Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

Q: How is it that a spell or potion of invisibility can make clothing invisible too — but only as long as it’s on the person who is invisible? — Aaron, Pasadena, CA

A: It’s called magic for a reason.

Q: I hated Dollhouse for a lot of different reasons, but one thing that creeped me out was the idea that the “dolls” were programmed for sex, which they had no control over. How is this entertaining? It bugs me that Joss Whedon also romanticized prostitution in Firefly. Given his reputation for writing strong females, does he not understand that most women see this “fantasy” very differently? — Margot, Chicago, IL

A: Whedon definitely intended the show to explore a certain kind of sexual fantasies, but says he immediately ran into studio interference surrounding those themes.

“Fox sort of has that reputation for sexy or edgy or blah, blah, blah, but they don’t actually want that and it frustrates me,” Whedon told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s the classic American double standard — torture, ‘Great.’ Sex, ‘Oh, that’s so bad.’”

At the same time, Whedon admitted that their objections weren’t quite so cut-and-dried.

“This was also more complicated because people responded to this [by saying], ‘This is trafficking. This is sex for money,’” he said. “It wasn’t just sex. It was also the other implications of what was originally supposed to be somewhat more of a fantasy. The real world version of [this kind of activity] was I think what made the network really twitchy and I can’t really fault them for that.”

In the end, Whedon sort of acknowledges the ethical problem with the central concept, but he seems to imply that it’s mostly the result of some kind of sexual hang-up.

“The idea was always, how much of the fantasy will [viewers] accept and how much will they go, ‘You know what, this just is too much like real-world situations that are truly appalling and so I can’t let the fantasy happen.’”

In the end, the Oracle sides with you, Margot, and thinks that Joss might have a bit of blind spot on this particular issue.

Q: How can Santa, one person, visit all those houses in a single night? There are billions of people in the world! — Mehran, St. Louis, MO

A: Because Santa isn’t real.

Q: If gladiators all fought to the death, wouldn’t that mean they’d run out of gladiators? — Logan, Rochester, NY

A: The ranks of gladiators were filled with captured enemy soldiers, criminals, and even paid “volunteers.” Except for the volunteers, all these people were officially laboring under a sentence of “death.”

Even so, due to the popularity of the sport, Rome did soon start to run out of gladiators, and the practice of often killing the loser at the end of every combat (if he wasn’t already dead) was officially banned. It didn’t seem to make much difference, however, as the odds of dying in any given gladiatorial combat actually rose from the beginning to the end of the empire. Rome, like Quentin Tarantino, was big on giving the audience what it wanted.

In any event, it was an extremely bloody sport. Few gladiators survived more than 10 bouts (although there are recordings of gladiators who won more than 150 fights). And almost no gladiator lived past the age of 30 — most died far younger than that.

Speaking of gladiators, the Oracle just received preview copies of the first four episodes of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the new Lucy Lawless show coming on Starz in January. The Oracle is psyched!

Q: How can you say that Narnia doesn’t really exist! It exists in the imagination of every person who reads those books! — Roberta, Fayetteville, AK

A: Under that reasoning, everything that anyone has ever imagined “really” exists, which is a nonsensical argument that turns words into sentimental mush.

Q: Someone told me that the characters in The Year Without a Santa Claus were puppets and that you could see the strings. So I guess I want to know if they were indeed puppets or is it just lines on the screen from the film being too old? – Barb

A: They’re definitely a kind of puppet, but they’re not moved using strings, but rather a process called “stop-motion,” where the movable models are position in a certain way, and a several frames of film are shot; then the camera is turned off, and model is moved slightly, and more frames are shot, and so on; when the frames of film are shown all together, it creates the illusion that the model is actually moving.

In the case of Rankin/Bass, which created The Year Without a Santa Claus and many other Christmas classics, they sometimes later added hand-drawn animation as well, for falling snow and other elements.

Any “strings” you see are probably imperfections in the film itself, although perhaps your eagle-eyed friend has also caught a glimpse of a string or stick that the filmmakers used to position a model in a certain way in an individual “shot” — suspended in the air, perhaps.

Q: Is it my imagination or is the All-Knowing Fantasy-Question-Answering Oracle in kind of a bad mood this week? Why gives? — Brent, Seattle, WA

A: Pre-Christmas let-down. Even All-Knowing Fantasy-Question-Answering Oracles get the blues.

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Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

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