app for entranceway
Feb. 25th, 2018 05:16 amName: Katie
DW username:E-Mail: mostlyverytired@gmail.com
IM: I’d rather be pmed then give my discord out
Plurk: autoclave
Other Characters: Wynonna Earp |![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
guncocked
Character Name: Julia Wicker
Series: The Magicians (TV show, not the book series)
Timeline: 3x07 “Poached Eggs”
Canon Resource Link: http://themagicians.wikia.com/wiki/TV:Julia_Wicker
Character History:
cw: rape, abortion, descriptions of gore and violence
do you love magic, is it in your soul, is it like the secret part of what you always were? yeah, so you know how I feel
In 39 timelines, Julia goes to Brakebills and excels as a student. In the current timeline, however, she fails the exam and is rejected from the school. She was supposed to forget it, her memory was supposed to be wiped, but she cuts into her own arm to use the pain to make sure she remembers. If magic is real, she can't forget it. She gives up on her plans to go to Yale or anything else. None of that matters anymore. She becomes despondent and depressed, stops eating or anything else. When Quentin comes home to visit her on her birthday she begs him to tell them to test her again. Then in the bathroom someone uses magic to assault her and take her shirt off -- and she becomes so angry and pissed off her hands spark -- it was a test. Pete had no intention of raping or hurting her, but he knew she had the gift and needed to see it for himself.
It turns out Brakebills is not the only way to learn magic. He takes her to a hedgewitch house. It is there she's presented with another test, she and Marina are locked into a meat locker where the supplies are kept. She needs to find a way out. Julia is tired of failing. She's going to figure it out. She bonds with Marina over the love of magic, of how knowing it exists changes your world, you can't go back to how things were before. This is where Julia's ruthless determination begins to really show -- she even goes as far as to cut into a dead body to get things she needs to get out. And she does get them out. She passes the test. Not everything can be solved by magic, that's the lesson she needs to learn. And it turns out the person she was proving herself to wasn't Pete, it was Marina. Marina is the top hedge witch in New York. Julia earns her first hedge witch star. This is just the beginning.
Julia is thrilled to start actually learning magic, and she's good at it. Soon enough she's pulling off spells like stealing cash from ATMs. She throws herself into it, and ignores calls from her boyfriend James. Pete warns her that she needs to balance her shit. She's sure she can handle it. She can't though. She's distant and distracted. The things that seemed so important. like going to Yale, don't seem to matter anymore. Magic is the only thing that matters anymore. Marina insists that her life is keeping her behind from her full potential, magic won't click until she's all in. Quentin finds her at the hedge witch house when looking for something and then leaves without saying much to her which leads her to following him out and a huge argument between the two. For people who were best friends things are falling apart more and more with one another. Julia can't stand how it seems like her best friend is judging her, turning his back on her, when she's just trying to do the same thing he is: learn magic. She just doesn't have the easy route he does because she was denied access to Brakebills. Julia comes up with an elaborate lie to James about how she was addicted to Adderall and going to meetings, she's already lost Quentin and she doesn't want to lose him too.
Julia is so angry at Q for his words and actions, how he seemingly turned his back on her, that with Marina's help she gets revenge on him. She creates this entire fake world where Q is back in a mental hospital and he thinks everything that happened in Brakebills was a delusion. Marina is doing this to lure Dean Fogg into breaking down some of the charms so she can her memories back from Brakebills. Kady convinces Julia to help save Quentin and because of that Marina blacklists her from the hedgewitch community.
But Julia is stubborn. She is desperate to find other witches to work with. She even offers her body to Pete for help with that. But it doesn't do much, the people she's connected with are desperate and low level. What makes things worse is that Marina has wiped James' memory of her -- more and more Julia finds herself completely and utterly alone.
Julia, however, is nothing if not persistent. She keeps looking for leads to magic which leads her to another hedge witch, Hannah. Hannah was banned by Marina too, which makes her the seemingly perfect ally. That is until she learns that Hannah is Kady's mother -- and the reason why Hannah got banished is she killed two people. That's no good. Julia then goes on to try to steal files from Marina -- but she would have died if she tried doing it alone so it's good Hannah came to help her, right? Well, maybe not because it turns out Marina put some heavy protection spells because Hannah ends up dead. Julia ends arrested but her sister comes to help her. It turns out her family is worried -- her mother wants to have her commited to keep from drawing more attention to their family. They think she's an addict spiraling out of control. Julia's father had been an alcoholic, and their mother had him sent away and Julia and her sister is afraid the same will happen to Julia. So she goes to rehab instead.
She plans on giving up magic. It's too much. It comes at too high of a cost and she's lost almost everything to it. Marina visits her while she's in treatment, tells her that there doesn't have to be a blood feud, but if Julia comes after her again she'll kill everyone Julia cares about, those who are left anyway. She also calls Julia weak. It turns out one of the chaplain's knows about magic, he went to Brakebills. He argues that magic isn't a burden or something to be used to get a fix, it's a gift, a set of tools. The spell he gives her, an offering to the goddess of the grain, makes her float in air, it was powerful and dangerous. She sends an amends letter to Quentin, and he sends one back, they're both still angry at one another and working to forgive one another, but they both still love one another too. Using the same spell that she used to enter Quentin's mind Julia enters the mind of Richard's friend, Kira. She helps give Kira peace before helping her die.
With Richard's help Julia has a community online she can talk to about magic with. One of the people in this community is Kady, who is unsurprisingly not happy to see Julia considering what happened to her mom. But they manage to work together to complete some spells and level up and discover that their group of cyber buddies have a bigger plan -- they want to summon a god. Because that'll end well (spoiler: it does not)
Julia is the key to it. She's god touched. The only one in the group who can make a real connection. They're told all the Gods are dead, that they should stop looking, but then Julia has a vision of Our Lady Underground. They're on the right path. The servant for Our Lady Underground, however, warns Julia. Once that bell is run, it can't be unrung. It makes Julia nervous. But the rest of her group is excited, and Richard reassures her everything is going to be okay and she has sex with him.
