I just want to chime in re your: "Wicked" is about the lifespan of love" post. I fully 100% agree with you, and I also recently noticed the parallel of Elphaba singing about "the cost of love being too high and she rather buys defying gravity" and then in movie 2 Jon Chu literally makes them fly, cause she no longer has to chose between love and defying gravity, cause love doesn't try to hold her down on the ground anymore. 😭
Oh, this is a lovely addition! I love how you put it, and thank you for sharing it!
The price of love being too high also applies to her preteding to be someone she is not, when that was always something she could never really do, does it not? She is green, and she cannot change that. Joining the Wizard would never change that. Being someone else would never work, because she was always someone seen and looked at different.
Like Animals.
She was always the talk of the town, of the class, and never the name on someone else's heart. And when she finds it, it's freeing - the Wizard and the propaganda did turn her into someone else; but it wasn't someone exactly new. Unkindness would never be fresh news to her.
And, so, when someone sees her in a different way, it is to be seen through lenses Elphaba herself never dared to look through. The mirror showed her a wicked thing even before she was The Wicked Witch.
To be seen can relate to being lost. She was a public figure. A public enemy. She was seen because she was everywhere, even if only an abstraction beyond recognition.
But to be known is to be found. One of the things I love most about the forest scene (other than the floating, because it took my breath away) is how he looks at the posters, then looks at her, and the beauty he always saw never once vanished. He doesn't see her in the posters. He doesn't see her in the rumours.
He knows her. He found her, finally.
And that is priceless.
