#wicked: no good deed / popular

[fadedflora]

i have not listened to hamilton in like a week why is he STILL HERE

read the tags if you want to see me talk about musicals for a little TOO long

[dark-frosted-heart]

Go Ahead and Dote on Me - Clavis card story

Story's in His POV

nsfw at the end

As usual, can’t guarantee 100% accuracy on this

[Just a note: people are calling Emma “usagi-chan”]

Spring finally arrived in Rhodolite after the egg hunting contest.

People happily took in the warm winds, admired the flowers that began to bloom following winter, and—

Sweets store owner: Oh, it’s the little rabbit. Are you out with Prince Clavis today?

Emma: Yes. I thought I’d keep an eye on him in case something bad happened.

As we walked through the market together, people called out to Emma everywhere.

It seemed like this would be a springtime tradition this year.

Sweets store owner: You got a lot on your hands, little rabbit. Come, let me give you some baked treats.

Emma: Thank you! By the way, I’ve been hearing “little rabbit” a lot…

Sweets store owner: Yeah, everyone’s been using it. Emma, weren’t you the rabbit in the egg hunt the other day? I think it’s popular because it’s cute. Look, that shopkeep over there’s calling out to you.

Flower store owner: Just in time, little rabbit. I’m currently making a bouquet modeled after you.

Emma: Wow, it’s shaped like a rabbit!

Flower store owner: Yeah. Recently, Rhodolite’s been experiencing an unprecedented rabbit bloom. I guess it’s all thanks you you, little rabbit. Thanks.

Emma: You’re…welcome…?

(Indeed a good trend)

Any direction you look, all of the new spring products displayed in the shops were rabbit-themed.

As a rabbit lover, I couldn’t have been more proud.

Emma: Clavis…do you have something to do with this?

After looking around the market, Emma turned toward me in suspicion.

Clavis: Haha, I don’t have the power to manipulate market trends. I suppose everyone’s become aware of the charm of rabbits. This is how Rhodolite should be.

Emma: Is that a good thing to be happy about…?

Clavis: Naturally. It makes me feel good to see how much everyone likes you. Why not do what the people want and wear those rabbit ears again?

Emma: I don’t want to. It’s embarrassing.

Clavis: I want to see it again. Rather, I always want to see it.

Emma: I’ll consider it when it’s just us alone…

(That’s Emma)

(At any rate, rabbit lovers will spread across the continent)

Emma: Ah…I remembered that Leon won the egg hunting contest.

Clavis: That’s right. He was so strong he almost got banned.

Emma: …Anyway, that means the all-powerful cup that grants any wish is currently in Leon’s hands, right? What exactly does Leon plan to do with that cup?

Clavis: Nothing at all. Since I have the cup on hand right now.

Emma: Huh

Clavis: He wasn’t interested in the prize at all. In exchange, I promised to buy him a drink the next time we went out.

(From the start, I was the one who invited Leon and asked him to win)

(If by chance the hunt failed, then the all-powerful cup would’ve been the target)

(Considering the risks, it couldn’t simply be given to the public)

(But we don’t have to worry about that anymore now)

To make up for a rigged contest, all participants were given a discount coupon that could be used in the market and commemorative Easter eggs.

Hopefully that’ll be enough for forgiveness.

Emma: That all-powerful cup…is in your hands…

Clavis: Hm? What’s with that face?

Emma: Because you’re definitely going to use it for something bad.

Clavis: Such as?

Emma: …

Emma’s face turned red.

It sounded like “bad things” involved doing some wicked deeds to Emma.

She was too cute to handle and I hugged her by the waist.

Clavis: Can you tell me?

Emma: No, I’m trusting your ability as a gentleman.

Clavis: I see, I see. I’ll make a wish on the all-powerful cup when we return home.

Emma: Oh, that’s right! I have a wish that I want the all-powerful cup to grant!

Clavis: You want me to use it to grant your wish and not my wicked one?

I tried not to laugh as Emma vigorously nodded her head.

Clavis: I have no choice but to do as my lovely fiancee asks. What do you wish for?

Emma: Um, well… …

Clavis: If you don’t have one, then I—

Emma: Rabbit!

Clavis: …Rabbit?

Emma: Yes. I know you’re a self-proclaimed rabbit lover, but I can’t be the only rabbit. Wearing the rabbit ears was embarrassing. So I want to see you as a rabbit!

Emma shouted at the top of her lungs, like she had forgotten we were out in public.

Man in market: King Clavis as a rabbit?!

Woman in market: …A rabbit? Is that okay? No restrictions?

(I see…Now I have to live up to expectations)

Clavis: Alright. After all, it’s my lovely fiancee’s wish. Even with the all-powerful cup, I have to make it happen.

Emma: …I’m sorry. I got caught up in the moment when I said that— 

When Emma tried to backtrack, I kissed Emma on the lips with a smile to stop her from continuing.

Clavis: Look forward to it, Emma.

In order to fulfill my lovely fiancee’s wish, I had to act quickly.

There wasn’t time to wish on the all-powerful cup and preparations had to be made as soon as possible—

Clavis: Now then my lovely fiancee, here comes Mr. Rabbit.

Emma: Are you actually a rabbit though?!

The next morning, I became a bunny boy and slipped into Emma’s room.

Emma, who was already awake and relaxing in bed, dropped her book in shock.

(However…)

(You’re being surprisingly shy)

I even altered the rabbit outfit, adding a tail to match Emma’s.

Originally I wanted to visit at night with the outfit I prepared overnight, but there’s entertainment in not having made it until morning.

Emma: I didn’t think about it when you disappeared after we came back yesterday, but…it suits you better than I thought it would.

Clavis: Right, right? A handsome man will look good in anything.

Emma: You might be better at being a rabbit than I am.

Clavis: I disagree. I could never be as adorable as you.

Emma: You’re pretty adorable now though?

Clavis: Oh?

(Apparently in Emma’s eyes, I’m a cute rabbit)

(That won’t do)

Clavis: I’m a rabbit today. You can hold me, pet me, love me. Anything you want, okay…?

Emma: Really?

Clavis: Yes, I’m a man of my word. What do you want from me? I’m open to any kinks or perversions.

When I got on the bed and crouched like a rabbit, Emma cleared her throat in embarrassment.

Emma: Th-then…

She hesitantly reached out and placed a hand on top of my head.

She patted my hair gently as if handling a rabbit, tickling me.

Emma: Soft and fluffy. Clavis, your hair’s really nice to touch.

Clavis: …

(I wanted to tease you, but I didn’t expect this kind of play)

(It’s fine when I do it, but when on the receiving end, it’s…difficult)

As I quietly accepted her hand, a small chuckle escaped Emma’s lips.

Emma: Are you feeling a little shy?

Clavis: Haha, how could I?

Emma: But you’re not being as talkative as usual.

Clavis: I was just distracted by how nice your hand feels.

Emma: If you say so.

(...)

As she became more accustomed to it, Emma’s hands got bolder.

I’ve never felt so self-conscious.

(I thought I’d be able to take anything Emma did, but…)

(I’m not cut out for this)

Clavis: Emma, you know this rabbit can do dirtier things, right?

Emma: No, please continue being a cute rabbit.

Clavis: Haha, don’t feel like you have to hold back. For instance— 

I push Emma down and boldly hike up the skirt of her nightgown.

When I pushed her legs apart and placed myself between them, Emma started to look flustered.

Emma: What are you doing there?!

Clavis: I’m a rabbit. I’ll go anywhere I want.

I pressed my lips against her thigh under the nightgown and continued up.

Emma: Ah…Don’t…

She tried to stop me with a hand, but faltered when my lips reached her underwear.

Clavis: I’m a cute rabbit, aren’t I? I can be more affectionate if you want?

I shifted her underwear to the side and licked.

The sweet sounds she made were like honey and I almost felt like a spring rabbit in heat.

Emma: Cute rabbits…don’t…Nghaa…

Clavis: Is that so? There’s all sorts of rabbits.

I sucked at her wet spot before appearing out from under her nightgown when her hips bucked up.

When Emma scowled at me in embarrassment with tears in her eyes, I wanted to focus on teasing her more.

(No matter what, you’re cuter than I am)

I removed my vest, undid my tie, and placed the rabbit ears I was wearing on Emma’s head.

Clavis: As expected, it suits you better.

Emma: Really…?

Though she was embarrassed, she didn’t remove the rabbit ears.

She fixed the ears and the sight of her being all shy burned all sense of reason away.

Emma: Nn…Clavis, don’t touch…Aahh

Clavis: Emma…stay as my rabbit for the rest of your life.

(After all, I’m a man that would rather be loved)

[adarkrainbow]

Names in fairytales: Prince Charming

Prince Charming has become the iconic, “canon” name of the stock character of the brave, handsome prince who delivers the princess and marries her at the end of every tale.

But... where does this name comes from? You can’t find it in any of Perrault’s tales, nor in any of the Grimms’, nor in Andersen - in none of the big, famous fairytales of today. Sure, princes are often described as “charming”, as an adjective in those tales, but is it enough to suddenly create a stock name on its own?

No, of course it is not. The name “Prince Charming” has a history, and it comes, as many things in fairy tales, from the French literary fairytales. But not from Perrault, no, Perrault kept his princes unnamed: it comes from madame d’Aulnoy.

You see, madame d’Aulnoy, due to literaly helping create the fairytale genre in French literature, created a trend that would be followed by all after her: unlike Perrault who kept a lot of his characters unnamed, madame d’Aulnoy named almost each and every of her characters. But she didn’t just randomly name them: she named them after significant words. Either they were given actual words and adjectives as name, such as “Duchess Grumpy”, “Princess Shining”, “Princess Graceful”, “Prince Angry”, “King Cute”, “Prince Small-Sun”, etc etc... Either they were given names with a hidden meaning in them (such as “Carabosse”, the name of a wicked fairy which is actually a pun on Greek words, or “Galifron”, the name of a giant which also contains puns of old French verbs). So she started this all habit of having fairytale characters named after specific qualities, flaws or traits - and among her characters you find, in the fairytale “L’oiseau bleu”, “The blue bird”, “King Charming” (Roi Charmant). Not prince, here king, though he still acts as a typical prince charming would act - and “Charming” is indeed his name. 

