The Fiyero Complex: On Charm, Chaos, and Hiding What Hurts.

Hey y’all! This post is a bit of a departure from my usual fare, but with Wicked: For Good releasing this month, I’ve found myself reflecting—and feeling a lot of feelings. Even if musicals aren’t your thing, I hope this reflection finds some resonance in you.

The first time I saw Wicked, I was supposed to care about the witches. Everyone does. You choose a side: green or pink, rebellion or perfection. But I found my eyes drifting to the boy who never stopped moving, the one with a grin sharp enough to slice through tension, who made detachment look like a kind of art. Fiyero was careless, or wanted to be. He sang about dancing through life, about never thinking too hard, about letting things slide off his back like rain. He was everything I pretended to be.

I’ve always admired people who float.

Those who seem untouched by embarrassment or fear, who can saunter through discomfort with a joke and a shrug. That’s the posture I learned early: levity as armor, laughter as disguise. The world feels easier when you pretend it doesn’t touch you. The trick is convincing yourself you’re in on the joke, that you’re the one choosing not to care, rather than the one terrified of caring too much.

Fiyero, of course, can’t keep it up. No one can. Beneath the easy smile is a kind of ache, an anxious restlessness that hums beneath the surface. He’s the kind of character who hides his tenderness so thoroughly he nearly loses it. And that, I think, is what makes him so devastatingly familiar. He reminds me that apathy is often just anxiety in costume, the way some of us hold our hearts at arm’s length so no one can drop them.

When Fiyero falls in love with Elphaba, the mask cracks. The boy who once mocked sincerity becomes undone by it. Loving her demands the very thing he’s spent his whole life avoiding: vulnerability. It’s messy and unguarded, and it costs him his image, his safety, even his body. Yet the tragedy of Fiyero isn’t that he dies; it’s that he finally learns to live just before he does.

There’s a strange holiness in that shift, from ironic distance to wholehearted devotion. He becomes, in a sense, un-cool. The posture of detachment gives way to something much riskier: presence. To care, after all, is to admit that something outside of you has power over you. That’s the terror of tenderness — and also its grace.

I think that’s why his story stays with me. Because in this world, it’s easier to be clever than to be earnest. To quip instead of confess. To pretend detachment is freedom, when really it’s fear.

Fiyero reminds me that apathy may keep you safe, but it won’t keep you alive.

There’s no music in numbness.

Maybe that’s what "Dancing Through Life" gets wrong — or what it gets exactly right. We all dance through life until something, or someone, stops the music long enough for us to listen to our own heart beating.

I used to think being unbothered was the goal; to move lightly through the world, unscarred, untouched, unimpressed. It felt like strength: to laugh things off, to keep my hands clean. But somewhere along the way, that lightness started to feel like absence. The thing nobody tells you about floating is that even freedom can become a kind of loneliness; sooner or later, you start to crave the gravity of being grounded.

These days, I think of Fiyero more gently. Not as the careless prince who got what he deserved, but as a boy who finally let the world touch him. Who stopped running from his own softness long enough to discover it was never weakness at all. Maybe that’s what growing up really is — letting yourself care, even when it's risky.

I still catch myself dancing through life sometimes… skipping across the surface of things to avoid the deep end. But I’m learning, slowly, to stay put. To feel the ground. To love without the safety of irony. Because in the end, the ones who risk being seen are the ones who end up transformed.

And maybe that’s the truest kind of magic there is.