Chase Aphrodite

She/Her, 28, 🇧🇷 🦄🏳️‍🌈

[sakurabraches]

sorry but it's so insane to me that part ii of the wicked novel ends with elphaba kissing glinda and then disappearing into the emerald city. then you turn the page and five years have passed and fiyero's like boy why don't i go to the chapel of st glinda despite not being a unionist to light a candle and think about glinda of the arduennas of the uplands (who, mind you, we've never seen him have a one on one interaction with or address at all)

and then what do you know but elphaba thropp, the same woman who was last seen kissing glinda of the arduennas of the uplands is also praying to saint glinda, despite being a firm atheist

[ieafy]

sweet days

[sakurabraches]

i think elphaba and glinda are both actually very much idealists, at least in DG, only in opposite ways. elphaba's an idealist because she has this naive idea about affecting change. she thinks something being true or morally good will be enough to enact change, and that she if she can just tell enough people the wizard lies then she'll be able to take him down. but she's also very much a realist because she's able to recognize the flaws and injustices within oz, and that she won't be able to be happy while those injustices persist. she knows a life in the emerald palace serving the wizard could never satisfy her because it'd be partly built on a lie

whereas glinda's a realist in the sense that she's much more aware of the fact that popularity and social clout matter most to people and knows the social game you need to play to move up in the wold. but she's also very much an idealist because she believes that gaming the system enough will result in happiness. and this is idealism too because she gets everything she wants but is unsatisfied with her heterosexual happy ending and guilt ridden because her life is being propped up by lies and elphaba's demonization. and both of their idealized views on the world ultimately serve as a barrier to their happiness

[itsalwaysdark]

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

[calciumcryptid]

I feel like a lot of people get "All Art is Political" confused with "All Art is made with Political Intentions" which is not the same.

[daiby1444]

happy pride month. gelphie shines eternal.

i should draw them getting married.

[meyerlansky]

just. please know. that giffing scenes like that is a fucking nightmare labor of love.

to wit:

bottom's the raw capture, middle's just flat curve correction to make the footage visible, top is the final coloring with /counts seven adjustment layers to add back in Literally Anything But Yellow

every giffer i know does it out of love for the game, but for the record it's not... easy. it's not just slapping the footage in a cap grabber and posting whatever it spits out. "professional" lighting and color grading has only gotten waaay murkier and flatter in the fifteen years i've been giffing on here, so uh. don't repost gifs, please!

[infiniteeight8]

I thought the bottom was a black bar. I didn't even realize that was footage.

Everyone say thank you to your neighbourhood GIF maker! Giffers are so important to the fannish ecosystem, but to so many people the amount of work involved invisible.

[starlitsecrets]

ppl say they hate defending glinda but are forced to because fiyerab*s hate on her the wrong way/for the wrong things which like, valid, but also couldn’t be me- call me head glinda apologist because i love to defend that stupid pink lesbian

[dreadbirate]

One thing the musical misses that is so essential to Elphaba as a character and her tragedy is that she fails at every cause or goal she sets out for.

The Quadlings, the Animals, Glinda, Revolutionary Terrorism, her relationship with fiyero, Saving Fiyero’s family, and even getting the damn shoes.

Her thinking the scarecrow could be fiyero is her grasping at straws (no pun intended. There’s no precedent for it, there are Animals and clockwork machines and cursed axes that her life has intersected with. But the scarecrow doesn’t fit, so she imagines that the scarecrow is about her too, in a way that absolves her of guilt.

She knows, somewhere in her heart, that Dorothy coming to the castle means the end of her one way or another and she wants a happy ending. If fiyero were alive, disguised and in hiding all these years, it means that she didn’t fail for once.

[sakurabraches]

gelphie being unrequited would be nice in the sense that it would save elphaba a lot of trouble if she just got over that blonde thing. unfortunately she was caught praying at the chapel of st glinda several times and gave her bf glinda's eyes. so here we are. good fucking riddance

[lokihiddleston]

ANASTASIA (1997)

[bumblingest-bee]

”which could mean nothing” is maybe my favorite phrase of all time. where would we be without it

[fullmetalwindbreaker]

[lakevida]

[thequeeninyellowlace]

[itrygraphics]

happy pride month :-)

[la-mombey]

She put her face against Glinda’s and kissed her. “Hold out, if you can,” she murmured, and kissed her again. “Hold out, my sweet.”

Wicked, Gregory Maguire

[lesbianshadowheart]

Day 1 of being a Wicked fan: damn these girls do have a bit of a gay vibe haha

Day 556 of being a Wicked fan: in a metatextual sense, Fiyero is not a person in his own right, but rather an extension of Glinda that is allowed to act on Glinda’s own repressed desires, which means that Fiyero’s not real

[sakurabraches]

okay, so here's something

in the scene with baby elphaba where the children are bullying her, we have a shot of her hand clenching as her anger and frustration at being mistreated grow

when practicing magic with morrible, morrible puts her hand over elphaba to help her, and we get a visual reference to the wicked witch's iconic claws. in this moment, morrible channels elphaba's anger so that she may produce magic, tapping into her feelings of isolation and loneliness and otherness by bringing up the hate crime in dr dilly's classroom. and as this plays on elphaba's isolation, the wicked witch persona is formed

in defying gravity, they callback to the childhood scene by having a similar shot of elphaba's hand as morrible announces to oz that elphaba is inherently evil (as evident by her green skin/otherness) and wicked because of what she did to the Monkeys. this solidifies elphaba as the wicked witch in the mind of the ozians

only this time, rather than suffering alone, glinda takes elphaba's hand and tells her not to be afraid. because while glinda fails elphaba in many ways, it's her love that grounds elphaba and strengthens her sense of self enough so that she can ultimately defy the wizard and stand up for what's right, and it's glinda who reminds elphie of her own goodness and potential

so in for good, at kiamo ko, elphaba takes glinda's hand one last time, a testament to her choosing her own goodness. and the shadow of the witch's hand melts away