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gamorahww · 2 days ago

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Analyzing Glinda Upland Through MBTI - Why She Doesn't Go With Elphaba, Why Ableism is Just Part of Her Worldview and Why She’s Upset, Fiyero Started “Thinking” -

Hello, this is a Glinda analysis no one asked for. It doesn’t contain any spoilers for Wicked: Part 2.

Glinda is one of the most interesting characters with one of the most interesting story arcs I have ever seen in any media. I love the deconstructed “good” of her character and all the layers that the music, the actresses playing her, even the choreography, and in the movie, the editing gave her. Which is why I am slightly annoyed that a portion of the fandom refuses to see her as anything but Pink Fairy Princess With a Girl Crush™. This analysis is meant to look at how Glinda functions, and why she clashes with the two other important characters of the story, Elphaba and Fiyero, based on their personality types.

Yes, I am biased. I ship Fiyeraba, and I even wrote a similar essay on why they work so well, also through the MBTI lense. This is one of the reasons why I will not look at Gelphie only, I would like this to be as broad as possible. I don’t mean to attack anyone’s shipping preferences, this is just a character study. If you are here for that, welcome! Grab a snack, this won’t be short.

Disclaimer Regarding MBTI

I know many people think MBTI is bullshit and even a bit limiting, when we talk about real life, and the people inhabiting it, but in the case of well-written, consistent fictional characters (which applies to Glinda, Elphaba and Fiyero) I think MBTI can be used without worrying about negative effects.

I.) Context, If You Are Not Familiar with MBTI

When it comes to MBTI, there are two angles of looking at the types. One you are probably familiar with is the four-letter abbreviation (ENFP, INTJ, ESTJ, etc), but there is a deeper layer, where looking at those cognitive functions that each type uses. There are 16 variations of the four-letter types, but only 8 functions, that vary in order, and preference in each type.

We identify four main cognitive functions in each type. Introverted types (their four-letter type stars with an I) are most comfortable using their introverted functions, and extroverted types (their four letters start with an E) are most comfortable with their extroverted functions. However as a person grows up, goes through life and evolves, they learn to harness their initially weaker functions better, and this gives them a more well-rounded personality, and a more healthier way of living in the world and be their authentic selves.

The order of the functions is also important, so whatever is in first place is their strongest function, and whatever is their last is their weakest.

You may be looking at this thinking “I didn’t ask for this”. And you are right, you didn’t, but bear with me.

So, lets sum it up: Each four-letter type has four main functions, and the extroverts are good at extrovert stuff, while introverts are good at introvert stuff. Got it!

II.) Glinda and her MBTI Type and Cognitive Functions

Glinda is an ESFJ personality type. ESFJs are also known as “caregivers”, because they are deeply social people, and they use their skills of being able to read people to influence the lives of those around them. Usually they thrive on giving to others, and they genuinely don’t want anything in return. ESFJ is the most common personality type among women, with their introverted counterpart (the ISFJ) they are considered the “mother” stereotype. They enjoy hosting parties, making sure everyone around them has a great time. They hate conflict, and in an ideal world for them, everyone would just get along, while upholding their own ideal of the world.

ESFJs have a deep sense of community, but they are also deeply traditionalists. They have a hard time letting go of the idea of “how things should be” according to them. Their ideals however don’t come from personal beliefs, they come from learned and social input that they interacted with throughout their lives. "How it should be" for them, always stems from what they are used to, and they usually struggle with thinking out of that box.

Glinda - ESFJ - Cognitive Functions: Fe-Si-Ne-Ti

(Fe) Extraverted Feeling: Focuses on creating harmony and meeting others’ emotional needs, making decisions based on group values and relationships. Glinda goes with the flow of the groups she inhabits. Whatever environment she is in, she wants to ensure the people around her are in harmony. When people around her have differing emotional needs, then she hits a wall, because she has to decide which one she prioritizes over the other.

(Si) Introverted Sensing: Draws on past experiences and traditions to create stability and provide a reliable sense of order. She relies on what she knows, and what she has experienced before. If she has to chose between what is new and what is familiar and therefore reliable, she will always chose the latter.

(Ne) Extraverted Intuition: Explores possibilities and connections, generating new ideas and perspectives for problem-solving. This function is used by ESFJs to explore creative ideas on how to improve the lives of the people around her. "Popular" is a great example of her trying a bunch of versions out to see how she can improve Elphaba’s life - mainly in ways that Galinda herself finds useful.

