#<-putting that there like someone will search that lol

[sugarplumkneecaps]

hiiiiii, i saw you were taking shadow the hedgehog x reader requests! I was hoping it would be okay if i requested one? Can i have a shadow the hedgehog x reader (romatic) where shadow when the readers had a really bad day just holds them close and cuddles them after he finally gets them ti admit what happend? And maybe he starts to play with the readers hair, because he knows it brings him comfort when someone does so with his quills? (I like to headcannon lol that shadow pats out his quills when hes idle because it provides comfort due to it reminds him of how maria used to do something similar)

A/N: I feel like this is so on brand for him and love the HC you have for why his idle animation is what it is! I hope I can do your request some justice <3

Comfort

Pairing: Shadow x Reader C/W: none Genre: Wholesome, cuddling, fluff, playing with hair

Life really had a cruel sense of humor, didn’t it? Everything that could have possibly gone wrong today absolutely had. You woke up late, your hair was an absolute mess that was beyond saving, and searching for a hat only made you even more late. Your car had issues starting up, so you had to beg your neighbor to help jumpstart it to get it running again (and you hoped with everything you had that it would start again when you needed to return home. Upon arriving to work, you were lectured and written up for your tardiness, your supervisor having very little patience with everyone but especially you. Customers screamed at you more so than usual, complaining about different orders being wrong in ways they had expected you to figure out on your own. Still, as unjustified as it was, it earned you another talking to about your performance. And the cherry on top was, of course, slipping and covering yourself in the large bucket of sauce you were carrying to the fridge. You did everything you could to try to get it out of your uniform, alas it was an effort in futility.

The only thing that possibly went right was that whatever hoping and praying you did that morning allowed your car to run again. Another downside, however, was that even with the windows rolled all the way down, your seat still stunk of the sauce you were covered in. Cursing the universe, you peeled your uniform off and immediately got in the shower to wash yourself. The warm water did wonders against your skin, washing away your tough exterior. You slunk down to your knees, crying softly as the warm water hit you.

“Love?” Shadow’s voice cut through the sound of the shower. You pulled yourself up, doing your best to compose yourself before he saw you.

“I’m in the shower!” you called back, attempting to sound at the very least neutral. It came off somewhat awkwardly and caught in your throat, almost making you choke on the words.

“Alright, I’ll get dinner set up for you.”

You rushed through the rest of your nightly routine, wiping at the redness under your eyes but to no avail. Shaking the feeling of knowing Shadow might notice, you did your best to fake a smile. Exiting the bathroom, you found dinner put together in a nice display in the center of the table. It was takeout night, and Shadow worked closer to all your favorite eateries. The sight of your favorite cuisine placed lovingly at your spot made your eyes water all over again.

“Everything alright?” Shadow’s voice was dripping with worry.

“Yes! I just appreciate you grabbing dinner,” you smiled, wiping at your eyes in a quick fashion before taking your seat.

For the most part, you both ate in silence, the only thing hanging in the air being your over the top attempts to try to compliment Shadow further. Much like your address in the shower, it came off as forced and awkward. Not that you were a stranger to complimenting your partner, but this felt akin to nonstop yapping than true appreciation. Shadow only thanked you each time, reassuring you it was no issue, and watching you intently.

With dinner done, the inspiration to ask Shadow to watch a movie with you came over you. In reality, you probably should’ve gone to bed, but you were determined to try to at least have a pleasant evening. Shadow obliged, even as his eyebrows knitted with concern. Quickly rummaging through your DVDs, you chose a film haphazardly, shoved it into the disc player and plopped yourself down next to Shadow.

He settled in next to you, a light chuckle rumbling in his chest. “You wanted to watch “Idiocracy”? I thought you hated this movie.” The title stared at you as you realized you had completely blown your cover. You scrambled to figure out a way to cover your blunder.

