the reason The Magicians is so good is because it has legitimately relatable characters
From the root of the whole story being a very young millennial (allllllllllmost Gen Z) obsessed with the Fillory books, and having a hard time growing up and dealing with the real world as well as very real mental illness and feelings of isolation because he doesn’t fit in, it’s relatable.
Us young millennial and older gen z young adults have that same experience with the Narnia books, books that continue to have lasting similarities to the Fillory story.
But even more then that, The Magicians is about found families (specifically at college), people with good and bad parents, those who are affluent and poor, straight gay and everything in between, people who have nothing to connect them outside of their field of study coming together and forming a group that spans worlds, timelines, and species.
From the level of dumbassery, to the way they speak, so the half nihilist, half optimist outlook they all seem to have on life, they are all wholly relatable.
I would argue it’s one of the best shows on television, if not the best representation I’ve ever seen.
Friends, myfavoritethings and I planned to release more of Entirely Too Much Blood (Episode 5.1),our TV-script sequel to You Better Be Alive, immediately after American Thanksgiving. This will be delayed until after the start of 2022. We’re sorry!
Butmyfavoritethings is a genius, and she had a sudden revelation, so she messaged me about it at 10:00PM on a Thursday because:
myfavoritethings: QUENTIN COLDWATER IS A MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL.
EarnestDesire: What?
myfavoritethings: MPD BOY! MPD GAY?
myfavoritethings: Think about it.
EarnestDesire: I’m thinking. But explain anyway.
myfavoritethings: He’s a complex version of the trope, for sure. He’s not Sam from “Garden State,” but he’s definitely Jack from “Titanic.”
myfavoritethings: Almost every character in The Magicians is broken, hopeless, disillusioned. After season one, every character except Quentin has become the worst version of themself. Q’s clinically depressed, but he isn’t defeatist. That’s his greatest strength, right? And who orchestrates most of the least selfish, most plot-moving plans?
EarnestDesire: Q.
myfavoritethings: Who convinces everyone around him to keep trying to better themselves? To believe in magic?
EarnestDesire: Jesus.
myfavoritethings: Who saves Alice, even when she doesn’t want him to do it? He’s OBSESSED with saving her. And later with saving Eliot. Even Margo gives up on saving El, but Quentin is very willing to kill and die for him.
EarnestDesire: You cannot fuck me up like this after 9pm.
myfavoritethings: He gives Eliot a wonderful, happy life (which El does not think he’ll ever have) and then Eliot rejects him, after everything, and Q doesn’t even argue! He just lets Eliot walk away from their 50 years together!
EarnestDesire: Because a Manic Pixie can’t make real demands on the hero. He exists just to facilitate their journeys.
myfavoritethings: You get me.
EarnestDesire: That’s fucked up.
myfavoritethings: Quentin changed very little throughout the series. He’s really the same guy at the end of S4 as he was at the start of S2.
myfavoritethings: But El is braver. Alice is trying to make amends. Julia is questioning her “magic at any cost” mentality. Then, once he’s saved Alice and Julia and Eliot and helped them into better versions of themselves?
EarnestDesire: He dies.
myfavoritethings: He dies.
myfavoritethings: “If I ever get out of here, Q, know that when I’m braver it’s because I learned it from you.”
EarnestDesire: He’s fulfilled his narrative function.
myfavoritethings: Ding ding ding! Bingo!
EarnestDesire: Wow. Okay.
(Edited for grammar and such, as requested.)
We need some time to figure out how this revelation changes our fanfic for season five, plus we have family obligations at the end of the year.
You can read our script-style rewrite of the season 4 finale right here:
A magician is strong because he feels pain..A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.
But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.
Not sure how I feel about Season 5 of THE MAGICIANS so far. It’s not bad, but something feels kinda ‘off’. It seems like one apocalyptic event after another, and things are getting kinda ‘been there, done that’. I’ll follow this show anywhere, but this isn’t a favorite season so far.
Do you ever think about how Quentin only released his Cacodemon, when Alice went after Eliot and Margo?
