Julia exists in a beautiful liminal space between being a hyperfunctional normie and totally nuts (many such cases?) and I think that was reflected by her being a joiner and a Gifted Kid. I think she had a lot of friends whom she felt passionately about but maybe spread herself a little thin because for Julia being someone's friend is a very active pursuit, but she was never as close with anyone as she was with Quentin, obvs, and she was aware of other people being intimidated by her intelligence, something I think would bring her level to understanding Alice in other circumstances(/timelines, probably this happened). Went through a "not like the other girls" phase essentially canonically confirmed. played softball, volleyball or soccer. I think she and Quentin are both products of 90s/2000s upper middle class to very wealthy libbed out homes where they would have gone through mostly public school. Also her dad having died in some kind of institutionalized hospitalization situation and her being forever day one besties with Quentin Coldwater, Mentally Ill, and THEN she also constructs a Normal Again hospitalization scenario spell for him when they have a falling out…this is hauntingggggg

Quentin I think had a lot of formative experiences with feeling on the outs from a certain type of masculinity (talked a lot about this in Vampire Quentin au for some reason). I think this really hurt him but at the same time he kind of legitimately didn't really care; love him. Jason Ralph is extremely handsome but plays Quentin with enough convincing offputting-ness (#offputting representation) that I think he probably had some or many "hey my friend likes you :)" "pranks" played on him. as an adult at the point of entry in the show I think you need to hit him with a mallet that says "I am attracted to you" for him to understand that and he still might think you're joking. he developed complicated internal rubrics for who is his "friend" and who likes him, I think, and only ever consistently felt that way his head about Julia once they met. Also a Gifted Kid but hit the internet participant-typical burnout phase of that Kwick

I feel like Margo had a surface-level popularity from being headstrong and hot that did not prevent her from feeling lonely in her childhood/high school. Based on how she reacted to Welters I feel like she must have been on a team sport in high school but in a kind of straight girl way even though she is not straight (also many such cases?). I think you can extrapolate from her dad's apparent enforcement of #gender that she had a weird step-mom or step-moms plural, I also think there was maybe some raised-by-nannies business involved. The show did not particularly want to engage with her as a racialized character, but I think being a Wealthy Hot Girl in California while not being white could have contributed a lot to her armoring herself in the exact way she does, but also she's just really idiosyncratically herself. HUGE, ENORMOUS only child energy.

Eliot is a character whose childhood we know both a lot and very little about, like whether or not he had siblings (I mostly skew no?), how his mom felt about him being gay, etc. I read his dad's rejection of him as not really based in commitment to surely ambient Christianity/evangelical stuff but supported by it but this might be projection from my own childhood #myownchildhood. I think he isn't a great student and didn't ever get one of those mentor teachers or other safe adults who was endeared by his personality that can be distributed to weird gay kids by the universe, hence why he's still acting like a strange high school brown-noser in magic grad school. obviously he was physically bullied and engaged in coerced physical bullying in kind. had an unwitting/kind of witting beard gf in high school who still thinks of him fondly. <3

Alice was why I wrote this post bc I rapidly developed a headcanon that she was partially homeschooled/#unschooled because her parents don't participate in regular society and are freak magicians in replies to Isabel on my last post BUT I googled and apparently she mentions not fitting in at school BUT maybe this happened for part of her high school, idk it is very easy for me to imagine that she had to keep track of school enrollment for herself and when something fell thru her mom was like "lol well who cares about homogenous non-magic institutions anyway eyeroll emoji" and Alice experienced rage that she never really recovered from. This is also extremely particular to #myownchildhood but we are having fun. Alice basically says a few different times that she never felt like she fit anywhere and that everyone was always intimidated by her intelligence (and frankly power) which is why Charlie's death was especially crushing to her. We don't like to think about how she lost her virginity with all of her clothes on + her parent's sex parties but we must. She might have had the worst time of it of all characters EXCEPT.....

Penny, foster kid from Florida! I know there's stuff about his childhood in s5 but I didn't watch s5 also it was technically somewhat about alternate Penny (I hate SyFy's The Magicians), so. Not to reference Harry Potter as a non-fascist-transphobe adult in 2026 but a telepathy version of Tom Riddle's diary essentially happened to him for his whole childhood and it's never mentioned again? ?????? I also think he was often put in awful positions to protect or defend foster siblings or other kids in the system; him swooping in and constantly saving Quentin while being very bitter about it and projecting the idea that he's an uncaring jackass doesn't come from nowhere (if u actually care about him and his subjectivity as a character). The show likes to pontificate on him being an uncaring jackass also but in terms of actual actions he shows again and again that he instinctively defends people who need defending and often lets his better angels win out after grumbling about it and I think this and his baggage around it could have a heavy basis in his experiences as a kid.

Now Kady I think had an experience that would align her more with Alice than any other characters in the show because her mom was constantly chasing magic for however long she was doing that but their childhoods must have materially been extremely different at the same time. It's unclear to me where a dad did or did not fit into that, I think you could make the case for it having happened a lot of different ways (really the case for any Magicians character), but it's very sad to me that she creates a story of a dad who is a sweet stoner who she doesn't mind spending time with. She has to be an only child bc she's shouldering her mom's burdens alone. Her childhood must have had Magic Metaphor versions of a parent who's an addict, maybe even kind of similar to a parent with a gambling addiction with her mom having "debts". and of course not a lot of consistency, moved a lot, learned battle magic distressingly young.