Untitled

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

so you may be wondering: how the hell does a 737 (capacity of roughly 100-120 people) run out of fuel midair? the METRIC SYSTEM, that's how!

up until the early eighties, airplanes would have three people in the cockpit: the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. generally speaking, the pilot's job is to fly the airplane; the first officer's job is to provide support, monitor instruments, and assist (the pilot and FO will swap roles periodically), and the flight engineer's job was to watch over all the fuel gauges, electrical systems, hydraulics, etc., to make sure they were all working properly, as well as taking charge of things like "setting engine power."

however, in the early 1980s -- when this story takes place -- the flight engineer role began to be made obsolete as computers and more advanced systems became capable of doing most of that work. the boeing 737 of this story was one such plane: actually, air canada 143 was quite a new airplane at the time of the accident, and had no flight engineer.

also in the early 1980s? canada was making the switch from the imperial system to metric.

neither of these things is bad in and of themselves. but put together? one of the flight engineer's jobs was to monitor fuel; it hadn't yet been made clear whose job it was now. canada, at the time, was doing refuelling in a convoluted "the fuel is weighed in pounds but put into the plane as liters" system that required Math and Conversion.

let's talk about AIRPLANE FUEL. unlike a car, you don't take your airplane to the station and fill 'er up: fuel has weight, and airplanes care a LOT about weight. way more than you'd imagine. it's the pilot's job to therefore calculate a) how much fuel they need to get from A to B b) how much extra/emergency fuel they need for safety and c) if and when they need to refuel and by how much. is there bad weather in the area? where's the nearest backup airport? if i need Ten Fuels to get to alberta and there's storms in alberta, i need another Two Fuels to circle around and kill time before landing safely, plus another Five Fuels to get to calgary in case alberta is impossible. my airplane is fully loaded, which means it's heavier than usual, so needs another One Fuel for takeoff power. so altogether i need Eighteen Fuels. except i'm in canada in the 1980s so now i need to figure out what that is in liters, and this used to be the flight engineer's job, and idk man. maybe it's 5 liters? that sounds right?

...you see the issue. it isn't that anyone was slacking off, but no one was quite sure what the conversion was, and so instead of giving the soon-to-be Gimli Glider 18 Fuels, they took off in that fucker with nowhere near enough fuel. to make things worse, the plane had a broken fuel gauge, which was a whole other thing and series of comical misunderstandings, but basically it meant that not only was there No Fuel, but the fuel gauges looked something like this:

the very-soon-to-be crashed airplane's day started off normally. they did a little hour long flight from one city to another with no issues. because they knew the fuel gauges were being silly, while on the ground they did a "stick test", which i'm imagining involved a tree branch, basically checking that yep, there was fuel in the tanks, we're good! (in actuality, what it was doing was measuring the weight of the fuel. except, again, they had their maths all backwards, so due to this convoluted conversion process they went "our fuel weighs 5 kilograms, which equals 20 pounds, which equals 18 fuels, which equals 900 liters." just. silly math. i don't want to make these guys out to be idiots: they would obviously have never flown the plane if they had realized their mistake. but the other problem was of course that the process was already convoluted and required multiple conversions; imagine how much worse it would be if, like these pilots, it was a new system you weren't used to!)

so they boarded their passengers and set off from montreal with the intention of flying to edmonton. and that's when things all went terribly wrong.

pictured: the intended and my interpretation of the actual flight.

all this set up leads to the actual flight, which is almost boring in summary: while high up in the sky, the plane suddenly ran out of fuel. this is bad. we do not want this to happen. the pilots had no idea what was happening at first, but i mean: it was pretty obvious. there's no fuel. no engines. no power. you're 30,000 feet in the air in a 64 ton machine and gravity is going hey girllll heyyyy.

but the thing is, airplanes are really cool. like, this is what got me so interested in these plane crashes and accidents: airplanes are awesome. because first of all: just because you weigh as much as a building and are thousands and thousands of meters in the air? doesn't mean the airplane just falls. hell no! without power, an airplane will still stay in the air, losing altitude, sure, but gliding fairly safely and manageably. this doesn't mean you're safe, but: when air canada 143 lost all power, it still had time and options. it also had... the RAT.

the Ram Air Turbine, or the RAT, is an amazing fucking guy. if an airplane loses power? a hatch pops open, and a little propeller drops down automatically. he's wind powered, and he will provide just enough backup power to keep the most critical systems online, even without fuel or engines or god. we LOVE the rat. and the rat leapt into action here, providing the pilots with enough basic systems to keep going.

