#gdi grantaire

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 4.12.2 “Preliminary Gaieties” part 3

So I hereby take back everything I said in Grantaire’s defense yesterday, he really is just being super weird and gross about the idea of a “virtuous” working class woman becoming a banker’s mistress.

The one good side is I’m not entirely sure Floréal is real; she’s the symbol, as @fremedon​ pointed out, of the Revolution of 1830, which did indeed fall into bed with bankers. Which is a sequence of events Grantaire has a LOT more reason to be upset about than some random neighbor of his falling into bed with a banker, but, unfortunately, the latter is the direction he took it in. It does at least explain why the fuck he felt the need to tell that story, but it’s still couched in blatant misogyny.

Sigh. As everyone has been pointing out to me, I’m having the full Grantaire experience; you get your hopes up for a moment, and then he disappoints you.

Anyway, he’s trying to bring up the July Revolution in order to dissuade (without quite saying it) his friends from joining this one. When that fails, he goes into the anti-revolution rant I described yesterday. He can’t dissuade them from going and he knows it, but he’s afraid they’re going to die isn’t able to let that go.

He manages to work some racism and orientalism into his rant along with the misogyny, and then, just when he reaches the peak of infuriating, he blurts out one of the most beautiful lines in the whole damn book:

“And it appears that they're going to fight, these idiots, to get their heads broken, to massacre one another, in midsum­mer, in the verdant month of June, when they might go off with some creature on their arm, to inhale in the fields the huge cup of tea of the new mown hay.”

Which is the core of what’s going on with him. He’s afraid everyone he loves is about to die, and finally, at the end of the rant, he says it.

Joly, sweet, sweet Joly, takes all this and says (leaving out his cold) “Speaking of Revolution, it appears that Marius is decidedly amorous.”

Which, as @fremedon​ points out, is a blatant subject change, but also a way of saying: That’s not what a revolution is at all. A revolution is a thing done for love.

Grantaire says of Marius:

“I can imagine how it is. Ecstasies where they forget to kiss. Chaste on earth, but coupling in the infinite. They are souls that have senses. They sleep together in the stars.”

Which is oddly perfectly accurate, probably because it’s also true of Grantaire, much as he tries to hide it by being a misogynist prick about every woman he can think of, even the ones who are metaphors. (I left out describing the part where he compared revolutions to yeast infections; you’re welcome.)

But, also, literally as Grantaire is saying this, Marius is wandering Paris with two pistols in his pocket, looking forward to the moment when he sees Cosette tonight and then---oblivion forever, which might or might not involve shooting her and then himself. I don’t think that outcome was ever certain; I think it was always a coin flip one way or the other.

Also: a coin flip is Too Fucking Close.

Grantaire is far, far and away not the person behaving worst towards women right now.

And this is also all a reminder that we’re to read the relationships between men and highly symbolic women as saying something about the fate of Revolutions. Fantine was the abandoned French Revolution/republic after the rise of Napoleon; Cosette is the republic abandoned during the Bourbon Restoration after Napoleon fell and the promise of the true and lasting revolution still to come; Eponine is, perhaps, the brief and abortive Revolution of 1848, heavily exploited by Thenardier/NIII, and if Hugo via Marius is expressing any guilt about how he treated her: Good.

All that may be not quite right, but the point is, a bonapartist nearly murders Cosette-the-Revolution, and only by joining the republicans does he become (possibly) fit to be a partner to her. Cosette is the one of our revolutions that a sincere bourgeois young man finally chooses to marry--“legitimizing” her, I guess. The hope of Marius and Cosette’s future at the end of this book is Hugo’s hope that the bourgeoisie he’s writing this book to convince--the bourgeoisie that Grantaire also represents--will finally take a revolution seriously and treat it right.

It’s maybe worth noting that at end the of this book Marius is still neither taking Cosette seriously nor treating her right.