They go ahead with the ritual to summon the Goddess and when Quentin looks up Julia she's alone. Quentin has found out that what makes this timeline different, what gives them the chance of defeating the Beast is that Julia was denied access to Brakebills. The whole time she was right, but it was necessary for her to be cast aside to grow stronger. After fighting all season the two finally seem to make amends with one another, if they're going to possibly die they don't want to die angry at one another. Julia tells him about how they summoned the Goddess and how much better things were, how beautiful some magic out there is. When Quentin asks her to go to Fillory with him Julia reveals that she still has the table where they mapped out Fillory together. They've been planning this trip since they were nine, it seemed like destiny that they were finally going to get to go together. But to find a way into Fillory then need to find a way to travel through time to go through one of the doors the Chatwins use. So they find their way back into 1942, enter a phone booth Jane Chatwin uses, and they get to go to Fillory.
And what's even more exciting is they get to help Jane in one of the most iconic scenes from the books, it's like every nerd's wish fulfillment. Julia is the Witch and Quentin is the fool. Someone has followed them into Fillory, though, a young Martin Chatwin who was denied access to Fillory after a while. The author of the Fillory books, Christopher Plover, had been molesting him. They think Plover is the Beast. So, they commission a blade that could destroy him. But then they run into the Watcher Woman who everyone is afraid of, and Martin runs off. It turns out the Watcher Woman is the older Jane Chatwin, the one who had created the time loops, the one who died in the current timeline. She helps set them into Fillory of 2016...and man do things suck there. She also reveals to Quentin that Julia's memory has been modified, but some things are better off not remembered. The blade is ready now but to get it there needs to be a new ruler of Fillory -- so Eliot (one of Quentin's friends from Brakebills) ends up marrying a woman and becomes high king. While a lot of other stuff is also going down Julia and Quentin hunt down one of the gods of Fillory, Ember. Ember is not exactly the most helpful person but he does tell them they need a champion to defeat the beast. Which means.... he gives Quentin a bottle of his semen to give him that power. Yeah, it's gross. This show gets really weird sometimes, the narration apologizes. Ember also notices there's a memory spell on Julia and removes it. He thinks he's helping. He's really, really not.
Julia's demeanor changes completely and she is clearly shaken. She begs Quentin to take the memory away from her again. It is only after Alice drinks ember's seed so she can wield the blade, however, that Julia finally talks about what happened. It turns out the goddess summoning didn't go the way Julia had previously told them. They didn't summon Our Lady Underground at all -- instead they summoned a trickster god, Reynard. Reynard takes over Richard's body and kills the rest of the coven. He is about to kill Kady when Julia steps in. Kady can escape but Julia cannot. Reynard brutally rapes her and leaves her for dead. Julia is devastated by the massacre and the assault and she doesn't know how to cope with anything that happened, so with no one else to turn to she called Marina for help. Marina helps her clean up the bodies and herself, and then Marina places the false memory into Julia's mind, so she can go on living. But thanks to Ember she no longer has that false memory to cling to. Quentin promises to help her, even if that means helping her kill a god.
It's time to finally take on the Beast and things go from bad to worse. The Beast gets the upper hand and Alice has somehow lost the blade. The Beast, Martin Chatwin, kills Alice, Margo and Eliot, and cuts off Penny's hands. When he goes for Quentin, Julia intervenes. It seems that what Reynard did to her has left her with extra power and she is able to wield the blade. She doesn't kill Martin, however, and instead asks to cut a deal because he knows how to kill Gods.
And that's the end of season one.
I lost my friend, I lost everything, he turned me into a monster
Julia has gone back to NYC with Martin and they agree on the terms of their deal, she'll give him the blade that can kill him but only once he helps her kill Reynard, and if he tries to double cross her, she'll kill him. They follow Reynard's trail which leads them to scenes like the one Julia experienced, triggering her PTSD and flooding her with emotions. Martin offers to help her cut off her shade, the part of her soul that allows her to feel emotion, but also the part of her that allows her to love. It'd be easier to get her revenge, he argues, if she wasn't in such constant anguish. He thinks that her capacity to feel is a weakness, time would prove in the long run that it is a strength.
The partnership doesn't go very well, Martin sings constantly and tries to drive Julia insane. They need each other but they don't like each other or get along very well. Though their motivations may be very similar, both driven by the trauma of sexual assault, their base personalities are very different. Martin rather represents what Julia could become if she lets that trauma consume her too much. They kidnap Marina to try to get her to agree to be bait to lure in Reynard. Marina convinces Julia to let her go but is clearly shaken as she tries to find help in dealing with the Reynard problem. In the meantime, Quentin warns Julia that they have a spell to kill Martin, but if she's too close she'll die too. She insists they can't kill him yet -- she still needs his help to go after Reynard. But in return she does warn Quentin that Martin has cursed the castle in Fillory. After exhausting her other options, Marina shows back up on Julia's doorstep, ready to help.
Reynard seems to be targeting people who are trying to summon Our Lady Underground so Julia advises Marina to do the spell to summon him. She plans on being there so she can protect Marina but then at the last-minute Martin uses magic to remove them from the room. He believes Reynard would never come if he senses Julia in the room. Needless to say , Julia is pretty pissed off at her partner in crime right now. While she tries to head back to Marina Marina has headed home, where Reynard is waiting for her. The problem is she had put up powerful wards before she realized Reynard was there so even though Julia and Martin try to come in to help her, they can't. Until they break the charms. It looks like they'll save her just in the nick of time!!!
You know, except that Penny interrupts them and transports them to Fillory because the others want to finally kill Martin. Except the spell gets interrupted because Quentin can't allow Julia to get killed in the crossfire. So then Penny takes Julia back to Earth while the others kill Martin once and for all in Fillory (with Alice turning into a niffin and then being killed as a result of all this) and she's too late. She makes her way into Marina's apartment and her friend is brutally murdered.
After the loss of Marina, Martin, and the knife to kill Reynard Julia is in desperate need of a friend and she finds herself locating Kady who has been in a drug den of sorts. She helps her friend get clean and then asks her for help -- she wants to bring Marina back from the dead, which means breaking into Brakebills and copying down a book because she can't take it. She runs into Margo there, they thrown down some snark at one another and they go on their ways. They manage to bring back Marina temporarily to learn forty years ago someone banished Reynard from this world and that woman is the key to everything.
So Kady and Julia start doing the whole research thing to find information but then Julia starts getting sick and they realize horrifyingly that she isn't sick --she's pregnant. She doesn't know if it's Richard's or Reynard's but she knows one thing -- she can't keep this baby. So they decide to go to the clinic to get an abortion. It should be simple right? Nope, nothing is ever simple in Julia's life. Something evil overcomes the doctor who is supposed to do her procedure and she stabs herself in the eye. It turns out half-god babies have ways to protect themselves. Great.
