Boq can’t leave. He asks Nessa out because he wants to impress Glinda, he stays because he thinks it’s kind but really it awful, because Nessa is lonely and he knows how that feels and he doesn’t want to be bad but knows that he has been, knows he has been awful and cannot bring himself to break her heart even though it’s the kinder thing to do. He never gets a chance to tell Glinda he loves her because she won’t let him and he waits for her to let him because he has a big heart and so much love and patience. Nessa takes that heart and takes him and holds on so tightly. She squeezes and squeezes like a python until any love and kindness he felt for her has been choked out. Who hasn’t felt stuck trying to do the kind thing to avoid pain and hurt and wait for the moment to be right but the moment’s never right and all the doors keep closing until you’re desperate, scrabbling at locked doors in the dark. You never noticed the house you had wandered into had become a prison. Maybe Boq wanted to confess to Glinda, maybe confessing to Glinda was simply a smaller part of the larger desire to go back to living his own life, a life where he had control, free movement, choice. Nessa shrinks his heart in a final effort to control him totally. Elphaba turns him to tin not to save Boq for Boq, but to save Boq for Nessa. Boq is never really seen as his own person. As a person with choices and love to share and a life to lead. He’s ‘that munchkin boy’, not royalty, not powerful, not a governors son, just on the sidelines patiently waiting. A boy who ran away from home to find something bigger only to be trapped, to be stuck, to be turned into a monster without a single question as to if he would prefer to die free or live life as a monster, enslaved to a woman who thinks she loves him but really loves the control. Of course Boq hates Elphaba. She transformed him to tin, to a monster without a heart, in his mind to lead a life of servitude to Nessa until she dies. Who could love a heartless man of tin? She has ruined him forever to all but her sister who has deprived Boq of his life. Why? Not for Boq. For Nessa. Even in No Good Deeds it is not Boq who she thinks she hurt with her magic but Nessa. She hurt Nessa by changing Boq because Boq is not an individual to any of them, simply an extension of Nessa, a subject, a nothing, a servant, a nuisance, a monster made of tin.
