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

[zieroses]

enda “rook” de riva

replay // shadows of arlathan + in entropy’s grasp

thoughts and notes -

shadows of arlathan

- “Solas can speak with people in their dreams, even kill them” he what? Since when can he kill them? What lore did i miss?

- They were evil gods who enslaved their people - how does Harding know these things? Lol is this stuff hidden in codex entries i didn’t read closely enough? Stuff Harding and Varric learned over the last 9 years? If so, how/why were they learning these things in their search for Solas when, in theory, the Evanuris being a danger was not on their radar?

in entropy’s grasp

- Upon re reading tevinter nights, strife is a completely different character. He was supposed to be chatty, smiley, and sarcastic, and notably did NOT have facial tattoos/vallaslin. Very strange, I wonder if this version of strife was not written by Patrick weekes. He’s also very monotone - no shade to the VA, but it was alarming to see the first less-expressive cutscene also paired with an inexpressive character. Gave me the worry that quality was going to go downhill fast after the introductory sequence to the game, but luckily that wasn’t the case.

- (Re: cutscenes - bioware games in general have 3 levels of cutscene from my observation. The capital-C Cutscene, the lowercase-c cutscene, and then the convo-cutscene, the first being the most detailed and cinematic and the last being the least. Speaking with Strife and Irelin felt like the first example of the convo-cutscene where characters just stand across from each other and chat back and forth. Which is fine but again, it’s that lack of expression paired with strife’s more monotone voice and bearing that really worried me for a hot second.)

- I do love Irelin’s design. i actually like strife’s a lot too; I just think he should be bare-faced like in the novel.

- bellara’s intro is also so strange. She barely acknowledges the gods thing. They tried a little too hard to make her quirky here. She grows on me, a LOT, over the game - they just frontloaded way too much of the super cute and absentminded thing here. I think that should’ve come to light after her introduction had a weightier heft to it. Someone also mentioned it makes no sense that she, without any questions, gives some randoms (incl. Neve if you brought her, who is Tevene) essentially a tour of what is theoretically some very powerful secrets. It would’ve been worth a brief scuffle with her, I think, and then a few lines of not just explanation, but hastily attempting to convince her you aren’t here to poach elven secrets or magic. Even a code word provided by Strife and Irelin would’ve sufficed to put to rest any concerns that never even reached the light of day.

- Ogre - i quite like the darkspawn designs, even if they’re slightly cartoonier than before. I do think it has to do with the fact that the designs themselves, with this art style, are more readable in general; i can pick out details on the types of darkspawn that I couldn’t before because of the more muted color schemes of the prior games. (I loved those, to be perfectly clear; i just like how clearly and sharply i can see what’s going on here. But i do think there’s something to be said about the cartoonish quality; there’s probably something that could’ve been done to make them slightly less so. I think they managed it with the blighted dragons.)

[that-one-ostrich-friend]

Delicate Part V

sirius black x reader - delicate part v

word count: 1.5k

link to part vi

summary: this is part v of a sirius black x ravenclaw!reader series. a slow burn romance with platonic remus x reader and maybe some flirtatious remus x reader if you squint a lot lol

warnings: y/n is from ravenclaw (not sure if that’s even a needed warning) so sorry if that’s not your house

a/n: umm wow I had a lot of exams lol… sorry for taking so long but part v is here!! hopefully i’ll get part vi out a little faster… anyways thank you so much for all the likes and reblogs!!!

The days following the hug were strange. In the quiet of the library and the hallways of Hogwarts, y/n could feel the shift between her and Sirius, but she couldn’t decide if it was something good or something that had made everything more complicated. The walls between them had been chipped away, but now, they were starting to build themselves back up. Slowly. Carefully. She had noticed the change in him, but she wasn’t sure how to interpret it. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to.

          The rest of the project went by in a blur. They polished their spell and earned top marks. The project was far behind them now, but the strange tension from that night in the library was not.

     The shift was subtle at first—small gestures, lingering glances that she would catch out of the corner of her eye. Nothing overt, nothing that screamed romance, but enough to make her heart skip a beat when she wasn’t paying attention.

     The Great Hall was bustling with students, the chatter and clinking of silverware filling the air as y/n sat at the Ravenclaw table, buried in her notes. She’d been avoiding Sirius. After the moment they shared in the library, something had shifted in her, and she wasn't sure what to do with it. She had convinced herself it was nothing—just a fleeting moment of vulnerability. But Sirius wasn’t making it easy to forget.

