#Frank Maguire

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1981 – Bobby Sands was elected to Westminster in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-election, while on hunger strike in Long Kesh Prison, as MP for the constituency.

Shortly after the beginning of the strike, Frank Maguire, the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died suddenly of a heart attack, precipitating the April 1981 by-election. The sudden vacancy in a seat with a nationalist majority of about five thousand was a valuable opportunity for Bobby Sands’ supporters to unite the nationalist community behind their campaign. Pressure…

[the-clock-of-the-time-dragon]

I've seen a lot of people lately harping about how "Wicked isn't canon to the Oz universe", "it's just glorified fanfiction", etc., and I can't express how silly that is, and how annoyed it makes me every time I hear it, lol. Baum's original Oz books were never meant to be some canonical series — they contradict each other constantly; Baum called it a "fairy story" with loose cohesion at best; and it only became a series at all because the first one got popular enough that Baum felt a duty to the fandom to keep making more (even after he had wanted to end it). And the 1939 film is every bit as much "fanfiction" as Wicked — it changes the story in both major and minor ways, including a complete shift of framing (i.e., making Oz into a dream rather than a real place).

Maguire's great contribution to the overarching legacy and lore of Oz was to harmonize the very weak "canon" of the older works with a different shift in framing: recontextualizing all of the prior Oz material as a revisionist history (going off of Baum's own idea framing of himself as a "Royal Historian of Oz"), and attempting to tell "the true story" behind the other works (fictively of course — we're never meant to literally think Maguire's version preceded Baum's, irl). In literary studies, this is called an urtext. The Wicked Years and its adaptations are as much "fanfiction" as the 1939 film: it's just self-aware of that fact in a way that earlier works weren't, and uses that perspective to deconstruct the material and explore deeper (and darker) themes — not simply adapting or reimagining the original text (as the 1939 movie did), but actively challenging it; interrogating it. It's not meant to be "canon" as such: it asks you to ask whether (and why) there is such a thing, and what that might say about the stories that we are meant to literally believe in, in real life.

[mask131]

So... Wicked is coming back in style. And as such I need to make a little informative post.

Because since as early as my arrival onto the Internet, in the distant years of the late 2000s, a lot of people have been treating Wicked as some sort of "official" part of the Oz series. As part of the Oz canon or as THE "original" work everything else derives from (literaly, some people, probably kids, but did believe the MGM movie was made BASED on Wicked...) And as an Oz fan, that bothers me.

[Damn, ever since I watched Coco Peru's videos her voice echoes in my brain each time I say this line.]

So here's a few FACTS for you facts lovers.

The Wicked movie that is coming out right now (I was sold this as a series, turns out it is a movie duology?) is a cinematic adaptation of the stage musical Wicked created by Schwartz and Holzman, the Broadway classic and success of the 2000s (it was created in 2003).

Now, the Wicked musical everybody knows is itself an adaptation - and this fact is not as notorios, somehow? The Wicked musical is the adaptation of a novel released in 1995 by Gregory Maguire, called Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. A very loose and condensed adaptation to say the least - as the Wicked musical is basically a lighter and simplified take on a much darker, brooding and mature tale. Basically fans of the novel have accused the musical of being some sort of honeyed, sugary-sweet, highschool-romance-fanfic-AU, while those who enjoyed the musical and went to see the novel are often shocked at discovering their favorite musical is based on what is basically a "dark and edgy - let's shock them all" take on the Oz lore. (Some do like both however, apparently? But I rarely met them.)

A side-fact which will be relevant later, is that this novel was but the first of a full series of novel Oz wrote about a dark-and-adult fantasy reimagining of the land of Oz - there's Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, Out of Oz, and more.

However the real fact I want to point out is that Maguire's novel, from which the musical itself derives, is a "grimmification" (to take back TV Tropes terminology) of the 1939 MGM movie The Wizard of Oz. The movie everybody knows when it comes to Oz, but that everybody forgets is itself the adaptation of a book - the same way people forget the Wicked musical is adapted from a novel. The MGM movie is adapted from L. Frank Baum's famous 1900 classic for children The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - and a quite loose adaptation that reimagines a lot of elements and details.

Now, a lot of people present Maguire's novel as being based/inspired/a revisionist take on Baum's novel... And that's false. Maguire's Wicked novel is clearly dominated by and mainly influenced by the MGM movie, with only a few book elements and details sprinkled on top. Mind you, the sequels Maguire wrote do take more elements, characters and plot points from the various Oz books of Baum... But they stay mostly Maguire's personal fantasy world. Yes, Oz "books" in plural - because that's a fact people tend to not know either... L. Frank Baum didn't just write one book about the Land of Oz. He wrote FOURTEEN of them, an entire series, because it was his most popular sales, and his audience like his editor pressured him to produce more (in fact he got sick of Oz and tried to write other books, but since they failed he was forced to continue Oz novels to survive). Everybody forgot about the Oz series due to the massive success of the starter novel - but it has a lot of very famous sequels, such as The Marvelous Land of Oz or Ozma of Oz (the later was loosely adapted by Disney as the famous 80s nostalgic-cursed movie Return to Oz).

So... To return to my original point. The current Wicked movies are not directly linked in any way to Baum's novel. The Wicked musical was already as "canon" and as "linked" to the MGM movie as 2013's Oz The Great and Powerful by Disney was. As for Maguire's novel, due to its dark, mature, brooding and more complex worldbuilding nature, I can only compare it to the recent attempt at making a "Game of Thrones Oz" through the television series Emerald City.

