i-am-mrhyde

[i-am-mrhyde]

me tbh

[i-am-mrhyde]

It’s nothing personal I promise but I left the J&H discord server I was in. I just never wanted to participate in it much 😭😭 the art was cool though

[i-am-mrhyde]

Hyde is non-binary in my head but I don’t know how to put it to words in what way he is.

He’s non-binary because he is like. RAW EXPRESSION. The core of what he is is OUTSIDE the binary of gender among everything else. Could also be read as agender or multigendered, but in my head he’s non-binary.

[i-am-mrhyde]

Half term ended and school is back on. Had English today and J&H got briefly mentioned. In my head I was giggling and kicking my feet.

[i-am-mrhyde]

Thinking about that ”Jekyll giving old leftover rolls to Lanyon”-comic of mine… it’s still the absolute funniest shit to me, I can’t stop laughing at it every time I see it again, my humor is broken

[i-am-mrhyde]

Guys it’s getting bad.

Hyde pony. On Ponytown. Diabolical work from me.

[i-am-mrhyde]

ID check at the bank

[i-am-mrhyde]

Guys I can’t lie I did forget this account existed for a while. Since I last posted.

[i-am-mrhyde]

anybody else ever obsess over a blorbo/fandom so hard they gotta like... take a step back and consider if they are mentally well

[i-am-mrhyde]

This Valentine’s Day I’m going to drink my potion and split man’s dual nature. Trust

[i-am-mrhyde]

Continuing my important contributions to the J&H tumblr fandom

[i-am-mrhyde]

Can't figure out how to post the PDF to tumblr lmao so. Speech under cut. It's decently long. Also again this is for SCHOOL. It's not groundbreaking. Don't be mean to me 😔😔

Is Jekyll and Hyde really about good and evil?

INTRODUCTION:

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. An 1886 novella written by Robert Louis Stevenson that helped define what Gothic horror is in the present day. The book is still widely known 139 years later, and talks about it's themes, such as this speech, still go on. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are two names often brought up in countless settings. Whether you're discussing films, other novels, music or even live performances, there's a decent chance the characters will get a mention. When talking about unrelated characters with unexplainable actions, emotions or sometimes even "multiple personalities", Jekyll and Hyde again is brought up. An argument could be made to say that the entire trope of "troubled and innocent man has an evil alter ego" stemmed from this book. However, these depictions are almost wholly inaccurate to the source material for a plethora of reasons. The main issue I'll talk about, though, is that "good" and "evil" are, in my opinion, far too narrow a lens to look at this character through.

P1: Jekyll

Doctor Henry Jekyll is one of the most mysterious characters in the story, as we never truly see what's happening in his head until the end, and even then, it has already been distorted and warped by the creation of Hyde. Jekyll is a guarded, eccentric, secretive man, which shines through during the sole chapter we get from his viewpoint. "I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering." This is how Jekyll describes himself before Hyde, before he awakened his other side. His choice of words here matter a lot. "Laid aside restraint" and "laboured". To Jekyll, committing those shameful actions was something he let himself go for, a release into something easy, while actions that helped others was something he strained and worked himself for, something difficult for him to pull off. Henry Jekyll, at his core, is a selfish man, who tries and seemingly fails to care for others. Moving on to after Hyde's creation, Jekyll has an interesting way of referring to him, where he can both talk about Hyde as an extension of himself, while also alienating himself from the actions committed by him. At Hyde's conception, Jekyll immediately claims him as a true part of himself. "It seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine." Hyde's mind was in no way something alien to Jekyll, not an outward force possessing or controlling him, like what's seen in popular adaptations. Henry Jekyll is not "good", he never was, and never could have been. Others know this, with Utterson stating that "He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations." Even Jekyll knows this, describing himself as "The old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair." Henry Jekyll is a repressed man, not a good one.

