Disorganization queen

So you hear a lot of “Fiyero is just a male Glinda” or “he has no purpose other than being a love interest for elphaba with zero personality” ect.

Neither of these things are true, if you look beyond the surface you will see a character that is completely lost. Lost in life, lost his purpose, lost his sense of self and his way forward and covers all that up with well… this

Because this is fun, this is what people expect from a spoiled carefree prince and if he can’t make himself happy he might as well lean in and give the people want they want. How many times has he done this? How many schools has been kicked out of? Before he reached the point where he knew no one would see or question the turmoil going on with him even when its incredibly disruptive and he arrives at Shiz basically shouting his depression and nihilism at everyone because he knows no one is going to listen to the lyrics he’s singing, he knows no one really cares…

Until she does.

Elphaba hears him loud and clear because she’s not looking at the ridiculous display, she’s listening to what he’s really saying, doing to others what she wishes people would do for her and finding the least likely person to be struggling.

Though its never explicitly stated why Fiyero is the way he is Jonathan Bailey has gone on record with some insights into how he played him:

“He’s deeply unnerved by stillness and adhering to rules and structure. That is probably a sign of someone who’s never really experienced love. When you see someone causing that sort of disturbance, it’s usually because they’ve never felt seen. His fluidity, ease, and elasticity speak to his ability to maneuver and avoid. He’s quite avoidant. He has these bright, shining moments with everyone but never really allows the other person to land it with him.”

That can be read as someone who had a very lonely childhood where his needs where never met, where he was likely raised by staff not family, and the family he had likely had sky high expectations, and expected results he could not reach so he gave up trying.

So here is a man that masks these insecurities under layers of superficial charm, charisma, and arrogance but deep down probably considers himself pretty useless, or a complete failure someone that can offer nothing but shallow beauty to others but has no real value other than that.

Now before we get into the scene that defines Elphaba and Fiyero’s relationship, I’d like to point out an interesting quality he has, that he doesn’t realize he has, that will go on to define his characters actions anytime he’s not shown or eyes are off of him for the rest of his arc- when eyes are on him he plays the part people expect, the second eyes are off him is when he snaps into action and does the right thing without thinking, this will establish what happens during his arc when he’s not on screen later…

So now we’ve arrived at Elphaba and Fiyero in the woods. I really do believe this sequence is the one that changed everything for him. Its subtle, but its monumental for his character.

She read him like a book, called out all his BS, and all that superficial charm and arrogance just falls on its face instantly. Suddenly the real Fiyero is standing there before her, raw, insecure, vulnerable and exposed. To him its ugly, its shameful, its inadequate, something he hides deep and assuming she has to hate it as much as he does and would never want his help like this, he pulls away, but then she catches his hand and tells him she does- that this is the version of Fiyero she WANTS- the real ‘broken’ one, the one that cares, the one that’s flawed and far from perfect but genuine. I believe in that moment he found his life purpose again.

That’s the thing with people suffering from depression, it takes your personality, your interests, your purpose, your self esteem, and leaves you a shell of a person that cannot see a way forward or out of the pit you’ve dug themselves into and most wish that someone would send them a lifeline or give them a sense of purpose to find themselves again and that’s exactly what Elphaba did for Fiyero.

Its also why I always take issue when people say ‘he has no personality outside of Elphaba,’ ‘no hopes or dreams other than being her ride or die’ …. Like yeah, that’s what depression does to someone and he’s only just started to be rebuilt before the one person who changed his life is taken from him again. Now he’s left searching for his lifeline as she’s been made public enemy #1 and he’s stuck trying to get back to her anyway he can.

In that time between the movies where only headcannon and bias exist, its difficult to say how things went down between Glinda and Fiyero, but what you can see of him at the beginning of For Good is that’s he’s completely regressed without Elphaba- he’s doing for Glinda exactly what he did for the students in the library at Shiz- going through the motions and fulfilling expectations she and the people of Oz want and expect out of him while being absolutely miserable while losing the part of himself he gained back with Elphaba.

His arc in the second movie is just sacrifice after sacrifice for the one person he loves and believes in: his morals, his freedom, his safety, his status, his title, his comfort and wealth, his life, his looks, his body, his friends, his home just to be with the person that saved his life in more ways then the obvious one. You see him finally reuniting with her when everything is said and done, and yeah, he’s still insecure and self conscious, but it also seems like a massive weight has been lifted off his shoulders. That he can leave ‘Fiyero the prince’ behind and just be his flawed self again with the one person that always loved and valued that side of him.

(This is mainly going to be about the movie version since I think they did a much better job than the musical making her descent into villainy a believable one.)

Nessarose wants to fit in, to have friends, a normal life, and be accepted and do all things she see’s others doing and wants that life for herself. She doesn’t want to stand out, be a spectacle or be treated any differently, she just wants a normal college experience and that lasts about 10 seconds once her sister arrives. As time passes you see her starting to live her best life at the Ozdust and the friendship montage where she is finally included and accepted for the first time in her life.

