Golden Girl: Find Your Fate...& Possibly A Most Horrific Demise!

I read these Golden Girl Find Your Fate Jr books as research for an upcoming video, but I was surprised at how violent they were!

I'm way behind on some of my vintage toy videos that I had planned to have up before the end of 2025, but life do be life-ing! But as I seem to have found my stride again, I decided it was time to finally tackle a video that has a lot of complexity, but that I'm really excited about: a Golden Girl lore video!

For those of you who have missed out on my obsession, Golden Girl is an 80s toyline created by Galoob to be a companion/competitor line to Mattel's Masters of the Universe line, developed at roughly the same time as Mattel's own girls' companion line, She-Ra Princess of Power. The line only existed for about a year, but despite that there is a ton of licensed product related to the line, including 3 books in the Find Your Fate Jr. line.

When I started making content around Golden Girl, I wanted to make the kinds of videos that I wished I could find myself - and that included a deep dive into the lore! The toy line consisted of 11 figures, two hourses, three collections of questionable outfits for the female figures, and a pretty fantastically detailed playset, called the Palace of Gems. But in addition to that, there were also storybooks, coloring and activity books, and other products that expanded the world of Argonia, introducing new characters who may have made it into future waves of the toy line if it had been successful (though so far, I haven't encountered any of the planned characters featured in wave 2 concept art in any of the books or other materials!).

To start building my notes for the lore video, I read three Find Your Fate Jr books: Golden Girl and the Crystal of Doom by Josepha Sherman, Golden Girl and the Land of Dreams by Alice Storey, and Golden Girl and the Vanishing Unicorn by RL Stine - yes, THAT RL Stine of Fear Street and Goosebumps fame! Find Your Fate is one of the variations on the Choose Your Own Adventure genre of books, where the choices that you make while reading lead you to different pages, as well as to potential success or failure. These were Find Your Fate Jr, which came in a slightly larger format than the mass market YA style of CYOA and were ostensibly created for a younger audience - put a pin in that for a moment!

Let's start with Golden Girl and the Crystal of Doom by Josepha Sherman. Part of the lore of Golden Girl is that she is costantly on the hunt for the other half of the Magic Gemstone, which was broken generations ago. Uniting the two halves would give the person possessing it untold powers, and Golden Girl wants to use it to protect Argonia from the evil, scheming Dragon Queen. Naturally, Dragon Queen is also trying to find the Magic Gemstone so that she can subjugate Argonia under her power.

Golden Girl receives a message from a stonecarver from the land of Landina who claims that he might have found the other half of the Magic Gemstone, but it's soon revealed that what he has found is a Reverse Crystal - a crystal that contains the potential for evil sorcery, though it can only be fully harnessed by a truly powerful evil sorceress. Golden Girl and her allies, the Guardians of the Gemstones, set off for Landina to investigate and stop Dragon Queen from acquiring this powerful magical tool. Based on your choices, you may pursue Dragon Queen and her allies deep into the Cavern of Crystals or follow them down into a ravine where waterfall and a rushing river present natural threats. If you fail to secure or destroy the Reverse Crystal, Dragon Queen will use its power to subjugate all of Argonia!

In Alice Storey's book, Golden Girl in the Land of Dreams, two of Golden Girl's allies, Rubee and Jade, receive prophetic dreams (which may have been sent as a trick by Dragon Queen to lead them all into a trap, though the quest objectives in the dreams also seem to be true?) that call them to adventure. Rubee's dream indicates that the missing half of the Magic Gemstone is located on her home island of Fire Isle, a desolate land that was conquered by Dragon Queen's "ally" Ogra (all of the Golden Girl materials go to great lengths to separate the male characters from being subserviant to Golden Girl and Dragon Queen, calling them allies, friends, advisors, etc. though Golden Girl and Dragon Queen are still clearly the leaders of both groups) and features many fire-related obstacles in keeping with Rubee's fire-themed character. Jade dreams that a group of children have been kidnapped on her home of Emraline Isle, a deeply forested land with very high fantasy inhabitants including a handsome druid named Redwood his chimp "best friend" Rosie.

Regardless of which dream you decide to follow, you will encounter Dragon Queen and her minions, and the two paths give us a chance to learn even more about the characters of Rubee and Jade. It's a shame that the line wasn't more successful, as it's possible that we might have gotten similar books that would have expanded the lore of Golden Girl's other companions, Saphire and Onyx, and possibly the evil characters as well.

There are no endings where the group retrieves the other half of the Magic Gemstone; obviously this is such a core piece of the mythology and the powers of the united Gemstone are so vast, this is something that only would have been achieved in some sort of endgame story. You can, however, rescue the children who turn out to be the 8 nieces and nephews of Redwood, who has been caring for them after Dragon Queen slaughtered ALL of their parents. Put in a pin in THAT as well...

