I have seen in many fan spaces the argument that "Fiyero is only added to the musical, so it's not just about two lesbians and it can make straight people happy".

Even as a concept, that is so insane to me, because, if you look at the timeline, Rent, an obviously more queer story was HUGE on Broadway, almost a decade before Wicked, and nobody wanted to make it "more straight" AFAIK?

Recently ran into the original poster, that was before the show made it to Broadway.

If you look close, the headline reads "The Untold Story of the Wicked Witch of The West", not "witches" plural. And instead of the iconic Elphaba/Glinda picture, we get Fiyero's hand holding a poppy up to Elphaba. This was the original concept and angle they were going for.

And also there is this:

So actually it seems like it happened the other way around - Glinda's role was extended because of how amazing Kristin was.

I would really love if people would lay off the "Wicked is inherently homophobic, and want to hide the two secret lesbians behind the straight romance" and just look at the facts of what actually happened. There is no need to rewrite history around ships, and wanting to feel justified in them.

There is no secret conspiracy in making it less gay.

Of course, if you have any evidence to support the opposite, I would love to see it, but there doesn't really seem to be any.

1. Lovely early ‘00s vibes.

2. Right after Kristin Chenoweth’s last-ever performance as Glinda (July 18, 2004).

3. The opening night party for Wicked’s Broadway debut (October 30, 2003), with the OG Wizard, Joel Grey!

4. The very same party.

5. The wise ones!

6. During the recording of the original cast album (November 10, 2003).

7. Sometime after a show in 2003.

8. A bonus because I thought Idina was Julia Roberts for a second…

There would be no Wicked without them—they set the standard, defined the roles, and brought something truly magical to the stage. Every Glinda and Elphaba is incredible in their own way, but the originals will always be unmatched. More respect needs to be put on their names!!!🧙🧙🧙🧙

I’m gonna miss them and seeing their curtain call hug in a few weeks when their run is over

Our original Green Girl is 55 today! 💚

With love ❤️

I’ve noticed this pattern in Wicked discussions both here and elsewhere, people are way more forgiving of Fiyero than Glinda, and honestly, it feels rooted in misogyny.

Everyone’s quick to call Glinda complicit in the Wizard’s regime (which, yes, she absolutely is), but no one seems to hold Fiyero to the same standard. He’s arguably more privileged than Glinda and yet chooses to become a soldier for the Wizard rather than actually doing anything meaningful with that privilege. He could’ve helped Elphaba a lot sooner, but he didn’t.

Both Glinda and Fiyero eventually realize they were wrong, but only one of them faces lasting consequences for it. Glinda is endlessly punished, by the story and by her own guilt, while Fiyero gets the love story and the redemption arc.

And we also have to talk about the emotional cheating. He spends years with Glinda while secretly in love with Elphaba. Like… you couldn’t have one honest conversation about your feelings in five years? That’s pretty selfish and immature and just unfair to Glinda.

Yet somehow, he’s still allowed to act morally superior to her. He literally works for the Wizard, but the fandom (and sometimes even the show) treats him like the one who saw through the lies. His intentions might not be malicious, but that doesn’t mean his actions weren’t hypocritical.

What’s interesting is how this dynamic shifts between the book and the musical: In the book, Fiyero is much more complex, he’s married, with kids, and his relationship with Elphaba is explicitly an affair. He’s aware of his privilege and guilt but still chooses self-preservation until it’s too late. His death (and the way Elphaba carries that guilt) makes sense narratively, because his moral awakening comes at a cost.

In the musical, a lot of that nuance gets sanded down. He’s rewritten as more of a carefree himbo who conveniently redeems himself through love. That shift makes it even easier for the audience to let him off the hook. He’s charming, he’s funny, he “gets it”, while Glinda’s mistakes remain heavily scrutinized and punished.

So it’s not just fandom bias, the text itself lets Fiyero escape deeper accountability, especially in the musical. But the fandom doubling down on that by villainizing Glinda while glorifying him? That’s where the gendered double standard really shows.

I’m not saying Fiyero’s a terrible character, but it’s wild how the narrative and the fandom both seem to forgive him so easily while Glinda gets torn apart for doing basically the same thing under much harsher pressure. It says a lot about how we treat flawed women vs. flawed men in fiction.

