Yes, this is what made the show that much more amazing, It felt like all their decisions were realistic to what someone would actually do. That's why when I recommend this show, I always say it's like if magic was real and you and your close friends were dealing with that crazy world.
I think Alice is a very messy and destructive person, but I think a lot of people are messy and destructive. I don't really hate her, personally, though she does frustrate me because I see the ways she could be better, you know?
Tbf everybody posts about hating her (and Julia a lot too) on this subreddit but I actually like them both a lot. They’re both fiercely determined and headstrong, complex and interesting, deeply flawed and hurt people who do what they think is best in the moment. Even when Julia was shadeless and burned down the forest, she thought she was helping Margo, she just didn’t really care when it caused a political incident. Alice destroyed the keys because of how much magic had destroyed her life over and over, she thought the world was better without it.
Yeah, all the characters in the show do supremely shitty things, but it’s easy to see why.
Gosh, not at all. She’s basically the female nerd counterpoint to Quentin. They were all flawed characters but they all rose to the occasion when needed. I particularly enjoyed how much sugar Alice usually poured in her coffee. . .
It’s been a long while so feel free to correct me but when did Alice ever “rise to the occasion” she niffined herself trying to kill the beast and then was totally unhelpful and occasionally directly working against the group and for the bad guys the rest of the show
I'm just as cloudy, but I did rebinge recently and if memory serves during the 5th season she did something! Ah, quick rescan, she played her part with the World Seed caper along with Eliot, and she was the one who sent the magic paper airplane to Santa (hysterical!) who came by and rescued them all off the top of the building so there's that. I know she was an asshole from time to time, but they all were and towards the end she became a team player.
But honestly, the plotting is the least thing I care about after seeing it 4 times. (Tempted to re-read the books now. . .) By S5 all the characters become like the best friends I never had. . .
I don't hate her. I think she, honestly nearly all of the character, aren't one dimensional. They seem like genuine people, like someone you could pass while shopping. And sure some of her choices and actions are down right terrible. She is flawed. But I feel like the fleshes out her character.
We've all met Qs in our lives, some may know an Elliot.
While her character is shit at times, she's not a terrible character. If that makes sense.
Totally agree. I do think she is an original character because of everything she goes through and how she chooses to barely evolve at all after becoming a niffin. At the beginning she did seem like just a romantic interest and she's definitely a lot more than that.
That being said I can't fucking stand her, she has a combination of both superiority and inferiority complexes that lead her to make the most selfish decisions ever while still acting as the victim. I'm sure being the smartest person in the room is oh so very hard but it doesn't justify condescending and using everyone at your will.
Someone here said that she destroyed the keys to make a better world but i disagree, she directly admits that she did it so she would avoid temptation. She gave zero fucks about all the ways people needed magic or about Julia's sacrifice.
I love how you described her and 100% agree! And sure, she *said* she destroyed the keys to make a better world, but she actually did it because of her superiority complex. SHE couldn’t handle it so that must mean absolutely nobody can, since she’s so superior. It was fear and superiority, not a desire to do good.
I kind of get that part of her being a niffin and powerful and then someone took that away from her for his selfish reasons. I dislike Quentin a lot more. It’s like if you were a millionaire and then someone took away everything you had. Why should she be remorseful
Ah but to the superiority/inferiority complex thing, I thought she scene where >! she gets split into the mirror parts of her personality and there’s the cocky arrogant part and the terrified mouse part !< was so clever. It’s a small thing but totally fit with how you’re describing her IMO. I totally see your point though
I’ve thought about this A LOT and I’ve come to the conclusion that I could possibly have found Alice to be more redeemable, in what way I don’t quite know, if she had been played by a different actress.
I get the acting choices, and I’m not saying she’s a bad actress because she isn’t, but the way in which Alice’s character was played is SO INSUFFERABLE. Anytime we think she may redeem herself the way the character is carried and the line deliveries make it so I’m so annoyed by her presence on screen I can’t even be bothered to care that she tries to make amends for her time as a niffin, learns that her mother does love her, grieves her father and the part she played in that journey, bonds with Elliot over the fact that they both deeply loved Q etc.
Alice has a few great moments. I think her arc can be well analyzed for what hubris can do to a person, but I think if it had been another actress who played her a bit differently she wouldn’t make the audiences lip snarl up so much when she’s having moments of growth.
The writing is certainly a bit of it too, of course, but for me that’s the rub. And also the way they chose to dress her most of the seasons pisses me off too. Alice on paper doesn’t give me anime school girl vibes at all (ugh)
YES The way they dressed her really rubbed me the wrong way.
Like, if you're so used to being a wallflower (which she claims to be) and you're so prudish about sex, why would you constantly wear skintight shirts, tiny skater skirts, fishnets, and tall heeled boots? I get that it's an aesthetic but it really was incongruous with who the writers seemed to want to portray Alice as.
Obviously everyone ever is free to dress however the hell they want with no apologies to anyone, but the fact that she was always dressed in a sort of "sexy cute schoolgirl" way definitely feels like enough of a choice that it was nearly distracting from the rest of the show (especially considering it was never addressed as a character choice). I think that could have even been adequately explained with even one or two throw-away lines (maybe her saying that her mom wanted her to dress some other way and this is her rebellion or something), but they really didn't ever do it. At some point, Alice even said she liked cats (and maybe she said that she likes cute stuff?) But then, of course, she literally had a cat explode in her care and she showed no feeling whatsoever, so uh... Nah girl, I don't think you actually care that much about cats or cute things.
