Rose Petal Place - Cartoon Retrospective (Part 5)

Rose Petal Place: The Storybooks ("Rose Petal's Big Decision" and "A Matter of Music")

It's storytime again, my beautiful fairies. And today, for the next stop on our journey of Rose Petal Place, we're going to be looking over the last two storybooks I managed to get my fairy fingers on: Rose Petal's Big Decision and A Matter of Music. Let's not waste any time and start off with Rose Petal's Big Decision.

 

This story comes to us from Nancy Buss, with Pat Paris’s artwork returning, but being assisted by Sharon Ross-Moore. A video read-a-long is provided by 80s Toys & Beyond, who also kindly shares with us her collection of the original Rose Petal Place dolls, showing everyone except for Orchid. Isn’t that sweet? However, the video quality itself is rather fuzzy and the screenshots I managed to grab from it are rather poor. For that, I apologize.

The story begins with Rose Petal getting an important letter in the mail: a contract from Garden Recording Company. Some producers had heard her sing at Carnation Hall, so they decided to invite her to their recording studio to make a record to be played all across the garden, farther than just the area she lives in- making the garden seem a lot larger than it has ever been portrayed. But the studio is 8 hours away from the garden and Rose Petal has to sleep away from her friends for about two weeks to record. Her friends are all supportive of her going, and Daffodil (of course) has dollar signs in her eyes. But before they can discuss further, Orchid falls into the daisy patch where Horace Fly is there and decides to sexually assault Orchid. Apparently, he has been stalking the girls the entire time and kisses Orchid on the nose before he flies off. 

Yeah, this is gross. Horace himself was already a sleazeball (him also attempting to kill Rose Petal didn’t help that), but stalking and non-consensual kissing crosses a line beyond fantasy and makes him a very disgusting and uncomfortable character. I get that’s the point, but as someone who has faced sexual assault before in the same way as Orchid here, this part of the book makes me incredibly uneasy. If there’s anything positive I can say, it is that it expands Horace’s character by giving him a creepy crush on Orchid. Making him more of a scumbag and adding this more perverted or dirty side to him does actually make him a more despicable antagonist. The second special had him make off-handed comments about the girls’ beauty, so it’s not an out-of-nowhere direction for the character. I mean, if Nastina has an obsessive gay crush on Rose Petal, what’s an obsessive straight crush for Horace? But it also doesn’t make sense that he has a crush on one of the flower lesbians because he’s working to destroy the garden, which will kill his crush- unless his “love” is shallow attraction and he doesn’t care about Orchid as a person, even if she dies. Is he just into Orchid because she’s the stereotypically pretty and fashionable one? Whatever the reason, it's repulsive. At least it gives Horace more of his own motivations outside of Nastina, but as mean as Orchid can be, no deserves something like this. I don’t want to see this in a kid’s book.

Orchid screamed, “Get that disgusting creature away from me! I’ll simply die if he touches me again!” She failed her arms and legs around so much that Pitterpat, thinking it was a game, scampered over and swatted her with her tail. Sunny collapsed with laughter. “Too bad Orchid can’t go with you as the Rose-Petal Place clown,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I fail to see anything funny,” Orchid fumed. 

Glad to see Sunny Sunflower is making fun of her friend after she’s been sexually assaulted by a man who tried to murder them last week. Me thinks Sunny is less of a “prankster who speaks her mind” and more of just a rude jerk who seems to actively hate her friends. As the girls go to talk about the record deal, we see the sexual assaulter laying seductively on a bed with candles (gross) and his closeted boss working on a new beauty potion. Which, let’s be honest, Nastina doesn’t need because she’s already fabulous. (I also do love the detail of Nastina’s bed being a sardine can with the lid as the canopy.) Big shock: the record contract was a fake and came from Nastina, because everything bad in this stupid world is her fault. Rose Petal could trip on a rock or spill her milk and the story would somehow pin it on Nastina.

Her plan this time is to lure Rose Petal away so she can, you guessed it, take over the world. She goes off to finalize her plan, while mentioning that Horace can “keep the lovely Orchid to himself” after Rose Petal is gone. Eww! Nastina finds the flower lesbians and feigns congratulations for Rose Petal, which further proves she really wants to gain her attention and insert herself into Rose Petal’s life. And Rose Petal stupidly believes the woman who tried to kill her is genuine in her praise and doesn’t suspect a thing. And she’s especially stupid for not seeing the red flags fly when Nastina says she will personally take care of the garden while Rose Petal is away and asks her to attend a goodbye party she’s throwing. Seriously, Nastina: just ask her out like a normal person.

 

"And Rose Petal promised she would. Because she was the kind of girl who would never hurt anyone’s feelings."

