#frnknstn hcs

[queerpyracy]

can't find the post but you know the one about giving your characters a kink even if it's not explicit in the text and how some stupid decisions can be explained by their brain shutting off because they're whistling like a lustful tea kettle. i really feel like that's the only satisfactory (in-story) explanation for victor being a complete dingus about the "i will be with you on your wedding night" threat. out of story mary shelley obviously needed him to be stupid so liz could get got.

in-story however what we've got is a real case of repressed homosexuality shutting off victor's cognitive processes. the eight foot tall super human he made in his dorm says "i will be with you on your wedding night" and all of the blood rushed out of victor's head for lower altitudes

[queerpyracy]

victor is never explicitly stated to have an interest in astrology as i recall but he did self-educate in alchemy and try to summon ghosts as a kid so like. i think i'm justified in saying he would be an astrology gay and he would be so rancid about it

[queerpyracy]

alphonse frankenstein: i love all my children equally

victor: dad elizabeth got murdered

alphonse:

[queerpyracy]

i'm never gonna be picky about the creature somehow having pants when he is an eight foot tall superhuman but i do think more adaptations should spare a couple seconds for him like. figuring out how to make clothes. i mean he learned to speak and also read french while living in a shed watching someone else's french lessons so it doesn't seem too unimaginable that he could figure out sewing under similar conditions

[queerpyracy]

i'm building so much hyperspecific liz lore i've even decided when her birthday is

[queerpyracy]

a lot of what i think about with regards to liz seeing the creature and thinking "i could be worse" isn't just about her eldest daughter disease (though that certainly is a part of it) but about it as an equivalent experience to the first time you see a visibly queer person and it fundamentally changes your understanding of what's possible. the creature should be an impossible being, and yet he exists and not only survives but is powerful. and how could encountering that not change her? how could it not show her that there is a whole world outside of what she thinks is possible for her?

[queerpyracy]

victor/elizabeth could be good y'all are just cowards who won't let them be fucked up and gross (complimentary)

[queerpyracy]

baby-faced victor is over i want a victor who looks like he survived trench warfare in spite of having been born over a century before that was a thing

[queerpyracy]

frankenstein modern au victor is growing body parts in second hand fish thanks and also a craigslist bathtub in his dorm and subsisting entirely on protein shakes vitamin gummies and energy drinks

[queerpyracy]

the thing about writing victoria fr*nkenstein is one should be able to imagine her saying "i don't think i can gaslight gatekeep girlboss my way out of this one"

[queerpyracy]

hi king [ gender-neutral ], may we have some more of your thoughts about frankenstein? i've really enjoyed your posts about it and your fic.

as you've been re-reading the book, and specifically writing about it, what do you wish you could point out to everyone and go, "SEE??? ARE YOU SEEING THIS????"

what questions do you have - for shelley, for the characters, for the story itself - that you feel like you can't yet get to the bottom of without writing ten extremely granular essays about them?

what parts of the story make you go completely apeshit?????

anon you've unleashed a monster but i'm happy to provide. long and rambly so i'm putting it under a cut

cw for mention of suicide

here's something that made me completely insane when i reread it recently: when the creature is giving his account of his life up to that point to victor, before he gets to the paradise lost bit that everybody rightfully loves, the very first book he reads is the sorrows of young werther, which concludes with the titular werther killing himself because of unrequited love. i may never read the end of the book the same way again. like mary just came out of the past to give me a swift right hook to the face when i googled werther to see what it was about.

i have long been of the opinion that frankenstein is a doomed romance, that victor & the creature are bound together in a terrible commingling of desire and hate that could only ever lead to them destroying each other (but like in a romantic way). at the same time that the creature curses his creator he also desperately longs for any sign of affection or kindness, and victor--well. victor made an 8 foot tall intended-to-be-beautiful superhuman in his college apartment.

this is why the ballet is the only adaptation

(relatedly, go ahead and listen to cosmic love and think about the creature, and you will know a fraction of the suffering i put myself through)

i think the creature is a fascinating lens through which to view all kinds of alienation, the kind of people that are made to be monsters in society. he is perceived to be monstrous because of his body, and that's a visceral source of alienation. bodies are an inescapable fact. there are things we can change about them nowadays, but generally not without drastic measures. and why do we make the changes we make? the monstrous body is hypervisible.