Julia and Kady have two missions now, getting rid of the baby and finding Dana, the woman who banished Reynard forty years ago. Julia manages to find the woman and discovers she was impregnated by Reynard too -- the baby's power is what helped her banish him. Dana basically says Julia has no choice but to have the baby and tries to trap her but then Kady comes to her rescue and they run off with Dana's Haxenpaxen, a creature that will hide them from Reynard.
Finally they find some witches who say they can get rid of the baby but it's going to cost a lot of money so they do what anyone would: they get the others to help them rob a bank. It doesn't go well, a bunch of people die, but then Julia rewinds time and saves them and in the end despite all the obstacles against them (one of the witches has been sending monsters to kill Julia just in case they can't ge the money) and Julia is able to get the magical black alley abortion.
Nothing is ever easy though and she's lost something important in the process. Her shade. The shade is like a part of her soul, the part that works most like a conscience, and without it the difference is staggering. She's laughing and giddy and more than a little reckless. She tries to track down Reynard's son only to run into Reynard himself -- but she's rescued by Quentin and taken to Fillory. Julia convinces Margo to let her help convince a Dryad to help in the war against Loria -- and when he's an asshole to both of them Julia gives him a spell that will burn his entire forest down. So there's that. Margo understandably locks her up for this.
When she's taken back to Earth Kady and Penny get pretty worried about her reckless, thoughtless behavior without her shade. They've located Reynard's son, Senator Gaines, and Julia wants to kill him to harness his power, which you know, is not great. So they compromise and kidnap the guy instead. When she runs into Quentin who is possessed by the niffin version of Alice they strike a deal to get Quentin to release Alice if Alice kills Reynard. But Quentin ain't down for that and all is without hope -- until Gaines shows up and he's who Reynard really wants so our intrepid heroes live to survive another day. And Julia gets locked up. Again. By Kady this time.
The next time she's let loose it's by Dean Fogg, Brakebills isn't a prison after all. She knows she's supposed to feel bad about the things she's done but without her shade she simply doesn't. But on a drug trip Quentin meets her shade and hey, now it's time for them to start trying to find a way to get it back. They question Dean Fogg and find out in one of the other time loops, Alice was very interested in shades. With the Tesla Flexion device Quentin can go to that other timeline and talk to Alice. They discover shades go to the Underworld but to get there they need an ancient one. And Julia is pretty sure that means a dragon.
The quest to find said dragon leads them into the sewers of New York which is pretty gross. And it turns out the passage to the Underworld costs them leaving behind the Fillory button which is pretty sucky for two kids who grew up obsessed with Fillory. When they go to the Underworld Julia finds her friends who were killed by Reynard -- including her former lover Richard, whose body Reynard wears now. It's an uncomfortable moment but Richard ends up being the most helpful person they've talked to in the Underworld. His distraction allows them to enter where they find both Julia's shade and Alice's -- and in a surprising turn Julia chooses to save Alice's for Quentin instead. It's during this time that Julia learns that Our Lady Underground was Persephone, and she's been missing for a long time.
When they get back to Earth Quentin and Julia work together to revive Alice back from being a niffin. After that Julia meets up with Kady again to go back to their plan to kill Reynard. Julia is still shadeless but she feels like Kady will keep her in line. Senator Gaines, Reynard's son, helps them by having them kill him to harness his power to kill a god. Penny also gets a book about killing gods, it seems like everything is in place. But when Julia goes to confront Reynard and kill him Persephone appears, revealing herself to be Reynard's mother. She begs Julia to show mercy, to not lose herself completely, and Julia agrees, letting Reynard go. And in exchange, she gets her shade back. Kady is pissed and wants nothing to do with Julia after this, after everything they've gone through.
Getting her shade back isn't easy on Julia. She seems drained from the weight of all the trauma she's gone through and can be found on the couch, smoking and trying to forget. It's there that Eliot reaches out to her with some kindness and implores her to help him save the world. Working with Quentin in Fillory they manage to kill both of the gods there and that means magic is saved right? Wrong. The old gods are pissed and use a plumber to shut magic off. Except months later Julia, who had returned to Yale and law school, meets with Quentin and shows him something. Sparks. She can do magic. But how? The closing shot of the season is Julia finally smiling.
I wouldn’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else
When season three starts Julia and Quentin are still trying to find a way to bring magic back and they realize they probably need to talk to another god to get more information. Finding gods has never been easy, however, but one of their classmates from Brakebills, Josh, leads them to Bacchus, the god of partying. Bacchus wants nothing to do with them at first because he thinks they're a bore so they get really drunk and start letting loose and he lets them in. It's during this party that we first start seeing that Julia is still experiencing PTSD from what happened with Reynard, having flashbacks in the middle of the party. Bacchus doesn't want to help them or introduce them to his parents, the higher gods. Julia sees how lost Josh in and reaches out to him, showing him the magic she can do, that there's still hope for magic returning to their world. Quentin gets mad at her for that, but she doesn't care. After everything she's gone through, she wants to help people now, she never wants anyone to feel as desperate or alone as she did. Their time with Bacchus is not completely useless, however, as they discover there might be a secret back door to magic. It won't be easy to get to, but when is anything ever easy in these kids lives?
Communication with Eliot from Fillory leads them to finding a book about the quest for the seven keys -- what they will need to open the backdoor for magic. But the pages aren't all revealed yet -- they'll need more magic for that. So they follow the news for any magic going ons and they hear about an incident at a bar where someone was turned into a bear. They're pretty sure the person turned into a bear was Mayakovsky, which is who they need to find because he has magical batteries. So Quentin hunts down his classmate Emily who is now married to Mayakovsky and that then leads them to Professor Lipton, who had also been involved with Mayakovsky. She was hurt he married the younger girl instead so stole the battery to do magic around town. And then she drops the battery from the roof during her suicide attempt. They think there might be one left so they go back to Emily only to discover Kady has already stolen that one.
Kady stole the battery because Penny has been dying of super magic cancer and she wants to summon a demon to try to help him. Considering how badly summoning someone has gone in the past Julia agrees to help Kady despite how rocky their friendship has been lately. The demon is able to eat away Penny's tumor but it's too late -- he seems to have died (he's not actually dead dead, as he was astral projecting at the time, these things are never simple).
