#but the phantom of the goddamn opera can't do a basic fucking disarm from literally the ideal position? get the fuck outta here.

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

to me, LND proves what the '04 movie suggests: Webber cannot imagine Christine as a grown ass woman. She can be of child bearing age, so she can give the gift of a male heir, and then she dies. Not out of authorial malice, I think, not even subconsciously. But as an expression of a truly fuckin baffled "well, what else can a woman do?" kind of cluelessness.

see also: the kind of evo psych guy who literally goes around wondering out loud what "purpose" women over 50 serve, wondering why evolution "allows" this to happen when it's clearly (to them) suboptimal.

but ANYWAY.

Gaston Leroux's Christine would never. You just know she ends up being like 90 something in some Northern village somewhere giving cryptic one liners about her mysterious and romantic past to wide eyed children and swooning teenagers and envious and yearning younger adults. probably had like five other weird as shit scandals happen to her before settling down, honestly.

It will always bug me that Christine died relatively young, outlived by Raoul and seemingly the Phantom. Even without LND, she’s dies like late 50s, early 60s. And yeah people didn’t live long back in the day, but she was a wealthy woman who I’m sure had the resources to live a longer life than others.

There’s so many characters that are alive and kicking that are around the same age that Christine died: The managers, Madame Giry, the music conductor, the old owner. So I don’t buy that it’s just “old age”.

She should’ve been in her 80s, the last one out of the three, giving cryptic interviews to the press on “The Strange Affair of the Phantom of The Opera”. She should’ve been a consultant on movies based on the tragedy and fuck with the directors so nobody ever knows the real truth.

How is it that the center of this massive story was never able to share her POV? She doesn’t live long enough to tell her story and instead we have to figure it out based on the perspectives of the men who loved her but also never fully understood her.