#but like!!!

[secretmellowblog]

One thing I feel people almost always overlook about Javert is that:

The book’s narrator is usually harsh/sarcastic towards Javert, and that harshness is why his character has pathos. Javert is able to be sympathetic because Victor Hugo has basically no respect for his beliefs. Javert is so pitiable because Hugo mocks and drags him on basically every page he appears.

I’ve mentioned before that the message of Les Mis is (paraphrasing) that ACAB— Javert is the best police officer it is possible to be, and he is terrible, because the laws he enforces are terrible. His law & order ideology is terrible. Everything he believes is fundamentally wrong, and so deeply wrong that it deserves no respect.

Yes, Hugo acknowledges that Javert occasionally has a misguided kind of nobility— the nobility of holding yourself honestly to a set of bad rules, the nobility of following a terrible moral code even when it hurts you. But Hugo has no respect for Javert’s bigotry, or his bootlicking, or his deranged obsessive worship of law and order. Hugo portrays the way that Javert martyrs himself for his ideology as strangely honorable— but the ideology itself is mocked and condemned. Hugo thinks martyrdom is cool, but that Javert is martyring himself for a terrible cause.

In his most sympathetic moments, Javert’s worldview is portrayed as pitiable…. not a worldview that’s worthy of true total genuine respect, but a worldview that’s deeply pathetic in its wrongness.

Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs.

This is part of why those old 2012-era les mis fanfics always threw me off, if anyone remembers the fandom trends at the time. XD People used to write Valjean and pre-barricades Javert having political debates, as if the two of them could make arguments about law that were equally valid and worthy of respect, and pre-barricades Javert had a worthwhile set of beliefs that Valjean could learn from. But to me it’s personally kinda like, no XD. Nah. The whole thing about pre-barricades Javert is that he does not have any valid points to make. He has nothing resembling a point. He is “ignorant” and determined to stay that way because he literally believes that thinking is evil. He is a violent authoritarian whose worldview is just “mindless self-destructive bootlicking and bigotry.” I joked about it in a previous post but if we want a character who offers a genuinely meaningful counterpoint to Valjean’s philosophy, who could debate him on politics, and who could represent justice while Valjean represents mercy— that character is Enjolras, not Javert.

Valjean has a fascinating complicated relationship with law and politics and violence, but Javert is just a deeply pitiable brainwashed creature who martyrs himself for Wrong things.

Hugo pities Javert, but he does not treat Javert’s worldview --‘authority is always right, rigid social hierarchies must always be enforced, human life has no intrinsic value, the police must violently suppress any kind of crime or rebellion’— as something that deserves to be genuinely respected. It is not something that’s even worthy of debate. It is wrong, it is nonsense, it is an incoherent cruel self-contradicting ideology, and Javert only believes it because (to quote Hugo’s sarcastic narration) “thought was something to which he was unused.” (Or to be more charitable, Javert believes these terrible things because he was born inside a prison and has been brainwashed from birth into internalizing a cruel carceral view of the world.)

And I think Hugo generally does a good job of walking that tightrope — having pity for Javert without portraying Javert’s ideology as something worthy of genuine admiration. He sympathizes with how rigidly Javert holds himself to his own moral code, while condemning the moral code itself for being idiotic. He has empathy with Javert’s sincere self-destructive dedication to what he believes in, while pointing out the things he believes in are all stupid. He pities Javert’s martyrdom, while condemning the nonsense that Javert martyrs himself for.

One of my Top Ten Favorite Pathetic Javert Moments is this one, when Javert recognizes Marius’s body after the barricades:

A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was to die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his elbows leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.

Because Javert martyrs himself so earnestly for this terrible cause! He “takes notes” even when he believes he’s going to die and the notes cannot possibly be of any use to anyone, simply because taking notes is the thing he has been ordered to do. He’s so self-destructively dedicated to performing these useless pointless tasks because he believes there is real ~dignity~ to his mindless bootlicking— when there isn’t.