Kady spirals after Penny's death and goes back to using heroin, overdosing on the stuff. But Our Lady Underground sends a message to Julia so she's able to get to her friend in time to heal her and save her life. After this she and Quentin find a lead to another one of the keys, and once again everything goes back to the Chatwins, this time Ruper Chatwin to be exact. Through trying to track the key down they discover Rupert had been in love with his best friend -- this particular key is the key of truth. They finally locate it in the home of a connection of Dean Fogg's. Eventually, when Eliot gets his hand on this key, they discover Penny isn't quite as dead as they thought. The key reveals the truth, after all, and whoever is holding it can see and communicate with Penny.
While Quentin goes back to Fillory with Eliot to look for the next key Julia continues researching and begins to bond with Alice in the meantime. While she's out having drinks with Alice she sees Our Lady Underground -- the one who has been using other people to send messages to Julia. This is when Julia learns that the reason she can still do magic is because she now has Reynard's magic. It makes her angry and pissed off because she doesn't want anything to do with him or his magic. And Alice wants nothing but to have magic again, so they come up with a plan to give her magic to Alice.
There are few magicians who are determined and headstrong as both Julia and Alice are so when they start working on this plan to transfer the magic they make a rather formidable team. It turns out Dean Fogg was the one who created the transfer spell so they shake him down with answers and he sends them after an incubus to get it's tail so they can start the process. And it seems to work, at first. Alice has the magic and she even begins to make a new body for Penny, like a new body had been made for her, but then she falls to the ground convulsing. That's not what one would call a good sign.
It turns out Alice's body is rejecting to magic because it was meant for Julia and Julia alone, so she makes a plan with Dean Fogg to take it back. She doesn't want it anymore than she did before but she's not going to allow Alice to die -- but she also knows Alice isn't going to willingly give it up to her either. But Julia needs magic to make the transfer -- which is a catch 22 until she makes a deal with Irene McAllister who had some backup magic -- for a future favor, of course. Julia snorts up the magic powder like one would do cocaine. She catches Alice as she's trying to get a vampire to turn her so she can keep magic and they end up dueling magically, and Julia gets knocked out. When she wakes up, Alice has performed the transfer, she realized the magic was Julia's -- and insist that it is Julia's now, not Reynard's. She talks about how much she admires Julia's strength, and the two seem to have to genuinely bonded. They have both lost so much and have been left changed by their traumas, no longer the girls they were before. But Alice leaves Julia with an important question -- this magic is hers, so what is she going to do with it?
And it as that point that Julia will find herself in Wonderland.
Abilities/Special Powers:
Julia is a witch who is mostly self-taught but as powerful as some of the Brakebills students, if not more so. She can conjure fire, teleport objects and helped summon a God, albeit not the right one, amongst other spells. She has written spells from scratch and tweaked spells on the fly. From her canon point magic has been cut off but she's still able to use it for reasons she’s still figuring out – however since Wonderland has its own magic she should be able to access magic much easier then she was back in her world currently. Spells are generally performed through hand motions and often need physical ingredients to work properly. In an alternate timeline, her focus at Brakebills was Knowledge, which means she's drawn to the discovery of magic. She has tattoos to show her high ranking as a hedgewitch.
Third-Person Sample:
Julia has ended up in other worlds before, but never unintentionally before (well, there was a few times when Penny pulled her between Earth and Fillory suddenly, but that was different). Compared to many people, she accepts that she's in the Wonderland fairly easily. Fillory had existed in books first too, and she's been there many times now. The Chatwin children really went to Fillory and Chistopher Plover exploited the stories they told for his novels -- it's quite possible something similar might have have happened between the real Alice and Lewis Carrol. The most off putting thing for her, however, is how alive this place is with magic. Her world, both Earth and Fillory, had been cut off from magic after Quentin killed Ember, and things have felt so hollow since then. She's retained some magic, because Our Lady Underground had planted a seed within her when she gave her her shade back, but it's nothing like this. The feeling is almost euphoric, and it keeps her from panicking or raging like so many new arrivals because while this place is unnerving and foreign to her, that connection to magic is something she's deeply missed.
She reads through the network to gleam what information she can and doesn't waste time to claim a room for herself. The closets were fascinating within themselves -- a seemingly endless supply of magically supplied items. She's more and more impressed with this place, honestly. She pulls out a warm winter coat and tugs it on before heading out to explore the grounds more.
She lights up a cigarette as she walks through the gardens and if someone is looking closely they might notice that she is moving her hands to cast a spell to manipulate the smoke into different shapes like stars and hearts and other things. It's a small spell, one she could still pull off at home as well, but it was always a fun trick, and there is a freedom in not having to worry about whether the limited supply of magic Our Lady Underground had imbedded in her would last. Because this place has its own magic, it's coursing with it.
She knows she can't stay for long, she needs to find a way home sooner as opposed to later, and she'll make her way to the library to start researching soon enough, but after everything she's been through, she's going to allow herself to indulge for a moment. It was nice to have access to magic that didn't feel like a tainted gift, that wasn't connected to the worst thing that ever happened to her. That wasn't his magic.
(The magic inside her isn't Reynard's anymore, it's hers, but she's still struggling to believe that, to accept that)
First-Person Sample:
[julia's voice is crisp and confident as she speaks over the network, she probably seems much more composed than a lot of new arrivals due, possibly because this isn't her first time traveling to another world.]
My name is Julia Wicker, and I'm new here to Wonderland. I've read through the backlog of information so I think I have a decent foundation of how this place works so I will spare you the normal hysterics demanding where I am, how I got here, or how I get home. But I do have one question.
[she pauses for a moment, normally she wouldn't openly talk about Fillory or other worlds with people she doesn't know, who aren't in the magic circle, but considering everyone here has been kidnapped by some sort of powerful magic and the mansion itself is brimming with magic...]
For those of you who are familiar with the Wonderland books, how does this compare to the Wonderland in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There? Are there any similarities to be found or is it completely different. I've been to a world that was in a book series I loved as a kid before and it was interesting to note what the author got right and what was completely off, what details were left out or changed.
Adaptations of any sort are an interesting case study, if nothing else.
Thank you for indulging my curiosity.