The Wicked movies coming out are separated from Baum's novel at the fourth degree. Because they are the movie adaptation of a musical adaptation of a novel reinventing a movie adaptation of the original children book.

And I could go even FURTHER if you dare me to and claim the Wicked movies are at the 5TH DEGREE! Because a little-known-fact is that the MGM movie was not a direct adaptation of Baum's novel... But rather took a lot of cues and influence from the massively famous stage-extravaganza of 1902 The Wizard of Oz... A musical adaptation of Baum's novel, created and written by Baum himself, and that was actually more popular than the novel in the pre-World War II America. It was from this enormous Broadway success (my my, how the snake bites its tail - the 1902 Wizard of Oz was the musical Wicked of its time) that, for example, the movie took the idea of the Good Witch of the North killing the sleeping-poppies with snow.

[thatsbelievable]

[snake-eggs]

L. Frank Baum: omg I loveeee fairy tales but some of the content in the Brothers Grimm's original tales is really disturbing :( so good news! I made my own whimsical world where I can have magical creatures and characters that go on amazing adventures and we'll keep it real niceys :) the bad guys get brought to justice and the heroes realize they have had all they ever needed inside of them all along. heart.

Gregory Maguire: and just to, like, riff on that, maybe the bad guy that got brought to justice had an incredibly rich and complex life full of love and loss. Maybe she was universally dreaded as a bad guy because of propaganda perpetuated by a deeply corrupt prevailing system that the heroes are simply upholding. But maybe she also lost her way a little and tried to brutally murder her teacher with a trophy, but maybe she was deserving of life and a second chance. <3 And maybe the lovely little fairy queen you've created has a history intertwined with the witch's. Maybe her smiles are all a facade, and she's being held in a figurative gilded cage by the Wizard. and then, of course, the dubious consent animal orgy--

[yellowfog4]

Reading Wicked for the first time has been so much fun after listening to the og broadway cast recording and the movie soundtrack, and of course watching the new movie. (I've never had the pleasure of seeing it on broadway). I think I've found an exact line or two that inspired part of "What is this feeling"!

The book is FANTASTIC, it's detailed and funny, and the characters are written so well <3

💚💖

[theforswornelite]

Glinda v. Glinda

[cjbolan]

Anyone notice in every version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy meets the Cowardly Lion alone in the forest? It’s implied he lives alone. Lions typically live in prides.

In Wicked…what if he’s alone because he’s hiding from the Wizard just like Elphie? Did the Wizard kill or capture all the other lions in Oz to take away their speech?

I’m surprised the Wizard later let the Cowardly Lion walk away with his voice intact.

[teenagedirtstache]

[kinsey3furry300]

It's actually really sweet to see all the shippers appear after the Wicked film came out, and good to see all their delight at seeing just how Saphic the film is. If you enjoyed it I must however warn you that no-one is mearly gay in the books: every single inhabitant of Oz is a walking pansexual disaster area, and if they ever notice the gender or even species of thier partner its purely bi accident by accident.

Spoilers below:

The Tin woodsman has a fiancee, but she marries a Frankenstien's monster made from all of his discarded human parts, and so he enters a lifelong situationship with the Scarecrow (who Wicked implies was formally Prince Fiyero, and formally in a love triangle with both elphaba and Glinda). The second Oz book from over 100 years ago made Ozma cannonicly trans and the offspring of her dad fucking a fairy goddess, and she is now dating Dorothy despite the fact they are technically different species. Wicked (the book) implied Elphaba is cannonicly intersex, and the sequel books have what might be an AIDs epidemic allegory attacking the talking animals. The Cowardly lion keeps bouncing around with various crushes none of whom are lions and is alwaysone step away from a full nervous breakdown. The Wizard shagged Elphaba's mum and thats why her dad is so grumpy. Moving back to the 1900's books, Glinda builds a harem of hot warrior women to guard her castle. The levels of monster-fucking and disastrous love triangles are off the charts, and then there is suprise turn-of-the-century racism when you least expect it, and by the way Oz is a socialist Utopia when it's not being run by a snake oil salesman carney. Body horror is everywhere and people just roll with it and stay horny. Procreation is via magic so hetero sex serves no purpose beyond pleasure, and the traditional family structure is like 9 weird little beings of different forms and the one human teen they found in the woods and adopted.

The Oz books and the Gregory Maguire spin-offs are a fucking fever dream, and are somehow even more queer than the Wicked film.

I am so here for the spike of interest in this fandom.

[p-c-ba-dcforever]

Closing out October celebrating 80 years of Solomon Grundy!

[ambersadventuresinwonderland]

Got this small 6" 3D printed Wicked movie logo tabletop sign for my wall shelf that I'm putting all my Wicked/Wizard of Oz books and magazines on. 💚🧹🩷🫧

[stuckasmain]

I don’t know if I’ll wait till part two comes out, if I have that much restraint, but Wicked really makes me want to dive deep into the world of oz again. I was deeply obsessed with the 30s movies as a little kid and have the first five books… I also have the first wicked book. I just, really want to dive and explore and emerse in this world but… I don’t know if I’d make anything out of it? That’s the big problem

Do all this research and for what? I don’t really have a fic or art idea lol

[reyturnofbensolo]

I 💚 Elphaba Thropp!

[90ssuperheroes]

My Top 10 Superhero/Comic Book Movies

What are your's?

[luminouslumity]

The Wizard of Oz and Wicked Have Always Been Gay