MAJOR SPOILERS for the Wicked musical AND MAJOR SPOILER SPECULATION for the film, Wicked Part 2. I’ll keep the spoilers below the “Read More” cut, but YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Okay, I saw Wicked Part 1 last weekend, and I loved it! I’ve always loved the musical’s soundtrack and the 1939 Wizard of Oz film, but I love Wicked Part 1 more. It’s just so perfect! It captures the whimsy of the Land of Oz while portraying the themes of the musical (and Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked, to a degree) really well with excellent world-building and character development.
Lots of content creators are already talking about Elphaba and Glinda and Nessarose and what they have going on, so I decided I want to talk about one of my favorite characters and his potential arc.
Who am I talking about? Our beloved Winkie Prince, Fiyero!
You see, by the end of Wicked Part 1, Fiyero has experienced quite a bit of character development, and he seems to be going on a journey, but we’re not sure where yet, at least in the movie musical’s timeline. However, we can guess where he’s going to go based on what we know of the stage musical and what’s foreshadowed in Wicked Part 1.
Now, before I go any further, I’m warning you: there will be spoilers for the Wicked stage musical down below the cut here. The foreshadowing in Part 1 is based on that knowledge. If you click the link below and read the rest of this post, please don’t say you weren’t warned.
In the second act of the Wicked stage musical, Fiyero becomes the Scarecrow. You know, Dorothy’s friend who just wants a brain. Yes, that Scarecrow. And in the movie, there’s a ton of foreshadowing that points toward the movie version of Fiyero also becoming the Scarecrow.
If you’re wondering what foreshadowing is, it’s a literary device where the creator drops hints about something that will happen later in the story. Literary devices like foreshadowing appeared first in prose fiction (novels, short stories) and in plays meant for the stage, but of course, they eventually made their way into film and television. In visual media, you often have foreshadowing worked into either dialogue (or song lyrics, in the case of a musical) or into the various visuals present in the movie or TV show.
Fiyero has both types of foreshadowing surrounding him once he appears in Wicked Part 1.
Here are some examples of foreshadowing about Fiyero that are in the movie’s dialogue and lyrics:
- Elphaba telling Fiyero to “get stuffed.” While that can be a genuine insult, it also refers to the Scarecrow being stuffed with straw.
- So many lyrics in “Dancing Through Life,” particularly: “Life’s more painless for the brainless/ Why think to hard when it’s so soothing/ Dancing Through Life…”
- Another lyric: “Dancing Through Life/ No need to tough it/ When you can slough it off as I do!”
- Yet another lyric: “Life’s is fraught less/ When you’re thoughtless/ Those who don’t try never look foolish!”
- Honestly, just all of Fiyero’s lyrics in “Dancing Through Life.”
- When Galinda puts on her flower-inspired dress for the party at the Ozdust ballroom, her male lackey, Pfannee, says, “You’re gonna make Fiyero lose what’s left of his mind!” (I only caught that line on my second viewing, but damn, movie!)
Why are the lyrics of “Dancing Through Life” so full of foreshadowing? Well, that song is our first musical introduction to Fiyero, and it shows us his outlook on life. His outlook is that thinking doesn’t matter and that you can just coast through life without using your brain. Of course, that’s easy to say when you’re a handsome Winkie Prince who’s just allowed to keep switching universities whenever you get kicked out of one.
The outlook expressed in “Dancing Through Life” is, of course, the exact opposite of the Scarecrow’s outlook. He’s ashamed that he doesn’t have a brain (or so he thinks) and desperately wishes for one. So if we recognize all the foreshadowing in this song, we begin to wonder: Is Fiyero going to turn out to be the Scarecrow? And if he is, how does he go from Point A (Winkie Prince who claims to be proud of not thinking) to Point B (Scarecrow who’s ashamed of his lack of education)? You have to keep watching to find out, and the story does begin to fill in some gaps, like when Fiyero claims he’s “genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow*”, Elphaba points out that if that were true, he wouldn’t be so unhappy.
*Note that the phrase “deeply shallow” is an oxymoron, which is a literary device where two words of opposing meaning are put together to make a contradictory phrase (e.g. “jumbo shrimp”).
But the lyrics of “Dancing Through Life” and other bits of dialogue aren’t the only forms of foreshadowing around Fiyero’s potential transformation. There’s also multiple forms of visual foreshadowing surrounding him, too. What do I mean by “visual foreshadowing”? I’m talking about images and movements that involve Fiyero and the possibility that he’s the Scarecrow. For example, throughout the dancing sequences in “Dancing Through Life,” Fiyero and the background dancers have a lot of wacky, flopping, yet still very coordinated movements that evoke the Scarecrow in the 1939 Wizard of Oz film.
On top of the dance movements, Fiyero has another bit of visual foreshadowing when he stands in the library with his arms straight out and his legs cross, mimicking the generally accepted pose of a scarecrow. A Google image search doesn’t bring up that image of Fiyero, so here’s F1 driver George Russell doing the same pose:
Okay, Fiyero’s arms were a bit straighter when he did this pose, but you get the point. And George did this pose so well that he became a meme during the 2023 Formula 1 season. (And George is very 1939 Oz film Scarecrow-coded.)
