Whenever I read a book about a new fantasy realm, I always enjoy looking at the included maps. Often a map will look like something you might see in the real world, with odd, uneven borders and large bodies of water. But what strikes me about Oz is its symmetry. Oz is a simple square, with four equally sized and shaped zones in the north, south, east, and west. Outside of the square, the desert expands in all directions.

The simplicity of this map could be the result of the fact that Oz exists in Dorothy’s dream, and was created by her. Dorothy has spent much of her life on a farm (which is usually a large, square piece of land covered in vegetation) surrounded by desolate country, and so Oz appears this way in her dream (though it is also shaped like farmland due to L. Frank Baum’s populist views). Obviously, there are many fantastical elements to her dream, and the colors are far more vibrant than they are in real life. But overall, Oz has the basic shape of her family’s land. Its large size could be explained by the fact that some farmland can be very large, and would appear even larger to a little girl, so that she would think it takes days to cross it.

This same idea can be applied to the smaller-scale aspects of Oz. Most of the people she meets are normal, working people, while most of the owned land is devoted to farms. Oz may not be a simple virtual reality, but more of an augmented reality that takes the world Dorothy knows and coats it with color and adds danger, but still leaves much of the original structure intact. This is especially true in the movie, where even many of the people in Oz and in the real world are the same and play similar parts in both worlds, only as slightly different creatures.