Upsetting Day: Wogglebug Love Productions

Who's your favorite character from The Wizard of Oz? The Scarecrow? The Tin Man? The Munchkin who rides on another Munchkin and leads Dorothy around on a chain? Fools. Like so many others, you fail to recognize Lyman Frank Baum's most perfect creation. So perfect, in fact, that his world is no longer deserving of its brilliance. Oz is a blighted land which shall be consigned to oblivion, and only a handful of its many denizens will be saved. Chief amongst them is Mr. HM Woggle-Bug, TE.

The Woggle-Bug was first introduced in the book sequel to The Wizard of Oz, in which he is a little bug who listens in on Professor Nowitall's lessons and grows to human size, thus becoming Thoroughly Educated (TE) and Highly Magnified (HM). He eventually becomes a scholar in his own right, with Baum making him into a parody of pompous and conceited professors. The Woggle-Bug does a lot of wordplay and everyone hates it. They hate it so much that the Tinman threatens to murder him if he doesn't fucking cool it with the puns.

Now, there was an unofficial sequel film to The Wizard of Oz called Return to Oz. It draws some inspiration from The Marvelous Land to Oz and includes characters like Ozma and Jack Pumpkinhead. It conspicuously does not include the Woggle-Bug. However, the character did appear in a musical that Baum wrote to capitalize on the success of The Wizard of Oz on Broadway. Unfortunately, the original show was still running at the time, and the stars refused to leave their sure thing to gamble on a risky sequel, so Baum re-wrote the story to focus on the Woggle-Bug, who plays a relatively minor role in the book.

Critics and audiences agreed: it fucking sucked. The Woggle-Bug ran for less than a month, and was never staged in a major production again. The Woggle-Bug character appeared in a few other Oz stories after that, but never garnered much of a fandom… until one 12-year-old girl discovered him decades later and decided to spend the rest of her life evangelizing for an irritating cockroach monster.

Cynthia Hanson stumbled across the Oz books when she was a child. She says that upon encountering the Woggle-Bug, she was able to "quickly see far beyond the perception of the 'others'" and that he subsequently became her favorite fictional character. But she didn't want to keep him all to herself — she initiated a quest to make the world love him as much as she did.

In Cynthia's eyes, the Woggle-Bug was disrespected by his creator, who didn't know what a good thing he had when he came up with a talking bug who wears clothes and makes puns constantly until someone threatens him with axe murder. As she puts it, the Woggle-Bug "was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and got involved with the wrong people also. He felt himself ripped away from everyone else, crushed in his pride and he eventually just devolved into his alter-ego out of feeling so much neglect of love and care and stopped being able to be caring or a good friend to anyone. He immersed himself in his pride and let his lovability fade away and dissolve. No one liked him and he didn't like them, either, and didn't care anymore." Enter Cynthia.

An aspiring movie maker, Cynthia set out to make a film which would restore her beloved Woggle-Bug's reputation. That film was called Sylvie and the Wogglebug, and it looks like something that a freelance animator from a war-torn nation might produce for a foreign child predator on a tight budget.

Don't worry, though, this is all on the up and up. The Woggle-Bug wants to teach children self-esteem and critical thinking skills, but most of all, manners. Manners is best. Manners is easy and are fun to learn.

The Woggle-Bug loves manners, such as: giving hug to child.

Critically, this film — and the entire Wogglebug Love Productions transmedia franchise — does not take place in Oz, but in a world of Cynthia's own invention called Genoma. That's because, while she adores the Wogglebug, she despises the world he crawled out of. Partly that's due to how he's treated in the text — recall the threat of dismemberment for pun crimes — but it's also because of her deep antipathy towards the Oz fandom.

It wasn't always this way. Cynthia previously published books featuring other Oz characters like the Tinman and Pumpkinhead.

But over time, she soured on the community. Come to think of it, "soured" isn't really doing justice to the strength of her feelings. If you tell Cynthia Hanson that you like The Wizard of Oz, there is a good chance that she will fly into the Black Rage and tear you apart.

What could inspire such fury? What experiences drove Cynthia to excise the Woggle-Bug from his literary context, pruning the most recognizable characters of Oz from her works?

It turns out that for someone who has elevated a fictional roach man into a kind of spiritual figure, Cynthia is actually really militantly atheistic. You might have noticed the bits about an afterlife in her explanation of why she detests the Oz community. But what she doesn't mention there is that a former fandom friend once wrote a story in which the Woggle-Bug was a Christian. Unforgivable! The Woggle-Bug does not worship any bearded sky god! The Woggle-Bug worships only at the altar of good manners!

Critically, he is also not gay.

I mean, ok. It doesn't matter to me either way. I didn't even think he was until you brought it up. But I guess maybe people thought the Woggle-Bug and Frogman were together? Sort of a Frog and Toad scenario, if instead of being coded life partners, they were absolutely not that and the creator spent a lot of time making videos where she and the characters themselves constantly reiterate that they are not gay, they're not.

As I always say, the quickest way to convince people that you're not gay is to appear on a talk show with your close male friend while dressed like the ringmaster of Genoma's gayest circus and explain that the only thing "gay" about you is that you're "happy practically all of the time," then titter mischievously. "We are both like refugees from Oz," the Frogman elaborates in his contrasting baritone. "And I am a completely straight Frogman who is interested in lady frogs." Well, case closed!

