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On the Magicians season finale
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:
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:
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
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
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
no subject
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.
no subject
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. :(
no subject
Accurate. And they did it very explicitly way back in season one, to the point where Quentin -tells- Alice he's not the hero, she's better at magic, and gives her the magic phlebotinum to defeat the bad guy (sheep god semen, which...that kind of show. why it had a cult following). and then -she- dies, and he brings her back, as in the book, and it doesn't go well, and so on and so on and so on.
By S4, I not think Quentin was the protagonist anymore--it was clearly an ensemble cast. If anything, he was the "heart" character who connected everyone, which, yeah, can be a thing in itself where the show decides he's actually too weak to be of much import anymore; here, they've apparently decided to have the rest of the cast bond by realizing they didn't appreciate what they had till he was gone.
Which, again, could be interesting in itself, but the -actual character- not only didn't think of himself as a hero anymore, but for most of the last season, it seemed like he could barely justify his own existence.
If they'd had him be less clearly depressed right up until maybe the last episode and a half, it might have been less egregious.
but speaking of "you can't do both," McNamara crowing about how he wanted academic journals to debate whether it was a suicide or not is...yeah, Jack, we can -see- that it was a parasuicide and you intended it that way, which is why trying to also paint it as heroic, triumphant, and a fitting end to the character's arc is fucked up. If you're going to go -there-, then go all the way.
also deal honestly with the part where he's queer and he left another queer character who was in love with him behind, who also has self destructive tendencies.