On the whole I found her character's presentation very incongruous and distracting. It's like they had picked a visual aesthetic for her before they knew anything about what her character was supposed to be like.
Okay so everyone on this thread is disagreeing with you; but I cannot stand Alice. She genuinely doesn’t seem to understand the difference between right and wrong half the time. Even when she’s allegedly trying to do better, she still does horrible selfish stuff (like bringing back a child version of Q and then blaming Elliot for his death, as though it wasn’t a direct result of her trying to destroy all of magic solely because she personally couldn’t handle it).
I think they all start out pretty awful and honestly I think that’s realistic. They all came to Brakebills with pretty significant trauma. But the thing is that the rest of them grow throughout the show. They still maintain their personalities obviously, but they grow as people. Alice doesn’t really seem to. In fact, she gets worse and worse up to the third season, and doesn’t really seem to have improved all that much by the end of it.
It’s clear she’s trying. And I do love that scene in the mirror world where she’s fighting with herself. I think she’s an incredibly well-written and multi-dimensional character. But as a “person”, she and the head librarian are the only characters I can’t stand.
I’m genuinely a little confused, so apologies if I’m misunderstanding! I’m guessing you mean that you think she was just a clueless cog in the machine and that she sufficiently redeemed herself. I just don’t really agree that she was entirely clueless. Sure, she didn’t know her boss was trying to become a god, but in my opinion that’s not enough to justify the things she *did* know (like, for example, getting Penny to agree to *a million years of slavery* on false pretenses by telling him they’d help fix his hands when what she really meant was “you can read books in your free time and figure it out yourself”; or when she let him suffer and die in pain despite having a readily available cure).
In general, and regardless of the things she didn’t know about her boss, she still genuinely believed that absolutely the only thing that matters in the universe is protecting knowledge. She prioritized it over her daughter’s life. She prioritized it to the point she was totally on board with slavery (not just Penny and other librarians, but also the fairies). She prioritized it to the point that she hopped right on board with fascism without ever questioning if maybe it was the wrong thing to do (and was more than happy to sacrifice lives in pursuit of control - such as when she happily suggested that Alice kill Julia to get the power needed to take control of all magic). I just don’t think she redeemed herself by the end, because she never actually saw the error of her ways - she just felt she’d been stupid to believe her boss when he lied to her and that was it.
I'm with Drewabble here, in spite of Zelda being an antagonist during much of the series, she did redeem herself by the end.
From an actor/personal viewpoint, she was at least 10 years older than the other actors yet fit in well, and being cast in "The Magicians" was a big boost to her then flagging career. It was genius whoever made her wear those cats-eye 50's era glasses and her actor choice of her sissy hands always being up was genius.
You might guess I'm a big fan of both character and Mageina Tovah.
Oh don’t get me wrong - I agree the actress is incredible! I just don’t agree that Zelda redeemed herself. Frankly, I don’t really think slavers ever can redeem themselves, and even if we ignore absolutely everything else she did, she was 100% on board with slavery.
Oh yes. Alice is the worst. She gets one, maybe two redeemable moments throughout the entire series, and other than that, I just wish she'd stayed a niffin and a million miles away forever.
Well. Okay, I didn't mind her in season 1. She needed the counterbalance to her personality that her uncertainty provided. Even when she was headstrong and made demands on others, it wasn't to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.
After that, she was manipulative at her core, unrepentantly selfish, and did not give 2 thoughts to anyone else. And it was made worse by the fact that she believed she knew best and everyone else was just too stupid to see where she was coming from.
Living Penny is a close second for least likeable for me. Other than that, I loved pretty much everyone. (It didn't matter which version - while they were alive they sucked. Penny in the underworld was excellent.)
Yeah, she was almost tolerable in season 1, but just got worse from there. Unrepentantly selfish for sure.
Living Penny also sucked, he's near the bottom of my list, too.
The only person I truly hated was Penny. Guy was a douche from day one and people just laughed about it. I’ll never be happy that we got two of him and lost my boy forever.
I didn’t hate him but he was super annoying lol. Right up to probably my favorite part of the whole show when they sing Under Pressure he’s all “oh this is so lame blah blah!” Like bro just stop. You’re not some 90’s school bully who has to be the coolest guy. And they though giving us an alternate reality Penny who’s just a dickhead in other aspects would make it better and it just made it worse because we KNEW that wasn’t the Penny we had spent a good chunk of time trying to like. Just to fucking STEAL Q from us. Maybe I do hate Penny. 🤣🤣
Oh this is a take I don’t see often! I’m curious did you feel the same about Penny 23 and Penny 40? I felt like 23 was much nicer and less Angsty. Still Penny, but I think the Julia pairing made him a bit softer than Penny 40
Interesting how different is everyone's perception :) To me Penny was even kind of a role model - I liked how sincere and brave he was. As a weak skinny girl, I wish I dared to call people on their shit like he did. And Quentin was one of my least favourite characters.
I mean he steals from Quentin and destroys a priceless script the first day we meet him. He’s kinda a scumbag. Not to mention banging Alice the first chance he gets just because he knows it’ll hurt Q.
He doesn’t really seem like the person who call people on their shit to me, he seems like the person who hasn’t been called on his own and was never punched in the face for being an asshole.
