Foremost Expert on All Things

alice seeing the good magic can do and using it to help ordinary people and being part of that pure joy when the kids were playing in the water for the first time in gods know how long is exactly the character arc i want for her

she’s spent so much time on advanced theoretical magic and seeking out these complicated secrets and yes that is important in some ways but this simple, kind, gentle magic is exactly what this shy girl who loves glass animals should fill her soul with

Quentin tries and fails to fly to the moon as his senior thesis

the battle magic is home-brewed by Alice and Penny instead of learning it from the hedge witches. Alice and Penny base all the spells on Dungeons and Dragons spells because they’re nerds

Quentin does a stint as a Brakebills professor, and he loves teaching and mentoring kids who’re fucked up in the same way he once was

Margo (whose name is Janet in the books) wrote the Fillorian constitution and is so good at Fillorian geopolitics that Q calls her Fillory Clinton

Julia becomes first queen of Fillory (Alice being niffin-ed out at the time) and she’s very popular. when she comes into her god powers she becomes 7 feet tall and much more ethereal than in the show

it’s hard for Josh to get spells to work, but once he does they’re super powerful

the character named Fen in the books is nothing like show!Fen, but book!Fen is a lesbian so like…time to give the people what they want, sera gamble

Don’t get me wrong, Alice and Quentin really couldn’t have gone any longer on that wicked game (sorry, I had to make a song reference)

There was really no mood for a reconcilliation at all, and it’s good that finally Quentin was confirmed in canon to be bisexual/pansexual

It’s just that the execution of Quentin and Alice’s final breakup feels relapse at best, and downright sexist at worst

Let me explain: it feels quite absurd that the show/the narrative keeps presenting Alice as if she needs to redeem herself before the eyes of the gang, and, mostly, Quentin’s

Because, well, while it’s true that betraying her friends in a desperate attempt to destroy magic out of a legitimate fear of how such power can corrupt humans was bad, everything else that happened wasn’t her fault

Of course, we can argue that she is indirectly responsible for her father’s death, given the way the Lamprey posessed his body and stuff, but that is a consequence that refers to Alice and Alice only; it has nothing to do with Quentin, and that is just another weight in her heavy emotional baggage that she has to deal with alone

But, that’s the point, most of the things Alice did had zero to none consequences to the gang and to Quentin until the betrayal; they were things that she already has been punished for by the consequences of her actions, like the situation with the Lamprey or her emprisonment by the Library

So, she already served her time, let’s say, and most of the things she did were more self-destructive than anything else

Actually, that’s when things get interesting, because both the show and the fandom – remember sometimes these things don’t happen at the same time – keep blaming Alice for things that she didn’t ever choose

Alice didn’t volunteer to drink Ember’s juice and run the risk of sacrificing her life to defeat the beast; it was Quentin that decided Alice was more “worthy”, as if putting your safety on the line in a plan that was basically set to backfire was some kind of reward, all because he, in his mind shaped by traditional masculinity’s views on heroism and sacrifice and battle, believed it was so. And, what is worse, it was obvious that, right deep inside, he did see himself as a hero for giving up his childish dream of being the hero

Alice didn’t choose to become a Niffin after said sacrifice to defeat the Beast; it was all a consequence of her vulnerability as a mortal human, something that our heroes seem to have difficulty to understand, given how much they keep playing with fire (in this case, quite literally, given that magic in the show is literally “the fire” Prometheus gave humans) and pushing the limits of the natural world on the show

Alice didn’t ask for Quentin to save her from her spiral of self-destruction as Niffin

Alice didn’t ask Quentin to try and save her from herself as she fell into depression (yes, depression, because, whether people believe it or not, being depressed is not just about Aesthetic™ things like staring longily at a window with a sullen expression on your face, it can also involve irritability and an urge to lash out as symptoms) after being brought back to a human body after her time as a Niffin

Except for her actions as a Niffin, Alice really didn’t choose the way her life would turn out

This is not to say that Alice’s actions were good or healthy, because they weren’t

It’s just that, well, if it wasn’t Quentin’s romanticized views on relationships and reality, and his attempts to be Alice’s knight in shining armor, in saving his damsel in distress from herself, then their relationship wouldn’t be beyond any chance of reconcilliation by now

Alice never asked Quentin to be her savior, a person to worship her or to expect her to worship them because of the things this person supposedly sacrified for her

What she really expected was for Quentin to be her partner, someone who can handle her emotional baggage and she can handle theirs’, someone to stick together through thick and thin as they navigate the chaos that life can be

But Quentin was always blinded by his very aggrandized views on the world to be able to see the difference

That is, until that moment when he had the opportunity to live an entire life in a day and had an actual mature and healthy relationship with Eliot and Arielle

So, putting Alice in a situation in which she practically begs to find a way to get into Quentin’s life again feels like a huge mischaracterization, and it shows how much the writers don’t have the faint idea on what to do with her character besides being Quentin’s love interest

Having the narrative itself blaming her for the failure of the relationship when most of it was due to Quentin’s unrealistic expectations on romance is very retrograde for a show that uses a Girl Power™ quote each two lines of dialogue and, therefore, markets itself as feminist

The whole “Alice is a bitch for how she treated Quentin” discourse feels almost like the “Summer is a bitch for how she treated Tom” discourse about 500 Days of Summer, except that this time it’s worse because the show actually seems to frame Alice as “the bad guy” – mostly by implying she needs a redemption to begin with, when the movie simply uses sarcasm to emphasize that Tom’s unrealistic expectations on romance led him to project an image of Summer that wasn’t real and it was people’s own unrealistic expectations on romance that led them to side with Tom

And that can be frustrating for anyone who enjoys complex female characters because of how much potential Alice has as one of the main characters of the Magicians gang – remembering that Julia was never a part of the original gang to begin with, and that it was crucial to her characterization because she is Quentin’s literary foil –, and because we can find on AO3 plenty of fanfics of any ship involving Alice that can do a better job with her than whatever the writers have been doing these 4 seasons

It’s awsome to finally have a canon confirmation of Quentin being bi/pan, but not at the expense of the representation of complex female characters

My earphones:

So recently my cat has become infatuated with a picture of Ringo Starr I have hanging up in my room

He only ever does this with ringo, not George, the only other picture he can reach, I thought maybe he actually liked Paul or maybe it was just the frame so I conducted an experiment

I decided to try out some different pics of the Beatles together and he still seemed to prefer ringo over the other three

I then tried out individual photos to see which he preferred and he stuck by ringo every time