[and with that she signs off.]
DW username:E-Mail: mostlyverytired@gmail.com
IM: I’d rather be pmed then give my discord out
Plurk: autoclave
Other Characters: Wynonna Earp |
guncockedCharacter Name: Julia Wicker
Series: The Magicians (TV show, not the book series)
Timeline: 3x07 “Poached Eggs”
Canon Resource Link: http://themagicians.wikia.com/wiki/TV:Julia_Wicker
Character History:
cw: rape, abortion, descriptions of gore and violence
do you love magic, is it in your soul, is it like the secret part of what you always were? yeah, so you know how I feel
In 39 timelines, Julia goes to Brakebills and excels as a student. In the current timeline, however, she fails the exam and is rejected from the school. She was supposed to forget it, her memory was supposed to be wiped, but she cuts into her own arm to use the pain to make sure she remembers. If magic is real, she can't forget it. She gives up on her plans to go to Yale or anything else. None of that matters anymore. She becomes despondent and depressed, stops eating or anything else. When Quentin comes home to visit her on her birthday she begs him to tell them to test her again. Then in the bathroom someone uses magic to assault her and take her shirt off -- and she becomes so angry and pissed off her hands spark -- it was a test. Pete had no intention of raping or hurting her, but he knew she had the gift and needed to see it for himself.
It turns out Brakebills is not the only way to learn magic. He takes her to a hedgewitch house. It is there she's presented with another test, she and Marina are locked into a meat locker where the supplies are kept. She needs to find a way out. Julia is tired of failing. She's going to figure it out. She bonds with Marina over the love of magic, of how knowing it exists changes your world, you can't go back to how things were before. This is where Julia's ruthless determination begins to really show -- she even goes as far as to cut into a dead body to get things she needs to get out. And she does get them out. She passes the test. Not everything can be solved by magic, that's the lesson she needs to learn. And it turns out the person she was proving herself to wasn't Pete, it was Marina. Marina is the top hedge witch in New York. Julia earns her first hedge witch star. This is just the beginning.
Julia is thrilled to start actually learning magic, and she's good at it. Soon enough she's pulling off spells like stealing cash from ATMs. She throws herself into it, and ignores calls from her boyfriend James. Pete warns her that she needs to balance her shit. She's sure she can handle it. She can't though. She's distant and distracted. The things that seemed so important. like going to Yale, don't seem to matter anymore. Magic is the only thing that matters anymore. Marina insists that her life is keeping her behind from her full potential, magic won't click until she's all in. Quentin finds her at the hedge witch house when looking for something and then leaves without saying much to her which leads her to following him out and a huge argument between the two. For people who were best friends things are falling apart more and more with one another. Julia can't stand how it seems like her best friend is judging her, turning his back on her, when she's just trying to do the same thing he is: learn magic. She just doesn't have the easy route he does because she was denied access to Brakebills. Julia comes up with an elaborate lie to James about how she was addicted to Adderall and going to meetings, she's already lost Quentin and she doesn't want to lose him too.
Julia is so angry at Q for his words and actions, how he seemingly turned his back on her, that with Marina's help she gets revenge on him. She creates this entire fake world where Q is back in a mental hospital and he thinks everything that happened in Brakebills was a delusion. Marina is doing this to lure Dean Fogg into breaking down some of the charms so she can her memories back from Brakebills. Kady convinces Julia to help save Quentin and because of that Marina blacklists her from the hedgewitch community.
But Julia is stubborn. She is desperate to find other witches to work with. She even offers her body to Pete for help with that. But it doesn't do much, the people she's connected with are desperate and low level. What makes things worse is that Marina has wiped James' memory of her -- more and more Julia finds herself completely and utterly alone.
Julia, however, is nothing if not persistent. She keeps looking for leads to magic which leads her to another hedge witch, Hannah. Hannah was banned by Marina too, which makes her the seemingly perfect ally. That is until she learns that Hannah is Kady's mother -- and the reason why Hannah got banished is she killed two people. That's no good. Julia then goes on to try to steal files from Marina -- but she would have died if she tried doing it alone so it's good Hannah came to help her, right? Well, maybe not because it turns out Marina put some heavy protection spells because Hannah ends up dead. Julia ends arrested but her sister comes to help her. It turns out her family is worried -- her mother wants to have her commited to keep from drawing more attention to their family. They think she's an addict spiraling out of control. Julia's father had been an alcoholic, and their mother had him sent away and Julia and her sister is afraid the same will happen to Julia. So she goes to rehab instead.
She plans on giving up magic. It's too much. It comes at too high of a cost and she's lost almost everything to it. Marina visits her while she's in treatment, tells her that there doesn't have to be a blood feud, but if Julia comes after her again she'll kill everyone Julia cares about, those who are left anyway. She also calls Julia weak. It turns out one of the chaplain's knows about magic, he went to Brakebills. He argues that magic isn't a burden or something to be used to get a fix, it's a gift, a set of tools. The spell he gives her, an offering to the goddess of the grain, makes her float in air, it was powerful and dangerous. She sends an amends letter to Quentin, and he sends one back, they're both still angry at one another and working to forgive one another, but they both still love one another too. Using the same spell that she used to enter Quentin's mind Julia enters the mind of Richard's friend, Kira. She helps give Kira peace before helping her die.
With Richard's help Julia has a community online she can talk to about magic with. One of the people in this community is Kady, who is unsurprisingly not happy to see Julia considering what happened to her mom. But they manage to work together to complete some spells and level up and discover that their group of cyber buddies have a bigger plan -- they want to summon a god. Because that'll end well (spoiler: it does not)
Julia is the key to it. She's god touched. The only one in the group who can make a real connection. They're told all the Gods are dead, that they should stop looking, but then Julia has a vision of Our Lady Underground. They're on the right path. The servant for Our Lady Underground, however, warns Julia. Once that bell is run, it can't be unrung. It makes Julia nervous. But the rest of her group is excited, and Richard reassures her everything is going to be okay and she has sex with him.
