i think it’s incredible that Elphaba, the righteous Elphaba, who protests and battles depersonisation and eradication of whole peoples, is portrayed as this dark lake, her motives and goals impenetrable and strange in their urgency. Nobody else seems to possess her instincts for what are ‘horrors’, for what must be stopped at great (personal!) costs. ‘Safety, food and fairness’, Elphaba names her drive towards these as the herd mentality, as though the choices she’s made to achieve these things for OTHERS, those who are being annihilated, is some sort of instinct that does not either elevate or condemn her.
She is the resistance! But none of her friends have come even close to an understanding of why she would choose to do what she does, none of them have ever felt so great an empathetic response as what is implicated in Elphaba.
it’s counter....intuitive. to see through the eyes of bystanders, who barely see the racial violence perpetrated by the state and simply go on with their lives. but maybe it is actually accurate. we are mostly taught to identify with the freedom fighters, but in this story through the people who it is told, it - perhaps - becomes a view more accurately presently foreign.