As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.

The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”

For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Teresa Lin join me as my guest for Part 2 of our deep dive into our creative process! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor
Welcome to the show everybody. Happy Valentine’s Day. Given that it’s the day of celebration for love and relationships, I thought I would invite my beautiful bride to join me today so we can have a chat about all things Alice and some of the relationships that are significant both in The Looking Glass Wars and in the musical that we’re developing. Welcome to the show again, Teresa.

Teresa Lin
Hi, it’s good to be back. Speaking about Valentine’s and love, love is such a complicated thing. It certainly is in The Looking Glass Wars and the musical. I think we all want to lean into that because love can be complicated. 

FB
Complication makes for good melodrama. Let’s talk about Alice Liddell and the Alyss that I created in The Looking Glass Wars and the relationships from real life and fiction. One of the things I wanted to talk about is in The Looking Glass Wars Alyss Heart meets Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s fourth son and he fancies her because she’s famous from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, famous for being Lewis Carroll’s muse. At the same time, she meets Reginald Hargreaves, who is a real-life figure. He was actually the real-life Alice Liddell’s husband. He was a cricket star and, in the novel, he fancies Alyss so there is a natural conflict for her love between these two men. But in the novel, I wrote Prince Leopold as a bit arrogant and not all that desirable, too much of an aristocrat. 

When you and I started talking about the TV show and the musical, you referenced The Notebook as an example, because in The Notebook, the two men, Noah and Lon, who are vying for the lead character, Allie, are both very, very desirable and likable. So there’s a real decision and there’s a real conflict. In The Looking Glass Wars, once Alyss is deciding if she should marry for status, it’s not very romantic.

TL
We were really trying to capture what would make a great love story. 

FB
Why would she fall in love with Leopold? What were his desirable qualities? 

TL
Also, what would be the real conflict for them? What would be the opposition to their relationship? 

FB
In The Looking Glass Wars, the opposition came from Queen Victoria because Leopold was marrying a commoner and someone who had been a street urchin. Also, and this is something you conceived of, Alyss is much more proactive in the TV show and the musical in terms of helping other orphans. 

TL
For the show, what we really wanted to hone in on was Alyss being a champion of people who are down on their luck or had no voice and had no power, because she felt something like that in her own story, deep in her DNA from being kicked out of Wonderland. She feels this injustice and her destiny is to be the person who fights for these people. I think to have her embody these qualities at a time when women didn’t have much of a voice, they couldn’t own property, they were property themselves in the Victorian age, and for her to pursue love, on her own terms, was something that was really out of time for that story. For her to come in and be the one who chooses the man rather than the man choosing her feels really in line with our modern values.

FB
The other interesting thing was the solution that you had regarding the love triangle. Alyss returns to Wonderland and it turns out the love of her life is Dodge Anders. While she’s in our world, she has strong dreams and visualizations of a destined love. 

TL
When she was young, she had these experiences with Dodge of being able to run off and have their own adventures and to have someone who was really a close friend and confidant, and someone she felt would risk his life for her. So I think that was in her body and memory, even as a dream that she was not supposed to be having. 

FB
So in the novel, she returns to Wonderland and she’s reunited with Dodge, who’s angry and bitter. He’s struggling with what happened during Redd’s coup. 

TL
He didn’t even know whether Alyss was alive or dead. 

FB
He did hold on to the belief that she was alive somewhere but it takes a minute for them to rekindle their friendship and find their romantic interest as adults and it’s something that I think people wish I had written more about. But what I wanted you to mention is the solution that you had for the love triangle in the musical. 

TL
We came up against the story conflict of Alyss having two different love interests, one in our world, Prince Leopold, and one in Wonderland, Dodge. What kind of choice would she be making? We circled this idea of the doppelgangers and that there was a version of ourselves in Wonderland that exists in our world and maybe other worlds. But when Alyss returns to Wonderland, the reveal is that Dodge and Leopold are the same person and they would be played by the same actor. They would be doppelgangers of each other. 

FB
I love that idea. It also gives Prince Leopold a moment in our world to tell Alyss, “It’s okay. It’s your destiny.” In essence, he sets her free, even though there’s a version of him that we’re going to meet in Wonderland, unbeknownst to his character. 

TL
I find that deeply romantic. One of the things that we researched when we were working on these projects was a possible real-life romantic relationship between Alice Liddell and Prince Leopold. It’s easy to construe that Queen Victoria would have been against their courtship. But when Leopold married and had his first child, he named her Alice. 

FB
And when Alice Liddell married Reginald Hargreaves, their first son was named Leopold.

TL
That just gave me goosebumps.

FB
It’s Valentine’s Day, that should give you goosebumps.

I think that it is really interesting and hopefully, when we get either the musical or the TV show made, it will be an effective moment. So those of you listening are getting a little preview of one of the shows.

Also, Leopold was a bit sickly. He had haemophilia, which is a bleeding disorder where your blood doesn’t clot properly. He inherited it from Queen Victoria. His daughter, Princess Alice, was a carrier of the disease and his grandson Rupert, died from it. 

TL
It lends a sense of fragility and vulnerability to his character, which I thought was really sweet and in line with Alyss being the warrior princess. She was, in essence, his protector. It was also the reason that he couldn’t go back to Wonderland and fight with Alyss.

