| schema:text
| - The 2003 musical and 2024 movie don't include all of the explicit elements in the book, though they do reference animal cruelty, xenophobia, and other dark themes.
In November 2024, the movie "Wicked," starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, was released to rave reviews and was a box office hit. Adapted from a popular 2003 Broadway musical, the movie featured hit songs like "Defying Gravity" and "Popular." The musical was an adaptation of the 1995 novel, "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," by Gregory Maguire.
Anticipating the movie's popularity, publishers put the movie poster on the cover of the book in order to boost sales. However, parents who picked up the book, anticipating it to be similar to the musical and the movie, described being "horrified" by its explicit content.
A Facebook post detailed a number of content warnings, with a caption: "Parents with minor children who allow them to see this Wicked MOVIE, apparently, the BOOK is for adults only, containing highly perverse sexual content?"
The post described graphic content in the book, including animal cruelty, child abuse, pedophilia, sexual assault, incest, and more.
(Screenshot via Facebook)
The book does indeed contain explicit content, which was not included in the musical and, later, the movie. This content includes sex scenes, incest, adultery, animal abuse, child abuse, murder, and more. As such, we rate the above claims as true. However, we should note the movie and musical do not include all of these explicit elements, though they do address xenophobia and animal rights in the context of the fantasy world.
The book was released in 1995 and served up a revisionist version of the world created by L. Frank Baum in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Told from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West, it portrays her as lonely and misunderstood due to her green skin, and not as "evil" as Baum's story conveyed.
Maguire said he was inspired to write a story about "evil" and was fascinated by the 1939 film adaptation of Baum's work, "The Wizard of Oz."
The interactions between the actors who played the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, also gave Maguire the idea of bringing the characters together at a school for magic: "I thought to myself, 'They know each other. They've crossed paths before. They went to school together!' I thought that was so funny. Because it was such a good idea."
A few examples of some of the more explicit scenes, as found in the Amazon Kindle edition of the novel:
The Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba, is ostracized due to her green skin. At the time of her birth, her family treats her cruelly. Some of the darker scenes throughout the book address political themes of fascism and xenophobia through the lens of animal rights, and how talking animals are mistreated in the fantasy world of the book.
An early scene references a family of puppets simulating incestuous sex. Other scenes depict brutality against animals. In one scene, a lion cub is the subject of an experiment, and in another, a goat is found killed. A man and a woman engage in sex acts with a tiger. Elphaba has a love affair with one of her married, former classmates, Fiyero, and the book describes some of their intimate scenes together. The Wizard of Oz also takes a child as a slave toward the end of the book.
The book ends on a darker note than the movie and musical. However, both the movie and musical address the relatively adult theme of bigotry through the rights of animals who face a conspiracy to stop them from speaking.
Maguire himself has said the book is meant for adults.
In a 2014 interview, he commented, "I deliberately included a ribald, unappealing sex scene in the first 10 pages so people would know it was not for children."
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)