On the Magicians season finale

[sholio]

So, the show that I vagueblogged a couple of weeks ago about following via reviews/reactions when I haven't actually watched the show is The Magicians. The season finale aired this week, and basically blew up the fandom a la that Tumblr gif of Troy on Community going for pizza and coming back to find everyone running around screaming and the room on fire. I now have way more thoughts and opinions than I ought to, considering that I've never seen even an episode of this show.

It's also led me to a lot of thinky thoughts about storytelling and how we engage with fictional characters, so I'm going to natter about that under the cut. Loads of spoilers for the current season of The Magicians. Warning for (not personal) discussion of suicide. Also, this post is LONG.


All the context

I'm sure there will be people reading this who aren't familiar with the show, and this is heavily context dependent, so here's the context. Seeing as I haven't actually seen the show, this is all picked up via osmosis/reactions. Anyone who has watched the show, please feel free to jump in with corrections if I got anything wrong.

- The Magicians is a riff on the Narnia/Harry Potter/etc genre of kids' portal fantasy, based on the books by Lev Grossman. One of the main points of the series, as far as I know, is to undermine/subvert the entire idea of portal fantasy worlds and the Chosen One in kidlit. (Which is actually why I've bounced off every one of Grossman's books that I've tried to read, because "All your childhood fantasies were A LIE!!" seems to be his big thing. YMMV on that, obviously.)

- Quentin is the main character, or at least is introduced that way, but since the show/books are all about subverting the Chosen One story, a big part of the plot concerning Quentin (henceforth abbreviated Q to save me from having to type "Quentin" 500 times in this post) has involved Q figuring out that he's not actually the hero of the story.

- The show also deals rather explicitly with storytelling as a theme. Q has been depressed and suicidal his entire life, and used Narnia-like fantasy books as an escape, only to find out that first of all, it's real, and second, it's nothing like the books in a "everything you love sucks, and growing up is about disillusionment" kind of way.

- That being said (and this is where I really just have to go off the fandom's take on it), the show in general seems like the kind of goofball, team-feels ensemble thing with wacked-out plots but good character dynamics that fandom goes for. It's the kind of show where there are musical episodes, alternate timelines, and characters coming back from the dead all the time, the kind of show that does high-drama, ~srs bizness~ plots but that's not actually what it's good at or what anyone is watching it for.

- This season, a major component of the overall arc has been Q's close friend/occasional lover Eliot getting possessed by a body-snatching monster. Eliot's friends trying to rescue/fix him has been a major thing, and Q and Eliot have unfinished business that was interrupted by the body-snatching: Q suggested starting a relationship, Eliot turned him down, but while Eliot's been possessed he's had a lot of time to dwell on regrets and has realized that he wants to try to make it work. Meanwhile Q is desperately trying to save him.

Okay, so all of that is the background (as osmosed by me) for what I still think is one of the most stunningly cruel things that I've ever seen show-writers do to the people watching their show, and I have been betrayed by a LOT of shows over the years.


So here's what they did.

- In the finale, Q is killed off: permanently, with no hope of resurrection, and before he can reunite with now-rescued Eliot, so there's no emotional catharsis there, not even a moment of "oh hey, you're all right!" that the entire season has been building up to, whether or not it ended in a romance.
- His death is framed as a heroic sacrifice with suicidal undertones. In the afterlife, he even asks himself outright if it was suicide or not.
- He also gets to see his friends mourning him at his funeral.
- In the books (which the series is currently only about 2/3 through), he doesn't die. The objective here is simply to shock the viewer by killing off someone who was supposedly narratively safe, on every level - as the protagonist, and as someone who doesn't die in the books.

So, they killed their bisexual, suicidally depressed protagonist, after four seasons, via (arguably) suicide, in a scene that is staged and framed as essentially a suicide fantasy - he sacrifices himself heroically, and gets to watch everyone being sad but basically okay - for pure shock value.

That's bad enough all by itself, but then the creator interviews take it to some next-level audience fuckery:

- The writers have had this planned since before the start of the season, and told the actor, but had a gag rule so he couldn't discuss it with his coworkers. The rest of the cast found out ON MONDAY. They went so far as to include an alternate ending that was filmed, to prevent the cast from knowing what was happening and potentially spoiling it. So basically, the actor knew he was going to be let go, and has known all season, but wasn't allowed to talk about it, including with the people he works with.

- The interview with the showrunners about Q's death is one long AAARGH. Highlights:

• The writers killed off Q because the entire point of the show is removing the white, male protagonist from the spotlight, and they wanted to do it completely, as well as proving that "no one is safe/anyone can die."

• Also, they feel that he's reached the end of his arc as a character and there's nothing else they can think of to do with him. (He's in his early 20s. WTF.)

• Quoting from the interview: "To me, when I look at people who do heroic things, sometimes I question, like, 'That was really heroic, but you clearly aren’t afraid of dying. For whatever reason, you did something that’s so amazing, that I wouldn’t have done, because I’m a fucking coward.'" (So, part of the point of Q's entire arc is that heroism is inherently suicidal, being a hero leads to death, etc.)

• There is no reunion between Q and Eliot, because "In the real world, you don't get to say goodbye."

• Also on the realism front, "you risk losing the trust of your audience if you never ever kill anyone for real."


The actual thinky bits

Okay, thanks for bearing with me through all the background stuff! So, that all happened on Wednesday, and since then I've been reading through a variety of posts on Tumblr and DW and occasionally other sites, all some flavor of extremely upset and hurt, and who can blame them? I've had my fandoms torpedoed by stupid canon decisions, but I don't think it's ever happened to this degree. The fact that he lived and got a much better ending in the books is just the salt sprinkling on the salt sundae.

