Magicians gay

'The Magicians' Season 4 Finale Is a Master's Class in How NOT to Treat Queer Characters

Spoilers for The Magicians Season 4 finale.

By now you already know that The Magicians’ Quentin Coldwater died in the Season 4 finale. Yes, D-E-D, gone. There’s no resurrection in the works and no trick of astral projection or Niffin declare of higher entity can bring nice, depressed, narcissistic Quentin back.

The decision to kill off a major character — the major traits, if the Lev Grossman novels still mean anything (they don’t) — is almost always controversial. But we reside in the time and age of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead and Thanos snapping half of the Avengers (and the universe) into nothingness. Any ethics could die at any moment (and sometimes all of the characters could die at any moment) and that’s the brave, novel, kill-happy world our media is made in.

So, why does it matter that Quentin is dead?

Well, my friends, let’s revisit a short-lived trope we prefer to call Bury Your Gays. Throughout media representations of queer folks, reaching back to 19th-century Victorian novels, the formula has been about the same: An LGBTQ+
magicians gay

Bi Men in Fiction — Quentin Coldwater and Eliot Waugh (The Magicians)

Quentin Coldwater and Eliot Waugh (The Magicians)

I have to provide the TV adaptation of The Magicians by Lev Grossman quite a bit of credit for entity notably more diverse than its source material (short summary: depressed nerds earn a magical post-secondary learning and find out Narnia is real). In addition to casting actors of color in the roles of presumably-white book characters, it takes two main characters’ bisexuality from suggested to unambiguous.

In both versions, the first inklings of our protagonist Quentin’s potential bisexuality comes early in the story when he cheats on his girlfriend in an ill-advised, intoxicated threesome with his friends Eliot and Janet (or Margo as she’s named in the show). The book frames it as “sex with Janet,” “cheating with Janet” and Quentin’s vague memory that he might have kissed Eliot is just a detail to show how out of control he was that night. In the show, Quentin and Eliot’s kiss gets as much visual emphasis as Quentin and Margo’s. Quentin also has a long-term affair with Eliot in an alternat

WARNING: Scenes of explicit hostility, drug use, suicide, sex, and/or abuse occur regularly. Not intended for children or sensitive viewers.

Overview

What if magic was real? And it killed off the only lesbian it showed? What if it devolved into dark rape tropes? Well then no one would watch it, would they?

Actually as it happens, this show turned out to be remarkably male lover and woman friendly. The lesbian who died became a goddess (somewhat of a trope for 2016). The show is attractive centric on a direct white lead, but it’s surprisingly interesting. Just really dark and triggerful. In fact, it’s incredibly aware that Quinten is the colorless hero. And they compete off that regularly.

As horrible as the show initially was for lesbians, the gay guy was the High King, until he was voted out and his best friend, the bisexual (possibly pansexual) Margot, became High King, so it’s got a lot more going for it. If you checked out in season one, appear on back. It gets better.

Notable Queer-Centric Episodes

  • Season 1, Episode 9 “The Writing Room” – Kira asks to be killed. It’s complicated.
  • Season 3, Episode 3 “The Losses of Magic” &

    Thoughts on The Magicians, by Lev Grossman (Amazon link)

    WARNING: I spoil the heck out of this book. Read at your own risk.

    Brief summary of the book: Our Hero, Quentin Coldwater, is a disaffected, overachieving Brooklyn boy in his senior year of high university, doing the usual standardized tests and Ivy League interviews and so on. He's madly but unrequitedly in adoration with his companion Julia, who's dating website their friend James. He's also madly in love with a series of children's books dealing with the Chatwin family children's adventures in a territory called Fillory, which clearly hearkens to some combination of Narnia and Oz. Quentin and James pay a see to the Princeton interviewer's house, only to discover him dead. On their way out, a mysterious woman paramedic offers them what they believe to be the interviewer's envelopes on them — Quentin takes his own and James doesn't. Quentin opens his to find a manuscript which claims to be the never-published sixth book of the Fillory series, and a notice which blows away in the wind before he can read it. He chases it into the back of an abandoned lot only to detect that — surprise! —

    Before The Magicians even aired, the people behind it did the now almost obligatory bits in LGBT media (check that “sexual events” happen to Elliot and his relationship “doesn’t go as expected” hah oh you crafty writers, may someone strangle you with a rainbow scarf) to talk up their regular inclusion of a gay characters and attempt to get a lgbtq+ following before the demonstrate even airs.


    I do contain to say I wonder at the mentality that is willing to troll to LGBT media to try and generate a fanbase and then thoroughly crush those hopes with maniacal glee. I suspect sadism.


    Since we’ve seen a whole lot of this before, we weren’t exactly taken in by the selling of Elliot as a positive character. It was no surprise that Elliot turned out to be exactly the compassionate of stereotypical gay side character we’re so used to: a sassy, quipping, comic relief there to delivery snarky put downs, cute one liners, and saucy innuendo. And, don’t get me wrong, entertaining innuendo and snark can be great fun - but this excessively stereotyped role is a box gay men are continually forced into (often to the exclusion of any actual characterisation or personali