Beyond dialogue, lyric, and visual foreshadowing, we also have a bit of character development present in the film (but not the musical or novel) that also works as foreshadowing. You see, in the 1939 Oz film, the Scarecrow tells Dorothy “…and I won’t try to manage things because I haven’t got a brain.” But then the Scarecrow ends up managing the rest of the group when Dorothy is unavailable (mainly when Dorothy falls asleep due to the poppies and when she’s kidnapped by the Wicked Witch of the West).
Similarly, in Wicked Part 1, Fiyero organizes two things that happen: First, he organizes the students’ trip to the Ozdust Ballroom, which is an act of rebellion that shows off his playboy prince reputation, but he does indeed organize it. He’s the one talking about how they can and should do it during “Dancing Through Life” and he’s clearly ushering everyone onto the boat the get to the Ozdust Ballroom (which seems to exist in an underwater cave). Then, when Elphaba knocks everyone out with her bouquet of poppies while the Lion* is freaking out in the cage, Fiyero is the one who seizes the moment that Elphaba created and gets the Lion out of his cage.
*You know this Lion. Or you will know him. Eventually.
All of these different forms of foreshadowing tell us where Fiyero’s journey is going. He will become the Scarecrow, whether he likes it or not. And he’ll have to figure out how to navigate being both sentient and made of hay. That sounds like quite the philosophical and existential dilemma!
Why am I explaining all of this? Well, I’ve seen some fun social media posts pointing out that Fiyero will become the Scarecrow and talking about what comes next. But I’ve also seen some people going, “Spoilers! Mark for spoilers! You spoiled me and now I won’t be surprised when it happens next year!” and when people point out that the stage show has been around for 21 years, others go, “I didn’t have access to that! You’re privileged if you got to see it in New York!” O course, things aren’t quite as black and white as those arguments would have you believe. There are many people out there who’ve become fans of the Wicked stage show through the internet, reading synopses of it, looking up clips in various places, and listening to the soundtrack on YouTube, Spotify, and other places.
Also, Fiyero becoming the Scarecrow isn’t as out of left field as other movie twists, like when Darth Vader says “No, I am your father,” in The Empire Strikes Back or when Thanos and Gamora go searching for the Soul Stone in Avengers: Infinity War and find that Red Skull is the Soul Stone’s guardian. These twists had little to no foreshadowing.
Those two twists gave us no inkling that they were coming and the studios kept that information locked down until after the film was released. That’s what makes them traditional spoilers: knowing about them ruins the twist that you didn’t see coming. But that’s not the case with Fiyero’s transformation into the Scarecrow. That information is out there online and in the musical, and it has a ton of foreshadowing in the film itself. While I get that some people are sad that they won’t be surprised when the transformation happens, but I also understand why other people were making social media posts about it without spoiler warnings on them. It’s something that will happen in the story’s second act, but we don’t have the second act right now. But we will get it in a year. So it’s coming.
This weird “I just want to discuss this upcoming story development vs. YOU’RE SPOILING ME” debacle actually reminds me of a similar situation I encounter in the Supernatural fandom some 16 or 17 years ago. Supernatural was in its third (I think?) season then, and I was hanging out on a particular SPN forum on fanfiction.net. (No, Gen Z, I’m not explaining what a forum is. It was like Reddit.) The forum was originally run by two moderators that allowed us to talk about the trailers/promos for upcoming episodes. But then, after the show’s second season ended, those moderators left and were replaced by someone who DID NOT WANT people talking about those episode trailers. Once, I didn’t realize that that rule had changed, so I posted some fun, silly ideas I thought of based on the upcoming episode’s trailer, and I found out the next day that the moderator had removed that content from my forum comment. It felt very intense and surprising. Apparently, that moderator and a few other forum users were turning off their TVs as soon as the episode ended so they wouldn’t see those promos because they wanted to know nothing about the upcoming story, and the other forum users couldn’t talk about the promos/trailers so as not to offend their sensibilities. I respected the rule, but it did feel like a way of limiting what people could talk about and the fun they could have for the sake of a few people.
What does that tangent about old drama in the Supernatural fandom have to do with Fiyero and Wicked Part 2? Well, it’s an example of how trying to prevent talk about any potential spoilers (including just fun fan theories) can alienate the fandom members around you and actually limit the types of fun you can have while you’re waiting for the story’s next installment. I mean, do you really expect people not to speculate on what’s going to happen in Wicked Part 2 for an entire year? This is a beloved musical, and it’s really fun to analyze and speculate on what’s coming next. And it’s not just preexisting musical fans who are doing that. I found post the other day by a woman who was analyzing two images she could find from Part 2 and trying to connect the dots on how Fiyero was going to become the Scarecrow. She admitted that she hadn’t seen the musical, but fell down an internet rabbit hole researching what would happen next. And then people were yelling her comments about how “All you need to do is add a spoiler slide!”
