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Never trust AI

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Who are you, @brickstudies? Are you on the Les Mis Letters/Letters After Dark servers? Because I can hook you up. Preferably, this involves getting to see your live reaction to learning Hamada Hideya's choices.

Victor Hugo: This chapter is called "The Immortal Liver", as a metaphor for—

Hamada Hideya: Hold my beer.

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Victor Hugo: This chapter is called "The Immortal Liver", as a metaphor for—

Hamada Hideya: Hold my beer.

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For the ask game, if any of these interest you:

Tell me about a trope you love (or hate) and why it appeals (or annoys)?

Is there a theme you keep coming back to in your work? What, if anything, do you think it says about you?

Do you have other creative pursuits or hobbies besides writing?

What kind of books do you like to read? Got any recs?

I'm imaging you (by which I mean your icon) adjusting a pair of spectacles prior to fielding this list.

Trope that annoys the piss out of me: the entire set of (usually visual) two-beat gags that follow of the formula of "She's right behind me, isn't she?" and "At least it's not raining!" (You know the second beat without me having to explain it, eh?)

For tropes that I love, please refer to a Valvert fic by the title of "Dammit".

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Incurable insanity and illness. They really fascinate me, y'know, as someone who's never experienced anything of the sort, and—

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I invested all my creative skill points in fiction. Even my poor work spreadsheets suffer my lack of artistic talent (not a lick of color on there).

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Speculative fiction and queer history are my main squeezes. If you want a sense of what makes my brain sing, try: Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (edited by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, Anna Kłosowska) Queer Lives: Men's Autobiographies from Eighteenth-Century France (edited by William Peniston and Nancy Erber) The Innnkeeper's Song (Peter S. Beagle) If on a winter's night a traveler... (Italo Calvino) A Canticle for Leibowitz (Water M. Miller Jr.) Rider at the Gate (C. J. Cherryh—really, all of Cherryh's science fiction, but not her fantasy) House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski) Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins) Swordspoint (Ellen Kushner) That Hideous Strength (C. S. Lewis) The Last of the Wine (Mary Renault) & everything by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ask the author.

Ask!

(It an ask game. What have you wanted to ask for a while? What popped into your head when you were BIGGEST font’d at? What do you wish you could ask everyone?)

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Welcome to my Les Misérables fan fiction recommendation blog !!

Submission rules are simple:

- Submit any les mis fan fiction that you enjoyed to my inbox (preferably originally posted to ao3 for the sake of my simplicity lol)

- Please provide the title of the work, the author, and a link to said fan fiction with your submissions

- It is optional to add any additional words of recommendation or opinions

- I will read through the work attached to each submission and also provide my thoughts with my recommendations !!

- Only positive feedback is allowed with recommendations! Hateful and demeaning comments on the works of writers will not be tolerated

- Explicit and mature fan fiction submissions are allowed but will be tagged as so on my posts if you wish to filter out fics rated as such

- Absolutely no AI generated fan fiction is allowed for submission

My goal with this blog is to create larger support and recognition for small and up-and-coming writers in the les mis fandom. I wish to share my love for community generated creativity.🩵🩵

Happy reading and writing, and recommend away !! :D

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Do you want some literal wolf creature Javert? I been writing literal wolf Javert & have updated. Have I derailed myself with a Cosette side plot? Have I also derailed myself with an entire speculative hard left turn on Seine bellyflop night, different than the usual in our belovèd post-Seine genre? yes. So, if you want more of what you’re used to from me, y’all also get that.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/56669194/chapters/175087616

@rubberbutton this is not your fleas and ticks chapter. The one that will be dedicated to you. The next one is.

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I started this and then got bored, womp womp. Was going to get into how Jean Valjean's idea of romance is shaped by the customs of peasants, bourgeois novels, and same-sex affairs in the bagne, and how these things came together into misunderstanding Marius' intent as being directed at him, but. Eh. Fandom has done this premise before. Back to werewolf.

***

We begin with a protestation: we do not question our friend M. Hugo’s acuity in depiction of mankind’s inner machinations. Regardless, we believe we must take up the matter of a single word, ‘oublia’, in that concise work of his, Les Misérables—to take it up, indeed, as a favor to M. Hugo, who must make certain concessions to the cost of paper, and not illustrate as it were to the final hair each motivation. Further, should that hair be located on an intimate locale, might manners proscribe his close attention, for fear a minor point would distract from his greater intent? If that be the case, we suffer no manners. On what occasion did a matter slip the mind of a character, then, that we would like to grant more generous attention?

Indeed, in no scenario we can imagine did slippage occur from a mind (that choice of verb to forget being one of M. Hugo’s coynesses), but rather from a pocket—

I.