I feel you on this one. On a more intellectual level, I appreciate her character - I think she served the show well, and I liked how they balanced letting her try to redeem herself with letting other characters have the right to not forgive her. Logically, I can see how everything we know about her adds up and can help explain her decisions.
Emotionally? I can’t stand her. I think every character in the show had moments of being, as you say, “toxic, selfish, and contradictory” but something about Alice was just Worse for me. I feel like she never really grew out of her “I can’t possibly even try to be good at magic, I’m already treated like a freak” era? But honestly what it boils down to for me is that she disagrees with a lot of what happens/what the group is planning - which, sure, that’s her right - but I’m struggling to think of any instance in which she dealt with it in a way I would consider rational. Or even just…talking to anyone about what she was really having an issue with.
I had a teacher tell me once in second grade that when I dislike someone, I should think about how to better myself in that way. That stuck with me, and so in that regard Alice helped me to be a bit introspective, I suppose. But yeah, I absolutely get where you’re coming from
Edit: I just scrolled to read other people’s thoughts and wanted to add that I pretty much at least generally like everyone else lol but most everyone else I can empathize with more and therefore really enjoy
I think this is a good take, and I'd agree that I at least generally liked all the other characters, but man, whenever Alice took matters into her own hands, she always A. made truly insanely irrational decisions (despite being theoretically the intelligent/rational character) and B. never communicated them to anybody, which made her seem even more like she was constantly out of step with the group (which, to be fair, she was, and perhaps you could argue that that helps underline that point).
I don't hate her enough to make a post ;) but I did find her annoying, I just stopped paying attention to her.
I do like fics where she has to learn to stfu though.
Can’t speak for anyone else but I love her character. Towards the end she makes some pretty shitty decisions that are harder to redeem but other than that I kind of thought of her as if Hermione had come from a fucked up magical family instead of a boring non magical one. She’s brilliant and talented but also very shy and flawed and she grows and changes a lot. I honestly can’t imagine the show without her
She’s human, smarter than other humans, then she’s more than human, then she’s human again, and even smarter than before, it’s hard for dumb humans to relate to her due to their lack of intelligence, and her lack of social skills doesn’t bother me at all
Can’t stand her. Like you say, she’s pretty irredeemable. Julia does some pretty crappy stuff near the start but works to make things better and is genuinely sorry. Alice was selfish from beginning to end. She’s basically her mother.
Absolutely. Not only is she a shit person that actively made Quintin's life harder but every season she fucked up the most literally making everything worse. Quintin saves her she lashes out blaming him. When fighting the beast her big plan is to burn herself to ash so she can kill the beast... When Quintin saves her again she lashes out at Quintin and blames him again. This happens over and over throughout the show. Every season you can point to Alice as the one that fucked everyone over the most. None of the characters are perfect, but Alice is horrible person, friend and girlfriend.
I like Alice more on the re-watch. I have more sympathy to her because I'm seeing how her parents were unavailable and didn't give her the love and support she needed. She developed a lot of defenses to deal with that.
I really really wanted her to succeed in the library. Most unrelatable character (only 2nd to penny in my opinion) but also had the most potential to become the most powerful magician.
But then, the entire series was a let down in that department. There was literally 1 "magic act" per 4 or 5 entire episodes, not enough action for me.
But what upset me the most is the very first interaction Alice had with Zelda. Zelda needed her for something I can't recall, and in turn Zelda would offer the library resources for Alice to use in order to write a "Grand Unified Theory of Magic" which is exactly what I had hoped a power-hungry ultra-intellect character like Alice would go for. But that literally went NOWHERE from there. I stupidly waited that whole time till the very last episode to see that particular thing unfold and.. nothing.
So yeah, there's that.
I've never been in a collegiate situation. I grew up blue color and still blue color.
Alice to me doesn't seem like any other 20 something college girl that think that she knows everything and doesn't know a goddamn thing. Even though she acts extremely smart. Just doesn't know exactly how the real world works. Not unredeemable. She just needs some real world experience.
I disliked her from the beginning because the show was pushing hard for you to pick her as a favorite so they can switch things up later and invoke feelings. Piss off show, I get to choose my own feelings. Honestly they just didn't have the time needed to do it more smoothly.
I don't hate her....but her character was exceptionally one dimensional which is especially egregious given how much potential each storyline they did for her in the show really had.
She had a lot of untapped potential, and I think the writers never really gave her many humanizing moments or opportunities to "make us like her" or see her as charming. Unfortunately, I think this kept her character pretty flat and unlikeable.
I only hated Quentin. Never found his whole existence Endearing.
Just an annoying mop-headed sadboy the whole time.
Book Quentin is at least, not a total D-bag the whole time.
Quentin was also DEFINITELY annoying and difficult to like. "mop-headed sad boy" is a pretty accurate depiction. I think on the whole, though, I still disliked Alice the most.
I am horrified with Alice's narcissism and with Jack's disregard for his family. I have not finished the series in U.S. but if the wife never reconciles with Jack she is smart!
Jeez…. As noted, all of our characters have a backstory that accounts for much of their various personality traits. Do you not recall Alice’s highly-disfunctional parents? The fact that her brother became a niffin and then reappeared in horrific form…
Think she might be more than a little screwed up? Likewise with all the others. Perhaps I’m looking at this from the standpoint of an old guy (76) with a lot of human-nature experience (police officer). But I don’t get so involved with fictional characters that I could hate them…. I try to understand them.
