Jan 23
It made Elphie grin a bit to herself, to feel her old contempt for the Wizard flare up. Perhaps this is what healing meant, after all.
-Wicked, p305
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It made Elphie grin a bit to herself, to feel her old contempt for the Wizard flare up. Perhaps this is what healing meant, after all.
-Wicked, p305
Not me catching a Galinda-Snow parallel.
"Looking about her, she could tell that some of these dollies came from families much better off than hers. The pearls and diamonds on them! Galinda was glad she had chosen a simple silver collar with mettanite struts. There was something vulgar about traveling in jewels. As she realized this truth, she codified it into a saying. At the earliest perfect opportunity she would bring it out as proof of her having opinions--and of having traveled. 'The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing,' she murmured, trying it out, 'while the true traveler knows that the novel world around her serves as the most appropriate accessory.' Good, very good." -p68.
This coming only 4 pages after "Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead."
Making up a saying about how dressing to the nines when traveling is stupid to cover up the fact that you don't have pearls and diamonds to wear is so something young Coriolanus would do.
Obviously, Wicked is some very very good Wizard of Oz fanfic. But the further I get into this book, the more it feels like the musical is some very very good fanfic of it. Wicked the musical is Wicked the book through 7 AUs. 200 pages in, I haven't seen this witch do any magic, and she's already underground with the rebellion. She's fucking the rather uncharismatic Fiyero, in whom Glinda never showed any interest and who has a wife (since they were children) and three kids back at home. Boq never showed any interest in Nessa, but the wife he does pick up from that all-girls school they went to is unsurprisingly suicidal.
Home sick. Feel too gross to write or draw. However, perfect for starting to read Wicked!
Page 8 Nanny is hilarious.
"You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are."
- the dwarf, Wicked, p374
The way age is represented in Wicked is very odd to me. Maybe I just wasn't expecting such DiCaprian sensibilities, but everyone seems to age more rapidly or the typical lifespan is shorter than in our world.
The students at Shiz University are slightly younger than most college students in our world, by 2-3 years. Fifteen-year-olds can drink at bars. Then characters in their late 20s are spoken of as if they are old, like Fiyero's wife appreciating having 30-year-old Elphie around as a "contemporary" vs her own early to mid-twenties sisters and a few comments suggesting she is past her prime. When Elphie is in her late thirties, Glinda's slow approach is speculated to be "either through age or shyness, or her ridiculous gown," as if an otherwise healthy adult woman in her thirties would be expected to already be slowing down (I know it's the gown, but still). And her father, at the specific age of 63, is described as more or less decrepit, long white beard, hunched and weak, losing his vision. None of the mid-60s people I know are in such poor shape, and he's spent the past 15-20 years in comfort, not even roughing it through Quadling Country anymore. Is this a weird depiction of aging or an Ozian thing?
When you're the Princess of the Scrow people:
"In the Vinkus" is off to a good start as a section. I like seeing Elphie come back to herself, to thinking, after spending so many years in grief and uninspired maunthood.
The bit where she enlists a hive of bees in the forest intrigues me. Was it magic? Would be only the second time she's shown using it (or trying to; damn schoolchildren getting in the way of murder 🙄). But they aren't Bees, so when she "talks to them," what form of communication is she using? Now, though they are bees, I am thinking about how she would totally have no problem eating Bee honey.