#I'm fine with exaggeration but be minimally accurate

[envolvenuances]

anticomunism will have some of you making the stupidest memes...

besides opposition to the sex trade being a basic non negoatiable principle for radical/authoritarian leftists. I'm honestly fascinated by the idea we don't have families and lineages so many gringos have seemed to have formed. or that we don't value labour. I know actual radical leftists are hard to find in the global north nowadays to the point you all convinced yourselves social democrats are left but c'mon.

[instantpansies]

oh my word THANK YOU!!! i've been trying to say this since the wicked movie repopularized all of the "wicked is canon" stuff, but you've put it in a way i wasn't able to. YES. certainly wicked is allowed to be a derivative work that recontextualizes Oz. assuming that whatever is in wicked retroactively and automatically changes details about the story (ie, that the scarecrow and the tin woodman knew each other before the events of Wonderful Wizard and/or the MGM film) is simply incorrect.

i'm all for incorporating a body of work that may not be fully compatible into a coherent canon that works as an alternative parallel to the original. i think it's completely fine and understandable that people are hooked on wicked and will want to understand some characters through the lens of wicked. but assuming that wicked's popularity makes it truly canon, or assuming that the history it presents is accurate to Baum's Oz, is ignorant to both the original context of the Baum books and the long history of Oz adaptation.

i'm also a bit of a hater, as i personally believe that understanding Wonderful Wizard characters through a lens of wicked, especially the musical but also the book, is a less interesting way of analyzing the text and symbolism present in that story than either the Baum novel or the MGM film presents as each stands alone.

wicked is, certainly, its own thing. of course it exists in the context of over a hundred years of adaptation before it, but that context is simply not known by most people. it must be able to stand on its own, and i believe it does. but when this retroactive wicked lens is applied to that context and history uncritically, we will run into problems.

i almost want to blame the seemingly recent, but really just more visible shift in fandom to a need for everything to be canon and confirmed? like, it can be difficult to reconcile in our minds that so many different versions of oz are allowed to exist and don't have to be compatible. wicked "confirms" things viewers are left wondering about after the mgm film, so therefore it must be canon, and therefore it's appropriate to correct people on facts they "get wrong" when they contradict wicked canon. that's how the thinking seems to work, at least in my observation. and that way of thinking seeps its way into the secondary or deeper oz fandom, which has led to (in my view) a sort of soft shift from Baum-centric understanding of oz as a whole to a binary star system where Baum and Maguire are seen as co-creators of a more true or real world and story. i'm exaggerating, certainly, but i've seen this shift occur over time. i hesitate to bring this up bc it sounds like i'm whining about the fandom's natural changes and how things aren't the way they used to be, and i guess i am. i digress.

anyways, your original point. yes!!! while oz became baum's most profitable endeavor, and throughout the series you can see him sort of wishing his other books were more profitable so he could expand in different directions, that doesn't mean he didn't care about continuity or cohesion at all. i'd argue he cared more about cohesion and telling a story that made sense and continued to make sense as it was expanded, than he cared about maintaining particular canon details through the whole series. oz changed as baum's tastes, needs, and audience changed, and that is just as important as the changes that would be added by adaptation later on. (hell, many oz fans don't think of the 1902 musical or the silent films as canon, despite them being created by Baum, both because they're less well-known and because they do change things up to better fit their respective media and contexts). this sense of inconsistency, whether overblown or minimized, doesn't mean that wicked is canon compliant with the baum novels. wicked directly contradicts baum's work in some cases--which again, is completely fine. it's a derivative work that takes certain aspects of the original books and the mgm film, synthesizes them in a grimdark expansion on especially the political aspects of the world, and seeks to tell a unique story that allows you to think about Wonderful Wizard and MGM in a different way. but it is not itself an explanation for Baum's supposedly undercooked or unfinished world. it is not itself a part of the original story (i mean this in the context of canonicity of baum's work. oz fans know how complicated oz canon is.) but instead is--as it claims to be--another branch on the complex tree of oz adaptations.

tldr. wicked does not "explain" anyone's actions in Wonderful Wizard or MGM. it seeks to provide an alternative context, or an alternative explanation, certainly. but it does not retroactively "fix" the story. it's perfectly fine to think about the original story or the mgm film in the context of wicked, if you like the alternative history it provides. policing others' adaptations and understandings of the story, or implying or directly stating that wicked should be incorporated into others' headcanons or interpretations or adaptations, or claiming that wicked is canon simply because baum didn't care about canon so everything is canon, is not helpful or productive or good. in fact, that actively makes oz analysis less fun, in my opinion. i hope my point is made here i've been trying to say this for months but as usual i was completely unable to get my thoughts across until acted on by an outside force (seeing this post). so thanks!!