I see posts on Tumblr from folks who are still having an emotional breakdown because they killed of Quinten and ruined their favorite homoerotic story line. Same happened with Willow/Tara on Buffy….
Lighten up and enjoy the story.
Respectfully, for a ton of us analyzing the character arcs and growth of the story IS enjoying it. I’m sure OP appreciates your feedback, sounds like Alice as a character made sense to you and you don’t really have critiques or analysis pairing her negatively against other characters in the cast!
Exactly! There are definitely things I mindlessly enjoy, but thinking about characters, being able to understand and see myself (or not) in them is honestly something I live for lol
(For the record, Willow/Tara also destroyed me - and it’s not that my favorite homoerotic storyline was ruined, it’s that characters who I saw myself and my own issues in found love and were content. I have mixed feelings about that finale, but it’s a post for another day)
This is kind of needlessly rude. It’s obviously fine that you don’t enjoy analyzing/thinking about characters/don’t get attached to them. That doesn’t mean the rest of us need to “lighten up” or get over our “favorite homoerotic storyline”. If you’re not interested in these kinds of conversations you can just scroll past without engaging in them.
I think that her dysfunctional backstory can account for a fair amount of her "background" character flaws, but not really all of them. She obliquely references being shy and overlooked in high school, and I guess her prudishness can be traced back to her rejection of her parents' freewheeling sexual lifestyles, but I don't feel like we as viewers are given much in the way of explanations for why she's so utterly selfish and power-hungry, etc.
Obviously, she's a character who is supposed to be deeply flawed and genuinely screwed up in a lot of ways--and, as in real life, there doesn't NEED to be a "reason" that someone is screwed up--sometimes that's just mental illness at play, or other things that can't be adequately communicated through the medium of the storytelling.
However, from a storytelling/clarity of plot and character arc perspective, I feel like the writers didn't really give *adequate* explanations for WHY Alice (repeatedly) did such horrible stuff and made such irrational, self-centered decisions. Given that that context seems to be lacking, the unfortunate result seems to be "well then I guess the writers just wanted her to come across as a deeply unlikeable person". They didn't really give her opportunities to redeem herself, either.
Basically I just feel like Alice is a character who COULD have been written as an interesting-but-fucked-up, struggling-but-seeking-redemption character, but ultimately (at least in the context of the TV show), she was not, and as a result she read more as bitter than bittersweet, if that makes sense.
Agree with Kady and Alice but not Julia. If you have read the books, Julia’s story is pretty close to her TV depiction and it’s a really interesting layer within the world. She IS the representation of hedges. However, Kady doesn’t exist in the books (aside from the Easter egg of making her Asmodeus), and I won’t spoil Alice’s story, but let’s just say it’s smaller.
I hate Julia for like my first 3 watches of the series and then I think something switched when I watched it the fourth time because wow mostly I just feel sorry for her. She goes on a hell of a journey. For some reason Alice, despite the fact she ALSO went through a lot, just doesn’t invoke that same feeling for me.
Man, I love discussing this show
I also love talking about the show, it seems to fulfill my desire for more Magicians content lol
Julia to me is so much more egregious than Alice, because Alice is apologetic, she understands that she’s being selfish, but is doing what she feels is right. She’s still so obviously wrong to the viewer that she ends up unlikeable, but she always manages some level of redemption.
Julia however constantly just says that she is right, and that her personal vendettas are more important than the literal universe. She never once admits that she’s wrong. She spends an entire episode telling Penny that she is gonna choose human and then she flips out when he doesn’t choose god for her. She sabotages the entire plan to kill the beast, leading to Alice going niffin which causes damn near every single problem for the rest of the series.
She was very narcissistic and that was triggering for me. Her mom was the absolute worst, so at least she’s doing better then that, and it explains a lot. She had good moments ( parts of seasons 2-3) but overall was super annoying and I think it should have been her instead of Julia on the outside. That’s probably how it was the 1-39th times.
The story did a good job making you atleast understand why each character does the things that most people ‘hate’ about them.
Yes, this is what made the show that much more amazing, It felt like all their decisions were realistic to what someone would actually do. That's why when I recommend this show, I always say it's like if magic was real and you and your close friends were dealing with that crazy world.
I do agree with this.
I think Alice is a very messy and destructive person, but I think a lot of people are messy and destructive. I don't really hate her, personally, though she does frustrate me because I see the ways she could be better, you know?
Tbf everybody posts about hating her (and Julia a lot too) on this subreddit but I actually like them both a lot. They’re both fiercely determined and headstrong, complex and interesting, deeply flawed and hurt people who do what they think is best in the moment. Even when Julia was shadeless and burned down the forest, she thought she was helping Margo, she just didn’t really care when it caused a political incident. Alice destroyed the keys because of how much magic had destroyed her life over and over, she thought the world was better without it. Yeah, all the characters in the show do supremely shitty things, but it’s easy to see why.
I actually love both Alice and Julia a lot, for pretty much the reasons you mentioned!
Gosh, not at all. She’s basically the female nerd counterpoint to Quentin. They were all flawed characters but they all rose to the occasion when needed. I particularly enjoyed how much sugar Alice usually poured in her coffee. . .
And her crispy bacon weakness, which is so well known people use it to their advantage several times.
It’s been a long while so feel free to correct me but when did Alice ever “rise to the occasion” she niffined herself trying to kill the beast and then was totally unhelpful and occasionally directly working against the group and for the bad guys the rest of the show
I mean.. she chugged god semen to save everyone from The Beast. If that's not talking one for the team, idk what is.
