Thank you to the anons as well as the people posting under their names who have sent messages. I’m sorry I can’t respond to you on anon, and am not reposting them here to answer, as this is profoundly distressing and I’m spiralling into a very dark place, and I’d prefer not to give people fodder for negative attacks. I appreciate the support, even if I can’t answer you directly, and you are more generous than I deserve. My main blog, on another subject and free from these problems, is continuing, so you can communicate with me via that one - that’s my happy place. I know that there have been attacks on my character, motivations, intelligence and perceptions, and associated victim blaming. I hope those involved are very pleased with themselves for contributing to the gaslighting. But thanks to those who sent a drowning person a lifeline.
I did delete this, but now I know from notes that the situation is being understood as “resolved” by some sympathetic readers, I’m reposting. Because damned if it is.
Time outing myself from the LM fandom, as it would seem it’s not a particularly healthy place for an alcholic with a suicidal ideation to be hanging out right now.
As mentioned, here is the next chapter, on Ao3 and on ff.net! Many, many thanks to Pip who was rather snowed under for the past two days but was still willing to beta for me. And now, at last, the promised pun so awful you will demand Courfeyrac auto-defenestrate once more:
“There are some…
I see some of my ideas re Enjolras being ill and thus unable to make a one-man demonstration at the trials made it in :) Although I had him more as injured. Did you finesse the timeline? (June’s a bit early, isn’t it - I thought they didn’t go to trial until October, from memory?) I’ll have to rethink that prison fic idea I had.
Great chapter. Glad things are resolving themselves…how is Marius doing?
Ah sorry if that was too close! I was very carefully trying to avoid the fic idea you mentioned you wanted to write out by moving the date of the trial away from that of Charles Jeanne’s, and then giving Enjolras a Charles Jeanne-type lung disease instead of having him be injured… again, apologies if it was too close! (Also the reason why I just glossed over the trial and made it one of the minor trials for lesser offenses that I think, based on Barricades, occurred before the Saint-Merri ones in October.)
Marius will make an appearance in the next chapter!
Better it be written by someone with talent than left to me, as I tend to turn things to dross anyway and can’t really see myself writing anything in the near future.
This is still my favorite gif
Marat’s girating in the corner, lurching over the table with a demonic grin
and Robespierre just doesn’t give a fuck. Robespierre has summoned the unholy demons of apathy and…
As mentioned, here is the next chapter, on Ao3 and on ff.net! Many, many thanks to Pip who was rather snowed under for the past two days but was still willing to beta for me. And now, at last, the promised pun so awful you will demand Courfeyrac auto-defenestrate once more:
“There are some…
I see some of my ideas re Enjolras being ill and thus unable to make a one-man demonstration at the trials made it in :) Although I had him more as injured. Did you finesse the timeline? (June’s a bit early, isn’t it - I thought they didn’t go to trial until October, from memory?) I’ll have to rethink that prison fic idea I had.
Great chapter. Glad things are resolving themselves…how is Marius doing?
so apparently the internet can find yaoi ship in everything, even les miserables, I wonder what would Victor Hugo think about it
Well, putting aside intentional fallacy (i.e. what the author intended isn’t necessarily any more valid than any other interpretation) or the fact that,…
Yup, that was me! “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo,” and once thought about a series of postmortem publicans where new Hugo poems ended up getting published well into the 20th and even 21rst century. I believe that he gave up the idea because he wouldn’t be around to enjoy those sales.
Anyways, there were gay people in the nineteenth century, and, as Gascon points out, there were lots of encoded gay characters in literature. Grantaire certainly appears to be one of them. Take a look at Balzac’s Vautrin and Lucien Chardon if you want to see explicitly queer characters in nineteenth century novels.
I’ll do you one better: The Last Incarnation of Vautrin predates Les Mis, and even Hugo’s first drafts of Les Mis. Yes, 19th-century literature is full of pretty blonds, but Lucien was a Type analogous to, say, Dorian Gray, and in fact Oscar Wilde admitted to being hugely influenced by the character of Lucien. Which means that when Hugo was coming up with his descriptions of Enjolras, it’s possible—nay, entirely probable—that he was playing at least in part off of Balzac’s character. Much like his description of Courfeyrac as “outwardly similar to Tholomyès, except not an asshole,” I think it’s perfectly plausible to read all the “Antinoüs, farouche” stuff as “looks just like a Lucien Chardon, but woe betide you if you mistake him for soft or lacking in backbone.” Which would make Grantaire—ugly, cynical, infatuated—a sort of Vautrin figure, but subverted and flipped upside down because Grantaire is the spineless one and Enjolras is the one pulling the strings in their relationship. (And since Balzac really wasn’t subtle at all about the nature of that relationship, ‘Enjolras/Grantaire as Lucien/Vautrin with their agency flipped’ might even be a viable avenue to argue that the suspiciously homoerotic allusions are deliberate, but I’m not sure that’s a limb I want to go out on.)
