“Can I call you Elphie?” @summergirl2000 - Tumblr Blog

one thing i've found particularly interesting is how some people seem to be so intent on demonizing everything glinda does that they like project offense onto elphaba. it's how you get takes about how glinda's so horrible and cruel to elphaba in popular and then you turn to the source material and the framing of the scene and the blocking and the cast and crew's thoughts on the scene and they're all talking about how it's a wonderful intimate silly bonding moment that ties into the wider arc of the story, which is how glinda and elphaba change each other for better

and i've always found that somewhat odd because there's no shortage of moments of glinda being a terrible person and being horrible to elphaba and elphaba being hurt because of it. some of cynthia's best acting moments in wicked are in microexpressions that manage to subtly and succinctly capture elphaba's hurt in certain moments while maintaining elphaba's relatively poised exterior. like, in their first meeting, after galinda offers to address the "problem" of elphaba's skin, you see hurt in elphaba's eyes before it hardens and she proceeds to give galinda the nastiest read of her life (very deserved. should've been an everyone clapped moment)

my absolute favorite cynthia acting moment across both films is after the "it seems the artichoke is steamed" comment. she first does this defiant little smirk, which establishes (1) on some level elphaba enjoys the back and forth with galinda and (2) she's incredibly resilient and refuses to back down. but then you see her glance down to the side and it's clear that she actually is hurt by the comments about her skin. and i think it's just such a masterful way of conveying how microaggressions just wear you down overtime, and there's so much pain and frustration and loneliness behind her eyes. i know i already posted about this today but i really love this cutaway it's really fucking good

there are moments where her hurt is more evident, too; the ozdust and the "you were a part of this" come to mind. it's not hard to find scenes that leave you being like well fuck we should probably kill glinda guys. and elphaba's pain is a far more damning condemnation of glinda's actions than anything else

but a lot of bad faith interpretations of glinda's character don't actually seem to focus on elphaba's pain. cuz like it or not a big part of gelphie's dynamic, especially movie gelphie, is elphaba being endured by glinda's over-the-topness and campy overly sincerely somewhat oblivious society dame thing. cynthia could've chose to subtly portray elphaba taking offense at certain moments in popular, for instance, but she doesn't--because her elphaba is fundamentally fond of and endured by glinda. it feels kind of disrespectful to cynthia and the work she put into elphaba to disregard these genuine moments of connection between elphaba and glinda, because that is and important part of how cynthia understood the character

also i kinda feel that any discussion of discrimination, even fictional, should focus on the hurt the victim experiences. i feel like a lot of posts about how certain glinda moments are bad and show she's actually a horrible friend and person never really actually center elphaba. like they'll argue that she ought to be offended, but disregard the framing and cynthia's acting choices that show the opposite. and i don't really like when elphaba's reduced to a prop to show that glinda is bad, especially since--and i really can't stress this enough--there are so many moments focusing on elphaba's pain that show glinda sucks

and to be fair people do the same thing with fiyero to some extent. like the "looking at things another way" line is kinda some early 2000s cringe writing and if someone said that to me i'd slap them but it's clearly not meant to be offensive and elphaba clearly isn't hurt by it, so there's really no point in projecting hurt where there is none cuz then you just look silly. now she also later tells glinda "look at me. not with your eyes--with theirs," which implies she took the early statement to mean that fiyero was actually looking at her the way glinda did--sorry, that's not the topic of the post

#elphaba thropp #glinda upland #wicked

kienava

ariana grande asks the bold question of what if imogen heap was at the club

#that nowhere nobody song is peak #ariana grande

the-evil-skull

it’s not even as queer as the book is the most based criticism of wicked tbh

I'm right and you know it and so does everyone else in their hearts. Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was written by a gay man and all but explicitly portrays Elphaba as an intersex girl who is alienated from traditional womanhood, and who has a homoerotically charged relationship with Glinda (as well as Fiyero) which is implied to have ended in sex in the Emerald City. The book is also clearly stamped with the experiences of a survivor of the AIDS crisis and its politics are still relevant. The musical, along with its general defanging of the books radical politics, reimagines the Gelphie relationship into a toothless and chaste friendship where they compete over a man, and everyone eats it up because they don't know what they COULD have instead.

Plus her son is bisexual. Everyone read Son Of A Witch now.

#wicked book

greylittlebird-deactivated20250

I don’t understand why people who cannot accept any moral grayness or complexity decide to join fandoms for the most emotionally complex stories and then try to shame everyone there who actually is able to understand the material.