Rose Petal, I think it’s okay to be a little mean to the spider monster that tries to kill you at every chance she gets. I’m sorry, Rose Petal is a complete dunce in this book. We see that a few days have gone by as Rose Petal prepares to leave, and Nastina has been hard at work wilting the flowers and turning the garden into the Bog of Eternal Stench. And no one has told Rose Petal what is happening? The entire time? Did she not notice? But hey, at least we get character development and establish Nastina is a crappy cook and that Horace is the only one who’ll eat her cooking. That's CLEARLY the most important bit. But this dish isn’t for eating, as Nastina has brewed a powerful poison. If you think it’s for Rose Petal, it’s a twist that you’re actually wrong with… Unfortunately wrong.

"Will see that Orchid gets just enough to put her to sleep for a little while. As for Rose Petal and the others, just leave them to me. I’ve waited a long time for this.” Nastina looked positively happy as she stirred her evil brew." 

Excuse me, not to darken a light-hearted children’s story too heavily, but I am literally watching characters essentially brew a date-assault drug. Specifically that they’ll be giving a portion of the potion to Orchid to make her fall asleep, directly implying to Horace that he can have her to himself. Jesus Christ, I’m half convinced Horace would’ve actually molested Orchid if he had the chance. Nastina is giving a girl a potion to make her fall asleep and implying she will be giving her over unconsciously to the man who assaulted her. Man, I PRAY to the Heavens these girls are actually lesbians, solely so they can avoid men like Horace! Nastina, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… you might be a bad person for this. I respected you: your style, your talent, your thickness, your unapologetic love for the ladies. But now, I’m starting to think maybe this murderous wannabe garden dictator… might be kind of mean.

Avoiding that, Rose Petal’s friends are helping her prepare for her studio voyage, but Rose Petal is so deeply connected and in love with Rose Petal Place that she actively feels the distress and unhappiness within the garden itself. The idea of Rose Petal being able to feel the emotions of the garden is actually a great idea, I’ll admit. I wish they did more with the idea, as it could also explain further why Rose Petal is so essential to the garden’s success rather than just that she's literally perfect. Despite this, she chooses to do nothing until P. D. Centipede tells her that Nastina has captured his Sonic the Hedgehog OC Tumbles for playing in her garden. But Rose Petal says, “You must be mistaken!”, because she’s really that obnoxiously optimistic and oblivious in this story. But upon seeing Tumbles in his cage, she finally realizes that Nastina is making the entire garden look like her swampy trash heap of a home. Rose Petal decides it’s her responsibility to stay, because she realizes her friends are no help in protecting the garden and no one else can take care of this godmother damn flower patch other than Rose Petal. The past few days have given Rose Petal a taste of what the garden would become without her, so she confronts Nastina, thanking her for making her realize how important her home is and telling her that she’s not taking the contract. Nastina is beyond pissed in this frankly hilarious close-up of her, where she pretends not to be bothered as she’s holding her explosive emotions back with a loose thread.

 

As Rose Petal leaves, Nastina begins to assault Horace by throwing her many shoes at him. (Oh no, I feel sooooo bad for Horace. Can we give Nastina even more feet?) After that, Rose Petal says that there will be other recording contracts out there and that her main priority is to stay with the friends she loves.

"And they decided to give her a big party in her honor anyway. Instead of a “going away” party, they changed it to a “glad you’re staying” party. So as Nastina wasn’t invited, no one was poisoned."

So Nastina’s last plan in the last book was to steal a dress, and this book actively had her trying to poison the flower lesbians? Earlier in the book, it stated that Orchid’s own drop of the poison would only be enough to put her to sleep, implying that this poison in its full power could actually kill. Meaning Nastina’s plan would’ve gone this way: send a fake contract and invite Rose Petal and her friends to a phony going away party, where they’d be dead by poison before they even realize there is no record company. With the exception of Orchid, who’d be given in her unconscious slumber to a man who had been established to be a sexual abuser. When Orchid wakes up, she’d find herself in a world where she’s essentially a prisoner in a rotten garden that was formerly her home, her friends are all dead, there’s an evil spider dictator who has ruined everything, and she’s basically a fly’s sex slave. Maybe I’m looking too deeply into this, but how else would Nastina’s plan go? What would Horace do with an unconscious woman he has a crush on? Orchid would probably die before waking up anyway as flies are some of the most disease-ridden creatures on the planet. She’d catch hepatitis, salmonella, and anthrax before Horace even takes his clothes off; her funeral would be a closed casket.

 

This book is nothing but uncomfortable implications and stupid blunders of obliviousness. And that’s a good summary of the story: oblivious. The main character is oblivious because she trusts proven-to-be evil individuals, with Rose Petal trusting Nastina to care for the garden despite knowing how much she wants to destroy it. The side characters are oblivious because they’re useless in protecting the garden or even noticing it’s being destroyed right under their noses. And the writing itself was oblivious with how they both added and ignored these disturbing implications, such as the casually overlooked poison subplot, Horace being a pervert, and the implied murder and sexual assault of the main characters. Nastina is pretty wicked as usual with a vicious and devious plan of out-right death, which is an improvement on the last book, but everything else in this book was far worse than the last. The story is just stupid at best and uncharacteristically shocking at worst. Hopefully the final book, A Matter of Music, will be an improvement.