While those people have a point, I feel like the folks who just want to talk about what comes next aren’t doing so maliciously. They’re not trying to rub the fact that they’re familiar with the second half of the story in anyone’s faces. At least, that doesn’t seem to be the case in the posts I’ve seen that discuss Easter Eggs and references or speculate about Part 2. These people are just excited, they want to discuss this stuff with other fans, and they may have thought the foreshadowing gave them permission to talk about it. In the weeks since Wicked Part 1‘s release, I’ve seen these posters start to put spoiler warnings on their posts, so they are capable of learning.
So what we end up with is a strange reverse-gatekeeping situation, where a certain type of new Wicked fan (not all of them, I think) decides that they need to limit what people talk about so they will be surprised. But there is a way for the new people to avoid spoilers entirely, and that’s to stay off the Wicked social media algorithms until after Part 2 comes out. That doesn’t sound like a fun thing to do, but if you’re absolutely insistent that you can’t know anything about Part 2 because you want complete and total surprise, that may be the only answer. After all, the social media algorithms are really the ones spoiling people, since (unlike a human moderator) an algorithm can’t discern who knows what about the Wicked musical’s second act. It only knows who has interacted with other Wicked-related posts.
I wanted to explain foreshadowing and how it relates to Fiyero’s journey because I wanted to show that it’s clear where his story arc is going. This isn’t a surprise thrown in during later script drafts, like Darth Vader’s true identity was. It’s there in the musical, and his journey is pointing towards the Scarecrow.
I also wanted to explain foreshadowing because for the last 20 years in the United States, the overall education system has been hollowed out, with educators having to teach toward standardized test results rather than knowledge that students can use in their daily lives. So I’m wondering if some of the people complaining about spoilers are people who were never taught about basic literary devices like foreshadowing. If that’s the case, that’s not your fault; it’s the education system’s fault, and that’s what happens when you tie schools’ funding to testing. So I hope that this post helps fill in the gaps to explain that many stories leave fun little hints about where things are going. Not every twist and turn comes out of nowhere, and you can actually catch lots of foreshadowing on rewatches (for films and TV shows) and during rereads (for novels and short stories).
Okay, now that we’ve covered all that, I just want to share my thoughts on what could happen next for Fiyero in Wicked Part 2, as in how things could unfold. It’s probably going to broadly follow the musical, but the musical is so dense that there are lots of things in the second act that happen offstage but are briefly mentioned, and the film can include those things because its been given more time to do so. Here’s just some of the stuff I’d like to see with Fiyero:
- An onscreen transformation: From what I remember of the stage musical (which I saw exactly once in 2012 when the Wicked National Tour came through St. Louis), Fiyero’s transformation into the Scarecrow happens offstage during Elphaba’s big solo, “No Good Deed,” as the result of a spell she casts after Fiyero has been kidnapped by an angry mob (“May his bones never break…and no matter how they may try to destroy him, let him never die”). Of course, that’s because a stage musical doesn’t really have the kinds of special effects to do that type of transformation onstage, but a blockbuster film version does. It would be cool to see something where Fiyero’s limbs start to flicker and turn from flesh to straw. Or maybe he’s in shadow the whole time, and then all of a sudden, a hand surrounded by straw pokes out. Whatever happens, I hope it’s amazing!
- Meeting Dorothy from the Scarecrow’s POV: Nobody’s really sure how much Dorothy we’re going to get (she’s only alluded to in the musical and barely shows up directly). But if we do get some of Dorothy, I’d love to see her first meeting with the Scarecrow from his point of view. After all, we see this meeting from Dorothy’s POV in the 1939 Oz film, so it would be interesting to pretty literally flip the script on that. The camera could be perched up where the Scarecrow’s line of sight is supposed to be, and then we see Dorothy walk into the frame from that angle. Then we get the introduction, and the camera zooms out to focus on something else because we know what comes next.
- Some backstory on Fiyero’s “brainless” facade: In Wicked Part 1, the story did a really good job of building out Fiyero’s character development and making it feel like a pretty natural progression. That contrasts with the stage show, where his character development is quite rushed. And in the show, his laziness seems to be genuine, where in the film, it appears to be a coping mechanism of some sort (especially since Elphaba points out that Fiyero is quite unhappy underneath it all). Maybe we could get a conversation after Fiyero runs off to Elphaba where he admits what he was trying to avoid by pretending to be brainless. (It’s worth noting that Fiyero is a Winkie, which is its own ethnic group in Oz. Maybe it has something to do with the Wizard’s treatment of them?)
Also, these are thoughts and ideas, not predictions. Why don’t I just call them predictions? These things may not happen at all, but I’ll still enjoy Part 2. As someone who’s used to waiting for the next installment of a story (Harry Potter, Star Wars, the MCU, A Series of Unfortunate Events), I know it’s fun to imagine what comes next while still leaving room for what will actually happen.