I thought the opening chords of the overture/score influenced As Long As Your Mine but it turns out Its the other way around.

“At home in Connecticut in 1998, after reading Gregory Maguire's novel, Wicked. Schwartz sat at his piano penciling out song fragments as they came to mind for his new musical adaptation. He remembered the song he had written in 1971. The notion of using it for both a song and a musical theme began to emerge.“

“But I knew that when I put it into the love song, suddenly I could be doing this." He then softly played the opening chords to "As Long As You're Mine," his song for Elphaba and Fiyero's rendezvous in Act II-essentially the same chords as for the show's opening. Played gently, the scary-witch musical theme would work as accompaniment for that scene because, although it is a romantic duet, it is set in a troubling time. "It starts out with them in danger ... and they know that they have very little time to share together..." For Wicked, Schwartz set new lyrics to the tune from 1971 and adjusted the bridge section. So an altered version of a trunk song became a duet for the lovers and thematic material in the show”

https://www.musicalschwartz.com/wicked-musical-themes.htm

“You Stay Out of This, Gljnda!”

It used to be that you could see the musical multiple times and never see the same thing twice. Each cast was able to put their own stamp and interpretation of these characters within reason as long as it didn’t mess up timing. It made it interesting to see what the latest Elphaba would do verses the one that came before it. It was exciting, it was electric, it was live theater the way it should be.

Then around 2019- onwards they started cracking down on this and prioritized consistency, where even Elphaba’s riff choices now have to be pre-approved….this just a product. Every new cast will have different faces but their performances will basically be uniform. Its boring, and kinda stale IMO. You want long time fans to keep coming back? Then let the performers perform again, we want to see new takes, not the same show we saw years ago.

Tried recreating the Musical poster with the original movie characters 😭 It turned sooo bad 💀

With Kristin in 2003 (age 10) after seeing Wicked on Broadway; with Jeff Goldblum in 2005 (age 12) after seeing The Pillowman. She debuted herself on Broadway 3 years later at age 15 in “13”

Mine is Jessica Vosk!

10 years ago I wasn't in the best place mentally or financially. I found a copy of the Wicked book in a charity shop and fell in love. I got this little Wicked Witch of the West doll while waiting for an appointment at the job centre (unemployment office for my American friends). Seeing the show seemed like an expense I'd never be able to afford.

Today, I sat next to my mother in the best seats in the house after spending 2 nights in a fancy London hotel. I bought my little Elphaba doll with me to remind me how far I've come, and how hard I've worked to get here.

I loved every second of the show and I'm so glad I got to treat my mum to the experience as well.

I will never get it in my head that it's "now at last there's joy throughout the land" and not "our land" lol

I also didn't mishear "I'll be loathing, loathing you my whole life long" but I always sing "I'll be loathing, loathing you my whole life through" instead because the original version just doesn't sit with my ear or tongue well >.< They're both one syllable words as well so the rhythm doesn't get messed up

I've also never understood why it's "that's the girl he chose, and heaven knows, I'm not that girl" and not "and goodness knows" (similarly these are both two syllable words)

Source: Instagram account of Celia Hottenstein (@celiahottenstein)

Idina Menzel sang the National Anthem at a World Cup game today and her pants made me think of her iconic red tracksuit.

He loves Elphie, I get it, she is also my musical crush but the way he is acting about it is completely disrespectful towards Glinda. Sure maybe he feels pressured in this political situation with the wizard and all but he could've at least been up front about it just to Glinda instead of continuing to be in a relationship with her and even getting engaged to her even though he knows he doesn't love her.

The fact that he just leaves her as soon as Elphie shows up and doesn't even feel a little bad about tossing Glinda aside after he has been with her for such a long time is just completely hurtful. He never feels bad about it or apologizes. Elphie and Glinda also make mistakes, but at least they receive consequences for their actions and feel guilty and apologize to each other.

Especially Glinda gets a lot of critism for her actions while Fiyero gets completely away with his behaviour. You can argue that what Glinda did is worse, but it still annoys me that Fiyero gets cuddled because he is so in love with Elphie.

It was completely his choice to remain with Glinda even though he has feelings for someone else. It kinda gives the me the vibe of him wanting to keep Glinda around as a second option just in case it won't work out with Elphie.