That’s why Javert’s emotional breakdown and suicide hit so hard for me, in a way that it wouldn’t if the narration was forgiving towards his stupid belief system. The contrast between Javert’s sheer pathetic terror and the often harsh/sarcastic narration is just….wild. It makes Javert sympathetic without making his awful ideology seem good, reasonable, or valuable. (And while this is only adjacent to the point I’m making- the harsh narration in Derailed also emphasizes the way Javert has been trained to view his own thoughts/emotions with contempt.) Javert is deeply pitiable/sympathetic without his ideology being framed as correct. And the whole tragedy of his character comes from the fact that he is utterly entirely wrong.

If I were to summarize the pathos of Javert, I wouldn’t say “he’s sympathetic because he’s a noble anti-hero with good strong morals who makes some valuable points about the importance of law” or w/e. I’d say that you can feel sorry for him because he’s a wretched brainwashed creature who’s never done anything right even though he wants to, and is deeply ridiculously pathetic without ever realizing it.

As Hugo puts it: “without himself suspecting the fact, Javert (…) was to be pitied.”

[stealingpotatoes]

I was thinking about the Ahsoka show and do you know what would be really fun? If they found Thrawn just chilling in a cozy house with Eli and a couple of skywalker daughters

PLEASE DEAR GOD YES

[walterfartzroy]

YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME ?

alt + rambles under cut

i listened to a lot of britney spears while drawing this. not super happy w how this turned out because it started as just a really self indulgent doodle but i ended up liking the sketch enough to do lineart + coloring. here's a version w no background!!! i think im done rambling :)

[pixellangel]

kai katskratch meets @mika-meowz 's cat scratch!!

+ bonus: friendship :]

[appleciders]

wga strike complainers about the potential gap in good tv they can watch...time to make art!! time for all of us to make our own art and share it among ourselves!! if the fight that the people who make mass-distributed art and want to (and should be) compensated for it will leave a hollow in your life, time to fill the hollow with your own hands and those of the people beside you!! if you don’t have the time or emotional energy to make your own art, first consider why - what are the structural pieces in place that prevent you? draining and unreasonable hours? hard workplace conditions? maybe get inspired by the strike to unite with your coworkers! is it disability? for you or your family members? why is art being held hostage from you! see if you can organize with your community! in the meantime - engage with other art! books/audiobooks from your library! fan made art! low budget tv shows from fifteen years ago that you can only access through haha completely and utterly legal means! nothing is being taken from you things are being taken from professional artists and as we stand by them in their struggle we can embody our appreciation for their work and for their organizing in our own lives

[itsahotminuteinbetween]

okay but like. what if the dca looked up henna patterns and designs so they could do some for you on eid. what then

[sadaveniren]

Gemma aligned herself with far right people and super racists ones but no one cares about that because she handle herself better on social media. That’s it.

She’s not a “IG Bimbo” 🤪 she has a masters degree in journalism and talks about her mental health so it’s all okay that she isn’t getting a “real job”! Feminism wins again!

[rigginsstreet]

The thing about the recent eps of vanderpump is that everyone’s watching like “well Rachel was making some points so even tho we now know she was being a snake and having an affair with her best friends man, we have to acknowledge she was right in this specific scenario” and it’s like… no we don’t. Cuz everything she’s saying in the name of “standing up for herself” has snakish undertones. And it all makes sense considering we now know the person she is. “Well if the affair didn’t happen we wouldn’t be looking at it that way” but that’s irrelevant because the affair did happen. Cuz this is her true character. The rest is semantics

[here-there-everyfuckenwhere]

I really do want to reread THROAM one day but I think my hatred towards Brendon Urie will just destroy the entire experience for me tbh…

[penelopwgarcia]

Pov you're an 25-year-old who went through so much in your life (including death) and yet you still hide yourself under that cape because while you're there no monster can harm you

POV you're an 8-year-old circus boy hiding from your first thunderstorm in Gotham and the weird emo man you live with tells you his cape will protect you from anything

[mias-back-from-the-dead]

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"

[arynneva]

wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???

Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.

First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.

[iiota]

refraining from a lot of election joke posting and instead I just donated $55 USD to gaza soup kitchen and i encourage anyone else to consider donating even a couple of dollars to the people who will be affected the most from whatever outcome happens

you can also donate to care for gaza here

EDIT: please also consider donating to this family their 93% to their goal!! and also please check out this post featuring more places to donate

[ugartecoco]

the transition im crying

[faeriekit]

"This fic was ai generated—" Cool, so lemme block you real quick