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.

[idealnerds]

Hi! I had a question about something I'm confused on I've heard that the Myers Briggs types don't change at all through our lifetime but I've seen ENFP answer on here that they DO change, and I looked it up and I actually did find a few people that said they somtimes can, but I guess I just wanted some clarification on what you guys think of that because I know the theory still says they don't? Idk, I just never heard that they can until now and I just want to know the argument behind it. Thx!!

Hello, Anon! Of course I can clarify! I expected we might get this question sometime eventually. So first off…

WARNING: This may be a long post. Disclaimer!: Neither of us are MBTI experts by any means, and are just hobbyists. I am currently studying psychology with the intent of becoming a therapist in the future, and a lot of my focus has been on personality theories. I THINK that in the past I may have misspoken on some of our questions and maybe said something like types can change “all the time,” or some junk, but hey, I’m an ENFP, and sometimes I mindlessly exaggerate, so I’ll smack myself on the wrist for that one, and will be better about it in the future. I am one of the people on the side of the argument that types can change, however, I think they change very rarely for people, and I think that more often than not, the maximum times that you might change type in your life is like, twice. Likely after reaching maturity, and then maybe much later after reaching old age. But I believe that most people, once their personalities develop, likely stay the same until, well they stop living. I also do not think that our types can change drastically, but one letter may shift at a time. It’s probably impossible that you would ever move from ENFP to ISTJ in one life period. Now, the Myers Briggs theory does state that the types do not change, but here’s the thing: MBTI Theory is A) never 100% accurate, and B) still just a theory. Myers and Briggs were simply theorists, and developed a theory. They did not discover a fact, and sadly they did not do their research within a large spectrum of people, but smaller groups that they had constant access to. Therefore they could not study a wide range of people with vast possibilities of experiences that might effect their personality. Because personality type is not an exact science, there is never a way of knowing for certain what is possible when it comes to our cognition. 

This being said, time and experience both have huge effects on our cognition whether we like it or not. Just puberty and menopause (and whatever the male equivalent of that is) have the capability of changing our perspectives, and traumatic experiences can do a WHOPPER on the mind. Mental illness can change our physiology, a well as trauma, and over time these things can erode our minds to take different shapes when it comes to reaction and complex thought. These variables can subtly effect our personalities, and over time, might cause them to change a bit, which can effect us in subtle ways until our types shift. For the third part of my argument, I will explain a conversation I had a few years ago with a friend of mine who is a mathematician and studied statistics and percentages a lot during his time in school. It should be noted that this guy hates Myers Briggs and thinks it’s a load of malarkey, but he brought up some good points with me when we spoke. The MBTI is based on a long list of percentages, and a limited list at that. With only 75ish questions, the idea behind perfectly understanding someone’s cognition is very minimal in the huge spectrum of the mind and how it functions. On top of this, because calculations are developed through percentages of these questions, it means that the data given have the ability to fluctuate. If your percentages can change over time, then mathematically, your type has the potential to eventually change as well. All this being said, I will very willingly state that none of this means that I am CORRECT in my opinion regarding personality change. There are many other variables regarding this subject that I am likely not education on, that may prove my thoughts on it wrong. To be totally honest, my INTJ might even disagree with me, and that’s fine. However, when someone comes to our blog and questions if their type may be changing, it feels very wrong of me to say “Nah, your personality type will never change, you’re gonna be the same until death,” because, as a future psychologist, it feels arrogant. I have too much respect for the brain to put it in a box. So this is currently where I stand on it, and I am totally open to having my mind changed, but here are a few last thoughts from yours truly.

I have spoken with a few psychologists who believe that Myers Briggs types are solid and never change, but when I probed a little bit and said “Really, never?” they said the one thing that any experienced psychologist would say and responded with, “When it comes to psychology, never say never.” The mind behind the personality is such an amazing and complex thing with lots of variables that effect it, and I just… man I love it so much.

I hope this mops up some confusion for you, Anon. - The ENFP