(Warning: Spoilers for “Wicked: For Good” below.)

If your familiarity with the massively successful “Wicked: For Good,” extends only to the poster, with its glittery green towers of Oz and its beautiful, stoic witches, you might think it’s just a sweet, escapist fantasy. In fact, the film is an intense examination of class, power, race and activism in the face of fraught political violence.

The story of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), a courageous witch of color; her earnest but morally conflicted friend Glinda (Ariana Grande); and the fight for the rights of Oz’s animal population against tyranny reminds a lot of people, including me, of what it takes to stand up for what’s right in our current moment.

So the question is: How do the characters of “Wicked: For Good,” the second part of director Jon Chu’s film adaptation of the blockbuster 2003 Broadway show, do as allies?

“The first act [2024’s ‘Wicked’] speaks to what we do to be the best possible, the best of us. We want to be vulnerable and defy gravity,” said Nathalie Folkerts of Baltimore, who is involved in local organizing work for prison abolition, justice and housing.

“The second movie is too realistic, getting into the good/bad binary. They don’t have time to grieve. Fascism is speeding up. It’s not the kindest mirror of who we are.”

It’s not surprising that the “Wicked” universe is controversial and relevant to modern sensibilities. The 1985 Gregory Maguire novel on which it’s based is a dark tale of otherness, radicalism and social unrest. It is also sexual, violent and absolutely not for children.

But from an adult perspective, even the 1939 version of “The Wizard of Oz” is about a lost, scared child being used as a pawn in an assassination plot, making her the target of the murder victim’s vengeful sister. And don’t even get me started on the poppy fields.

Last year, I concluded that Glinda failed as an ally in the first film because when the Wizard’s minions were coming to kill Elphaba, Glinda tried to get Elphaba to just go apologize and didn’t get on the broom with her to escape.

A lot of fans of the musical told me I was judging Glinda wrongly because she got much better in the last half. I didn’t really see that, though.

“She makes changes in the world only after she had come into power,” explained Regina Verow of Crofton, a “Wicked” fan. “She didn’t lose anything. I mean, she lost [Prince] Fiyero, but she doesn’t have to give up any of her power. In fact, she ended up gaining power.”

Glinda “was willing to stand idly by while the lives of friends and countrymen were destroyed around her” if it meant that “she could get her comforts,” Baltimore writer Will Maye wrote in a Substack essay hilariously titled “‘Wicked: For Good’ Needed More People Hit With Houses.”

Mercedes Samudio, a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor at California’s Pepperdine University, said that Glinda thinks she’s an ally, and at one specific point in the first half, “when she changes her name from Galinda in honor of their goat professor, who pronounced it Glinda,” she actually is.

”But even that moment is performative, done publicly in a way that makes her look selfless and heroic," Samudio said. “It’s like wearing a pink hat or making a bracelet. There’s nothing happening underneath.”

What’s funny is that Elphaba — who leads the fight to protect the animals, whom the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) have removed from their public life as equals and forbidden to speak — takes actions that don’t always work out as well.

In part one of “Wicked,” we’re introduced to Brrr, otherwise known as the Cowardly Lion, when Elphaba and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) free him as a cub from a classroom cage. But as an adult, Brrr has beef with them because they released him into the world as a baby with no resources and now he’s traumatized.

Folkerts gives Elphaba, who at this point is a young college student literally taking her first steps into activism, some grace. “I resonate with why the lion was upset, but collective liberation needs all of us. Her action was a little brash, sure, but do I wish she hadn’t done anything? Not really,” she said. ”I wish other people stepped up, like Glinda.”

It must be noted that the other person who does step up in that moment is the previously shallow Fiyero, who only gets more active in the second half. In a property so focused on female friendship, this straight royal white guy is a “good visual representation of what an ally should look like,” Samudio said. “He actually does change internally.” (SPOILER! He also changes externally. A lot.)

In his essay, Maye wrote that unlike Glinda, Fiyero “turned on the establishment when needed. He was willing to put his body and life on the line to protect that and whom in which he believed.”

Allyship is not perfect. There is no rulebook. The only constant seems to be that it involves risk, sticking your neck out and actually being defiant, whether that’s of gravity or tyranny.

“Are we living in values when there is pressure not to?” Folkerts said. “What lets Elphaba live those values?”

It’s getting on that broom — an act of human courage, not magic.