves as a metaphor for the game world, while players are little “Alices,” brimming with curiosity and putting adventure above everything else. In terms of human socialization, play seems to be a child’s privilege, and attachment to “dreamworlds” seems incompatible with the adult social role. Yet history tells us that the people who fall down gaming’s “rabbit hole” tend to be about my age. The overwhelming majority of today’s game developers and consumers are adults. Like the blonde girl chasing the White Rabbit, we wander between the fairy-tale world and the adult world, messing about at the boundary between Wonderland and everyday life.
As Carroll writes in the prefatory poem to Wonderland:
Alice! a childish story take,
And with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers
Pluck’d in a far-off land.
Many scholars of children’s literature have argued that Carroll wrote the Alice books out of faith in childhood’s innocence and freedom from sin. He did not want “Alice” to grow up. Fairy tale and dream are like a crystal coffin, preserving Alice forever in her most sacred form. Might that boozehound Ōta—ZUN—who fashioned a “Childhood Festival” persona for himself, have felt something similar when he began to draw his own “Reimu”?22 Whether the dōjin miracle belongs to the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, it seems to tell us that the heart of a child is part of what makes the adult world possible. At the same time, social expectations demand that we not become lost in “Wonderland,” that we be able to climb out of the “rabbit hole.” Yet who could resist the temptation of changing sex and becoming a blonde loli? To be an “Alice” who can move freely between the fairy-tale world and the adult world: perhaps that is the appeal of “role-playing” in our age.