And this character of “King Charming” actually went on to create the name we know today as “Prince Charming”. It should be noted that, while a lot of d’Aulnoy’s fairytales ended up forgotten by popular culture, some of her stories stayed MASSIVELY famous throughout the centuries and reached almost ever-lasting fame in countries other than France: The doe in the woods, The white cat, Cunning Cinders... and the Blue Bird, which stays probably the most famous fairytale of madame d’Aulnoy ever. It even was included in Andrew Lang’s Green Fairy Book.

And speaking of Andrew Lang, he is actually the next step in the history of “Prince Charming”. He translated another fairytale of madame d’Aulnoy prior to Blue Bird. In Lang’s “Blue Fairy Book”, you will find a tale called “The story of pretty Goldilocks”. This is a VERY bad title-translation of madame d’Aulnoy “La Belle aux Cheveux d’Or”, “The Beauty with Golden Hair”. And in it the main hero - who isn’t a prince, merely the faithful servant to a king - is named “Avenant”, which is a now old-fashioned word meaning “a pleasing, gracious, lovely person - someone who charms with their good looks and their grace”. When Andrew Lang translated the name in English, he decided to use “Charming”. At the end of the tale, the hero ends up marrying the Beauty with Golden Hair, who is a queen, so he also becomes “King Charming” - but the fact Avenant is a courtly hero who does several great deeds and monster-slaying for the Beauty with Golden Hair, a single beautiful queen, all for wedding reasons, ended up having him be assimilated with a “prince” in people’s mind.

And all in all, this “doubling” of a fairytale tale hero named “Charming” in Andrew Lang’s fairytales led to the colloquial term “Prince Charming” slowly appearing...

Though what is quite funny is the difference between the English language and the French one. Because in the English language, “Prince Charming” is bound to be a proper, first name - due to the position of the words. It isn’t “a charming prince”, but “prince Charming” - and again, it is an heritage of madame d’Aulnoy’s habit of naming her characters after adjectives. But in French, “Prince Charming” and “a charming prince” are basically one and the same, since adjectives are placed after the names, and not the reverse. So sometimes we write “Prince Charmant” as a name, but other times we just write “prince charmant”, as “charming prince” - and this allows for a wordplay on the double meaning of the stock name. 

[bestmusicalworldcup]

I didn't make any poll for the 20th so I'm posting this now!

[macabresymphonies]

With the news of cancellation of Good Omens S3 into a 90 minute finale I sort of find myslef reminicing about where does the border between seperating art from the artist lie.

As a preface I'm gonna say I don't have any particular attachment to Gaiman's body of work as a whole. Western comics were never really popular where I'm from outside of extremely niche circles that graduated into standard niche circles only recently, with Gaiman's visual and literary works included. So this opinion does not stem from any particular nostalgic place. As far as I'm aware the situation is currently still under investigation, but there is concrete proof that Gaimain is, by the traditional definition, no longer considered a "good person" or at least not aligning with his previous public persona. I'm not really an authority to speak on the topics involved in the scandal and I'm really here just to ramble on my own personal blog about art and artist relationship, I'll leave the rest to people who know what they are talking about. Good? Good.

I know it's easy for to denounce, degrade or disprove work made by people we find out were some sort of morally corrupt or did awful stuff in their life. This usually stems from the fact it's hard to believe someboy who's in empathetic and introspective enough to write about topics that resonate with many people so well would still choose to hurt vulnerable people around them or to generally engage in activities that mean to do harm to others.

If we take JK Rowling for example, as heartbreaking as it must have been for most fans of her works to find out about her hate campaigns and such, if we look objectively at the body of work in question it was already brought many times it was a bit problematic. Class issues, race issues, character development and morality weren't really well handeled topics in her books and the whole pedestal was really based more on the whimsy of it or mythos that people enjoyed getting immersed into. Even that was put into question with many plagarism allegations, as such, while flabbergasting from a fan's perspective, from outsider's perspective it wasn't really that thought provoking. "Bad person's books turn out to be pretty bad after all" type of situation that's pretty common among people, especially with writing that's generally consider to be "cool", but ultimetly hollow when it comes to emotional stakes.

Another thing is actors that did bad or immoral things. Generally unless an actor doubles as a writer for stuff they star in, it's not hard to imagine that they are actually wicked people behind the curtain. It was a "funny movie trivia" for years that some actors who played the sweetest most innocent characters on screen were awful when the cameras stopped rolling so it's not that hard to detach yourself from their work. Especially when you consider that it's technically not their work to begin with, just because Bratt Pitt plays an important character in Fight Club, does not mean the whole movie should be shunned, because that's just punishing other actors, director, screenwriters even the OG book's author for sins of one person who's personal life was irrelevant to the work in question.

Gaiman is a special case to me, because despite his actions, his work has been universally regarded as very emotional, empathetic and generally very introspective. I was not an avid fan but I did see merit in his work and ideas he helped create. To write stuff like that you need to be in some way selfaware of your own morality and emotions while also being an empathetic enough to be able to imagine how your characters feel. He touched upon a lot of topics, including stuff he's accused of, while also getting praised on how he handled them.

We want to seperate art from the artist and claim it's impossible only when that art relates directly to the artist's immoral deeds (like in Jeepers Creepers), but to me it's just that we don't want to consider the fact that somebody can be so introspective and emapthetic and STILL use their position to hurt people. To write about the emotional damage caused by cruelty and malice of others and then do the same is incomprensible to us and it either speaks really badly about the person or about our understanding of what it means for somebody to be a "bad person".

[spacepajamas956]

Random Musical Songs I Associate With Mob Psycho 100

These are kinda random and weird, but idc LOL I am an insane beast who cannot be tamed and I must combine my favorite things.

(THIS IS A LONG POST I APOLOGIZE.)

When He Sees Me from Waitress - Serizawa. I have a specific scenario in my head for this one, but I already made a post about it, so I'll spare you the details LOL. But I feel like it's a very him song, yk? HEAVILY implied SeriRei.

Slipping Through My Fingers from Mamma Mia! - Reigen and Mob. I don't think I need to explain this one.

No Good Deed from Wicked - Mob. IDK it just... feels right, y'know?

Say My Name from Beetlejuice - Ritsu and Dimple. BJ is just SO Dimple and Ritsu feels very Lydia. It's very Big Cleanup Arc when Dimple is trying to convince Ritsu to side with him.

Without Love from Hairspray - Teru, Mob, Sho, and Ritsu. I again already made a post about this one, but I still think it's very fitting for some reason idk.

Watch What Happens from Newsies - Mezato. COME ON. REPORTER SONG.

A Guy That I'd Kinda Be Into from Be More Chill - Mob and Teru or Tsubomi and Mob. I can't decide on this one. Obviously, if it was the latter, Tsubomi would be Christine and Mob would be Jeremy. But if it was TERU and Mob, Mob would be Christine and Teru would be Jeremy. Also either way, Dimple is totally the Squip.

Monster from Frozen - Mob. It's a very him song in the final arc I feel.

What The World Needs from Ride The Cyclone - Pre!Mob Teru. It's just so him.

Money, Money, Money from Mamma Mia! - Reigen. Mob, Serizawa, Tome, and Dimple are the ensemble.

Popular from Wicked - Teru and Mob. SHOPPING DATE.

Breathe from In The Heights - Ritsu. GOLDEN CHILD.

Pulled from The Addams Family - RitsuSho. Ritsu is Wednesday ofc. IDK just felt like it fit.

Only Us and If I Could Tell Her from Dear Evan Hansen - TeruMob. Mob is Zoe and Teru is Evan. Take the songs out of their original context, and they're just cute love songs.

Rotting from Rockabye - Mob. Final arc specifically. (ALSO GO WATCH ROCKABYE ON YT ITS FANTASTIC.)

Hopelessly Devoted To You from Grease - Teru. He's singing about Mob, ofc. This works even better if it's the Glee Version.

Therapy from Tick, Tick... BOOM! - SeriRei. MARRIED COUPLE.

For Good From Wicked - TeruMob. If I remember correctly, Mob was Elphaba and Teru was Glinda. They're so cute.

Voices In My Head from Be More Chill - Mob. It just... works. IDK.

THANKS FOR READING THIS FAR LOL ITS A LOT. I really love musicals and MP100 so I had to smash them together.

[talonabraxas]

Divine Union of Lord Vishnu and Goddess Lakshmi

It is said that we reach where our thoughts lead us to. So, if we are surrounded by positive thoughts we will attract positivity and if our thoughts are related to divine energy then positive aura is the ultimate destination.

Let us revive our mind and nurture it with sacred things about god and goddesses who are the real foundation of this universe.

Hindu religion is the richest one loaded with a huge number of gods and goddesses. Among many, the tales of Lord Vishnu and Maa Lakshmi are very popular among Hindu devotees throughout the world.

Lord Vishnu along with her consort Maa Lakshmi is regularly worshipped by people for their eternal blessings in the form of good health, wealth, success, prosperity and harmony in the family.

About Lord Vishnu and Maa Lakshmi

According to the various Hindu texts, puranas, and epics Lord Vishnu is the part of trinity gods who play the role of preserver. The other two gods are Lord Brahma (the creator) and Lord Shiva (the destroyer). Lord Vishnu is the sacred Hindu god also known as Narayana who used to appear on earth to maintain a balance between the good and the evil and to protect humans and other beings from the wicked demons. Lord Vishnu has appeared nine times on earth in the form of different incarnations during the times when bad deeds increased.

Maa Lakshmi also known as ‘Shri’, the Hindu goddess of wealth, health and good fortune who is the wife of Lord Vishnu. It is believed that she also appeared in different forms on earth along with Lord Vishnu as Radha or Rukmini, Sita, Padma and more.

Both Lord Vishnu and Maa Lakshmi possess powers which are capable of transforming the lives of people. When they both are worshipped together miracles happen and the desires of people are fulfilled. They bless their devotees with abundance of health, wealth and prosperity.

Marriage of Vishnu and Lakshmi

The union or the tying of knots between the Lord Vishnu and Maa Lakshmi is an auspicious moment altogether. Lets dive into the esoteric journey of sacred marriage and bring out some best of the gems.

