It didn’t take long for BookToker Asia Lin to understand that “Wicked,” the book by Gregory Maguire, would be nothing like the musical she had first seen months earlier.
“It was the first page,” Lin tells TODAY.com, recalling a scene in which Dorothy and her companions discuss a rumor that Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is intersex. “I was like, ‘Wait. Hold on. This was not in the musical at all.’”
Content creator Sara Ribeiro, who grew up listening to “Wicked” in a musical theater-loving family, experienced a visceral shock while reading the book this year.
“(The book) ended up being a lot darker than I thought. I would say within the first 10 to 20%, my jaw was on the floor multiple times. I wasn’t expecting it to be so … graphic,” she says.
With the first part of “Wicked” debuting in theaters Nov. 22 (and the second and final part coming in 2025), TikTokers like Lin and Ribeiro are discovering the novel and sharing their experiences — from surprise to admiration — in real time. “Why didn’t anyone warn me?” Lin asks in a TikTok, echoing many other fans.
Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West”— a revisionist take on L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” — originally published in 1995 and was followed by multiple other books to make a series. “Wicked” the musical made its Broadway debut in 2003.
The book and musical could be distilled to the same plot summary: Behold, the unexpected backstory of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda the Good. But the ways the book and musical convey its themes — like injustice, identity and friendship — is what distinguishes the two.
“They’re both about a young woman named Elphaba — but very different. The best way I can explain is like when your parents would hide vegetables in your food, and you wouldn’t notice it. That’s kind of what they did with the musical,” Meredith Ammons, a content creator, tells TODAY.com.
Whereas the musical hides its political message behind “fluff,” Ammons says, the book “hits you over the head with it.” She continues, “It’s like reading a children’s Bible for the first time versus reading the actual Bible for the first time, and how differently the tones are.”
The plight of Animals — conscious animals — takes center stage in the book, as does Elphaba’s activism. Not so much a side character, the Wizard is rather a full-fledged dictatorial force committing massacres on the hinterlands of Oz and amassing power. While political allegory is the B-plot to “Wicked” the musical, which centers on Glinda and Elphaba’s friendship, it’s the main storyline of Maguire’s book.
Maguire’s “Wicked” doesn’t contain hallmarks from the musical, like a “Popular”-esque union between Glinda and Elphaba. But it takes detours the musical never would have space for — long explanations of religious sects, descriptions of terrain never mentioned in the musical and, well, quite a bit of R-rated content.
For example: Elphaba bites off a midwife’s finger as an newborn; her parents are involved in what is essentially a loving throuple with a Quadling man named Turtle Heart; Fiyero is a child groom married off at 7. Plus, there is inclusion of sexual assault, bestiality, murder, racism and politics.
“Trigger warning for everything. If you can think of it, it’s in here,” Eryn Kieffer, whose multipart read-along of “Wicked” has amassed millions of views on TikTok, said in a video.
Kieffer’s series goes into all the graphic scenes she wasn’t expecting — like the Clock of the Time Dragon’s puppet show or the Philosophy Club scenes, which have become shorthand for the book’s surprising sexual detours.
Among “Wicked” fans, the book’s content is divisive. Kieffer, on her end, said that the sexual content “muddles the plot.”
Ribeiro says she loves the “shock value” in the books and that the unexpected parts were her favorite to read — but ultimately took away from what she considered the “point” of the book.
“I think I was so distracted by all of the weird stuff that was going on that the political aspect of it was overshadowed,” she says.
Meanwhile, TikToker Aynsley Broom worries the focus on salaciousness takes attention from the book’s more powerful parts about the rise of authoritarianism, which she sees as a “mirror” to the news. In the book, the Wizard of Oz is a despot who ostracizes and marginalizes entire classes of Ozians, not to mention Animals.
“I saw a video that was like, ‘(The book) explicitly describes (Elphaba’s) pubic hair.’ And I was like, ‘Not really. The book just said it was purple and then moved on,’” she says. “To me, the stuff people are focusing on is completely missing the message. The message needs to be talked more about than the shocking parts, which to me, weren’t that shocking. Granted, I also read a lot of romance novels.”
In the book, she sees a more substantial offering than the musical — calling the former “a great dinner” and the latter “cotton candy.”
Broom is among the readers who want a more faithful adaptation of Maguire’s “Wicked” than another retelling of the more saccharine musical. “I think people want fluff, and we don’t need more fluff,” she says.
Maguire, on his end, seems at peace with the adaptation. During a 2020 interview pegged to the book’s anniversary, he said the musical’s composer, Stephen Schwartz, presented his vision during a walk in Connecticut, and that he felt they were aligned — that Schwartz understood his book and the moral universe it’s set in.
“I came home and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to let this happen, I don’t care about the money. This is far more in line with why I wrote the book than the movie scripts I’ve read so far,’” he told Broadway World.
Maguire said he was “very happy” with the way Schwartz and book writer Winnie Holzman told the story.
“It made efficient, economic and narrative sense for them to make the story choices that they chose to do, and I applaud it completely. The play is a little less subtle than the novel in some ways. And I wanted the novel to be more ambiguous because that’s the nature of how I was trying to tell my story,” he said.
What TikTokers generally agree on, though, is that “Wicked” the book is certainly not as kid-friendly as “Wicked” the musical.
Creators like TikToker Sal Currie are remarking on their experiences reading the books as kids, and giving a heads up to parents who might be persuaded by the newly rebranded cover.
“My main thing is — it’s not for kids. It’s really, truly not for children. The musical is completely fine for kids. I would not say this book is at all,” Kieffer tells TODAY.com.
Ammons says her mom bought the book when she was a young child. She asked if she could read it.
“She said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And she said, ‘You’ll understand when you’re older,’” she says. Ammons ultimately waited until she was 22 to read Maguire’s novel. “My first reaction was like, ‘Yeah, I’m glad I waited to read this, because my mom was right on this one,’” she says.
Others think reading, and being bewildered by, “Wicked” is a rite of passage: “It’s a canon event for most ‘Wicked’ fans,” one comment on Currie’s post reads. “We must not interfere.”
This post was originally published on here