He didn’t try to safe himself, when she was advancing on him, with the clear intent to kill him. He said her name, and looked at her. Maybe pleading, maybe afraid, maybe devastated. But he didn’t make a single move to stop her and save himself. He would have let her.
Only when Margo got Alice’s attention away from him. Only when Alice started in on her and Eliot. Only when Quentin saw that if he didn’t, she would kill them, did he release the being he was sure would destroy her.
The above link leads to a discussion about the timeloops that Jane Chatwin started, and her general involvement and competence in the plot. And I have to say, this hits on a lot of points that I have been wrestling with myself.
As someone who hasn’t read the books, and has no additional information about the world that ‘The Magicians’ plays in, than what the tv series showed, I have to say that from a narrative stanpoint, it’s a mess.
And not a ‘it’s supposed to be this way and at one point all the different strings will lead to the bigger picture’ mess, but a whole, cluster fuck of a mess.
Why didn’t Jane Chatwin lay her cards on the table for the gang from the beginning?
Why didn’t she tell them what different ways to defeat the beast had already been tried, and failed?
Why didn’t Dean Fogg focus on getting the core group ready for the fight?
Why didn’t they try to warn the group about the danger in the first place?
Why couldn’t Jane use her power over time magic to save her siblings in the past?
Was Rupert Chatwin the little brother that was killed by Plover’s sister the night that Martin gave him the button? If so, then how was he a king of Fillory? Was he just a very young king, or was there another Chatwin sibling we just never saw?
If I didn’t like the characters so much, I would have written the series off as bad story telling and never continued watching after the first season.
Quentin and Alice are oblivious about their feelings. Eliot is running away from his. And Margo just categorically denies having any at all.
Or: the one where Alice and Quentin are convinced they should be dating because it’s easy and logical and they kinda fit together, in the sense that they fit in nowhere else, while being completely oblivious about the fact that they are both in love with other people.
Meanwhile Eliot and Margo can’t believe they actually caught feelings for these nerds.
Everyone is temporarily unhappy and pining miserably until they finally figure out who wants to date who.
Honest to god, I actually thought, while watching season 1, that this was the plan for the parings to go. I would love to read a re-write of the series with this in mind.
In a world where the next world-ending catastrophe is not waiting just around the corner for our favorite group of Magicians, most of the excitement is to had by guessing when Eliot and Quentin will finally realize that they are in a relationship.
Julia: “Okay, they just went out on a date. Which means I win because I picked July and that’s closer than any of you.”
Alice: “No, sorry. Q just wants to go to that library in Manhattan, and Eliot tagged along because he said he liked the coffee from one of the pastry shops near there. That doesn’t count as a date. It’s gonna happen at the Halloween party this year, so my October is going to win the pot.”
Josh: “Are we sure that them cuddling and falling asleep together on the couch while watching that rom-com last week doesn’t count? Because that would have been totally my win.”
Margo: “You are all wrong. It’s going to happen on Christmas. There will be mistletoe everywhere. Sooner or later one of them is gonna get trapped under one of those with someone else, and then the other one is gonna be jealous and make some kind of public claim. They are both idiots, and that’s the kind of thing that has to happen for them to stop being idiots. So it will be December and the pot will be mine.”
Kady: “I still think you are all cheating me out of my win. Quentin called Eliot ‘Honey’ in May. Eliot handed him a glass of wine and Q said ‘Thanks, Honey.’ And then they were making heart-eyes at each other for like a minute. I won.”
Margo: “That didn’t count. The use of petnames is not conclusive evidence of them tuning into the program and acknowledging that they are a couple.”
Penny: “… Why the hell am I friends with you people?”
Okay, level with me here. When Jane Chatwin set the timeloops, it was at a time when our heroes were young adults and attending (or about to attend) Brakebills.
However, her brother had been going to the wellspring to drink from it every day since he found it, and with every one of those drinks, he grew more powerful. So by the time the group is in place to fight him, he has already become very powerful.
So what if, in one of the timelines where Jane changes one thing to see if this one works, she calls upon Quentin sooner? Like, teen aged Quentin, sooner?