(Ti) Introverted Thinking: Analyzes information internally to find logical consistency, supporting nuanced and precise understanding. Glinda has this internal sense of logic, where she sees how in her mind, things hang together. This is an internal system, that is rather rigid, and to change one aspect of it would mean to change everything else around it as well. She uses this to decide what is actually possible, and what’s not - according to her.

III.) Clashing Values and Peronalities

Elphaba and Fiyero are obviously the two main characters Glinda interacts with the most throughout the story, but her relationship with either of them mostly works on a superficial level only, and the main reason for that lies in the cognitive functions each character uses. Let’s take a look below. To see how two characters are similar in their personalities, what we are looking for is the same functions in their function stack.

Fe-Si-Ne-Ti > Glinda

Ni-Te-Fi-Se > Elphaba

Se-Fi-Te-Ni > Fiyero

As you can see, Glinda doesn’t share a single one of the functions of the other two. On the surface this would not be a huge issue. Different people find beauty in their differences all the time, and can greatly benefit from those differences. If this was a story, where personal values are of no significance, if there wasn’t you know, an authoritarian regime on the horizon, they all could be friends, as they are. But that is not the case, and in the context of the story, this situation first makes, but then also breaks both of these two relationships she has. And the main culprit in their personality for that is…

Elphaba and Fiyero's Introverted Feeling clashing with Glinda's Extroverted Feeling and Introverted Sensing.

You see, Introverted Feeling (Fi) is what Fiyero and Elphaba bond over. (Fi) is the part of a person that holds their values and integrity. It’s what they hold dear, it’s their sense of what is right, and how things should be. People with introverted feeling are more driven by what they perceive as just, vs what people around them see as just acceptable and normal. You can read more about my exploration of (Fi) in Elphaba and Fiyero here.

Glinda doesn’t have (Fi). This is very obvious in how she reacts to injustice around her, and how she doesn’t really care about Dr. Dillamond’s fate, even when she saw him getting dragged out of the classroom with her own eyes.

In the deleted scenes, Glinda tells Elphaba that she would have helped, if Elphaba asked her to do that. Glinda is telling the truth. She would have helped, but not because she thought it was the right thing to do, but because Elphaba asked. Her motivations stem from what the outside world wants her to do, and if she loves the person asking her to do the thing, and it doesn't clash with her how others view her or what she thinks others expect from her, then she will do the thing. But had Elphaba put a spell on everyone, except for herself and Glinda, Glinda wouldn’t have done what Fiyero did. She wouldn’t have jumped out of her seat immediately to pick up the cub, on her own accord, and if it was the two girls in that situation, they probably would have stood there for a while, not really knowing what to do.

Neither of them are the taking action type of people, that's Fiyero.

See, Glinda's love for Elphaba can take her as far as helping her save one lion cub when everyone else is asleep, and there are little to no consequences for doing this. She is absolutely right, she would have helped. But this is the limitation of her helpfulness, and essentially, her love for Elphaba as well.

Glinda can’t help who and what she is. “Popular” is not her “I want” song in the musical, but it is a declaration of her values, and how she thinks the world works. I feel many people write "Popular" off as a comic relief moment, but it actually spells out exactly what she is, and what is important for her. She sees social standing as the most important thing in the world, so far that she even would teach Elphaba whom she cares for at that point, how to get a more appropriate status, so she can get by. She truly believes that “networking” with anyone, and maintaining good relationship and a beneficial personal brand is the best way to get what you want. She is not wrong, in many cases, her way of diplomacy are useful, impactful, and may also lead to some level of change.

Glinda is very manipulative, in bigger and smaller ways, but she is usually able to manipulate people in a way that they don't get angry with her for it. (see her directing Boq's attention towards Nessa, something that Glinda thinks kind, but it actually also a self serving act.)

However... Elphaba’s integrity does not let her to compromise in the face of what she percieves as injustice. Her morals don't allow her to network with people, who are so willing to do… well, fascism.

IV.) Satisfying the System

I won’t go into details of how far Glinda goes to be the part of the established system, as that is spoilers territory for part 2, and maybe not everyone is here for that. Nor do we know, how this will play out in the movies. But…

Glinda has no interest in questioning the system and how it works. She understands how it functions, and she uses it to her advantage whenever she can. She uses her social standing and the image she cultivated to get what she wants, and this takes her as far as she can go, like she said in "Popular", without “brains or knowledge”, but she hits a wall with Madame Morrible, and the sorcery class. Magic is so rare in Oz, and Glinda wants to be able to do magic so bad. There is an almost throwaway joke that, when we examine it closer, I think explains why she wants to be a sorceress.