The story goes back to the time when Indra (the King of all Devtas) was traveling on his vehicle Airavata, the elephant. He met sage Durvasa on his way who gave him a magical garland. Indra in his arrogance did not greet the sage properly due to which sage Durvasa cursed him. As a result of which Indra and all the other devtas lost their power, wealth and possessions.

After this, devtas were attacked by Asuras the demons. In the battle they lost Indralok and other powers.

Indra along with other gods went to Brahma who advised them to visit Lord Vishnu in Vaikuntha.

Indra pleaded in front of Lord Vishnu and asked for help. Lord Vishnu advised them to go for churning of the ocean of milk that is 'Samudra Manthan'.

Lord Vishnu told the gods to take help of Mount Mandara for churning and snake god Vasuki as a rope.

Lord Vishnu himself appeared as an incarnation of Kurma avatar in tortoise form. As Kurma avatar, Lord Vishnu went into the ocean below the Mount Mandara and held it on his back providing a firm base.

This was the time when Lord Vishnu and Maa Lakshmi parted.

On the advice of Lord Vishnu, Devtas went to hold the tail of Vasuki and the Asuras were towards the head which was throwing out a deadly poison.

As the churning began, many precious gems and other things came out. Goddess Lakshmi also appeared in a beautiful form all dressed up in red saree and loaded with gold jewelry. All the Devtas and Asuras were awestruck by the beauty of goddess Lakshmi. They eagerly waited for Lakshmi to choose them when Lord Brahma interfered and organized the 'Swayamwar' for the marriage of Lakshmi. This was done to protect the rights and respect of women as in Swayamwar, goddess Lakshmi had the right to choose her husband.

Devtas and Asuras were admiring goddess Lakshmi and wanted her to choose them. Just then Lord Vishnu also appeared and posed as one of the grooms. The moment goddess Lakshmi saw Lord Vishnu, she ran with a garland towards him and chose him as her husband.

This was the moment when goddess Lakshmi tied knots with Lord Vishnu and became his eternal consort. Lord Vishnu and Goddess Lakshmi Talon Abraxas

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

No One Mourns The Wicked • Dear Old Shiz • The Wizard And I • What Is This Feeling? • Something Bad • Dancing Through Life • Popular • I'm Not That Girl • One Short Day • A Sentimental Man • Defying Gravity • Thank Goodness • Wonderful • I'm Not That Girl (Reprise) • As Long As You're Mine • No Good Deed • March Of The Witch Hunters • For Good • Finale

Spotify ♪ YouTube

[elphabaoftheopera]

i just think we need to talk about it

WICKED 4 KIDS

reblog to spread the misery

[graciehart]

i know you've ranked the wicked album before, so you can go off that or just like whack up the full ranking again. Curious where you place wicked witch of the east? (if they weren't COWARDS and gave us a recording of it)

sorry for being the WORST and taking forever ifjda;fj okay let's just expose my rankings again 🫣 REMINDER that this was partially just based on how often I listen to the songs and NOT how "good" they are objectively

For Good

As Long as You’re Mine

Thank Goodness

Defying Gravity

The Wizard and I

Wicked Witch of the East

I’m Not That Girl

What is this Feeling?

Popular

Finale

Dancing Through Life

No Good Deed

No One Mourns the Wicked

One Short Day

Wonderful

I’m Not That Girl (Reprise)

Something Bad

Dear Old Shiz

A Sentimental Man

March of the Witch Hunters

[that-ari-blogger]

Get Ready (No Good Deed)

Joseph Campbell is famous for writing The Hero With A Thousand Faces, in which he put forward the concept of the Hero’s Journey, or Monomyth. This, boiled down, is a series of plot beats that most stories ever written hit in some way or another, at least to Campbell.

Campbell is one of my favourite literary scholars to disagree with, but one thing that I believe he got right was the idea that he called “The Belly Of The Whale”. This has gone on to become the darkest hour trope, a moment when everything seems lost before the protagonist picks themself up.

In Wicked, the story of Elphaba picking herself up is told by the song No Good Deed, which dwells on the emotional low, but also the resolution she makes as a result. This song changes the trajectory of the entire musical, and is a masterclass in writing a threat.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD (Wicked, Avatar: The Last Airbender)

“Eleka nahmen nahmen ah tum ah tum eleka nahmen.”

The song opens with gibberish, it’s inspired by Greek, Latin, Italian, and other languages. But it is bastardised to sound more mystical. Like a language that could be true but isn’t.

It’s also weird when it comes to the phonetics. Each of the words (I’m counting “ah tum” as one word for this) takes up the same time to say aloud, but the “ah” is naturally drawn out because more stress is being put onto it. It forms a rhythm similar to a horse’s galloping, implying motion.

Keep an eye on that, this song is all about motion.

That actually translates into the plot of the wider musical. This song is changing the tone of the story as a whole, pushing it into a tale of revolution.

The conflict of this story is brought on by the “death” of Fiyero and Elphaba’s love. Achieving change and achieving personal happiness are not compatible in this story, at least not for Elphaba.

But incompatibility is an important theme here. Elphaba has been trying to achieve things in her way. She tried to enact change through the Wizard, and when he turned out to be a schmuck, she tried to help people, stir up change and hope that good deeds get rewarded by fate.

I have mentioned in the past that Glinda and Elphaba’s relationship was characterised by the former being the more world wise and Elphaba being naive. That’s what Popular is about. However, this is a change of status quo, paired with Glinda’s rendition of I’m Not That Girl, showing the reversal of that dynamic. Now Elphaba is truly cynical, and her eyes are opened to how the world works, and Glinda has been fooling herself the entire time.

In the opening of this blog, I referenced Campbell’s “The Belly Of The Whale” concept. The name of that is actually a reference to a biblical tale, in which a prophet uses the inside of a fish as free transport and therapy.

I want to draw that biblical reference back in here. Do you notice anything about how Elphaba’s wishes are phrased?

“Let his flesh not be torn Let his blood leave no stain Though they beat him Let him feel no pain Let his bones never break And however they try To destroy him Let him never die Let him never die”

Do those remind anyone else of the opening of Genesis?

“And G-d said, let there be light. And there was light.” Genesis 1:3

There is a very specific wording here that evokes that biblical concept of divinity. In the Bible, the only people and entities that speak in this way are either G-d, people talking about G-d, or people praying. No Good Deed is explicitly drawing on that speech pattern to imply the divine symbolism with Elphaba.

This isn’t the first time the musical has done this. I keep referencing older posts that I have made in this series on Wicked, but that’s because the musical does set up and payoff really well, and I have to talk about callbacks. But, my first post in this series was titled The Gospel of Elphaba, and I did that for a reason.

One of Wicked’s most interesting story techniques is its biblical allusion. Elphaba is explicitly framed as divine in this song, but also by how she is referred to in a few other places. This has the effect of implying a change in history. Elphaba’s life will change Oz for good, and this is the story of how that happened.

Now, I am not a Christian, I am coming at this from the angle of study and having lived in a very Christian environment for most of my life. So, while I am trying to treat this with the respect befitting any faith, I want to stress that I am far from a perfect, definite source on anything related to Christianity.

I've brought up this artwork by @abd-illustrates (youtube) before, when I was talking about Defying Gravity. But the piece is about No Good Deed, and its so amazingly well done, coming from a place of obvious love for the song and the musical, that there was no chance that I would miss a chance to show it again.

On a different note, the things that Elphaba wishes for in this song are vague as all hell, and the implication of Fiyero being turned into the scarecrow because the lawyers found a loophole in his resurrection contract is neat.

That implication is really important for the theming of the story, and it happened earlier on in the musical when Boq became the tin man. The magic expresses the theme of consequences rather concisely. Nobody knows what effect they will have on the world and on history, you can just try to make the world a better place, no matter what people think of you.

In other words:

“Was I really seeking good Or just seeking attention?”

Intentions don’t matter, actions do. The second verse of this song dwells on this question, asking if Elphaba’s morals were what she thought they were and what that means for her.

The conclusion drawn is that it doesn’t matter. Elphaba, despite breaking free physically from her society’s constraints, is still following them emotionally. She still believes in the ideas of good and evil that she has been presented with, and now she resolves to take a different approach. If wicked is what they call her, wicked she shall be.

The music of the song itself feels like a fight. It feels like it has the eb and flow of a boxing match, with Elphaba’s vocals falling to match her being struck, and rising for her blows.

For example, here the higher note on “charity” combines with an accent to feel like an attack, with the slope matching the follow up and ease of tension.

Although, if you are perceptive, you will notice that this is a solo, and that Elphaba isn’t actually fighting anyone, so what gives?

I have two readings for this. In the first, Elphaba is declaring war on Oz, essentially, so the fight is the warmup to that. This is posturing, it's a threat. It’s Elphaba’s Bitter Work moment.

For context, Bitter Work is one of the best episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and, fun fact, my introduction to the series (I was very young, I thought the movie was cool, I got three seconds into the series and realised how wrong I was). In the episode in question, Zuko is wrestling with his identity in relation to the world, and to his father. He doesn’t know who to be, or how to proceed.

The episode then follows Zuko as he tries and fails to learn a new type of bending (magic in everything but name), culminating with him standing on a cliff, screaming for lightning to strike him because he thinks he can finally throw it back. Its self-destructive, and it's a character on the very edge, lashing out at everyone, including himself, in a desperate attempt for control.

Does that sound familiar? That’s exactly where Elphaba is when she sings No Good Deed, on the edge, looking for control.

The second reading is that Elphaba is arguing with herself about what to do. Part of her wants to run and hide, but the part that is singing is trying to convince her to stay. That she needs to change.

Wicked is a story about dreams and reality colliding, and this is Elphaba’s speech to the troops on the side of hope. Unfortunately for her, the entire army consists of one person, herself.

The idea of Elphaba’s internal struggle is reflected in the inconsistency of the music. Wicked likes to mess around with key signatures and time signatures, with Thank Goodness taking the concept to its breaking point. But No Good Deed has, by my count, four different key signatures, and three different time signatures.

The first chorus follows the Wicked formula of being understated. It’s rhythmical, and balanced in 4/4 time to give it a self contained vibe.