As a writer, I don't think anything should be categorically off the table, and yeah, that includes having the depressed, queer, suicidal protagonist commit de facto suicide. Actually, I really liked this comment talking about a possible way to reframe Q's death in a way that treats it as an actual suicide. Rather than being gently sad, have his friends be upset and furious! Let the show actually talk about it. Strangely enough I think this does clear away a lot of what feels intellectually dishonest, to me, about this particular ending. As it stands, it's a suicide with the rough edges sanded off, gently smoothed into an idealized fantasy shape - which is completely at odds with the creators' talk about realism and keeping the gritty edginess of things.

You couldn't give the audience the reunion they've been waiting all season for, or Q any hope of resurrection like all the other characters got, because of realism? But you can shine a soft warm glow on the actual circumstances of his death, and end the funeral on a warmly sad note of bonding in grief rather than showing the messiness and anger and misery that actually goes along with losing a friend that way?

It's just dumb, dammit. It's a bait and switch. You can do a dark, gritty, anyone-dies show, but you have to put in the work for it. You can't play the "narrative realism" card 4 seasons into a show with talking rabbits and musical episodes. If you want to be The Wire, you have to be able to write The Wire. And you have to signal to the audience that that's the kind of story you're telling, a little sooner than 4 seasons in, when you blindside everyone by killing off a character that a lot of people identified with.

Okay, so. About that last part. One thing that I'm seeing over and over again in reaction posts to the episode is the devastation of people in fandom who loved Q because they related to him. His entire character type is basically "depressed hot mess of a millennial", after all, which is like ... at least half of Tumblr fandom, and a pretty big swath of the demographic that gets into fantasy shows. And a fantasy-show protagonist who got to be openly bisexual, and deal overtly with insecurity and depression and suicidal thoughts, is something that viewers almost never get to have.

Audience identification and escape isn't the only reason why fiction exists, for sure. And there is ABSOLUTELY a place for the kind of emotional catharsis you get from dark, gritty, anyone-can-die fiction, as opposed to the "things are getting better and people like me can get a happy ending" kind of escapism.

But I hate the mentality that the latter one is the superior kind, and you have to teach people not to over-invest in fictional characters by hurting and upsetting them. Which is really what this kind of death-for-shock-value comes down to, whether it's on purpose or not. People don't get into a show like this the same way they get into a show like Breaking Bad. There are shows you enjoy intellectually and narratively, and shows that you get into with your heart.

And sure, you can lose pivotal characters from a "heart" show, but you really, really don't want to. It's not that characters on a "heart" show should never die. It's that killing them for pure shock value is bound to piss off and alienate a lot of your audience, because they're not here for that.

I feel like there's a fundamental disconnect here, first of all between the kind of story the Magicians writers thought it was and what it actually was, but also between people who invest deeply in characters, and people who don't. I suspect that all the hurt and anger in the fandom is just going to fuel the writers' belief that they made the right decision, because people are talking about the show! You stirred up emotions, and that's what they were trying to do! Even if a lot of those emotions are things like, "Fuck you, you gave me a character like me to identify with and then took him away."

Because people who don't invest heavily in fantasy escapism don't understand why it's important to people who do. Even when they're literally writing a series that's all about emotionally investing in fiction as an escape! It's like the lesson the writers got from all of this is just "Emotionally investing in fiction is juvenile", and now they're out to prove it.

I ran across this post on Tumblr that cuts right to the heart of why those types of stories matter, even within the series itself:

If this [the actual show] was the story that Quentin Coldwater had thrown himself into I’m not sure if he would be able to make it through this. If in Fillory and Furthur, Martin Chatwin sacrificed himself and saw all the people he loved mourning him but moving on, was told that all that pain he carried could be put down now and he could move on and rest finally. How would Quentin deal with that? That message from a story he loved, from a story that saved his life would irreparably damage him and I don’t think he would make it through it. Quentin Coldwater - the volunteer tomato who just kept showing up - would stop showing up.

As a writer, I believe to my core that it is valuable to tell ourselves idealized stories about how we could be, because it gives us something to aspire to, and teaches us how, and gives us hope.

And ... look. That's not the only thing fiction can do, or should do. Not all fiction needs to be aspirational. Not all fiction should be. But clearly, based on the hurt and anger flaming all over the Magicians fandom right now, this was that kind of story for a lot of people. The writers appear to have gotten so stuck on the "white male" aspect of Q's story that they don't seem to have realized that anyone else could identify with him for any reason, let alone that a lot of people were identifying with him as a depressed, queer bisexual.

... And you know, I'm just going to flat out say that all privilege axes aside, I frequently identify with fucked-up "hot mess" characters, and this is one area where the gender balance in fiction has not caught up AT ALL, especially in visual media like TV. When female characters are allowed to be as messy and dirty and angry and ugly as men, then -- I was going to say, then I wouldn't need the male ones anymore, but I don't think even that's true; it's just that I'll have my choice of female or male "hot messes" to choose from. Let's not go all the way out to the point where it's only considered valid to identify with a character if you happen to match on privilege and identity. I like what I like. I identify with who I identify with.

(ETA: After I posted this, I went on Tumblr and happened to run into a post on Bucky Barnes as a target of emotional catharsis precisely because he's a straight white dude: he's not "us" for a large number of people in fandom and therefore emotionally safer to inflict torture upon. And while we could argue all day about whether that's actually true, whether it's only true in certain instances and for certain people, and so on, that's a thing too - sometimes it's easier to identify with a character going through something terrible precisely because they are not "like us.")

None of this negates the fact that it's important to have representation (it is!), and that there are a whole bunch of issues surrounding killing off marginalized characters because of their history of being treated as disposable in fiction (as the Magicians writers are currently learning, I guess), but it also doesn't automatically make the inverse true: that white male characters are safe to kill off because you won't hurt anyone by doing so, and the only people invested in them deserve to be hurt.

You get to identify with the characters you identify with.

That being said, on the one hand, what the Magicians writers are trying to do is something I'm narratively in favor of (not revolving the show around the Chosen One, the Straight White Hero), but what they seem to have actually done is gotten too hung up on the idea of That Guy to realize that they weren't writing him.