“Y-yeah! I figured, why not give it another chance? There are so many good meme moments!” you laughed nervously, clicking pressing play and readying yourself to suffer through the film. You truly felt the film was made as a social experiment, perhaps even one with the potential to be used as torture. You had watched it once with your friend and it filled you with a rage that you could not describe. The same friend had given you a copy of your own for your collection of movies as a gag gift, to which you swore up and down you would never subject yourself to it again.

Of course it would be today of all days that you eat your words.

Shaking his head in protest, Shadow reached over and paused the film, sensing your doom. “Alright. What’s going on? You’ve been acting strange.”

You swallowed hard, working at the lump forming in your throat, “nothing! I’m fine, let’s start the movie-”

Your outstretched hand was grasped by Shadow’s, preventing you from keeping up with this facade. His crimson eyes were intense as they searched your face, his smooth voice serious, “tell me. We promised to not keep things from each other. Let me help.”

As if a dam had been broken, your eyes welled with tears and they poured down your cheeks. “Today has just been-“ hic “the worst.” And just as he had asked, you spilled everything. How you woke up late, your car wouldn’t start, how awful work had been, everything. He listened intently, his hand moving to caress your cheek before pulling you into an embrace. You sat there for awhile, your shoulders heaving as you cried.

Shadow pulled away for an instant, moving to the disc player and ejected the wretched movie in favor of one of your comfort films. He moved silently into the kitchen, filling up a water bottle and gathering up some of your favorite snacks. You wiped at your wet face, watching on curiously.

He set everything down before you and sat once again next to you, pulling you into his arms. You did little to prevent the shift, feeling a great amount of comfort from his touch. The movie started up, the opening scenes working magic on your nerves. You exhaled a much needed breath.

A gentle smile stretched along Shadow’s lips as he moved his hand up and began to stroke your hair. The soothing sensation rivaled the work of the Sandman himself as your eyelids began to droop. The sounds of Shadow’s steady breathing mixed with the background noises of your favorite film set the perfect backdrop for you to fall asleep, Shadow’s fingers working through your hair gently to seal your fate. Images of better days fueled by Shadow’s love for you made their way into your mind. You sighed one last time as you drifted asleep in Shadow’s arms.

[losyr]

Let's be real, I'm cooking harder than shrimpo with a wok and day old leftover rice tonight

I had him in mind as essentially the prime distractor, but way, way more punishing. You're at 1 heart, and you need to get to the elevator? Lmao nah, you kicked twisted toodles because brightney kept stealing her, and you wasted your stamina without knowing. Good luck with 3 star speed stat and no stamina for 10 seconds while panicked toodles is tunnel-visioned on you.

Also, I know he's missing 4 from his stat pool, but I didn't know where to put them, and I liked the one broken star for stamina.

He's also supposed to have stress lines under his eyes, but I made them too small and compression made them dissappear

And the framing is shit, leave me alone :(

[acourtofquestions]

TOWER OF DAWN SPOILER ALERT

OH MY WORD

ITS LYSANDRAS FATHER isn’t it

Update:

OH MY WORD IT IS

Updated Update: OH MY WORD I HAD IT WRONG HES HER… UNCLE??

But still…

Wait… Does that mean her father’s alive??

I can’t keep track of the updates but I’m pretty sure Nesryn just put the pieces together and almost said it

Mostly just my mind is blown twice in less than 2 chapters… I have no coherency… just… wow

[unproduciblesmackdown]

maybe bsol is that time jen tepper mentions when she was so upset about a review of a show of joe's that she broke a glass (&/or threw it out a window)

[imminent-danger-came]

4x02 Fallen Stars

Hmmmmmmmm.

[tenpixelsusie]

everytime i've fully considered the possibility that i might be a system and i just have some guys running around driving this thang i go "no i just have memory problems" and toss it away. well gentlemen. guess what possibility i'm considering again

[compacflt]

okay so obviously the whole point of ESTD is that ice is unhappy because he cannot accept that he loves maverick because he must serve his country and at the end he realizes how stupid that is when maverick dies!! but…do you think that your ice and maverick could have ever been happy had maverick forced ice to talk about it earlier on? do you see any potential for them to live their lives not publicly but also not as a complete secret? a world where slider would have known ice was happy and seen what caused that (his love for maverick)?

maverick, venice Italy, 2002: um i 🥺👉🏻👈🏻 love you actually

ice: 😳🤯😗 ok! I love you too let’s make this work!