This conveys a feeling of speeding up and slowing down, as she rushes into decisions, then hesitates. Wicked has done this in previous songs already, and I have discussed them, but its a neat thing to see repeated here.

Elphaba seemingly makes her decision, however, belting out the song’s name. But then she falters, and the key changes to b majour. To me, this evokes a feeling of happiness, which doesn’t really square with the lyrics.

Except, I would argue that it does. Nessa and Doctor Dillamond are the two people she was closest to, and they are gone now. They were to hallmarks of her old life, and this feels like her reminiscing about a better time. The other name that comes up here is Fiyero, but that quickly shifts.

Jessica Vosk plays this scene like Elphaba is seeing ghosts, speaking the names as if she is seeking advice from the departed. It's a really cool acting choice.

Grief is a powerful motivator, and Fiyero was the last person that Elphaba had left over from her previous life. Even Glinda has left her, and now that grief bubbles over into a war cry.

In the version of Wicked that I saw most recently, Elphaba was played by Sheridan Adams, who put a little bit of flair into that final call, rising slightly, then flowing down to keep the momentum into the chorus. I don't know what this is called, so if any music scholars who understand my extremely limited and vague explanations here, please help me out.

“Let all Oz be agreed, I’m wicked through and through. Since I cannot succeed. Fiyero, saving you. I promise no good deed Will I attempt to do again. Ever again. No good deed Will I do Again!”

The final chorus of this song is a revelation. It gains momentum by alternating between 4/4 and 3/4 to gain that rocking rhythm like a ship in a storm. But I want to go a bit weird here and talk about the rhyming scheme.

There are two main rhyming sets here, “deed” and “do”, and they alternate in an ABAB pattern and are reminiscent of classical poetry.

Agreed, through, succeed, you, deed, do. Again, Again. Deed, do, again.

Annapantsu's cover of this song is phenomenal and manages to capture the magnitude of both the story and the musical really well. I highly recommend you check it out.

Classics were often about big emotions. Romanticism springs to mind, for example, although that was a movement defined by a desire for freedom of expression, which plays into the themes of Wicked exactly. How convenient.

However, the scheme is broken up by the repeated word “again”, which juxtaposes the idea of classicism with change. The force with which Elphaba interrupts her own rhythm makes the line seem as though it is a threat. Elphaba’s desire for freedom is coming for Oz, whether anyone likes it or not.

Elphaba has snapped, and things will never be the same in oz again. Never again.

Final Thoughts

This song is iconic, and that is well deserved. We are ramping up to the finale of the musical, and the story is gathering speed.

As a side note, I genuinely love how Wicked subverts the prequel pitfall of explaining everything, not by avoiding doing that, but by making that its whole thing. Boq’s transformation into the Tin Man works with the story as told in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz because it comes close to what the Tin Man explains, but frames him as an unreliable narrator.

Similarly, Fiyero’s lack of anything going on behind his eyes is superficial, and when he becomes the Scarecrow, that superficiality carries over. Like Boq, he is reframed as an unreliable narrator, but not through selfishness, and instead through a secret desire to help the Wicked Witch out. Also, the fact that he is the captain of the guard kinda explains why he rocks up to the final battle of the The Wizard Of Oz movie with a gun.

Next week, I am looking at For Good, and trying to justify why I cannot make it through listening to it without crying. Seriously, I am always a wreck at the end of the Wicked soundtrack, and I blame this song.

So stick around if that interests you.

Previous - Next

[frodo-with-glasses]

Ah, now here’s one I’ve been looking forward to discussing. Lord of the Rings has a strange relationship with hope. Before I began this read-through, I would have told you that hope is at the core of LotR: hope that the war will end, hope that light will triumph over darkness, hope that “there’s some good in this world, Mister Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for”. I would have told you that it’s an innately cheerful, optimistic story, though it gets dark at times.

But over this past year, as I’ve reread this book with the eyes of an adult, I’ve begun to realize it’s more complicated than that.

Lord of the Rings is not a story about hope. It’s a story about what you do without hope. It’s a story about when your spirit is utterly defeated, and your prospects are grim, and both the best and the worst possible outcomes look shockingly alike, and yet you keep walking anyway. It’s not a story of blind, naive optimism, of sitting back and dreaming about a better about-to-be. It’s a story of weighing the facts with a clear mind, of realizing that there’s no way in hell this works out well for you, and of doggedly moving your grain of sand to tip those massive scales anyway, because the only other option would be to sit back and let the world burn.

I feel like that rings truer to the human condition, really. After all, what good is it in the end to be kind and generous and courageous; what good is it to waste our short lives trying to make this awful world a better place? For every one human being trying to be a good person, there are hundreds more who are selfish, cruel, exploitative, greedy, twisted, and wicked. For every good deed done on this planet, there are hundreds more murders and abuses and horrors. One day, you will die, and at some point, everyone who knew you will be dead. There will come a day when you will be utterly forgotten. No one will remember you. No one will remember what you did. No one will remember if you made a difference, if you tried to make the world a better place. And let’s be honest; you won’t. No matter what light you managed to throw into the world while you were alive, this awful cosmos will generate enough pain and misery to overshadow it, eventually. When you’re gone, the world will be just as bad as it always was. Always has been. Always will be.

What good is it to go on loving someone when the diagnosis is terminal—when the medicine doesn’t work—when the sickness in their head has locked the person you love behind an unbreakable concrete wall? What good is it to stand for what you believe in when it’s not popular anymore—when friends and family turn their backs and reject you—when those who gave you praise and encouragement now insult you and curse you and spit on your face? What good is it to love when your heart is broken, be kind when your skin is mottled with bruises, be brave when your back is bent and your arms are weary under the weight of it all? What good is it to cast your little candle light when all the wind in the world tries to blow it out? Why be good? Why be selfless? Why sacrifice so much, when you lose so much more than you gain?

In that moment, there’s only one answer. And it’s not hope. It’s not optimism. It’s some strange defiance, some visceral fire that roars in the chest and aches in the bones.

“I will be light,” it cries. “I will defy you,” it howls. “I will push back with the last of my strength, though you crush me down,” it screams. “Because if I am not light, I am darkness, and I cannot, I will not, I refuse; let me die with my knees unbowed and my head held high; I WILL NEVER SURRENDER”

There are many instances in the book that speak to this point—Aragorn himself says something along the lines of “we must do without hope for the moment”—but to me, nothing better encapsulates this strange spirit of hopeless defiance than this moment with Sam Gamgee.

“Sam said nothing. The look on Frodo’s face was enough for him; he knew that words of his were useless. And after all he never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed. Now they were come to the bitter end. But he had stuck to his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he would still stick to him. His master would not go to Mordor alone. Sam would go with him.”

Sam would go with him. Not “we will win”. Not “I believe in us”. Just “he will go, and I will go with him, whether this ends in (improbable) victory or (more probable) a horrible, horrible death”. It’s not that Sam’s hope began to fail here; it’s that he never had much hope to begin with, but he went with it anyway, and it’s only his cheerful disposition in the face of near certain disaster that ever began to flag. Holy cow.

Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but when the first two fail, love is the unkillable cockroach of all the virtues and will survive the nuclear winter of utter despair and grow wings and fly buzzing right up into your face just to spite you.

Now, of course Lord of the Rings does not simply leave us with the tragedy of a futile fight against the darkness. This story has a happy ending. And I’m glad it does, because sometimes, there are happy endings. Sometimes sicknesses are cured, families are restored, and old scars are healed and begin to fade. Sometimes loved ones emerge from the prison of their own minds and return to you—wiser, more melancholy, but still themselves—and you discover that the bond is deeper, the smiles sweeter, the laughter richer, and the love galvanized into something stronger than it ever would have been. Sometimes there are happy endings, and it’s not wrong to want them. It’s not wrong to have hope.

But Lord of the Rings lets us linger in that moment of hopeless defiance, because it offers an odd sort of comfort of a totally different kind.

“Lost all hope, did you?” it whispers. “It’s all right. So did Frodo, and Aragorn, and Gandalf, and Sam. But you see, they kept fighting anyway, with hope or without it, and that’s what made them heroes. Oh, you might still have your happy ending, someday, and it might come in ways you don’t expect. It is also equally likely that nothing will get better, and it will actually get much worse, and you shall die. But do keep fighting. Do keep walking. One foot in front of the other. If you do nothing, the worst will definitely come to pass; but if you fight, it just might not. So if we shall win, let’s not be embarrassed by our cowardice when that happy ending comes; and if we shall lose, let’s not go down without a fight.”

Perhaps, paradoxically, that’s what makes Lord of the Rings the most hopeful story of all. Because this is the story that whispers, “Remember, when all hope is gone…

“It isn’t.”

WORD ASK GAME!

[etruatcaelum]

On Ozlem.

This will be less a singular headcanon than a collection; my reading of the relationship is particular and on several key points, well off the beaten track from popular fanon. I thought it would be helpful to put it all in one place for ease of reference.

Salem’s Childhood.

Salem was the second-born child of a minor lord, born into the eighth generation of mankind since the creation of the world Arziant, in a kingdom called Pastoria. Her mother Salome had been the king’s only child, but not heir to the realm; Pastorian law and custom forbade women to leave their divine appointment within the home. In practice, a woman belonged to her father until she was given to her husband.

In that time, monolatrous worship of the God of Light was nigh-ubiquitous, and tradition held that no one who lived a virtuous life would die before their hundredth year, unless slain in battle or by some violent calamity brought about by the Darkness. To fall ill was proof in itself that one had committed some offense in the eyes of God. This was not mere superstition, for although natural sickness did exist, the God of Light gave healing to those he judged pure and inflicted disease as a punishment for sin.

Death in childbirth, although not (as Salem believes, even now) wholly unknown, was quite rare and supposed to be a punishment reserved only for the truly wicked. Both of Salem’s parents were well-known for their piety, and her father Lord Ithai was scrupulously devout; for his wife to sicken and die in the course of bearing their second child was shocking, not only to Ithai himself but to all of Pastoria. While he would have held the tragedy against her in any circumstance, his personal inclination to do so fed eagerly upon advice from religious advisors who, to preserve Salome’s good name in the eyes of the people, blamed her infant child. There had been, after all, prophecies foretelling the virtue and great deeds of heroes in the past; why not portents of a dire evil?