In fact, as another Tumblr post points out, killing off Q on the grounds that he's a classic white male protagonist recontextualizes the entire story, and not in a good way:

The thing about Q dying, in the way that he does, and through the lens that they’re framing it in the interviews, is that it changes the whole show for me. I thought I was watching a show that was a fucking revolution, a fantasy show that didn’t need a typical straight white protagonist, that had transcended the idea entirely. Said goodbye to him back in season 1, episode 1. Never even introduced him at all.

But instead, the whole time, it was actually about the straight white protagonist. And I don’t mean Quentin. I mean the concept. The concept of the Leading Man, who battles the demons and is brave and gets the girl and all that tired, boring nonsense. The theme was always him, even if he wasn’t on the screen.

The way they’re framing having been “so bad, killing the safe guy”, changes so much of what I’ve loved about the show.

I loved that they didn’t need that protagonist. That, instead, they had this nerdy, depressed, queer, loving, vulnerable mess of a gorgeous human leading the story. No straight white protagonist necessary. Never existed. Even if Q had to find out for himself that he doesn’t fit that mold - that he’s read all his life about - we ourselves never got that stereotype. Q learning that heroes aren’t always gonna look like the ones you read about, not always gonna look like him, is his season 1/early 2 arc and it’s perfect.

If the whole point was that Q's not the hero, then having Q sacrifice himself in a hero moment and then implying in interviews that the first four seasons were all about him as a really weird way to go about it. There's also a post around somewhere that points out, if you didn't want to tell a story about That Guy (the classic straight, white, male hero), then why didn't you pick a story to tell that wasn't about That Guy in the first place? (As the above Tumblr post discusses, they kind of did do that ... until they didn't.)

Anyway ... you can take apart the idea of the Chosen One/the Straight White Hero in other (and to me, far more narratively satisfying) ways than just by setting someone up as the archetype and then killing them. I mean, sure, you CAN do that. I've run into versions of it that really worked, e.g. there's an example in Jessica Jones, and Agents of SHIELD had a good one (though also incredibly divisive in the fandom).

But generally speaking, I think "You thought you were a hero but you're not; and now you're dead" is the simplest and yeah, the safest way you can run with that plot. It's not my favorite iteration of it. I'm glad that deconstructions of that sort of thing are getting traction, but the version that enthralls me best and harks back to the aspirational thing I was talking about is not "you're not the hero" but rather "everyone's a hero, there are different ways of being heroes; learn to let someone else carry the story." Which again, is what they WERE doing with Q, right up until the story took a sudden left turn and he died.

I feel that the narratives in which That Guy is either completely absent and other kinds of characters get to shine, or the ones in which That Guy gets an out (other than death) are ... well, okay, they're the version I like best, personally, because I'm a fucking optimist. But I also think that if you're really trying to hold up a mirror to That Guy in real life and try to reflect it in a better direction, giving them an "out" other than death is a better way to go about it. Not saying "There is no place for you in this story" but instead, "Here's a different place for you in this story so someone else can be the hero for awhile." Quite frankly, making that particular point simply by killing off That Guy is more revenge porn than anything else. Which, y'know, there's a place for. I like it, sometimes. But I don't love it.

I mean, let's face it, the story that TPTB were trying to tell in Magicians 4x13 is not one that's up my alley, narratively speaking. But the real issue isn't so much that they were telling it, it's that everyone who didn't care for that particular story was baited into it. Clearly, from the shocked and betrayed reaction of the fandom, most people didn't think it was that kind of show. And just as clearly, from the care they took to cover up the spoilers about Q's death, to the point of lying to the cast, TPTB didn't want the viewers to ever catch on that it wasn't that kind of show until blindsiding them with it.

I almost want to say there's something downright sociopathic about that, even though, for the record, I don't think the writers are actually sociopaths. I'm just not sure they were taking their audience's humanity into account. All writers manipulate their audience's emotions and expectations, of course. Surprise twists do not, by themselves, indicate a lack of respect for the audience; in fact, most of my very favorite narratives are twisty and surprising. But there's a fundamental lack of empathy in this particular kind of twist ending (bait them in, make them care, turn their love for the character into a weapon against them). Your audience are people, not pieces on a chessboard. TPTB appeared to be subverting the story in a very different way than the subversion they eventually went with, and what they did, and the way they did it, was just ... cruel.

And ESPECIALLY because it involved taking a queer, bisexual character and framing his death in a way that (unintentionally or not, and I think it's mostly unintentionally) echoes a classic suicide fantasy: the world is better off without you, your death has meaning, your loved ones will appreciate you after you're gone but your death won't break them. I think that's the main reason why I'm still dwelling on this as much as I am, days later, given that I'm not even IN this fandom. What makes this such a stunningly insensitive trick to play on your audience is not just that you tricked them; I've had that bait-and-switch thing happen to me in other fandoms (see: White Collar, or why I will never trust Jeff Easton again), and it's not fun, but this might be the most blatantly infuriating example of it that I've ever seen. It's just a perfect storm of DNW: that they dangled incredibly rare representation in front of their audience (a queer, mentally ill lead of a fantasy show) and then took it away in the worst possible way; that they also jerked around the cast in a particularly egregious way; that they are framing it in interviews in a way that seems to indicate that they never understood what their audience -- at least the fannish slice of their audience -- was getting out of their show in the first place, and they don't want to, along with an incredibly odious take on heroism and death and just ... everything.

AUGH.

Let me close by rounding up a bunch of links that I have open in tabs, in which various people talk about the issues with the episode. I'm just going to throw them out there without context because this post is nearly 4000 words long, and there were other things I meant to do tonight than write an epically long meta post about a show I don't even watch!