When the sun passes over Toulon, through much of the year it sheds a brilliant light which the new convict bemoans: for how it burns his skin, extracts the salt from his body, and its snitch illumination of every one of his motions to the guards. Once seasoned—brined, as the cant has it, those gentleman being humorous about the impact of the sea air upon the skin, and it allowing for such obscured exclamations as he was well-cooked, the cognes spotted him right off as the most tenderized cock in the meat-market from his brining!, an example we pull from an occasion on which a horse-thief became a horse near before he put his hand on the bridle of his target, the police having recognized him as a parolee by his leathered face—that is, once he gains experience, the convict grows so clever that being seen becomes as much a part of his plot to escape as being hidden.

When a convict suspects himself of being under close observation (here we preserve the reader from a digression on how the ratio of guard to convicts forces the former to calculate how much of his attention each of the latter earns), while sitting with his back against a wall in full sun he will let slip from his smock a if a scrap of a paper with a benign note written upon it—say perhaps so-and-so owes me a third of his bean rations for one week (again, we limit ourselves, and do not enter a discussion on the value of these scraps among convicts, their value in trade, and what sort of scratchings are made upon them, whether proper language written by a literate banker imprisoned for embezzlement or hatch-marks by a poacher whose experience of books ended at a family Bible he could not read). He will then stand, brush himself off, and with absolute naturalness stroll away. If he has a comrade who has his absolute faith, he will ask them to watch over this scrap; should he be cautious that his comrades are the cause of increased scrutiny upon him, or else a loner such as our Jean Valjean, he must content himself with glancing behind himself with as much subtlety as he possesses, knowing that this might give him away. If he or his comrade see the guards pounce upon the abandoned scrap, the convict knows that he must hibernate upon his plans, surveillance being too close for him to effect his departure without alerting his hosts.

Impossible that Jean Valjean should be unaware of this common tactic. 

II. 

The reader being well-acquainted with Jean Valjean’s history in the bagne, why should this detail with regards to the handkerchief be obscured as intimate? We admit ourselves to have been distracted. In fact, that the handkerchief being left upon the bench was a deliberate act of Jean Valjean’s, and not a matter of chance, can be easily derived from M. Hugo’s text. Forgive us. We possess this information, attested to within a private letter that cannot be published without other content damaging its recipient’s reputation, that M. Hugo described the handkerchief as forgot and not left—say even gifted—as part of a broader obfuscation of his character’s motivation. We read that Jean Valjean deployed various tricks to determine that Marius Pontmercy had romantic designs upon Cosette—in fact, in the week before his quitting of the apartment at the Rue de l’Ouest, all that we read in the published text of Les Misérables describes the fierce and mournful sensations of his spirit in the most striking detail. 

M. Hugo reserved for himself those motions of the heart which stirred Jean Valjean prior to the reorganization of his thoughts vis-a-vis the young man in the garden.

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Happy Marius Huffs Valjean's Handkerchief Day to all who celebrate, particularly my friends who ship them. (Marius and the handkerchief. Or Marius and Valjean. You can guess at my meaning.)

Yesterday I kvetched about fandom portrayals of Marius forgetting he very efficiently killed some guys. Now I recall why.

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Drink With Me: A Les Misérables Platonic Gift Exchange 2025

Hello everyone!!

We may be a little late but we are back for another round of celebrating platonic affection! :)

What is the Drink with Me Platonic Exchange?

It's a fandom event to celebrate the platonic relationships in Les Misérables! In it, each person gives up to three platonic ships, and receives another person's ships to make some kind of content for. Let's get the wine of friendship flowing!

The mods this year are @pumpkinspice-prouvaire, @aromantic-enjolras, @shamedumpster and @p-trichor

How do I participate?

Just fill in this form

And we'll assign you a person accordingly (and keep that information confidential).

After the inscription process is done, you'll be assigned one person, along with their top three ships, and choose which one to make content for. You're not obligated to make content for all of them, we just want you to have wiggle room!

I can't write/draw, can I still participate?

Of course! Fics, fanart, videos, moodboards, gifsets, edits, etc.... All content is welcome!

What is the timeline?

Beginning today, the registrations are open till 18th July 2025. Your user and ships will be assigned within the next couple of days.

We will do a check in on the 20th of August to make sure everything is in order.

All the content must be uploaded on the 5th of September.

And remember, it's a surprise, so please keep it secret until then!

If you change your username between sign up and submissions, please let one of the mods know so we can avoid confusion.

If you're posting a fic on ao3, be sure to add it to the collection: Drink With Me 2025

Remember to tag the person who you're gifting, as well as @drinkwithme-exchange, and tag #drinkwithme2025. We want to see it!!

Feel free to drop a question in our askbox, if you have any doubts.

Happy creating!

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Not to hijack ya, but:

Let's all of us go squeaksquonksqueaksquonk in our big clown shoes outside into a meadow where we can lay down & feed the mosquitos with our clown blood & weave flower crowns and talk about how breaking out the homoerotic-homosocial-homosuggestive aspects of texts tangled by the homicidal antisodomy prejudices of their time into fully realized same-sex love relationships is an exciting and transformative and rainbow-farting activity to share among ourselves. It does not matter whose fictional cocks/pussies are in question.

