So when I hear TDS, I can’t wrap my brain around how that doesn’t apply the to the cult of 🔸 but applies to RLS instead.

I’m not irrational about this administration. I’m very aware - I just see how that makes me deranged. 🤷‍♀️

The entire book hinges on the fact that she wasn’t born with an acceptable skin tone for a person of the human race. Today, though, the People have come together and said that green is a perfectly acceptable and desirable color.

She was already different because of her skin tone and what does the wizard say?

What better way to bring people together than creating a common enemy.

If Elphaba was person colored, she wouldn’t have been shunned or excluded as strange. Afterall, she is relatively amiable and makes friends easily – as long as they can see past the color of her skin.

If Elphaba was person colored – rather than “cabbage colored,” her father wouldn’t have hidden her away. She probably would have gone to Shiz before Nessa, and she never would have roomed with Galinda.

If Elphaba wasn’t green, there would have been no reason to see her as anything but normal. The fact that she’s magic may have actually been a good thing, not a scary one.

Why? Because they looked so impressive on screen.

Elphaba being green is a key plot point in Wicked the novel, Wicked the musical, and Wicked Pt 1 and For Good the films.

The Wicked Witch of the West, as written by Baum, was not green. She was just wicked. The filmmakers behind The Wizard of Oz (1939) wanted to really play up the technicolor factor. Afterall, it was new cool technology. So the witch became green and the shoes became ruby red.

What’s amazing about Wicked is how we see Gregory Maguire’s perspective of what Oz is like. That’s reader response in action – reader response is, at its core, the idea that a reader fills in what the author doesn’t say.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire is often labeled “Wizard of Oz fan fiction,” and they are absolutely correct. More importantly, Wicked, the novel, is the first big shift/change in the Wizard of Oz narrative. Maguire tackled big issues in the same allegorical way as L. Frank Baum did.