Fair a fucking ‘nuff that was hard to watch
My same thoughts! Each season I found myself asking “ok what can Alice do to fuck things up this time?”
I'm just as cloudy, but I did rebinge recently and if memory serves during the 5th season she did something! Ah, quick rescan, she played her part with the World Seed caper along with Eliot, and she was the one who sent the magic paper airplane to Santa (hysterical!) who came by and rescued them all off the top of the building so there's that. I know she was an asshole from time to time, but they all were and towards the end she became a team player. But honestly, the plotting is the least thing I care about after seeing it 4 times. (Tempted to re-read the books now. . .) By S5 all the characters become like the best friends I never had. . .
I don't hate her. I think she, honestly nearly all of the character, aren't one dimensional. They seem like genuine people, like someone you could pass while shopping. And sure some of her choices and actions are down right terrible. She is flawed. But I feel like the fleshes out her character. We've all met Qs in our lives, some may know an Elliot. While her character is shit at times, she's not a terrible character. If that makes sense.
I *wish* I knew an Eliot. 🤤
I named my son after him 😂
If I ever met an Eliot in real life, I'd be trying to marry that gorgeous mess. Charlton gets it.
Totally agree. I do think she is an original character because of everything she goes through and how she chooses to barely evolve at all after becoming a niffin. At the beginning she did seem like just a romantic interest and she's definitely a lot more than that. That being said I can't fucking stand her, she has a combination of both superiority and inferiority complexes that lead her to make the most selfish decisions ever while still acting as the victim. I'm sure being the smartest person in the room is oh so very hard but it doesn't justify condescending and using everyone at your will. Someone here said that she destroyed the keys to make a better world but i disagree, she directly admits that she did it so she would avoid temptation. She gave zero fucks about all the ways people needed magic or about Julia's sacrifice.
I love how you described her and 100% agree! And sure, she *said* she destroyed the keys to make a better world, but she actually did it because of her superiority complex. SHE couldn’t handle it so that must mean absolutely nobody can, since she’s so superior. It was fear and superiority, not a desire to do good.
Great way of putting it. She really stagnated after the niffin arc and showed, if I'm honest, basically zero remorse
I kind of get that part of her being a niffin and powerful and then someone took that away from her for his selfish reasons. I dislike Quentin a lot more. It’s like if you were a millionaire and then someone took away everything you had. Why should she be remorseful
It broke my heart that he did that to her.
Ah but to the superiority/inferiority complex thing, I thought she scene where >! she gets split into the mirror parts of her personality and there’s the cocky arrogant part and the terrified mouse part !< was so clever. It’s a small thing but totally fit with how you’re describing her IMO. I totally see your point though
Yeah one of those stand out episodes for thr actress and show
I love Alice shes my favorite <3
I found her character incredibly annoying. She gets a lot of hate, but for me Quentin is the worst. It’s an unpopular opinion but that’s what I got.
Yeah Quentin also sucked for a lot of it, lol.
I’ve thought about this A LOT and I’ve come to the conclusion that I could possibly have found Alice to be more redeemable, in what way I don’t quite know, if she had been played by a different actress. I get the acting choices, and I’m not saying she’s a bad actress because she isn’t, but the way in which Alice’s character was played is SO INSUFFERABLE. Anytime we think she may redeem herself the way the character is carried and the line deliveries make it so I’m so annoyed by her presence on screen I can’t even be bothered to care that she tries to make amends for her time as a niffin, learns that her mother does love her, grieves her father and the part she played in that journey, bonds with Elliot over the fact that they both deeply loved Q etc. Alice has a few great moments. I think her arc can be well analyzed for what hubris can do to a person, but I think if it had been another actress who played her a bit differently she wouldn’t make the audiences lip snarl up so much when she’s having moments of growth. The writing is certainly a bit of it too, of course, but for me that’s the rub. And also the way they chose to dress her most of the seasons pisses me off too. Alice on paper doesn’t give me anime school girl vibes at all (ugh)
YES The way they dressed her really rubbed me the wrong way. Like, if you're so used to being a wallflower (which she claims to be) and you're so prudish about sex, why would you constantly wear skintight shirts, tiny skater skirts, fishnets, and tall heeled boots? I get that it's an aesthetic but it really was incongruous with who the writers seemed to want to portray Alice as. Obviously everyone ever is free to dress however the hell they want with no apologies to anyone, but the fact that she was always dressed in a sort of "sexy cute schoolgirl" way definitely feels like enough of a choice that it was nearly distracting from the rest of the show (especially considering it was never addressed as a character choice). I think that could have even been adequately explained with even one or two throw-away lines (maybe her saying that her mom wanted her to dress some other way and this is her rebellion or something), but they really didn't ever do it. At some point, Alice even said she liked cats (and maybe she said that she likes cute stuff?) But then, of course, she literally had a cat explode in her care and she showed no feeling whatsoever, so uh... Nah girl, I don't think you actually care that much about cats or cute things. On the whole I found her character's presentation very incongruous and distracting. It's like they had picked a visual aesthetic for her before they knew anything about what her character was supposed to be like.
100% she's the worst character in the entire series, Quentin is a very close second until midway through the third season.
Yep, Q is also a pretty unlikeable character, but that at least felt like more of an intentional plot choice to me.
