glinda experiences hardships in the wicked books to put it mildly. she has trouble reading and retaining information, which causes her to write herself off as someone who's able to learn or think much, but manages to be the first girl in her town to get into shiz university, and on scholarship. she's bullied by the girls she tries to befriend for being technically lower class and teased as smitten with her weird girl roommate, though she tries to deny it. she's being actively spied on and manipulated by an older school staff member, who murders glinda's caretaker in a way that causes glinda to blame herself for the rest of her life (glinda's in her 60s later in the series discussing how there isn't a single sleep she ever wakes up from where she still doesn't feel guilty about her caretaker's death). glinda's only friend, elphaba, abandons her and becomes a missing person, and straight out of college, glinda aims to marry upwards socially, so she marries an infertile old man. she's clearly extremely lonely and isolated in this time, so she tries desperately to get her old college friends to keep hanging out with her, but her old college friends find her obnoxious and overtalkative, so they make excuses to never meet up with her again. she spends the next decades longing for the one close friend she did have, but when they finally reunite, they have a massive falling out (i really do think this was glinda's fault) and elphaba storms off furious with her and gets executed by the state. glinda becomes throne minister for a bit but they replace her with a literal strawman. elphaba's son comes to introduce himself to her, with elphaba's broom and cloak, and glinda has a breakdown in front of him and throws elphaba's broom in the fireplace and smashes vases and beats her own chest with her hand. more time passes. she finds out elphaba was actually sheltering as a nun in the nunnery to Saint Glinda when she was alive (a saint that likely more than coincidentally shares glinda's name), so glinda donates to the nunnery in elphaba's memory, but the nunnery is found to be printing seditious material and glinda is put under suspicion and eventually house arrest when she refuses to cede her strategically located estate over to the military. her house is seized with her in it, most of her staff are slashed, and the military forces her into tighter and tighter living conditions until she and her staff are all in a single bedroom, and when glinda displeases the military, they begin to kill off her staff members. glinda is so depressed in this period of her life that she notes that everything in her life looks like spoiled food forever and she is still dreaming and dreaming of elphaba coming back from the afterlife to save her from her pain and unfulfillment. glinda finally executes a revolutionary strike against the empire by blowing up their warships, but she is arrested for this and put away in high security prison, left to rot until her glasses have broken and she has gone legally blind. at this point, she either finally is rescued by elphaba, or she wishfully hallucinates that she is, and dies
gummygunk
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
stormborns