…

ice, 2002: ok i think we should follow caroles orders and pull Bradley’s papers from the academy and also i am leaving you to get my second star because my career still comes first sry

maverick: i know we literally just codified our relationship but uh you suck i am breaking up with you forever fuck you

(relationship ends .)

[lillazyboithings]

ya boi is slaving her ass away in speedrunning her research proposal but she got the best news ever which is a perfect 145/145 on her latest chemistry lab work<333

as a celebration gift, yall get one of my most recent wips (which is just a redraw of a 3-month old wip).

[amatres]

🌺 Layla loves receiving homemade gifts, but on the flip side expensive gifts make her nervous.

oh, interesting! layla is the sort of person who will appreciate any gift, no matter the cost, as long as the intent behind it was genuine. what doesn't matter so much is it's price or monetary value, but simply the person who gifted it to her did so because they cared for her. how she approaches being given one fully depends on the gift giver's demeanor!

if she thinks they did it just to buy her, she'd be much more flippant with it than say, someone did it because they were trying to give her a fun gift to make her laugh (how she at first interpreted daeran's gifts F) or because they're trying to make a romantic gesture of some kind and will go according to the situation

that was very long winded explanation Lmao. all that said however i am going to give this a 6/10, i won't lie and say expensive gifts dont get assumed to be more joke gifts (sorry daeran...) or someone trying to buy her off for one reason or another. the later definitely make it much harder for someone to approach her and continue to have a relationship with her after that point, as she'll get uncomfortable and perhaps even scared depending on the situation

either way, it's definitely not the best way of getting her attention if your intention is you're trying to court her lol

[bixiaoshi]

my mom trying to get me to say that i am smart is so funny to me

[eri-blogs-life]

Been a bit since i posted a selfie. Have girls & curls

Til there's a limit to how many tags you can have on a single post. I guess that makes sense but how am i to ramble in the tags now with only 30 tags???

[fingertipsmp3]

My eczema is actually driving me out of my mind I swear to fucking god

[mathmusicreading]

Blog(ger) Shift

I am, so weird and bad about original posting and about reblogging and about saving things on Tumblr and that's why my blog has been mostly inactive or the lurking consumer type. But I don't want my fears about putting myself out there, being seen and known, articulating myself well vs. having been told my whole life I'm too wordy and opinionated vs. not managing to articulate myself well enough to justify being verbose and passionate, etc. to continue to control me so much.

So for my new specific-interest sideblog that I'm not locking, I hope it being themed will help me with making more original posts and reblogging, and I'm publicizing that here to push myself and also welcome interaction.

RIP to my other public specific-interest sideblog and the fandom sideblog I took over for someone that I didn't take further and to my private sideblogs that were meant to make me reblog and save and say stuff because they would be personal and just for me. I still would like to make those happen and reblogging and posting things that matter to me here, and oh my heart for the content ideas I haven't been working on, but they're pipedreams with how I'm (not) managing my life and I keep kicking those cans down the road.

To the person who I developed a real relationship with as a beta but who by now I probably count as having disappeared on with how long it's been and my not coming back to explicitly say I still can't help and don't know when I can, I am so sorry. I'm being a coward languishing in hoping I can tell you soon that I can get back into beta-ing for you and talking, but that's turned into me not talking to you because I'm waiting to be able to say something positive. Hopefully my vaguing here can help push me into talking to you, or at least this is here for you to read if you happen to see it; and I want you to know you absolutely can talk to me, can call me out, and if you're so gracious as to still want to be friends with me and just chat despite my dropping being your beta, I'm here for you and still want to be your friend even if I don't know if I'll have the spoons to be a good one and I know my saying that preemptively isn't apology or justification enough.

