Wonderland's Queen of Hearts takes something familiar and makes it genuinely disturbing. You recognize the name, the cards, the royal court, all of that. Then you find out who t…

Wonderland's Queen of Hearts takes something familiar and makes it genuinely disturbing. You recognize the name, the cards, the royal court, all of that. Then you find out who this version actually is. Julia and Bethany were two sisters before Wonderland got hold of them. They entered through a mirror, and when they were terrified, they held on to each other. Wonderland twisted that connection into something physical. The Queen of Hearts is both of them, joined together, with their own personalities still inside that horrible arrangement. That background changes how you look at her. There's a person, actually two people, underneath the creature everyone else has to survive. They didn't start out presiding over a nightmare. They were children who ended up inside one. By the time Calie encounters her, though, the Queen is a danger to everybody around her. Even something as ordinary as a game becomes an excuse for punishment when she doesn't like how it's going. Her card soldiers turn those impulses into a threat that reaches much further than the Queen herself. You can survive a conversation with her and still have an entire court to deal with afterward. The Hearts side also has a history with the other monsters in Wonderland that makes calling all of them one big group pretty misleading. The Mad Hatter has his own reasons to hate her. In Queen of Hearts vs. Mad Hatter, his revenge extends to the people serving her after what she did to the woman he loved. Their shared home doesn't make them friends, and being attached to her court can make somebody a target in somebody else's feud. Her reach also extends outside Wonderland. In Beyond Wonderland, she takes over a house of mirrors in New York and uses it to draw children into the realm. She becomes involved in Violet's kidnapping, too. That makes her a threat to the Liddles even when they aren't standing in her palace. The contrast between her origin and those actions is horrible. She entered Wonderland as one of two frightened children. Later she's helping pull other children into it. Knowing what happened to Julia and Bethany adds to the horror of what the Queen has become.