I write bullet-point meta now? Bullet-point meta is cool.
If you think Eponine was a terrible person I will fucking fight you
If you think Eponine was a pure virtuous saint I will fucking fight you
If you think the most tragic thing about Eponine was that Marius didn’t love her back, look, I’m sorry, you are just plain wrong
Eponine’s parents are awful people trying to raise her into an awful person and her entire adolescence has been a morally-degrading hell and SHE IS TRYING TO ESCAPE
She doesn’t even make any claim to being a good person, she just wants OUT of the criminal underworld and begging and fraud and extortion and prostitution and robbery and assault
She p. much considers herself a devil who’s trying to defect to the side of angels
Marius is what sets all this off
She puts him up on a pedestal of Virtuous Poverty b/c holy shit, an alternative to being Le Mauvais Pauvre
No seriously Marius is what makes her realize how fucked-up her life is and how fucked-up she is as a result of her upbringing, and that she doesn’t have to just mutely accept it
There is a hefty dose of sexual shame in why she considers herself Irrevocably Fucked-Up, she’s a 19th-century girl in a 19th-century world, but it’s so not the only thing going on there, and the ways Eponine is being sexually exploited and how they affect her fucked-upness is a subject that deserves a long-ass meta post all to itself
And yeah, she hatches a wild plan to lure Marius to the barricades so they can die together
This is not a relapse into her family’s Wicked Ways or a random act of capricious madness, it is a full-on goddamn Javert Derailed breakdown
bc when you pin EVERYTHING on someone, not just your heart but your hope and your backbone and your moral compass, then yeah you can totally suffer in noble silence while watching him be in love with someone else, but the prospect of him DISAPPEARING AND BEING GONE FOREVER?
does not compute
critical error
initiate self-destruct sequence and lock down Marius unit in closest possible proximity
Yes this is pointless and selfish, in the general sense that Eponine is fucking drowning and clinging to Marius’ ankle to stay afloat and tries to pull him down with her rather than let him get out of the water
And holy shit she manages to transcend that moment of total breakdown panic and fix the damage she’s done and let Marius go? A teenager with no guidance and a shitty amoral abusive upbringing and basically nothing except a dogged determination not to be the person her parents made her?
Come back and tell me to my face that Eponine was a terrible person, ya little punk
She is ambiguous and conflicted and trying so, so hard to do the right thing
victor hugo really is the most insufferable writer of all time, every damn five chapters he introduces a mysterious stranger, an OLD MAN who is UNUSUALLY STRONG, “who could this be ;)” he asks us! “why! its jean valjean!” as if we’re supposed to be surprised, as if we didn’t guess this 100 pages ago VIC, i love him so much i could DIE
enjolras, pointing through the window: oh look, grantaire is reading a christmas story to les amis
courfeyrac: see, i told you we could trust him to lead while we were gone
combeferre: i wonder what he’s reading…
grantaire, inside: t’was the night before bitchmas and all through the hut, one creature was stirring: me, busting a nut-
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 