just saw for  Wicked For Good a second time and couldn’t stop thinking about all the thematic details in the costume, set, and character design.

glinda always struck me as more of a gold than a silver girlie and, aside from my own preference, thematically it’s an important distinction. she needs to appear prim and proper and polished but not quite settled in. gold is the major accent color to the emerald city. it’s on every building, woven into the citizens’ clothing, right down to the yellow brick road. so glinda wearing gold might suggest that she’s more ingratiated than she actually is. 

she’s a public figure and a mouth piece, she’s the face of Oz now, but she’s still got her conscience telling her something isn’t quite right. though she’s attracted to this life that she’s dreamed of and she does little to reexamine it without prompt, seeing how fragile and false the reality of it is, *she can never fully buy in*. and her silver, compared to madame morrible and the wizards’ gold accessories, show how unsettled she subconsciously is as a figure in their regime. 

that’s not even getting into the tin man of it all, ever in proximity to power but unable to possess it the way he wants. he wants glinda, but is never seriously considered or respected by her. and nessa, who does consider him and is infatuated by him, doesn’t respect him either. instead wielding her own power to maintain a claim to him. 

boq ultimately becomes vengeful over this severe and permanent visualization of his outcast status, he’s going to live the rest of his life bathed in pure silver (or pure tin? idk you get what i mean).

at that moment glinda effectively *is* Oz/the emerald city, and he’s just become the antithesis of it. at least on a superficial level. not just subtle accessories, but well and truly standing out. even though it saved his life, even though Elphaba who saved him can certainly relate to being unavoidably physically different, even though his rage is *genuine*, he’s also very clearly doing whatever he can to point those who would reject him towards the common enemy to absolve his differences and attempt to assimilate.

obviously a lot of this is baked in to the novel to musical to movie adaptations of course, but these were new observations to me anyway!

Thematic Details in Costuming and Character Design