(In truth, Salome had made an error in a ritual entreating the God of Light to grant his blessings to her unborn child, and he intended to make an example of her carelessness.)

The modern fairytale The Girl in the Tower portrays the girl’s father as a paranoid, possessive tyrant who loves the girl as a miser loves his treasures, who becomes angry and violent when she asks to be set free; this characterization, though not an inaccurate portrait of Lord Ithai himself, elides the misogynistic norms and popular religious justification for Salem’s imprisonment. Simply put, she had no hope of rescue because most of Pastoria truly believed that she was an ill-omened child who needed to be locked away for the good of all.

Salem did not grow up in complete isolation, though she was alone far more often than not: she was raised by an ever-changing parade of servants, priests, and tutors. Her father visited her on occasion; her elder brother Kalev snuck in to see her with greater frequency.

The first twenty-one years of her life, she spent in locked in a single room—little more than a cell, ten paces wide and nine across—at the top of her father’s keep. Her singular window overlooked the block where Ithai executed those whom he suspected of treating her with undue kindness; from the time she was old enough to understand, Salem was made to watch these executions (and in time it became a compulsion to do so, one that still lingers; to this day Salem keeps obsessive count of the deaths she considers to be her fault).

She was nearly always hungry. Of the one hundred forty-three people Ithai executed, in those twenty-one years, most were kitchen servants condemned on suspicion of bringing her too much food, or for lingering to speak with her while she ate; to bring the lord’s daughter a meal, it was well known among the kitchen staff, was to risk one’s life. Quite often, she went without food altogether, and seldom received more than one meal in a day. Salem grew up both hoarding food and feeling intense guilt around eating.

Ithai was, on the rare occasion of his visits, extremely abusive; Salem was so terrified of him that even now she feels on edge around men who remind her of him. (He was quite tall, broad-shouldered, with a full beard; his hair sandy-brown in his youth, half-grey by the time of Salem’s birth; a deep baritone.) She cannot handle being yelled at without shutting down. Her instinctive reaction to violence against herself—to simply take it, quietly, without resistance, and wait for it to be over—is a response she learned in childhood, and unless she is already quite angry, it’s one she finds difficult to overcome.

Escaping the Tower.

In the fairytale, at the age of sixteen, the girl asks her father for paper and pen. She uses these to write pleas for rescue, promising to marry anyone who can save her from her father, and throws them to the wind. Innumerable would-be saviors flock to answer, only to be slain by her father while the girl looks on in horror, until one day a true hero defeats her father in a duel and frees her at last.

This is not quite how it happened.

When Salem was sixteen, and Kalev eighteen, she put to her brother that he should find someone to marry her. She was reaching the proper age (indeed, their mother had been only a year older when the king married her to Ithai), and she could think of no other means to escape than by marriage, though the prospect filled her with dread. Kalev undertook this effort very reluctantly, fearing that anyone willing to marry a girl who’d spent her whole life locked away would undoubtedly be at least as awful as their father; but he did try, without success, for several years.

He was twenty-one, Salem nineteen, when he met Ozma: not an aristocrat but the wandering knight of a holy order who chanced to be nearby when Kalev’s retinue was set upon by the largest wyvern any of them had ever seen. Ozma leapt to Kalev’s aid and slew the grimm, and would have died of the injuries they sustained in doing so had Kalev been less skilled in healing. They talked, afterward, finding they had much in common; and before long, the conversation turned to the plight of Kalev’s sister.

Ozma had no interest in marriage—had sworn vows of chastity, in fact—but Kalev’s account of Salem’s treatment horrified them. They had heard tell of the ill-omened girl held safe within the lord’s keep, of course, but the rumors had given them the impression that she was sickly, too frail to leave her bed. Upon learning the truth, they became determined to help her. Together, the pair hatched a new plan: Ozma would pledge themself as Kalev’s vassal, ingratiate themself to Lord Ithai, and find some opportunity to free Salem in secret.

Two more years would pass before Ozma found their opportunity, for the magic Ithai had woven around her cell would not allow her to cross the threshold, even were the door torn from its hinges. During this time, Ozma stole up the tower whenever they could to visit Salem; they didn’t dare enter the room, for fear of being ensnared by the wards, but they could speak to her through the door.

Without fail, Salem would beg them not to come back; desperate though she was for escape, she did not believe this plan had any chance of working, and lived in terror of Ozma being found out and executed. Ozma, for their part, stayed resolute in their conviction that freeing her was a worthy cause to die for, which had—for as long as they could remember—been the only thing they really wanted.

In the end, what happened is this:

Lord Ithai came to Salem’s cell late one evening, on the same night Ozma risked ascending the tower to talk to her; and though they realized the danger halfway up the stairs, hearing echoes of her father’s tirade, before they turned back as they’d promised her to do if this should ever happen, they heard the unmistakable sound of a blow, a choked cry of pain, and could not find it in themself to leave.

Up they charged. Ithai had his back turned to the door, his hands around Salem’s neck, and Ozma gathered all the magic they knew to strike at him from behind; but Ithai was an experienced combatant. Though wounded, he was not bested, and he whirled around in a murderous fury to retaliate. The duel was swift and brutally decisive—within moments, Ithai shattered Ozma’s defenses and had them on disarmed on the floor.

Salem had collapsed when Ithai dropped her and remained cowering against the wall while the brief battle raged; but when her father raised his hand to strike Ozma dead, with the door open and someone who had been kind to her about to die because of her like so many others, she snapped. Her magic, never trained, and never very strong, exploded outward as she threw herself across the room.

She drove her hand into Ithai’s body as if his flesh were water and ripped his pulverized heart right out of his chest.

That was not what she meant to do, exactly. She had wanted only to make him stop, and twenty-one years of desperate fear crashed together in that moment to become a wild, boundless rage; but no sooner had his body crumpled than reality caught up with her, and then she was only a girl clutching the gory shreds of another person’s insides in her hands, whereupon she became hysterical.

Salem does not, whatsoever, remember leaving the tower, nor anything else until dawn, when she regained her senses to find Ozma coaxing her to let them clean the blood off her hands. But after realizing what had happened, Ozma scrambled up, pried the gore out of her hands, swept a few valuable-looking trinkets into a satchel—they’d wanted her to have something to her name—thrown their cloak around her shoulders, and raced the both of them out of the keep at speed.

The image Jinn presents when Ruby asks her what Ozpin is hiding, of Salem and Ozma fighting their way out together, is a representation of how Ozpin would have told this story: distilled, softened, stripped of personal feeling… but that fight did happen, for the lord’s death and Salem’s passage through his unravelling wards awoke his retinue. Ozma fought; Salem was a storm of uncontrolled violence lashing out in blind panic.

Their First Relationship.

Although Ozma had, over the course of those two years spent whispering through her door, fallen quite hopelessly in love with her, it became clear to them within hours that Salem not feel the same. The satchel of minor valuables they’d hastily gathered for her, she tried to give to them, and their polite refusal to accept caused her to lapse into hollow silence for several minutes before she asked what they wanted from her instead—and only then had they realized how scared she felt that she might be no more to them than a prize.

The first lie Ozma ever told her was that they had never thought of anything but to set right the terrible injustice her father inflicted upon her, and they resolved to take the secret of their infatuation with her to the grave.

Still: she had nowhere else to go, and neither of them dared stay in Pastoria after murdering a nobleman. Ozma offered to take her wherever she liked, and Salem ventured that she had always wanted to see the ocean. In those days, the land formed a single continent, and Pastoria lay nestled at its heart, in the verdant foothills beneath the Light’s sacred mountain.

The long journey would be Ozma’s undoing, for the sea and the edges of the great continent belonged to the God of Darkness, and the vows Ozma had made to Light forbade them to enter Dark’s own country. But they thought nothing of it at the time; their whole life, they had scrupulously abided by the stern, unyielding tenets of their faith while privately yearning for death, only for Salem to ignite within them a ferocious desire to live.

So off they went.

For more than two years, the pair traveled further and further west. Salem grew easier around them, and as her wariness ebbed, true friendship rose to take its place—not the desolate, harrowing need which had bound them both together when they fled, but the simple sense of being kindred spirits. (It was during their travels together that Ozma first decided to worry less over fitting into either manhood or womanhood, and began—just between themself and Salem—to invent an un-gendered mode of address for themself; at the time, the phrase they’re still so fond of repeating in the present, that they are only a man, not even a very good one, was not self-deprecation but a private joke they shared with her at the world’s expense.)

With other people, however, Salem struggled: her speech was stilted and afflicted by a ruinous stutter, she was awkward, she was sometimes volatile and sometimes seemingly void of any emotion at all, she was painfully shy, she could not eat with anyone else looking at her, she sometimes lost the thread of conversations and simply lapsed into silent staring… every invisible scar her childhood left upon her marked her out as strange, as unnatural, perhaps even dangerous.

By the time she and Ozma reached the ocean, Salem felt utterly exhausted and half-certain her brother and Ozma were the only good people in the entire world; she found the desolation of the coast appealed to her, the wild emptiness, the sheer scale of the endless water.

She wanted to stay, and stay they did.

They built a little house upon cliffs overlooking the sea, a day’s walk from the closest village. Planted a garden. Lived. Grimm were far more numerous around the coast than in the heartland, and though the creatures proved to be less trouble than Ozma expected, they still insisted on teaching Salem how to fight, more than the basics she’d picked up along the journey. For a year, all seemed well.

However, though Ozma had long since forgotten their vows, the God of Light did not forgive, and seeing now that his wayward servant had no intention to repent, he at last struck Ozma down.

The sickness killed them slowly; it began with mere fatigue, headaches… mild at first, though they grew ever more severe and lingering until Ozma was left nearly insensate with agony for days at a time. Over the course of nine months, they slid piece by piece into a listless haze of pain and confusion—and though Salem tried everything she could think of to help, even leaving them in village and traveling alone to the nearest city to plead for medical aid or healing from the temple, they died just short of four years after her liberation.

Salem has always, deep down, believed she killed them, somehow.