#wicked

lqcedup

ariana grande, hate that i made you love me ౨ৎ

“just don't eclipse the moon 'cause it's all bad news”

#such a good mv #ariana grande

perigrin

the most important thing to ever happen

#my heart is healed #cynthiana

vuelie

I absolutely have no idea with what’s going on in the recent Frozen III teasers from D23 — but I am absolutely overjoyed that we’re getting another movie. 🤧😭

I fucking miss the Frozen fandom.

#omg i missed frozen so much #i'm so excited!#frozen 3

lyn1tx

YALL ITS HAPPENING

Anna and Olaf from frozen 3

#frozen 3 #frozen fanart

tiranushka

Elsa and the villainess from Frozen 3 dance a strange waltz (toxic yuri, my beloved)

#oh my #frozen fanart #give elsa a girlfriend

whencartoonsruletheworld

not to "trying to be chill but can't help noticing how misogyny bleeds through the cracks etc etc" but once you realize that almost none of the cute disney comic relief sidekicks are women you can't unsee it. like that thing only exists to do some slapstick and look cute for plushies. why can't it be a woman. why are ALL of them he/him. it's driving me fucking insane

whencartoonsruletheworld

here let's look at JUST the disney princess lineup. almost all of them have exclusively male sidekicks. cinderella has female mice hanging with her but they are significantly less present in the story AND marketing than jaq and gus, her male horse and dog, and even fucking lucifer. the only princess i can think of with significant female sidekicks is belle, and that's 1) the Mom™, 2) the wardrobe with barely any merch or screentime, and 3) the maid with barely any merch or screentime, all of which pale in comparison to the attention lumiere, cogsworth and chip get. sisu is more of a sub-protagonist than a sidekick so that leaves raya with her male tuktuk.

what are the other female sidekicks i can think of? uh the pig from black cauldron who doesn't even do any slapstick. LIVE-ACTION scuttle. the star from wish doesn't have a gender ig. one (1) of the five other major animals in hoppers. like literally once you ask yourself "why did rapunzel's chameleon have to be he/him-ed" you just don't stop thinking about it. does the animated jasmine have any female friends

bnprime

this is a fascinating question! i can think of so many possible reasons, and i want to hear what other people think.

sexist marketing: the company wants boys to feel included.

sexist marketing: disney stunt-casts famous actors in supporting roles, and feels like male celebrities are a bigger draw.

sexist writing: while a female character is at the center of the story, all other characters should be default (male)

sexist writing: just like the “children whose birth mothers are alive don’t get put into risky fairytale situations” trope: “women who have female pals don’t take *disney princess* risks. male companions are a symptom of being at the periphery, and also of a heroic soul.”

sexist writing: writers want to make man-jokes and don’t like women-jokes.

any other conjectures?

the discourse about disney writing is so interesting because it’s so successfully mainstream. it’s both what the public wants, and also a reflection of the public’s attitudes.

sakurabraches

crope and tibbett never have explicit sex yet everybody recognizes they're clearly a gay couple. frex and turtle heart also don't have explicit on page sex, and it's only much later that frex confirms he and melena "shared him," yet every one still recognizes them as queer rep and no one ever says it doesn't count because only melena and turtle heart got on page sex. glinda and elphaba literally kiss and it's heavily implied they have sex but it suddenly doesn't count or oh it's just implication we can't give credit for that. the way people are so quick to see any affection between men as gay but deny affection between women can be anything but platonic is insane

gelphienation

before we really get down to buisness I just want to say that if this post is about feuding with fiyerabas I think glinda and elphaba absolutely canonically fucked raw. every night in that little dorm room. tongue in every hole. but if this is a discussion between learnéd disciples of gelphie I DO think the way people read sexuality in the Wickedverse is complicateddddddd because (to approach gender and sexuality and the characters of wicked in a very binary way. though I'm aware of the nuances of the book Elphaba in the room) men and women experience homophobia differently.

A big part of the way homophobia is applied to women is that their ability to possess a sexuality independent from men is denied. I think queer men experience homophobia as hypervisibility (every touch or moment of affection is "gay") queer women experience homophobia as invisibility (ie "they're just really good friends") and that does change how the characters need to be approached when you write them. I think people absolutely dismiss the objective evidence that Glinda and Elphaba are written as romantically linked because they're homophobic. But at the same time I don't feel that the wicked years books are written with the understanding that erasure is one of the primary ways homophobia manifests towards queer women.

It’s like that graphic of equality vs. equity with the people and the fence and they're all on the same sized stool but the short person still can't see over the fence. I think queerness in the Wicked years is approached through the lens of equality where all the queer characters regardless of gender are largely written largely the same way. But I think an equitable treatment would understand that queer men and queer women are perceived in fundamentally different ways and approach how the characters are written in response.

