imagine being a normal citizen of arendelle. you’re just minding your goddamn business when the queen plunges your kingdom into eternal winter, very nearly killing you. she then somehow recovers from that absolute PR nightmare by building a cool ice rink. then three years later you’re forced to evacuate because that bitch decided to Awaken The Spirits of the Enchanted Forest and you almost die AGAIN when the kingdom almost floods– but wait, she saves the day! so it’s Fine!

then she hands the kingdom over to her normal well-adjusted sister and peaces out to the scandinavian wilderness to become a full-time forest cryptid. she can occasionally be spotted riding her magical water horse across the sea like lesbian jesus. you have no idea what the fuck just happened. you’re just trying to sell some lutefisk. how do you explain this to your children

citizens of arendelle when they hear idina menzel yodeling about how her heart yearns for adventure at 3am

I'd like to thank Willemijn Verkaik for resurrecting my obsession with Rebecca

(if anyone happens to be in possession of a bootleg with her, I'm ready to draw anything for them 😳)

my favorite Iconic Lesbian Moment in wicked is when elphie sings a song that is ostensibly about how badly she wants to be with fiyero and spends a good chunk of it going on about how beautiful and graceful glinda is while saying not one single word about fiyero’s appearance or other qualities

the jolene of wicked

you can explain why it’s important for aspiring authors to read published books and not just fanfiction without condescending to fanfiction authors/readers and implying it’s inherently of lesser quality

like a lot of fanfiction is genuinely good and well-written! there’s some amazing work there! there is absolutely fanfiction out there that’s the same quality as well-written published works. being like ‘well, it’s cute, but it’s not real writing’ is just dismissive and frankly completely untrue. 

but, at the same time, there are a lot of reasons it’s important to also read published works, and those reasons aren’t just ‘it’s better’. for one, a lot of writing original fiction involves introducing one’s own characters and setting to an audience who knows nothing about the characters or worldbuilding, which is generally not something you’re going to learn how to do by only reading stories where you already know the world and characters. that doesn’t mean the work isn’t good; it just means it doesn’t teach all of the skills you’ll need to know when writing

im a lifelong fanfic writer, but one thing fanfic won’t teach you is how to end a story. or how to structure one, really. fanfic is itself a continuation of a story, it’s a transformative work, and… it’s kind of rare for long, chaptered fic to actually be complete. it’s awesome when it is! but you do kind of get used to reading fanfic as a big nebulous cloud of what-ifs, and furthermores, and so ons, and etc.

published fiction pretty much always has to have a start, middle, and ending. you can’t really learn formal anatomy from fanfiction. you can learn a lot of creative stuff that published fiction rarely has the freedom to engage in–aus and remixes, for instance–but fanfic really isn’t where you’re going to be able to study structure and discipline.

Thank god. Finally some good fanfic vs. published story dialogue.

Fanfiction is also usually published as the author writes it, which means authors are limited in their ability to retroactively change story elements (removing plot holes or subplots that go nowhere, or adding foreshadowing for an important event they decided they wanted 1/3 into their story, etc). This means stories overall are generally less “polished” than professionally published work. 

On a similar note, fic writers can “get away with” a lot more fluff that doesn’t move the story forward– ie, dedicating an entire chapter to characters cuddling, or spending a very long time explaining the economics system of a secret wizard world. This is a strength of fic because it’s often what people want to read– but it’s also something that usually hinges on the reader already being deeply invested in the characters and the world, which is a luxury you’re not going to get from a lot of original fiction.

Fanfiction isn’t necessarily better or worse than original fic, but it is a fundamentally different art. An aspiring fiction author reading only fanfic is like an aspiring fiction author reading only poetry; it’s great to enrich your skills by reading widely, but if you don’t read *the kind of art you are trying to make*, you won’t know how to make it.

dave malloy’s revenge (2021)

I remain of the opinion that the biggest mistake Wicked Broadway made in recent years is only casting one half of the double name witches.

MK and GC have that once-in-a-lifetime chemistry on stage and the producers at the Gershwin were idiots for not seeing that. I love that Ginna Claire is Glinda, but she should've had her Elphie there with her.

i’ve made a playlist of every song in the Frozen Cinematic Universe™ sung by Elsa, as performed by the four (4) actors who’ve both voiced Elsa and starred as Elphaba in various international productions of Wicked:

plus some honorable mentions:

why would anyone want this, you ask? i don’t know. maybe you just want to spend 2 hours and 58 minutes listening to musical theater divas belting about snow in various languages. did i make this to procrastinate writing an essay? maybe. we’ll never know for sure

thank you!! we got another one folks

Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA, getting domestic in the 1970s

you may not like it but every greek tragedy is a musical

directors 2000 years from now, holding a translated script of wicked: okay so we know they put these parts to music but we have no way of knowing what the tunes were. it was based on an ancient myth called “the wizard of oz” but we have no way of knowing how close it was to the original because we only have fragments. we’ll have to speak the choruses

just as SchawrtzBaum intended

queer as in gay but also queer as in unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe

enemies to friends to lovers, slow burn, 10k seconds, 2 acts

Men want her. Women want to be her. Children befriend her but their parents fear her. Doctors hate her and police officers' heads explode in her presence.

Scientific consensus on her nature and origins has not been reached.

Authorities warn civilians to stay away from her and report any sightings immediately.

Jolene

man

i’m obsessed with this moodboard

2021 was supposed to be the year of lempicka on broadway

Capybara vocalizations

you are a dollar general ray gun toy, i would die for you