Oh wait, but this post has a point that particularly resonated with me. Talking about mirror neurons, which reflect what other people are feeling:

https://medium.com/@regalmiscreant/an-open-letter-to-those-awaiting-a-queer-story-with-a-happy-ending-c69fcdb213b3

But that empathy isn’t just produced for the other person. It allows you to give yourself compassion, too.

When we see ourselves in other people — when we look at people who look like us, who feel like us, who talk like us — and we relate to them, and we feel them looking back, our feelings of fondness and passion and affection for them reflect back onto us. We mirror that kindness we have for other people like us onto ourselves.

And, in that way, we are in danger of mirroring those negative messages onto ourselves, too.

I just ... I really like the idea of learning to love yourself by learning to love fictional people like you.

Anyway. Other posts to read -

Articles and such:

https://medium.com/@greywash/on-fannishness-privilege-and-a-whole-other-grab-bag-of-entitled-millennial-bullshit-81ea4148a6d0

https://medium.com/@melkress/im-not-sure-what-i-m-to-say-i-ll-say-it-anyway-responsibility-and-the-magicians-6b2cba03a3f9

http://www.stopitshow.org/2019/04/quentin-coldwater-is-bisexual-did.html

https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/Why-Quentin-Death-Magicians-Wrong-46050057

https://medium.com/@emmacmillan/tragedy-isnt-beautiful-a-reaction-to-4x13-of-the-magicians-98c9cd34ed0d

http://phenixxgaming.com/2019/04/22/the-magicians-season-4-finale-infuriates-fanbase/


Tumblr posts:

https://gallifrey-via-pylea.tumblr.com/post/184299652080/did-the-writers-get-that-quentin-wasnt-the

https://coronation-eyes.tumblr.com/post/184298533140/this-whole-thing-is-a-great-example-why-shows-that

http://the-maura.tumblr.com/post/184303543219/there-is-one-point-ive-been-fixated-on-since-i

https://peachesareaguysbestfried.tumblr.com/post/184301558305/so-ive-finally-collected-my-thoughts-on-the

https://scarhoax.tumblr.com/post/184333701824/i-stopped-watching-at-the-end-of-season-one-bc-i

Comments

[cesperanza]

This was a good post. And yeah, I think this was really a terrible thing to do to people and proves again, (again, again!) that you can't trust any canon, tbh. At least on the AO3 we have to warn for bullshit like this. But TPTB still are miles and miles away from getting how people read their stories, and in this case I think the cluelessness was cruel and irresponsible.

[cathexys]

Agree, great post. However, as someone who finally made it through the first episode and is somewhere in the middle of season two, I loathe Q. To me he's exactly the straight white entitled dude the showrunners saw him as. (I know fandom cathects what they want, but OMG everyone in this show is just kinda horrid and I hatewatch it at about the level of Girls without the brilliantly smart moments that kept me going in that show).

And in the end, it's Ces's and my refrain: we're too old :) Seriously, if this is a millennial show, I can see why I can't get it.

Anyway, really smart thinky thoughts. (And the showrunner's fuckery is up there with Lexa's death and the lying around it...)

[sholio]

Thanks!

I feel like a big part of the disconnect does probably come down to not really seeing your audience as people, and therefore getting too invested in manipulating the story to surprise them without really caring about the emotional impact it'll have. The objective is to get people talking about it. Which is actually part of the appeal on some shows, e.g. the Game of Thrones type, or the Black Mirror type of Netflix shows, where the whole point is to make people gasp in shock. But that just doesn't work on some shows, especially when it means totally screwing over your audience when they thought they were getting into something else entirely.

[sciatrix]

As another person who was kind of watching the fandom, and enjoying the meta, and thinking about maybe picking the show up even though I also bounced very hard off the books and in fact strongly associate them with the painful end of a friendship...

...and then has watched all this unfold...

It feels sickening to watch. And it's sickening in part because the specific marginalizations that Quentin has apparently been painted with are marginalizations that don't work in terms of open hostility; they're marginalizations that work in terms of forced invisibility.

Quentin's queer because he is bisexual? Well, maybe the writers knew and acknowledged him as queer, but there are a few bits and bobs I've seen around that imply that TPTB thought of him as a straight man experimenting, and that's why they disposed of him--and that is a key central form of biphobia, the one that hits bi people with all the traumas any queer person can get, and then hits them with the central uncertainty of their welcome as a real queer person. The writers have re-enacted a central biphobic trauma for the audience and congratulated themselves on doing so, and written a world for themselves in which that biphobic trauma is not an unjust trauma but instead is a tenet of How The World Truly Is.

Quentin's disabled because mental health? You'd be surprised how many people specifically rule anxiety and depression out of disabilities, including psychiatric disabilities. The nature of the way the writers treat their choices with respect to his suicide implies that they do not understand what depression is, what mental illness is, and that he was correct to commit suicide, that the world is explicitly better off without Quentin: and again, this plays explicitly into the pain of this kind of trauma. It re-enacts this trauma, having invited the viewer along for the ride, and it says: yes, this is how the world Truly Is, everything you feared and dreaded and fought against is totally true.

It's a violation on a level I usually associate with psychiatric health professionals using their position to harm clients, and I say that because given the subjects of the show it feels like the show went out of its way to play up to the particular audiences who have these particular sore spots. It horrifies me. And it's coated in such a self-satisfied coating of Wokeness that I'm still reeling even by contrast.

I mean, for me--I wasn't--I didn't watch the show, but then again, I am queer and for many people, I don't count; I am currently not in a great mental health place and I am doing a whole lot of trying to dig out of it, as I have been doing for some years; and one of the things in the fandom that was drawing me in even as I'm completely exhausted without a lot of time for fandom is that constant fandom thread of learning compassion for a trauma survivor who doesn't yet conceptualize that for himself. It's huge in the meta that has been floating helpfully over my feeds. And this ending, this says: "actually, you were foolish to feel compassion for this traumatized person; this was the best way we could think of to end this story." If you're trying to use the media as a way to learn and externalize compassion for the fucked-up parts of yourself, that hits so hard. But the thing is, that's one of the ways that we as humans process Shit That Happens To Us: we tell stories about it, and we use the externality of a character who is us and isn't to practice feeling compassion without facing down all the parts of ourselves we can't stand.

