Reply To: Out in Storybrooke: Who should have a Queery Tale romance?

… they kissed? Twice? And slept together? Like they outright kissed each other at one point. Glinda was only ever interested in Elphaba. She married for money. She was a lesbian.

I think part of the problem with people “Not reading” Queer romance is that they’re either straight or generally not exposed to it… which is why you end up with such a rift in the OUAT fandom for example. We don’t get enough of these examples in the media, people get defensive, don’t want to look homophobic but don’t want to accept sociological concepts like heteronormativity either.

When it comes to WIcked a lot of this was confirmed in later books etc. like Glinda’s friends got married after college. Ozma is a lesbian as was Lurline. Gregory Maguire’s Oz was pretty queer – everyone is Bi until proven otherwise(this is Word of God) which is a nice change from having to go to a lot of effort to “prove” potential queer attraction between characters in other series. The idea of bisexuality being the norm messes with people’s heads and I love it.

Even in the musical, it’s not stated as outright that it’s a love story between Elphaba and Glinda, but it has been outright stated by cast and crew. In the song “Loathing”, they purposely took a lot of tropes associated with love songs and subverted it.

It was all intentional, word of god stuff and when people still deny it even then that’s when it gets darn right offensive. The assumption that all characters are 100% until proven otherwise is really offensive and one which the Wicked years explicitly rejects. I hope they realise that even if they are not adapting that book or musical, their marketing and focus on the Witch is riding on the coat tails of it, and fans of both the book and musical are largely queer women.

So at the very least, again, it would be a nice nod to one of the books that probably has inspired the development of characters like Regina as well as Zelena even if they’re not outright admitting it. I would like if we can stop acting that queer people or queer romance are some sort of special case that need some sort of special justification for our inclusion – you never need an excuse for straight people so it should be different for us, especially when there is a very clear precedent in it. Using “Wicked” in the marketing implies they’re taking at least some inspiration from the book and/or musical even if they can’t use it directly – it’s not a stretch to also embrace the book and musical’s love of queerness.