Sorry Fiyerabas, you lost this round.

Wicked: For Good is officially out now, and Gelphie truthers are cheering worldwide. Warning, major spoilers for the film, Wicked's fandom culture, and the thought processes of hormonal teenage girls below the cut.

READ: All the Changes Wicked: For Good Made to Act 2 of Wicked

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a teen girl in possession of a new obsession must be in want of an internet connection.

Young women have always loved ardently, but with the advent of the internet, that passion is magnified tenfold. Fangirls are some of the most powerful marketers on earth, and when an army of 16 year olds go to battle, the online drama can rival trench warfare. So, too, can fandom inspire a creative renaissance in individual fangirls, who are driven to innovation by the sheer force of their love for the object of their affection.

For 22 years, Wicked superfans have spun the scarecrow's straw into gold, establishing themselves as one of the most active theatrical fandoms on the internet. Long before Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson's Miku Binder, Wicked was the Broadway fandom, with thousands of message boards, fan art pages, and fan-fiction profiles populating every corner of the internet. Since 2003, fangirls have taken it upon themselves to digitally occupy Oz, engaging in countless debates about preferred performers, ranking their favorite riffs, and occasionally engaging in fisticuffs with Baum purists.

None of that compares to the shipping war of attrition.

Shipping, or the act of emotionally investing yourself in a relationship between two characters, is one of the hallmarks of fangirl culture. If you are wholly unfamiliar with the concept, I recommend you power down your computer and enjoy your blissfull naïvety. If you, like me, had unmonitored internet access far too early in life, read on.

Within the Wicked fandom, there have, historically, been three significant armies. They are as follows

1. The Fiyero x Elphaba shippers: also known as the Fiyerabas, the Elphiyeros, and the Blue Diamonds on a Green Fields, this is the home turf army. They have the advantage of being explicitly canon–after all, Fiyero and Elphaba do consummate their relationship on the forest floor during "As Long as You're Mine." This army has the easiest enlistment process, and most casual fans default to this.

2. The Fiyero x Glinda shippers: also known as the Gliyeros, the Flindas, and the Born to Be Forevers, this army mostly keeps to themselves, unless they are forcibly dragged into a conflict by one of the other two opposing armies. While they have the benefit of being canon for a significant portion of the musical, they are also explicitly not endgame, with holes in their relationship exposed from the very beginning. Most of this army prefers to reside in Shiz-era fan-fiction circles, pretending Elphaba and Glinda's trip to the Emerald City never happened.

3. The Glinda x Elphaba shippers: also known as the Gelphies, the Glephabas, the Elphalindas, and the Pink Goes Good with Greens, this is the invading army. While this relationship is never explicitly elevated from a friendship in the musical's text, this army does have the boost of being briefly semi-canon in Gregory Maguire's book series, which inspired the Wicked musical. Of all of the armies, this group pours the most energy into defending their position, while often ridiculed by outsiders.

Now, in theory, these three armies should be able to co-exist peacefully. Multi-shipping is a common practice in most fandoms, with fangirls chasing dopamine wherever they find it. Wicked, however, has an arguably uneven second act, and that has led to countless "fix-it" fanfics that pit armies one and three against each other. Things have been evenly split for decades, with some of the most popular fanfiction and fanart websites from the 2000s and early 2010s—including Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt, and LiveJournal—having roughly equal distribution between the two. Fans entrenched themselves on either side of the conflict, shouting into the void in defense of their particular position with seemingly no end in sight.

Enter the Wicked film franchise.

The Wicked films have revitalized the musical's fandom, dusting up these rivalries in a dramatic way. As often happens for shippers of non-canon queer couples, Gelphie shippers were attacked en masse, facing multiple fronts as they pushed through the usual parade of "they're just friends!" attacks, as well as a sea of new fans who were distrustful of content that has historically populated Gelphie fandom spaces. 

For many years, Gelphie has been a community that young queer kids have turned to in order to figure themselves out. Many Gelphies identify heavily with Elphaba and her outsider status, and the art they have produced in response to her and Glinda's bond has also been a tool for their own self actualization. Many of the most Fandom-Famous writers from the early days of the Gelphie fandom have since come out as lesbian and bisexual, with several also coming out as trans and non-binary. Much of their art reflects those identities, and can be interpreted as shockingly explicit by the uninitiated, rather than being recognized as the vulnerable expressions of desire that they were intended to be.

As the war of attrition transitioned into social media guerilla warfare, unexpected reinforcements soon came to Gelphies' aide during the first film's press tour. The very stars of the film franchise, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, weighed in. Erivo, an openly queer woman herself, spoke in defense of Wicked's queer fandom, and the ownership they have come to feel over their corner of Oz. In an dual interview with the Gay Times, Erivo stated that her Elphaba was not rigid in her attraction, and that what Elphaba and Glinda had together was "true love.” In a move that caused a fandom meltdown on parr with the Chernobyl disaster, Grande even went so far as to explicitly state that her Glinda “might be a little in the closet” in respect to her feelings for Elphaba. 

