The Magicians

[achray]

The Magicians starts season 4 this week: as far as I can tell, I've got no way to watch it, but here's a post about my new-found fannish love for this show, just in case the new season rips this into pieces and then stamps all over it.

First up, I don't really love the whole show. I'm nearly done reading the books now too, and I don't love these either. There are plot lines in seasons 1 and 2 in particular that made me very unhappy, and a recurring theme of Very Bad Things repeatedly happening to the women and people of colour in the show, which the leading white men get to feel angst-ridden about - or worse, not particularly care about - at length. (The books make me feel marginally better about this, however, in that at least there are people of colour in the TV show, plus women with a bit more agency and who are more likeable). But - what's the point of fandom, if not to fix such problems? And the show, in my view, does get its act together far more in season 3: it flowed better, the plot structure was more coherent, the lead female characters had better arcs, and it embraced its own silliness while still managing to make some serious points.

What there really is to love about this show is the whole set-up, from a fic-writing perspective, and the central relationship between the two male leads, Quentin and Eliot. The set-up is a total gift: not only is there magical grad school, with all the potential for spells gone wrong etc and where everyone is sleeping together anyway; BUT ALSO another fantasy world where pretty much anything can happen AND that has a load of stuff going on with laws around marriage and sexuality to play with; AND ON TOP a series of canonical alternate universes, so that literally any plot one might choose to write cannot clash with canon because it can exist in one of these. As if this wasn't enough, there is also at any time the potential that the lead characters have their memories wiped and are leading normal non-magical lives, hence any non-magical AU is also canonically fine. And there are evil librarians. I have a great weakness for fantasy libraries, especially if they secretly control the multiverse.

Above all, there is Eliot Waugh. Eliot is a glorious, perfect character. In Grossman's first two books (still reading the third), Eliot is gay but all we see of this is one brief, unhappy and problematic sex scene between him and someone unpleasant, which Quentin stumbles on and then never mentions again. So reading the books has made me feel much, much warmer towards the TV writers/producers etc for giving us a fantastic, openly gay man who gets to cut a swathe through everyone around him, men and women, including the protagonist, Quentin. He is the character we all want to write, who is attractive, smart, witty and abrasive and not always very nice, yet also secretly kind and noble and very good at friendship. He's also ambiguous enough that you can write him in a very wide variety of ways, and they'll all ring true. And he has a fabulous best friend, Margo, who he also canonically has sex with, so there's great potential there too.

Quentin I'm less interested in though I have become more and more invested in him as the show progressed: it's fun to write someone who is a total geek and can be presented as both clueless and knowing, and I am very up for being involved in shows which will represent the lead character as not only engaged in heterosexual romance but also having sex with a man - you can read this various ways, so it's entirely possible to write Quentin defining himself as bisexual, or mostly straight but occasionally sleeps with men, or almost entirely straight but definitely interested in Eliot. All of these options are good for writing m/m (or m/m/f) fic, and although the writers were clearly deliberately playing directly to me with the Quentin/Eliot moments (and it worked! I bought 3 seasons because you let the protagonists kiss! TV writers take note!) I greatly prefer this over shows which shamelessly signal to fannish interests without any intent to follow through.

So....more people should be writing in this fandom, is what I'm saying. Great characters, excellent premise, and literally anything goes with this one.

Comments

[digsdigsdigs]

this is exactly how I feel about the whole shebang. I binged the whole show a couple weeks ago and while I find basically everyone but Eliot irritating, I'm SO on board the fandom train.

[achray]

HOORAY!! More Eliot fans! I find Margo and Quentin relatively un-irritating. But we're clearly supposed to like Alice and Julia: and I find Alice incredibly irritating all the time, while Julia maybe has a lot of potential in episode 1, before it's all literally beaten out of her by the plot.

so much fic I want to write for this show, but where is the time....

[ruinsplume]

Great post! I just got into this fandom like two weeks ago and have binge watched all of season one already. Going to follow you (is that what we call it here on dw?) because yay!

[achray]

Great! I don't understand DW very well but I will follow you back (unless you are a student, which I don't think you are - I post about academic and fannish teaching stuff too so actual students make me uneasy...).

Feel I should go back and edit this Magicians post to clarify: Quentin = canonically bisexual, thank you show, more of the same please.

[ruinsplume]

Hell, no, I’m not a student (at least, not in the undergraduate sense). I was of legal drinking age before your students were even born!

I teach at a university myself—writing, both creative and academic. Lately I’ve been more interested in the meta side of fandom as opposed to the fic side, so would definitely be interested in your posts about fannish teaching.

I am on Magicians season 2.3, so I haven’t had much bi/pan content yet, but boy, am I waiting for it. My other two fandoms are HP and Sherlock, which in terms of erasure and queerbaiting, respectively, are the absolute worst. The idea of seeing two MCs actually be something other than heterosexual is (sadly) breathtaking.