And fuck, I feel so goddamned weird about the class issues inherent in all this? ALL these revolutions (the actual ones, not Hugo’s weirdly symbolic women) were powered by the work of the working class, and that only became more and more starkly true as the century went on. Hugo gives all these women working class backgrounds (revolution comes from “the people” after all), but their lovers and the arbiters of their fates are always bourgeois men. Working class men don’t appear in this metaphor--nor do all the women, particularly working class women, who weren’t symbols of these revolutions, they fucking fought in them.

So, two questions:

1) what the hell is Valjean in this metaphor?

2) can I take the historical uselessness of the bourgeoisie in all future revolutions as a sign that Marius and Cosette don’t in fact work out as a couple and Cosette goes on to do something way more interesting with her life?

[kittengrantaire]

I'm probably making these pockets waaay too complicated

[pilferingapples]

Les Amis + Marius, Eponine, and Gavroche as animals? JVJ, Javert, and Cosette as well if you would like, but I'm pretty sure they already have canon associations. JVJ = Lion, Javert = Dog, Cosette = Lark.

Gavroche and Eponine also get animal assignments! They both start with birds-- Eponine gets Dove that is forced to become a bird of prey, and Gavroche gets called a Sparrow (as do gamins in general).

Eponine, though, gets another very strong and important animal association--the dog child of a wolf, like Javert:

I'm not the daughter of a dog, since I'm the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, what matters that to me? You are men. Well, I'm a woman. You don't frighten me. I tell you that you shan't enter this house, because it doesn't suit me. If you approach, I'll bark. I told you, I'm the dog, and I don't care a straw for you.

So...wow. From dove to bird of prey to Dog, a very loaded animal symbol in Les Mis.

Marius, though-- you know, I'm not sure Marius ever gets an Animal Symbol?? At least not from the narrative. Courfeyrac has that Mouse comment about his political opinions, but the narrative...? I can't think of an instance--though Marius gets compared to lots of people ! i am admittedly not the most attentive Marius-watcher; anyone who has a solid, from-the-narrator Animal Soul assignment for Marius here, please let me know!

For the Amis, we have a few canon and specific connections:

Enjolras: lion and eagle both ; for the eagle he gets linked to having an eagle's wings/ eagle's flight in particular.

...maybe he's some kind of griffin??

Combeferre: wings of a swan (in contrast with Enjolras having the wings of an eagle)

Courfeyrac: cat! in particular a young cat; it's suggested that if he lived long enough he'd have become a soft housecat in his settled years ;__;

Joly and Legle get lots of bird symbolism between them; Joly has his four L (ailes, wings) ; Legle is said to have his homes "like a bird has a branch" , and has obvious eagle imagery through his name (a connection made by both Marius and Grantaire).

Grantaire: toad. ouch, Hugo.

That leaves just Prouvaire, Feuilly, and Bahorel without any specific animal-selves beyond the general "Parisians and esp Parisian revolutionaries are Cats" thing. And for them...well there's imagery that works with Hugo's established animal-themeing and then what I'd give them in a daemon AU or whatever from my own very different understanding of animals XD But sticking with the first one option there :

Prouvaire : nightingale--a good, Romantically loaded symbol of a bird Feuilly :.. dammit, Feuilly's a horse, isn't he. Bahorel: .... gdi Hugo has loaded the guns against wolves in his symbolic schematics but he's a wolf, Hugo, you know it, I know it, your cat knows it* . I could write an argument for why this actually does or at least can work with the book's themes but. Sigh. if constrained to Hugo's animal mythos , fine. He's a rooster.

[besanii]

hey hey have you thought about drink with me + mdzs specifically "drink with me to days gone by / can it be you fear to die / will the world remember you when you fall / can it be your death means nothing at all / is your life just one more lie" and "drink with me / to the life that used to be" AND "would you weep cosette / for me" bc :-) i have :-) not stopped thinking about it

OH BOY OH BOY every time I think about Drink With Me and MDZS I just...cry. And then re-enact Grantaire’s verse as if I were WWX. Usually in the shower. Where I can pretend it’s the rain scene /o\

BUT YES. Drink With Me.

If I directed MDZS (moreso CQL I guess) The Musical, “Drink With Me” would probably be set around the time of the “banquet” at the Burial Mounds, mashed with the events leading up to the battle at the Nightless City (before WWX’s death).