I think about this next to, say, GOTG--also full of dumbass disasters coping with trauma with varying levels of unacceptable!--and I think about what would happen if some theoretical GOTG3 came out guns blazing with the theoretical movie decision that, say, Gamora or Rocket were irredeemable people whose past sins can never be canceled out by their future actions, and I feel physically ill. You know?

[kore]

Yeah, I think the whole collision between "We killed off the safe white male character!" and "You killed off the QUEER MENTALLY ILL/DISABLED CHARACTER" is, just as you say, TPTB not seeing Quentin as queer (despite....all the PR they did about it apparently) or mental illness as an actual disability. Which is again whack because they have him go through the whole litany of how it fucked up his life right before he gets taken to the wake. But no! apparently that was all, IDEFK, something that could be fixed with a song.

The writers have re-enacted a central biphobic trauma for the audience and congratulated themselves on doing so, and written a world for themselves in which that biphobic trauma is not an unjust trauma but instead is a tenet of How The World Truly Is.

That is, unfortunately, an excellent point. (And one nasty thing that quasi-supports it is they were really careful to suddenly resurrect his relationship with Alice, presumably for the Tragedy Points -- they just found true love again and now he's gone! -- but also to establish that the real romance in his life was heterosexual.)

GOTG is a really good comparison point, too, both in terms of seeing people as redeemable, AND in the tone -- veering from zany to serious, with the possibility of some real darkness but darkness is not the overall tone.

[sholio]

one of the things in the fandom that was drawing me in even as I'm completely exhausted without a lot of time for fandom is that constant fandom thread of learning compassion for a trauma survivor who doesn't yet conceptualize that for himself. It's huge in the meta that has been floating helpfully over my feeds. And this ending, this says: "actually, you were foolish to feel compassion for this traumatized person; this was the best way we could think of to end this story." If you're trying to use the media as a way to learn and externalize compassion for the fucked-up parts of yourself, that hits so hard. But the thing is, that's one of the ways that we as humans process Shit That Happens To Us: we tell stories about it, and we use the externality of a character who is us and isn't to practice feeling compassion without facing down all the parts of ourselves we can't stand.

YES THIS. And it's like, sure, that's not the only thing fiction can do, and not all fiction is about that. But it's one very important thing that fiction does do. And from what I was getting from the fandom, it's something that was an important aspect of the show for a lot of people in the fandom - the "coping and getting better and learning compassion for yourself" thing, the same way that it's a big thing for people watching GOTG. Having it turn out that the writers' priorities were so far in a different direction that they ended up completely writing it out of the show, and writing the opposite in its place, is a total kick in the teeth for a lot of people who didn't need that.

Anyway, good points all around.

[cesperanza]

This. This exactly.

[kutsuwamushi]

I was just considering trying out this show a few days ago. I'm glad I didn't.

[recessional]

Interestingly I'm in the same boat as someone outside the fandom watching, except that the person I'm primarily watching the show through.....is going "....guys this was always this kind of show. 'Magic comes from pain' IS THE PREMISE. S1 had a graphic rape scene. What did you think you were watching."

Soooo I'm by no means convinced that they didn't write exactly the kind of story that viably ends that way, and that a lot of fandom wasn't straight up sticking their fingers in their ears.

[kore]

Mmmm no. Two other main characters, as in names in the opening credits, died, and still have major parts on the show. Several minor characters died and came back. The showrunners said in interviews they were specifically unhappy with the perception that death didn't stick, and they wanted to change that with this death. So they were really violating their own setup. Everyone EXPECTED Quentin to die. We just thought that it was highly probably he would still be on the show. The permanence combined with the very, very weird send-off is what's upsetting people. And it's not as grimdark as "Magic comes from pain." It's often a very whacky, zany show, with darker parts, but it's not magical Game of Thrones.

[toujours_nigel]

S1's rape scene is actually one of the reasons I stuck with the show, because of the way it dealt with the Pure Nightmare of it without being titillating, and later stuck with consequences and grief unfolding over the next season and change. As late as S4 the woman concerned is allowed both a continuing fragility and to assert that she's processing and moving not past but through the pain.
Q's death was... playing into tropes of suicidality in a deeply awful way, because hey, his death did fix the world, and his friends are sad but not devastated.
Obviously YMMV.

[longmagpieroads]

This is a great summary. Thank you so much for writing it!

[sholio]

Thank you! <3

[amalthia]

loved your post. I think you summed up why I wasn't happy with this season finale. :( I don't know why these shows try to be like Game of Thrones, I think someone needs to tell them it's okay to be different...

[sholio]

It's okay to give characters happy endings! Especially characters in a demographic who don't often get happy endings on TV. SIGH.

[rydra_wong]

If the whole point was that Q's not the hero, then having Q sacrifice himself in a hero moment and then implying in interviews that the first four seasons were all about him as a really weird way to go about it.

Yeah, this is one thing that puzzles me, as another non-watcher. If the goal is to de-centre Q (as the White Male Protagonist, ignoring his other qualities) -- telling a story where Q kills himself to save everybody else and then they all mourn him is still a story centred on Q. Maybe they're going to centre other characters in future plotlines, but they haven't done so in this one.

"Hamlet" doesn't "de-centre" the character of Hamlet just because he dies at the end!

To actually de-centre the White Male Protagonist, you'd have to centre someone else -- have the big season finale turn out to be all about Margo's heroic actions and decisions, for example.

It's like the only way they can imagine to "de-centre" the White Male Protagonist is ...still to tell a story about the White Male Protagonist (just, arguably, a shitty and damaging story).

