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THε CAղOղ










Margo: We're stuck in some epic fantasy that likes to behead heroes halfway through season one. If we even are heroes. We might be comic relief.

  • The Magicians is a series of books by Lev Grossman loosely adapted into a Syfy television series that ran from 2015 to 2020. The TV series is better than the books. No, really.


  • Picture Harry Potter as a suicidally depressed grad student. Hogwarts? A grad school with an alarming on-premise casualty rate. Dumbledore? He’s a cynical drunk. Magic? It’s not born of genetics or talent, but pain. The world of The Magicians is not a nice one. Whether you’re a classically trained Brakebills College Magician or a hedge witch turning tricks for spells, there’s a good chance you’ll ruin someone’s life with magic more than once.


  • Now picture Narnia, except Aslan isn’t a majestic lion but two satyr brothers opposite in nature. One’s a stickler for the rules (and a ruler), the other is a drunk bitch who loves drama. Seriously, he gave only the sexiest animals the power of speech and declared that only Children of Earth can become kings and queens purely because they’re the most entertaining messes.




  • Smash these two worlds into each other, and you get The Magicians, an edgy urban magic show that has no right being as funny, heartfelt, and human as it is. Across five seasons it tells the story of Quentin Coldwater, his on-again off-again kind-of-toxic-for-him flame Alice, his best friend Julia Wicker, his teleporting frenemy Penny Adiyodi, and Penny’s hard-hitting hedge witch girlfriend Kady as they stumble from traumatic world-ending disaster to traumatic world-ending disaster with all the decision-making skills you can expect from jaded first year grad school students.


  • They do it all with the help of two fabulous disasters upperclassmen named Margo Hanson and Eliot Waugh. They are 100% the best thing about the show, full stop. I won’t take questions.




ϻARGο HάNϛON





Eliot: You’re called Margo the Destroyer!
Margo: I was a woman ruling a patriarchy; my brand had to be overkill.


  • If you want me to keep choking these metaphors in their crib, I could describe Margo as what you get when you take 85% of the ‘heart of gold’ out of characters like Tahani Al-Jamil or Alexis Rose and replace that with a screaming heavy metal version of ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ played on endless repeat for 20 odd years.


  • Margo thought her dad was better than other dads, and her dad thought that she was better than other daughters. He told her she could become anything she wanted to be. So she became a woman he couldn’t control. Sorry about the fucking surprise, dad. Not so sorry about pissing you off. Lesson learned.




  • The first impression she’ll give you is that she’s your average charming, spoiled princess who never learned to keep her opinions to herself. Margo loves fashion and gossip and catty remarks. She’s all about sex and fancy vacations to the Magicians’ version of Burning Man.


  • Under all that “hard, glossy armor”, she’s angry. All the time. Margo’s anger is not my anger, so reach out to me if you’re unsure about something she said, but girl’s got rage. If you’re lucky, somewhere along the line, you’ll get far enough under the anger she’ll decide she cares about you enough to cut a bitch.


  • She’s High Queen of not!Narnia Fillory and faking it to make it. It’ll work out for her in the long run.


  • She’s the kind of ruthless asshole you’re going to need on your team in a less-than-Disney magic universe. She’s the girl who comes to the magical quest with a pistol in her purse, just in case the spells don’t cut it.


  • She’s also the girl who will sell your unborn child to a bunch of fairies if it’ll save your life, magic, and/or the island.


  • She’s an Indian-Mexican American woman with brown skin, dark hair, a low voice that she uses to swear like a sailor, and the most fashionable eye patches you’ll ever see in your life. Girl knows how to coordinate an outfit, ‘kay?


  • Fandom’s Margo comes from the end of Season 2. She’s just traded her right eye to the fairies to travel from their realm back to Fillory. She didn’t intend to come here, let alone take over a lotion shop. Fucking whimsy, gets her every time.


  • She’s going to worry about her best friend/platonic life partner Eliot Waugh so much. She knows she’s at least 80% of his executive function.








ρOWϵrϚ





Eliot: Funny little irony they don't tell you, but magic doesn’t come from talent, it comes from pain.

  • In the Magicians universe, magical ability is something born from trauma. But you have to refine it through countless hours of practicing hand movements, studying foreign languages, and mastering math. Each spell requires some ‘metamath’ to put all the pieces together.


  • The bigger the spell, the more complicated the math, the less likely Margo can pull it off on her own. But with enough power, math and know-how, you can do just about anything in this universe, including moving the moon, or breaking it in two trying. This is not going to come up much.


  • As a classically trained Magician, Margo knows a large number of minor league spells. Think starting fires, manipulating smoke, looking through illusions, shaping objects and levitating them. I could list all the minor spells here, but there’s a lot of them. I’ll never let her use anything that affects your character without consent.


  • The real spell MVP of the Magicians is its OMWF-spell. Margo or any other classically trained Magician can make a localised OMWF-event happen with a song of her choice, down to feeding you the lyrics and staging the dance moves. The show uses this power for things like resolving a quest by showing a neglected member of the team that the team is there for him through song, giving Eliot the courage to go to battle and overloading evil empathy golems. Margo getting a backing chorus as she comes into her power isn’t magic, that’s just her tripping on magical lizard, but it’s cool so I’m mentioning it.


  • Margo attended Brakebills College as a Physical magic student, which means her talent lies in manipulating matter and energy. In the books, Margo’s personal talent is cryomancy.


  • She’s spent the past few months of her life as High Queen to a country full of drama queen satyr god magic, so don’t expect her to be impressed by anything that happens around here. If the whimsical bullshit doesn’t permanently fuck up your life somehow, is it really whimsical bullshit?



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Margo Hanson

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