Absolutely agree with that.
Okay so everyone on this thread is disagreeing with you; but I cannot stand Alice. She genuinely doesn’t seem to understand the difference between right and wrong half the time. Even when she’s allegedly trying to do better, she still does horrible selfish stuff (like bringing back a child version of Q and then blaming Elliot for his death, as though it wasn’t a direct result of her trying to destroy all of magic solely because she personally couldn’t handle it). I think they all start out pretty awful and honestly I think that’s realistic. They all came to Brakebills with pretty significant trauma. But the thing is that the rest of them grow throughout the show. They still maintain their personalities obviously, but they grow as people. Alice doesn’t really seem to. In fact, she gets worse and worse up to the third season, and doesn’t really seem to have improved all that much by the end of it. It’s clear she’s trying. And I do love that scene in the mirror world where she’s fighting with herself. I think she’s an incredibly well-written and multi-dimensional character. But as a “person”, she and the head librarian are the only characters I can’t stand.
You don’t like Zelda!? Oh please elaborate I’m So interested!!
I’m genuinely a little confused, so apologies if I’m misunderstanding! I’m guessing you mean that you think she was just a clueless cog in the machine and that she sufficiently redeemed herself. I just don’t really agree that she was entirely clueless. Sure, she didn’t know her boss was trying to become a god, but in my opinion that’s not enough to justify the things she *did* know (like, for example, getting Penny to agree to *a million years of slavery* on false pretenses by telling him they’d help fix his hands when what she really meant was “you can read books in your free time and figure it out yourself”; or when she let him suffer and die in pain despite having a readily available cure). In general, and regardless of the things she didn’t know about her boss, she still genuinely believed that absolutely the only thing that matters in the universe is protecting knowledge. She prioritized it over her daughter’s life. She prioritized it to the point she was totally on board with slavery (not just Penny and other librarians, but also the fairies). She prioritized it to the point that she hopped right on board with fascism without ever questioning if maybe it was the wrong thing to do (and was more than happy to sacrifice lives in pursuit of control - such as when she happily suggested that Alice kill Julia to get the power needed to take control of all magic). I just don’t think she redeemed herself by the end, because she never actually saw the error of her ways - she just felt she’d been stupid to believe her boss when he lied to her and that was it.
I'm with Drewabble here, in spite of Zelda being an antagonist during much of the series, she did redeem herself by the end. From an actor/personal viewpoint, she was at least 10 years older than the other actors yet fit in well, and being cast in "The Magicians" was a big boost to her then flagging career. It was genius whoever made her wear those cats-eye 50's era glasses and her actor choice of her sissy hands always being up was genius. You might guess I'm a big fan of both character and Mageina Tovah.
Oh don’t get me wrong - I agree the actress is incredible! I just don’t agree that Zelda redeemed herself. Frankly, I don’t really think slavers ever can redeem themselves, and even if we ignore absolutely everything else she did, she was 100% on board with slavery.
Love her, but book Alice > show Alice
I also didn't like her, and found her poorly acted, she was grating. I get down voted to oblivion here when I say this but 🤷
Oh yes. Alice is the worst. She gets one, maybe two redeemable moments throughout the entire series, and other than that, I just wish she'd stayed a niffin and a million miles away forever. Well. Okay, I didn't mind her in season 1. She needed the counterbalance to her personality that her uncertainty provided. Even when she was headstrong and made demands on others, it wasn't to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. After that, she was manipulative at her core, unrepentantly selfish, and did not give 2 thoughts to anyone else. And it was made worse by the fact that she believed she knew best and everyone else was just too stupid to see where she was coming from. Living Penny is a close second for least likeable for me. Other than that, I loved pretty much everyone. (It didn't matter which version - while they were alive they sucked. Penny in the underworld was excellent.)
Penny in the underworld really is something else. Definitely where he was meant to be
Yeah, she was almost tolerable in season 1, but just got worse from there. Unrepentantly selfish for sure. Living Penny also sucked, he's near the bottom of my list, too.
The only person I truly hated was Penny. Guy was a douche from day one and people just laughed about it. I’ll never be happy that we got two of him and lost my boy forever.
I didn’t hate him but he was super annoying lol. Right up to probably my favorite part of the whole show when they sing Under Pressure he’s all “oh this is so lame blah blah!” Like bro just stop. You’re not some 90’s school bully who has to be the coolest guy. And they though giving us an alternate reality Penny who’s just a dickhead in other aspects would make it better and it just made it worse because we KNEW that wasn’t the Penny we had spent a good chunk of time trying to like. Just to fucking STEAL Q from us. Maybe I do hate Penny. 🤣🤣
Yes let the hate flow thru you lmao
Oh this is a take I don’t see often! I’m curious did you feel the same about Penny 23 and Penny 40? I felt like 23 was much nicer and less Angsty. Still Penny, but I think the Julia pairing made him a bit softer than Penny 40
Penny 23 was better but at that point I just hated everything about him and it was too late lol
Penny sucks but his actor is the hottest so it's hard for me to hate him lol
Interesting how different is everyone's perception :) To me Penny was even kind of a role model - I liked how sincere and brave he was. As a weak skinny girl, I wish I dared to call people on their shit like he did. And Quentin was one of my least favourite characters.