this doesn't mean that air canada is out of the woods. landing without power is not easy! the trick to landing an airplane is doing it at a nice shallow angle and low speed, which involves things like "doing nice steady turns to line up with a runway" (no time, we're falling steadily), "using engines to get our speed right" (what engines), "getting to the correct altitude and speed to touch down gently" (we have NO POWER we can't go "oopsie too low" and pull up and adjust). if a plane loses too much speed, it WILL fall out of the sky (a stall) because the aerodynamics stop working. if it's going too fast, you're not landing, you're diving cockpit first into the ground. without power, you can turn, but turns will reduce speed. you can't level off or go back up. you are Going In A Downward Direction. the trick is figuring out how fast and how far and aiming at a runway.

this is also where ATC comes in! we love air traffic controllers!! air canada called a mayday, and ATC leapt into action. their job becomes to Get Them What They Need. air canada wants to go anywhere in canada? atc will move everyone out of the way and get them any runway in the northern hemisphere. when this happened, air canada 143 was near winnipeg, which was their initial goal: this IS going to be a crash landing, and the nearer they can be to emergency services, the better. however, the first officer was doing Good Math, calculating their rate of decent vs distance flown, and soon realized that even though they could literally see winnipeg from the windows, they just weren't going to make it. they were falling too fast.

enter: GIMLI. the first officer had actually trained there during his air force days; it's a former base with two runways. it wasn't ideal, because ATC had no information on it and it lacked instruments and equipment (normally, for example, airports will have locator beams and so on to help an aircraft lock on to the runway at the Correct Safe Angle), but... better than a field or lake. one of the dangers of this type of no engine landing is actually being non-committal: waiting too long to make a decision, trying to maximize time in the air rather than land. this makes sense! it's probably pretty human instinct! prolong that crash as long as possible! but it's much, much better to simply Commit and Prepare and Go For It. and that's exactly what air canada now did.

they told ATC they're going to gimli and made the turn. the cabin crew was meanwhile preparing the passengers for a crash landing.

the crazy thing about plane crashes is, actually, that they are very survivable. don't get me wrong: they're bad. people die. but the number of worst case scenarios where dozens of people still, somehow, survive? shockingly high. of course, you don't want ANYONE to die. i would be terrified if it was me. but cabin crew had to know it would probably be... well, not okay. but that if they got everyone prepared and braced, people were going to make it out. people were going to survive this. possibly most of them. possibly all of them.

as the plane approached gimli, problem #87 came up: they were still too fucking fast. they're gliding down! they can't stop! normally, a plane would simply slow down with flaps, or maybe do a couple of big circles before reorienting themselves towards the runway to lose some speed and altitude, but they don't have time -- or altitude. and that's where the theme song KICKS IN

here are reasons you DO NOT DRIFT airplanes, by the way. it can fuck up your engines: engines work in part by taking IN air, so flying at a Drifting Angle means that's all wrong. the aerodynamics are wrong. you're losing speed VERY fast. you can get OUT of the drift, but now your engines are fucked. on the other hand, this plane effectively HAS no engines, but... there's a reason people don't drift planes, okay.

another plot twist: gimli air force base was no more. the runways were still there... but it had been turned into a drag strip, ironically enough. and it was family day! picture this. you're a nice canadian racing fan in 1983, at the strip with your family, cooking hotdogs and poutine on a grill. and a fucking 737 APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in front of you. because that is exactly what happened. there were KIDS. on BIKES. with a PLANE HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS THEM. in the mayday episode, the kids tried to outrace the plane in a panic: in the pilot's telling, the kids simply froze in fear.

by the time the pilots realized the runway was occupied, it was way too late to turn back. they landed. in a twist of bad luck that turned into good: without power, they had to manually release their landing gear.... and the nose gear didn't lock. this turned out to be a weirdly good thing: without nose gear, the plane's nose hit the runway and acted as one hell of a brake in ITSELF, grinding on the asphalt as the plane barreled down at high speed. the pilot also intentionally steered the plane into the rail in the middle of the runway, trying to slow the plane even more. and... it worked! the plane came to a stop. everyone was fine. even the kids on bikes.

all this friction caused a small fire in the nose, and so the pilots called for an immediate evacuation to be safe. this caused a bit of an issue: because the nose was on the ground, the butt of the plane was higher than usual, and the back slides were basically just vertical drops. a couple people got mildly hurt using them, as you'd expect.

meanwhile, the drag strip folks were rushing over with fire extinguishers and the like, and the small fire was easily contained (note: do not fuck with burning airplanes. this one had no fuel so COULD be contained). by the time ATC got emergency services to gimli, everyone was safe, ankles were being iced, and presumably everyone was eating hot dogs.

the airplane itself had some minor damage (from when the nose acted as a brake), but was largely intact: it was patched up, refuelled, and took off from gimli a while later, where it flew for another 20 years before retiring of old age.

and that is the story of the Gimli Glider: that time a pilot drifted his plane so hard that he saved the lives of everyone on his plane.

all 69 of them 😎

and then thinking about all the people who call her cold or uncaring or clinical about what she has to do to save earth. eva stratt, who had silly t-shirts and vodka and favorite meals stored in the Hail Mary and treated with the same level of importance as the finely tuned equipment and the centrifuge the entire planet relies on for salvation.

and then thinking about eva stratt nodding and saying, “yeah, I’m pretty awful. that’s why i’m in charge” with a neutral expression and even believing it. as if crafting the most beautiful coffin and homage to her soon-to-be dead friends won’t haunt her always.

thinking about eva stratt being the first person on the “eva stratt is a monster” train, welcoming ryland grace aboard and knowing she believed in him more than anyone else.