This was huge: with the exception of a handful of stage performers (we love you Rachel Tucker and Louise Dearman!), almost every actor that has played Elphaba or Glinda has stayed mum on the subject of Gelphie. The flurry of attention Grande's comment received was so great, original Glinda Kristin Chenoweth felt compelled to respond, commenting on social media that "I thought so too way back when….," which of course led to an even larger wave of fandom attention. After more than two decades of being told they were crazy, suddenly Gelphies had two of the actors most firmly identified with the character of Glinda stating that they themselves saw the same undertones in Glinda's relationship to Elphaba. 

None of that compares, however, to the gift Gelphie shippers have been given in the form of Wicked: For Good.

The second act of Wicked positions Elphaba and Glinda on opposite sides of the Ozian conflict, with Elphaba propagandized as wicked and Glinda as good. 

In the musical, Glinda and Fiyero become engaged, only for Fiyero to leave Glinda in the middle of their engagement party to be with Elphaba on the run. Glinda mourns the loss of Fiyero, she and Elphaba fight when they next see each other in Munchkinland, and they only barely patch things up before Elphaba disappears for good, leaving Glinda with no knowledge that both Elphaba and Fiyero are still alive.

In Wicked: For Good, Glinda and Fiyero are pushed into engagement by Madame Morrible as a distraction technique. The night of their wedding, Elphaba comes to visit Glinda, who is overjoyed to see her. Glinda then spends her entire pre-wedding night attempting to convince Elphaba to stay with her, devoting her energies to repairing the fracture between Elphaba and the Wizard in a rainbow colored dreamland. When the Wizard is once again revealed to be hiding important information from Elphaba, she cancels the deal, and inadvertently stops Glinda and Fiyero's wedding via an animal stampede. Fiyero leaves with Elphaba, and Glinda mourns the loss of them both in the ruins of the fairytale wedding that was thrust upon her. Elphaba and Fiyero share the [arguably] least sexy "As Long as You're Mine" possible, with Elphaba doing everything she can to keep her distance from him. Elphaba and Glinda reunite and fight in Munchkinland, and Glinda laments who she has become in the Emerald City, choosing once and for all to remove herself from the bubble society has put her in. She flies to Elphaba's side, desperate to be with her as the mob descends. They share an extraordinarily resonant final exchange, Elphaba fakes her death, and Glinda is left behind to carry on Elphaba's legacy with no knowledge that both Elphaba and Fiyero are still alive.

The last 20 minutes of Wicked: For Good are more than a Gelphie shipper would have dreamed of even three years ago. The last words Elphaba and Glinda say to one another are desperate, tear stained "I love you"s as Elphaba shuts Glinda away in a literal closet. Short of a last-minute makeout scene, director Jon M. Chu could not have made things more obvious: oh wait, yes he can.

In the final frames of the film, as Elphaba crosses the Deadly Desert, she conjures a rainbow to Glinda. As Glinda looks upon the rainbow, the Grimmerie (Elphaba's the book of spells that holds the true power of Oz) suddenly opens for her, allowing her to become her true self for the first time. That is a level of queer symbolism that makes a good chunk of the existing Gelphie fan-fiction look like a child's board book.

For well over a century, the world of Oz has been a refuge for queer people. L. Frank Baum's original books feature some of the first mainstream characters who exist outside of the gender binary, and reams of scholarship have been written exploring how his books emphasize the value of existing outside of societal norms, rather than fitting into prescribed roles. To be a "Friend of Dorothy" was slang for being homosexual for decades, and the star of the 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland, became one of the most influential gay icons of the 20th century. At the London premiere of Wicked: For Good, Grande lit up with excitement when Gelphie was mentioned, stating that "Oz has always been a queer place, a safe place for queer people for every different color of the rainbow, for everybody. If you read the L. Frank Baum books, it’s the truth. You’re safe with us; we love you so much! The gayer the better.”

The film taking such a strong stance doesn't mean the fandom wars are over—conflicts this long rarely fizzle out overnight. It has, however, changed the fandom landscape immeasurably. On ArchiveOfOurOwn, the most popular fan-fiction website on the internet today, 82.04% of the stories listed in the Wicked category have Gelphie as a relationship tag, with hundreds more stories being posted every day. After decades of derision, Gelphie is positively mainstream. A whole new generation of queer kids are figuring themselves out through Elphaba and Glinda, and that, as far as I am concerned, is the real meaning of having "a celebration the Glinda way!" Congrats Gelphies, you've made it across the Deadly Desert, and found your rainbow on the other side.

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Photos: First Look at Wicked For Good

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