to the best of my memory, victor receives very little in the way of physical description in the novel, even when he's starving to death in the arctic. (walton waxing poetic will be discounted for the moment, because i don't think he actually gets into too many specifics about victor's features.) most of the men are hardly described at all. some female characters receive a bit more, to highlight how beautiful they are, of course. but we know a lot about the creature's physicality. we know about his incredible strength and speed, his yellowed eyes, his sleek black hair, his black lips. other bodies, human bodies, are allowed to largely sink into the landscape. the monstrous body has to be brought into sharp relief as the thing that doesn't belong.

and victor, victor, victor. victor who gets pushed by his father to move on from the death of his mother, who most certainly never really processes his grief, who never seems to consciously make the connection between his mother's death and his quest to defeat mortality. victor who fashions a near-son while subconsciously trying to bring back his mother, who dreams about kissing elizabeth (his adoptive sister, cousin, and fiancee) and having her turn into the corpse of his mother on that night the creature first wakes, for whom the notions of death, family, love, and desire are all inextricably intertwined. victor who doesn't seem to be aware that his world is suffocatingly small, and that his inability to act when faced with the creature is because he has been so shielded from the world by virtue of his privileged position in society. victor who imagines his suffering is greater than that of an innocent woman being condemned to death for the murder of a child she cared for.

i think, ultimately, that frankenstein is a novel without heroes. as much blame might be (rightfully) laid at victor's feet, can we not also lay some blame on victor's father? "you've grieved enough, better to get back to being a productive member of society" is some toxic protestant bullshit if i've ever heard it. what about the peers and mentors in ingolstadt who apparently failed to notice anything odd about victor's behavior during the two entire years he spent building the creature? where does the harm begin? we know where it ends.

as for questions, i think my biggest question is one mary shelley probably wouldn't give me an answer to, even if i could ask her. because i do wonder how much of the men in her life there is in victor frankenstein. if there are shades of her relationship to her father, or to percy. this paper posits that to some degree mary can be found in both victor and the creature, which i can certainly see, but i still wonder. she clearly loved percy bysshe shelley a great deal, but it doesn't seem to have been easy for her. (certainly from my perspective two hundred years in the future i think he behaved terribly callously to her.) i wonder if there were times that she hated him as much as she loved him.

which is not, ultimately, to say i think she would have written it that way on purpose. i don't think i'm undercutting the rich material of the novel to say that she was 19 and writing her first work, it's very easy to do these things subconsciously. she may not have intended it that way at all, but perhaps, she might have noticed it later, if there was something to notice. but i suspect, from the way she carefully constructed her own myth around the writing of the novel, she would never give me an answer to that.

[queerpyracy]

victor was never going to take responsibility for the life he created because he was an oldest son who got shipped off to college after his mom's death whereas elizabeth, also a teenager with 0 trauma processing, was suddenly asked to be mother to her two still-at-home adopted brothers because responsibilities are for oldest daughters

[queerpyracy]

this wasn't terribly related to that last post bc this is about AUs but anyone who thinks victoria frankenstein wouldn't be exactly the same kind of ineffectual, ego-centered rich brat blinded-by-a-privileged-upbringing personality as victor is someone i simply cannot vibe with

[queerpyracy]

.

every day i am mentally writing an essay about my strong feelings re: the creature not having a name and why giving him one generally undercuts the fundamental cruelty of him lacking a name

how a name signifies connection and belonging and the creature is repeatedly denied both, there is never anyone who cares enough to give him a name, to call him anything other than monster

how i really profoundly dislike calling him 'adam' not only because i think there's no new interesting symbolic territory there but because it allows victor too high a status as a callous and cruel god, how there was never any eden for the creature to be cast out of

how i dislike giving him the surname 'franke.nstein' because as strongly as people argue for it i could argue just as strongly that it's as meaningful to have the creature reject the name of his near-father, who never gave him any kind of name at all, denied him even that basic dignity of having something to call himself by

how all of this is a pain worth exploring rather than painting over it

[queerpyracy]

as i'm in the business of growing increasingly invested in elizabeth and the creature as mirrors for each other, i feel it's worth pointing out that elizabeth gets appointed the family role of Mother upon caroline's death (we are denied any insight into how elizabeth felt about this) whereas the creature demands that victor take on a parental role, which victor finds to be intolerable.

victor begins his story with his parents and his idyllic childhood bc, imo, a large degree of his refusal to take responsibility for the creature is a reluctance to grow up, to leave the world where his mother was alive and everything was, from the perspective of victor's nostalgia, perfect. he can project the past onto elizabeth but the creature demands he look at the present and the consequences of his actions and victor cannot handle that

[queerpyracy]

i do love how when walton is writing letters to his sister he keeps referring to "my father" and "my cousin"