Someone to be brave for.

excerpt is from chapter 29 of the novel.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

Some time later, his was the first funeral I ever went to. I was still in elementary school. And it wasn’t a real funeral because his mother had confiscated his ashes and almost of all his things, despite not having spoken to him for I don’t know how long. She certainly wasn’t the one caring for him when he was sick and dying. That was a friend (maybe partner? I don’t actually know). I don’t think I was even 10 when this showed me how hateful people could be.

We helped make a panel for him for the AIDS quilt. My sister went to a massive display of it at one point (maybe on the National Mall?), and I remember her recounting how she lost her shit at someone who stepped up to them and said something hateful. People were there to honor and mourn thousands of people who had died of AIDS, and someone used that as an opportunity to air their homophobia.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Elphaba sets the tone right away with “It might be hard for you to comprehend that someone like him could choose someone like me” which is such an interesting way to phrase that because she doesn’t say “it might be hard for you to comprehend that he could choose someone like me” she says “someone like him” (privileged, beautiful, adored by the public, living in luxury…Glinda) and then emphasizes the hell out of the word choose. 

She’s throwing Glinda’s choice to not leave on the broom with her right in her face, which is such an excellent moment, because Fiyero did choose to come with Elphaba - WILDLY different circumstances and I will forever maintain that Fiyero's choice was incredibly easy and very low-stakes when compared to Glinda's situation - but the fact remains, he did choose, and I think the shock of being chosen finally, FINALLY flips a switch for Elphaba and she goes from just missing Glinda, to letting herself be angry as hell with Glinda for choosing to stay behind. 

Given both the wistfulness and the clumsiness of their earlier scenes together in Act 2, I think up until this moment some part of Elphaba has tried to soften, excuse, and rationalize Glinda’s decision to stay behind - Elphaba being Elphaba, you know she’s thought it through a thousand times and came to the reasonable conclusion: Glinda grew up in this world of privilege, it was unrealistic for me to think she could just leave it. 

So then when Fiyero joins her, Elphaba’s brain comes screeching to a halt like HANG ON - someone like him (someone like you) could choose me, but you didn’t. 

And she finally allows herself to feel that anger toward Glinda in a way she hasn’t before and she just lights the fuck into her. And then she keeps twisting that knife by highlighting every lie in Glinda’s life, every tiny little fabricated detail Glinda has had to surround herself with as a result of her decision to stay - the wand, her public figure persona, the fact that she can’t magically transform her life into the picture of perfection she pretends it is, her absolute sham of a relationship with Fiyero - and you know Glinda doesn’t have any real argument against any of that because it’s all true so she just up and SLAPS her. 

That whole opening interaction is fantastic because even though Fiyero is literally the subject of the conversation, he’s just a device Elphaba is using to point out what Glinda failed to do. If you want to go so far as to look at it through a gelphie-fied lens, it even reads as a “this could’ve been us” moment - whether you see it as romantic or platonic, dealer’s choice, but at the end of the day, it’s all about driving that knife home: someone like him chose someone like me - you could have chosen me, but you chose yourself instead.

And to be clear - I’m actually not trying to fully demonize Glinda for staying behind during Defying Gravity. I’ve written more in-depth about it here and here, but the quick version is: in the big picture moral sense, Glinda was absolutely in the wrong to stay behind, and REALLY, DEEPLY in the wrong to live in the comfort of denial and become a public figurehead for the Wizard; that’s a very fair objective truth. However—

—someone saying “give up your entire life to become a fugitive with me where we’ll be hunted to the ends of the earth by the most powerful people in the world, you’ll never see your family again, you’ll never know a moment of safety or peace again and you don’t fully comprehend why, also armed guards are ramming down the door as we speak and you just watched the entire world flip upside-down in realtime, you have 10 seconds to decide, yes or no” - is a tall order, and frankly, 18-year-old Glinda staying behind isn’t that hard to understand. She had no idea that decision was going to result in becoming a political prop, but Morrible got straight to work grooming her for that role while Glinda was still reeling from far and away the most traumatic experience of her life.