FB
Because he was worried he might get cut if he went through the Looking-glass. 

That’s the central love story, for which I think we will continue to find moments. But there’s also the familial love story between Queen Genevieve and Princess Rose, who became Queen Redd and there’s also the story between Hatter and his brother Dalton.

The relationships between the two sisters and the two brothers carry a lot of emotional power, because of the love and the betrayal. So you have both sides of this coin.

TL
The familial relationships are always hard to tease out because you have the loyalty to family, then you have, for them, the loyalty to the nation and to their queens. Then they also have their own private feelings about who they choose to love and how that complicates things if that doesn’t fall in the right domain. 

FB
In terms of the development of, one hopes, a very long-running show…

TL
There are a lot of story and relational threads that could feed into the complicated conflict set up in our stories. 

FB
For folks that have not read the graphic novels, I introduce Hatter’s brother, Dalton, and there is an entire backstory of Dalton having a relationship with Queen Redd, or Rose when they were younger. 

There’s just a lot to work with. There are multiple timelines and multiple characters to play with and we don’t have to follow the structure of the novels. We can take prequel stories and sequel stories and we can feather those threads into season one with the hopes that we do a good job and it’s long-running. 

TL
Bringing it all back to love, I think the best love stories are the ones where you see the characters fighting for their love. They have to go through this long, arduous emotional journey of really fighting and proving themselves and testing the love. I think we have all of those pieces in our story threads for all the characters. They have a lot of opposition. There’s a lot of conflict before they ever get to a place where they are reunited or there’s peace in the land or their hearts. 

FB
I think we can really stretch out the tension between Alyss and Dodge when Alyss returns and she’s trying to find her footing as the destined queen, the warrior, and Dodge’s eventual wife. For anybody who has read Crossfire, the graphic novel, we see that the two of them are married and it’s be careful what you wish for. Ruling is difficult and ruling as a couple is also difficult. But their love is strong. 

TL
How would you describe the relationship between Hatter and Alyss? Although it’s not a romantic love, he’s her sworn protector, her guardian, and very much a father figure. What does that feel like for you, when you think of those two characters?

FB
The father figure aspect is really important because she grew up with him for those first seven years. They had a very playful relationship, she would tease him quite a bit. Hatter, as a Milliner, is meant to marry within the Milliner race and, of course, he falls in love with somebody outside of that race. So, being in this forbidden relationship, he can’t envision having a son or a daughter of his own. 

TL
By the time he’s catapulted into our world, and he’s lost Alyss, his whole journey and his whole focal point over 13 years has been finding Alyss. I thought that was really, really strong in your graphic novels. Even though he’s come across all of these romantic relationships throughout time and in different places on Earth, his primary focus is to find Alyss. Yet when he does find Alyss, he’s rejected by her. I find that so interesting. I think about the internal turmoil that he has to face. He’s found his charge, his lost child, but she rejects him. That’s very rich.

FB
I often think of Hatter as Liam Neeson in Taken except his skill set is not as well honed, and it takes a very long time. But I don’t think Liam Neeson would be very happy if his daughter was like, “I’m fine. I’ve got this, Dad.”

On one of the other podcasts, I talked about not having a moment in the novel where Hatter confronts Alyss and she commands him to leave, which would have been a really great scene to write. I just thought that he would forcibly take her and forgot she’s really his superior. 

TL
I don’t know, I think after 13 years lost in our world, and then finally finding her, he’s not losing her again, no matter what she commands. 

FB
Thank you for that. 

TL
There is no way he’s leaving her side. 

FB
That’s what I thought. But then it is a complicated and interesting scene that creates a lot of tension and a lot of turmoil. 

TL
And also, the complications of them finding each other again, as people. She’s grown up now. She’s no longer a seven-year-old child. There’s a relationship that they both have to earn and there’s trust they both have to come back to because when Alyss got catapulted into our world, she was looking for him for a long time and then slowly had to let go of her hope. 

FB
And he’s only holding onto the seven-year-old Alyss. That’s the image that he has but she’s a completely different person, finding herself in our world for 13 years. 

TL
Back to love and Valentine’s and relationships, this underscores for me how we’re always evolving and we’re always changing in relationships. You can’t pinpoint a place in time and say, “You’re not the same person I met 20 years ago. How come you’ve changed?”

FB
Well, how have you changed since we met 10 years ago? 

TL
That’s hard to describe. “Where have I stayed the same?” would be the better question.

I definitely feel more expanded and more aware and hopefully more conscious. Definitely in my sense of relational self. I feel like the more that you learn about yourself and about how life is the less you take things personally. You realize that everyone’s on their journey, everyone’s on their path, and you can’t fix it for anyone else. That is true of Hatter and Alyss. She has to do the work and he has to do the work. 

FB
Well, I am happy to be on this journey with you and to get the opportunity to wish you a happy Valentine’s. 

TL
Thank you, my love.

FB
I love you very much.

TL
Your favorite word, Ditto.

FB
Thanks, everybody. Happy Valentine’s to everybody out there listening. 

We will be back with, what I’m gonna call “All Things Creative,” where Teresa and I are going to talk about some of the other projects we’re working on and the creative process that we go through and give everybody a sneak peek at some other shows and books and things we’re working on. Take care.

TL
Take care.

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