However there is a darker undercurrent with her that seems to want these things at all costs even at the expense of her own sister’s ridicule and we see those seeds planted that she’d rather keep her head down than be associated with someone that causes that type of scene.

As an abled bodied person I cannot speak for her reasoning here but I assume she’s under immense pressure to be perceived as normal and one slip up shatters that in her mind

Then there is the fact that her whole life she’s been coddled, and doted upon by her father treating her like the golden child, giving her everything she wants to make up for the fact that her life was most likely tightly controlled and managed by the staff her father employed to the point where she’s never learned healthy self sufficiency or coping skills to endure when things go wrong.

Then things go wrong…

The world has been pulled out from under her. Her father that catered to her, dead. Her sister, a fugitive and public enemy #1. Her friends?scattered, and she’s back at home at the mansion stuck as the now eminent Thropp. She’s alone, not with the friends that helped to ground her where she could learn to deal crisis in a more leveled way by watching others, instead you see her signing cruel laws into place to secure her legitimacy and set her self apart from her sister- that need to fit in and be accepted at all costs rearing its ugly head again and taking precedence over doing what she knows is right. Then there is Boq. The one that did come back and probably the worst one to come back as he’s doing it under false pretenses of guilt and duty not love having made a promise to the Governor at the train station before he passed. She’s miserable and she see’s Boq as a lifeline to get back to happiness, to love again, to dance again to be worry free again and she puts all that on him and expects him to deliver that and when he doesn’t, when he’s different: aloof, distant, clinical, she squeezes him tighter trying to get the version back that she thought loved her. Everytime he tries to pull away she pulls him in tighter. The pot is filled the oven is lit.

The darker side of her personality has set in that wants things at any cost has taken over reasoning and sensing his flight potential she starts doing the only thing her life has taught her- how to control, first Boq, than Munchkinland basically imposing a tightly micromanaged life on others. Her cruelty comes from a place of insecurity from her fear of abandonment. Her sister returns, briefly gives her back the feelings she sought from Boq and once she tries to share them with him only to be told that Glinda’s had his heart from the first moment he saw her. The water is boiling.

Well now we’ve gone full Annie wilkes in Misery…. She making slaves, she’s accidentally shrinking hearts, she’s screaming at her sister to save him only later to blame her when he burst through the door like the can opener version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The pot is empty the scolding has shot through the air like a steam volcano. Or maybe like this…

I’d like to talk about something that’s has been bothering me since the movies came out. Throughout the 20+ years of this fandom existing there has been more or less a kind of unspoken tolerance between sapphic fans that loved the story being centered around two gay/bi women and the neurodivergent and disabled community that found a deep connection to the story as they saw themselves represented in Elphaba, or the supporting characters struggles. Because the story at the end of the day is not just “about the girls stupid” its a story about struggles of being othered and the toll it takes on someone that just can’t be…normal. Neurodivergence, depression, and disabilities both congenital and later acquired are thematically represented in their character arcs.

For many who her story resonates with, Elphaba losing, isn’t a study of how radicalism accomplishes nothing and she should have followed Glinda if she wanted to change things, its a completely relatable outcome to someone that has been there, who has the stakes set up so thoroughly against them just because of who they are and its something they can’t change, so they have to work 10x harder to prove themselves capable, and still lose in the end. For me as a early diagnosed ADHD-inattentive/OCD comorbid I feel for her struggles where you give 100% of yourself to something you believe in only to f*ck it up in planning or execution to where it spirals in the most self sabotaging way.

And before you go “oh girl your projecting onto Elphaba, you ‘outcast rebel weird girl” lets look at some of her qualities and why she’s so relatable to the neurodivergent community: Elphaba’s overly sincere, incredibly empathetic, irritatingly inflexible, and (more-so in the musical) emotionally volatile and can be seen as lacking emotional regulation, she also misses social cues, big ones….

These are qualities that have resonated with fans for decades before the movie was a thing, and since it came out we have lost something tragic in the fandom. The theater gays and the outcast weirdos who have loved this story since they were children were suddenly drowned out by some of the new fans that were either fans of Ariana, pink aesthetics, edgy bully gays here for Yuri and nothing else, or identified with popular influencer vibe Glinda radiates effortlessly, none of which is very compatible with the original community, and any push back resulted in social media dog-piling, reddit downvoting, and often popular backhanded think pieces that try to bury anyone that clashes with their own interpretation.

Like how is that a life for Elphaba when she would just be prisoner forced to hide from a brainwashed population? (if Glinda wants to keep her power)

Leaving Oz with or without Fiyero gives her a chance to carry on her cause from the outside for the Animals that have already left and made the journey across the desert (this is the original Bad lands ending from the workshops) while Glinda carries on from the inside because she believes she’s dead.

The role reversal of Fiyero being one that would traditionally go to a female love interest doesn’t end with him, it applies to Glinda in reverse.

Elphaba deserves to be free from a society that cheers for her murder, and celebrates her death, and start over unburdened, if you care about her as her own character at all.