[kore]

Yeah, and not only that, altho non-watchers probably didn't pick it up -- they sidelined nearly ALL the other most powerful magicians, some of them women, so it just had to be Q who went with Alice (the actual most powerful magician, who was reduced to screaming and being dragged off by a guy because Q said so) to do this one thing. One woman was lampshaded as being an indestructible magic-less vessel a monster could possess (said monster was killed off about 10 minutes in), one woman went totally OOC to make sure her brand-new boytoy recovered from a spell rather than help her platonic soulmate, and so on....there was this big scene of "communal magic" at the end that was supposed to be uplifting and important, but it was really still so the one white male guy could do his thing and rescue everyone with one great big heroic gesture. Which really hasn't been what the show has been about.

[kore]

YEP, as someone who has been watching the show since the beginning, you absolutely nailed it, particularly

That being said (and this is where I really just have to go off the fandom's take on it), the show in general seems like the kind of goofball, team-feels ensemble thing with wacked-out plots but good character dynamics that fandom goes for. It's the kind of show where there are musical episodes, alternate timelines, and characters coming back from the dead all the time, the kind of show that does high-drama, ~srs bizness~ plots but that's not actually what it's good at or what anyone is watching it for.

I even just saw an article about this before the finale blowup, that what the show really does best are one-off high-concept eps. The musical "episodes" started out with something that was more or less a silly joke in S1, became more serious with a couple of songs in S2, was really well-done in S3 (a tribute to Queen/Bowie) and the very best episode this season was an all-musical one about a woman's desert visionquest. The third season stumbled pretty badly because (I think) they tried to be more Dark and Serious, and the fourth season has been pretty much everyone waiting for Eliot to get un-possessed because he's one of the best actors on the show. It kinda reminds me of Buffy and Whedon famously saying "Buffy happy, show good. Buffy in pain, show better." Really, not necessarily.

And a big part of what's upsetting the fandom is -- yes, on this show, people die and come back all the time! Two main characters have stayed (and one even got a dual part)! And apparently the showrunners got upset that the fans felt, on the evidence, death didn't "stick," and so therefore their show was not Srs Bsns, I guess. The whole thing that the showrunners and actor had supposedly agreed he would die, and that then he couldn't tell anyone else in the cast and crew, really, really made people unhappy. Especially because Eliot's actor talked a lot about his character's love for Q and what it meant and obviously had no idea what was going on. So it's not just the "no one is safe" thing, but "we've built up these conventions to make you think this character is safe, but SURPRISE! we're going to change them just for him, and claim no one is safe." That's kind of bullshit. There was a dummy scene in the script after the big wake scene they apparently filmed, for God's sake, where he came back. But it wasn't until after filming was done that everyone else learned, oh yeah, Quentin's gone for good. There have been plenty of examples I can think of where a character gets a secret motivation (one I know about is who was the mole on Dark Matter S1) or the actor gets a head-up before they die, but as far as I know this one is pretty fucking out there. And from the many interviews that immediately dropped after the finale, they absolutely wanted that shock and awe effect.

As you say, that really lacks empathy on a bunch of levels.

[glorious_spoon]

Ugh, yeah, this is one of those shows that I was thinking about getting into after my current fandom obsession wanes, but as a chronically depressed bisexual person I think I'm gonna have to pass.

And it's not even that I particularly mind grimdark gritty death scenes; it's the bait and switch aspect and (especially) the narrative framing of it as a suicide fantasy playing out on screen that makes me queasy to think about. I mean, I watched Black Sails, which is a show about profoundly damaged queer people and the power of stories. A lot of beloved characters die in that show; some of them get righteous heroic deaths, some of them get shitty meaningless deaths, one of them gets an ambiguous maybe-death, maybe-not narrated through the lens of a notorious liar, and none of them pissed off the fandom like this has. And some of it is that it's very clearly a grimdark anyone-can-die show from the first episode, but a lot of it is that the writers understood the kind of story they were telling in a way that the writers of The Magicians evidently didn't.

As you say, it seems like they either didn't get or didn't care why people were invested in the show, so they're taking how upset the fandom is as proof that they did a good job, which, like... no. It's not actually that hard to emotionally devastate people with a story if you pull a bait-and-switch like this, and it's also not good writing.

(And ugh, killing off the white male character in a way that explicitly centers his death as heroic is the exact opposite of de-centering white male characters, ffs.)

ETA: And also, the way they're going 'people are upset! that means we succeeded!' indicates that they don't understand the difference between viewers being upset in the sense of 'that character death made me cry and I'm going to wallow in sadfeels and reblog sad gifsets about it and cry some more' and 'oh fuck you'. You want the former; you don't want the latter.

[sholio]

And also, the way they're going 'people are upset! that means we succeeded!' indicates that they don't understand the difference between viewers being upset in the sense of 'that character death made me cry and I'm going to wallow in sadfeels and reblog sad gifsets about it and cry some more' and 'oh fuck you'.

Yeah, I think this is critical, because you don't see people doing this for shows like Game of Thrones or other grimdarkish, anyone-can-die shows. It's "aaaaa!" and "NOOOO" and "HOW COULD YOU" and "You killed my bae!!!" and sometimes even "Fuck you, show, I'm done" - but not with this level of widespread betrayal and outrage in the fandom, except in cases where they really done fucked up.

I was going to say it's mostly about genre signaling, but it's not even that necessarily, because Yondu's death wasn't a "throw the canon against the wall and quit" moment for most people either, and that was an incredibly sad and sudden death in a canon that doesn't usually kill off characters. (Er, prior to Infinity War, anyway.) But I went back and saw that damn movie twice more because I wanted to suffer. It didn't feel arbitrary and cruel in the same way at all.

Any death is going to wreck some viewers - I've been in plenty of fandoms that killed people off and caused some people to nope out. But the ones that I remember with a particular feeling of betrayal were usually a combination of "not that kind of show" and really badly done and/or arbitrary, and this is just ... yeah, plus several extra layers of ick for the suicide framing.