A Matter of Music is our final book (that I managed to find) and its read-along video comes from Marlys Kirkpatrick. With Jean Thorley doing the art assistance for this book and Lost Classics from a Xennial Childhood providing an audiobook version, the story begins with Pitterpat Cat asking Rose Petal for a song in her adorable little meows. And the flower lesbians and their friends do, what else, drop everything to gawk over how pretty Rose Petal’s voice is. Because why would these characters have lives outside of worshiping the dirt Rose Petal walks on? Speaking of being obsessed with Rose Petal, Nastina’s organ practice is constantly interrupted by Rose Petal’s singing and she brews a new plan to make her shut up. Horace gives her the idea to simply overpower her noise with more noise. They turn Nastina’s organ into a giant noise machine with scraps of empty cans, busted-up pots, and funnels. Lily Fair is about to do her dance for her friends, but as stated in the first book we looked at, they all hate her dancing. So thankfully for them, Nastina’s giant noise machine interrupts them from having to pretend to be supportive of their friend.

 

Every time Rose Petal tries to sing, the noise simply gets louder and uglier. Iris and Seymour realize that Nastina is using an amplifier, to which Rose Petal weeps over the possibility of Nastina’s noise preventing her from ever singing again. Sunny Sunflower wants to march up to the castle and slap Nastina’s stupid spider face, so the gang all formulate a plan to dismantle the amplifier, highlighting that their love for Rose Petal is stronger than their fear of Nastina. It definitely tries to make the girls seem brave and compassionate, as it explains details like how the ever-fashionable Orchid’s clothes had gotten filthy from searching through the trash, but she doesn’t seem to care as much as she cares about helping her friend. I like that while they’re doing this for Rose Petal, they are trying to make these girls more proactive than they were in the special and the story isn’t necessarily all about Rose Petal this time (even if she is the main motivation). Lily Fair finds a bunch of garbage strung on a wire, realizing it’s connected to a funnel that leads back to the organ. So far, Lily Fair is my favorite character in terms of actually being a likable and useful person. They all yank the wire, and all the garbage comes tumbling down. P. D. Centipede chews out Nastina’s ear with a “love is stronger than hate” speech and leaves her rotting in her rubbish. Rose Petal is nothing but grateful, with her even highlighting that Orchid has never looked more beautiful, even in her filth. And our tale ends with (what else?) a song.

"Rose Petal’s singing was beautiful as she filled the garden with the sounds of her love- the love of music, and the love of her friends."

Well, that was better than the last book- mostly because it didn’t have implied death and sexual assault, but I didn’t like it as much as Lily Fair Learns a Lesson. But these are at least nice little children’s books that aren’t insultingly bad. As C. S. Lewis once said: “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children isn’t a good children’s story in the slightest.” But I genuinely believe even the corniest or silliest of children’s media can still have redeeming qualities for all ages and can be used to help us find inspiration and make better stories. That’s one of the reasons I started this review blog. I try to find something positive to say about everything I review, and I do think Rose Petal Place as a storybook series is genuinely well-drawn, and I appreciate some character growth and attempt to make a proactive cast. I do think these books are better than the first animated special, but I also prefer the second animated special as the “definitive” Rose Petal Place.

But that also leads into the third main issue I believe led to Rose Petal Place’s failure: The side characters are a waste.

The other characters are meant to be expanded in these books. But in reality, the stories mostly focus (once again) too much on Rose Petal, to the point where her friends don’t feel like individual people. The only character development we really saw from any of these characters was Lily Fair. But to be less unfair, there appear to be other books where the side characters get the spotlight that I was not able to find, such as the books about Orchid shrinking or Orchid planning a party. There’s also two books dedicated to exploring Sunny Sunflower and Daffodil entirely, and they could’ve been great reads or mediocre stories, I’ll never be able to know. But I do think it’s a bit suspicious that the only character not to get her own book is Iris: the only girl with a darker complexion. I pray that was unintentional ignorance and not potential prejudice. The girls are too often treated as one single entity as Rose Petal’s friends and it does these potentially charming characters a great disservice. Strawberry Shortcake has simple stories with low stakes like this series, but the characters do stand out on their own apart from being Strawberry’s friends, especially in the 2003 series where they feel like actual kids with tons of little quirks and flaws that make each one stand out. Which is probably why that series lasts to this day, and this one faded away. But we're not done yet, as we've got an audiobook and an album to look over next time with Your Clairy Godmother.