They go ahead with the ritual to summon the Goddess and when Quentin looks up Julia she's alone. Quentin has found out that what makes this timeline different, what gives them the chance of defeating the Beast is that Julia was denied access to Brakebills. The whole time she was right, but it was necessary for her to be cast aside to grow stronger. After fighting all season the two finally seem to make amends with one another, if they're going to possibly die they don't want to die angry at one another. Julia tells him about how they summoned the Goddess and how much better things were, how beautiful some magic out there is. When Quentin asks her to go to Fillory with him Julia reveals that she still has the table where they mapped out Fillory together. They've been planning this trip since they were nine, it seemed like destiny that they were finally going to get to go together. But to find a way into Fillory then need to find a way to travel through time to go through one of the doors the Chatwins use. So they find their way back into 1942, enter a phone booth Jane Chatwin uses, and they get to go to Fillory.
And what's even more exciting is they get to help Jane in one of the most iconic scenes from the books, it's like every nerd's wish fulfillment. Julia is the Witch and Quentin is the fool. Someone has followed them into Fillory, though, a young Martin Chatwin who was denied access to Fillory after a while. The author of the Fillory books, Christopher Plover, had been molesting him. They think Plover is the Beast. So, they commission a blade that could destroy him. But then they run into the Watcher Woman who everyone is afraid of, and Martin runs off. It turns out the Watcher Woman is the older Jane Chatwin, the one who had created the time loops, the one who died in the current timeline. She helps set them into Fillory of 2016...and man do things suck there. She also reveals to Quentin that Julia's memory has been modified, but some things are better off not remembered. The blade is ready now but to get it there needs to be a new ruler of Fillory -- so Eliot (one of Quentin's friends from Brakebills) ends up marrying a woman and becomes high king. While a lot of other stuff is also going down Julia and Quentin hunt down one of the gods of Fillory, Ember. Ember is not exactly the most helpful person but he does tell them they need a champion to defeat the beast. Which means.... he gives Quentin a bottle of his semen to give him that power. Yeah, it's gross. This show gets really weird sometimes, the narration apologizes. Ember also notices there's a memory spell on Julia and removes it. He thinks he's helping. He's really, really not.
Julia's demeanor changes completely and she is clearly shaken. She begs Quentin to take the memory away from her again. It is only after Alice drinks ember's seed so she can wield the blade, however, that Julia finally talks about what happened. It turns out the goddess summoning didn't go the way Julia had previously told them. They didn't summon Our Lady Underground at all -- instead they summoned a trickster god, Reynard. Reynard takes over Richard's body and kills the rest of the coven. He is about to kill Kady when Julia steps in. Kady can escape but Julia cannot. Reynard brutally rapes her and leaves her for dead. Julia is devastated by the massacre and the assault and she doesn't know how to cope with anything that happened, so with no one else to turn to she called Marina for help. Marina helps her clean up the bodies and herself, and then Marina places the false memory into Julia's mind, so she can go on living. But thanks to Ember she no longer has that false memory to cling to. Quentin promises to help her, even if that means helping her kill a god.
It's time to finally take on the Beast and things go from bad to worse. The Beast gets the upper hand and Alice has somehow lost the blade. The Beast, Martin Chatwin, kills Alice, Margo and Eliot, and cuts off Penny's hands. When he goes for Quentin, Julia intervenes. It seems that what Reynard did to her has left her with extra power and she is able to wield the blade. She doesn't kill Martin, however, and instead asks to cut a deal because he knows how to kill Gods.
And that's the end of season one.
I lost my friend, I lost everything, he turned me into a monster
Julia has gone back to NYC with Martin and they agree on the terms of their deal, she'll give him the blade that can kill him but only once he helps her kill Reynard, and if he tries to double cross her, she'll kill him. They follow Reynard's trail which leads them to scenes like the one Julia experienced, triggering her PTSD and flooding her with emotions. Martin offers to help her cut off her shade, the part of her soul that allows her to feel emotion, but also the part of her that allows her to love. It'd be easier to get her revenge, he argues, if she wasn't in such constant anguish. He thinks that her capacity to feel is a weakness, time would prove in the long run that it is a strength.
The partnership doesn't go very well, Martin sings constantly and tries to drive Julia insane. They need each other but they don't like each other or get along very well. Though their motivations may be very similar, both driven by the trauma of sexual assault, their base personalities are very different. Martin rather represents what Julia could become if she lets that trauma consume her too much. They kidnap Marina to try to get her to agree to be bait to lure in Reynard. Marina convinces Julia to let her go but is clearly shaken as she tries to find help in dealing with the Reynard problem. In the meantime, Quentin warns Julia that they have a spell to kill Martin, but if she's too close she'll die too. She insists they can't kill him yet -- she still needs his help to go after Reynard. But in return she does warn Quentin that Martin has cursed the castle in Fillory. After exhausting her other options, Marina shows back up on Julia's doorstep, ready to help.
Reynard seems to be targeting people who are trying to summon Our Lady Underground so Julia advises Marina to do the spell to summon him. She plans on being there so she can protect Marina but then at the last-minute Martin uses magic to remove them from the room. He believes Reynard would never come if he senses Julia in the room. Needless to say , Julia is pretty pissed off at her partner in crime right now. While she tries to head back to Marina Marina has headed home, where Reynard is waiting for her. The problem is she had put up powerful wards before she realized Reynard was there so even though Julia and Martin try to come in to help her, they can't. Until they break the charms. It looks like they'll save her just in the nick of time!!!
You know, except that Penny interrupts them and transports them to Fillory because the others want to finally kill Martin. Except the spell gets interrupted because Quentin can't allow Julia to get killed in the crossfire. So then Penny takes Julia back to Earth while the others kill Martin once and for all in Fillory (with Alice turning into a niffin and then being killed as a result of all this) and she's too late. She makes her way into Marina's apartment and her friend is brutally murdered.
After the loss of Marina, Martin, and the knife to kill Reynard Julia is in desperate need of a friend and she finds herself locating Kady who has been in a drug den of sorts. She helps her friend get clean and then asks her for help -- she wants to bring Marina back from the dead, which means breaking into Brakebills and copying down a book because she can't take it. She runs into Margo there, they thrown down some snark at one another and they go on their ways. They manage to bring back Marina temporarily to learn forty years ago someone banished Reynard from this world and that woman is the key to everything.
So Kady and Julia start doing the whole research thing to find information but then Julia starts getting sick and they realize horrifyingly that she isn't sick --she's pregnant. She doesn't know if it's Richard's or Reynard's but she knows one thing -- she can't keep this baby. So they decide to go to the clinic to get an abortion. It should be simple right? Nope, nothing is ever simple in Julia's life. Something evil overcomes the doctor who is supposed to do her procedure and she stabs herself in the eye. It turns out half-god babies have ways to protect themselves. Great.
