Warning: This article contains spoilers for “Wicked” and “Wicked: For Good”.
Strip everything else away from the two Wicked films—the spectacle, the steampunk, the singing—and you’re left with the story’s central theme: an unequal and unlikely relationship between two people who inhabit the same world but experience it in profoundly different ways. The fantasy setting offers enough distance to allow viewers to see the racial and social implications without the baggage of reality, but it also risks us missing the full impact of how Wicked speaks to those realities.
Glinda (played by Ariana Grande) is the very picture of privilege. She’s praised for her beauty, rewarded for her charm, elevated because she fits the aesthetic of Oz’s respectability. She is welcomed, platformed, and protected not because she is magical or remarkable, but because she is marketable. Glinda embodies the image the system wants to project—pretty, non-threatening, the perfect aesthetic to mask the regime’s brutality. Her polished innocence becomes a veneer that hides an empire built on oppression.
Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo), meanwhile, is the marginalized neighbor. Her initial presence at Shiz University incites alarm. The film makes the racial implications explicit when Glinda tells her she’s “so sorry” she’s had to “live with” green skin before publicly announcing she’ll major in sorcery and maybe one day “fix” it. Elphaba responds with grace. She is accustomed to living under suspicion. But when she is told she doesn’t belong, and she pushes back, her resistance becomes the justification for further harm.
Wicked forces these two incompatible women together. Their mutual loathing (“there’s a strange exhilaration in such total detestation”) softens into respect and then a fragile friendship. That relationship becomes the emotional core of the story—and a lens through which we can evaluate privilege, power, and complicity. If we’re willing to see it, the tension between Glinda and Elphaba mirrors something deeply true about white American Christianity.
Their friendship begins with friction, but the transformation it produces is overwhelmingly one-sided. Glinda grows because of Elphaba’s courage and integrity. Yet even as she changes, Glinda never stops benefiting from the system that crushes her friend. She enjoys the spotlight. She even participates in Elphaba’s demonization. She chooses comfort over courage and admiration over advocacy.
By the end of Wicked: Part 1, Elphaba has revealed to Glinda the truth behind Oz’s façade. Elphaba refuses to cooperate, escapes the Wizard’s grasp, and becomes publicly branded as “The Wicked Witch.” Glinda, tempted by status and public applause, is very sad her friend has been victimized but nonetheless aligns herself with the Wizard. Her silence—deep and dangerous—helps fortify the very system harming her friend.
Years pass. This is where Wicked: For Good begins. Elphaba has become a lone resister of the empire. Glinda—now branded “Glinda the Good”—is the polished face of Oz. When circumstances force the two women back together, Glinda must finally confront her complicity. She realizes she has been “The Girl in the Bubble,” floating above the truth. She sings:
“The truth has a way
Of seeping on in…
Eventually
It’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen.”
With initial ignorance turned into years of knowing complicity, Glinda can no longer deny that she is truly the wicked witch of the two. She allowed the oppression of the Animals because that oppression benefitted her. Her glamour had been the curtain that obscured the Wizard and Madam Morrible’s machinery of harm. And she realizes that without Elphaba, she would have continued living blissfully unaware—or willfully ignorant—of the system that privileged her at others’ expense.
The climax of the film centers on this reckoning. In their final duet, Glinda and Elphaba acknowledge the impact of their relationship:
“Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better?
I do believe I have been changed for the better.
And because I knew you
Because I knew you
Because I knew you
I have been changed for good.”
The film ends with Elphaba disappearing into the land beyond Oz, living in exile as the cost of resisting injustice. Glinda returns to the Emerald City, deposes the Wizard, imprisons Morrible, and becomes Oz’s new leader—a more benevolent face for a broken kingdom.
Glinda’s transformation throughout Wicked happens not through moral principle, but through proximity. She finally sees Elphaba as she truly is, not as the culture framed her. She sees how the Wizard maintained power the way empires always do: by inventing a villain, creating an “other,” and weaponizing fear. And what disrupts those lies—on screen and in our world—is relationship.
Many white Christians have experienced a similar awakening. It often begins with one honest conversation, one friendship, one story that unsettles inherited assumptions about race. Proximity doesn’t magically fix racism, but it can dismantle false narratives. When we allow those relationships to challenge our assumptions, reshape our theology, and expand our moral imagination, we begin the long process of becoming “changed for good.”
White American Christians are a lot like Glinda. We have embraced the rewards of proximity to power. We have allowed our theology to be shaped by comfort rather than courage. We have participated in narratives that demonize Black, brown, immigrant, and marginalized communities while congratulating ourselves for our kindness. We have chosen false innocence over solidarity, reputation over repentance. And then we sing “For Good,” celebrating our redemption as if transformation requires nothing of us.
There is a problem in Wicked’s story. There is something wrong with Glinda’s arc of redemption. Throughout the story, Glinda repeatedly chooses comfort over courage, applause over advocacy, and power over solidarity. She participates—actively and passively—in the empire’s oppression. Yet when the Wizard’s regime collapses, Glinda is not only spared from consequences but elevated as its new moral center. The system that rewarded her silence now rewards her with leadership, allowing her to step into authority without confronting the harm her inaction enabled.
This produces a redemption arc without repentance. Transformation without consequence.
Awakening without accountability. Glinda inherits a kingdom built on suffering while the one who resisted injustice is forced into exile. The musical gives Glinda a comforting ending, but it avoids the deeper truth that genuine repentance requires relinquishing power, repairing harm, and reshaping systems—not simply acknowledging guilt.
The film ends. The music fades. The curtain rises. But the work remains unfinished. Oz is still Oz. The system remains. Glinda’s future choices will determine whether her transformation is superficial or substantive. Wicked: For Good presents her new leadership as the end, but it should be only the beginning.
The question for those of us who are white, who come from privileged places, whose voices echo loudly in halls of power, is this: If we have been “changed for good,” will we accept the systems that elevated us, or will we use our voices and privilege to dismantle them?
We must not mistake the moment of awakening for the work of reconciliation. Wicked: For Good leaves the ending untold. So do our own stories. We can follow Glinda down the path of least resistance—performing goodness while preserving power. Or we can take the more difficult road, laying down privilege and lifting up those long pushed to the margins.
And maybe—finally—it’s time to try defying gravity.