Honest assessment, I'm going to curse and say my living situation and work have both become even more of a shitshow, and with those things in mind I can't begin to imagine handling a real project until basically literally a year from now.

Which segues back into the main topic of this post. My goal isn't to have my new sideblog be like an active mainblog nor to abandon this blog—people interested in that blog can and should still interact with me here given how primary vs. secondary blogs on Tumblr work, and in terms of using that blog to help make me be a better Tumblr user, I think I should make certain original posts here and reblog them there as opposed to them being original there. With my mental-emotional and time resources, I want that blog to be "active" for a given definition of active, but really I think I should see my objective as "clear out tabs and likes and photos and lists and notes and drafts, etc. from the last four months" by saving stuff there, as opposed to my goal being the original posts I want to make there, and actually my long-term goal should be to use that momentum to do the same for older digital and physical storage that hasn't been lost or stolen. In my failure to be an interesting person, do I at least manage to be fascinating as a basket-case? Ha. But, also, as expressed above the Read More, the exercise of my danmei/Chinese sideblog is supposed to be a foray into me allowing myself to be an interesting person.

[i-dreamed-i-had-a-son]

My gosh this is beautiful and I have to reply because this is EXACTLY why I project onto him so much (a Very Healthy reason I know. When I first read Les Mis, I cried, bc I have felt exactly that pang). Ten million percent agreed with everything you said above!

I love your point about Cosette and Marius bringing up his (long-buried) feelings of envy: the tragic irony is, Jean Valjean--so often defined by his one act of theft--feels, himself, robbed.

Because ultimately, underneath it all, Valjean has a desperate desire for love--total, enduring love. Every time Jean Valjean has allowed himself to be truly known, people have immediately turned on him; all the goodwill he's built up over years of charity and suffering fades immediately. He feels that he will always be abandoned. So he's desperate for someone to stay. What first allows him to love Cosette is her helplessness: he is her savior, so she cannot leave him. And because of how enmeshed his identity is with Cosette, becoming anything less than her everything is a brutal extraction for him. He believes, since it is all he has known, that love is total and all-consuming; therefore, he believes Cosette can only really love one person, just as he only loved her, and that person (by Right™) is Marius now. After all he has gone through, and all he has done, he feels abandoned once again--even though Cosette may still claim she loves him--because he is not her everything, so he is nothing. And that literally kills him.

Valjean's perceived abandonment by Cosette is so devastating to him because in a way, he uses Cosette as a stand-in for God. He has never believed God could love him--in fact, even in the convent, he's described as kneeling before the sister "as though afraid to kneel directly before God." He has never allowed himself to see himself as anything other than the "miserable man" he was at the start of the story. And how could God love that? Instead, he finds Cosette, who is initially desperate and has no other choice but to rely on him (and he believes as soon as she does have a choice, or if she learns who he really is, she will leave him), and uses her as the foundation of his identity. She's also the center of his virtue; with someone to care for, to sacrifice for, maybe he can earn God's love somehow. And if someone so pure could love him, maybe there was something in him that could be loved. So of course when she begins to love someone else, Valjean crumbles--her love felt secure because it was desperate, but now she can choose. And he could never imagine anyone, including God, loving him willingly.

But I love Les Mis because he's wrong!!!! He's wrong about that, and he's wrong about himself, and he's wrong about what love is!! And the story tells him so!!!

From the start of the story to the end, God has always been with him, guiding his path. The narration throughout the story makes it clear--he even recognizes "the hand of Providence" in guiding him to the bishop and the convent, in bringing him finally to the trial to save the innocent man; to stumble upon Cosette in the woods was no coincidence, nor was it chance that Cosette and Marius found him (because they were looking for him!! Because they love him!!!) right before he died. He has always been loved, wholly and forever, even in the midst of his sin and suffering.

It's a love that knows him fully, and endures.

And I love that his story ends with that.