As an aside, "hey, here's my pile of evidence for the author's intentional writing this guy as wanting to bang the other dude nasty" and "hey, the author would hate and/or be bewildered that I've constructed this tenuous web of reasons why you can read this guy as wanting to bang the other dude nasty" are equally fun games! These Are All Games.

Every time I make posts about Enjolras and Grantaire as a ship some people tag it as 'I don't go here, but-' which is fine but I have to make it clear I don't go here either my only les mis ships are Jean Valjean/Fauchelevent and Marius/having a therapist

but yk if you want to engage with the brick you end up having to engage the fact that Enjolras is a greak hero and Grantaire is his Patroclus. In the text. And that's kinda that. It's part of it asdfghjkl

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I couldn't do it without... her.

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This this this! Strong agree. I got quotes.

Does he want her to engage in a romance with some dumb-ass boy? No:

“How stupid I am!” thought Jean Valjean. “She had not noticed him. It is I who have pointed him out to her.” (5.3.7)

But he is also definitively has no fucking clue what's going on, and we see Mr. No Theory of Mind doing what he does worst: trying to get into the head of somebody else:

What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so impenetrable? What was on its way there within? What was taking place in Cosette’s soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he passed whole nights asking himself: “What has Cosette in her mind?” and in thinking of the things that she might be thinking about. (5.3.7)

There's a tangle, also, of love and innocence (and gender!) that overlaps curiously between Cosette and Valjean. From the beginning, their capacity and experience of love is intimately bound together:

He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing. [. . .] Thus, from the very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved this kind man. She felt that which she had never felt before—a sensation of expansion. (2.4.2)

And with Marius' appearance and Cosette's first experience of romantic/sexual love, they're starting out more or less on the same page so far as comprehension again:

Jean Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries which are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted; the consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance of Cosette’s silence. He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. On his side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue. (5.3.7)

Except that he certainly doesn't find Marius to be "something charming, luminous, and impossible" (5.3.6)—if anything, the prime difference between him and Cosette is that he has a smidge of practical awareness of what a young man might want that Cosette doesn't (and which the text specifies she would have feared, here, were she confronted with it directly).

What fucks 'em both, besides Valjean's inability to follow the thought process to this new love, is—well, gender, this idea Hugo has that women simply know how the game of socially unacceptable sexual behavior must be played (because this affair is framed as illicit, whatever bourgeois nonsexual framework Marius is building in his brains), and Cosette's acting as if her father also knows those rules (spoiler: he doesn't, actually):

[. . .]a  feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more. But days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette’s tacit consent. She regretted it. (5.3.7)

The fact that silence and tranquility as a tactic to escape detection is explicitly tied to femininity throughout this chapter, by the by, is so— I mean— Listen. I gotta move on to the next thing, it's still not time to expand upon trans woman Valjean, but my good lord the text is pregnant with her.

the thing is I do kind of think if cosette had actually been able to express/was able to articulate to jvj what & how strongly she felt for marius & that she wanted to see him again I do think jvj would have done his best to allow that to happen (even if he was miserable about it) — see his behaviour after he sees cosette's letter/reads marius letter, everything he does to make sure they're able to see each other & then get married, and his motivations for leaving the convent (to allow cosette to live her own life as her own person even if that means eventually being 'separated' from her) — but unfortunately (not her fault) she was raised by the most secretive & dysfunctional & repressed man alive so like. that doesn't even occur to her or seem like a possibility. and then jvj through his own inexperience doesn't perceive that cosette is actually really interested in marius (there are several scenes of his misunderstanding this) & so just thinks marius a creep his daughter is not even aware of. and like this is not to say that there is not pettiness & selfishness & misery around this on his part in his own thoughts (there obviously is) but just that we see do see him overcome this to do what's good for cosette as a person & what will make her happy at several points in the story, and also that I don't think he would have separated them intentionally if he knew their real feelings

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Whenever an adaptational Javert claims to have chased Valjean incessantly—hunted him across the years, you may say… Let me draw a comparison.

No, let me pause. I believe Oyelowovert. He’s been seeing Valjean in every crime committed. If your squirrel dog barks at each mouse and toad and chicken, he’s gonna catch a squirrel someday. As to the rest—

Sometimes I review my team’s metrics, and I sit down with someone who spent a few days fuckin around on their phone instead of doing their work. They tell me, I’ve worked so hard! I don’t know why my work isn’t done. And I say: ok! quantify your day. walk me through it. let’s start with sitting down at your desk and go from there.

(They hate this. We identify a lot of barriers and areas for improvement together.)

I’d like these never shall yield til we come face to face Javerts to quantify their work, please, this better be a hobby and not happening during company hours because the time:success ratio is off.

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Dammit ch. 21, which quotes heavily from 5.9.5–no reason for concern here.

(I’ve been fretting at this one, unsure about craft choices, but at some point you gotta stop kneading the dough. Y’all didn’t forget too much since the last update, right? It hasn’t been a whole six months, after all.)

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It's too late. Like an image on film, *The Expression* belongs to your primary motor cortex. It would take a minor neurological miracle for you to cease producing it.