All of Gavroche’s friends think he’s so cool for having all these twenty-something friends with cars and jobs and flats but whenever they gush about how cool they are he just sighs because they are literally the lamest people he has ever met and he doesn’t know why they are actually allowed to have cars and jobs and flats
“all they do is yell about politics and kiss each other when they think no one is watching!”
enjolras and grantaire didn’t just hold hands and then die, grantaire probably gripped it tighter and enjolras squeezed back as he was hit with the first bullets and maybe grantaire felt enjolras’ muscles go slack before enj died and let me tell you, not just seeing or hearing the person you love die but feeling it must have been horrific
In honor of Victor Hugo’s birthday, please reblog with one (1) Wild Fact about him. My go-to is the one about his funeral, and how all the prostitutes in Paris wore black veils over their crotches to mourn their best client.
( @pilferingapples I KNOW you have some good ones, and probably some I haven’t heard yet.)
24601 comes from the day Victor Hugo [believes he] was conceived: June 24, 1801
-When Hugo was in school, he reigned like the king of the schoolyard, calling assemblies of the other kids, making them kneel (and sometimes stepping on them apparently??) and sending them to run his errands and bring back school contraband of various sorts. Years later, as an adult, he asked a classmate he’d been particularly demanding towards why none of them had ever told him to get bent, and the classmate said, essentially, “ But then you might have stopped paying attention to me, and that would have been the worst!”
-Marius and Cosette’s wedding night is the night Hugo and Juliette first had sex. This is confirmed by her own letters.
-Hugo drew his (really very inventive) pictures with all sorts of materials, including food, spilled coffee, spit, and…possibly worse:P
– We know so much about Hugo’s sex life because he kept an itemized barely-coded Sex Diary
– Hugo wrote a little poem to put on a dog’s collar; with the result that the collar was stolen almost daily by people who wanted a Victor Hugo Original
– After Les Miserables came out, Hugo was swamped with letters from people begging for money in the name of Jean Valjean, threatening to turn to crime if he didn’t pay up.
– He wrote naked
His parents conceived on Mount Donon, and he used to tell his son that he was destined to be special because of it. That spot is marked with a block of sandstone that says:
IN THIS PLACE
ON 5 FLOREAL, YEAR 9
VICTOR HUGO
WAS CONCEIVED
It was made by some dude in the 1960’s as a joke, and I personally think we should all take a field trip there.
– he was a foot fetishist
– he claimed to have had sex with his wife NINE times on their wedding night
– he was recognized by a group of belgians in 1881 and they broke his windows and doors while shouting “down with victor hugo! down with jean valjean!”
– he once sent his publishers a telegram that just said “?” (they replied with “!”)
– oscar wilde was once at a party at his house and instead of listening to his anecdotes hugo fell asleep
– in the original draft of les mis jean valjean was named jean tréjean which literally just means “jean veryjean”
this guy is twenty-two years old and is completely willing (eager, even) to sacrifice his life for the liberation of an entire country’s people
he understands the inner-workings of the french government better than the majority of the members of the government do
he manages to keep a group of rowdy twenty-somethings in line: he may become exasperated with them but he does not give up; he spends a very large amount of his extremely valuable time searching for their redeeming and useful qualities and tries to place them in areas where they will prosper; he is always weighing the options of what is best for the amis, the people of france, and the revolution as a whole, and (just as anna has pointed out recently) continually exhibits an inordinate amount of patience with regard to the amis and should be admired for how much shit he puts up with (especially from grantaire), not vilified.
i am still amazed at how much criticism is thrown at enjolras, especially when it comes to him being blamed for the amis’ deaths or depicting him as some sort of unfeeling monster who treats all of the boys like shit. enjolras is one of the most admirable, selfless, thorough, and dedicated characters within the entire story.
the only argument i have against ace enjolras is that hugo chose to compare him to more than one gay figure from classical antiquity. to me thats a clear indicator that enjolras is at the very least leaning towards being gay.
Also like… Ace people can be gay?
But… at the time, when Hugo wrote it, he wouldn’t have had the same understanding of what asexuality is, so he probably wouldn’t have written a character specifically believing them to be asexual… or at least, knowing what it meant.
I think it’s a perfectly valid interpretation to have nowadays – especially given that it’s canon he has not so much as kissed another person – but I think at the time, Hugo was coding him as gay very explicitly, so even if you regard him as Ace as well, you can’t just ignore that. Enjolras is gay.
i think it’s time for a little lesson in appreciating eponine thenardier as a character.
get ready for a truth bomb comin’ at you: eponine is fundamentally selfish, her feelings for marius were not genuine sustainable romantic love, and they would have been a complete disaster if they had ever been something resembling a couple. you are doing it wrong.
i’m sorry. she’s not some fallen disney princess, and i get SO FREAKING MAD when people romanticize her character. it’s not totally the audience’s fault, and the people running the musical have over the years tended to cast actresses who could easily play both roles, type-wise, and that would have been UNTHINKABLE in the original cast. because eponine is an unwashed, possibly mentally unstable street urchin who follows marius around and sneaks into his apartment and eats his leftovers while humming to herself. lea salonga’s casting was maybe the worst thing that ever happened to the character, and i love lea salonga. but if there’s a fallen disney princess, IT’S FANTINE JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
let’s get one thing straight: the poor little eponine bullshit is getting old.