     She glanced up from her book, her focus faltering for just a second as she caught sight of him. Sirius Black, as usual, was surrounded by a group of his friends, laughing and being the center of attention. But today, his eyes seemed to be searching for something—or someone. When they locked with hers from across the room, a grin tugged at his lips.

     Before y/n could even process the situation, he pushed his way through the crowd and made his way toward the Ravenclaw table, his usual swagger accentuated by a cocky tilt of his head.

     “Mind if I join you?” he asked, his voice low, and too casual to be entirely innocent. He leaned in just enough for her to catch the scent of his cologne, a mix of something earthy and a little wild, just like him.

     Y/n didn’t immediately respond. Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at him, sensing the familiar flirtation in his tone, but this time, it felt different—like he was testing something, or maybe... trying to push her buttons. He’d been like this before, overly confident and playful, but today, there was something sharper behind it.

     “You’re just going to sit here, all... charming, and expect me to entertain you?” Y/n asked, her voice cool, her brow raised. She could feel the heat of his presence, the way it felt like he was trying to draw her into his orbit again.

     He flashed her a cocky grin, clearly undeterred. “Why not? It’s more fun sitting next to the most fascinating person in the room.” He leaned a little closer, his elbow brushing hers on purpose as he picked up a piece of bread from her plate. “I’d say I’m pretty good company, don’t you think?”

     Sirius’s smile didn’t falter, but there was something in his eyes that looked… off. It was a flicker of something she hadn’t seen before, but y/n wasn’t sure what to make of it. She had dealt with enough flirtation and playful banter to know when someone was being genuine and when they were just putting on an act. And right now, Sirius was putting on an act.

     His charm, the way he leaned in just a little too close, it all felt like another one of his games. And she wasn’t interested in playing.

     “I don’t know,” she said, her voice calm but firm. “It’s just… I don’t want to get caught up in all that. You’re not the only one who has to deal with things, you know. I don’t need anyone making everything more complicated.”

     Sirius’s eyebrows knit together slightly, but he quickly masked it with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “What? You think I’m trying to make things complicated?”

      Y/n took a deliberate breath before finally answering. "I think you’re trying to make something out of nothing." Her tone wasn’t harsh, but it was resolute. "And I don’t have time for distractions like that right now."

     Sirius leaned back slightly, his grin faltering for just a fraction of a second before it returned, though this time it felt more like a mask than anything else. "Distractions, huh? I didn’t realize I was such a problem for you, Ravenclaw."

     His teasing tone grated on her nerves more than usual. "You’re not a problem," she said quickly, her voice softening out of habit. "I just... I know how you are, Sirius. And I’m not interested in being the next joke or experiment for you."

    The words landed harder than she’d intended, and for a moment, Sirius’s face shifted. The easygoing, confident smirk melted into something unreadable, and his grey eyes studied her as if searching for something.

     "Is that what you think I’m doing?" he asked, his voice quieter now. The usual bravado was gone, replaced by something almost vulnerable.

     Y/n hesitated. She wasn’t sure what to say. This wasn’t how she’d imagined the conversation going, but now she felt like she’d stepped into dangerous territory. "I don’t know what you’re doing," she admitted finally, meeting his gaze. "But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s real."

     The silence that followed felt suffocating. Sirius didn’t look away, but there was a weight in his expression that made her heart twist unexpectedly. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a hint of bitterness, "Right." Before she could respond, he pushed himself off the bench, his movements sharp and deliberate. "Well, thanks for the reality check, y/n. Wouldn’t want to waste your time."

     And with that, he turned and walked away, his usual swagger noticeably absent.

     The distance between them grew over the next few days. Sirius didn’t approach her again, though Y/n caught him glancing her way a few times, only to turn away when their eyes met. For her part, she threw herself deeper into her studies, refusing to let the strange interaction occupy space in her mind.

     Their exchange at the Ravenclaw table had left her feeling frustrated, exposed, and conflicted. His cocky demeanor and teasing words felt like layers he was hiding behind, and she wasn’t interested in trying to peel them back to figure out what was real. It wasn’t her responsibility, and she told herself she didn’t care to try.

