#Whether it be the murder of peasants and other revolutionaries during the French Revolution

[arthrobot]

It has become increasingly difficult as of late to escape the nagging feeling that there is nowhere to turn in which one or more likely several groups are being offered up as living sacrifices to the Great Work of the Cause to which the people in that space have decided to attach themselves. Collective punishment at worst, justified by the inherent badness of "those people whomst are inherently enemies of The Cause" or at best whose suffering is fake, a mirage of "The Enemy" to delegitimize "our side" seems to be the order of the day, and it is genuinely terrifying.

[margridarnauds]

i know you reblogged the Thing a while ago but aaaa i really love reading your answers so - 002 for lazare, if you wanna?

Thanks! (And seriously, if I’d reblogged it a month ago, I would still be down for answering it; I love talking 1789, especially if it involves my boy.) I feel like I did this some time ago, but also I’ve never stopped screaming about Lazare and I’m not going to stop now. 

Be warned: The following is based off of various and assorted headcanons and theories, ergo the canon compliance is, as always, questionable. Since it isn’t like Lazare gets all that much in canon, bless his heart. 

How I feel about this character: My baby. My son. My murderous son. It’s funny because, when I first watched 1789, it must have been about 3-4 years ago, because I somehow managed to fall into the fandom just before the Takarazuka version dropped (I seem to recall some of the initial questioning over how Marie Antoinette’s role would be dealt with and expanded), I REALLY didn’t like Lazare. I remember seeing all the fanfic on him (in French, which I read via Google Translate on my college’s computer while I was taking a creative writing class over the summer) and being like “This guy? WHY? HE KILLS PEOPLE.” Ah yes. My 17 year old self was so painfully naive. On so many points. Then, about a year and a half ago, I fell back into Hell after a stream of the Takarazuka version and managed to latch onto him. I really resisted for the longest time, but after about a month, I ended up bonding with him, and the rest is history. 

I think that, of all the cast, he has some of the greatest potential, and I really think that Matthieu Carnot in particular did a great job with giving us a variety of interpretations on him. 

All the people I ship romantically with this character: For the most part, I’m pretty monogamous to Peyronan. I do ship Artois/Lazare as a purely one-sided thing, purely so that Artois can do a flip when he finds out about Ronan. Olympe/Lazare and Olympe/Lazare/Ronan is right there; it’s pretty much the only way I can actually stomach Ronan/Olympe as a ship, and at one point I had. Words. Written out on that one, though who knows if I’ll ever complete those Words. I’ve also batted around Louis XVI/Lazare as an alternative to Artois.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: I STRONGLY Brotp Solène/Lazare and Olympe/Lazare, as well as Lt. du Puget/Lazare (with du Puget filling in as the father that Lazare SHOULD have had, had things gone better) and Ramard/Lazare. (Toho/Takarazuka Ramard, with the two of them both having to deal with Artois and Ramard still being new enough to the job that he’s not been totally corrupted yet.) 

Olympe and Lazare, in my own headcanon, parallel each other well, with Lazare’s longstanding crush on Artois and Olympe’s on Antoinette. Both of them are fiercely loyal to their respective members of the royal family, both of them distrust the mob and what it’s capable of, but while Artois exploits Lazare for his own benefit, making him into his personal attack dog (you know, In the one scene they have together in canon), Antoinette...doesn’t MEAN to with Olympe, she doesn’t even know that she HAS a crush on her. Antoinette is pretty oblivious to the world around her, bless her heart, but she means well. But still, we see in canon that Olympe sticks her neck out on the line time after time for her sake, before MA FINALLY lets her go. And even then, I go back and forth as to whether she realizes Olympe has a crush on her (and is trying to spare her the pain + the damage to her reputation) or whether she genuinely believes that Olympe has a lover (and genuinely thinks she’s helping Olympe by letting her be with someone she loves, not realizing that the person she loves is...), given that both are pretty devastating in their own ways. Artois, though, would never let Lazare go. Even if he doesn’t personally have any LIKING for Lazare, he’s not going to let him leave him, because he wants that control and his pride can’t stand the thought that Lazare could (1) Move on from HIM and (2) Move on from him WITH A PEASANT. Like, Ronan’s existence is basically the single biggest middle finger that Lazare could deliver to Artois. 

Solène and Lazare also have a hell of a lot in common, aside from just...the shit-talking Ronan opportunities. Both of them are the more pragmatic, cynical partner in their respective pairings, both of them pretend to feel a lot less than they actually do, and both of them have reputations of being People You Do Not Fuck With but also MELT for their respective love interests. 

My unpopular opinion about this character: This is something I’ve noticed primarily from the French and Russian fandoms (with a LITTLE bit in the Chinese, though I’ve also read fluff in Chinese), but Creepy Crawly Lazare. No. Absolutely no. I once literally started an Angsty Childhood Friends AU fic out of sheer SPITE over Creepy Crawly Lazare. (Not Le Cri, another one that I will unleash when the time is right.) I understand it with the Japanese productions a little bit more, because they tend to deal with a much darker look at him than the French, but I still don’t see Laz...like that. And, for the most part, I tend to favor the interpretations of Laz where he genuinely BELIEVES in the Ancien Régime and has managed to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing. I love the Takarazuka Laz; I love the Toho Laz (I’ve FINALLY warmed up to him. I mean, he replied to my mom on Instagram. How can you not like him if he replies to your mom on Instagram?), but they’re...not MY take on Lazare. I tend to see him as borderline asexual/demisexual as it is.  

