It didn’t take long for BookToker Asia Lin to realize that “Wicked,” the book by Gregory Maguire, would be nothing like the musical she had first seen months earlier.

“That was the first page,” Lin tells TODAY.com, recalling a scene in which Dorothy and her companions discuss a rumor that Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is intersex. “I thought, ‘Wait.’ Hold fast. This was not in the musical at all.’”

Content creator Sara Ribeiro, who grew up listening to “Wicked” in a musical theater-loving family, experienced an internal shock when she read the book this year.

“(The book) got a lot darker than I thought. I’d say within the first 10 to 20% my jaw was on the floor several times. I didn’t expect it to be so … graphic,” she says.

As the first part of “Wicked” opens in theaters on November 22 (and the second and final part will arrive in 2025), TikTokers like Lin and Ribeiro are discovering the novel and sharing their experiences – from surprise to admiration – in real time. “Why didn’t anyone warn me?” Lin asks in one TikTokwhich echoes many other fans.

Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” – a revisionist version of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” – was originally published in 1995 and was followed by several other books to make a series. “Wicked” the musical made its Broadway debut in 2003.

The book and the musical could be distilled into the same plot summary: Behold, the unexpected backstory of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda the Good. But that one way the book and the musical convey its themes – such as injustice, identity and friendship – is what separates the two.

“They’re both about a young woman called Elphaba – but very different. The best way I can explain it is like when your parents would hide vegetables in your food, and you wouldn’t notice. That’s kind of what they did with the musical,” Meredith Ammons, a content creator, told TODAY.com.

While the musical hides its political message behind “fluff,” Ammons says, “the book hits you over the head with it.” She continues, “It’s like reading a children’s Bible for the first time compared to reading the actual Bible for the first time, and how different the tones are.”

The plight of animals – conscious animals – is at the center of the book, as is Elphaba’s activism. Not so much a supporting character, the Wizard is more of a full-fledged dictatorial force, wreaking havoc on the hinterlands of Oz and amassing power. While political allegory is the B-plot to “Wicked” the musical, which revolves around Glinda and Elphaba’s friendship, it is the main story of Maguire’s book.

Maguire’s “Wicked” contains no hallmarks of the musical, such as a “popular”-like union between Glinda and Elphaba. But it takes detours the musical would never have room for—long explanations of religious sects, terrain descriptions never mentioned in the musical, and, yes, a lot of R-rated content.

For example: Elphaba bites off a midwife’s finger as a newborn; her parents are involved in what is essentially a love battle with a Quadling man named Turtle Heart; Fiyero is a groom who is married off at 7. Also includes sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, racism and politics.

“Trigger warning for everything. If you can think of it, this is it,” said Eryn Kieffer, whose multi-part reading of “Wicked” has racked up millions of views on TikTok, in a video.

Kieffer’s series goes into all the graphic scenes she didn’t expect—like the Clock in the Dragon Puppet Theater or the Philosophy Club scenes, which have become shorthand for the book’s surprising sexual detours.

Among “Wicked” fans, the book’s content is divisive. Kieffer, for his part, said the sexual content “confuses the plot.”

Ribeiro says she loves the “shock value” of the books, and that the unexpected parts were her favorite to read — but in the end, she took away what she considered the “point” of the book.

“I think I was so distracted by all the weirdness that was going on that the political aspect of it got overshadowed,” she says.

Meanwhile, TikToker Aynsley Broom worries that the focus on callousness takes attention away from the book’s more powerful parts about the rise of authoritarianism, which she sees as a “mirror” to the news. In the book, the Wizard of Oz is a despot who ostracizes and marginalizes entire classes of Ozians, not to mention animals.

“I saw a video that was like “(The book) explicitly describes (Elphaba’s) pubic hair.’ And I thought, ‘Not really. The book just said it was purple and then moved on,'” she says. “To me, they miss things that people focuses on the message completely. The message needs to be talked about more than the shocking parts, which to me were not that shocking. Sure, I also read a lot of romance novels.”

In the book, she sees a more comprehensive offering than the musical – calling the former “a fantastic dinner” and the latter “cotton candy”.

Broom is among the readers who want a more faithful adaptation of Maguire’s “Wicked” than another retelling of the more saccharine musical. “I think people want fluff, and we don’t need more fluff,” she says.

Maguire, for his part, seems comfortable with the adjustment. During a 2020 interview tied to the book’s anniversary, he said that the musical’s composer, Stephen Schwartz, presented his vision during a walk in Connecticut, and that he felt they were aligned—that Schwartz understood his book and the moral universe in which it takes place.

“I came home and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to let this happen, I don’t care about the money. This is much more in line with why I wrote the book than the movie scripts I’ve read so far,'” he said Broadway World.

Maguire said he was “very pleased” with how Schwartz and book author Winnie Holzman told the story.

“It was efficient, economical and narrative for them to make the story choices that they chose to make, and I completely applaud that. The play is a little less subtle than the novel in some ways. And I wanted the novel to be more ambiguous because that was the nature in how I tried to tell my story,” he said.

What TikTokers generally agree on is that the “Wicked” book really isn’t as kid-friendly as the “Wicked” musical.

Creators like TikToker Sal Currie comment on their experiences reading books as childrenand give a heads up to parents who can be persuaded by newly marked cover.

“My main thing is — it’s not for kids. It’s really, really not for kids. The musical is perfectly fine for kids. I wouldn’t say this book is at all,” Kieffer told TODAY.com.

Ammons says her mother bought the book when she was a small child. She asked if she could read it.

“She said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And she said, ‘You’ll understand when you get older,'” she says. Ammons finally waited until she was 22 to read Maguire’s novel. “My first reaction was like, ‘Yeah, I’m glad I waited this, because my mother was right about this,” she says.

Others believe that reading and being confused by “Wicked” is a rite of passage: “It’s a canon event for most ‘Wicked’ fans,” reads one comment on Currie’s post. “We must not interfere.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com