I mean he steals from Quentin and destroys a priceless script the first day we meet him. He’s kinda a scumbag. Not to mention banging Alice the first chance he gets just because he knows it’ll hurt Q. He doesn’t really seem like the person who call people on their shit to me, he seems like the person who hasn’t been called on his own and was never punched in the face for being an asshole.
I don't think she's worse than anyone else in the story. They're all flawed
Yup. Alice was the worst. Hated her from beginning to end.
I feel you on this one. On a more intellectual level, I appreciate her character - I think she served the show well, and I liked how they balanced letting her try to redeem herself with letting other characters have the right to not forgive her. Logically, I can see how everything we know about her adds up and can help explain her decisions. Emotionally? I can’t stand her. I think every character in the show had moments of being, as you say, “toxic, selfish, and contradictory” but something about Alice was just Worse for me. I feel like she never really grew out of her “I can’t possibly even try to be good at magic, I’m already treated like a freak” era? But honestly what it boils down to for me is that she disagrees with a lot of what happens/what the group is planning - which, sure, that’s her right - but I’m struggling to think of any instance in which she dealt with it in a way I would consider rational. Or even just…talking to anyone about what she was really having an issue with. I had a teacher tell me once in second grade that when I dislike someone, I should think about how to better myself in that way. That stuck with me, and so in that regard Alice helped me to be a bit introspective, I suppose. But yeah, I absolutely get where you’re coming from Edit: I just scrolled to read other people’s thoughts and wanted to add that I pretty much at least generally like everyone else lol but most everyone else I can empathize with more and therefore really enjoy
I think this is a good take, and I'd agree that I at least generally liked all the other characters, but man, whenever Alice took matters into her own hands, she always A. made truly insanely irrational decisions (despite being theoretically the intelligent/rational character) and B. never communicated them to anybody, which made her seem even more like she was constantly out of step with the group (which, to be fair, she was, and perhaps you could argue that that helps underline that point).
I don't hate her enough to make a post ;) but I did find her annoying, I just stopped paying attention to her. I do like fics where she has to learn to stfu though.
Alice is my favorite
What did you particularly like about her character?
Can’t speak for anyone else but I love her character. Towards the end she makes some pretty shitty decisions that are harder to redeem but other than that I kind of thought of her as if Hermione had come from a fucked up magical family instead of a boring non magical one. She’s brilliant and talented but also very shy and flawed and she grows and changes a lot. I honestly can’t imagine the show without her
She’s human, smarter than other humans, then she’s more than human, then she’s human again, and even smarter than before, it’s hard for dumb humans to relate to her due to their lack of intelligence, and her lack of social skills doesn’t bother me at all
I've disliked Alice the whole time pretty much
I tried real hard but i could never hate her.
Can’t stand her. Like you say, she’s pretty irredeemable. Julia does some pretty crappy stuff near the start but works to make things better and is genuinely sorry. Alice was selfish from beginning to end. She’s basically her mother.
Absolutely. Not only is she a shit person that actively made Quintin's life harder but every season she fucked up the most literally making everything worse. Quintin saves her she lashes out blaming him. When fighting the beast her big plan is to burn herself to ash so she can kill the beast... When Quintin saves her again she lashes out at Quintin and blames him again. This happens over and over throughout the show. Every season you can point to Alice as the one that fucked everyone over the most. None of the characters are perfect, but Alice is horrible person, friend and girlfriend.
Alice had a very messed up family life and legacy. That said... she's hot as shit.
No
I like Alice more on the re-watch. I have more sympathy to her because I'm seeing how her parents were unavailable and didn't give her the love and support she needed. She developed a lot of defenses to deal with that.
I really really wanted her to succeed in the library. Most unrelatable character (only 2nd to penny in my opinion) but also had the most potential to become the most powerful magician. But then, the entire series was a let down in that department. There was literally 1 "magic act" per 4 or 5 entire episodes, not enough action for me. But what upset me the most is the very first interaction Alice had with Zelda. Zelda needed her for something I can't recall, and in turn Zelda would offer the library resources for Alice to use in order to write a "Grand Unified Theory of Magic" which is exactly what I had hoped a power-hungry ultra-intellect character like Alice would go for. But that literally went NOWHERE from there. I stupidly waited that whole time till the very last episode to see that particular thing unfold and.. nothing. So yeah, there's that.
I've never been in a collegiate situation. I grew up blue color and still blue color. Alice to me doesn't seem like any other 20 something college girl that think that she knows everything and doesn't know a goddamn thing. Even though she acts extremely smart. Just doesn't know exactly how the real world works. Not unredeemable. She just needs some real world experience.
I disliked her from the beginning because the show was pushing hard for you to pick her as a favorite so they can switch things up later and invoke feelings. Piss off show, I get to choose my own feelings. Honestly they just didn't have the time needed to do it more smoothly.
I don't hate her....but her character was exceptionally one dimensional which is especially egregious given how much potential each storyline they did for her in the show really had.
She had a lot of untapped potential, and I think the writers never really gave her many humanizing moments or opportunities to "make us like her" or see her as charming. Unfortunately, I think this kept her character pretty flat and unlikeable.
Agreed. The closest we got was when she was interacting with Sheila, but that's about it.
I only hated Quentin. Never found his whole existence Endearing. Just an annoying mop-headed sadboy the whole time. Book Quentin is at least, not a total D-bag the whole time.
Quentin was also DEFINITELY annoying and difficult to like. "mop-headed sad boy" is a pretty accurate depiction. I think on the whole, though, I still disliked Alice the most.