In all that time, Ozma had never breathed a word to her of how they loved her or the depth of their feeling, still afraid to ask for anything she didn’t want to give; and Salem had only just begun to realize similar feelings for them when they fell ill. The thought that they had died not knowing she loved them was almost as unbearable a torment to her as grief itself.

Salem’s Petitions to the Brothers.

The journey back to the heartland took Salem just seven months. She had pushed herself extraordinarily hard to traverse such a vast distance in so little time, scarcely sleeping or eating and using magic to whip herself onward past the brink of collapse; she was deeply unwell, and her thin hope that the God of Light might take pity was all that kept her standing.

She had always been fervently religious, in her way, although her imprisonment and the abuse she’d suffered and the estrangement she felt from the rest of mankind after her escape had all left her with idiosyncratic, at times nakedly heretical ideas about the Brothers. (For one, Salem had spent most of her life praying to the God of Darkness too, because it never made sense to her that only one of mankind’s creators should be worshipped; she believed, and still believes even today, that it was Darkness who freed her from the paralyzing terror on the night she killed her father.)

Salem had no intention of marching into the sacred domain of the Light to demand anything, nor did she truly expect him to give her what she asked; but she did feel certain there had been some mistake, because good people were not supposed to sicken and die, and she did believe, with all her heart, that the God of Light was just and kind.

When she climbed the marble steps, she imagined that she would kneel before the pool to pray, and perhaps the Light would offer her some sign of comfort, of sorrow, of understanding. For him to appear in front of her himself before she could even utter a word shocked her, and ignited a wild hope that he might actually grant her a miracle—hopes that he shattered by instead chiding her for making demands of him.

That was the first fracture in Salem’s faith. Light sent her out of his realm and left her reeling: he had not been kind. Why reveal himself to her at all, just to rebuke her prayers? It seemed—unfair, even cruel.

Of course she turned to the God of Darkness, then. If even the gods were cruel, Salem did not care to live in the world, and she had worshipped Darkness from afar all her life. Why not seek out kindness from him, or else find merciful death in the jaws of his monsters?

Perhaps, she thought, he was lonely too.

Finding his realm took some doing, for no one in living memory had dared go looking for it; in the end, Salem resorted to following the grimm until one led her to the proper place. By then she had lost all sense of time, exhausted and sick and starving as she was, but it was almost exactly a year since Ozma’s death when she stumbled wearily up the granite steps to visit the God of Darkness.

Though Ozma believes that she asked Darkness to bring them back to life, and lied to him about having gone first to his brother, this is not so. (Salem told them the truth, eons later, as well as she could: but by then she had been so long alone, and the events that had led to mankind’s destruction were so distant, that her account had been meandering and confused, difficult to follow. The answer Jinn gives Ruby is not absolute truth, only exactly what Ozpin believed to be true and chose to hide, and contains a great deal of guesswork on Ozma’s part, to make sense of it all.)

What she did do is tell Darkness of all her sorrow, vowing to revere him above his brother for the rest of her life if he ended her pain. Salem half-hoped he would unite her with Ozma in death—it seemed a fitting mercy, from the god of destruction—and half-feared he would answer by unburdening her of the capacity to feel at all. Until he did so, it never occurred to her to imagine that Darkness would grant her the favor his brother had coldly forbidden her to even want.

But he did, and during that brief moment before the God of Light appeared in all his icy wrath, Salem had every intention to uphold her end of the bargain. Light had treated her with cold disdain, but in Darkness she had found the kindness she had been taught to expect from his supposedly benevolent brother; she would never again worship the God of Light, and had Light not interfered then, she would have become a devoted, unendingly faithful disciple to the God of Darkness.

Instead, the Brothers twice incinerated Ozma in her arms and drowned her in the fountain of life to consign her to a deathless eternity alone, and that was the second fracture in her faith.

Her Rebellion.

When the Brothers cast her out of Light’s realm, they sent her home: to the cliffside by the sea where she and Ozma had lived.

The very first thing Salem did was hurl herself into the sea.

How long she spent drowning and drowning and unable to die beneath the waves, Salem did not know; by the time a (distraught) fisherman discovered her undying but horrifically broken body in his net, the little house on the cliff had fallen into ruin, and the village she remembered had grown into a large and prosperous town.

The fountain of life had poured into her soul—which left the physical pool in the Light’s domain a mere puddle of water with no magical properties at all—and remade her into the very wellspring of creation itself; the life-force humans would, much later, come to know as aura. No matter the severity of her injuries, she could not die, but healing serious injuries with aura requires training, focus.

Salem had healed imperfectly: the bones she had shattered when she plunged into the sea knitting back together at strange angles, her body bent and distorted by the uncontrolled and unchecked growth of masses that would have killed anyone mortal, her chest distended with seawater. She could barely move, let alone speak, and it was only good fortune that the fisherman who had found her overcame his panic before casting her overboard again.

He brought her to Light’s temple, in the town that had once been a village. The priests there were baffled, but they could see that she was in terrible pain, and they did what they could to help her. Mostly, this was miserable: a matter of breaking bones and carving out tumors, little by little pulling her body back into human shape.

She did not make it easy for them. The ruin of her physical body had not diminished her magical power, and as soon as Salem understood where she was she began to lash out, wanting nothing to do with the gods who had done this to her. Still, the priests felt sorry for her—and assumed that her violent reactions were motivated by pain, rather than hatred of the god they served—so they persisted.

Then the ones who had taken charge of her care began to sicken, and Salem realized two things: first, that they were not caring for her under Light’s auspices; and second, that he accounted the kindness they were trying to give her a sin deserving of punishment.

That was the third, and final, fracture in her faith. She stopped fighting her caretakers and bent every effort toward healing herself and trying to heal them; in this, she failed, and watched those who had aided her die one by one even as she was restored to perfect health.

She was outraged.

Yes, she had prayed for things she was not meant to have, and yes, she had sown discord between the Brothers by mistake, and yes, she had railed against them and called them monsters when they ripped her love away from her again. Perhaps that did make her selfish, arrogant, deserving of the torment they inflicted upon her—but these people had done nothing to deserve death.

It was an injustice.

It was worse than cruel; it was wrong.

Salem returned to Pastoria brimming with righteous fury. There, to her surprise, she found Kalev—an old man now, though she still looked not a day older than twenty-five.

The reunion was strange and bittersweet. Kalev had spent most of his life wondering what happened to her, praying to God to keep her safe and happy, and to learn that the Brothers had treated her with such brutality devastated him. From his devastation and her rage, the first spark of rebellion was struck.

When Salem set out to galvanize others to their cause, she told the truth: of the injustices and cruelty she had seen; of how the Brothers had made her immortal by throwing her into the fountain of life, and so revoked the promise of healing for the pure from the rest of the world; of the division she had seen between Light and Darkness; of her vision of a new world freed from the chains of their creators. The gory spectacle of her immortality and the fervent truth of her convictions overcame every obstacle that had always set her apart from the rest of her kind.

Though it was Salem who lit the match, the firestorm she unleashed surpassed her expectations, and when the rebellion stormed the marble steps to Light’s domain, the movement had long since grown beyond her, grown bigger than the faint hope she clung to that she might find a way to die after the Brothers were gone.

(She wouldn’t recognize it until eons later, but she had already begun, even then, to resign herself to the possibility of living forever.)

The Moonfall and the Making of Remnant.

See this post.

Upon climbing back out of the pool of grimm, Salem found that it, just as the fountain of life had done, had poured itself into her soul. The vast and infinite well over which Darkness once presided had diminished to mere scattered ponds of atrum, still capable of birthing grimm if given a spark of life yet no longer alive as the dark lake had been; and she felt that vast and infinite power churning within herself now, mixing together with the molten radiance of the fountain. She began to have an inkling, then, of what she had done.

Eons ago, the Brothers created mankind by the admixture of their two natures—so went the old stories—creation and destruction bound together in one. Salem had thought to do the same, when she bore the light into the pool, but instead… some intangible barrier had shattered, she thought, had fallen into dust and less than dust. The waters mingled: and here is fire.

She wandered away from the Dark’s onetime domain in a daze, unsure of what she would find in this new world but excited to meet it, and what she found was the first and second of Remnant’s peoples: the fauni, who were no more human than she, and the grimm, as fierce and wild as she remembered.

Humans would come later. Salem has… complicated feelings about mankind, these days, a mixture of admiration for their virtues—their strength, their wisdom, their resourcefulness, their passion, their ingenuity, their hope—and profound wariness. She has not thought of herself as human since that half-century beneath the waves, and even less since her transformation in the dark lake; she is grimm, she is the one called God of Animals, the fauni are her people, and she does not much care for the way humans treat those who are different from themselves.

The First Reunion.

Ozma knew nothing of this, when the God of Light sent them back into life. They knew only what Light told them: that Darkness had destroyed mankind for an offense he implied had something to do with Salem, that humanity would rise anew in desperate need of redemption lest they be condemned to obliteration, and that though Salem yet lived, she was no longer the woman they held dear.

When they agreed to return, Ozma did not give a damn about any of this. Salem lived. No matter how she’d changed, they felt certain beyond any doubt that they would love her still, and when the words I’ll do it left their mouth, they had every intention of finding her at once.

But nothing could have prepared them to wrench awake behind a stranger’s eyes, nor for the overwhelming flood of another’s mind shattering and bleeding into their own. Nothing could have prepared them to feel the like-minded soul die so that they could live.

Nothing prepared them for the horrors of this new world, where humans bereft of magic cowered in the shadows like rats among grimm who now seemed all but unstoppable. Nor could they fathom the scale of suffering they saw everywhere they went: the senseless ravages of disease, the brutal and desperate wars over resources that had once been abundant, the seemingly endless panoply of false gods and false creeds which served as pretext for yet more war, the almost-human creatures called faunus who—they were told—lived bestial lives in the wilderness, whom the grimm did not hunt because they had no souls, who hated humanity just as fiercely as did the grimm… who served and worshipped the malignant Witch of the Wastes.

She had to be Salem. Ozma knew it from the moment they heard the first whisper of that name, for who else in this damned and desolate world could wield power of that kind?