#i think maguire's notions around “respecting characters' privacy” or whatever are strongly influenced by his identity as a gay man #but for queer women for most of history their lives have been relegated to the private sphere #<prev tags #gelphie #wicked analysis #wicked book

gelphienation

extremely long multiple paragraph post about the wicked years, gelphie, gender, and queerness as a social class.

essentially i think what makes gelphie very complicated is that the wicked years series establishes them as clearly romantically linked but never establishes them as queer, or makes an attempt to establish queer women as a legible class with complex relationships to gender and society. I think they arguably do for queer men--for example Sarima refers to Crope and Tibbett as "inverts" and Trism mentions that gay sex isn't accepted in his social class. They also mention that there's a tradition of men playing the role of the female fairy Preenella during celebrations so there's also a history of drag. It's also clear that crope and tibbett approach gender in a way that's linked to their sexuality. but at the same time Trism balks at the idea of dressing like a woman, so gender fluidity isn't universally accepted. There were also a couple different instances where male characters cohabitated in what was implied to be a romantic way. that tells me that queer men exist in the wicked universe, that they're socially recognizeable and legible to other characters, and that it is possible for average people (or Animals) to make a life with each other.

at the same time, we don't really get that same degree of clarity with queer women. someone calls elphaba "a woman who prefers the company of other women" in the opening and like 3 books later someone tells Rain not to get too attached to female teachers. But there doesn't ever seem to be any evidence of how "a woman who prefers the company of other women" is recieved in the world. what is their relationship to gender? what's their social station? there are a couple characters besides glinda and elphaba who are implied to be queer (oatsie manglehand and lurline/preenella) but they're never really discussed as a social class. their queerness is never legible to other characters. also the hints of homophobia that elphaba and rain experience (see above) are never applied to Elphaba and Glinda's relationship. Nanny says that Frex and Turtle Heart are "flirting like schoolgirls" or something like that, but she only says that Elphaba was "devoted" to Glinda in a way that never registers to her as strange.

I think the first book especially is dedicated to exploring the different ways someone who is nominally a woman can be considered evil. queerness is ostensibly one of them, but the social impacts of queerness are never addressed, so it never really makes sense. why would it matter if elphaba had gay sex if we never find out what people think about women who have gay sex? we hear a lot about what Glinda thinks about basically every aspect of society (including "theatre people") and a lot about how people interpret her, but her relationship to elphaba as a specifically taboo relationship or her attraction to women is never something that comes up at all, even when she's talking to other queer characters. And that's the crux of it all. Glinda and Elphaba behave in ways that are queer (and this was done knowingly, and with intention) but they don't understand themselves as part of a class of queer women (even subconsciously, ie "I know what I feel is wrong/different") and neither does anyone else.

And yet when queer women talk about those characters, they not only identify the characters as queer but speak specifically to how their sexuality affects their relationship to society. ie in the movie Cynthia, Marissa Bode, and arguably Ariana are all very invested in the characters' sexuality. Cynthia and Ariana have made it clear that they view Elphaba's queerness is related to her sense of otherness and Glinda's queerness as part of what motivates her need to perform. they were also conscious that queer women as a social class would respond to the characters in a specific way for those reasons.

I also think that legibility is VERY important to queer women generally because a major way that bi women and lesbians experience homophobia is as erasure. For example when pluribus was airing, people were very frustrated that news outlets never identified Carol as a lesbian, because that label is important for people because lesbianism as an identity is so often erased or disputed. or I just finished reading A Desolation Called Peace (also written by a queer woman) and even after two female characters have made out twice, one of them asks the other if she actually likes women. OR how the bridgerton showrunner (a queer woman) talks about the sapphic bridgerton couple is very direct in a way that's very different from how gregory maguire talks about gelphie.

I think there is demonstrably a noticeable mismatch between what the Wicked books think queer women would think about themselves and how they actually ARE talking and thinking about themselves. I don't think it means they're bad books or "bad representation" and I actually really like them, even if I don't agree with everything they say (esp about disability among other things). HOWEVER I do think that queer women reading them will inevitably pick up on the fact that what the author values is slightly different from what they value AND people with homophobic inclinations can and do use the ambiguity around Glinda and Elphaba to deny that there's any sexual or romantic element to their relationship at all. This means that not only are they reading the text against authorial intent and losing crucial pieces of information about major characters' motivations, they also make discussions of the book actively hostile to queer women. I mean I'm not trying to attempt an epic cancellation on a very old bostonian gay man here BUT I do think there are several valuable lessons to be learned here about ourselves and our world

#gelphie #wicked book #wicked analysis