That said, I really love that Elphaba would rightfully be not just hurt, but angry, that Glinda couldn’t make the same choice she could and revolt against everything she knew, because they are very different people, and Elphaba could make that choice, and that’s what makes their dynamic so rich. I will always lament that Act 2 of Wicked doesn’t give Elphaba enough time or space to express her anger, but the movie-verse catfight scene really feels like her finally getting to let off and be angry with Glinda for things which, again, have very little to do with Fiyero himself, and everything to do with what Fiyero did versus what Glinda couldn’t.

So going back to an earlier point of the catfight, we've also got this bit, which to me is actually just really funny:

Fiyero’s choice to come with Elphaba “happened and it’s real” with no mention of the romantic aspect of it being the significant factor - later on, she even straight up says the words “he loves me” but NEVER says anything about loving him, which is a weirdly glaring absence for a catfight supposedly about boyfriend-stealing; meanwhile Glinda ONLY refers to him quite literally as an object (“taking things that don’t belong to us”). This poor man isn’t even a man to them, he’s a baseball bat they’re using to smack each other in the head with. 

And even the metaphorical baseball bat isn’t good enough, because then they take more literal sticks to hit each other with, and when that STILL isn’t enough, they both just ditch the weapons and throw down jungle style.

So then we come to the Gale Force showing up to apprehend Elphaba and when Elphaba is rightfully devastated that Glinda would use Nessa’s death to capture her, we get THIS line:

Glinda's motivation for what she thought was only going to be a rumor about Nessa was never about getting Elphaba arrested - she wanted to draw Elphaba out so she could confront her alone, on her terms, because they do have so much shit to hash out that could never be hashed out in the stilted, dancing-around-feelings way they tried at the Emerald City Palace - and of the shit that needs to be hashed out, the boyfriend-stealing is just a symptom, not the root cause. 

Because the truth is, while Elphaba’s anger with Glinda is fully justified from every angle morally, politically, and personally, Glinda also has reason to be angry, to feel like she was abandoned, and to feel like she was shoved into a role she never intended to be in because of Elphaba. Glinda’s decision to stay behind during Defying Gravity was her own, but the resulting Glinda the Good persona wasn’t, and the fact that she has created this life built entirely on lies is all the more cruel because when she and Elphaba were friends, Elphaba was quite literally the only real thing Glinda had ever known. So by choosing to leave in Defying Gravity, Elphaba took that one brilliant little piece of something real away from Glinda, and Glinda was pushed right back into the fake persona she’s been forcing herself into since childhood. Has she benefited from the Glinda the Good persona? Absolutely. Has she been the shiny distraction keeping all of Oz passive and besotted amidst the rise of this regime? You betcha. Has it brought her even a split second of true happiness or sense of purpose? Very clearly not. And while the staying behind was her choice, it's not unreasonable that some part of her would blame Elphaba for not only the mess she's found herself in, but for actually understanding why she isn't happy, why she knows she's in the wrong and still doesn't have the courage to change it. If she'd never known Elphaba, she wouldn't have that insight into why her life feels so empty, but because she was friends with Elphaba, that insight is going to eat away at her and all the denial in the world won't keep her safe from it. And with that much bitterness and anger and resentment and regret built up between them, it’s honestly no wonder they’re using Fiyero to beat the absolute crap out of each other.

So finally we come to the cherry on top, which is Fiyero showing up in person to sacrifice himself (and I’ll be real, I genuinely feel sorry for this boy, he is so devoted to Elphaba, and Elphaba just like…canonically assumed alaym was a one night stand and had no intention of ever seeing him again even when he offered her a whole castle, which will forever be hilarious to me) - anyway, tangent, sorry - so Fiyero himself shows up to sacrifice his penis his life, and EVEN THEN, the scene STILL manages to center on this stand-off between Elphaba and Glinda.

I don’t ever want to downplay Fiyero’s sacrifice because he is important to both of them, and narratively it serves as a really effective breaking point to have the person who chose her be "killed" because of her as the final (literal) straw that makes Elphaba succumb to the Wicked Witch persona in No Good Deed - but before all that, even with Fiyero himself telling Elphaba to leave, Elphaba doesn’t budge until Glinda tells her to. 

And I love that a lot because Fiyero stating he’s willing to kill Glinda for her is a bluff and Glinda knows it’s a bluff - but for Elphaba, there’s just enough of a risk that it might not be a bluff that it actually makes her hesitate. She obviously doesn’t want to leave Fiyero behind because she cares about him and doesn’t want any harm to come to him, but she’s also not going to leave if Glinda’s in any real danger from him, so despite Fiyero dramatically trying to fling himself onto a grenade for her, Elphaba isn’t moving an inch away from that grenade until Glinda gives the word - and when she does, that’s when Elphaba obeys, not a second before.

people who are straight: yeah i’m straight