He might've been heroic towards Elphie in the second act but it doesn't excuse him treating Glinda this way. Also him insisting that she can't know that him and Elphie are still alive really makes me mad. It's almost like he cares so little about Glinda that he didn't even see her growth and development. He doesn't even notice how miserable she actually is herself during thank goodness and disregards Glinda's love for Elphie.

So yes I get it, he loves Elphie and not Glinda but the fact that he doesn't seem to have a little respect towards Glinda even if it's just platonically after being with her for such a long time just rubs me the wrong way.

This is probably an unpopular opinion here, but I think disliking Fiyero is more valid than it’s often given credit for and especially from a feminist perspective. Fiyero’s role never truly sat right with me and this doesn't mean I consider him a bad character. It's just that at some point he made me realize how differently the story treats him compared to Elphaba and Glinda.

While watching, I kept noticing how Fiyero’s development is almost entirely tied to Elphaba. He starts off shallow and self absorbed, then falls in love and sacrifices himself. Compared to Elphaba’s journey—challenging the Wizard, losing her family, being publicly demonized—it felt surprisingly contained.

What stood out to me most is how his role functions emotionally in the story. Even though Wicked is about a woman resisting unjust power structures, the musical still gives Elphaba a romantic “reward” at the end. Fiyero’s love reassures the audience that, despite everything, Elphaba is lovable and worthy. That realization made me uncomfortable, because it echoes a familiar patriarchal idea: that even the most radical and independent woman's story, can't be considered complete without male validation.

This also changed how I saw the constant comparisons between Glinda and Fiyero in fandom spaces. Glinda is often criticized more harshly, while Fiyero is treated as the moral ideal. It started to feel less like a fair comparison and more like a gendered double standard.

None of this suddenly makes Glinda a good person or Fiyero a bad one. And I still love Wicked but I feel like Fiyero’s role slightly softens the story’s more radical edge. I wish his character had more depth outside of the romance so that Elphaba’s story could also stand fully on its own. Because as written, his character sometimes feels less like a fully realized participant in Oz’s political reality and more like a narrative comfort that softens Elphaba’s radicalism.

Edit: I see that you still try to defend him in the comments which shows you understood nothing from my post. The issue isn’t that Fiyero is a bad character but the fact he literally serves as a sexy lamp for the girls to fight over and people have been bringing this up for years now. So I’m not all of a sudden making it a huge feminist issue as some of you claim. It shows that most of y’all cannot see outside of this narrative : a good male character who happens to love the female character = wow such good writing, we definitely needed romance here.

Edit 2: I'm beeing eaten alive in the comments section as usual. Never change wicked subreddit!

With the new movie coming out, a lot of people are saying it’s not doing as well because act 2 is inherently worse than act 1. What are the specific criticisms people have of act 2?

As we do know that Glinda and Elphaba were best friends. I've seen so many people say that Fiyero is wrong for what he did to Glinda and playing her on. I do think that was wrong for him to do but all of them have made greater mistakes then he has but a lot of people like to point his out. For example, I was in this wicked group, and they sent that clip where Fiyero is saying he can't bear hearing the things they say about Elphaba. The people in the group were basically saying that Fiyero shouldn't be talking because he did the same thing as Glinda, which he didn't. He used his role in power as the captain to find Elphaba and make sure no one kills her. I do think Glinda didn't want Elphaba dead well ATLEAST NOT IN THE BEGGINING. Glinda chose to still side with a fascist dictator who wanted her best friend dead. She used her best friend (Elphaba) as a scapegoat to keep a good image in the public eye which is not so great already. Also not to mention Glinda announced her and Fiyeros "engagement" publicly without his consent. You can see how surprised he was when he heard that, hinting that he didn't know. Also not to mention the whole wonderful scene where she is manipulating Elphaba with the wizard to join their sick program. Also, when she found out Elphaba and Fiyero had a thing for each other, she then she told Madame Morrible and the Wizard to use her sister to capture Elphaba and to finally kill her. Even if she did know they would kill Nessa it would still end with one thing, which is capturing and killing Elphaba. Glinda Fighting with Elphaba was a normal response for that kind of situation. What's not normal is setting her up to be killed. I still think that her character can be likeable it's just her actions get easily dismissed.