Fear crept over them. Doubt. They remembered what she had done to her father, the spectacular violence in her fear; Ozma had never been blind to Salem’s wrath. What had happened to her, after they died? What had she done? What if—in the end it was this thought that overcame the rest of Ozma’s worries and brought them to her doorstep, heart in their mouth—what if the God of Darkness had laid a curse upon her?

(Might she still be saved, even now?)

Some of those fears melted away when Salem opened her door and Ozma looked into her eyes at long last: they knew at once that she was still herself, and for a while that was all that mattered.

For her part, Salem had long since made peace with never seeing Ozma again; she held on to a faint hope that their soul might be reborn, now that the gates of death had cracked, but she knew—thought she knew—that they would never return as themself, and she might never find their soul again. Her grief had become a deep ache, never quite fading but possible to live with, around, through. What else was there for her to do but keep living?

(Sometimes—now and then, when the anguish rose to the surface again—her mind did conjure echoes of them. She had spent countless nights of her interminable isolation huddling miserably in their arms, half-dreaming and half-believing they were really there. It comforted her sometimes to pretend not to know these were only hallucinations; she liked to imagine their spirit lingering with her, reaching out to soothe her when she could bear the pain no longer. But even that had not happened in a very long time, when Ozma found her.)

The first thought to arise from the searing, wordless shock of finding them before her once again was wonder at the recognition aglow in their eyes, the smile dawning upon their face as if no time had passed at all; the second, an overwhelming terror that this wasn’t real.

Both were cautious, in the beginning. Salem felt acutely aware of how much she had changed, how foolish it would be to expect everything to go back to the way it was in that little house by the sea; Ozma’s fear that she had been cursed by Darkness seemed all but confirmed by her grimm appearance and the bizarre, erratic tale she told of defying the Brothers and plunging into the divine wellsprings. She could do magic no longer, for the Brothers had torn their gifts from her soul, and the wild power she held now was unlike anything Ozma had seen.

Yet… even so.

Every troubling tale they’d heard of the Witch proved to have a reasonable explanation. Of course the fauni had souls (and Ozma has never quite lost their mortification for believing otherwise), and Salem’s careful observations of the grimm led her to believe they were drawn to powerful negative emotion: hatred, anger, misery, envy, fear, all feelings roused by the rampant persecution of faunuskind at human hands. She offered protection to those fauni who sought her out, and sometimes stole into settlements late at night to set captive fauni free. In the village nestled along the edge of her woods, she was well-regarded—if still a little feared, for she seldom left the woods unless someone came to ask for her help.

Those first few weeks together in her cottage were peculiar, thick with dread and uncertainty and the awkward feeling of the eons now lying between them; there had been missteps and hurtful misunderstandings aplenty, while they learnt each other again.

She was different: she had acquired a sardonic sense of humor which delighted them, an astounding depth of knowledge on the natural forces of the world, an alarming farrago of new gods, a vicious temper that often saw her storming out of their cottage to (she admitted to them once, rather sheepishly, when they asked) lurk at the bottom of a lake for hours to calm herself…

But though they looked, Ozma could find nothing in her to fear; she was still kind, still inquisitive, still terribly shy, still—true enough that Salem was no longer the awkward, volatile, passionate girl they’d held so dear, but that girl wasn’t gone. She had only grown into herself, and each day they loved her more.

Ozma didn’t exactly intend to lie to her.

For those first few weeks, they kept what the God of Light had told them to themself, wanting to hear Salem’s side of the story before they made any judgments; and as weeks turned to months, Ozma concluded that, cursed by the Brothers though she was, nothing was wrong with Salem, and they resolved to forget their task as they had once forgotten their vows to be with her.

They found that they could not. Even as the love they shared with Salem, never quite fully realized in their previous life, put down roots and blossomed in this one, the suffering they had seen—the promise of obliteration—the twisted, still-bleeding shrapnel of the boy they had overtaken—all of it still lurked in the back of their mind, impossible to forget and growing ever harder to ignore.

In the present, when Ruby asked Jinn her question, Ozpin did almost believe that Salem had lied to Ozma, used them, led them blind and infatuated to their ruin: but that is only the lie Ozma has clung to for centuries.

The truth, far more painful, is that Salem trusted them. In spite of everything she had suffered, despite her terror of rejection, of losing them again; despite the fact that they answered her eager questions about how they’d found their way back with naught but vague nothings, Salem chose to give them her trust and her love and her unwavering faith; and so, when they cautiously ventured to lament the division they saw tearing Remnant apart, she had looked at them with hope shining in her eyes and promised to help them heal the world of its wounds.

To create a paradise—without the Brothers.

Ozma should have told her then. In that moment, they had known she would never break from her hatred of the gods who had slain the last world and tortured her for so long, would never submit to them again, and that had been the right time to tell her.

But they’d looked into her eyes, and imagined that boundless admiration curdling in betrayal and disgust, and instead they had leaned closer to kiss her and said, let’s do it.

Lux Aeterna.

Every lie that followed came easier than the last. Salem balked at too grand ambitions, and it often seemed to Ozma that she would have preferred to stay in that cottage with them forever—it was plain to see she did not much like standing before crowds, let alone leading a country, for all that she could be a dazzling orator when she had time to prepare—but they found they could persuade her to agree to almost any course of action so long as they gave it to her piecemeal.

(There were some lines she would not cross: Salem flatly refused to even consider imposing prison sentences, no matter the crime, and she afforded no patience to those humans who protested bitterly at being treated as equals to faunuskind under Aeternian law. But Ozma considered that she was often on the right side of these lines, and did not trouble themself much over her stubbornness.)

The girls were a surprise bordering on miraculous. Salem and Ozma had talked about wanting to have children, raise a family, but neither believed Salem could bear her own. (Ozma could not help but see it as a good omen, a sign that they were on the right path, and all the more so each time their daughters came out human.) Mara, the eldest; the twins, Dana and Lital; and Esther, the baby.

For a time, all seemed well. Lux Aeterna soared to prominence in the region: a small but prosperous city-state ruled by fair-minded, if frightfully powerful, rulers, a place where all were welcome regardless of appearance or culture or creed.

The troubles started small.

Ozma, plagued by terrible nightmares of the final judgment and knowing that this harmonious medley of differences was not what the God of Light truly meant by unity, grew ever more nervous about their utter failure to nudge Salem toward adopting a unified state religion.

Many of their people did worship Salem and Ozma, of course, just as planned. However…

Salem had been the one who put forward the idea of claiming divinity, but it quickly became apparent that Salem meant something quite different than what Ozma had thought: they’d envisioned a stepping stone toward acting as heralds for the true God, condemning the worship of false idols. But to her, becoming gods meant little more than fulfilling a certain societal role, one which overcame every difficulty she found in connecting with other people by simply asking them to accept her as an inhuman being who acted in accordance with inhuman rules. She cared not at all for the trappings nor the power of godhood; she just liked the rules, the contractual nature of relationships built on ritual and reciprocal favors.

Thus the worship of other gods did not trouble her whatsoever; Ozma could not even persuade her to stop adopting more of the gods invented by Remnant’s people, let alone to condemn the worship of false idols. Nor could they explain why it troubled them so without revealing their deception, and so they fretted, and their occasional arguments on the subject never came to any satisfying conclusions.

Then came the intractable problem of what Salem looked like, and the stories told about her across the region.

Grimm did not trouble Lux Aeterna, but they did prey upon her neighbors—many of them ancient human city-states wherein fauni were still enslaved and viewed with deep suspicion; many of them envious and resentful of the way Lux Aeterna flourished. Rumors began to spread of dark rituals performed by the Grimm Queen in the wilderness at night; baseless accusations of human sacrifice, of secret cannibalism, of Aeternians driving grimm into other kingdoms in order to steal more land, and similar fare.

Ozma tried desperately to lower tensions through diplomatic appeasement, ignoring Salem’s blunt insistence that it wouldn’t work. (She had seen this play out many times, in many places, and her cynicism with regard to mankind’s fear of the unknown is boundless.)

It did not work.

Rumors became threats, threats turned to actual incursions against Lux Aeterna’s borders—and one gory assassination attempt against Salem herself, which shook Ozma very badly—and when a vigorous, decisive defense of the borders failed to put an end to all the saber-rattling, Lux Aeterna took the offensive.

With the onset of war, Ozma discovered a new side of Salem that they had never yet seen: she had a strategic brilliance that spoke to deep experience, and she was utterly, dispassionately ruthless. In swift succession, one after the next, each hostile city-state crumbled and bent the knee beneath the Aeternian banner.

Salem approached this conquest with an attitude of grim necessity: there could be no peace with these wolves snarling at the door, and so the wolves must be broken and brought to heel. To Ozma, the merciless expansion of their borders felt by turns intoxicating—for how simple it was after all, to bring people together by the sword—and horrifying.

The Shattering.

One of the many things Ozma reflected upon, during their protracted withdrawal after Jinn caused them to relive all this, is whether Salem had begun to suspect the truth, near the end. Throughout the last few of the thirteen years they shared, she developed a habit of making disquietingly blunt remarks about what they were doing; about the necessity of conquest, if Ozma truly wished to unite the world behind their banner.

Salem did not have any idea what Ozma was hiding from her, but she did know that there was something they would not tell her; and as the war raged on, she grew ever more impatient with Ozma’s—as she saw it—willful blindness to the cost of their grand ambition. To bring freedom and peace to a small portion of the world, that could be done with ease: one needed only to give people something true, a common cause to strive for, and then shepherd it from one generation to the next. Lasting change did not dawn quickly.

(They were still, she often reminded herself, so young. She had been impatient once, too.)

Lux Aeterna had always seemed to her far more precarious than Ozma believed, an idealistic, fragile experiment surrounded on all sides by adversaries who would like nothing better than to tear it to shreds; years before the possibility of war even crossed Ozma’s mind, Salem had deemed it inevitable and made quiet preparations to insure that the outcome fell in their favor. (Her web of spies was vast, intricate, and wholly invisible to Ozma.)

One thing to prepare for war; another to wage it and hear her partner speak dreamily of bringing the whole world together and in the same breath recoil from the bloodshed.