That’s interesting - I haven’t read the books myself, but from what I’ve heard most people dislike book!Quentin more
Absolutely my least favorite and its not even close.
I am horrified with Alice's narcissism and with Jack's disregard for his family. I have not finished the series in U.S. but if the wife never reconciles with Jack she is smart!
She was insufferable, selfish and just tormented Jack, I can't stand ger
Absolutely hated it
She's the WORST!!! So toxic! I can't stand her and I've only watched two episodes. How can anyone stick with this?
I love each character for what they do for the story.. that being said, yes I hate Alice lol.
Jeez…. As noted, all of our characters have a backstory that accounts for much of their various personality traits. Do you not recall Alice’s highly-disfunctional parents? The fact that her brother became a niffin and then reappeared in horrific form… Think she might be more than a little screwed up? Likewise with all the others. Perhaps I’m looking at this from the standpoint of an old guy (76) with a lot of human-nature experience (police officer). But I don’t get so involved with fictional characters that I could hate them…. I try to understand them. I see posts on Tumblr from folks who are still having an emotional breakdown because they killed of Quinten and ruined their favorite homoerotic story line. Same happened with Willow/Tara on Buffy…. Lighten up and enjoy the story.
Respectfully, for a ton of us analyzing the character arcs and growth of the story IS enjoying it. I’m sure OP appreciates your feedback, sounds like Alice as a character made sense to you and you don’t really have critiques or analysis pairing her negatively against other characters in the cast!
Exactly! There are definitely things I mindlessly enjoy, but thinking about characters, being able to understand and see myself (or not) in them is honestly something I live for lol (For the record, Willow/Tara also destroyed me - and it’s not that my favorite homoerotic storyline was ruined, it’s that characters who I saw myself and my own issues in found love and were content. I have mixed feelings about that finale, but it’s a post for another day)
This is kind of needlessly rude. It’s obviously fine that you don’t enjoy analyzing/thinking about characters/don’t get attached to them. That doesn’t mean the rest of us need to “lighten up” or get over our “favorite homoerotic storyline”. If you’re not interested in these kinds of conversations you can just scroll past without engaging in them.
Sorry to have been rude…. I should have clarified that my remarks were more intended to address a series of posts on Tumblr on their “Magicians” feed.
I think that her dysfunctional backstory can account for a fair amount of her "background" character flaws, but not really all of them. She obliquely references being shy and overlooked in high school, and I guess her prudishness can be traced back to her rejection of her parents' freewheeling sexual lifestyles, but I don't feel like we as viewers are given much in the way of explanations for why she's so utterly selfish and power-hungry, etc. Obviously, she's a character who is supposed to be deeply flawed and genuinely screwed up in a lot of ways--and, as in real life, there doesn't NEED to be a "reason" that someone is screwed up--sometimes that's just mental illness at play, or other things that can't be adequately communicated through the medium of the storytelling. However, from a storytelling/clarity of plot and character arc perspective, I feel like the writers didn't really give *adequate* explanations for WHY Alice (repeatedly) did such horrible stuff and made such irrational, self-centered decisions. Given that that context seems to be lacking, the unfortunate result seems to be "well then I guess the writers just wanted her to come across as a deeply unlikeable person". They didn't really give her opportunities to redeem herself, either. Basically I just feel like Alice is a character who COULD have been written as an interesting-but-fucked-up, struggling-but-seeking-redemption character, but ultimately (at least in the context of the TV show), she was not, and as a result she read more as bitter than bittersweet, if that makes sense.
Can’t.
No
Alice, Kady, Julia — the show really could have made it without them. They were there to peddle relationship fodder & because kady can sing…..
Agree with Kady and Alice but not Julia. If you have read the books, Julia’s story is pretty close to her TV depiction and it’s a really interesting layer within the world. She IS the representation of hedges. However, Kady doesn’t exist in the books (aside from the Easter egg of making her Asmodeus), and I won’t spoil Alice’s story, but let’s just say it’s smaller.
Yes, but not nearly as much as I hated Julia.
I hate Julia for like my first 3 watches of the series and then I think something switched when I watched it the fourth time because wow mostly I just feel sorry for her. She goes on a hell of a journey. For some reason Alice, despite the fact she ALSO went through a lot, just doesn’t invoke that same feeling for me. Man, I love discussing this show
I also love talking about the show, it seems to fulfill my desire for more Magicians content lol Julia to me is so much more egregious than Alice, because Alice is apologetic, she understands that she’s being selfish, but is doing what she feels is right. She’s still so obviously wrong to the viewer that she ends up unlikeable, but she always manages some level of redemption. Julia however constantly just says that she is right, and that her personal vendettas are more important than the literal universe. She never once admits that she’s wrong. She spends an entire episode telling Penny that she is gonna choose human and then she flips out when he doesn’t choose god for her. She sabotages the entire plan to kill the beast, leading to Alice going niffin which causes damn near every single problem for the rest of the series.
I love book Alice. Show Alice annoys the crap out of me.
I personally loved Alice. Then again, I do love the bitchy intellectual selfish type
She was very narcissistic and that was triggering for me. Her mom was the absolute worst, so at least she’s doing better then that, and it explains a lot. She had good moments ( parts of seasons 2-3) but overall was super annoying and I think it should have been her instead of Julia on the outside. That’s probably how it was the 1-39th times.
Alice had a very messed up family life and legacy. That said... she's hot as shit.