Catstealers, the fulfillment partner who helped me with the TToS kickstarter, is moving~!! 🥳🎉
WHICH MEANS! This is gonna be the last chance to get your hands on these for the foreseeable future. I just don't have the energy or means to do fulfillment from my end.
We're hoping to keep everything US domestic. There's still the online PDF up for grabs if you're international and would like a goodie, since it requires no shipping whatsoever.
If you're interested, take a gander at Sandflake.Bigcartel.com
thinking about how bill tried to/thought about killing both ford and dipper when possessing their bodies in ways that would’ve made it look like suicide; and jumping off of things at that (dipper via the water tower and ford via the roof of his house). the former is referring to journal 3, and the latter the book of bill. the parallels are insane and i haven’t seen anyone bring it up yet. the fact that if he would’ve went through with either of those- he honestly could’ve won. but alas, he enjoyed torturing ford more and was still attempting to make a deal (and ofc the toxic old man yaoi cough cough), while mabel made the decision to sacrifice her play in order to save dipper.
also… just wanna say that for some reason this page that i mentioned about ford on the roof, “the war in my mind”, has got to be my fav page of the entire book as of right now. this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg as to what bill did to ford, but i think it really sets the tone well and is almost like a warning of things to come. i think the drawing of the scene and just the small silhouette of ford really helps this too. bill spared his life for now, which seemed like a blessing at the time, especially becus he also chose not to burn the journals. but in actuality this was the start of fords descent into madness.
One fascinating thing about the way Hugo writes Jean Valjean's inner conflict is that we're almost never actually in his POV when he makes his final decisions. We spend chapters and chapters exploring Jean Valjean's thought processes as he agonizes over difficult moral choices, but in the final crucial moment, when he actually makes his choice, Hugo "cuts us off" from his internal monologue. We view what his final choice looks like from the outside, from the perspective of other characters.
This is especially significant because Jean Valjean, from the outside, is often pretty unreadable. He is uncannily calm, tranquil, and polite. He's opaque. There's a moment where he's described as a "whirlwind within, calm without;" Jean Valjean uses excessively polite behavior as a defense mechanism, "picking up his calm the way a warrior would pick up his buckler."
The most obvious example of this is the Champmathieu trial, where Jean Valjean agonizes over whether to turn himself in. We spend chapter after chapter inside of his POV, exploring his terror and inner conflict as he weighs his options and invents a thousand excuses for himself-- we explore his trauma-fueled reactions to the concept of returning to prison in painful, agonizing detail, from his horrific memories of prison to his surreal nightmares about being buried alive. The tension builds as chapters fly by and he still hasn't made his final decision, as he hopes some unforseen accident will prevent him from making it to the trial and he won't have to make the decision after all--
But in the final moment, when Jean Valjean *actually* makes the final choice...we're not in his point of view. Instead, it's told "from the point of view" of the courtroom, and Jean Valjean's strange heartbreaking serenity is described solely from the outside.
At the moment where we most want to hear what Valjean is thinking, we're abruptly cut off from his inner monologue.
This becomes even more tragic when the "adrenaline rush" of the courtroom fades away and we witness the aftermath of the trial.
When Jean Valjean returns to Fantine, we see him from the point of view of Simplice and other characters. He's described as behaving "mechanically" as if in shock. From the outside he appears eerily uncannily "tranquil" and completely opaque. It is impossible to tell what he is feeling or thinking.
Jean Valjean responds to Javert's violence toward Fantine with an icy, eerily tranquil restrained fury: threatening him with a leaden bar, saying "I advise you not to disturb me at this moment"-- but you can feel behind that restraint the weight of all the grief/anger from the previous chapters, which he's incapable of letting himself express openly.
He has made this horrible nightmarish sacrifice that he's been agonizing over for thousands of words, he's facing unimaginable violence and grief--- and in the moments where we most want to hear how he's reacting to this, "the line goes dead." We're brutally cut off from his mental state and left to imagine what he might be feeling.
After a few moments of this meditation (Jean Valjean) bent towards Fantine, and spoke to her in a low voice.
What did he say to her? What could this man, who was reproved, say to that woman, who was dead? What words were those? No one on earth heard them.
Shanks is so fucking intimidating until he cracks a smile, and even then it still feels like this is deliberately shown to rattle readers' perception of him. Is he a good person? Does he really have something up his sleeve? What are even his motives?