And now I think about it, oh my God, talk about a vivid illustration of Hugo and Balzac being on the opposite ends of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs Cynicism. Desperately trying not to frame this as a battle of “Cynicism tops!” “No, idealism tops!”
This is fascinating. In my initial readings I tended to lean towards the more simplistic interpretation of Enjolras’ beautiful androgyny tying into his “angelic” nature, angels being androgynous entities, but I think the above, read with the meta that Gascon has put forward in other posts about the layered meanings of Enjolras’ appearance and character (not to mention how others respond to him), makes it easy to demonstrate that there are multiple possible meanings in the character to unpack.
so apparently the internet can find yaoi ship in everything, even les miserables, I wonder what would Victor Hugo think about it
Well, putting aside intentional fallacy (i.e. what the author intended isn’t necessarily any more valid than any other interpretation) or the fact that, as I believe Marguerite once brought up with me, Hugo was a bit full of himself and therefore would love to know people were raving over his work for any reason, I think this goes a bit beyond the conventions of yaoi/slash shipping. There’s an awful lot of queer subtext to be picked out of the book with regard Les Amis in general, and I’ve spent far too much of my time on Tumblr doing just that. Picking out encoded homoeroticism and gender non-conformity in 19th/early 20th century French and British fiction is rapidly becoming my Serious Academic Thing, it seems. Also, for what’s it worth this is hardly a post-movie phenomenon; there’s fics in the Les Mis online fandom dating back to the early 2000s at least.
What Gascon says.
Read the book? Yah - many times. Researched the era (my degree is in English lit, and I work with interpreting history as my day job)…and I’ll continue to read the book, interpret it, and enjoy it as I choose. Not everything I write or sketch is from a romantic/homoerotic perspective - much isn’t - but I’m not going to limit those possibilities, or listen to someone else who tries to do that.
I think I would dislike E/R as a pairing less if I could find more than roughly 1 in 200 stories that is both canon era and vaguely in character. I swear 90% of the prompts on the kmeme involve one of them being abusive and the other being a woobie and I just. Don’t. Care. It’s even worse than woobie Javert, who at least is counterbalanced by a fair amount of stories with more canonical takes on him.
I mean, I do like that 1 in 200 good E/R story a lot, but those are really shitty odds. (I have the same issue with other Amis fic, but the overall volume is not as overwhelming.)
This amuses me because the first two stories I wrote in this fandom were unrequited E/R and I thought I was going to write Amis fic and Javert gen. Well, I was half right…
(We don’t talk about the terrible Javert’s suicide poem based on the 1998 movie that I wrote in high school, nope.)
I have a hard time finding fic for E/R on the kmeme that at all resembles why I’m so interested in the characters and the relationship in the first place, because the characterization is either done to fetishistic extremes (SuperDom!Enjolras! UltimateSub!Grantaire) or simply not attempted.
I mean, Hugo himself ships E/R pretty hard, which will probably come out in a disgustingly long, tl;dr metapost I need to do (STAY TUNED FOR EXCITEMENT ah ha ha ha). Enjolras and Grantaire as characters do not make much sense if they aren’t able to come to a final understanding (but I really don’t think they could work as a couple in the long term - Hugo basically shot them with perfect timing). I feel like my own E/R fic tends to go out in its own in terms of characterization, so I’m honestly surprised that people are responding well to it and more importantly, seem to find it IC.
omg though if you wrote more E/R it would be like christmas for sath
Holy fuck word on the fetishistic extremes. I keep seeing these fics with odd details/bits of characterization/turns of phrase lifted from my “I am going to hell for this and I’ll be trying vainly to integrate it with canon all the way down” D/s thought experiment and wanting to crawl into a hole. Because oh my god, it was a thought experiment (albeit one I fapped to for days because ohoho just give me an excuse to line up a bunch of my kinks in a row, will you?), not the basis for a new wave of really skeevy fanon.
(Though I’m not sure how much of that is fanon and how much is the personal headcanon of one very prolific person. Who… well, I’ve run into her stuff on at least one other fandom’s kinkmeme and it was just as disappointing and generic and skeevily OOC over there too.)
Oh-kay…that might explain a lot! I’ve almost given up on E/R as well - every now and then a gem comes along that saves it for me. But I just…like the character Hugo wrote, and don’t really see a lot of the in a lot of characterisations bearing their names. I kind of put that down to my personal kinks, which are in-canon, canonical era interpretations.
I feel like we need trope bingo - the latest I’ve seen is Eponine feeling the need to be protective of R/Giving Enjolras a dressing down etc for not being nice enough to R. This seems to be a continually recurring theme.
There was a different comic set to post tonight, BUT I think we all need some quiet time with our friends after today, you know?
Yes - we did need this, Between Courfeyrac sprawled in the centre, and Jehan draped across everyone, and the centre trio all interlinked, and everyone embraced and embracing…yeah, we needed this.
