#I think pilferingapples was the person who first made me aware of this and :;(((

[secretmellowblog]

Before writing Les Mis, Hugo’s beloved 19-year-old daughter Leopoldine tragically drowned. As a result Les Mis is full of drowning imagery— drowning as a a symbol of impossible grief and loss, drowning as a symbol of being left behind by a society that doesn’t care about protecting your life, drowning as a method of suicide.

The les mis letters chapter today is the first chapter where Hugo highlights the drowning imagery that becomes central to the rest of the novel. The horrible symbolic death Valjean suffers as a result of being entirely isolated and forgotten by a society that doesn’t value his life is also foreshadowing of Javert’s eventual death.

Throughout the novel, Eponine also frequently talks about her desire to drown herself in the Seine; Thenardier monologues about how “the river is the true grave” and when bodies fall in it “justice makes no inquiries;” later Valjean escapes prison by faking his death by drowning, and so on and so on. There’s this emphasis that drowning doesn’t just mean death, it means erasing yourself from existence. It means you’re forgotten.

One of the saddest references to the death of Leopoldine is the way Valjean and Javert learn about the other’s death (or “death.”)

Hugo learned about his daughter’s death not from a family member/friend, but by reading about it in a newspaper. He was on vacation away from his family at the time. He was reading the news in a cafe and happened to stumble on an article about Leopoldine’s horrible tragic drowning, which was how he first learned that she was dead.

When Javert learns about Valjean’s “death” in prison (when Valjean pretends to drown in order to escape), he learns about it by reading it in the newspaper. When Valjean learns about Javert’s death by drowning, he learns about it by reading it in the newspaper.

So…yeah :(. Les Mis is full of all these agonized metaphors around drowning (as a metaphor for death/grief/being entirely forgotten by the people around you) and part of that comes from Hugo’s own deep personal trauma around the death of death of his daughter.

[starfieldcanvas]

how do you recommend coming up with a tumblr url?

First off, I strongly advise against fandom-based names unless the creator is dead and their work is something you've felt strongly attached to for the last twenty years, because fandoms change, creators turn out to be asshats, and it's a pain to have to change your URL because your hyperfixation passed or because associating with a fandom makes everyone think you're Schrodinger's bigot. (Shoutout to poor @luny0 💜) And of course it's also very confusing for your followers when you change names!

Second, be aware people will likely nickname you based on your URL — even if your internet name is in your bio like mine — and you can't predict exactly how they'll do it. @pilferingapples has an excellent username but didn't anticipate that it would be universally shortened to "Pilf." It took me forever to realize that @shitpostingfromthebarricade was called Barri, not as in a fem version of 'Barry' like Bari Weiss, but as in "Barricade." My friend @fleetingeternities (rest in peace🕊️) had a lovely name but also went by Flee, for short. So... think about that the same way you'd think about what your baby's initials would spell.

Third, I suggest thinking about how clear the starts and ends of each word in your username are. If a word later n the username starts with a vowel, will it get erroneously linked to the previous letter, or vice versa? It took me years to realize that @nurselofwyr 's username was Nurse Lofwyr and not Nursel of Wyr. Did I know what Nursel meant? No, but people have some pretty bizarre fandom and fantasy names on this hellsite. Users will go on trying to string letters together unless there's a hard stop, so if you want a username where the words might run together unhelpfully, consider hyphenating.

Just a little snippet of an idea, enough to give a vibe or a mental image, is great. Something whimsical, evocative, or downright silly. These things are easiest to achieve by pairing two words that can be imagined together but wouldn't normally go together or wouldn't go together in that grammatical format, e.g. starfishwhisper/ambient-color/marchbloom/goose-destroyer, genderflexing/hamsterwheeling/meme-foraging, frequentlykneecapped/rarelymarried/veryverily, etc. Or stack a few together, e.g. bigbadbandwidth, stabby-old-tabby, godawfulgayghost. Bonus if you get some alliteration or slant rhyme going.

Snapping a few out-of-context words from a quote is solid too: live-in-infamy, delenda-est, among-mad-people, rarely-make-history. They're not word for word quotes, so it's easier for them to morph into a collection of sounds that represent a person. I do know a lot of people have usernames that are full lines of poetry or song lyrics, but my personal opinion is that these tend to flow best as usernames when they're cut off before they get to full sentences. It's always a bit odd to address someone by a name with a pronoun inside it; that's how you get "ME SAW WHO!"

Unless you are on Tumblr for professional reasons, do not use your legal or professional name!

Obviously you always have the option to go with a fake proper noun, fantasy-name style — "larkacyn" or "devossa," or I dunno, "altseven" or "priov" if you're feeling more scifi — but I feel like if you had one of those you wanted to use, you wouldn't have sent this ask.

And of course...all the truly top tier usernames are puns. If you're really committed to getting a fandom name, bury it in a pun, like @owlmylove or like my ao3 username.

(All examples made up of the top of my head unless they're tagged users. You are welcome to any of my nonsense)