she shouldn’t see herself as some tragic poor soul whom the world has broken. the best actresses have not played her this way. she is not self-pitying. have you even LISTENED to on my own? that shit is not bemoaning. she is not blaming marius. she gets mad and does the little you know little you care shit, but on my own, her big song, is not a fucking pity party. she is realizing that she loves him and that THEY WILL NEVER WORK OUT. it’s not “why doesn’t he love me.” she knows she is not even remotely in his field of romantic prospects and yeah, it hurts, but she’s not blaming anybody, especially not cosette or marius. don’t fucking simplify her to that level. she has her selfish indulgent moments but she has balls and strength and grit. she stands up to the father who most likely doubles as her pimp and who rules her life and whom she has until now been aiding in criminal activities IN ORDER TO PROTECT MARIUS AND COSETTE.
she even says it! it’s the title of the song! “i love him, but only on my own.” ON MY OWN. she does not expect him to love her back! she wishes she did. it hurts that she doesn’t. but she is on some level aware that she is idealizing him into this vision of what her life could have been like, and what she wishes her life could be like.
for all that sympathetic portrayal i’ve just given you, i’m gonna drop another truth bomb: she continues to interact with him in an unhealthy possessive manner, and in the book she wants so badly to be with him that she tricks him into going to the barricades, hoping he will get shot. obviously, this doesn’t occur in the musical. she also jumps in front of a bullet heading for marius in the books, so i mean on a cosmic level i guess it evens out. but her death in the musical? she’s not risking her life to save him. she’s not even intentionally risking her life. she’s caught by a stray bullet trying to climb back to him to tell him she did what he asked, in a move that is clearly meant to endear her to him further. she didn’t do it for him. she did it for herself, because she wants him. despite having recognized and accepted that they will never happen.
and the cosette thing? the girl-hate perpetuated by this fandom’s segment of eponine lovers is positively disgusting, and the term mary-sue comes up a whole fuckton of a lot. if you think about it for like three seconds, a mary-sue is a female character who is too perfect, and most often it goes way beyond criticizing bad writing and into hating female characters. i’m sorry, since when are we criticizing people for being awesome? if it were a dude in the same position, you’d never say he was a gary stu. in the book, cosette is a fully developed character who is more sympathetic and interesting than eponine, and in addition to several years of staring at each other from across parks, cosette and marius have been meeting in secret for weeks. i understand that she was simplified and fucking shafted by boubil and schonberg into someone without much personality at all. that doesn’t make her some kind of horrible harpy bitch who is stealing marius from poor righteous devoted eponine. she had the audacity to fall in love with him and to have him fall in love with her.
but besides all that, you don’t get to ~get the guy by completing a series of tasks or being more devoted or loving him better. the HOW DARE HE CHOOSE COSETTE OVER EPONINE WHO LOVED HIM SO MUCH!!! argument is getting really fucking stale, and it’s been that way since, like, the nineties. you’re late to that party, the ship has sailed, leave your internalized misogyny and immature notions of how relationships and affection work at the door. she isn’t entitled to marius, and her entitlement sure as hell shouldn’t be interpreted as in comparison to cosette. it should never BE cosette OR eponine. they’re not on the same level.
for all that, i still really like eponine. i like the eponine that you should be liking. i like the eponine who stands up to her father, who refuses to stop dreaming despite horrifying circumstances, who is selfish and immature and spoiled and maybe a little unstable. i like the eponine with character, with layers—not the 2d teenybopper taylor swift bullshit misogynist self-indulgent brat you identify with because she gets spurned romantically. stop blaming the guy. stop blaming the other girl. marius did nothing to hurt eponine on purpose. cosette sure as hell didn’t, and there’s no evidence that eponine hates her, so why the fuck do you? she’s desperate and grasping and selfish, but she doesn’t hate either one of them.
in the end, dying in marius’s arms is her happy ending. she knows it. she honestly accepts that this is the best she’s gonna get. that’s her tragedy. not that she didn’t get the guy and died for love. no. stop that bullshit before you even think it. and she is honestly happy to be there! she is legitimately thrilled to get that much. she’s got fight. she’s got practicality. she’s got strength and flaws and qualities and this interpretation of her absolutely KILLS them all as well as the characterizations of cosette and marius (admittedly not fucking helped by the casting trends as a whole).
you want a good eponine, check out frances ruffele. her voice is squeaky, but the character sure as fuck isn’t who you’re thinking she is. try to get a hold of footage of celia keenan-bolger, because she’s the closest to book!ponine and maybe the best-developed eponine i have ever seen. she doesn’t turn on my own into her BIG SHOWSTOPPING ALL-ABOUT-ME number—it’s a number among many others that gives us insight into her character and she sure as fuck doesn’t stop to have a pity party. the fandom and the franchise have absolutely gutted a great character, and she didn’t deserve that shit. don’t try to sell it to me.
another rant for another day is the fact that THIS LOVE TRIANGLE IS NOT THE FUCKING POINT OF THIS MUSICAL. it’s a slice of so many characters and lives intersecting at these few moments and it’s meant to criticize what was happening in society at the time of its publication. it is an epic. it is way bigger than your fucking romantic intrigues, so stop simplifying it to that. you will never get me to cry more over eponine’s death than the barricade scenes.
tl;dr: this macro is a steaming pile of horse shit, and so is the interpretation eponine it represents.
Enjolras was 24 when the amis realized that he was under the impression that kangaroos were a widely beloved fictional animal created by Dr. Suess. He was deeply troubled to learn that they are, in fact, real Australian wildlife.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 