Ah. Hm. Ok, I kind of see why they did the media blitz now. This is pretty incriminating.

That image, and the other illustrations above, are from Cynthia's earlier books. No matter what you might want to say about them, they were at least produced by a human being, as was Sylvie and the Wogglebug. But making stuff is hard, especially when people's reactions to your crusade promoting an off-putting and freakish character range from "total lack of interest" to "active repulsion." And so, like many of her fellow dreamers, Cynthia turned to generative AI to bring her Woggle-Bug visions to life.

Oh, sorry. That's not the Woggle-Bug at all. It's actually his best human friend, Terry Hayman, attacking the Tinman with freezing water while the Scarecrow looks on in horror. Computer, show me the Woggle-Bug.

Huh. In any other context, I would assume this was someone's sex thing. But here, I'm fairly confident it's just about punishing the Oz characters for disrespecting Cynthia's bug husband. I didn't realize ChatGPT allowed for generating images of urine-based revenge fantasies. Maybe AI isn't so bad after all.

I take it back. Motherfucker looks like Jiminy Cricket in a Brazilian straight-to-DVD version of Pinocchio called Pine Boy's Life Wish. And while she promises not to (over) use AI in her projects, Cynthia really seems to have taken to the technology in all its myriad forms.

For instance, she published a book with a cover using what appears to have been an early version of StableDiffusion. I dare you to try and identify anything in this image.

What's that, though? A co-author? Who could this mysterious "Dave Sampson" be? Maybe the back cover will give us some information on him.

My god. She used AI to create a fictional, melting man named Dave with an irritating verbal tic. It's all so obvious now! "Dave Sampson" is an anagram of "I Love Woggle-Bug!"

But AI isn't just good for inventing men and drawing book covers of deformed anime children trapped in glass jars. It can also be used to arrange words in a desired order, an art we once knew as "writing." You can tell the exact point at which Cynthia stopped writing her own blog posts and outsourced them to robots, because they go from personal essays with titles like "The World Needs Wogglebug" to things like this:

This is without a doubt one of the saddest things I've ever seen. Asking an AI to write a story or create art for you is, of course, deeply humiliating and pathetic behavior. But asking it to write a glowing review of something you made yourself? Somehow that's even worse. And she's done it again and again, not even bothering to attribute it to someone else. Did you all see that story recently about how AI is egging on psychotics? This is like that, only instead of agreeing with people that they're the prophesized Star Child, it's spitting out praise about the reanimated corpse of a minor character in a series of children's books created by a guy who died over 100 years ago. This is burning rainforest to flatter the ego of a single maniac without even getting gigantic anime titties out of it.

Unfortunately, using AI to churn out blog posts, books, and piss crimes hasn't gotten Cynthia the acclaim she craves. And that must have gotten her thinking — hey, if you can use generative AI to create content, what's to stop you from using it to create an audience for that content as well?

Sometimes she's up-front about this, like when she created a fictional podcast where two women delve into the world of the Woggle-Bug. Why is AI always "delving" into things, anyway? Nobody except sophomore college students and old-school D&D players "delves" these days.

Sometimes Cynthia isn't so open about her use of genAI, like in these videos featuring unnerving simulacra of Instagram models giving testimonials about how Woggle-Bug is good and teach children manners in colorful vibrant world of learning.

From the thumbnail, I thought maybe she'd gone the Gorilla Flow route and just paid people pennies to shill her stuff. But in motion, the flat tone and tell-tale head bobbing give it away. Oh, and YouTube flags GenAI stuff. And also, there's a watermark left by the free version of the app that Cynthia used. But to a casual, drunk observer, this might appear to be a genuine endorsement of a crudely animated film from 2019. And hey, someone even liked it enough to leave a comment.

"WogglerTomac?" Cynthia, is that you? No. It's much sadder than that.

"Tomac the Woggler" appears to be a young man obsessed with Cynthia's version of the Woggle-Bug. The generous interpretation here would be that he's genuine and has simply developed secondhand madness through constant exposure. But what seems much more likely to me is that he's intentionally communicating with Cynthia in an effort to direct or simply accelerate her output.

This is, of course, a direct violation of the Prime Directive. It's also bad manners! A true fan of the Woggle-Bug would know that. Shame on you, Tomac the Woggler. Is Cynthia Hanson's lifelong dedication to a character that everyone hated when he got his own musical in the early 1900s kind of sad? Sure. Is her use of generative AI to try and get a talking cockroach over as a genuine icon of children's entertainment a grim indictment of the way we live today? Yes. Does she harbor an insane hatred of the Oz fandom? Absolutely. Should she have told a member of that community to kill herself for writing a story featuring a Christ-loving Woggle-Bug? Probably not.

But despite it all, there is, perhaps, something admirable here. While we sit in judgment of those who devote their lives to folly, they have, nonetheless, found a singular purpose. How many of us crave such certainty yet find that it endlessly recedes from our grasp? Does the ability to recognize the fool's errand make us any wiser for the recognition? Is chronic unhappiness the price we pay for critical sophistication? I know not. But I know this: if there is any justice in this world, then, Tomac the Woggler, your deception shall bring you naught but ruin.

May the Woggle-Bug live a hundred thousand years. A good Woggle-Bug to you all. I am not gay.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Josh S, the lead submitter of the plausible-deniability Wogglebug/Frogman tag on AO3. Read his new story "We Only Kissed to Maintain the Ecosystem"

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