Every movie adaptation is a fanfiction to some degree - it just happens to be in a different medium. I can't think of any film-of-a-book that is exactly the same.

Nor, for that matter, can I think of any novelisation of a film that doesn't expand on it the way a fanfic would. (Or not, thinking of one HORRIBLE movie-tie-in in particular... *wanders off grumbling*)

From a fanfic and PPC standpoint, it's definitely a Word World of its own: Baum's work was out of copyright when Maguire wrote it, and it's published - thus, it is fully-fledged canon. There is a clear differentiation between the musicalverse and the bookverse for fanfic writers, however, those are considerd Wicked fanfiction, not Oz fanfiction.

However, from a story-reader's viewpoint, it can be either. Generally I find that those who didn't like Wicked in one way or another consider it Published Fanfiction and therefore ignorable, which is perfectly valid. I was never a big fan of Oz before Wicked, and so I consider Baum's work to be more of a background from which details can be drawn to give substance to the Wickedverse, but which is not strict law, meaning I can ignore the 'childish' and ridiculous aspects of the original Oz books that I don't like. So it works both ways.

Also bear in mind that there is quite a difference between Baum's Oz books and the 1939 film with Judy Garland which most people know - in the book, the ruby slippers were silver, Glinda was Witch of the South, and the Witch of the West was a one-eyed coward with perfectly normal skin. Maguire's Wicked is a combination of the two which leans more heavily towards Baum's book, while the musical is extrapolated almost exclusively from the '39 movie. So you basically have two parallel works of Published Fanfiction - one in books, one acted on film or in theatre - and four different potential 'verses, of which fans can theoretically pick any.


To answer your first question: I personally don't like Maguire's novel very much, for almost the same reason that Trojie seems to like it: Maguire seems to be trying way, way too hard to make an adult world - there's way too much unecessary sex and violence in the Wicked book for my taste. Butt the musical definitely isn't written for children - there's torture, several main characters die, and the love song verges on explicit - and I like that. I like the adult-but-still-soft version in which Elphaba was someone I could like. Of course, the fact that I saw the musical first will have a great deal to do with it. :)