P2: Hyde

Mister Edward Hyde is an erratic, finnicky character, whose eventual start to split from Jekyll proves to be his fall. Hyde is an eccentric man, who never truly exists on his own until the end. Described by Jekyll to be "like a thick cloak," he was just that, something to be worn and felt by someone else. The hollowness within Hyde is plain to everyone who meets him, like Enfield saying that "There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable," or Utterson, stating that "If ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend." Hyde's appearance in itself adds another layer to his character, with his sparing description linking to how much we don't know him. What is described of him is very important, however. Hyde, at first, is never honestly described as something threatening. He's small, he's "stumping along at a good pace," or "crouching against the pillars", and finally, "particularly small and wicked-looking." Hyde is a weird and unnerving man at his core, with his profound wrongness immediately drawing ire from people, but he is still a man. The book, at multiple points, talks about Hyde's love for life, his fears, how he's pitied. As Hyde becomes more detached from Jekyll, he becomes more scared, hysterical even. He can't handle being himself. Everything about Hyde means something, because he is everything that Jekyll hides about himself. His house being in Soho, how he mutters, people calling him "deformed". Soho at the time was a rough place full of crime, and some of this crime was homosexuality, which had recently again been criminalised in the Labouchere Amendment. Mental and physical disabilities were even more heavily stigmatized in the 19th century, and Hyde being clearly disabled in some way probably drew him just as much hatred as his "sense of wrongness" did. Hyde is the personification of everything that Jekyll can't be, whether that's horribly violent, emotionally erratic, visibly disabled or just being gay. Hyde is the physical manifestation of unrestraint, no holds barred, he's not simply "evil".

CONCLUSION:

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be about a lot of things. It can be a drug addiction metaphor, a metaphor for being gay, id, ego and superego, science versus religion, atavism and evolution. One thing it's not about, is honest people. They are all dirty, grubby little liars. There's no good and evil in the characters, because you don't truly know where any of them fall on that scale. Jekyll is deeply unhappy and doesn't enjoy helping others, Hyde is sporadic and unknowable, even to Jekyll at the end, Utterson is a boring little man who drinks to repress himself in secret and make himself purposefully dull, Lanyon is practically allergic to change, and literally dies when faced with a reality he doesn't like, Enfield is described as a "man about town", and was out in the middle of the night with an unknown purpose before seeing Hyde trample the girl. Jekyll's statement is the closest we get to understanding both him and Hyde, and yet it too is full of bias and twisting of words. Jekyll flits between accepting Hyde and rejecting him, he jumps past actions he committed and doesn't acknowledge that everything Hyde does, he wants. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can't just be about good and evil, or good fighting evil, because that's not where this duality lies. Repression and unrestraint. Is it better to sit in meek surrender, water yourself down until you're not you anymore, or would you rather escape into being the rawest version of yourself, until you burn up and destroy yourself when the afterglow fades?

Yipay.

[i-am-mrhyde]

Okay reblog if you’re an artist who STRONGLY PREFERS reblogs with commentary

People are apparently under the impression that reblogging someone’s art and adding a comment is frowned upon and that can’t possibly be true, every artist I know of sees a reblog-comment as like the ultimate definitive reward for their hard work.

Obviously don’t feel bad for NOT adding a comment if you’re shy or just don’t know what to say, but if there’s something you would like to say about a drawing you’ve liked enough to reblog, I’m pretty sure most artists crave hearing it.

[i-am-mrhyde]

reasonable villain enjoyers have it rough because on the one hand you have to deal with people who woobify your villain faves and sandpaper away their hard edges (and most interesting qualities) to make them soft uwu; on the other hand there’s the folks who think your villain fave is satan incarnate or act like it’s an actual moral offence to like a fictional character who does bad things

[i-am-mrhyde]

uhhh @kusnechik s hyde here

i really like your design, he’s fun :]

[i-am-mrhyde]

Would anyone want to see the speech I wrote? It’s not like. Groundbreaking but I think it’s alright. The main point is “Is Jekyll and Hyde really about good and evil?” Where I just say that it’s more complicated than that. I’ll have to post it tomorrow though cause it’s disastrously late rn

[i-am-mrhyde]

THE SPEECH IS DONE. OH MY GOD.