Julia and Kady have two missions now, getting rid of the baby and finding Dana, the woman who banished Reynard forty years ago. Julia manages to find the woman and discovers she was impregnated by Reynard too -- the baby's power is what helped her banish him. Dana basically says Julia has no choice but to have the baby and tries to trap her but then Kady comes to her rescue and they run off with Dana's Haxenpaxen, a creature that will hide them from Reynard.
Finally they find some witches who say they can get rid of the baby but it's going to cost a lot of money so they do what anyone would: they get the others to help them rob a bank. It doesn't go well, a bunch of people die, but then Julia rewinds time and saves them and in the end despite all the obstacles against them (one of the witches has been sending monsters to kill Julia just in case they can't ge the money) and Julia is able to get the magical black alley abortion.
Nothing is ever easy though and she's lost something important in the process. Her shade. The shade is like a part of her soul, the part that works most like a conscience, and without it the difference is staggering. She's laughing and giddy and more than a little reckless. She tries to track down Reynard's son only to run into Reynard himself -- but she's rescued by Quentin and taken to Fillory. Julia convinces Margo to let her help convince a Dryad to help in the war against Loria -- and when he's an asshole to both of them Julia gives him a spell that will burn his entire forest down. So there's that. Margo understandably locks her up for this.
When she's taken back to Earth Kady and Penny get pretty worried about her reckless, thoughtless behavior without her shade. They've located Reynard's son, Senator Gaines, and Julia wants to kill him to harness his power, which you know, is not great. So they compromise and kidnap the guy instead. When she runs into Quentin who is possessed by the niffin version of Alice they strike a deal to get Quentin to release Alice if Alice kills Reynard. But Quentin ain't down for that and all is without hope -- until Gaines shows up and he's who Reynard really wants so our intrepid heroes live to survive another day. And Julia gets locked up. Again. By Kady this time.
The next time she's let loose it's by Dean Fogg, Brakebills isn't a prison after all. She knows she's supposed to feel bad about the things she's done but without her shade she simply doesn't. But on a drug trip Quentin meets her shade and hey, now it's time for them to start trying to find a way to get it back. They question Dean Fogg and find out in one of the other time loops, Alice was very interested in shades. With the Tesla Flexion device Quentin can go to that other timeline and talk to Alice. They discover shades go to the Underworld but to get there they need an ancient one. And Julia is pretty sure that means a dragon.
The quest to find said dragon leads them into the sewers of New York which is pretty gross. And it turns out the passage to the Underworld costs them leaving behind the Fillory button which is pretty sucky for two kids who grew up obsessed with Fillory. When they go to the Underworld Julia finds her friends who were killed by Reynard -- including her former lover Richard, whose body Reynard wears now. It's an uncomfortable moment but Richard ends up being the most helpful person they've talked to in the Underworld. His distraction allows them to enter where they find both Julia's shade and Alice's -- and in a surprising turn Julia chooses to save Alice's for Quentin instead. It's during this time that Julia learns that Our Lady Underground was Persephone, and she's been missing for a long time.
When they get back to Earth Quentin and Julia work together to revive Alice back from being a niffin. After that Julia meets up with Kady again to go back to their plan to kill Reynard. Julia is still shadeless but she feels like Kady will keep her in line. Senator Gaines, Reynard's son, helps them by having them kill him to harness his power to kill a god. Penny also gets a book about killing gods, it seems like everything is in place. But when Julia goes to confront Reynard and kill him Persephone appears, revealing herself to be Reynard's mother. She begs Julia to show mercy, to not lose herself completely, and Julia agrees, letting Reynard go. And in exchange, she gets her shade back. Kady is pissed and wants nothing to do with Julia after this, after everything they've gone through.
Getting her shade back isn't easy on Julia. She seems drained from the weight of all the trauma she's gone through and can be found on the couch, smoking and trying to forget. It's there that Eliot reaches out to her with some kindness and implores her to help him save the world. Working with Quentin in Fillory they manage to kill both of the gods there and that means magic is saved right? Wrong. The old gods are pissed and use a plumber to shut magic off. Except months later Julia, who had returned to Yale and law school, meets with Quentin and shows him something. Sparks. She can do magic. But how? The closing shot of the season is Julia finally smiling.
I wouldn’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else
When season three starts Julia and Quentin are still trying to find a way to bring magic back and they realize they probably need to talk to another god to get more information. Finding gods has never been easy, however, but one of their classmates from Brakebills, Josh, leads them to Bacchus, the god of partying. Bacchus wants nothing to do with them at first because he thinks they're a bore so they get really drunk and start letting loose and he lets them in. It's during this party that we first start seeing that Julia is still experiencing PTSD from what happened with Reynard, having flashbacks in the middle of the party. Bacchus doesn't want to help them or introduce them to his parents, the higher gods. Julia sees how lost Josh in and reaches out to him, showing him the magic she can do, that there's still hope for magic returning to their world. Quentin gets mad at her for that, but she doesn't care. After everything she's gone through, she wants to help people now, she never wants anyone to feel as desperate or alone as she did. Their time with Bacchus is not completely useless, however, as they discover there might be a secret back door to magic. It won't be easy to get to, but when is anything ever easy in these kids lives?
Communication with Eliot from Fillory leads them to finding a book about the quest for the seven keys -- what they will need to open the backdoor for magic. But the pages aren't all revealed yet -- they'll need more magic for that. So they follow the news for any magic going ons and they hear about an incident at a bar where someone was turned into a bear. They're pretty sure the person turned into a bear was Mayakovsky, which is who they need to find because he has magical batteries. So Quentin hunts down his classmate Emily who is now married to Mayakovsky and that then leads them to Professor Lipton, who had also been involved with Mayakovsky. She was hurt he married the younger girl instead so stole the battery to do magic around town. And then she drops the battery from the roof during her suicide attempt. They think there might be one left so they go back to Emily only to discover Kady has already stolen that one.
Kady stole the battery because Penny has been dying of super magic cancer and she wants to summon a demon to try to help him. Considering how badly summoning someone has gone in the past Julia agrees to help Kady despite how rocky their friendship has been lately. The demon is able to eat away Penny's tumor but it's too late -- he seems to have died (he's not actually dead dead, as he was astral projecting at the time, these things are never simple).