In her conversation with Morrible, Glinda mentions she submited and essay titled “Magic Wands: Need They Have a Point?” which is a pun on the shape of wands (and Glinda eventually not having a wand that has a point at the end of her transformation into Glinda, the Good, but one with a sphere and crystals at the end) but also, if we break it down a bit, she is saying “does magic need to have a point?”. I believe this means she wants to do magic for the sake of it. Not to change the system, or improve it, no. Of course, she also wants to help others with her magic, but, importantly, to help them in a way she sees fit, and to help others meet the standards of the system and the society they live in, so they fit in nicely into Glinda's world.

Not everyone is able to fit in like that however. I would like to briefly touch on the ableism she exhibits by manipulating societal perceptions of Nessa as “tragically beautiful” and giving her a suitor Glinda herself doesn’t want. Glinda exploits the pity she knows people feel for Nessa to manipulate Boq, using the ableist system to her benefit while perpetuating it. She views herself as superior to both Boq and Nessa, which is why she feels justified in orchestrating this situation.

Another example of her ableism is when she criticizes Dr. Dillamond for his inability to pronounce her name. The professor explains that his lack of upper front teeth, a physical difference that impacts his ability to articulate certain sounds in human language, prevents him from doing so. However, Glinda dismisses this explanation, insisting that “every other professor” can manage. She fails to recognize that a skill she considers basic might not be universally achievable, and she unfairly holds him to a standard he cannot meet.

Glinda’s actions perpetuate an ableist system by upholding and exploiting societal biases against those with disabilities or physical differences. By manipulating perceptions of Nessa and disregarding Dr. Dillamond’s explanation, she reinforces the idea that people must conform to arbitrary standards of “normalcy” to be valued. This behavior not only marginalizes individuals with unique challenges but also normalizes the expectation that their worth is contingent upon overcoming or compensating for those differences.

V.) It’s Safer inside the Bubble

To ignore the fact that Glinda comes from great privilege in a story that has this much politics in it would be a silly thing to do, but I will kinda do that anyway. The only level of privilege I would like to touch on is the fact that her and Fiyero come from similar backgrounds, royalty and power. They both had a presumably an easy and sheltered life before meeting Elphaba. Elphaba also comes from wealth, but society and her family made life a lot more difficult for her.

Glinda sees this similarity with her and Fiyero, and feels like she found her match. In the state Fiyero is in, when they initially meet, he seems like the perfect fit for her. But the thing about Fiyero is that he is in a very-very emotionally unhealthy state when they meet. (You can read about his looping in my Fiyero and Elphaba analysis)

Isn’t it interesting, that Glinda sings about popularity not needing “brains or knowledge” and Fiyero claims to dance through life “painless” and “brainless”?

Fiyero lives superficially and carelessly, literally shutting his brain off, and not engaging his inner world. This inner world is where his Introverted Feeling lives, so him not using that keeps him from clashing with Glinda on the points mentioned in III.) above.

But that is not Fiyero’s natural state, and he shouldn’t behave like that. However the fact that they can only connect when one of them is not entirely themselves is something Glinda clocks, when she says he is being “distant” and that he “has been thinking”. After his encounter with Elphaba, Fiyero starts engaging his (Fi) - again, more about that in the other analysis - and Glinda has no idea, what to do with that. He presumably even told him that it had to do with the day Dr. Dillamond was taken, but Glinda cannot connect to this on an emotional level, and she calls him “an old goat”, which is pretty insensitive of her. She can’t really cope with the fact that Elphaba and Fiyero were both affected by this thing that seems almost trivial to her, just another day at school, and she didn’t like Dillamond anyway.

She is very pereptive, and she can see the change in both of them. And change for a traditionalist like Glinda is devastatingly scary.

Little does she know that Fiyero from that point onward is no longer inside the same bubble as she is, and he is a lot less afraid of seeing it all in the rearview mirror, and never to return to it again. Well, if he could help it, that is.

So, taking Fiyero and the lion cub, and school, and all that away, Elphaba and Glinda go to see the Wizard. Once they realized (well, Elphaba does) that the Wizard has no magic, and he is also behind all the things happening to the animals, Glinda's bubble doesn't... pop. She aligns herself with the crowd, preserving the status quo.

She has to chose between what is right, and what feels right for her, and well... she stays behind. And she doesn't do the right thing. This time.

#galinda upland #glinda upland #elphaba thropp #fiyero tigelaar #ariana grande #mbti #esfj #mine #wickededit #wicked meta

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