Jean Valjean's Canon Toxic Unhealthiness around Romantic Love

( alternate titles: “Does Jean Valjean is Gay?”, or “Does Jean Valjean is Asexual?” Or: “Why is it so difficult to slap an identity/sexuality label onto Jean Valjean?” Or “LGBTPTSD+”)

I was looking at the responses to this poll about whether people interpret Jean Valjean as gay/asexual/straight or something else….and it got me thinking again about Jean Valjean’s canonical intense, complex, awful, toxic, and overwrought emotions around identity/ romantic love. I want to talk about that for a bit because I think it often gets overlooked in fandom!

I've noticed that Les Mis fandom/analysis often tends to interpret Jean Valjean as being far more content, more "at peace with himself," and more "comfortable in his own skin" than he ever is within the novel. This is also a common change in adaptations. The musical's version of Jean Valjean is great-- but he also seems a lot more self-actualized, more like he's gotten himself completely "figured out" by the end of the story. Other, bad, Les Mis adaptations — the adaptations that generally portray Jean Valjean a worse more violent person — also usually make Jean Valjean more confident in himself, more confident in his own feelings/desires, more certain that he’s entitled to certain things, and more willing to demand or take what he wants.

But one major aspect of book Jean Valjean's personality is that he does not have a healthy relationship with anything about himself. He has a tortured broken relationship with his own identity. He repeatedly thinks about “Jean Valjean” as a person outside of himself, a person who he finds frightening, repulsive, savage, and horrible— like a wild animal he needs to sedate, or beat into submission. He is obsessed with self-denial and self-repression. He is fixated on the idea that he is subhuman, that he is not allowed to want things or to pursue having any kinds of relationships with other people-- and that the most heroic thing he can do is "grab himself by the collar” and violently force himself to stay away from the things he wants. He is desperate to be loved and fixated on being unworthy of love and on denying himself love. He is absolutely not at peace with his identity: to paraphrase Jean Valjean in one of the later chapters, he believes he can only gain inner peace by “eviscerating his own entrails.”

He is never truly content with who he is, what he wants, or what kind of love he wants— and he never learns to be. The novel ends with him cutting himself off from his only family, breaking ties with the only person who loves him, and essentially slowly killing himself out of self-loathing.

There are other characters in Les Mis who seem very content with who they are and what they want. Enjolras is self-assured in his identity, and doesn’t appear to feel like there is any kind of love that is missing from his life. Whether you interpret him as gay or ace or trans or w/e, book!Enjolras is written as someone who is extremely self-assured and has a loving support system that is enough to keep him happy. But I don’t think that’s true for Jean Valjean at all XD.

And that’s why it's hard to apply labels like “aromantic” or “ace” or gay/straight/etc to Jean Valjean, when talking about his canon characterization. Those labels imply the person has a basic level of comfort with acknowledging their own desires/lack of desire/identity. And Jean Valjean never achieves that level of comfort. What “label” do you give to someone whose relationship with their identity is “I do not belong in a family, I have no right to want things, I have no right to be happy, I am outside of life, and I will never be at peace until I eviscerate my own entrails?” Is there a “self-disembowelment" pride flag? XD I've seen a lot of interpretations that go "Jean Valjean never expresses any interest in romance, he's perfectly content just to have his relationship with his daughter" but I honestly don't think that's true. Jean Valjean tries to content himself with having only Cosette. But part of why everything explodes so catastrophically in the end of the novel is because he needs more than just a paternal relationship. He doesn’t try to have a “normal” father-daughter relationship with Cosette, he tries to force his relationship with Cosette to be literally everything and everyone to him, for her to be his entire world: and it doesn’t work.

There’s a passage in the novel that talks about how all the love Valjean is capable of ends up being suppressed/sublimated into his relationship with Cosette. The love of a brother, of a friend, of a father, of a husband, the love of everything he is capable of, gets repressed so that he can throw every part of himself into being a father. There are Bad les mis adaptations that incorrectly misinterpret that passage to mean that Jean Valjean is incestuous/grooming Cosette. But in context, that’s not what the passage means at all.