Kady spirals after Penny's death and goes back to using heroin, overdosing on the stuff. But Our Lady Underground sends a message to Julia so she's able to get to her friend in time to heal her and save her life. After this she and Quentin find a lead to another one of the keys, and once again everything goes back to the Chatwins, this time Ruper Chatwin to be exact. Through trying to track the key down they discover Rupert had been in love with his best friend -- this particular key is the key of truth. They finally locate it in the home of a connection of Dean Fogg's. Eventually, when Eliot gets his hand on this key, they discover Penny isn't quite as dead as they thought. The key reveals the truth, after all, and whoever is holding it can see and communicate with Penny.
While Quentin goes back to Fillory with Eliot to look for the next key Julia continues researching and begins to bond with Alice in the meantime. While she's out having drinks with Alice she sees Our Lady Underground -- the one who has been using other people to send messages to Julia. This is when Julia learns that the reason she can still do magic is because she now has Reynard's magic. It makes her angry and pissed off because she doesn't want anything to do with him or his magic. And Alice wants nothing but to have magic again, so they come up with a plan to give her magic to Alice.
There are few magicians who are determined and headstrong as both Julia and Alice are so when they start working on this plan to transfer the magic they make a rather formidable team. It turns out Dean Fogg was the one who created the transfer spell so they shake him down with answers and he sends them after an incubus to get it's tail so they can start the process. And it seems to work, at first. Alice has the magic and she even begins to make a new body for Penny, like a new body had been made for her, but then she falls to the ground convulsing. That's not what one would call a good sign.
It turns out Alice's body is rejecting to magic because it was meant for Julia and Julia alone, so she makes a plan with Dean Fogg to take it back. She doesn't want it anymore than she did before but she's not going to allow Alice to die -- but she also knows Alice isn't going to willingly give it up to her either. But Julia needs magic to make the transfer -- which is a catch 22 until she makes a deal with Irene McAllister who had some backup magic -- for a future favor, of course. Julia snorts up the magic powder like one would do cocaine. She catches Alice as she's trying to get a vampire to turn her so she can keep magic and they end up dueling magically, and Julia gets knocked out. When she wakes up, Alice has performed the transfer, she realized the magic was Julia's -- and insist that it is Julia's now, not Reynard's. She talks about how much she admires Julia's strength, and the two seem to have to genuinely bonded. They have both lost so much and have been left changed by their traumas, no longer the girls they were before. But Alice leaves Julia with an important question -- this magic is hers, so what is she going to do with it?
And it as that point that Julia will find herself in Wonderland.
Abilities/Special Powers:
Julia is a witch who is mostly self-taught but as powerful as some of the Brakebills students, if not more so. She can conjure fire, teleport objects and helped summon a God, albeit not the right one, amongst other spells. She has written spells from scratch and tweaked spells on the fly. From her canon point magic has been cut off but she's still able to use it for reasons she’s still figuring out – however since Wonderland has its own magic she should be able to access magic much easier then she was back in her world currently. Spells are generally performed through hand motions and often need physical ingredients to work properly. In an alternate timeline, her focus at Brakebills was Knowledge, which means she's drawn to the discovery of magic. She has tattoos to show her high ranking as a hedgewitch.
Third-Person Sample:
Julia has ended up in other worlds before, but never unintentionally before (well, there was a few times when Penny pulled her between Earth and Fillory suddenly, but that was different). Compared to many people, she accepts that she's in the Wonderland fairly easily. Fillory had existed in books first too, and she's been there many times now. The Chatwin children really went to Fillory and Chistopher Plover exploited the stories they told for his novels -- it's quite possible something similar might have have happened between the real Alice and Lewis Carrol. The most off putting thing for her, however, is how alive this place is with magic. Her world, both Earth and Fillory, had been cut off from magic after Quentin killed Ember, and things have felt so hollow since then. She's retained some magic, because Our Lady Underground had planted a seed within her when she gave her her shade back, but it's nothing like this. The feeling is almost euphoric, and it keeps her from panicking or raging like so many new arrivals because while this place is unnerving and foreign to her, that connection to magic is something she's deeply missed.
She reads through the network to gleam what information she can and doesn't waste time to claim a room for herself. The closets were fascinating within themselves -- a seemingly endless supply of magically supplied items. She's more and more impressed with this place, honestly. She pulls out a warm winter coat and tugs it on before heading out to explore the grounds more.
She lights up a cigarette as she walks through the gardens and if someone is looking closely they might notice that she is moving her hands to cast a spell to manipulate the smoke into different shapes like stars and hearts and other things. It's a small spell, one she could still pull off at home as well, but it was always a fun trick, and there is a freedom in not having to worry about whether the limited supply of magic Our Lady Underground had imbedded in her would last. Because this place has its own magic, it's coursing with it.
She knows she can't stay for long, she needs to find a way home sooner as opposed to later, and she'll make her way to the library to start researching soon enough, but after everything she's been through, she's going to allow herself to indulge for a moment. It was nice to have access to magic that didn't feel like a tainted gift, that wasn't connected to the worst thing that ever happened to her. That wasn't his magic.
(The magic inside her isn't Reynard's anymore, it's hers, but she's still struggling to believe that, to accept that)
First-Person Sample:
[julia's voice is crisp and confident as she speaks over the network, she probably seems much more composed than a lot of new arrivals due, possibly because this isn't her first time traveling to another world.]
My name is Julia Wicker, and I'm new here to Wonderland. I've read through the backlog of information so I think I have a decent foundation of how this place works so I will spare you the normal hysterics demanding where I am, how I got here, or how I get home. But I do have one question.
[she pauses for a moment, normally she wouldn't openly talk about Fillory or other worlds with people she doesn't know, who aren't in the magic circle, but considering everyone here has been kidnapped by some sort of powerful magic and the mansion itself is brimming with magic...]
For those of you who are familiar with the Wonderland books, how does this compare to the Wonderland in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There? Are there any similarities to be found or is it completely different. I've been to a world that was in a book series I loved as a kid before and it was interesting to note what the author got right and what was completely off, what details were left out or changed.
Adaptations of any sort are an interesting case study, if nothing else.
Thank you for indulging my curiosity.
[and with that she signs off.]