14/15 year old Quentin Coldwater becomes the youngest student to attend Brakebills ever (there is some heavy magic involved with getting his father to sign off on this, or something). However, it’s only Quentin, Fogg and Jane can’t get the rest of the gang as well, for various reasons.
So Q has to face the Beast with a different group of Brakebills students. Most of which don’t matter, because they die fighting Martin (which absolutely adds to Quentin’s trauma, by the way). But three of which are Josh Hoberman, Marina Andrieski, and Charlie Quinn. (I’m messing with the ages of these characters a little, because Charlie wasn’t that much older than Alice as he would need to be here.) And Viktoria (the traveler that Martin held in his dungeon and who was together with Josh)
Josh becomes the High King of Fillory. Due to the age difference, he kinda views Q like a little brother.
Even Marina has a bit of a soft spot for Quentin, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.
Charlie, probably due to Quentin being the same age as his little sister, becomes the most protective, and tries to take the beast on himself, to shield Q from this kind of responsibility. Like Alice when she fought Martin, the magic becomes too much for Charlie, and he niffin’s out. Again, like Alice, Niffin Charlie then kills the beast, When Charlie tries to kill the others, Victoria manages to travel everyone to safety, but is fatally wounded and dies shortly after.
So, anyway, Niffin Charlie is in the wind, Josh stays in Fillory to be High King with his wife Fen, and Marina and Quentin return to earth. (Maybe all this contributes to Marina hating Brakebills and Fogg in particular so much, and becoming the top bitch of New Yorks covens.)
The experience has left a deep fucking mark on a far too young for this Quentin, and he turns his back on Brakebills and Fillory and Magic as much as he can.
Now, forward a few years to the time when the others are all in Brakebills finally. (Julia too. Because there is no longer a reason not to admit her) (Julia is also curious if she can find some kind of magic to hopefully find out what happened to her childhood friend Quentin, who had just fucking vanished one day and never come back. The police just filed him as a run away. No even his father knows what happened to him, it’s all very mysterious…)
Alice, just like in the series, is there in the hopes to find out what happened to her brother.
Anyway, the group encounters some kind of problem, because of course they do. (Reynard, some other godly being, magic becoming unstable, or something that looks like the beast, but that can’t be because Martin is dead!!, just some kind of fuckery that they have to deal with)
And of course the answer to the problem lies in Fillory. Unfortunately, the only people who know how to get to Fillory, are the ones who have been there before. (And, technically Jane should know too, but maybe she wants to try to make things up to Quentin, and hopes that if the group has to work with him on this, that they can help him find his love and passion for magic and Fillory once more) - or maybe she just fucked off after Martin was killed.
Fogg, who does not want to burden Quentin any more than they have already done, seeks out Marina first. But she absolutely refuses to help. Fogg even tries appealing to her soft spot for Q, reminding her that if she doesn’t tell them how to get to Fillory, then they have to rope ‘him’ into this. However, turns out you need a royal key to open the portal to Fillory. Which Josh gave to Quentin, hoping the kid would come back to visit and let Josh and Fen help him through all the bad experiences.
Marina only very reluctantly tells them where to go (she was the one who helped Quentin vanish from his old life in the first place, faked a new identity for him or something. Brian? - They have stayed in contact)
So, when Quentin Coldwater one day opens his door to the sight of Dean Henry Fogg and five people approximately his age, plus his once best friend Julia, the real story begins.
(also, when they do get to Fillory, Josh doesn’t need to have aged too much. Fillory and earth are not always on the same timeline, after all. ;-) )
I think it’s beautiful how the whole fandom decided to basically ignore everything that happened in The Magicians since Quentin’s death and live on Queliot headcanons instead. I have to admit it, I rather like our version of the events in which Quentin lives and gets to be Eliot’s boyfriend, Alice has a proper storyline outside being Q’s love interest, the others are safe and together, they all live happily ever after and Sera Gamble and the others showrunners can go fuck themselves and maybe learn to write a show decently.
A magician is strong because he feels pain..A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.
But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.