It vexed her that they couldn’t seem to grasp that one implied the other. More than that, it crushed her to think that they were not satisfied with the life they had built with her, even more than it hurt when she realized they wanted more than a simple life together in her cottage. Salem had grown to like Lux Aeterna, despite her misgivings. She cared for its people; she loved her own daughters to bits; she loved Ozma. She was not… exactly… unhappy.

But she was not exactly happy, either. She felt inadequate, and taken for granted, and with ever-growing frequency in those last few years, like everything she did was wrong somehow. Whatever Ozma refused to tell her was plainly tearing them apart, and they seemed to always be further out of reach.

By the end, Salem had begun to question whether they even loved her anymore, or if all that really bound them together was inertia, or tired habit, or some misguided sense of obligation to her and their daughters.

The truth was worse, and far more horrible than Salem could ever have guessed: that the Brothers she’d thought long gone were trying to claw their way back was awful enough, that they wanted to butcher this world too a nightmare almost beyond comprehension, but the depth of Ozma’s betrayal in serving those monsters for all this time, in manipulating her into enacting their design, was beyond her ability to fathom. She could not understand it. (She still cannot understand it.)

There is a very old story faunuskind used to tell about where they came from, called The Shallow Sea: in it, the God of Animals gathers all the unhappy misfits and outcasts of the world and brings them to a certain island—a harsh new world where they can make their own home, if they choose. All they need to do is leap into the magical waters of the sea and swim ashore, shedding their old human skins to become something new.

Most choose to embrace the change, the chance for freedom given to them; but a small handful refuse, spitting accusations at the god and their chosen people, so the god sends them back home to their old lives, and for the rest of time, the ones who refused to change and all their descendants hate and fear the fauni, for reminding them of what they are not and never can be.

This is the myth Salem quoted to Ozma when she refused to go along with the divine plan for Remnant’s future, and this is what she meant: that the Brothers are of a kind with the resentful humans in the story, seething impotently that the world has outgrown them, and they deserve nothing but scorn; that humanity cannot be saved because there is nothing to redeem, and the only course is to press onward; that the world will never again be what it was.

Both she and Ozma understood her meaning perfectly. (No one else who witnessed Jinn’s answer did, a fact Ozma has not actually realized yet. When they tell Hazel that Salem is cursed to live for as long as the world turns and that she craves only death, they are—as they so often do—lying through their teeth.)

Salem does not remember anymore what she said, exactly, for she’s torn and twisted the memory so badly in desperation to make sense of it that the only thing she remembers is the emotion, and the way Ozma glared at her before they stormed out of the study.

Nearly four hours elapsed between that moment and Salem catching Ozma leaving with the girls. Most of that time, Ozma spent at war with themself, torn between their desperation to stay with Salem and their terror of what punishment the Light would inflict upon her, upon their daughters, upon the whole world if Ozma defied him. Salem, meanwhile, was sitting where Ozma had left her in a state of abject shock and horror.

Both were so on edge by the time they came face-to-face in the corridor that they broke at almost exactly the same time, and both remember seeing the other move to attack first. (In The Lost Fable, there is a very brief shot in which Ozma tightens their grip on their staff—bracing themself—and then Salem visibly startles at that movement the instant before she snaps.) Both were caught up in an overwhelming tide of desperate fury and years of pent-up resentment and distrust that had long since eroded the foundation of their relationship, and both were one hundred percent focused on trying to kill the other.

Neither of them knows exactly what happened to their daughters.

& The Rest.

Since that night, Salem and Ozma have seen each other only twice—in the apocalyptic final battle for Ruakh, and in Atlas when she captured Oscar.

Salem has largely done her best to avoid them, not caring what they did so long as she knew they didn’t have all four relics. She never wanted to see them again, after Ruakh. Ozma, meanwhile, has never stopped hating themself for sacrificing her for the sake of the divine plan… but the divine plan is all they have left, and they do not believe she could ever forgive them, so they keep stumbling through the motions of trying. Their paranoia, their tendency to see her in the shadows of every conflict and every grimm, arises from a mixture of intense guilt and twisted longing.

Salem is not aware that they do not have a choice about coming back, and nearly all her hatred in the present is founded upon her belief that they have spent the last three or four thousand years making a deliberate choice to murder an innocent person each time they return, either out of sheer zealotry or an obsessive desire to punish her. The instant she learns this is not so, her rage will rebound tenfold on the God of Light.

The girls did not, in fact, die that night. Ozma’s semblance—once they’re free, once it manifests in its fully-realized form—will reach back four thousand years to the moment the fight began and simply bring them forward. Or it has already done so, depending upon one’s perspective, and they just haven’t arrived at the right moment yet. Either way, to the children it is as if no time passes at all.

(The girls disappear from the scene right before the fight begins, and V9 gave me time travel shenanigans. I am in constant misery. Let me have this.)

[jesterjazz]

So I heard you like Wicked too?

Which songs from Wicked do you think would fit the FOP characters?

For Good is obviously Timmy and his fairies which you already made a post about, peak >>>> You made another ask but I also agree that As Long As You're Mine is Coswan coded Popular goes to Blonda, no question. Even though we only had one episode with her, she means the world to me. It's very obvious she's a parody of those diva celebrities and Glinda at the start can seem like a mean girl diva. Plus they're both blonde with curly/swirly hair.

I can easily see Blonda in the Glinda role and Wanda as Elphaba for that song. But I raise a more interesting concept, Blonda and Peri. Peri as a baby was naturally confident but with how much of an anxious mess he grew up to be I headcanon that the pressure of fame got to him as a teen growing up. Like damn I was the first fairy baby in a hot minute, and I can see Blonda showing him the ropes of fame through musical theatre. Next song, Dancing Through Life (well at least the first half) I can see Cosmo as Fiyero sooooo well. I mean- Life's more painless, for the brainless

Thanks to this writing guide/cosmo analysis I've realized Cosmo is a little smarter and self aware then he seems. He's seen as an idiot and can play into that. Fiyero does the same thing when he's first introduced in the musical, but it's an act of sorts. Which Dancing Through Life demonstrates beautifully. The rest of the song is more focused about the shifting character dynamics but that first part with Fiyero really gets to me. I was writing Timmy as Spider-Man like two days ago (stick with me) and as I wrote a scene where he was being a selfish jerk (which he tends to be in canon sometimes) and No Good Deed started playing in my head and snuck it's way into my writing. I've always been fascinated by the episode where Timmy does a bunch of good things for his friends and then gets punished for it so he wishes he was never born. It was really messed up but yeah, people in Timmy's life (outside of his fairies) don't really appericate him. AJ got insanely jealous when Timmy got an A once. Chester and AJ started playing a new game Timmy got when Timmy wasn't even there. These are random examples but those are the vibes I get from them. I mean the whole world is cartoonish against Timmy, and the times he does do good things he gets the short end of the stick. Wishing his mom's garden was alive and it bringing back a deadly hamster... Wishing Vicky remained his babysitter just so he'd keep his fairies longer... Wishing Vicky wasn't evil and then an evil bug almost infecting the president. That boy can't catch a break fr. I'll end off on a fun one, One Short Day. I can see that being Peri and Timmy being excited to explore fairy world, especially since they grew up on Earth. Fun brotherly bonding time. Two boys LET LOSE IN FAIRYWORLD!! MORE AT ELEVEN

[toiletpotato]

on one hand I think "yes add more nods to the 1939 film that's so fun I love the 1939 movie and it's the most recognizable one to the general public" but on the other hand I think "maybe don't add too many references to the 1939 film because if you give any critical thought to it, the plot of the two works together just barely line up and sense begins to unravel if you give it the smallest bit of thought: the entire movie takes place in the span of four songs in act 2"

for example:

No One Mourns the Wicked

Dear Old Shiz

The Wizard and I

What is This Feeling

Something Bad

Dancing Through Life

Popular

I'm Not That Girl

One Short Day

A Sentimental Man

Defying Gravity

Thank Goodness

The Wicked Witch of the East

Wonderful

I'm Not That Girl (reprise)

As Long As You're Mine

-> Dorothy's house lands in Munchkinland

-> Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are

-> Dorothy meets Glinda AND the Wicked Witch of the West; receives Ruby Slippers- I'll get you my pretty and your little dog too

Catfight scene

No Good Deed

-> Dorothy meets the Scarecrow

-> If I Only Had a Brain

-> We're Off to See the Wizard

March of the Witch Hunters

-> Dorothy and the Scarecrow pick apples

-> Dorothy meets the Tin Man

-> If I Only Had a Heart

-> The Wicked Witch of the West appears on top of the farmhouse and threatens them

-> We're Off to See the Wizard

-> Dorothy meets the Lion

-> If I Only Had the Nerve

-> We're Off to See the Wizard

-> Poppy scene

-> Arrive in the Emerald City

-> Horse of a Different Color

-> Surrender Dorothy

-> King of the Forest

-> Meet the Wizard

-> Go to the Haunted Forest

-> Dorothy gets captured

For Good

-> The friends save Dorothy

-> The Witch lights the Scarecrow on fire

-> The Witch gets melted

-> Dorothy and friends go back to the Emerald City

-> They receive their gifts

Glinda tells the Wizard to leave and Morrible to prison

-> The Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man are put in charge of the Emerald City in the Wizard's absence

-> The Wizard's balloon floats away

-> Glinda returns, click your heels 3×

-> Back to Kansas

Finale begins

The Scarecrow shows up in Kiamo Ko

Opens trapdoor

Says they can never return to Oz

Glinda thinks her friends are dead

End of Finale

End of show

--

Idk what I'm trying to say with all this- don't get it wrong I LOVE both properties dearly. It's just funny when one is framed as a prequel when that only applies to act 1 since the entire thing takes place in the background of act 2. All three (book/movie/musical) entities are very unique in their own special ways! It's fun to look at it closely and realize some little silly bits about it though :3

[takethistoyourstardust]

MY personal wicked ranking (based on OBC recording) is as follows:

the wizard and i

no good deed

defying gravity

one short day

for good

popular

dancing through life*

thank goodness

as long as you’re mine

no one mourns the wicked

i’m not that girl*

what is this feeling*

wonderful

* ranking is subject to change depending on how much pussy the movie musical cast puts into the performance