The Rules of Heroic Fantasy and the Rules of Hollywood may be together aligned against a female lead insistent that this is her story, too, but rather than pretend we’re not bringing that baggage to the table, The Magicians is laying it all out. Quentin has to grow up, yet the very narratives he must outgrow fuel the institutions that hold Julia back. Among other things, this means addressing the arrested development, both personal and cultural, from which such a wish often springs. Mostly through Quentin’s Fillory obsession, both Grossman’s novels and Syfy’s adaptation are pretty explicitly about our relationships with stories we love, and stories we wish we were part of. When she’s later told she can’t Have It All (with her non-magician boyfriend), she quietly resolves to try anyway. On Julia’s first day with the hedge witches, they seal her in a meat locker, and to break back out, she gets more help from a corpse than from the fellow initiate who accompanies her. She’s already fighting her own battles, in much less privileged circumstances than Quentin’s. The difference is that Julia won’t have her victory handed to her by a paternalistic gatekeeper only once the traditional male hero’s arc is safely resolved, like Hope getting her suit in Ant-Man’s mid-credits stinger. Like Hope, Julia has to jump through a bunch of hoops that her male counterpart doesn’t in order to get even close to the same place. Hindered, in other words, by the fact that all too often, even fantastical fiction has a gendered glass ceiling.
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It seems that The Magicians-one half of Syfy’s latest, smartest bid to reclaim the genre TV throne it inexplicably abdicated post- Battlestar Galactica-will follow through with greater self-awareness on what Julia shares with Hope: not just her overlooked qualification, but a nagging sense that this qualification is hindered specifically by her being in This Kind of Story. They just end up being a distracting lampshade.
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But ultimately we and she are still subjected to half-assed in-universe justifications (mostly variations on “to protect you!”) for why we’re not watching a movie called The Wasp.
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In that intermittently joyous installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we’re repeatedly told and shown that the female lead, Evangeline Lilly’s Hope Van Dyne, is far more competent than the title character. The show’s treatment of Julia is worth comparing to the analogous character arc in Ant-Man. Twice.īut what might you do if you had clear potential for greatness and yet everyone (including your best friend) told you, without adequate explanation, that you didn’t deserve to use it? Not That Kind of Story Indeed, Quentin does just that, if in the pettiest way possible. Given that their emissary threatens Julia with rape (fake-threatens, but still, an act break I found discouraging), you kind of want to tell her to make better choices. Local hedge witches-magicians learning their craft without classical training or institutional support-happen to agree, and welcome her to their scrappy but poorly lit, probably unsanitary fold. She foils an attempt to magically scrub her memory, and becomes obsessed with proving that her rejection was a mistake. etc.-ends up at the same Brakebills qualifying exam, but flunks it. Julia Wicker (Stella Maeve)-Quentin’s lifelong friend and unrequited etc. (It’s an undergrad college in the books.)
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He spends most of his time doing card tricks and re-reading the Narnia-like Fillory and Further novels, until a grad school interview gone sideways sees him teleported to Brakebills University, hidden home to a sort of master’s program in magic. Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) is our 20-something Brooklynite Harry Potter, gifted and basically an okay guy, but also an insufferable and insecure “Well actually….” type. These are among the things that make The Magicians, Syfy’s adaptation of the novels by Lev Grossman, much more than just another wish fulfillment fantasy about a straight white dude with a chip on his shoulder who becomes the hero he always knew he could be. In genre stories, how often is the apparent Chosen One told he’s actually not special? How often do the architects of the Master Plan despair that said plan is less “master” than “only,” and nowhere close to good enough?