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Thanks, I hate it - The Magicians S4 Finale
So the thing that makes me ABSOLUTELY INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE is this line from Hollywood Reporter’s interview with the magicians creative team [x]:
“And from a dramaturgical point of view, it’s kind of great that at last, the white male lead on a show is no longer safe.”
It’s so transparently disingenuous.
I mean first of all, when fans complain about shows fridging “everybody except the white guys” it’s because we want shows to STOP fridging women & POC. It’s not because we want shows to START fridging white guys IN ADDITION to women & POC.
And secondly, if they sincerely wanted to make a statement about the unimportance of privileged white men, they would have fridged Josh, instead of spending two seasons setting him up as Quentin’s more heterosexual, more neurotypical REPLACEMENT.
Josh is the textbook white straight cis neurotypical male self-insert Gary Stu. He’s a mediocre white man who requires constant validation.
Every single Josh scene goes something like this:
Josh: I know I’m not important or special .
Core Castmember: You’re wrong, Josh. You’re actually very important and special. I’m sorry I didn’t realize it sooner, and give you the validation you deserve.
The show constantly rewards him for his mediocrity. He gets a giant werewolf penis, and then he gets to angst about his giant werewolf penis. He gets a hero’s journey. The show even hands him naked!Margo on a silver fucking platter like she’s some kind of fucking participation trophy.
Oh yeah, don’t get me started on Josh/Margo. The straight male gaze is so glaringly obvious in how that romance was written.
Their relationship literally starts with her servicing him sexually out of pity after he gives a big speech about how he doesn’t want to be a rapist. So many of his scenes in the last season serve no purpose except to 1) demonstrate to the audience how “chivalrous” Josh is and then 2) immediately reward Josh’s so-called chivalry with pussy.
And the show pulls the exact same patriarchal bullshit with Penny23/Julia. Penny23 knows Julia’s not sexually or romantically interested in him, but he keeps putting niceness coins into his Julia vending machine until eventually sex comes out.
Both of these relationships reinforce the message that the love of a beautiful woman is a reward mediocre straight men earn for being Nice Guys™.
Margo having a romance with Fen would have made a million times more sense. Fen was supposed to be a lesbian in the books anyway, and Margo’s canonically expressed sexual interest towards both men and women.
Oh and I could write a whole other post about how Eliot spent 50 more years with Quentin than Alice yet somehow the show gave Alice’s grief higher priority, further demonstrating their continued commitment to prioritizing patriarchal heteronormativity ahead of queer representation.
Just.
The sheer unmitigated gall of these showrunners.
To write the most grossly patriarchal narrative possible, ending with them fridging a queer, mentally ill character, then still have the audacity to award themselves progressiveness points.
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With the kids getting older and my mental health issues getting to a manageable place, I decided to dip my toe back into fandom. Lots of people were pimping this great show about magical queer graduate students figuring out life is more challenging than the fantasy we're sold. So I gave it a shot. And Quentin Coldwater was me in ways, I've never, ever had before. Hell, I was a graduate student for over a decade. All of them were me in ways no other characters have been.
I figured out early in season four that they'd kill him. There was just too much foreshadowing. I did not think they could possibly be so pig-stupid to do it this way, though. The god-damned gall of them to bask in all of the press for 4X05 knowing the whole damned time that it wouldn't amount to anything. It's "too artificial" to have a reunion between Eliot and Quentin? You're a show that does a musical episode once a year and has talking bears. Get the fuck over yourself.
And I'm sorry it's too damned hard to figure out what to do with the depressed bisexual for another year other than having him commit suicide and then watch how his life mattered after all because everyone he loves has the sads for five minutes. I guess writing people like me getting up and finding happiness and fulfillment is too boring. So sorry about that.
They are just so pleased with themselves for killing off their main character, like they are time travelers from, like, 1972 and no one's ever done that before. Even without the other, many, terrible issues with Quentin's death, it's not even new. I teach high school now, and pretty much every third story I read of theirs has them killing some character for the shock value. So, congratulations, Gamble and Co., your shocking twist is shared by fifteen year olds. It was just sooo badly written.
The big scary monster and his even scarier sister? Really not so scary. Didn't do anything. They were just there to torture Quentin for an entire season, violate Julia once again and then disappear. Margo drags herself through the desert for Eliot, but, hey when werewolf dick is on offer, she'll just forget all that. Sure, that violates everything we've ever established about her character. After all, who can resist schlubby white-dude with entitlement issues?
Seriously, fuck them.
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It's not like this show has ever had airtight plots, but someone went and counted up all the many, many dropped thread this season, and it was just ridiculous. And I'm a big Julia fan and I was just infuriated that her consent was violated again, once by the Monster and then by Penny 23. (And a big plot hole was, Penny is a fucking telepath! He has read the minds of even unconscious people before! Why couldn't it happen this time? Because they wanted it to fucking happen that way, that's why, because they saw it as twistedly romantic? IDEFK.)
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Oh, and fucking Hyman.
Like originally, when I saw that he was on the IMDb cast list for 4x11 and I was giving the showrunners way more benefit of the doubt then they deserved, my fan theory for his return was that he'd finally go to the underworld where he belonged and Penny40 would disabuse him of his mistaken belief that Q is straight.
But they just brought him back to abuse Margo and force Julia into Penny's arms.
And then they immediately did everything in their power to redact Quentin's queerness, in a last ditch attempt to actually *validate* Hyman's original flawed perception of Quentin. Which is just so heinously biphobic, to essentially argue that Q is straight as long as he's in a "straight relationship" and that therefore fridging him is progressive.
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OMG, when Margo got hit on the head with the vase or whatever in the room full of rose petals I was like OMFG NO. I thought sexual assault was on the freaking horizon.
What really tripped me out was even with the whole "Let's try again" and kissing with Alice, &c &c., it was Eliot who got the big dramatic entrance from the shadows, and Q's face when he saw him, my God. And Eliot was the one who threw the REMEMBRANCE OF A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP into the fire.