Our final story, RL Stine's Golden Girl and the Vanishing Unicorn, finds Golden Girl receiving a map from an old woman (Moth Lady in disguise) and then her unicorn, Olympia, is kidnapped by the evil doers. Golden Girl and her allies must decide if they want to pursue Dragon Queen to her home (referred to in the story as the Dead Lands, though in some sources she is said to live on Storm Isle), wait for Dragon Queen to bring Olympia to the Palace of Gems and exchange him for Golden Girl's half of the Magic Gemstone, or follow the map that Moth Lady had given her which would take them to the Wastelands, an island to the east.

So, let's talk a little bit more about these books. The story choices are interesting and they introduce a fair number of characters that expand the lore. The world is also expanded with several new locations including Fire Isle, Emraline Isle, the Dead Lands, and the Wastelands. The world seems to be a series of different islands, and there is a lot of sailing to and fro in these stories; it sort of slows down the action a bit, although it does allow for some sea-faring adventure moments, and for the toy line there are all kinds of water-themed and bath appropriate toy possibilities that could have been developed for future releases.

What the books also contain is a surprising amount of violence! There is some suggested violence in the backstories: the orphans on Emraline Isle and Rubee's backstory revealing that Ogra had slaughtered her entire family (including her twin brother Garnet, who Dragon Queen impersonates in some branches of the story using her dark sorcery) while she hid in the Castle of Stone's dungeon, are two examples. The scene where Rubee reveals that she keeps the table in the dining hall set with glowing red plates and silver goblets is surprisingly poignant for a kid's book. But in keeping with the potential doom that awaits readers who make poor choices along the way in these kinds of books, some of the endings are wildly graphic, especially for a "junior" version of the series!

I didn't note all of them, but I started noting some themes in my notes for the lore video, and there are some pretty grisly ends that Golden Girl, the Guardians, or the evil foes can meet. In one questline, Jade is hit with a love potion that makes her fall in love and ride off with Ogra! As if the nonconsensual subtext isn't bad enough, if you want to survive you have to leave her and trust that she will find a way to escape on her own; if you follow her to rescue her, you and Olympia will be trapped in a cave by Ogra's vile assistant Tallon and devoured by thousands of baby "snake-birds." Yep, seriously.

In one ending, Golden Girl throws her jeweled sword to stop Dragon Queen from casting a deadly spell, and either slices her throat or decapitates her. The language is vague but gives enough detail to know the broad strokes of what happens. In one ending, Golden Girl is defeated by a stone golem summoned by Dragon Queen, and it says the last thing she hears is "the crunching of bone" as the creature's sword finds her neck. In another ending in that same story, Dragon Queen uses a magical wind to restrain Golden Girl, position her under a stalagmite, and then use it to crush her skull and pin her to the ground. RL Stine's book has the least graphic endings of the three books, but there is a possible scene where Wild One is pursuing Golden Girl on a horse that Dragon Queen has given wings to with one of her evil spells; however, during the chase the spell wears off, and both Wild One and the horse fall to the jagged rocks below. Golden Girl looks away from the scene in horror to preclude any need for a full description of the carnage, but this was the 80s - we didn't have cell phones then, so we all had pretty vivid imaginations!

There were also not one, not two, but three scenes of characters being boiled in oil; in one, the high fantasy tone was broken so that Prince Kroma could make a pretty terrible joke: "It smells like French fries in here." "More like Tallon fries!" And had I read these books in the 80s, it would have only compounded my fears that quicksand was a common threat: there are two endings in Rubee's dream questline where Golden Girl (and in one, Prince Kroma as well) fall into and drown in a bottomless quicksand trap.

I mean, I know that things were wild in the 80s, and the language is not super graphic and leaves a lot to be filled in by the imagination, but I was still surprised at how cavalier they were about including such violent deaths for the main characters in these stories. In one scene, Prince Kroma decapitates a character out of simple annoyance - "I don't have time for this!" - as if this was a rational time-saving maneuver. If anyone wonders why we Gen Xers have so much grit and cynicism, I think that this can help explain - we had whole series of books where if we made the wrong choice (and in many cases, there was no way of predicting which choice was right or wrong) the character that we had been told to identify with, putting us in the driver's seat of the story, could meet any number of terrible, violent ends.

I'm glad that I have these in my collection, and I love the bits of lore that were introduced, even if it doesn't seem like it aligns with any of the plans for future waves of the toy line, but it was definitely an eye-opening experience! Look for a lore video about Golden Girl and the Guardians of the Gemstones coming soon to my channel!