[michelel72]

I've never seen the show and have barely seen the fallout myself, but you've put into words a lot of what I've been trying to express about "realism" in various narratives, so thank you for all of this.

[alessandriana]

WOW, okay, I had been considering watching this show but that is a hard nope for me on multiple fronts. Thanks for the warning!

[monanotlisa]

Thank you for cut-tagging! One of my friends spoiled me in two ranting posts, and it's annoying on principle.

(I don't mind in this case, because certain, uh, narrative elements I always want a warning for. But still.)

[kore]

(ohghod, if this was me, I'm so sorry. I try to be careful about cutting spoilers but I also get overexcited and just blab)

[ceitie]

I'm asofterhibou on tumblr, and I'm going to come back later to write a fuller response to this, but I just wanted to say thank you for writing this post. I'm aware that I can get over-invested in fictional characters, and I've been burned by shows before, so I was actually surprised by how hard this one hit me. I'm over thirty. This is not my first rodeo.

I think it was because the show went so hard with the Q/Eliot romance that I thought, surely this show, which is so trope-savvy and references Buffy and usually deals pretty well with queer themes, wouldn't play up this romance right before killing one of the characters, right? Like, they know about Tara dying in Buffy and Clexa and Bury Your Gays, right? They killed two minor LGBT characters in the first season and got backlash for it. This show is really fucking meta. They know. The show posted honest-to-god ship fanvids on their official twitter, they let the actors talk about how the characters loved each other. I was hopeful.

As a bisexual woman who identifies pretty hard in various ways with both Q and Eliot, this ending and the way the showrunners have addressed it felt like getting slapped in face, hard. And then being told smugly, "Didn't we do such a good job? Don't you appreciate how well we tricked you? You should have known better than to think you were going to get a happy story. Nope, you get death and tragedy and Fantasy Brokeback Mountain. And by the way, that character you identify with as also being bisexual? No, he might have been in a fifty-year relationship with a guy, but it didn't count. This is the best ending to his story, you're just not mature enough to see it. You should have known better."

And that's not even getting into the issues with mental illness and suicide that you addressed so well here. Anyway, I'll come back and try to be more coherent tomorrow. Just wanted to say thank you for writing this and laying it out so clearly, especially for a show you don't watch.

[sholio]

Oh my gosh, okay first of all - I know this is a total digression from an incredibly serious comment, but I had no idea that asofterhibou was you! I saw your username in my comment notifications and was like, WOW, I remember them from SGA fandom, long time no see, HI THERE!! And then found out that I've been sharing various fandoms with you for awhile now on Tumblr and AO3. XD So, um ... hi, again, now that I've connected your pseuds?

Anyway, now that I got that out of my system - I'm so, so sorry the show kicked you in the teeth like that. I know that I'm coming into all of this secondhand as a non-viewer and therefore don't have either the full set of context or the emotional investment that the fandom does, but just the secondhand impressions are such a miserable mess. This really does feel like one of the cruelest things that I've ever seen a show do to its fans, particularly since it was its marginalized, vulnerable fans who were hit the hardest - just the combination of deliberately leading the viewers on, and utter tonedeafness to the implications of their writing, and the interviews compounding the problem. It's so cruelly, pointlessly gratuitous, all of it, when there are so many other things they could've done that would have been more true to the characters and world they'd established.

*hugs if you want them*

[wembley]

- That being said (and this is where I really just have to go off the fandom's take on it), the show in general seems like the kind of goofball, team-feels ensemble thing with wacked-out plots but good character dynamics that fandom goes for.

In order to warn people that might check the show out anyway based on this description, despite this finale:

This show -- at least in its first season, because that's all I've seen -- is INCREDIBLY. DARK. It is dark from the first minute of the first episode. This is conveyed through the lighting, the costume choices, and the spoilers below.

SPOILERS:

It starts with Quentin, the main character, in a mental hospital (not sure if he tried to commit suicide?). As we continue, the show has infrequent but memorable and graphic gore (eyeball stuff, severed hands, spurting blood, cut throats, the whole shebang). I just mainlined the first season and had to nope out at the graphic, on-screen rape of one of the female characters.

It's not just "your childhood is a lie," it is Dark & Grim Harry Potter Plus Narnia. Like a Game of Thrones deconstruction of both Harry Potter and the Narnia books.

It is not Stargate. It is not Legends of Tomorrow. It is not for me right now. It is for a lot of people! It might be for you! It might not. It does have humor! The most likable characters get a lot of funny lines -- bitchy, catty funny. Nearly everyone is mean. Sometimes in a funny way. But it's dark. Maybe this changes in later seasons, idk. But I just wanted to... put that out there.

ETA: Also, I'm super glad I spoiled myself for this season finale because if I'd stuck with it, I probably would have been super pissed, and I don't blame people for feeling hurt and betrayed. No one was betrayed by a tonal switch, though. But people hurt and arguing, "I thought this show with lots of resurrections and an actual bi male character would a) not permanently kill him and b) be smarter with regards to people with suicidal ideation in the audience", sure, absolutely.

[ginger_rude]

"I thought this show with lots of resurrections and an actual bi male character would a) not permanently kill him and b) be smarter with regards to people with suicidal ideation in the audience", sure, absolutely.


nutshell, yes. Which is why the showrunner interviews were so infuriating (well, one reason): they steadfastly ignore that point and keep answer as though the only complaint was "we're so sad you killed off this main character we loved, how will the show ever survive without him." And that the show is "whimsical but dark:" well, yes, we -knew- that, that's why we were fans. We've been watching since the beginning; some of these interviews make it seem like maybe you haven't?

they've also said explicitly that they want to make it dark but not hopeless. I gather now that S5 is about closer emotional bonding in the face of grief, and that's...helpful; but they do really tend toward grimdark for the sake of it, and honestly that shit gets old. Especially for queer characters. They will never make up for what they did on that score, even if they give Eliot a replacement goldfish boyfriend that lasts to the end of the series. Still won't be a main character and relationship that was developed over four years in all its complexity, and still killed off a bi character without even acknowledging it as such (because that would ruin "we killed the boring straight white male hero, because diversity" angle they keep trying to throw)

[nic]

I am very late to this post. But...