The first verse would probably be a combo of the Wen remnants (Uncle Four etc.) and WWX while they’re getting drunk:

Drink with me to days gone bySing with me the songs we knewHere’s to pretty girls who went to our headsHere’s to witty girls who went to our bedsHere’s to them, and here’s to you!

The second verse (Grantaire’s) would be WWX singing into his wine cup, thinking no one would hear it (but Wen Qing is there watching him):

Drink with me to days gone byCan it be you fear to die?Will the world remember you when you fall?Could it be your death means nothing at all?Is your life just one more lie?

The third verse would be WWX and all the people WWX was close to and are about to fight at the Nightless City (JC, NHS, LXC, the Yunmeng disciples):

Drink with me to days gone byTo the life that used to beAt the shrine of friendship never say dieLet the wine of friendship never run dryHere’s to you (here’s to you), and here’s to me

AND THEN THE FINAL VERSE would be LWJ and WWX:

WWX:

Do I care if I should die now she goes across the sea?

LWJ:

Life without Cosette means nothing at all

LWJ/WWX:

Would you weep, Cosette, should Marius fall?Will you weep, Cosette for me?

Except, you know, substitute the names and stuff. 

No I haven’t spent the last week or so thinking about this particular song what are you talking about I have cried about Drink With Me for eight years gdi

[ferretrade]

RULES: Choose any three fandoms (in random order) and answer the questions. Then tag some friends.

shoutout to @discord-ant​ for tagging me! :) open tag to anyone who wants to do it?? consider yourself tagged, my friends. 

You choose:

yuri on ice, les mis, young avengers. 

The first character you loved:

yoi: makkachin. is that sad or relatable?

les mis: all of les amis? maybe grantaire first because gblags

ya: billy 

The character you never expected to love so much:

yoi: yuri. why do I care so much about this angry child?? I do though.

les mis: marius. my child. 

ya: eli. because he’s so neglected, I am all for this boy.

The character you relate to most:

yoi: honestly, probably seung-gil lee because I too never want to be around people. or maybe yuuri.

les mis: marius gdi. 

ya: I kinda feel billy but also maybe cassie. or shit maybe david. I might be a david. 

The character you’d slap:

yoi: I really don’t know?

les mis: thenardier. follow up slaps to tholomyes and everyone who ever so much as looked at fantine the wrong way. 

ya: it kinda depends when. billy definitely could have used a good slap at some points. eli too. honestly every one of them needed some sense slapped into them at one point or another. 

A character you liked at first but not so much anymore:

yoi: none. they’re all angels. 

les mis: same

ya: seriously I apparently don’t unlike characters at all?

A character you did not like at first, but they’ve grown on you:

yoi: fucking jj. I never expected to care about the fucker at all and then episode 11 or whatever and UGH. (also isabella for the same reason.) although he did not deserve that medal that was otabek’s medal 

les mis: I guess just the more... fringe amis? like bahorel, bossuet, etc. I had no idea who they were at first haha

ya: mmm maybe nate. 

3 OTPs:

yoi: victor/yuuri (duh), otabek/yuri (I mean you’ve seen my tumblr right), mila/sara (kind-of?). also jj/isabella which I’ve never read but feel like I want to.

les mis: courferre (again you’ve seen my tumblr right), e/r, marisette

ya: billy/teddy (how can you not), kate/tommy (kinda?), cassie/being alive

[covldbeworse-a]

brooklynmadetm replied to your post: if i wind up deciding to write enjolras ( at this...

don’t make me bring back my grantaire muse gdi

do i need to mentION I ALREADY SHIP ENJOLRAS AND GRANTAIRE???

[besmirchthis]

Zero, not wanting to go around entirely naked, has clothed himself in vanity.

Grantaire in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables [transl. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee]

[kittengrantaire]

My plans for MCM keeps changing so much gdi But I think maybe I've settled with Grantaire, Steve Trevor and Six?

[kittengrantaire]

nooooo, fucking missed adam linstead as grantaire by a week, gdi