     But the truth was harder to face in quiet moments. Alone in her dormitory, her mind would drift back to the way his expression faltered when she said she wasn’t interested in being another one of his games. She hadn’t expected the flash of hurt in his eyes or the weight in his voice when he asked if that’s what she thought of him.

     Her chest tightened as she replayed the conversation over and over, dissecting every word and gesture. Was she wrong? Had she judged him too harshly? And if she had, did it even matter? It wasn’t like Sirius Black was losing sleep over her opinion.

━━━━━━━•✧°•°𓅦°•°✧•━━━━━━━

          But Sirius couldn’t stop thinking about it. For the first time, his usual charm had failed, and the rejection had hit harder than he expected. It wasn’t just that she’d dismissed him—it was the way she saw straight through him, saw the parts of himself he worked so hard to hide.

     “She’s not stupid, Pads, she won’t fall for every guy that looks her way,” Remus said quietly one evening, as Sirius sat brooding in the Gryffindor common room.

     “I know,” Sirius muttered.

     “So what are you going to do about it?”

     Sirius sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. She’s—she’s different. She doesn’t fall for the usual stuff. And I—I think I screwed it up.”

     Remus raised an eyebrow. “Maybe start by figuring out what you actually want from her. Because if this is just another game to you, she’s right to walk away.”

     Sirius didn’t answer, but the weight of Remus’s words settled heavily in his chest. For the first time, he realized he didn’t have an answer—not for Remus, not for Y/n, and not for himself.

     As the days stretched into weeks, the distance between him and Y/n only grew, and Sirius couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ruined something he hadn’t even fully understood.

[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 :(

[smoothie03]

Other version below the cut

@pokenoire 's lgbtq+ headcanons for my childhood OTP gave me some ideas ^^

[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

[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

[dokjaism]

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

[violetclarity]

I know this may come off kind of whiny and is possibly more specific to living in the US being as it’s so individualistic, but what I wish partnered people especially (and to a lesser extent folks who live with roommates) understood about being single/living alone is just how much fucking time I spend by myself.

I’m not a person who can’t handle time alone! I don’t mind doing things by myself, even public things like going to the movies or going out to eat! I think I’m great company! But the thing about being single & not having a default person/people for a lot of these things is that all the novelty of doing things alone, or any benefit you might get from taking some alone time, is kind of erased.

It’s not a ‘fun solo movie night!’ if every time I sit down to watch TV, I’m by myself. It’s not ‘taking myself on a date!’ if the majority of the time when I eat any meal, or go do anything, I’m alone. I keep busy, y’all. I have the most active social calendar of almost anyone I know, because I love my friends, and also by necessity. My coworkers - most of whom I would never choose to spend time with - are already the people I see the most of in a week. If I didn’t make an effort to see friends as much as possible outside of work, they’d be the only people I saw regularly, and that would be fucking me up even more than it already is.

I like living alone, I like being able to do my own thing, I’m proud of myself that I don’t let not having a person to do something with keep me from doing something. And sometimes I really fucking wish I had company for some of this shit. Wish I didn’t always have to run errands by myself, because it would be more fun with a friend. Wish I had someone I could ask to come with me to check on my friend’s cat, because I don’t know if her roommate is going to be home and it might be awkward. Wish there was someone to chat with while I did chores, or have an actual movie night with so it felt like an actual occasion, or, you know, literally anything mundane that could be done with another person, because sure I see and talk to my friends a lot, but that’s usually for an activity or an event - we’re going out to eat! we’re going to watch a specific show! - and rarely just to do the daily mundane shit that I always have to do by myself.

[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???

[saltedbuttercups]

Here's the text from Scara's new demo. There's a couple other shots of text but they're hard to screenshot, and these specific "words" appear two different times so they must mean something, right? These "words" are:

rshn shnti nekxn srlt

For those who don't know how genshin's Inazuman cipher works...

it's basically just the first letter of the sound. Like S could stand for sa shi se etc. S can also be Z sometimes. Sometimes there are also whole additional sounds in the word too (e.g. it could say ART and mean arigatou even though it doesn't show an G). And X's are stand ins for other letters, so it could be anything. Also T's are sometimes D's. It's very inconsistent and almost impossible to decipher anything without some hint as to what it's saying. So. 🙃.

[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.”