A stereotypical view of Portland's youth culture is expressed through Prue, Curtis and Prue's parents. Literary critic Anna Minard describes the kids as "bespectacled, bike-riding, vinyl-browsing, Kurosawa-referencing children." Descriptions of real elements of Portland are combined to create what critic Claire Dederer calls a "richly satisfying weave of reality and fantasy." "Wildwood" echoes several classic fantasy and children's tales, notably J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, "The Chronicles of Narnia", "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The kidnapping of a child by crows comes from Irish folktales of the Sluagh, and from Maurice Sendak's "Outside Over There" where a girl rescues her brother kidnapped by goblins. The literary tone of Decemberists songs is apparent in the writing style, with a weakness for the charms of archaic language and sesquipedalianism. "Wildwood" is more soft fantasy than hard fantasy, in that historical and technological consistency and plausibility are not a high priority, giving the book a whimsical, or stream of consciousness, tone. The factions of The Wood use a variety of anachronistic technologies, including cutlasses, blunderbusses, and flintlocks, concurrent with howitzers and semi-automatic pistols, and vehicles like animal-drawn wagons and carts alongside bicycles, trucks and trains. No attempt was made to maintain a consistent level of technological advancement or to rationalize why a particular piece of equipment was used; rather, Meloy said, they could "pick coolest version of whatever piece of technology" they wanted, and Ellis said they "just picked whatever we liked." When she first meets the South Wood postman Richard, he threatens her with a shotgun, which in the same paragraph is referred to as a double-barrelled rifle, then on the next page it is called a shotgun again. Though the text pointedly mentions Prue's single-speed bicycle, the illustrations twice show her bike having derailleur gears, which are only present on multi-speed bikes. Carson Ellis's illustrations, ever present on Decemberists album covers, are consistent with the folklore roots of the band's songs, love of nature, and romanticized historical periods, having a dark and playfully macabre tone reminiscent of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl. Ellis said that her favorite drawing among "Wildwood"s 85 illustrations is of a badger pulling a rickshaw, a relatively minor illustration compared with the full page color plates depicting pivotal scenes in the book.