Thank you. There is so much in your post, and the comments below, that resonate with me. It's a few weeks on now and I am moving into acceptance, but the saddest thing of all is that I feel like I have "lost my show". I can't ever trust it again. I can't go back. (I've watched it from the beginning; which was 4 years, and the last 2 seasons I was completely invested in the characters.)

And now, all these weeks later, with no apology from the showrunners at all? I am leaning into the theory that it was deliberately sadistic and manipulative. They wanted to shock and hurt the audience. And yes, they did that, but I think they have achieved it at the expense of their own show because I, and many others, are now out.

I probably will watch it but with detachment and I certainly won't be paying for it. Which is a shame, because up until this point, I wanted to throw them money to keep entertaining me.

[adjovi]

I think what stood out to me the most in your excellent essay was this point: If the whole point was that Q's not the hero, then having Q sacrifice himself in a hero moment and then implying in interviews that the first four seasons were all about him as a really weird way to go about it. There's also a post around somewhere that points out, if you didn't want to tell a story about That Guy (the classic straight, white, male hero), then why didn't you pick a story to tell that wasn't about That Guy in the first place?

Because THIS exactly. The whole first season was telling the story of Q recognizing he was not THAT GUY. The scene where he realizes it is Alice, not him, who is the superior Magician and should be the one to face the Beast, whelp. That is what drew me into the show for good. Because of that journey, of not being the chosen one, was actually really powerful. And, the finale (and pretty much S4 where they were beating us over the head with this message, so much so they devoted an entire episode to this, just seemed--weird to me). If I'm being honest, S4 as a whole was such a let down from the momentum of past seasons. Having Q spiral downwards, having none of his friends notice or comment on this, was painful to watch. And, I kept hoping that would be rewarded in some way--a reunion with Eliot, even if it wasn't falling back into each other's arms, but at the very least working towards something--I stupidly held on to the hope that was the point of all that misery. Just to find out that there was no point.

[sholio]

if you didn't want to tell a story about That Guy (the classic straight, white, male hero), then why didn't you pick a story to tell that wasn't about That Guy in the first place?

YES!! And again with the caveat that this is solely based on what I've soaked up via people who have watched the show and not on personal viewing, I feel like the show tried to do two subversions simultaneously, and ended up falling flat on both because they're mutually exclusive. Subversion One: have the Chosen One White Dude learn to be a team player and step aside to let others take the spotlight, so he basically ends up as fucked-up teammate #3 (or whatever) instead of the hero. Subversion Two: draw attention to his Chosen-One-ness by making it a big deal and kill him off so someone else turns out to be the real hero.

You! Can't! Do! Both!

I also feel that if you're going to do #2 (and I have seen it done successfully!), the time to do it is the first season, not the fourth. You can pull off that arc over a few episodes, but by the time you get around to season four and that character has gotten as much development as everybody else, especially on an ensemble show, it just doesn't make sense anymore.

It sounds like the show up until season four was doing a really lovely job with #1, and then suddenly veered off in a direction that made it clear the writers didn't even understand their own show or have any respect for people who were emotionally invested in it. I'm so sorry your show did you dirty like that. :(

[ginger_rude]

Very, very belatedly:

Agree with everything. A lot of people have written their takes; I think yours most thoroughly covers all the points and more. You--and the tumblr post you're quoting--really hit the nail on the head regarding how tone deaf the creators have been about how a) Quentin stopped being either the hero protagonist or That Guy a long time ago b) there were many other ways to continue to reinvent that wheel than simply killing him off c) he was never a typical straight white male protagonist to begin with.

It irks. And yes, the showrunner interviews have been arguably the worst part. McNamara in particular needed to learn the phrase "The work speaks for itself" and just stop talking.

Or, well--

I get, at this point, that they're wanting to deal with grief, and that's...fine, in itself, and the promo suggests at least some bonding between some of the characters who haven't had a lot of emotional screen time together, and in another context I'd see that as potentially good writing.

But they keep blatantly ignoring that there's any other aspect to this other than "well, sometimes, life is just like that."

Also, all of it's been done; there's nothing new under the sun. Especially since they seem to hint that Julia can take his place as the lead; well, she was already a co-protagonist (if such there was) way back at the beginning, and honestly, an SFF show with a straight (apparently) white privileged female protagonist? Gee, never saw that before. (How old is Buffy now? 25 years?)

as for dealing with grief "not like on TV," Gamble and McNamara, meet Six Feet Under. I'm sure there's plenty more where that came from.

What you -don't- see much, especially on SFF, of is a suicidally depressed main character who comes to terms with life and keeps going, and has a same sex relationship with another main character. Especially male.

anyway.

[sholio]

Yeah ... I think this is why I keep circling back around to read and reblog meta on this show's ending even though I really wasn't in the fandom, as such. I keep feeling like I want to understand, from a writing perspective, but there is nothing really to understand except that the writers seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the show they were writing.

... And that's not something I say lightly! In fact, I usually nope out when fans start talking like that, because what it usually comes down to is "my ship didn't get together" or "I didn't like what the character did in this episode." But this goes way beyond that; based on everything I've read and the way the fandom is still hurt and betrayed about it, this is flat-out "I don't think the writers understood the show they were writing." There's only one other show in my personal fannish experience that I can think of off the top of my head that was such a fundamental mismatch between the show and what the head writer apparently thought he was writing, and that's White Collar, but that's a much less extreme example since it didn't also come bundled up with the queer and mental-health issues.

Anyway, yeah, UGH. I'm sorry your show did that to you.