The passage specifies very explicitly that Jean Valjean “did not love Cosette otherwise than as a father,” that “no marriage was possible between them,” that his feelings for her are absolutely paternal. But the passage does show how Jean Valjean is doing a very different unhealthy thing: he’s relying on Cosette to fill every single emotional void in his life.

He’s relying on parenthood to fill the grief/emptiness left behind by all the other kinds of love that he has wanted, but never been given.

To quote a bit of that passage:

Jean Valjean did not love Cosette otherwise than as a father (…) Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With the exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood, Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known anything of that which may be loved. The passions and loves which succeed each other had not produced in him those successive green growths, tender green or dark green, which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter and in men who pass fifty. In short, and we have insisted on it more than once, all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to Cosette. A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the brother, and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored her, and who held that child as his light, his home, his family, his country, his paradise.

Jean Valjean reminds me of a Failmode I’ve seen in a lot of different real-life parents? There are parents who cope with their own hard lives by telling themselves that parenthood is their sole reason for being alive, and who obsess over their child’s success as their only source of purpose, meaning, love, happiness, community, and validation. But it’s a bad idea to rely on one child to provide the emotional support that should be shared by friends, parents, siblings, every possible loved one, etc etc—- One child can’t actually heal you from your trauma, be a replacement for your broken relationships, pull you out of your grief, save you from your adult loneliness, etc etc etc etc.

When I see the common interpretation that Jean Valjean is perfectly content just to be the father of Cosette, I think of this line:

Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this crushing proof: “another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her father, I no longer exist”; when he could no longer doubt, when he said to himself: “She is going away from me!” the grief which he felt surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being nothing!

On one hand, the terrible Les mis adaptations that portray Valjean as Incest Creep are incorrect and wrong. On the other hand, though, Jean Valjean IS unhealthy about Cosette— just in a different and actually sympathetic way.

He has made fatherhood his only purpose, to replace every other purpose he could have in life. So he can’t be “just Cosette’s father.” He can’t imagine her becoming an adult and leaving the nest, like children do. What does he have if he’s not taking care of her? What is his purpose in life if she doesn’t need him to be her parent? He's not just being her father, he's relying on her to be his entire reason to exist. He hasn't been allowing himself to have things outside of her.

And speaking of things outside of Cosette: segue time. This post was supposed to be about Jean Valjean and romance, so let's switch gears and talk about his canon 'romantic experiences' more:

We’re told that in his youth he “never had a sweetheart” because he “never had time to be in love.” There is no indication that Jean Valjean never wanted to be in love. The opposite is implied. Hugo frames it as a tragedy that Jean Valjean’s does not experience young love; it’s the horror of poverty taking yet another thing from him.

Within prison, Valjean is “gloomy” and “chaste;” when he traumadumps to Montparnasse about it, he talks about women looking on galley slaves with horror and disgust. Romance, at least “normal” heterosexual romance, is no longer something that is permitted for him. Jean Valjean knows very little about romance/love/sex and it repeatedly messes up his life. He spends 19 years in the all-male environment of prison, then about a decade in the almost-all-female environment of the convent. He has very little experience with how men and women are supposed to interact. The oppression Fantine faces as a sex worker, and Cosette's relationship with Marius, are both two big 'blind spots' that he struggles with.

At one point romantic love is described as “The only misery Jean Valjean had not yet experienced, and the only one that is sweet.”

In his massive confession to Marius, he agonizes over how he is not allowed to be part of a family, and is incapable of being part of a home. He compares himself to someone sick and diseased, that poisons good and normal people with his presence, and cannot be allowed to make himself part of their families.

So Jean Valjean doesn’t frame Romance as “a thing he doesn’t want:” it’s a thing “he is not allowed to want,” it is one of the many things he is banned from wanting. It's impossible to tell what kind of things he would want, if he were allowed to want them.

One of the most interesting things to me, however, is his general attitude towards Marius/Cosette.

Obviously his first reaction to Marius snooping around is fear and resentment— he doesn’t know to interact with romance, having never experienced it, and immediately begins catastrophizing. He views Marius as a privileged booby ruining his life for something as frivolous as a love affair: it reads to me as partially envy, envy of the fact that Marius lives the kind of safe comfortable life that allows him to experience young love.