Relating to that, any interpretation of Laz where he’s a smooth talker. My boy can play the political game as needed, primarily by keeping his mouth shut, but casually giving out pick up lines...no. The only way I could accept this is if he ran to Ramard for help, desperate, and he jotted down all of his favorite pick-up lines (hint: They’re all awful), only for Lazare to blank the second he saw Ronan. I genuinely have a hard time believing he’s had any kind of relationship pre-canon. Like, RONAN’S probably had more experience kissing than he has, and we’ve all seen how Ronan kisses. 

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: Obviously, I would love canon, mutually consensual Peyronan. I think that all three productions have hinted at it; I don’t think ANY of the Lazares have really played him as Straight™, especially when it comes to Ronan (THE HUG IN THE FRENCH PRODUCTION), but I would actually like to see it 100% canon. Not that that would EVER happen in a mainstream musical, especially in the Japanese productions (not saying there’s NO progress there, because there have been some stupendously gay things I’ve seen via Zuka and Toho, but most of the time it’s either [1] villains, [2] comic relief, or [3] queerbait, with the lead still ending up with the lead female character) but a girl can dream. 

Shipping aside, I would genuinely love to see Lazare and Ronan develop side by side as an antagonist/hero pairing. I would love to see Lazare grow increasingly desperate and brutal as the musical goes on (IF and only IF we’re going to have him as the villain and not the antagonist), just as Ronan slides deeper and deeper into the Revolution. I would love to see them parallel each other in various and assorted ways, not the least in their devotion to their respective sides, as both of them suffer from the society they were born in, just in differing ways and extents. On one hand, Lazare never starved like Ronan did, but on the other...he was made into a machine for the sake of preserving the Ancien Régime (and...it does seem like there’s a small amount of canon backing to that one, given some of his lines in Nous ne Sommes.) If you’re going to kick off the musical with the Lazare/Ronan rivalry and Ronan swearing vengeance, then you’ve got to make SURE you carry that one through to the end, even if it’s Ronan ultimately realizing that he doesn’t WANT Lazare dead. I just...need that development between the two of them, since it’s such a missed opportunity in the original. I do give Toho some props for showing SOME of that, as far as explaining why Lazare wants Necker out of a job + having Ronan there during Nous ne Sommes, but still...I need more Lazare development, dammit. 

my OTP: Lazare/Ronan. Was there any doubt? 

my cross over ship: Lazare/Chauvelin from The Scarlet Pimpernel is, like...my trash crossover ship. Not the least because Ryuu Masaki played both Ronan and Chauvelin in the Zuka productions. So it’s not TECHNICALLY cheating on Peyronan. 

Also, guilty pleasure ship I’ve been tossing around: Der Tod from Elisabeth/Lazare. I mean, given how often Lazare’s around dead people, I think it could go swimmingly. 

@janetcarter and I also have a longstanding 1789/Terra Nova crossover where the 1789 crew ends up in the colony of Terra Nova and meet some dinosaurs, and in that one Lieutenant Washington and Lazare are a big BROTP, given that they are both staunchly loyal soldiers with ponytails who fall in love with someone on the other side of the conflict and who were massively underwritten in canon. 

a headcanon fact: 99% of what I do with him is extensive headcanoning anyway and there are times I almost feel like I run out of headcanons, but Lazare wasn’t given an extensive education, ESPECIALLY not by aristocratic standards. Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Danton all outpace him there. He never learned Latin or Greek, his only two languages are German and French, because his grandfather went for the Prussian influence with him and he thought that Latin was unnecessary and would lead him to libertinage. His education was strictly kept to what would be immediately useful for his military career. When Lazare is talking about the “high class education” of the revolutionaries in the Takarazuka + Toho versions, he’s not just trying to convince Ronan to join him, he’s also projecting his own deeply buried, unacknowledged envy towards them. It also means that he often finds himself uncomfortable in the intellectually driven salons and court discussions, and his lack of formal court training puts him at a disadvantage, especially since the Comte d’Artois (who isn’t one to TALK there, historically), regularly uses him as the target for his mockery. A solid background at court was necessary to be a good officer and advance, connections were EVERYTHING, and a socially stunted officer was never going to make it as far as someone like, say, Fersen, who could navigate the best of both worlds. 

Also Autistic Lazare is very, very important to me as a concept. Whenever I write him, it’s with the idea that he falls somewhere on the spectrum.

Also, bluntly speaking, I have my. Ideas. For what happens to Lazare post-canon, and most of them don’t end well for him, though I truly don’t believe he makes it to the guillotine. I think Toho!Lazare in particular sings his lines in Pour la Peine with a certain resignation. 

In a happier timeline, as Lazare gets older, he needs reading glasses and grays quicker than Ronan. Ronan relentlessly teases him about being an old man; Lazare retorts that the reason he has so many gray hairs is because of Ronan.