Jean Valjean added: “What does he want? A love affair! A love affair! And I? What! I have been first, the most wretched of men, and then the most unhappy, and I have traversed sixty years of life on my knees, I have suffered everything that man can suffer, I have grown old without having been young, I have lived without a family, without relatives, without friends, without life, without children, I have left my blood on every stone, on every bramble, on every mile-post, along every wall, I have been gentle, though others have been hard to me, and kind, although others have been malicious, I have become an honest man once more, in spite of everything, I have repented of the evil that I have done and have forgiven the evil that has been done to me, and at the moment when I receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over, at the moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment when I have what I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid, I have earned it, all this is to take flight, all this will vanish, and I shall lose Cosette, and I shall lose my life, my joy, my soul, because it has pleased a great booby to come and lounge at the Luxembourg.”

But, even though Jean Valjean views romance as something he isn’t allowed or have or to want, views it as a threat and catastrophizes over how it will ruin his life……he seems to also put heterosexual romance on a pedestal.

The way Jean Valjean idealizes marriage is one of his weirdest character notes for me.

He views marriage as Cosette’s “happy ending.” It’s her “happily ever after” point where she won’t need him anymore, where she won’t need anyone outside of her husband. A Man And a Woman Are Meant to Get Married, It's Fate, and It Means They Will Live Happily Together Forever. Marius is “the goal of her heart, the wish of her life; her dearest one.” Nothing outside of that matters anymore.

He treats her marriage as if romantic love is inherently always more important than any kind of platonic relationships, and always takes priority over them. He later dismisses the unconventional family structure he has with Cosette, saying that despite his love for her he was only a "passerby" and was not actually her real father, because they were not biologically related.

There's a moment where Jean Valjean is described as someone whose ideal is to be angel on the inside and a bourgeois on the outside. Jean Valjean's worship of bourgeois social norms, norms he can never truly be a part of, is one of his character flaws. He has a similar "guard dog" energy as Eponine does when she defends Rue Plumet from her parents.....Eponine and Jean Valjean both become the guard dogs of a kind of romantic relationship they believe they are banned from having. Jean Valjean believes that getting Happily Straight Married in a Middle-Class Home with a Picket Fence(tm) is the ideal path for life....but believes himself broken/incapable of ever following that path. And so he instead throws his entire life into securing that future for Marius and Cosette.

In what manner was Jean Valjean to behave in relation to the happiness of Cosette and Marius? It was he who had willed that happiness, it was he who had brought it about; he had, himself, buried it in his entrails, and at that moment, when he reflected on it, he was able to enjoy the sort of satisfaction which an armorer would experience on recognizing his factory mark on a knife, on withdrawing it, all smoking, from his own breast. Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette. They had everything, even riches. And this was his doing.

TL: DR:

Jean Valjean's gender/sexuality label is “idk but he’s super fucked up about it.”

[snazum]

Working on a little (big) project, finally figured out the storyline I want to go with, that's all I'll say, it's called IYKYK. Literatly thats the project name, it might change but it's quite what it means. but if you don't know? That's okay too! I'm hoping to tell a compelling story anyways. This is probably gonna take a couple years to do though XD

If you are interested this is the playlist I'll be working with. Yes I'm planning on making video visuals for this project (I'd say animating but I'm gonna be using a bunch of different techniques, also animating is hard af and takes a long time and I'm not exactly an animator.) Also you get to learn a little bit of my music taste now XD

[radellama]

Picky but.. when watching a docco/docco style video, while it can be interesting to hear about how you ended up in contact with certain relevant people, or how there were plans to contact people that fell through, or that you couldn't get in contact with them... I hate when the filmmaker harps on and on about their 'investigative' process and try to dramatise it.

Sorry but. I don't really want a 15-20+ min detour of you lamenting over trying to get in contact with certain people when all that's happened is you sent an email and didn't get a reply.